Second Treatise of Government

OF CIVIL-GOVERNMENT

Book II

Chap. I.

§ 1. Where political power really comes from

In the earlier part of this work, I argued four things:

• Adam never had the sweeping authority people claim for him—not by “natural fatherhood,” and not by any special gift from God. He didn’t have a built-in right to rule his children as a king, and he didn’t have personal ownership of the world.
• Even if he had, his heirs still wouldn’t automatically inherit that authority.
• Even if his heirs could inherit it, there’s no law of nature—and no direct law from God—that reliably tells us who the “right heir” is in every messy situation that can come up. So succession, and therefore the right to rule, couldn’t be pinned down with certainty.
• And even if you imagine succession could be settled in theory, in practice it’s hopeless: the record of who belongs to Adam’s oldest line vanished long ago. After so many centuries and so many branches of families, there isn’t a single house on earth that can plausibly claim, “We’re the eldest line, so we inherit the right to rule.”

If all of that is true—and I think it’s been shown clearly—then today’s rulers can’t honestly squeeze even the faintest hint of authority out of what some people call the source of all political power: Adam’s private ownership and fatherly jurisdiction.

That leaves us with a problem. If we can’t ground government in that story, we don’t want to slide into an even worse one: the idea that all government is nothing but force, and that people live together under the same rule as wild animals—whoever is strongest wins. That view doesn’t just sound bleak; it practically invites endless chaos: disorder, harm, riots, factions, sedition, rebellion—the very outcomes that defenders of that “Adam-as-first-king” theory claim they’re trying to prevent.

So anyone who wants to avoid making government look like legalized violence has to do something else: they must find a different beginning for government, a different origin for political power, and a better way to identify who legitimately holds it than what Sir Robert Filmer teaches.

§ 2. Defining political power by separating it from other kinds of power

To get clear on this, it helps to say plainly what I mean by political power—because people often mix it up with other kinds of authority.

The power a magistrate has over a citizen is not the same thing as:

• a father’s authority over his children
• a master’s authority over a servant
• a husband’s authority over a wife
• a lord’s authority over a slave

Sometimes one person can hold several of these roles at once. But if we keep the relationships distinct, it becomes easier to see what each kind of power really is—and, just as importantly, what it isn’t. That way we can tell the difference between the ruler of a commonwealth, the head of a household, and the commander of a galley.

§ 3. What political power is

Here’s what I mean by political power:

It is the right to make laws—including laws backed by the ultimate penalty, death, and therefore every lesser penalty as well—for the purpose of regulating and preserving property. It also includes the right to use the community’s collective force to:

• carry out those laws
• defend the commonwealth from foreign harm

And there’s a strict limit on all of it: political power is justified only when it’s exercised for the public good.

CHAP. II.

Of the State of Nature.

§ 4. If you want to understand political power—and trace it back to where it comes from—you have to start with the default condition human beings are born into. Call it the state of nature. In that state, every person has complete freedom to decide how to live: to direct their own actions, and to manage their possessions and even their own person as they judge best.

But that freedom isn’t a free-for-all. It operates within the bounds of the law of nature—a moral law built into reason itself. And crucially, you don’t need anyone’s permission to act. You aren’t naturally under anyone else’s command.

Just as important: the state of nature is a state of equality. Not “everyone has the same talents,” but something more basic—no one is born with automatic authority over anyone else. Power and jurisdiction, such as they exist, are mutual and reciprocal. If we’re members of the same species, born into the same basic standing, with the same human faculties, then we start out equal, not ranked like a chain of command.

The only exception would be if the supreme maker of humanity plainly and unmistakably appointed one person over others and gave that person a clear right to rule. Absent that kind of explicit appointment, no one has a natural title to dominion.

§ 5. This natural equality, Richard Hooker treats as so obvious that he uses it as the foundation for our moral duties toward one another—especially justice and charity. His point is straightforward once you say it in modern terms:

• If I want others to treat me well, I can’t reasonably expect that unless I’m prepared to treat them well too.
• Because we’re equals by nature, the standard I want applied to me is the standard I’m obligated to apply to others.
• And if something would hurt me—if it runs against my natural desire for good—then it would hurt them for the same reason, since they’re made of the same human stuff.

So, Hooker argues, my desire to be loved and treated fairly by my equals creates a natural duty to give them that same love and fairness. From this basic equality, ordinary human reason draws the everyday rules that guide life.

§ 6. Now, don’t confuse liberty with license. The state of nature gives people wide freedom, but it doesn’t give them permission to do whatever they feel like. Even if you’re free to manage yourself and your property, you are not free to destroy yourself—or to destroy other living things you possess—unless some higher purpose than mere preservation calls for it.

The state of nature is governed by a law of nature, and it binds everyone. That law is reason. And reason teaches a clear lesson: since all people are equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in any of these fundamentals:

• life
• health
• liberty
• possessions

Here’s the logic behind that rule. Human beings are the work of one all-powerful and supremely wise creator; they are, in that sense, the servants of one sovereign master, placed in the world for that master’s purposes. So they are not made to be disposable tools for one another’s convenience. They are meant to last for the maker’s pleasure, not for anyone else’s.

And because we share the same faculties and participate in a common human nature, there is no built-in hierarchy that would authorize one person to destroy another—as though people were designed for one another’s use, the way animals might be used by humans. Each person is obligated to preserve himself, and not to abandon his own life recklessly. And by the same reasoning, as long as my survival isn’t in direct conflict, I should preserve the rest of humanity as far as I can.

So, unless it is an act of justice against an offender, no one may take away or damage another’s life—or anything that supports life: freedom, health, bodily integrity, or goods.

§ 7. But a law without enforcement is just ink on paper. For the law of nature to actually restrain people from violating each other’s rights—and to serve what it aims at, which is the peace and preservation of mankind—the power to enforce it has to exist somewhere.

In the state of nature, that executive power is placed in every person’s hands. Each of us has the right to punish violations of the law of nature to the extent necessary to prevent its being broken again. Otherwise the law of nature would be useless, because there would be no one authorized to protect the innocent and restrain the guilty.

And if it is true that anyone in the state of nature may punish someone for wrongdoing, then it follows that everyone may do so. Why? Because in a condition of natural equality—where no one has natural jurisdiction over anyone else—whatever authority any person has for enforcing that law must be an authority all people share.

§ 8. This is how one person can gain a kind of power over another in the state of nature. But it is not an absolute or arbitrary power. It does not mean you can treat an offender any way your anger happens to want. Punishment is limited by what calm reason and conscience can justify as proportionate to the offense.

And what is punishment for? Locke says it has only two legitimate goals:

• reparation (making good the harm)
• restraint (preventing future harm—by the offender or by others)

When someone breaks the law of nature, he announces, by his actions, that he’s choosing a rule other than reason and fair dealing—the basic standard set for human behavior so we can live securely together. By rejecting that standard, he makes himself dangerous. He loosens the bond that protects people from injury and violence.

Because that kind of violation threatens not just one person but the whole human community, any person—standing on the general right to preserve mankind—may restrain the offender, and, when necessary, may even destroy what is harmful to human safety. So a person may impose on the violator whatever penalty is needed to bring repentance and to deter both him and others from repeating the same mischief. On that basis, in the state of nature, every person has a right to punish the offender and act as the executor of the law of nature.

§ 9. Locke expects this to sound shocking. So he offers a test: by what right can any prince or state punish a foreigner for a crime committed within its territory?

A country’s laws get their force from its own legislature. But those laws—considered as mere enacted rules—do not automatically bind someone who is not a member of that political community. The laws aren’t addressed to him as one of their subjects; and even if they were read aloud to him, why would he be obligated to obey a legislature that has no authority over him?

To a person from far away—Locke uses the example of an “Indian”—the lawmakers of England, France, or Holland are just other human beings, not natural superiors. So if individual human beings do not, by the law of nature, possess any authority to punish offenses against that law as the case reasonably requires, then it’s hard to see how a government could have that authority over a foreigner. In relation to him, the magistrate can have no more power than what any person can naturally have over another person.

§ 10. In most real-world wrongs, there are two different things going on at once.

First, there is the crime itself: the violation of the law of nature, the departure from reason’s rule. In doing that, a person degrades himself, abandons the principles of human nature, and makes himself harmful—like a dangerous creature within the human world.

Second, there is usually a specific injury: some particular person is harmed, and suffers a loss.

In that second case, the injured person has more than the general right everyone has to punish for the public good. The injured person has a distinct and personal right to seek compensation from the wrongdoer. And other people, if they judge it fair, may join the injured person and help recover enough from the offender to make satisfaction for the damage done.

§ 11. Once you see those two rights clearly, you can understand why magistrates can do some things but not others.

• One right is the public right of punishment, aimed at restraint and preventing future offenses. This belongs to everyone in the state of nature, and in political society it is placed into the magistrate’s hands.
• The other right is the private right of reparation, which belongs only to the person who was harmed.

Because the magistrate holds the public power of punishment, he can sometimes choose not to pursue the full penalty for a crime when the public good doesn’t require it. He can remit punishment. But he cannot, by his own authority, cancel the compensation owed to a private person for a private injury. That claim belongs to the injured party, and only the injured party can forgive it.

