The transformation of the politics of government towards material necessities has deep roots in Locke’s work. Public order may guide human reason, he argued in the controversy over ‘matters indifferent’, while the classic understanding of conscience, with its troublesome perplexities, appears to be demoted to the private sphere in his unpublished Two Tracts of Government. In his Essays on the Law of Nature the innate principles are denied. Instead, Locke affirms the centrality of human necessities since they compel human beings to band together.