John Locke's Political Philosophy

well we're right at the beginning still we're just at the beginning and talking about how our way of thinking was born in the early part of the Scientific Revolution the philosophic revolution of the early 1600s and we looked first at Thomas Hobbes who set up the problem and today we're going to move from Hobbes to the man who followed him in addressing the central problem of this kind of philosophy John Locke but let me look back at Hobbes a little bit and just kind of remind you refresh your memory on what it was he tried to accomplish and how he thought he accomplished it Hobbes is trying to create a political logic a political mathematics if you want to he was trying to produce an incontrovertible proof of the necessity of government a proof that would be like a mounted mathematical demonstration and he felt if you did that you'd have a true political theory for the first time in history not just an idle conjecture but a political theory that would have the logical standing of Euclid it would be axiomatically he axiomatic he could show you why government ought to exist and why you ought to obey the laws he was trying to prove the necessity for political obedience in about the same way as others have tried to prove rationally the existence of God now his method borrowing from Rene Descartes was to try to make the fewest possible assumptions about the nature of man the universe or the human good that he could get away with unlike previous philosophers who always started with some big but very conjectural assertions about the human good I remember those of you are with us last semester but we were always talking about the human good and you began to feel you could postulate anything what is the good for man well if you start out with a postulate of pure justice in the Platonic sense or a Christian view of community or something like that you can create a political theory but your starting point is always opinion it's always an idea that's occurred to you and the question begins well why should you enforce this idea the human good on everybody else and it looks like political theory always will founder on that problem of not being neutral among various conceptions of the good it's always biased right from the beginning because it's somebody's idea of what life should be for so Hobbes tried to reverse all that and he started to try to think politically and think toward a conception of politics without starting with an idea of what human life should be about what human morality should be what people should live for what was good and what was evil and he started instead with what seemed the most in controversial uncontroverted a basic assumption about people if you couldn't agree to anything else about human nature maybe at least you could agree to the proposition that people were acted in turn wealth were attracted by things that gave them pleasure and were repelled by things that gave them pain the people called things that gave them satisfaction good the people called things that gave them distasteful sensations bad now there's not much to that it's hard to disagree with that at some level in fact the only real disagreement one might have with it is to say is that to have said enough about human nature but at least it seemed axiomatic unexceptionable if you could get everybody to just agree that far you were dealing with what the cart had called a clear and stinked idea one that was a fundamental atomic building block of thought now from this table said well if you accept that then you will accept the next proposition which is that people are self-interested they seek their own satisfaction they seek those things that give them pleasure and that can be anything we won't have to define what those are because any every person can make up their own mind about that and then to generalize this one step further we'll say that people not only seek that satisfaction but they are rational creatures in the sense that they calculate the means to achieve those satisfactions and hobbes called that power one seeks power power to achieve the goals that one is defined for one's own life pollard power to achieve the means that one has that one's that one needs to achieve those goals and Hobbes says I take it as a further proposition about humankind that this is not something that ever comes to an end that the real characteristic of mankind humankind is that one is engaged in a relentless quest of power after power that endeth only and death that you just are all this is so characteristic of human nature that you're always doing this you're always seeking fulfillment whatever that means to you and you're always never at rest never static you're always in motion know that Hobbes goes on in the state of nature then if there is no government if we can imaginatively conjecture what life would be like without government each individual is persistently sizing up each other as a means to personal ends and in turn is being sized up by those others there is a perennial question of who is going to dominate whom because each person can be a means to another satisfaction I want something from you and so I see you that way and I exert influence to get you to fulfill my demands you may find my desires repugnant so you retreat from me but there's a tension there in the air and because we're as Hobbes claimed roughly equal in that we're never quite sure who is going to dominate and who's going to be the dominated life is always uncertain we live in perpetual weariness of one another we could be the Dominator we're never so sure that the others are stronger than than we are that we might not be willing to just sort of acquiesce in their wills we could take advantage of them we could get away with it on the other hand we're never so sure that we're going to win then we're gonna be able to triumph over others that we don't have cause all is to be on the lookout so unsleep spur any aliy uneasy in the state of nature when as always waiting for the knock on the door the scraping of the window somebody who's apt to take advantage of you we always look at one another warily because each one may be seeking to take advantage of the other and in this condition of rough equality life is dominated by a state of perpetual uncertainty and fear as Hobbes thought the state of nature would be a war of all against all now the only remedy to this Hubbs thought was civil society and enforced cooperation between people community is better than solitude and he thought that any rational person then if confronted with the facts of existence outside of government would rationally give up all one's rights to a sovereign authority that would then create a condition of peace among people that this would be much better than the state of perpetual war that the state of nature implied it would give us the security to fulfill those purposes that were lawful it would give us an orderly frame of reference within which we could do which was lawful we could pursue our aims with some notion that others would be restrained from destroying them or us in the process now Hobbes said we necessarily had to give up all rights to this sovereign authority that the giving up of one's freedom to government was unconditional and absolute and the reason for that of course is that if we reserved any right of independent judgment moral or political or ethical we would immediately revert to the state of nature once again for example let me say that I just assert in the face of Hobbes that no I don't agree with him that I am in the end the best judge of how to use those things that belong to me of my private property and let us say that I owned a nice house out in the country and that it is my view that the prettiest thing that I can do is to get a giant old fire engine and decorate my yard with it and let us say that my neighbor does not think that a giant old fire engine in the yard is the most beautiful thing in the world and takes umbrage at that now in the state of nature if I have read if I've said well I'm not giving up my right to judge aesthetics to the state and certainly no Zoning Commission is going to tell me whether fire engines are beautiful or not and it's my land and I can do what I want with it and that's as well ok the moment you make that exception is that you know the state of nature is back with all its uncertainty because if your neighbor really doesn't like your fire engine and if you're not submitting yourself to Authority he's gonna come over and blow up your fire engine and he may furthermore look at your house and say furthermore I'm like the looks of your house and take an axe to it and tear it down and retire with complete satisfaction in what he's done whereupon you have viewed this little thing are going to go after your neighbor with a shotgun you've just by making that one reservation I will not let the Zoning Commission make aesthetic judgments on how I may use my property reopen the whole war of all against all yet again or say that you say no I don't agree with this idea of absolute sovereignty I believe in rule by majority we ought to vote on things and Hobbs would say ok you're back in anarchy and you're back in the state of nature in the war of all against all again because if you say the majority can do anything that they want to do the majority may decide to enslave the minority or the majority being white may decide to exploit those who are black who are the minority what you just opened up the possibility of his majority tyranny and you may someday on some issue be in the minority and then there will be no be no safety for the minority there will be no safety for the majority you will be back to the state of war once again or say that you just reserve the right to decide what is good and bad just and unjust you're not going to give up moral choice certainly to any public authority and so you