The person who suffered the damage may, by the right of self-preservation, take the offender’s goods or services as compensation. In the same way, every person has the power to punish crimes to prevent them from recurring, by the general right to preserve mankind and to do what is reasonable toward that end.

And this is why, in the state of nature, every person has the power to kill a murderer. The reasons are twofold:

• deterrence: murder is a kind of harm no payment can truly repair, so the public example of punishment aims to terrify others away from the same act
• protection: someone who has renounced reason—the common rule God has given for human life—has, through unjust violence and killing, effectively declared hostility toward all mankind

Such a person may be destroyed the way we destroy a wild predator that cannot safely live among us—Locke’s example is a lion or a tiger—because there can be no security or society with it. This is the basis, he says, of the great natural law: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

He even points to the story of Cain: after killing his brother, Cain cries out that anyone who finds him will kill him. Cain’s fear shows, Locke argues, how widely understood it was that every person had the right to destroy such a criminal—so deeply was this principle written into human conscience.

§ 12. The same logic applies, in proportion, to lesser violations of the law of nature. Someone might ask: does that include punishing with death? Locke’s answer is not “always,” but “as needed.” Each offense may be punished with as much severity as is sufficient to make wrongdoing a bad deal for the offender—enough to produce regret and to warn others.

In other words, any offense that can be committed in the state of nature can, in that same state, be punished in a way that matches what a commonwealth could justly do. Locke doesn’t stop here to lay out the full scale of punishments under natural law. But he insists on two claims:

• There really is a law of nature.
• And it can be understood by rational creatures—sometimes even more plainly than many human-made laws, because reason is often easier to grasp than the tangled and self-serving legal language people invent under hidden and competing interests.

In fact, many “municipal” or civil laws are only right to the extent that they rest on the law of nature. Natural law is the standard by which those local laws should be interpreted and corrected.

§ 13. Locke anticipates another objection: isn’t it unreasonable to make people judges in their own cases? Won’t self-love bias them in favor of themselves and their friends? And on the other side, won’t cruelty, passion, and revenge drive them to punish others too harshly—producing chaos and disorder? From that, people conclude that God must have appointed government to restrain human bias and violence.

Locke concedes part of this. Civil government really is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature, and those inconveniences can be serious—especially when people act as judges in their own cases. After all, someone unjust enough to harm his brother is unlikely to be just enough to condemn himself.

But Locke asks his critics to keep something else in mind: absolute monarchs are still just men. So if government is supposed to cure the problem of people judging their own cases—and if the state of nature is therefore intolerable—what kind of government is an absolute monarchy? How is it better than the state of nature, when one man commands a multitude and has the freedom to judge in his own case and do whatever he pleases to his subjects, with no meaningful power in anyone to question or restrain the people who carry out his will? Whatever he does—whether he’s guided by reason, mistake, or passion—everyone must submit.

Locke’s conclusion is sharp: in the state of nature, people are not obligated to submit to another person’s unjust will. And if someone judges wrongly—whether in his own case or another’s—he is answerable for it to the rest of mankind.

§ 14. People also ask, as if it ends the argument: where are the people who live in a state of nature? Have they ever existed?

Locke says the answer is sitting in plain sight. As long as there are independent governments in the world, their rulers stand in a state of nature with respect to one another. That alone proves the world never has been, and never will be, without many people in the state of nature.

He clarifies what ends the state of nature between persons. It isn’t just any agreement or promise. The only contract that truly ends it is the mutual agreement to unite into one community—one political body. People can make other bargains and still remain in the state of nature toward each other.

Two people on a deserted island might trade and make promises that bind them, and still be in the state of nature. A Swiss trader and an Indigenous person in the American woods might strike a deal that binds both sides, and still be in the state of nature relative to one another. Why? Because truthfulness and keeping faith are duties that attach to human beings as human beings, not only as members of a political society.

§ 15. To those who insist there never were any people in the state of nature, Locke replies with more than his own reasoning—he brings Hooker again as a witness. Hooker says the laws of nature bind people simply as people, even if they have no settled fellowship, no formal agreement about what to do or not do.

And Hooker also explains why political societies began: alone, we aren’t sufficient to supply ourselves with everything needed for the kind of life human nature aims at—a life fitting human dignity. So to make up for those defects and limitations, we are naturally drawn to community and fellowship. That, he says, is why people first united into political societies.

Locke then adds his own claim: all people are naturally in the state of nature, and they remain there until, by their own consent, they make themselves members of some political society. He promises to make that point fully clear as the discussion continues.

CHAP. III.

Of the State of War.

§16. What a “state of war” actually is

A state of war isn’t just people being angry at each other. It’s a condition of hostility and destruction. The moment someone shows—by words or actions—not a sudden, hot-tempered outburst, but a calm, settled intention to take another person’s life, that person has effectively declared war on him. And once you’ve declared that kind of intent, you’ve put your own life in the other person’s hands: he may take it himself, or anyone who joins him in defending himself may do it.

Here’s the logic: it’s reasonable and just that I may destroy what is plainly trying to destroy me. The basic law of nature is preservation—human life should be protected as far as possible. But when everyone can’t be kept safe, the safety of the innocent comes first. So someone who makes war on me, or reveals a settled hostility to my very existence, may be destroyed for the same reason I may kill a wolf or a lion: not because I enjoy it, but because such creatures live by force and predation. A person who throws off the common rule of reason and lives by violence alone can be treated like a dangerous wild animal—because if he ever gets power over you, he will use it to ruin you.

§17. Why attempted domination counts as war

That’s why anyone who tries to put another person under absolute power immediately places himself in a state of war with him. That attempt is, in effect, a declaration against the other person’s life. If someone tries to get me into his power without my consent, I have every reason to think he’ll treat me however he likes once he has me—and could even kill me whenever the mood strikes. Nobody seeks absolute power over me for an innocent purpose. The point is to force me into doing what violates my freedom—that is, to make me a slave.

And freedom from that kind of force is the only real security for my survival. Reason therefore tells me to see as my enemy anyone who tries to take away the freedom that protects my life. So the person who attempts to enslave me makes war on me.

This scales up. In the state of nature, if someone tries to take away the freedom that belongs to anyone, you must assume he intends to take away everything else too—because freedom is the foundation that makes any other rights meaningful. Likewise, in a civil society, if someone tries to strip the members of a commonwealth of their lawful freedom, you must assume he’s aiming at the rest of their property and security as well. That is why such an attempt is rightly treated as a state of war.

§18. Why forceful theft can justify lethal defense

This also explains a harsh conclusion: it can be lawful to kill a thief who hasn’t yet injured you or explicitly threatened your life—if he uses force to get you into his power so he can take your money or anything else he wants. Because once someone uses force where he has no right, to make me helpless in his hands, I can’t reasonably assume he’ll stop at my wallet. If he’s willing to take my liberty, why would he spare anything else once I can’t resist?

So I may treat him as someone who has put himself into a state of war with me—meaning I may kill him if I can. Anyone who introduces a state of war and becomes the aggressor justly accepts that risk.

§19. State of nature vs. state of war

This is the clear difference between the state of nature and the state of war—two things people often mix up, even though they’re as different as peace is from violence.

• State of nature: people live together according to reason, without a common superior on earth who has authority to judge disputes between them.
• State of war: someone uses force, or clearly threatens force, against another person, and there is no common authority on earth to appeal to for immediate protection.

And notice: this lack of an effective appeal is what gives a person the right to treat the situation as war—even if the aggressor is a fellow citizen in an organized society.

That’s why the law can draw a line like this: if someone steals everything I own, I must normally seek a remedy through the courts. But if he attacks me to rob me on the spot—even for something “small,” like a horse or a coat—I may kill him in self-defense. Why? Because the law exists to preserve me, and in that instant it can’t step in to protect my life from immediate force. A life lost can’t be repaired afterward. Since the attacker leaves no time to reach the common judge or wait for legal decision, the law permits immediate defense—what Locke calls “the right of war,” meaning the liberty to kill the aggressor when delay would invite irreparable harm.

One more key point:

• The absence of a common judge with authority puts people in a state of nature.
• Force without right against someone’s person creates a state of war—whether or not a common judge exists in the background.

§20. When the state of war ends—and when it doesn’t

In a society with functioning law, once the immediate violence is over, the state of war ends between the parties—because both sides are subject to the fair decision of the law. At that point there’s a clear path: appeal for past injury, and legal protection against future harm.

But where there is no such appeal—as in the state of nature, lacking established laws and authorized judges—then once a state of war begins, it continues. The innocent party keeps the right to destroy the aggressor whenever he can, until the aggressor offers peace and seeks reconciliation on terms that both repair the damage already done and secure the innocent person from future harm.

And there’s another grim scenario: even where courts exist, if justice is openly twisted—if the law is shamelessly bent to protect or excuse the violence of certain people or factions—then it’s hard to see that as anything but a state of war. Because violence is still violence, and injury is still injury, even when it’s done by officials who claim to act “under color of law.” The whole purpose of law is to protect and restore the innocent through an honest, unbiased application to everyone under it. When that isn’t done in good faith, the victims are, in effect, being warred upon. With no appeal on earth left to them, they have only one “court” remaining: what Locke calls an appeal to heaven.

