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What Is The Power In John Locke's Second Practice Of Civil Government

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Short Answer Questions: John Locke published his Second Treatise of Civil Government in 1690 and two years earlier, the Glorious Revolution had occurred, ousting the very unpopular King James II. He was replaced by King William III and Queen Mary. His specific motives for writing this Treatise was to support the Glorious Revolution and justify the resistance to King Charles II. He also sought to refute the pro-Absolutist theories of Sir Robert Filmer, which he and his Whig associates felt were getting too popular for his liking. Locke refers to the laws of nature in order to define political power. He sees these laws as the natural instincts of people and something man is bound by at birth- “a state also of equality, wherein all the power …show more content…

He introduces these powers as the judicial, legislative and executive powers. The reason he splits it into three powers is so that they can function as a sort of leash on each other to ensure that no one branch ever gains more power than the other, thus keeping the notion of tyranny at bay. By creating a government with three branches that each has equal yet different powers no one group of individuals is able to gain all the power and each branch could limit the power of the other two,successfully creating a loop of sorts wherein no one branch can escape. Montesquieu believed that the executive powers “...ought to be in the hands of a monarch…”. This was because the executive branch was always “... need of expedition…” and therefore simply just run more efficiently by only one person and if it was run by more than one person it would be “an end then of liberty”. On the other hand he also believed that the legislative power should reside in many people because it was better regulated and run by multiple individuals, but if it was run by one person it would also be an end of liberty because no legislative resolutions and the state would fall into

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