Locke's Two Treatises: Purpose and Argument

John Locke (1632–1704) published Two Treatises of Government anonymously in late 1689, though much of it was probably written around 1679–1681 during England's Exclusion Crisis, when opponents of the future James II feared Catholic absolutism. The First Treatise attacked Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which claimed that kings inherited absolute authority from Adam, the first father.

The Second Treatise set out Locke's own theory: people are naturally free and equal, they have rights to life, liberty and property, and they form governments by consent to protect those rights. A government that betrays this trust may be resisted and replaced. Locke presented these ideas as conclusions of reason drawn from the law of nature, which he also connected to God as creator.

Because it appeared just after the Revolution of 1688–89, readers long treated it as a justification of that revolution, but its philosophical claims reach far beyond one English crisis.