§21. Why people form societies: to prevent war from becoming the default

Avoiding this state of war—where there’s no appeal but to heaven, and where even small disagreements can spiral into ruin because there’s no recognized authority to decide between contenders—is a major reason people leave the state of nature and enter society. When there is an authority on earth that can be appealed to, the endless continuation of war is blocked, and disputes are settled by that power.

Locke illustrates this with the story of Jephtha and the Ammonites. If there had been any court, any superior jurisdiction on earth that could have judged their rights, they would never have come to war. But instead Jephtha was forced to appeal to heaven: “The Lord the Judge be judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of Ammon.” And then, trusting that appeal, he goes to battle.

So when people ask, “Who shall be judge?” it can’t mean “Who will decide the case?”—Jephtha’s answer is plain: the Lord, the Judge, will judge. Where there is no judge on earth, the appeal lies to God in heaven.

What it must mean, then, is this: who will judge whether another person has put himself into a state of war with me, and whether I may, as Jephtha did, make that appeal? And in that question, each person is the only judge available—answerable to his own conscience now, and, as he believes, to the supreme judge of all people on the last day.

CHAP. IV.

Of SLAVERY.

§22. What “liberty” actually means

A person’s natural liberty is simple: you’re not born under any higher human authority. No one on earth is your built-in master. You aren’t supposed to live under another person’s private will or personal “law.” Your only rule, in the state of nature, is the law of nature—the moral limits reason lays down about how people may treat one another.

Once you join a political community, your liberty changes shape but doesn’t disappear. Liberty in society means:

• You answer to no lawmaking power except the one the community has set up by consent.
• You’re bound by no one’s personal commands, and by no laws, except those the legislature makes within the trust the people placed in it.

So freedom is not what Filmer claims—some wild permission for everyone to do whatever they feel like, live however they please, and ignore all rules. That’s not freedom; that’s chaos dressed up as a slogan.

Freedom under government is something more practical and more secure:

• A standing rule to live by—public, stable, and the same for everyone in the society.
• A rule made by the legitimate legislative power the society has established.
• Room to follow your own choices where the law is silent.

And just as importantly, freedom means not being at the mercy of another person’s inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will. Natural freedom is being restrained only by the law of nature; civil freedom is being restrained only by law made through the authority you (and your society) have authorized.

§23. Why you can’t “consent” yourself into true slavery

Being free from absolute, arbitrary power isn’t a luxury—it’s tied directly to survival. If someone can treat you as a thing, they can end your life whenever it suits them. And that’s why this kind of freedom isn’t something you can casually sign away.

Here’s the core logic: you don’t have rightful power over your own life in the sense of being allowed to destroy it at will. So you can’t, by contract or consent, give another person a power you don’t have yourself.

• No one can give more power than they possess.
• If you don’t have the right to take your own life, you can’t grant someone else the right to take it.

So “I agree to be your slave” can’t create legitimate slavery, because the central feature of slavery is exactly that: another person holds absolute, arbitrary power over your life.

There is one situation that can look similar, but it’s different in its moral basis. If someone, through their own wrongdoing, commits an act that deserves death, they may forfeit their life. In that case, the person to whom that life is forfeited—say, the victim or a lawful authority acting on behalf of justice—may, when the offender is in their power, delay execution and instead use the offender’s labor for their service. That isn’t an injury, Locke argues, because the offender’s life is already forfeit.

And notice the grim implication Locke builds in: if the captive finds the misery of that condition worse than life itself, they can force the issue. By resisting the master’s will, they can provoke the death they prefer to continued captivity.

§24. Slavery as a “war that never ended”

That leads to a sharp definition: perfect slavery is simply a continued state of war between a lawful conqueror and a captive.

In war, one person claims the right to kill the other. Slavery, in this strict sense, is just that threat stretched out over time—life held at another’s discretion.

But the moment the relationship becomes genuinely contractual, something changes. If the two sides enter a compact—an agreement that sets:

• a limited power on one side, and
• obedience on the other,

then the state of war ends, and with it slavery—at least for as long as that agreement holds. Because, again, no agreement can legitimately hand over what no one possesses: a rightful power over one’s own life.

Selling oneself: hard labor isn’t the same as slavery

Locke admits that among the Jews, and many other peoples, we do read of people “selling themselves.” But he insists this was drudgery, not true slavery.

Why? Because the person sold was not placed under an absolute, despotic power. The “master” did not have the right to kill them. In fact, the arrangement itself required that the servant be released at a set time, which makes it impossible for the master to have a standing right to destroy them.

And the limits went further: the master didn’t even have free rein to injure the servant’s body. Under the law described in Exodus, if a master caused the loss of an eye or a tooth, that injury triggered the servant’s freedom. This kind of service may be harsh, but it is not slavery in the strict sense—because it never hands one person the arbitrary power of life and death over another.

CHAP. V.

Of PROPERTY.

CHAP. V.
Of PROPERTY.

§ 25. However you come at it—natural reason or revelation—the starting point is the same. Reason says that once people are born, they have a right to preserve their lives, and that means a right to food, drink, and whatever else nature provides for survival. Revelation tells a parallel story: God grants the world to Adam, and later to Noah and his sons. Put that together and the conclusion is hard to miss: as the Psalm puts it, God “has given the earth to the children of men.” In other words, the earth was originally given to mankind in common.

And that’s where people often get stuck. If the world starts out as everyone’s, how does anything ever become anyone’s? I’m not going to settle for the lazy answer. (And notice: if you think property is difficult to explain when the world is granted to humanity in common, it becomes impossible to explain if you insist it was granted to Adam and his heirs alone—because then property would make sense only for a single universal monarch.) Instead, I’m going to show how private property can arise out of a world held in common—without needing a formal agreement signed by “all the commoners.”

§ 26. If God gave the world to people in common, he also gave them reason—the ability to use it in a way that supports life and makes it more livable. The earth and everything in it exists for human support and comfort. So yes: the fruits the earth produces on its own, and the animals it feeds, belong to humanity in common as long as they sit there in their natural state.

But here’s the practical problem: something can’t help any particular person unless there’s a way for that person to take it into use. Before food can nourish you, it has to become yours in some meaningful sense. Think of the “wild Indian” in the old example—someone living without fences or private fields, still sharing the world in common. The fruit or venison that keeps him alive must become his in a very real way: it must become part of him, so that nobody else can still claim a right to it. Otherwise, it can’t do its job—keeping him alive.

§ 27. This is the key move: even if the earth and animals are common to all, each person has a property in his own person. Nobody else has a right to your body but you. And because your body is yours, so is the labor it can perform—the work of your hands, the effort of your muscles, the skill in your motions.

So when you take something out of nature’s common stock—when you pick it, catch it, dig it up, or otherwise remove it from the state nature left it in—you mix your labor with it. You attach something that already belongs to you (your labor) to something that was common. That’s how it becomes yours. And because your labor is unquestionably yours, no one but you can claim a right to the thing your labor is now joined to—at least as long as there is still enough, and as good, left in common for others.

§ 28. Take a simple case. If you live on acorns you picked up under an oak, or apples you gathered in the woods, you’ve clearly made those acorns or apples your own—because the nourishment you get from them is yours. So when did they become yours?

• When you digested them?
• When you ate them?
• When you cooked them?
• When you carried them home?
• Or when you picked them up?

The answer is obvious: if the first act of gathering didn’t make them yours, nothing later could. The gathering is what marks them off from the common supply. Your labor adds something beyond what nature, the “common mother,” provided on her own. That extra—your effort—is what turns them into your private right.

And no, you don’t need “permission from all mankind” for that. If universal consent were required before anyone could take food from nature and make use of it, humans would have starved in the middle of abundance. Even in commons that remain common by agreement, the property begins when someone takes a portion and removes it from the state nature left it in. Without that, the common is useless.

That’s why ordinary cases make sense without anyone signing off:

• The grass my horse bites becomes mine.
• The turf my servant cuts becomes mine.
• The ore I dig out of the ground becomes mine,

so long as I have a right to those resources in common with others. My labor moved them out of the common state; that fixes my property in them.

§ 29. Push the “everyone must explicitly consent” idea, and it collapses into absurdity. Children and servants couldn’t even cut meat their father or master has provided for the household—because they’d need everyone’s permission to assign each person a specific portion. That’s not how life works.

Or take water. Water in a running fountain is everyone’s. But once someone draws it into a pitcher, nobody seriously doubts that the water in that pitcher belongs to the person who drew it. Their labor removed it from nature’s shared supply and made it theirs.

§ 30. The same “law of reason” explains why the deer belongs to the person who kills it in the hunt. Before that moment, it was part of the common world; afterward, the hunter’s labor makes it his goods.

And this isn’t just a rule for so-called “uncivilized” people. Even in societies full of laws about property, this original logic still operates whenever something previously common becomes privately owned through labor. The ocean is still a vast common, yet the fish you catch in it become yours by the labor that takes them out of that shared state. The same goes for valuables found and collected—like ambergris in the old example. Even closer to home: a hare, before it’s caught, isn’t anyone’s private possession. But during the chase, people tend to treat it as belonging to the person pursuing it, because the pursuer has invested real labor to find and follow it—and has begun to pull it out of nature’s common stock.

