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John Locke's Second Treatise Of Civil Government

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In the Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke asserts that we are free and equal persons with natural rights. However, due to our needs and the desire to possess goods, conflicts would be inevitable in the process and hence political authority is required to resolve conflicts and mete out penalties in a way that protects people’s rights. According to Locke, who has a more optimistic view of humanity compared to Hobbes, as a result of the disagreements among free and equal people in a state of nature, free and equal persons with good reason, consented to confer authority to someone else so as to be able to live in moral harmony. In a Lockean state, freedom is governed in a particular way to ensure that individuals are able to protect it. This appears to be a contradictory idea, but can be explained if we properly examine the concept of …show more content…

If free and equal persons are able to do anything they want, there is a significant chance that someone else’s freedom would be taken away from them in one way or other. In this case, no one is truly free to exercise their natural rights to life and property among other things. However, if this freedom is regulated through the existence of an impartial authority, then we essentially are able to better protect our freedom. The desire to protect our freedom manifests in the formation of governments, and this manifestation, while somehow limiting our freedom in the strictest sense, allows us to have a better grasp of it. The horizons of our freedom may have shrunken, but our freedom is now safer and more deeply rooted. Locke himself mentioned that “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge

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