decide that abortion is bad and that you will blow up clinics that perform abortions if they do this thing and that you believe that is the ultimate law and you must obey the ultimate law well you've just opened the door once again those who oppose your position will take the law into their hands they will track you down with shotguns and you're back in the war of all against all again for these reasons Hobbes said the grant to the sovereign authority must be absolutely unreserved you can't hold back anything anything you hold back makes you a judge in your own interest anything you hold back you will interpret to your own will and in terms of your own search for your own satisfaction your own view of the world and your own power therefore he concludes there must be you would any rational person would accept the necessity of absolute sovereign homme study done this QED quote Aerith didn't strand him he thought that this was an irrefutable logical argument and proved the case for sovereignty that in any political system there had to be an authority above the people above individual judgment above the interests of individuals in order to group to moderate and to control those judgments now Hobbes's conclusions are and were puzzling and enraging we can't quite figure out how he got there we know he starts from premises that we accept and he argues to conclusions that appalled us but how can one escape from them and you sort of backed your heads against them and like everyone else in the history of the West you are tempted to try to play Hobbes's game and to try to refute him and a large part of the political thought of the West has been an effort to try to refute hobbes and to show that his logic is not irresistible that there may be other answers to the same questions and of course the great irony of our history is at the same logic of argument that led to the case for absolute unconditional authoritarian government also led to the case for limited government the case for the distinctive characteristic of liberal democracy and it was Jon luck in picking up this logical pattern of reasoning about the social contract who provided exactly the opposite answer who who reason - exactly the opposite conclusions that Hobbes said that the answer was not royal authority but individual rights and parliamentary government and so now we should look at how Locke tried to prove exactly the contrary conclusion from Hobbes's premises okay before we before we look at luck then let's talk a little about the context in which luck operated because it was rather different from Hobbes as part of that very stormy and tumultuous seventeenth century through which England passed and we think of England is such a wonderfully long stable country but the sixteen hundred's were something else again as we recall the 1600s started with the Stuart monarchs attempting to proclaim absolute monarchy against the rites of Parliament that had developed during the long period of the Tudor monarchs in before and this led to the Cromwellian revolution to a stormy revolutionary tumultuous period in British politics in the midst of which Hobbes was writing on behalf of the Royalists side and that came to an end when Cromwell failed and when the monarchy was restored in the 1660s now the rest of the restored Stuart monarchy began pretty auspiciously with charles ii who was a monarch who tried to patch up fences and tried to rule according to some of the older traditions of making peace with parliament and acknowledging many of the interests of the country but gradually well but but but but while he was successful in consolidating royal authority james ii was openly catholic in a country that was now becoming protestant and his political skills were quite a bit less than those of charles ii james ii she was pushing catholicism and was pushing interests in the country that were opposed to many of the rising middle class commercial groups that began to call themselves wig as whi yes and they saw themselves more closely associated with the historic rates of Parliament than they did with the crown and tension just simply grew throughout the 1670s and 1680s in the end finally the Whigs opposed James in 1688 the Parliament that they came to control deposed James from the crown and invited William of Orange from the Netherlands to assume the throne of England well William did land William did March William did assume the crown of England the the House of Stuart disappears from history and Britain go undergoes a change now it's still a monarchy you haven't declared a republic but something notably significant had happened because there was no way in the world that William of Orange could claim to rule England by hereditary right or by long tradition his family was Dutch it was not English nor could he claim to rule by divine right he had all to obviously come to power through the will of parliament which is to say the people and so this realization occurs in British life that the crown the King now rules with the King rules because Parliament has asked William to assume the throne and what Parliament can do they can undo so in a sense the whole idea of the British constitution has changed and from then on the notion is that the crown rules with the consent of Parliament and Parliament and the will of the people become central to am anarchic Authority the King reigns but does not rule in the end the king is dependent on the support of Parliament and the events of 1688 to 1690 made that all too manifestly obvious but at the time this looked like a terribly revolutionary to do to depose a lawful king is a revolutionary act and this the whole structure of what the English came to call the Glorious Revolution needed a political theory and in a very fragmentary form it was John Locke who was a Whig politician involved in Whig politics in the 1680s and into the 1690s who provided it by among other vehicles the second treatise of civil government which provide an apology and a theory for the new British government that was emerging now what was a scholar he was the son of a member of the minor country gentry he'd been to Oxford he studied the cart in the new sciences but he also read medieval theory and scholastic works with some sympathy he became a physician and a tutor he was a man of science in his own eyes and in this way he was attracted to the idea of writing politics in this and about politics in this new scientific mode we think of him in history as the man who refuted or at least controverted Hobbes but there's no evidence that Locke ever read Thomas Hobbes his attack is on his target in the India in the treatise of civil government is against a very minor figure named filmer who has disappeared from history altogether really and his arguments are of no significance but the idea of Hobbes and the method of Hobbes the method of the social contract were very much in the air at that time and so in a sense whether Locke was responding directly to Hobbes or not he was certainly writing against the atmosphere that Hobbes had created he was writing in the tradition of the social contract and making a case for the new conception of government that had emerged with the accession of William of Orange and the new conception of what the British constitutional monarchy was all about now how did Locke go about this well like he starts with exactly the same premises that Hobbs does men naturally pursues self-interest and self-interest is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain precisely the same basing point and precisely the same reductionism for the same reason trying to find not an absolute theory of human nature but the least controversial theory of human nature can we not at least agree to this much and furthermore he is providing an ethically neutral theory of human nature if we start with each individual's interests as the basing point if we say each person is the legit person to legitimately define their own name aims in the world let's not have a philosophy that begins by defining what life is all about what the nature and destiny of man is let's assume that it's each person's right to define that at least in the first instance so we're not caught up in arguments about what is good and bad let's just say each person defines that for themselves so we're going to be ethically neutral at the outset in that particular sense as well as trying to start from a non-controversial assumption now Locke takes the next step with Hubbs reason is a calculation of self-interest a weighing of the advantages and disadvantages of different courses of action and to the extend what liberals have always meant and beginning with Locke by human rationality is that we are calculators that we look at a situation and we say now how am I going to get the optimum level of satisfaction out of this the pluses are this this in this the minuses are this this in this I will pursue this course of action if on the whole the pluses are greater than the minuses we don't try to we may try to get everything our own way we may try to maximize satisfaction but in fact we're going to be optimizing we're going to get as much as we can in terms of what our interests are as diverse and complex as they are in any situation I mean you don't look at life and say I want the most money possible I will go after that one goal even if you are the greediest most 1980s type in the class you're nonetheless saying what I really want is a decent family life a satisfying job a you know the good opinion of my friends and enough money so that I can live in the manner to which I wish to become accustomed now how do I go about getting all those things to come together and Locke would say you are being reasonable and rational if you sort of calculate how to put that package of satisfactions together in your mind and so you debate different careers you say well government service would be all