§ 31. At this point someone will object: “If picking acorns gives you a right to them, then why can’t anyone just grab an unlimited amount?” Because the very same law of nature that creates property also limits it.

God has given people the world richly. But “given” doesn’t mean “given to waste.” The limit is straightforward: you may take and claim as property as much as you can use—as much as you can enjoy and put to advantage—before it spoils. Anything beyond that is more than your share, and it belongs to others. Nothing was made for humans to ruin.

In the early world, that limit mattered a lot. There was plenty of natural provision, few consumers, and the reach of any one person’s industry was small. If you can only gather, hunt, and store so much, you can’t “corner the market” on nature’s goods. So there was little reason for quarrels over property formed in this way, especially when people stayed within the rational boundary: use, not spoilage.

§ 32. But the biggest object of property today isn’t usually the fruit or the animals—it’s the land itself, because land contains and supports everything else. Still, the logic is the same.

A person gains property in land by labor the same way he gains property in apples or deer. As much land as a person can:

• till,
• plant,
• improve,
• cultivate,

and then actually use the product of, that land becomes his property. By working it, he effectively fences it off from the common—not necessarily by building a literal fence, but by attaching his labor to it in a way that makes it his.

And it doesn’t undermine his right to say, “But everyone else had an equal claim, so he needed everyone’s consent.” When God gave the world in common, he also commanded people to work. Human need reinforced the same command. Reason pushes people to “subdue the earth”—meaning: improve it for life’s benefit. When someone obeys that command and brings a piece of land under cultivation, he joins his labor to it. That adds something that is his, and others can’t take it without wronging him.

§ 33. In the beginning, this kind of appropriation didn’t harm anyone else, because there was still enough, and as good, left for others—more than the unprovided could use. In that situation, someone’s taking a tract for cultivation doesn’t leave less in any meaningful sense. If I leave you as much as you can use, it’s practically the same as taking nothing from you.

The point lands with a simple analogy: nobody thinks they’re injured because someone else drinks a large cup of water when a whole river is still available. When there is enough of both land and water, the cases are the same.

§ 34. Yes, God gave the world to people in common. But he gave it for their benefit—for the greatest conveniences of life they could draw from it. So it makes no sense to imagine he meant it to stay forever uncultivated, unused, and wild.

The world, in practice, is given to the industrious and rational—and labor is their title. It is not given to satisfy the whims or greed of people who only want to fight and hoard. If someone still has land just as good available for improvement, he has no basis to complain about land another person has already improved. If he interferes anyway, he isn’t chasing “his share” of the common; he’s trying to grab the benefit of someone else’s work. That’s the real motive—wanting another person’s gains without having earned them.

§ 35. But now we need an important distinction. In places like England—crowded societies under government, with money and commerce—common land often stays common by agreement. In that case, no one can enclose or appropriate part of it without the consent of the other commoners, because the land is common by law. Violating that compact is just breaking the law.

Also, even when land is “common” in that sense, it isn’t common to all humanity. It’s the joint property of a particular country, parish, or community. And in those settings, taking a portion can genuinely make what remains worse for those who relied on access to the whole.

In the earliest days of the world, it wasn’t like that. The practical pressure ran the other direction: the law people lived under was, if anything, a law favoring appropriation. God commanded labor, and necessity forced it. Wherever someone fixed his labor, that became his property and couldn’t rightly be taken away. That’s why “subduing” the earth and having dominion are paired: cultivation gives title; title supports dominion. By commanding humans to subdue the earth, God authorized appropriation to that extent. And the basic conditions of human life—labor plus materials to work on—naturally produce private possessions.

§ 36. Nature sets a clean measure for property: the reach of a person’s labor and the needs of life. No one can work all the earth. No one can consume more than a small portion. Under those constraints, it’s impossible—through labor alone—for one person to seize property in a way that genuinely blocks another’s rights, because others still have room for land just as good and as large as they can use.

That’s why in the first ages, each person’s share stayed moderate. People were more likely to be endangered by wandering too far into a vast wilderness than by running out of space to plant. And the same principle could still work today without hurting anyone. Imagine a family living as early families did, then settling in vacant inland regions of America: even now, the property they could claim under this rule wouldn’t be huge, and it wouldn’t deprive the rest of humanity.

You even hear claims—true or not, and I won’t hang my argument on them—that in parts of Spain a person may plow, sow, and reap on land without any title beyond using it, and people don’t interfere. On the contrary, they’re grateful, because the worker’s effort turns neglected land into food the community needs.

But even setting that aside, I’ll state this confidently: the rule still holds—each person may rightly claim as much as he can use—without making anyone worse off, because there is land enough to support even far more people than exist now. What changed things wasn’t a shortage of land. It was the invention of money, and the quiet, widespread agreement to treat it as valuable. That consent opened the door to larger possessions and the recognized right to hold them. How that happened is something I’ll explain shortly.

§ 37. Here’s what’s certain. In the beginning, before the desire to have more than one needed distorted the way people valued things—before usefulness was replaced by accumulation—property by labor could not expand into anything like modern inequality. People hadn’t yet agreed that a small piece of yellow metal, which doesn’t rot or decay, should be worth a huge amount of food that does spoil. In that earlier mindset, a person could appropriate by labor only as much as he could actually use, and that couldn’t stretch very far—especially when plenty remained available for anyone willing to work.

One more point matters: when someone appropriates land by working it, he doesn’t shrink the common stock of humanity. He increases it. An acre of fenced-in, cultivated, improved land produces vastly more life-supporting goods than an equally rich acre left wild in common. Even if we speak conservatively, it’s at least ten times more. So when someone encloses land and gets more from ten acres than he would have gotten from a hundred left to nature, he can fairly be said to “give” ninety acres back to mankind—because his labor draws from ten acres what would otherwise require a hundred in the wild.

And even that ten-to-one estimate is cautious. It’s often far closer to a hundred-to-one. Ask yourself: do a thousand acres of untouched American wilderness, with no tillage or husbandry, provide the “needy and wretched inhabitants” with as many comforts of life as ten equally fertile acres in Devonshire, carefully cultivated?

Before land was privately taken up, the rule was still the same for nature’s spontaneous goods: if you gathered wild fruit, or caught, killed, or tamed animals, and you invested labor that changed them from the state nature put them in, you acquired a right in them. But if you let them spoil in your hands—if fruit rotted or venison decayed before you could use it—you violated the common law of nature. You had taken more than your share and effectively stole from your neighbors, because your right extended only as far as your actual use and enjoyment.

§ 38. The same limit applies to land. Whatever a person tilled and harvested, stored, and used before it spoiled—that was his special right. Whatever he enclosed and could actually make use of—through grazing, crops, and livestock—that too was his.

But if the grass in his enclosure rotted unused, or the fruit of his planting spoiled unharvested, then that portion of earth—despite being enclosed—should still be treated as waste. And in that case it could rightly become someone else’s possession.

So in the earliest times, Cain could take as much ground as he could work and make it his, while still leaving enough for Abel’s sheep to graze; a few acres would cover both their needs.

As families grew and people got better at making things, their “stuff” naturally multiplied too. But for a long time, that didn’t automatically mean anyone owned the land in a fixed, legal sense. People used the ground they needed and moved on. Clear, permanent land ownership shows up much later—after groups settle down, live close together, and build towns and cities. Then, by mutual agreement, they start doing two things:

• drawing borders around a shared territory
• writing rules inside that society about who owns which pieces of it

You can see this early pattern even in the oldest, most densely inhabited regions. As late as Abraham’s time, people with flocks treated the land as something you used, not something you claimed. Abraham wandered freely with his herds, even though he was living as a foreigner. That only makes sense if large areas of land were effectively held in common—people didn’t value it as private property beyond what they actively used.

And when land did become a problem, they solved it with consent, not conquest. When Abraham and Lot’s herds couldn’t graze together in the same place, they simply agreed to separate and take different pasturelands. Esau did something similar later: he left his family group and settled elsewhere. The basic idea is straightforward: once there isn’t enough “shared room,” people negotiate a split.

§ 39. Property doesn’t require a mythical first owner

So you don’t need to invent a private, exclusive ownership claim in Adam over the whole world (a claim that can’t be proven anyway, and wouldn’t help establish anyone else’s property even if it could). Start with the simpler assumption: the world was originally given to humanity in common. From there, it’s easy to see how labor creates clear, individual titles to particular portions of that common world—because when someone works a specific piece for a specific use, the claim is visible and practical. In that situation, there’s little to argue about.

§ 40. Labor is what makes things valuable

It may sound odd at first that the “ownership” created by labor could outweigh the original commonness of the land. But think about where value actually comes from. Labor is what turns raw nature into something worth having.

Compare:

• an acre planted with sugar, tobacco, wheat, or barley
• the same acre left untouched, open to everyone, with no farming at all

The land itself is the same. The difference in value is the work. And the work isn’t a small add-on—it’s most of the value.

A very conservative estimate would say that nine-tenths of what the earth produces that’s useful to human life is due to labor. And if you track things carefully as they actually reach your hands—counting all the steps, tools, and effort—it often turns out that ninety-nine hundredths of the value comes from labor, not from nature alone.

