Two Treatises of Government

⚖The case for it

Natural rights, consent of the governed, the right to revolution. Locke's Second Treatise is the philosophical DNA of liberal democracy. Jefferson borrowed from it so heavily that the Declaration of Independence reads like a remix. Life, liberty, and property. Government exists to protect these; when it doesn't, throw it out. Three centuries later, we're still arguing about what 'property' means.

— the canon

✕The case against

Skip the First Treatise and you skip half the book; it is a page-by-page demolition of Robert Filmer, a royalist nobody has cared about for three centuries. The Second's labor theory of property conveniently declared America vacant and improvable, and Locke held Royal African Company stock while theorizing natural liberty. The contradictions are instructive; the prose is not.

— the honest librarian