right but you can't make enough money there and you got to live in Washington you know that's kind of a pain and on the other hand the law is okay but everybody's been doing that to the point of tedium and can everybody says computer science is good but being locked up with a bunch of robots and people who think like robots probably wouldn't be my idea watch that weighing process you've been doing it and as Locke and Hobbes would say it's perfectly natural you are calculating your own satisfaction in the light of alternatives considering and deliberating both the pros and cons of any action now so like hubs Locke's natural person the natural man natural woman of Locke's scenario is somebody who thinks and reasons in this way you seek your own self-interest you see other people to some extent as means to ends and you are seeking power after power in a way that even for Locke would end if only in death because you're constantly calculating this through life but here Locke makes a very different kind of assumption about what the state of nature would be like when he suggests that natural reason that this calculating property that we go through will lead people to recognize that to achieve their individual purposes they must reach a reciprocal right in others I mean hobbies portray Hobbes had this picture you know what we're all standing there you can almost picture we're all standing around in a circle kind of breathing heavily down each other's necks and everyone you know you're you're just about ready to look at the other guy it's just about ready to grab you and run off with you and put you in Chains and have you serving breakfast at 6:00 a.m. every morning and you're doing the same thing to him and it's just a terrible thing it mark says look this is unreasonable people aren't really like this that the way we really are is that in our calculated self-interest we say now wait a minute if I'm going to have my way with others if I'm going to live well with others I've better recognize that they're doing the same thing and that they have a right to do the same thing and lots as we will do that we will say look I can't go around trying to enslave my roommate because the odds I remember MIT's gonna try to enslave me or somebody else will and so we treat each other as equals and we say okay you get a life to live so do i and we'll collaborate in this we'll treat each other civilly I'll respect your rights and you respect mine and I'll try to I won't be envious that the things you have are just you know you aren't going to start stealing my stuff if I don't steal yours and we will agree tacitly to respect the rights of others now form from walks point of view is that for each to achieve what he wants there must be and we will recognize that there must be this mutual self restraint and accommodation Hobbes said the same thing we will understand that to be the dictate of natural reason we will make contracts we will make bargains we will accept reciprocity with other people to reduce the amount of danger in the world but Lockett sees done Hobbes didn't draw the conclusion that that would be very important Locke sees no tit and said that's central and he said this is what I mean by enlightened self-interest so that a rational person a person who is really calculating how to make their way in the world will not merely ask of every situation what's in it for me but what will say now what's in it for us everybody has is trying to advance their own purposes I am trying to advance mine how could we come to a situation in which each of us will optimize the realization of the things we want will not terrorize one another will not exploit one another will not drive us into this Hobbs like condition and lock thought we will simply automatically do this now in the state of nature than lock reason before there was government we would have figured this out and that on the whole people would be living in fairly peaceful ways they would be living in neutral respect mutual accommodation they would be living and I almost hate to use the example because it may be all wrong the way you sort of do did when you first moved into a dormitory at the University I mean there are Hobbesian dyma dormitories and Lockean dormitories I realized around here but let's assume that those of you who moved into the dormitory I'm thinking of exercise lucky and self-interest now there were police on every floor for heaven's sake and in fact you knew the authorities of the city in the university were pretty far away but most of you settled into a dorm and settled for a lot of reciprocal self-restraint you just sort of knew that for everybody to get along there was good it to be kind of an agreement on quiet hours people were not going to play rock music at three o'clock in the morning that there was not going to be terror in the streets that you were not going to kill somebody if they made you angry or got a higher grade on the exam than you did and so forth even if you get away with it there was a lot of mutual restraint capital she said that she asked is this a moral version of capitalism capitalism is the next step in the argument you betcha capitalism builds on this foundation absolutely and walk is the walk is one of the fathers of capitalism all right now if you can assume that man is more naturally this way that you do that I've know a person acting in enlightened self-interest will not try to exploit every individual will not feel driven to exploit everybody or be exploited will not live in this constant sharp edge of a jungle beast calculating whether they whether to fear or to attack but rather will live in this world of thinking how do we get along together then you've got an acceptance that locks state of nature the people naturally when they come together will live pretty much this way now Locke would argue because of this Hobbes made the wrong inference life in the state of nature is not a war of all against all people do do not seek unending power over one another but they are actually relatively congenial and cooperative however there are imperfections in the state of nature that man will come to recognize that this anarchic dormitory that I'm thinking of where everybody's just kind of moved in without a government and are treating each other pretty nicely will not be a perfect society some people will not recognize the dictates of natural reason most will but there will always be a criminal class because even if we've mostly moved into the dormitory and we've mostly agreed that we're not going to play our hi-fi's late at night and we're not going to leave the dishes around there maybe a free writer in the situation there may be somebody who just doesn't care and what are we going to do about that person there may be somebody who takes advantage of the situation takes advantage of other people call it a criminal element if you want to but people who are not guided by enlightened self-interest but by self-interest alone they simply will take advantage of the situation and then there is also the continuing problem of the impartial adjudicator four people will interpret situations differently what one sees is harmful to others another Mason is absolutely unharmed though I think listening to I mean rock and roll was terrible but turning on Beethoven full power the middle of the night well who could object to that the majestic sounds of the ninth century at 3 o'clock in the morning why I mean it is my duty to share this with all the rest of you in the building right now that is one point of view on the situation the point of view in the person who is sick in bed and wakes up at 3 a.m. to the chorus at the end you and the fourth birth may not share quite the same view of Beethoven at 3 o'clock in the morning now what are we going to do there are arguments on both sides of this every person feels that they're operating in community interests I was sharing Beethoven with you you were not sharing Beethoven with me you are making a fearsome noise not even under the Lord but unto me I am going to go and I am going to take the gizzard out of your speaker right here now before your very eyes now here again it's back to hamsa state of nature but Locke said yes but that's not going to occur every day that's an exceptional situation and it's one of those imperfections in the state of nature now then when we recognize these two things the lack of an impartial judge and the fact that some people well all of us will not be guided by enlightened self-interest all of the time every once in a while we're all tempted to cheat and there is some part of the population that has persistently tempted to cheat it will not be guided by enlightened self-interest all of the time we entertain the conjecture of whether government would be useful I mean government kind of like an invention at that point in somebody says well maybe it would be good idea if we had a system of laws judges and a police force then we'd have our rules about quiet hours that headway we'd have rules about property and who's got a right to what then we'd have rules about aesthetics and whose judgment will prevail and that these will be enforced by a procedure that is known universal and fair we'll all do it now Hobbes says once we look at the situation of the state of nature will be drawn to this conclusion but Locke says no once this idea comes up we'll have to weigh it will calculate it as we would any other question of self-interest because for luck the state of nature is not a desperate necessity I mean the civil society is not a desperate necessity government is not a desperate necessity we'll all kill each other if we don't have it rather for Locke it's an improvement on something that's a tenable way of life the state of nature will work the spontaneous living together of people in the community the dormitory will work up to a point but after a certain point it just