§ 41. A living demonstration: land-rich, comfort-poor societies

If you want proof, look at nations in the Americas (as Europeans then described them). Many lived on enormous stretches of fertile land and yet had comparatively few of the comforts Europeans took for granted. Nature gave them the same basic “inputs”—rich soil and abundant materials for food, clothing, and shelter—but without sustained improvement through labor, they enjoyed only a tiny fraction of the conveniences available in places like England.

Put bluntly: a king ruling a vast, fertile region there might eat, sleep, and dress worse than an English day laborer. The land isn’t the limiting factor. The transformation of land into usable wealth is.

§ 42. Follow the value chain

To make this concrete, trace everyday necessities and watch how they gain value through human work.

Take bread, wine, and cloth—common, daily items. Without labor, “bread” would be acorns, “drink” would be water, and “clothing” would be leaves, skins, or moss. Anything that makes bread better than acorns, wine better than water, or cloth and silk better than leaves and skins comes from labor and industry.

Nature provides the raw starting point. Human effort turns it into something far more valuable. That’s why, in the final value of what we use, the “ground that produced the materials” often barely counts—or counts as only a small fraction.

This is also why land left entirely to nature—no pasture improvement, no farming, no planting—gets called what it really is: waste. It yields almost nothing compared to what it could, because the missing ingredient is work.

And this has a political punchline: a society is often better off with more people productively working than with a huge empty empire. The real art of government is increasing the useful yield of land by ensuring it’s used well. A ruler who protects and encourages honest industry—through stable laws and liberty, not oppression or factional games—will outcompete neighbors fast. But that’s a side note. Back to property.

§ 43. Same land, wildly different payoff

An acre that produces twenty bushels of wheat in England and an acre in America that could produce the same amount with the same farming methods have the same natural value. The soil, in itself, is comparable.

Yet the benefit people actually get from them can be worlds apart. In one place, the annual output might be worth pounds; in another, it might be worth almost nothing—perhaps not even a thousandth as much—once you measure it by what could be sold and used in a developed economy.

The reason is the same: labor creates the value.

And notice what “labor” really includes. It’s not just the farmer’s physical effort—plowing, harvesting, threshing, baking. It also includes the work behind the tools and infrastructure:

• training and keeping the oxen
• mining and working iron and stone
• cutting and shaping timber
• making the plough, mill, oven, and other equipment
• transporting materials and supplies, sometimes by ship, to support every worker in the chain

If you could list everything that “industry” contributes before a loaf of bread reaches your table, it would be staggering: iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coal, lime, cloth, dyes, pitch, tar, masts, ropes—plus the materials in the ships and wagons that moved goods for the workers involved. Nature provides the base materials. But by themselves, they’re close to worthless until labor turns them into usable forms.

§ 44. The foundation of property is self-ownership

So even if the natural world is originally given in common, each person is still the owner of something crucial: their own self—their body and the actions of that body. That means a person owns their labor, and that labor is the deep foundation of property.

Once arts and inventions expand the conveniences of life, most of what supports and comforts us is the result of someone’s labor—and therefore belongs to them, not to everyone in common.

§ 45. Labor came first; law came later

In the beginning, labor created property rights wherever someone chose to work on something held in common. And for a long time, “the common” was still the vast majority of the earth—honestly, it still is compared to what humans actually use.

Early people were largely satisfied with what nature offered directly. Later, in places where population grew, wealth increased, and money came into use, land became scarce and therefore valuable. At that point, communities:

• marked the borders of their territories
• regulated private property by internal laws
• formally stabilized the ownership patterns that labor had already begun

The same thing happens between societies. Treaties and alliances—explicitly or quietly—often amount to mutual recognition: “we won’t claim land you possess, and you won’t claim ours.” By common consent, states give up the sweeping “natural” claim they might have had to all land in common and instead accept distinct, bounded ownership across the earth.

Even so, you can still find large stretches of land that lie “waste”—unused and effectively common—because the people living there haven’t joined the wider world’s monetary system and its shared rules of exchange. That situation becomes rare among groups that have adopted money, because money makes land valuable in a new way.

§ 46. The spoilage limit—and why money changes everything

Most things humans first care about—because survival demands it—don’t last. Food, basic materials, many natural goods: if you don’t use them, they rot, decay, or fall apart. By contrast, gold, silver, and diamonds are valuable mostly because people agree they’re valuable—not because they keep you alive.

So here’s the original natural rule for taking from the commons:

• You have a right to as much as you can use.
• You have property in what your labor transforms for your use.
• But you must not take so much that it spoils unused in your hands.

If someone gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, they became his property the moment he collected them—because he mixed his labor with them. But he was obligated to use them before they rotted. If he let them spoil, he’d taken more than his share and effectively stolen from others by removing goods from the common supply for no purpose.

Hoarding beyond use is, in this view, not just immoral—it’s irrational. But notice: giving things away counts as “using” them too, as long as they don’t rot pointlessly. Trading perishable goods for other goods is also fine. If you swap plums that would spoil in a week for nuts that last a year, you haven’t harmed anyone. You haven’t wasted the common stock.

Now consider durable items. If you trade nuts for a shiny piece of metal because you like the color—or swap sheep for shells, wool for a sparkling stone, or even a diamond—and you keep those durable items for life, you still haven’t violated anyone else’s rights. You can pile up durable things as much as you want, because the moral boundary wasn’t “how much you own.” The boundary was whether anything perishes uselessly in your possession.

§ 47. Money enters as a non-spoiling store of value

That logic opens the door to money. People start using some lasting thing—something that won’t spoil—that they can keep, and that others will accept in exchange for useful but perishable necessities. Money is essentially the mutually agreed solution to the problem of spoilage and exchange.

§ 48. Money makes large accumulation possible

Different levels of industry naturally lead to different levels of possessions. But the invention of money lets people hold onto and expand those possessions over time.

Imagine an isolated island with:

• one hundred families
• plenty of animals (sheep, horses, cows)
• healthy fruits
• enough good farmland to feed not just them, but unimaginably more people
• and no durable, scarce item that could function as money

In that situation, why would anyone expand possessions beyond what their family can use? They could produce goods and trade for other perishable goods, but anything beyond use would spoil. Without something durable and valued for storage, there’s little incentive to claim massive extra land—even if it’s rich and freely available.

Push the thought experiment further. What would a person do with ten thousand—or a hundred thousand—acres of excellent, well-stocked, ready-to-use land deep inland, with no hope of trading with other regions and no way to turn surplus into money? It wouldn’t be worth fencing or managing. He’d likely let the extra land slip back into the wild commons, keeping only what supports his family’s conveniences.

§ 49. “In the beginning, the whole world was America”

Early on, that’s what the world was like everywhere: no money, so little reason to enlarge land holdings beyond use. Once you find something that functions as money among your neighbors—something durable, scarce, and widely accepted—you’ll see the same person suddenly begin to expand possessions.

§ 50. Unequal land ownership becomes “fair” once money exists

Gold and silver aren’t very useful compared to food, clothing, or transportation. Their value comes mostly from human agreement—though labor still matters in determining their worth.

Once money exists, people can agree—often silently and without a formal treaty—to unequal possession of the earth. Here’s how:

• A person can work land and produce more than he can personally use.
• Instead of letting the surplus spoil, he trades it for gold or silver.
• Those metals can be hoarded without harming anyone, because they don’t rot or decay.

So money makes it possible, even outside formal society, for someone to “fairly” possess more land (and more output) than he can directly use, because the excess is converted into durable value rather than wasted.

Inside governments, this becomes even more structured: laws regulate property rights, and land ownership is settled by explicit legal rules.

§ 51. Why early property produced little conflict

Seen this way, it isn’t hard to understand how property began. Labor created the first titles in the shared gifts of nature. Use—and the spoilage limit—set the boundary.

In that early stage, there was little reason to fight over ownership. Right and practicality lined up:

• You had a right to whatever you could work on and use.
• You had no incentive to work for more than you could use.
• Your portion was easy for others to recognize.
• Taking more than you needed was both pointless and wrong, especially if it spoiled.

That left little room for disputes about title and little opportunity to encroach on others.

CHAP. VI.

Of Paternal Power.

§ 52. Why “paternal” is a misleading word
People may think it’s nitpicky to argue about terms in a book like this. But sometimes a familiar label quietly smuggles in a bad idea. That’s exactly what the phrase “paternal power” has done. It makes it sound as if a parent’s authority over children sits entirely in the father—as though the mother has none.

Yet if you check either plain reason or Scripture, you get the opposite: the mother has an equal claim. So a better name would be parental power. Whatever obligations children owe because they were brought into existence, those obligations must run equally to the two people who jointly caused it. And that’s how the Bible consistently speaks:

• “Honor your father and your mother.”
• “Whoever curses his father or his mother…”
• “Every one of you shall fear his mother and his father…”
• “Children, obey your parents…”

Old and New Testament alike pair the two without ranking one above the other.

§ 53. A word choice that could’ve prevented a major mistake
Even if we went no further than this naming issue, it might have saved people from some big errors about what parents’ power really is. Under the label “paternal power,” some writers have managed to treat parental authority as if it were absolute dominion or even royal authority—and because the word “paternal” points at the father, they could pretend the whole thing belongs to him alone.

