John Locke, from Two Treatises of Government (1690)

John Locke’s (1632–1704) position as one of the most influential philosophers of the eighteenth century was a result of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Before that he was physician to the first Earl of Shaftesbury in 1667, and then held a variety of official posts until he fled to Holland in 1683 in the wake of the Exclusion crisis (parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s heir, James, from the throne). Written against this background, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government theorised the basis of a constitutional state and government by consent. It was often mobilised to support the accession of William III and the Glorious Revolution and influenced the thinking behind the American Declaration of Independence. The First Treatise is a demolition of the theory of divine right of kings and absolute monarchy as laid out in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680). This extract contains the forceful opening to his whole work which aligns Englishness and liberty; an association that weaves its way throughout the writings on empire and one with which few contemporary Britons would have disagreed. The Second Treatise argues the case that people’s freedom arises from a civilisation that ensures the protection of property, and then goes on to lay the foundations of government by consent. In the second extract from the Second Treatise, Locke justifies the natural rights to property as the fruits of one’s own labour, synthesising Biblical precedent and secular reasoning, and thereby providing colonialism with a powerful legitimating ideology.1