doesn't work there are those few people who won't be guided by enlightened self-interest is the lack of the impartial judge so that we do tend to get into arguments maybe government would be a good idea so we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of government and and of living in government and giving up our rights to government now we do give up rights to government in Locke's compact to form a civil society in assuming in in the state of nature for Locke you have the right to property absolutely the right to property anything you mix your labor with is yours if you go out and make a log cabin in the woods out of trees that are unappropriated that belongs to you you can use it you can dispose of it you can burn it down you can do anything you want to it but once you've got a law property the government's going to tell you how you can come into possession of property how you can use it and how you can sell it the same is true with Liberty in the state of nature you're free to do anything you will restrain yourself in relationship to others voluntarily but you do that of your own free will under government they're going to be laws that are going to specify what rights you have and what duties you have you're no longer as free as before now the question is when would you rationally give up that right to be free in property in personal liberty to do with your life as you wanted to and Locke says you're gonna calculate that pretty carefully and you're only going to do it under one circumstances once they're constants which is when you come to the conclusion after deliberating the pros and cons that your natural rights the rights that you enjoy in the state of nature are better protected in civil society than they would be in the state of nature now everything follows from that what that means is you your perennial e calculating and you're saying all right in the state of nature I can exploit now I have the right to property anything I mix my labor with is mine now I'm going to trade that right for a complex system of property laws why would I do that well I've got a greater assurance of keeping my property if there's a police force and I've got a greater assurance that what's mine will be protected if there is a system of just universal laws I don't have to worry about people stealing things or borrowing things and having misunderstandings but that's the only condition under which I do that the same with this question of Liberty I'd only give up my right to just define my own relations with other people and have them defined by a body of law what my duties are what my rights are if and only if my Liberty were greater as an outcome of that particular transaction now Locke sees the rational individual as constantly pondering that question it's a question he sets in this artificial time when you're moving from the state of nature to civil society but in truth it's going on all the time you're always asking the question whether government represents a real improvement over the state of nature and Hobbes was sure it did but Locke thought it was an open question and that the only government a free person would accept was one that could guarantee individual rights better than they would be guaranteed in the state of nature and Locke and Newman enumerated those rights as life liberty and property but what he does in doing this is to answer Hobbes's question exactly in Reverse he has proven not that a rational person would accept government absolutely he has proven that government a rational person would only accept a certain kind of government and a kind of government that would appear to be a very minimal government and in doing so he has provided a series of tests of when government is legitimate and when it is not now from Locke's point of view then we have a conception of what the purpose of government is what are the ends of government ever since Aristotle proclaimed that man was a political animal we've asked what is politics that big question what is government for well out of the analysis we've just gone through Locke gives a very quick concise answer government only has one purpose it is to protect the rights of individuals better than they could be protected in the state of nature unless government can prove that it is doing that it has no right whatsoever therefore it follows the government has no right to impose a conception of morality or of truth on individuals because that is not it's right that any government action that is designed merely to enhance the power or grandeur of the state rather than to defend the rights of individuals is illegitimate government only has one purpose which is to protect the rights of freedom and property and life of individuals to create a police force so that a small group of individuals don't take advantage of others to create a system of you form and universal laws so that people will know where they stand with relation to one another that there will not be arguments over property or intrusions on one another's life and liberty and that's about it that's the only legitimate function of government and this gives you a test of law in public policy to a law or a government action is good insofar as it can be shown to defend individual rights better than they would be defended in the state of nature it is bad if it doesn't do that and this gives you a theory of legitimacy and of obligation a rational person would consent to a government that protected your rights better than they could be protected in the state of nature because it would be a good bargain you would be getting more rights that way you would be giving up nothing in the process now Locke of course as I say was created an idea that has come down to us in many different forms and a test of the legitimacy of government and Americans in particular have been singularly influenced by by his teachings we think as locke Ian's more than we realize Locke of course in his original formulation gave birth to the idea of the rights of Englishmen against government and our Declaration of Independence when Jefferson tried to justify the American Revolution he is Lockean language that governments are instituted among men to protect certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but more importantly we just simply think this way consider two or three contemporary issues or if we may consider abortion as a controversy which we debate the proper kind of public policy in our society on one side are those who argue that abortion is a matter of individual right it is a matter of personal choice and that government airs if it imposes a moral or religious doctrine society which declares that on religious grounds abortion is either right or wrong because of some belief that not everyone endorses in other words unless it can be shown that government is enhancing the right of individuals to freedom of choice any action that cannot meet that test is not in good law one side says the other side says the government has an obligation to protect individuals lives against the depredation of others that murder is an obvious case in point where government has to protect people's lives in ways that they could not protect themselves in the state of nature that the fetus is a particular example of this Locke gives no answer to this question but we certainly debate the question in Lockean terms both sides do consider another example we talk about Social Security these days and the political one part of our political spectrum argues the the right that Social Security is coercive in effect under Social Security you are forced by the government to insure yourself against destitution in old age you have to buy an insurance policy from the government the political right argues that this is a deprivation of personal liberty an individual should be free to plan for their old age or not as they see fit and to buy such annuities and securities for old ages they think are most profitable to them but that's a choice that should be left to the individual that there's no advantage to society or to the individual in forcing an individual to buy their insurance that the government issues for old age that this fails to meet the Lockean test that a person in the state of nature would not rationally agree to such a lot the other side that defends Social Security says known as a problem here unless people provided for their old age and were required to provide for their old age a person who is not calculating an enlightened self-interest but simple selfishness could easily say I won't say for my old age I'll spend it all now and when I get to be 65 I'll go to the County Courthouse and there's nobody just gonna let me starve to death you know on the steps of the County Courthouse so they'll take care of me in my old age anyway and the view is that if you know people selfishly calculated that way they can probably get away with it and that some people would take advantage of the system whereas everybody else prudently concerned not to be an obligation and family or community would logically save for their old age hence Social Security is a good idea because it requires everybody not to take advantage of one another by enforcing a saving for old age once again both justifications are very Lockean there's no right answer but we certainly argue unlucky and grownups or consider taxation Democrats progressives argue for progressive taxation that the wealthier in society should pay a higher proportion of their taxes and incomes in tax some conservatives argue on more Lockean grounds the government should not be permitted to take money in taxation to fulfill social schemes like creating greater equality or helping the poor that this is not government's business that if money isn't the government's money it's the individuals money if you've earned it fairly under the law it should be yours to do with as you see fit and no righteous