Consent, Property and the Right to Leave

Locke published the Second Treatise of Government in 1689 and answered Hobbes by accepting his method and changing his premises.

Locke's state of nature is not a war. It is inconvenient. People have rights before any government exists, they mostly manage, and what is missing is not order but a neutral judge: when two people disagree, each is judge in their own case, and that does not work.

That change of premise does all the work in what follows.

If the problem is catastrophic, the solution can demand almost anything. If the problem is an inconvenience, the solution gets much less. Government exists to fix a specific defect, and it holds only the powers handed to it for that purpose.

Which gives Locke the claim that made him dangerous.

Authority comes from the consent of the governed. It has no power that was not given to it. And what was given on terms can be withdrawn when the terms are broken. A government that violates the rights it was created to protect has broken the agreement, and may be replaced.

Read the American Declaration of Independence with this chapter in mind and the debt is not subtle. Governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and the right of the people to alter or abolish them. That is a striking amount of practical consequence for an argument about a hypothetical condition nobody was ever in.

Then there is property, which is the most contested thing Locke wrote.

His account is that the world begins unowned, and you acquire something by mixing your labour with it. You pick the apple, the apple is yours. Nobody had a claim on it, and now somebody does, and no government had to authorise it.

Everything from land titles to intellectual property still runs on a version of this, and so does most of the criticism of how particular holdings were originally acquired. Locke himself attached conditions, notably that enough and as good be left for others, and that condition has been quietly dropped by most people who cite him.

Finally, the weak point, which is worth being honest about because it is where every consent theory struggles.

Nobody consented to anything. You were born here. You signed nothing.

Locke's answer is tacit consent: by remaining, and using the roads, and enjoying the protection, you have consented in the way that matters. This is generally regarded as the weakest part of the argument, and the objection is obvious. If the only way to withhold consent is to emigrate, then consent is not being tested, because emigration is not available to most people who have ever lived.

That difficulty has never been solved. Every subsequent attempt to ground authority in agreement runs into it at exactly the same place, which is why Rousseau, in the next chapter, tries to get what consent was meant to deliver by a completely different route.