Two Treatises of Government

Two Treatises of Government proceeds by dismantling one theory of political authority and constructing another. In the First Treatise, John Locke answers Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which grounds kingship in divinely sanctioned paternal power. Locke contests Filmer's scriptural claims and rejects the idea that civil rule can inherit an unlimited right from Adam.

The Second Treatise begins from natural equality. Human beings possess rights before political institutions exist, and government becomes legitimate through consent. Locke uses the state of nature to explain the emergence of property and civil society, then asks what powers people entrust to rulers and what limits remain binding on those rulers.

This structure makes the work more than a defense of one constitutional settlement. Authority must be justified by the purposes for which it was created, especially the protection of rights. A government that rules without consent or violates that trust can lose its claim to obedience, making resistance and removal theoretically legitimate.

Published anonymously in 1689, the treatises also belong to the political conflicts surrounding late seventeenth-century England. Their lasting importance comes from the connection they establish among equality, property, contract, limited government, and revolution. The two books work together: the first closes off inherited divine right, and the second supplies a civic argument for accountable power.