government should take it for well-meaning but badly planned social schemes well that's a good Lockean argument on the other hand there is also a Lockean argument that's that it runs to the effect that when great inequalities of wealth appear in society people do not have equal chances to express their liberty and that the rich will in fact intrude upon the choices that are available to the poor or the more directly off and that it isn't responsible of got responsibilities of government to open up rights in that situation and to provide a context where all can be freer to choose and that argument 2 has a Lockean base well that's a big beginning of a look at luck next time what we'll do is talk about Locke's political economy and the right of property Locke's politics and the theory of majority law we're so familiar with John Locke and with his ideas that we often miss their originality Locke spoke for the world of politics we believe in and yet at the time he wrote almost everything he said was absolutely radical right from the beginning on and let me just show you at the most basic level how that was true luck did not accept the naturalness of government he thought government was a human contrivance that in a sense was an open option to mankind now that really was the first time in Western civilization that anybody had thought that thought seriously after all Plato had an Aristotle had both begun from the notion that men naturally lived in the community in the palace Aristotle went so far as to say that man's essence was as a political animal the Christian thinkers had thought that government was ordained by God for st. Agustin as a punishment for sin we needed government because we were not perfect creatures like angels are like gods and the later Christian thinkers had accepted this view but no one had ever assumed that government was less than natural so the question that rather motivated Hobbes and Locke and came out of that Cartesian sceptical background which was why would a rational person agree to be governed which even presumed that such a question was sensible or what kind of government would a free person accept is a mind-boggling question now Hobbes and Locke raised it a bit as an artifice of thought as a way of building political theory it was a way of starting for the opposite end to see if you could reason to a proof for government and it wasn't just accepting the government was natural or inevitable it was presuming you had to prove it and we watched how Hobbs did it and now we've watched how Locke did it too but the remarkable thing unlike Hobbes is that Locke never assumed that government was inevitable or natural or a desperate imperative Locke always held back a little bit and assumed that maybe man would invent government probably he would but maybe he wouldn't under some circumstances men would prefer to live in a state of nature than he would in government and therefore there was only one kind of government that would have the allegiance of a rational man and therefore or woman and therefore only one kind of legitimate government and that was one that protected ones natural rights well the idea of natural rights was fairly radical to the Stoics had talked about it the Christians had talked about it everybody had talked about the idea of a person's natural rights of rights that came because one was simply human but in lucky interns that took on a new vitality in a new starkness the idea was that life was not given nor liberty nor property by government by the act of the state those things existed apart from the state they were it is simply part of the human experience and government only was legitimate insofar as it helped preserve those individual rights the government had no higher calling than that government was not designed to pursue absolute justice the common good except as the common good was defined by the protection of individual rights there was nothing greater or more glorious government's job was a fairly basic and fundamental one well from this starting point Locke has generally been taken to be the founding father of what might be called classical realism which means that his doctrine has been taken as a defensive minimal government that government has very limited responsibilities in human affairs that those are very clearly specifiable and that in effect that government governs best that governs least and if you took walks three great rights the right of life liberty and property and said what do they amount to in terms of an agenda for government most about many modern Lankans classic liberals would say they really amount to just three things the government should do government is a security agency it should have a Defense Force to protect the individual from outside invasion that's one of the the security of life liberty and property against outsiders is a primordial and necessary function of government the second function of government is what we might in modern language call the criminal law that the state should define the rights of the person and of property against unwarranted intrusion by others this is the guarantee of one's life against murder or attack or assault this is the guarantee of one's Liberty against exploitation corruption enslavement harassment this is the protection of one's property against theft and the second thing the government should do besides have a department of criminal justice a police department and criminal courts a system of criminal law is to have a system of civil law and particularly a law of contract because as will recall locks other great point following Locke Hobbes about what government was good for is that it served as an impartial adjudicator someone we or the the basis of human life is contract voluntary agreements among us that create the pattern of social cooperation but someone has to interpret those contract corrects le Wilkin conflict else we will each feel abused and harmed by others because we interpret the contract to our advantage the other to his own the difference in our points of view can lead to conflict someone has to create a law of contract and interpret it through regular courts now anything beyond this a classic liberal might argue is an intrusion on the rights of individuals this is all government has to do to secure the rights of individuals better than they would be secured in the state of nature but any scheme of social betterment any solicitous paternalism in which the government tries to protect the individual against his or her own folly the welfare state the regulatory state all these things seem illegitimate to a kind of primitive Lockean or ism or a classical Lockean ISM and this basic conception of what John Locke meant and what his message was intended to say passes on through the ages he becomes the property of modern American classic liberals like Milton Friedman and becomes quite essentially the ideology of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States that that government governs list best the governs least and that these are the three basic functions of government and have government restricted itself to these functions there would be no problem well as I say through most of Western history Locke has been taken as teaching this but as we'll see Locke is by no means this simple because when we talk about what government must or could do to protect individual rights the situation becomes quite complex and it can and there are two sides to every argument of this gun and as we go along we'll begin to see that Locke cannot well usually argued on the side the side of classic liberalism can also be argued on the side of progressive and liberalism and that Locke does not really give us answers he gives us tests and an arena of our but that and we all argue in lucky interns but that lock there is a conservative lock and there is as well a radical luck know the lettuce then look today at lock both as a political theorist and as a political economist but let's look first at Locke's political economy at Locke's economics if you want to and because here in the long sequence of this course we see something quite radical about to begin now as we say this course is on political economic and social foot and last semester as we Tut and we thought about the whole classic period of Western thought we noticed that economics was always subordinated to politics in fact many of you wondered what where the economics was I mean we were talking consistently about political theory and political map where the classic mind did not really have an independent conception of economics but watch what's happening in Jacque John Locke's theory of natural rights and particularly the theory of property if you look real carefully at what Locke is writing you'll notice that he says that property is natural to man in the state of nature so is commerce so is exchange so is money the economy is natural government is not government is a contrivance it comes after and it comes out of human deliberation but in the state of nature the economy already exists now Aristotle wouldn't have recognized this he would have seen it the other way around politics is natural that comes first the human deliberation on the ends of life in society is primary and economics follows from those deliberations but with Locke we begin to see the liberal pattern that again still intuitively is with us the idea that the marketplace is a natural form of social order and government regulation is some how unnatural is a thought that no sort of deeply embedded in our imagination it begins somewhere in John Locke and in his conception of the naturalness of property now John Locke taught that there were three great rights life liberty and property the first two are unconscious in your mind but the third needs very careful examination because Locke's conception of political economy and the relationship of politics and economics