But call it parental power and the problem shows immediately: whatever authority parents have would belong to both parents. That alone wrecks the argument of people who insist the “fatherhood” carries total, exclusive power. It also undercuts their favorite political leap—using the father’s supposed one-person authority as the template for monarchy—because the “fundamental authority” they want to start from would visibly rest in two people jointly, not one. Still, we can set the label aside and talk about the thing itself.

§ 54. What equality means—and what it doesn’t
When I said earlier that all humans are equal by nature, I didn’t mean every possible kind of equality. Some differences are real and can deserve social weight:

• Age or virtue can justify precedence.
• Talent and merit can put some people above the ordinary level.
• Birth, family ties, gratitude, or benefits received can create duties of respect.

None of that conflicts with the equality I meant: no person is born with jurisdiction or dominion over another. Each person has a natural right to freedom—to not be subjected to the will or authority of someone else.

§ 55. Children aren’t born fully free—but they’re born headed there
Children aren’t born in that full condition of equality, even though they are born for it. When they enter the world, parents do have a kind of rule and jurisdiction over them for a time—but it’s temporary.

Think of it like the swaddling clothes wrapped around an infant: they support a child during weakness, but they aren’t meant to last. As children grow, age and reason loosen these ties until they finally fall away and the person stands on their own, free to direct themselves.

§ 56. Why parents owe care: children aren’t “property,” they’re persons
Adam, on the story’s terms, was created as a complete adult—body and mind already strong, already rational—so he could immediately support himself and govern his actions by the law of reason God planted in him.

But Adam’s descendants arrive differently. We are born as infants: weak, helpless, and without understanding. To make up for that early lack, Adam and Eve—and after them all parents—are bound by the law of nature to preserve, nourish, and educate the children they have brought into the world. Not because children are their “workmanship” to do with as they please, but because children are the workmanship of God, to whom parents are accountable for how they treat them.

§ 57. Why infants aren’t “under the law of reason” yet—and what law is for
The law that governed Adam is the same law that governs everyone: the law of reason. But because children enter the world through natural birth—ignorant and not yet able to use reason—they are not immediately under that law.

No one can be bound by a law that has not been made known to them. And the law of reason is made known only through reason itself. So someone who hasn’t yet reached the use of reason cannot properly be said to be under that law. And because they are not yet under that law, they are not yet free.

That sounds strange until you remember what law is. Properly understood, law is not mainly a cage; it is guidance for a free and intelligent being toward its own good, and it goes only as far as the common good of those under it requires. If people could be better off without it, law—as a useless thing—would fade away. The restraints law imposes are like guardrails: it’s a poor sort of “confinement” that merely keeps us from bogs and cliffs.

So the purpose of law is not to destroy or shrink freedom, but to protect and expand it. In any world of creatures capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom. Why? Because liberty means being free from restraint and violence imposed by others—and without law, nothing prevents one person’s mood or power from ruling everyone else.

And freedom is not what some claim: not a license to do whatever you feel like. If it were, no one could be free, because every other person’s whims could dominate you. Real freedom is this: the liberty to order your own person, actions, possessions, and property as you choose within the bounds of the laws you live under, and not to be subject to another’s arbitrary will.

§ 58. Where parental authority really comes from
Now we can see the source of parental power. It doesn’t come from a right to command because you “made” a child. It comes from a duty: parents must care for their offspring during the imperfect state of childhood.

Children need guidance because they are still ignorant. Parents are obligated to inform their minds and direct their actions until reason can take over and relieve the parents of that burden. God gave human beings understanding to steer their lives, and along with it a freedom of will and liberty of action—within the limits of the law that governs them. But as long as someone lacks the understanding to guide their own will, they shouldn’t be left to follow a will of their own. The person who understands for them must, for a time, choose for them too—prescribing and regulating their actions. When the child reaches the condition that makes the parent a free person, the child becomes free as well.

§ 59. The same logic holds under natural law and civil law
This isn’t just a point about nature; it’s how every legal order works.

• Under the law of nature, what makes someone “free” under that law—able to manage their property and choices within it—is maturity: a stage where we can reasonably presume they know the law and can keep their actions within its bounds. Before that, someone else must guide them, presumed to understand what liberty the law allows. If that degree of reason makes the father free, it will make the son free too.

• Under the law of England, the question is the same: what makes someone free under that law—able to dispose of actions and possessions by their own will within what the law permits? It is the capacity to know the law. English law generally presumes that capacity at twenty-one, and sometimes earlier. Until then, the law treats the child as having no fully independent will: they must be guided by the will of a father or guardian who “understands for them.”

If the father dies without appointing someone to take up this trust, the law steps in and supplies a guardian. Someone must govern the child—must act as a will for them—until the child reaches a state of freedom where their own understanding can govern their will.

After that point, father and son are equally free—like tutor and pupil once the pupil is past minority. They stand side by side under the same law. The father retains no dominion over the son’s life, liberty, or estate—whether they live only under natural law or under the positive laws of an established government.

§ 60. What about people who never reach full reason?
There are cases where, because of defects outside the ordinary course of nature, a person never reaches the level of reason needed to understand the law and live by it. Such a person is never capable of being fully free—never safely “let loose” to the disposal of their own will—because they do not know its boundaries and lack understanding, the will’s proper guide.

So they remain under the care and governance of others as long as their own understanding is incapable of that task. This is why people with severe intellectual disability, those who are temporarily delirious or mad, and children who have not yet reached years of discretion are guided by the reason of others—tutors charged to seek their good. All of this amounts to the duty God and nature lay on human beings (as on other creatures) to preserve their offspring until they can support themselves. It is hardly evidence that parents possess any kind of royal authority.

§ 61. How freedom and childhood dependence fit together
We are born free in the same way we are born rational—not in the sense that we can actually exercise freedom or reason at birth, but in the sense that both arrive with age.

That’s how natural freedom and childhood subjection to parents can coexist: they rest on the same principle. A child is “free” in title through the parent’s understanding, which governs them until they can govern themselves. The freedom of an adult at years of discretion and the subjection of a child before that age are not only compatible—they are plainly distinct.

Even those most committed to the idea of monarchy by “right of fatherhood” can’t miss it. Suppose their story were entirely true: suppose the rightful heir of Adam were known and enthroned with the absolute, unlimited power some theorists describe. If that monarch died as soon as his heir was born, wouldn’t the infant—however “sovereign” by title—still be under the authority of a mother and nurse, tutors and governors, until age and education brought reason and the ability to govern both self and others?

The necessities of life, bodily health, and the shaping of the mind would require the child to be directed by the will of others, not their own. Yet would anyone claim that this guidance destroyed the child’s rightful sovereignty, or transferred the empire to the caregivers? Of course not. It would only prepare the child to exercise that authority sooner and better.

So if someone asks, “When is my son old enough to be free?” the answer is: when he is old enough to govern himself—the same moment any ruler is old enough to rule. Exactly when that is can’t be pinned down by a single neat formula. It’s easier for common sense to recognize than it is for learning to define precisely.

§ 62. Governments admit this point in practice
Even commonwealths acknowledge that there is a time when people begin to act like free citizens. That’s why, before that time, governments don’t demand oaths of fealty or allegiance, or other public acts that formally own and submit to the political order.

§ 63. Freedom requires reason; “letting a child do whatever” isn’t liberty
Human freedom—the ability to act by one’s own will—rests on having reason. Reason teaches the law by which we should govern ourselves and shows us how far our will is left free.

To set someone loose in unrestrained liberty before they have reason to guide them is not granting the privilege of freedom. It is abandoning them—pushing them out among the brutes into a life as miserable, and as far beneath human life, as theirs. That is what places authority in parents’ hands during a child’s minority. God has made this care the parents’ work and has planted in them tenderness and concern to soften and steady their power, so that they use it—just as wisdom intended—for the child’s good, as long as the child truly needs it.

§ 64. Care doesn’t turn into absolute rule—and it belongs to mothers too
But what argument could possibly turn this duty of care into an absolute, arbitrary dominion of the father?

A parent’s power extends only as far as the discipline needed to build:

• strength and health in the child’s body,
• vigor and soundness in the child’s mind,
• the skills and habits that let the child be useful to themselves and others,
• and, when necessary, the ability to work for their own support once they’re capable.

And in this authority, the mother shares equally with the father.

§ 65. Being a “father” doesn’t automatically grant power; caregiving does
This power belongs so little to the father by any special right of nature—and belongs instead to whoever actually serves as the child’s guardian—that when a father abandons his care, he loses his power. Authority travels with nourishment and education; it is attached to them inseparably.

That’s why a foster father who raises an abandoned child has as much parental authority over that child as a biological father has over his. Simply begetting a child gives a man very little power over his offspring if his involvement ends there.

Consider places where a woman has more than one husband at a time. Or consider parts of the Americas where husbands and wives often separate, and the children follow the mother and remain entirely under her care and provision. If the father dies while the children are young, don’t they, everywhere, owe the same obedience to their mother during minority as they would have owed to the father if he were alive?

