Richard Ashcraft - Lockes Two Treatises of Government

First published 1987

This edition first published in 2010
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1987 Richard Ashcraft

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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49111-2 (Set)

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ISBN13: 978-0-415-64978-0 (PBK)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-55552-4 (HBK)

Richard Ashcraft, 1987
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First published in 1987

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ashcraft, Richard

Lockes two treatises of government.

(Unwin critical library; 17)
1. Locke, John, 1632-1704
I. Title
192 B1297
ISBN 0048000795

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ashcraft, Richard

Lockes two treatises of government.

(Unwin critical library)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Locke, John, 1632-1704. Two treatises of
government. I. Title. II. Series.
JC153.L853A84 1987 320 8617293
ISBN 0-04-800079-5 (alk. paper)

Set in 10 on 12 point Plantin by Columns, Caversham, Reading and printed in Great Britain by Billings & Sons Ltd, London and Worcester

Each volume in this series is devoted to a single major text. It is intended for serious students and teachers of literature, and for knowledgeable non-academic readers. It aims to provide a scholarly introduction and a stimulus to critical thought and discussion.

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The hope is that the volumes in this series will be among those which a university teacher would normally recommend for any serious study of a particular text, and that they will also be among the essential secondary texts to be consulted in some scholarly investigations. But the experienced and informed non-academic reader has also been in our minds, and one of our aims has been to provide him with reliable and stimulating works of reference and guidance, embodying the present state of knowledge and opinion in a conveniently accessible form.

C.J.R.
University of Warwick,
December 1979

I want to thank Sage Publications for granting me permission to reprint material from my article, Revolutionary politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government , Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 4 (November 1980), pp. 429-86. I also want to thank the American Political Science Association for permission to reprint material from my article, Lockes state of nature: historical fact or moral fiction?, American Political Science Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (September 1968), pp. 898-915. Princeton University Press kindly granted me permission to make use of some material from my Revolutionary Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

I am grateful to the Academic Senate of the University of California at Los Angeles for its assistance in funding the research for this book and to the staff of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA) for their courteous and efficient help in the execution of that research. A special thanks must go to my research assistant, Susan Matthews, whose dedication and perseverance made a valuable contribution to the completion of this project. I am also indebted to the Keeper of Manuscripts of the Library of the Inner Temple, and to the staffs of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and of the British Library for allowing me to consult manuscripts in their possession.

I am appreciative of the advice and suggestions I received from Ian Shapiro and C. J. Rawson, though the responsibility for whatever errors remain in the text is mine.

Thirty years ago, Lockes Two Treatises of Government was viewed as the classic expression of liberal political ideas. It was read as a defence of individualism and of the natural right of individuals to appropriate private property. The Two Treatises , it was argued, stated the fundamental principles of the Whigs, and thus served as an intellectual justification for the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The Two Treatises of Government provided, in short, a general philosophical defence of the rights of property-owners to institute and defend a political system based upon their consent, and a specific historical defence of the actions of the landed gentry and aristocracy in placing William and Mary on the English throne in 1689. Moreover, Lockes work, and especially the Second Treatise, was often characterized as the first secular expression of political theory in the modern era.