rests on what we take the naturalness of the right of property to me now I'm gonna try to convey this idea that property is a natural right to you in ways that I did last semester when I spoke to you about the human intuition of injustice the when Plato said that we had a natural sense all of us for justice and injustice even before we could define it or explain it and we were talking about a mate of a built-in intuitive human moral capacity and that we could identify it by arbitrary treatment I said last semester if for example if that in the course of a course I had said looked at the class and I'd said no you will write three exams this semester but you will write for that before you even thought about that before you could give me a reason something would happen viscerally to you you'd get angry and you'd call it unfair and that that is that moral sense it's not rational we rationalize it afterwards is build into us now I think something of the same case can be made about property or at least John Locke thought it could be let me show you what he means assume we are in the state of nature assume we're in a Western forest far beyond the reach of the common law or the lawful king and that you're an early settler and that you've decided to take a piece of land and begin to clear it and you work very hard at this somewhere in Iowa County let's say in the 1830s you cut down the trees and you furrow you begin to get the land ready for planting and then you begin to build a log cabin and you work very assiduously at this you mix your labor with the things you have appropriated from the from from nature and after about four days when you have the edifice about half up a stranger comes into view sort of an ugly seedy character in buckskin jacket carrying a long rifle and he sits down in your front yard doesn't do much of anything shoots a rabbit cooks it and just watches you work he kind of works on his fingernails with his long knife sleeps in a tree and every once in a while wakes up enough to see what you're doing you go out every morning cut down more trees shave them Mitch your cabin get it built and finally after a couple of months of hard work you know you just put on the cross pieces of the roof and this fella finally gets up from his lethargy he just about twice the size of you and he's got a gun and he walks over it he says thanks so long now that I'm taking that now walk would say that even if there were no law of property even there were no custom of property even if you existed in a society that ever heard of property you would find that wrong just morally repugnant and if you were a third party observing that you'd find it wrong that that would just the idea it just goes to the bottom of your soul that that it would not be right to let that person take that log-cabin from you after you had mixed your labor with it and Locke is suggesting in a way that he can define the essential condition of that sense of moral outrage which is that you are entitled you have a right to that which you have mix with with with which you have mixed your labor in comparison to those who had taken so in a sense there are three great wrongs that go with the three great rights you know that murder is wrong in order to prove it by some logical proposition and thus there is a right to life you know that enslavement is wrong unless there is a right to Liberty and you know that theft is wrong and hence there is a natural right to property and hence in the state of nature you would be indignant about that and in your enlightened self-interest you would be indignant about that on behalf of other people similarly situated if you watch this event happening in the clearing in the forest you'd want to do something about it and on those grounds you would if you were contemplating a government with a police force consider that the protection of property would be one of the great aims of government now extending everything that I think Locke said and that we have argued between socialists and capitalists between liberals and Marxists for 300 years it's kind of comes out from this simple picture of what the right of private property might look like and be all about because one first extrapolation from the principle would be that well theft is not something that is just too by individuals theft can also be committed by a government for the government to take property arbitrarily or without your consent is simply a crime it is a form of theft and if an underdeveloped country you can do 20 well one can just imagine the cabinet of an underdeveloped country sitting around saying I think I figured out a way that we can develop and avoid American imperialism we will invite in foreign capital give them big tax concessions lots of privileges let them build the factories let them invest their capital bring their technology and then we'll nationalize them well one might yeah the classic liberal would argue that would be an act of theft that would simply be another form of stealing for government for the majority to feel that once people have mixed their labor and built factories built farms built ranches that out of envy for those possessions you couldn't take them away and give them to the proletariat is simply robbery for the government in the same time to take the money that you've worked hard for perhaps and coerce you require you by taxation to pay taxes to subsidize let us say a public television system which broadcasts programs only of interest to the effete intellectual snobs whereas you had much rather be watching football or baseball or situation comedies is theft in a sense shouldn't do things like that shouldn't require people to pay for things I don't intend to use just simply because some small group has power over government and can coerce through the tax system to do that all of these things make the classic liberal just as angry as the primitive act of theft itself and in this sense one can see how Locke's idea of the absolute right of property and the natural right of property can be the foundation for an absolute theory of capitalism and laissez-faire government yet the question if this is it whether this is what Locke actually meant or whether this is all that he would have to say on the subject is quite complex and it gets complex as we read locks discussion of the right of property because he provides a variety of tests or criteria of what counts as property now the first thing that counts as a claim to the right of property is that you can show that you've appropriated something with nature for your use and you have mixed your labor with it that with which you have mixed your labor you have a right to but that isn't the only test of the right to property because lot goes on to qualify this in various significant ways for example there's a second principle that is a qualification what we might call the labor principle of property which is the principle of waste and Locke argues as you've already seen that we would find it intuitively immoral for people to store up vast quantities of things they did not want or did not use or to let them lie idle that if even if a person worked extremely hard and started up enormous quantities of apples or acorns or something like this and then claiming that they were his property or her property on the labor theory principle this let them go to waste that we would be angry by that - that that would be a source of automatic natural moral outrage - this to us now if you concur with Locke that you that a natural person a person in the state of nature would feel a natural moral outrage about this then you see that Locke's principle becomes a little more complex and he shares a more ancient Christian principle that does go back in fact also to Aristotle the property should be for use and the property must have a social function and in this sense that just because you do not just because you have built something does not justify a law alone your right to property and on this principle of waste you could justify the redistribution one imagines of unused land of idle factories or surplus possessions however Locke as you notice also accepted the idea of money in exchange here again this idea that the naturalness of the economy the economy exists in the state of nature the market is not cream or money are not created by government they're created by people out of their enlightened self-interest and the person who has developed a store of extra property a lot more apples or factories can sell them and thus prevent them from going to waste and Locke as you see very much admires this and he thinks money is a very satisfactory human invention because the hard you know hard gold hard silver does not rot and therefore you can store up value without it going to waste and others can use it and he finds this a very convenient form of human endeavor that overrides so money in effect overrides the waste principle now it follows from this quite obviously that Locke accepted inequality of wealth inequality of income as long as you didn't waste as long as you mixed your labor you were entitled to whatever share of property you could lay your hands on he assumed that people were unequal in property and most importantly that they would enter government in this condition of being unequal in property as Locke writes the great and chief end of people uniting into Commonwealth's is the protection of their property now in historical context the comments kind of interesting Locke is writing in the period of the Glorious Revolution 16 989 1690 and he's writing in defense of the Whig cause which is largely the cause of the middle class the rural convert farmers against the older nobility but also against some very threatening people who had arisen in the British in the British Civil War the Levellers some of the Commonwealth men who had argued for communism her absolute redistribution of income the greatest