But would anyone therefore say the mother has legislative power over her children—that she can make permanent standing rules that bind their property and liberty for the rest of their lives, and enforce them with death penalties? That is the proper power of a magistrate, and the father has not even the shadow of it.

A father’s command over his children is temporary. It does not reach their life or their property. It exists to remedy the weakness of childhood and to provide the discipline required for education.

A father may, of course, dispose of his own possessions as he wishes once his children are not in danger of starving. But his parental authority does not extend to:

• the lives of his children,
• the goods they earn by their own labor,
• the goods given to them by someone else’s generosity,
• or their liberty once they have reached years of discretion.

At that point the father’s “empire” ends. He can no more dispose of his adult son’s liberty than he can dispose of any other person’s. So this cannot be an absolute or perpetual jurisdiction—especially since divine authority itself licenses a grown person to “leave father and mother” and join to a spouse.

§ 66. Freedom ends command, not honor
Even though there is a point when a child becomes as free from the father’s will as the father is free from anyone else’s—and both are restrained only by the same law, whether natural or civil—that freedom does not exempt the son from the honor he owes, by the law of God and nature, to his parents.

God built the human story so that parents are the means by which the species continues—and the people who, in everyday life, first make it possible for their children to survive and thrive. That role comes with a hard obligation: parents must feed, protect, and educate their children. And it also creates a lifelong obligation in the other direction: children owe their parents honor.

By “honor,” don’t think of a polite “thank you” and a birthday card. Locke means something deeper: an inner respect and reverence that shows up outwardly in how you act. It rules out anything that would deliberately harm, insult, endanger, or even recklessly unsettle the people who gave you life. And it commits you to active care—defending, helping, relieving, and comforting them when they need it.

Nothing—no political status, no social rank, no personal freedom—cancels that duty.

But here’s the key distinction: owing honor to your parents is not the same thing as being under their rule. Respect and gratitude are one kind of bond; absolute obedience is another. A king, sitting on a throne, still owes honor to his mother. That doesn’t mean she governs the kingdom.

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Two Different “Powers” People Confuse

Locke says most confusion comes from mixing up two very different things:

1. The temporary authority parents have over children while they’re minors (what he calls the right of “tuition,” meaning guardianship and education).
2. The lifelong duty children have to honor and support their parents (a permanent claim to respect, care, and gratitude).

These aren’t the same power, and they aren’t aimed at the same goal.

1) Guardianship During Childhood (Temporary)

A child’s “subjection” while young gives the father (and parents generally) a temporary kind of government. It ends automatically when the child reaches adulthood.

And notice how Locke reframes it: this isn’t really a royal privilege parents get to enjoy. It’s mainly:

• the child’s right to be cared for, trained, and protected, and
• the parents’ duty to provide that care.

Because childhood comes with ignorance and weakness, this role naturally includes the ability to direct, restrain, and sometimes punish—not as domination, but as discipline for the child’s good. Human nature, Locke argues, is built with a strong bias toward parental tenderness, so the more common danger is not cruelty but overindulgence.

That’s why, when scripture describes God’s corrective treatment of Israel, it uses the image of a parent disciplining a child: even when there’s punishment, it’s meant to be firm and caring, no harsher than what the child truly needs—and, in fact, less discipline than necessary would be a kind of neglect.

This is the kind of authority children are commanded to obey: so their parents’ labor and worry aren’t increased or repaid with contempt.

2) Honor and Support (Permanent)

On the other side, children owe parents something for the benefits they’ve received—life, care, and the chance to enjoy anything at all. That obligation expresses itself as:

• respect and reverence
• support and relief
• defense and protection
• the kind of thoughtful compliance gratitude naturally produces

This “honor” is fundamentally for the parents’ benefit, just as education and discipline are fundamentally for the child’s benefit.

It can look less like “obedience” because it’s not about being bossed around. But it’s often stronger in its moral weight, especially once you’re grown. Nobody seriously thinks the command “Children, obey your parents” means that a man with children of his own must submit to his father the same way his ten-year-old submits to him. And it would be absurd to say a father can keep treating his adult son like a little boy and demand the same kind of blanket compliance.

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Education Ends; Honor Doesn’t

Locke draws the line sharply:

• Education and guardianship have a natural endpoint. When the work of raising and training is done, that authority expires.
• It can even be transferred before then: a father can place his child under someone else’s instruction—say, by making him an apprentice. During that time, the child’s day-to-day obedience shifts largely to the person responsible for training him.

But the duty of honor doesn’t transfer and doesn’t end.

• It remains fully owed to both parents.
• A father can’t use his authority to strip the mother of her right to honor.
• No one can “release” a child from honoring the woman who bore him.

Still, none of this—neither childhood discipline nor lifelong honor—adds up to what political rulers have: the power to make laws and enforce them with penalties that reach a person’s estate, liberty, body, or life.

Once a child is an adult:

• the parent’s power to command is over
• the parent has no dominion over the adult child’s property
• the parent has no general right to dictate the adult child’s actions

Yes, it’s often wise and decent for adult children to give their parents real deference when it doesn’t seriously harm their own household. But that’s a matter of prudence and gratitude, not sovereignty.

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Why Gratitude Doesn’t Create Government

Locke pushes the point with everyday examples. You can owe:

• respect to an elderly or exceptionally wise person
• protection to your child or a close friend
• support to someone in distress
• gratitude to a benefactor so deep that you could never fully repay it

None of those debts—no matter how heavy—give the other person the right to legislate over your life.

And even within families, the amount of honor and support owed isn’t identical in every case. It often varies with the real history:

• how much care was given,
• how much trouble was taken,
• how much expense was borne,
• and how much kindness was shown—

sometimes more for one child than another. So this can’t be a simple, one-size-fits-all political authority that comes merely from the label “father.”

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Paternal Power Isn’t Political Power

This distinction also explains something you can observe anywhere: in societies where parents are themselves subjects under a government, they still retain parental authority over their children. That would be impossible if political power were nothing but paternal power, as if they were the same thing.

If all political authority were merely “fatherhood scaled up,” then paternal power would belong entirely to the prince, and ordinary parents—being subjects—would have none left.

But political and paternal power are built on different foundations and aimed at different ends. So:

• every father who is a subject has as much parental authority over his children as the prince has over his children, and
• every prince who has parents owes them the same filial duty the poorest subject owes theirs

Which means the prince’s political dominion over subjects cannot be derived from the kind of dominion a parent has over a child.

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The Hidden Lever: Inheritance

Locke adds one more kind of “power” that often gets mistaken for parental jurisdiction: control over property and inheritance.

In most societies, children naturally expect to inherit their parents’ estate in some customary proportions. But fathers usually have some freedom to distribute that estate more generously or more sparingly depending on a child’s behavior. That expectation can be a powerful incentive to stay in a parent’s good graces—even after adulthood.

People also notice something else: land typically comes with political strings attached. If you own land in a country, you’re subject to that country’s government. So some have argued that a father can bind his descendants to the government he lives under, because his “agreement” with that government carries over to his heirs.

Locke says that’s not quite right.

• The political obligation isn’t a mystical family chain.
• It’s a condition attached to the land.

Children are born as free as their parents ever were. While they still have that freedom, they can choose which society to join and which government to live under.

But if they want the ancestral estate, they must accept it on the same terms their ancestors accepted it—meaning they must submit to the conditions that come with that property. That submission is therefore voluntary: it applies only to those who choose to take the inheritance under those conditions.

So yes, by controlling an inheritance, fathers often manage to secure obedience and even nudge children into a particular political allegiance. But this happens not because fatherhood grants a special ruling right, and not because adult children are naturally bound to their father’s political commitments. It happens for the same reason anyone can influence anyone: because a valuable reward is on the table.

A Frenchman can exert the same kind of pull over an Englishman if he promises him an estate. And if that Englishman accepts the estate, he accepts the legal conditions of the country where it sits—France or England. The mechanism is property and choice, not paternal sovereignty.

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How Fathers Became Kings (Without “Natural” Right)

Locke closes by explaining how political rule could plausibly grow out of family life—without being justified by any special “father-right.”

Even though:

• a father’s authority to command is limited to childhood and only as far as discipline requires, and
• lifelong honor and support don’t give him the power to make laws or impose punishments, and
• he has no dominion over an adult child’s property or actions,

it’s still easy to see how, in the earliest human communities (and in sparsely populated places where families could spread into unclaimed territory), the father of a household could end up functioning like a prince.

Why?

• He had already been directing the family since the children were small.
• Living together without any shared authority is hard.
• So when the children grew up, it would feel natural—often by explicit agreement, and just as often by quiet habit—for them to let the father continue as the family’s central governor.

But this, Locke insists, would be a matter of consent, not biology or birthright.

You can see that by a simple test: if a stranger came into the household and killed one of the children (or committed some other serious wrong), the father could judge and punish that stranger—potentially even execute him—just as he could punish one of his children.

That power cannot come from “paternal authority,” because the stranger isn’t his child.

It comes from something else: the executive power of the law of nature—the right every free person has, in a state without civil government, to enforce natural law and punish violations. In a family, the grown children might step back from exercising that power themselves and let the father exercise it alone, out of respect and convenience. But that’s them yielding their equal right to him, not him possessing a built-in right over them.

