God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience. To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.Ī state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction, is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty. The colonists readily accepted Locke's theory, but it would be a later generation of provincials who would apply this revolutionary concept. In his second treatise, the one excerpted here, he promulgated the idea that government rests in the will of the people, thus those people have the right to challenge and change their rulers and government. The philosopher John Locke (1632≡704), a supporter of the Glorious Revolution that deposed King James II, enthroned William and Mary, and established the supremacy of Parliament, attacked the divine right of kings in his first treatise on civil government. The Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), John Locke The Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), John Locke
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