the left the less to the least he as well as the greatest tea in the Commonwealth has a right to live they argued and they frightened the middle class and Locke's argument for that people entered political affairs entered consented to government to protect their already existing property was in effect also to say the property of the middle class the property of those who have property and Locke has been taken historically to be the defender of the rising capitalist classes the rising commercial classes the middle classes against the landless workers against the landless peasants and the new industrial proletariat of his time and that may very well be true but it's not but theorists have several sides to them there's not only what they said in the context of their time there's the logic of their argument to be considered and what they've been taken to mean through the years because Locke qualifies the principle of property not only by the criterion the test of labour and the test of not cutting things go to waste but by a third principle as well and that's the principle of scarcity and LARC Locke argues that the third condition of a right to property is that one leave enough and as good from the common domain now in Locke's time of course this was not a major problem it's hard to think of the England of Locke's day but there was it was almost like the American frontier the 19th century we think of England today is a very densely populated country which is true it's hard for either Englishmen or a merry to realize that England has a pocket that England has a population of 60 million in an area the size of the state of Wisconsin but in the time that Lockley in the time that Locke lived there were large strips of vacant land between the settlements so one could relive the little fantasy that I gave one could go out in the forest inappropriate from the Commons from the common domain it was not an impossible proposition and of course in locky in America that America the frontier the nineteenth century there was free land to the west and the answer to the question what do you do about there being large concentration of property in the United States or the fact that you were poor was go west there's land in Nebraska there's land in Kansas in Montana and beyond anyone can be a free farmer at least until 1890 yet Locke wrote of logical consistency saw the central problem in the central principle that if people had a right to property if people had a right to mix their labor with the things of this earth then that had to be a right that was in some sense equally proportioned it had to be a right that government would protect against monopolies and that if any group or any individual monopolized property or took so much that no one else could get to it then in fact the right had become self contradictory and people would find that an unfair condition too because of an individual in the state of nature argued appropriately that one had a right to which one mixed one's labor and if there was nothing left to appropriate because every because somebody else had taken it all that person would not rationally consent to be governed and locked I think recognized that further implication of his argument perfectly well and in that sense Locke I think foresaw the problem that Marx thought would be central to capitalism for Marx never thought the capitalism was a bad thing do you thought it was simply self contradictory but when the proletariat realized that the principles of justice and equality upon which it was built the natural rights upon which it its legitimacy was proclaimed were denied to them that they would find that the system contradicted itself that had bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction and once they had achieved a true consciousness of the way things were in relationship to the natural rights they had been told that all people possessed they would overthrow the system well in that sense Locke paved the way for Marx by setting criteria for the right of property that were logically necessary in some sense and in to complete the argument from property and to universalize that right so that a rational man consenting from for government to government would in fact do it that way so looked at this way we have both a conservative and a radical luck potentially we have a look that could defend very canaveral imited state and what I would call something verging on perfect capitalism in which one argues that governments exists to protect property and to take property for the benefit of those who have not mixed their labor with it would be theft and that government commits theft went through taxation or expropriation it takes people's property that they have earned in the marketplace and uses it to help those who have not mixed their labor with it with me with those things and that's the conservative luck and one can make a very consistent argument for that luck but there's also a radical luck who might argue that people have the right to gain property by their work and effort and when some Canon do monopolize the property that is available to a society then government has a duty to intervene to protect the rights of individuals to life liberty and property itself it's not just existing property it's the potential to get property some would argue that requires government intervention against large concentrations of wealth and in that sense law can be seen as the forerunner of a socialist ethic as well as the capitalist one well we continue to bet to debate such matters within the context of liberalism within the various strands of progressive or classical liberal thought and in America ourselves we've never settled for one extreme or the other answer to the solution we have always believed in it it's part of our Constitution that ones that the government has a right of eminent domain or of expropriation of property but only with full compensation and in that way are constitutionally and in our law we have recognized the fundamental Lockean right to property but also the right of government to redistribute or to use private property for public purposes that's our compromise our reconciliation it's when we continue to argue and debate and it's there now so far are there any questions about Locke's political economy you'd like to ask at this time before we talk to him about his political theory yeah leave yes so the principle that I take as principle scarcity is that one should leave enough and as good behind once one is appropriated from nature one must at the end of that operation have left enough for others and as good in other words you can't just skim the cream off the crop you and claim that that people are just as well-off if you take all the fertile land and leave just the desert you can't claim your good or right to it by that principle and if you and if you take so much that others simply can't follow in your footsteps if you take all the land and there isn't enough left for those that come behind your right is qualified your right is not absolute according to that principle okay let's look now at Locke's politics what Locke recommended about the structure of government and about majority rule now in Locke there are two contracts you'll recall one is the contract to form a community which is the agreement that we will give up our rights to judge our own personal affairs absolutely and give them to the collectivity and the second contract the really to contract social contracts involved is to form a government and here we get into more technical political science and we ask the question to what specific kind of a government would a rational person freely consent now in getting at this question one of the things that I think helps to understand Locke is to be very clear about what he was opposed to politically and it's not so much monarchs or kings or anything of that kind if you look very carefully at what Blanc is arguing against I'd call it tyranny and arbitrary rule and tyranny I think has a very special meaning to the Enlightenment that Locke represented and it's one that if you see it carefully you just sort of see it as part of everyday life again is one of these moral intuitions of something that would make you morally upset when it occurs arbitrary government is whimsical government it's random government it's government without a reason it's government that can't justify itself by giving reasons for its actions that pertain to the welfare of the community if you ask the president for example why he invaded a small country and he said because I felt like it you'd be outraged if you asked a prosecuting attorney while here ooh if you has to judge what he ruled for the for the plaintiff and he said well the defendant had shifty eyes and I always rule for the plaintiff on Thursdays you you'd just be livid about the situation if you went to somebody if you went to a driving to get a driver's license and the examiner said I'm not gonna give it to you and you asked why and the driver's license said oh you know it's ten below zero and I just you know I just don't feel like giving it to somebody like you today now that's arbitrary arbitrary Authority if you go to your professor and some of you unfortunately have already had this experience and asked on what basis you were graded and he says well I give the grades and he cannot tell you you know what how various exams were weighed in relationship to another you get morally furious that's arbitrary now if you if your if your boss if you're working and your boss just comes downstairs and balls you out and makes general noise just because he's had a custody bad day gives you a hard time for no reason nothing you've done it all that's arbitrary now this is arbitrary this is the idea of tyranny government that cannot be justified you've got it you know again the principle of the free man back to Martin Luther unless I am persuaded by the clear light of reason I am under no obligation you asked the government how come you make these decisions and you wait for a reasonable answer and lockwood say that answer will always have something to do with the protection of individual life liberty and property but in any event it will have something to do with some conception of the public good not the good of the government now from Locke's point of view the greatest evil was that kind of tyranny of governments that aggrandized themselves that went off on wars of conquest just to right wrongs that had to do with only the interests of the royal house that did arbitrary and capricious things that build huge castles for their own amusement and their own betterment the treated people in you know whimsical erratic ways so that you didn't know how you were going to be treated all of this was wrong a free person would never consent to tyrannical government of too arbitrary government of that kind so the great tests of natural rights gave you a test of legitimacy against arbitrary government they told you what was room unless government could say look this law is necessary so as to protect human rights and it does it in the following ways no rational person need consent unless such an answer was forthcoming now Locke went on to say suggest then that the structure of such a government would take a particular form and would be a mixed government in that the legislative and the executive power the power to make rules would be different from the power to carry them into force now you think of this as a question in our modern language is the question of bodies that you have a parliament and you have an executive but think of it more abstractly that these are just simply two different functions of government the lawmaking authority could reside in a single person could reside in all the people Locke because he was fairly cautious about such matters preferred it to reside in an indirectly elected parliament and he of course he being a constitutional monarch estate the executive would be the monarch but if we ask the question why legislative supremacy we come back to this principle that law should not be arbitrary so you need a legislature to interpret human rights they don't interpret themselves not every individual is going to interpret his own rights anymore we need somebody to do it but that can't be done in a case-to-case basis you can't have the king going out and just saying well I think in this case you've got a right to property but you probably don't know don't over here and I think your your Factory is subject to expropriation but you probably left nothing as good and therefore you know you'll probably get by all right and just one ad hoc decision after another now that wouldn't do the reason you need legislation sounds almost like a truism is that you need law you need a general statement of the principles that will be applied and how they will it be apply so the function of the legislature is to create and universal laws known and universal laws that the executive will enforce their words in advance you have to know what is going to count as property and what is not you aren't going to do that just in the spur of the moment because of an administrators decision and these have to be universal you cannot write laws that say Sally Smith is entitled to all the land she can get her hands on you have to say any person of age as a right to property if they file in such in such a way you can't make no proper names no identification of classes or irrelevant characteristics characteristics that are irrelevant to the laws the laws have to have general application they have to be known again a defense against arbitrariness the definition of what a legislature is for but the legislature shouldn't apply the rules to specific cases that's another function of government Locke defined it as the executive function we would further clarify it as an executive and a judicial function but in either case the executive should not make the decisions because they would be arbitrary and whimsical the executive should only apply the general principles of law to specific cases as the judiciary should only interpret the law it should not make the law and this basis basic idea of the separation of powers that you've heard in every civics class goes back way back to the fundamental logic that Locke who was following out the other thing that Locke believed in was majority rule and this deserves a comment because one says well maybe he gave up everything at the end there when he advocated rule by the majority because if all that is left is the end is that those who get to define what these natural rights are is the majority does that not throw us back with the most ancient political problem of all which is that the majority can be a tyrant as well as any individual the majority can decide for whimsical arbitrary or self-interested reasons the majority can create laws that are in its interest rather than the interest of all the people Aristotle thought that democracy was a corrupt institution now how could Locke defend majority rule well frankly there's a little basic logic to majority rule that you come to simply by the exclusion of alternatives one alternative is that one person rule and in that case that person becomes all-powerful and makes all the decisions or you have minority rule in which case some group in the society makes all the decisions but even if you had Yunan unanimous rule the rule of unanimity let's say everyone had to approve an action before it came into force then you would create another kind of tyranny which is that the one recalcitrant individual who didn't want to go along we'd become all-powerful or if you had the rule of unanimity the small minority of three or four would become all-powerful now Locke believed as all liberals believe that each individual has a right to judge and evaluate government and there's only one principle that's consistent with the idea of equality of choice which is the majority principle any other principle is going to make some individual or set of individuals in the society whether it be one person a minority or under the rule of unanimity also one person or a minority infinitely more powerful than the rest and under Locke's logic the logic of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and the Reformation that each individual is rational and capable of judging government that will not do only majority rule would do so in the end then an entering civil society in Locke's world the individual gives up the right to judge in his or her own case but the individual does not give up the right to judge whether government is legitimate or not in one's enlightened self-interest you are always evaluating whether government is acting to protect individual human rights or whether it is not one did not give up the right of political evaluation to the sovereign at all and then unlike Hobbes when always the community always had the right so who was sovereign well it certainly wasn't the legislature and it wasn't the king it wasn't the government it was the community and as the community could always evaluate the government that it had created because government wasn't natural it was a contrivance it could always withdraw that authority and it could but it could reach draw that authority only for good and sufficient reason because the community could be no more arbitrary or win psycho or self-interested or vindictive than the king himself hence the Declaration of Independence and it's argument the people will endure a long time the outrages of society for its conveniences but in that in the end one must justify separation and revolution and the appropriate ground of that is a deprivation of those rights with which individuals are endowed by nature and which it is the duty of governments to protect and then in the declaration comes the long lists of the bill of particulars against the king all the things that he have done that none has done that our tyrannical whimsical arbitrary and that the community can no longer sustain well this is john locke and as I say he leaves a mixed heritage our beliefs in the fundamentals of government in our society have a Lockean foundation as our beliefs in capitalism but by lot by modern standards locks limited conception of government is only one side of it his canoes idea that that is so much come down is the meaning of lock that that government is basically a security state designed to protect people from outrages against their lives or property but one can argue for a very intervention of State on Lockean grounds - on the need to protect the right to property and make it universal the need to protect the right of equality of opportunity both as a matter of Liberty and as a matter of property and universalized that lies that one can argue the the the right of property Locke's political economy boasted progressive ends and too conservative ends what didn't give us answers finally I don't believe but he set up an argument and therefore gave us at least one thing that we're sure of the government must give good reasons government must give a justification and that justification must always be the interests of the citizens

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

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Keywords: Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Liberalism, Classical Liberalism, State of Nature, Private Property, Human Nature, Human Rights, Political Liberalism, History of Philosophy, History of Political Theory, Laissez-faire, Capitalism, Individualism, Liberty, Equality, Property, Libertarianism, 17th Century, History, Property Rights, Lockean, Political Science, Conservativism, Social Contract, Democracy, Labor theory, Natural Law

Id: hMfvO2v3Z5o

Length: 95min 52sec (5752 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018