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Why the Transition Felt “Natural”

Once you picture the early household, the drift into paternal rule makes sense.

Children had spent their whole childhood following their father’s guidance. They brought disputes to him as the natural umpire. And when they became adults, who would seem more fit to keep order than the person who had raised them, cared for them, and was inclined by affection to treat them fairly?

In those early settings, people also had:

• smaller possessions,
• fewer incentives to grab and hoard,
• and therefore fewer serious conflicts

So the family had little reason to draw a sharp legal line between being under guardianship as a minor and being free as an adult. They didn’t stare at a birthday—twenty-one or anything else—as the moment someone suddenly becomes the full manager of himself and his fortune. They often had no desire to leave the “pupilage” they were used to, because it felt more like protection than restraint. And they could hardly imagine a safer guardian of their peace, liberties, and property than a father.

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From Family Fathers to Political Monarchs

Over time, Locke says, many natural fathers became political rulers by gradual, almost unnoticed steps. If they lived long enough and were succeeded by capable heirs, that pattern could harden into:

• hereditary kingdoms, or
• elective kingdoms, or
• other political arrangements shaped by circumstance, planning, or necessity

And then Locke turns the argument back on his opponents.

Some people claim: “Look—early rulers were fathers. Therefore fathers naturally have political authority, and princes rule by paternal right.”

Locke replies: if that reasoning proves princes must be rulers because fathers often were rulers, then it proves something else just as strongly: princes ought to be priests, and perhaps priests only—because it’s at least as true that, in the beginning, the father of the household served as priest as well as ruler.

The fact that something happened historically doesn’t automatically prove it was a natural right.

He reinforces this with an older author’s observation: in early households, the leading person often functioned “like a king,” so when multiple households joined into a civil society, kings were among the first forms of government. That may also explain why rulers kept being called “fathers,” and why kings sometimes took on priestly roles—echoing what fathers did at first.

But—crucially—this wasn’t the only possible form of government. Different political systems were devised because different systems had different problems. In the end, all public government, whatever its shape, seems to have risen from people deliberating together, consulting, and agreeing on what was useful and workable. And there’s nothing in human nature, considered by itself, that makes it impossible for humans to live without public government at all.

CHAP. VII.

Of Political or Civil Society.

What “society” even means, and why it matters

§ 77. The basic setup is simple: humans aren’t built to live totally alone. Whether you frame that in religious terms (“God made us this way”) or just as a fact about human nature, the point is the same. We’re pushed into community by need, by convenience, and by plain old inclination—and we’re also equipped with the tools that make community possible: reason and language.

The earliest forms of human society are small and close to home:

• Spouses (husband and wife)
• Parents and children
• Masters and servants

Often these relationships overlap inside a single household, where one person (a master or mistress) has a kind of family-level authority. But even taken together, these bonds still aren’t the same thing as a political society. To see why, you have to look at what each relationship is for, what holds it together, and where its authority ends.

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Marriage (conjugal society): voluntary, practical, and limited

§ 78. A marriage begins as a voluntary agreement between a man and a woman. Its central biological purpose is obvious: reproduction. That involves a mutual claim on one another’s bodies in the ways needed for that end. But marriage also naturally creates something broader: a shared life.

So marriage tends to include:

• mutual support and help
• a shared set of interests
• joint care for children, who have a real right to be fed and maintained until they can provide for themselves

In other words, even if marriage starts with procreation, it expands into partnership—because raising children and running a life together requires it.

§ 79. And notice the key distinction: the goal isn’t just producing a child once; it’s the continuation of the species, which means children have to survive and grow up. That’s why the bond between male and female has to last beyond conception—at least long enough to get the young through the vulnerable years until they can “shift for themselves,” as the old phrase goes.

You can see this pattern across animals, depending on what the young need.

• In many grass-eating mammals that give live birth, the male’s role is brief. The mother can feed the offspring with milk until it can graze, so the male’s continued presence doesn’t add much.
• In predators, it’s different. Hunting is risky and labor-intensive, and the mother may struggle to feed herself and several young at once. So the male’s help becomes necessary, and the pair bond tends to last longer.
• In most birds, the pattern is even clearer: the chicks can’t fend for themselves, and they need food delivered to the nest. So both parents typically stick around until the young can fly and feed themselves. (Some domestic birds are exceptions, since easy access to food reduces the need for the male’s help.)

§ 80. Humans, though, are tied together longer than almost any of these animals, and the reason is straightforward: human children stay dependent for a long time, and human reproduction can overlap. A woman can become pregnant again and give birth to a new child while the older one still needs heavy support. That means a father’s obligation to care for the children he has created pulls him into a longer, more stable partnership with the same woman.

And there’s another advantage. Humans can plan ahead. We can store food, save resources, build property, and organize a future. A more durable marriage makes that kind of long-term effort realistic: it unites interests and encourages sustained work to provide for children. If partnerships dissolved easily and constantly re-formed, that planning would be chaotic and unstable.

§ 81. Still, it’s worth asking an awkward but reasonable question: if marriage is a voluntary agreement designed to secure procreation, child-rearing, and inheritance, why must it always be lifelong? In principle, it could be set to end:

• by mutual consent
• after a fixed time
• under specific conditions

There’s nothing in the basic nature of marriage’s purposes that logically demands “for life” in every case—unless there’s a positive law (a society’s explicit legal rule) that requires marriage contracts to be perpetual.

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Who has the final say in a marriage—and what that does not mean

§ 82. Even when two people share a household and a common interest, they don’t share one mind. Different judgments lead to different choices, and disagreements are inevitable. So any partnership needs some way to reach a final decision when a decision must be made.

In practice, the old argument goes, that final “tie-breaker” role tends to fall to the man, because he is typically stronger and more able to enforce it. But here is the crucial limit: this authority applies only to shared concerns—their common interests and property.

It does not make the husband an absolute ruler over the wife. She keeps full control over whatever the marriage contract makes hers specifically, and the husband has no more rightful power over her life than she has over his. In many situations she may even have the right to separate from him—depending on natural right, their original agreement, or the laws and customs of the society they live in. And if separation happens, custody of the children goes as their agreement or the governing rules determine.

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Government doesn’t create marriage; it referees it

§ 83. Marriage can achieve its purposes under a political government just as well as in a “state of nature.” The civil magistrate doesn’t cancel the basic rights needed for marriage’s ends—having children and supporting one another while together. What the magistrate does is settle disputes when they arise.

This is an important test: if marriage required the husband to have absolute sovereignty, including power of life and death, then marriage could not exist in countries where husbands are not granted that authority. But marriage plainly does exist there. So that absolute power cannot be essential to marriage.

In fact, almost everything about the economic and practical arrangements of marriage can vary by agreement, as long as the essentials are protected:

• procreation
• the raising of children until they can provide for themselves

That’s the general rule: nothing is necessary to a society that isn’t necessary to the ends for which it exists.

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Parent–child society is real, but it isn’t political

§ 84. The parent–child relationship has its own distinct rights and powers, and it’s already been covered in depth earlier. The key point here is simple: it’s plainly not the same as political society.

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Servants and slaves: contracts versus domination

§ 85. “Master” and “servant” are ancient labels, but they cover very different situations.

A servant (in the ordinary sense) is a free person who agrees—by contract—to work for another for a set time in exchange for wages. That arrangement may place the servant inside the master’s household and subject to its discipline, but it gives the master only temporary authority, limited to what the contract allows.

A slave, however, is different in kind. In this framework, slavery arises when someone is captured in a “just war” and, by the supposed right of nature, becomes subject to the absolute and arbitrary power of a master. Such a person is treated as having forfeited life and liberty, losing even the capacity for property. And because the central purpose of civil society is the preservation of property, slaves—having no property rights in that condition—cannot be counted as members of civil society.

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Why a household isn’t a “little government”

§ 86. Now picture a single household containing all these relationships—spouses, children, servants, and perhaps slaves—under one domestic rule. From the outside it might resemble a tiny commonwealth: a head of the house, roles, hierarchy, a kind of order. But it is fundamentally not a political community, not in its structure, its power, or its purpose.

Even if someone insisted on calling the head of household a “monarch,” the comparison falls apart quickly. The master’s authority is not one broad absolute power; it is a bundle of separate, limited powers over different people, each limited in scope and often in time. And setting aside slavery (which isn’t required for a household to be a household), the master has no legislative power of life and death over the family—and whatever domestic authority he has is not necessarily greater than what a mistress of the family can have as well.

Someone who has only limited authority over each individual cannot honestly be said to have absolute authority over the whole group. So if we want to understand what real political society is, we need a clearer definition.

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So what is political (civil) society, exactly?

§ 87. Start from the natural condition: each person is born with a claim to complete freedom and equal access to the rights of the law of nature. That includes two core powers:

1. The power to preserve what is his—meaning life, liberty, and estate (this is “property” in the broad sense used here).
2. The power to judge and punish violations of the law of nature, using his own judgment—even, in extreme cases, with death if he believes the offense deserves it.

But here’s the catch: a political society cannot exist, and cannot last, unless it holds within itself the power to protect property and punish wrongdoing among its members. And that happens only when each person gives up his private power of judgment and punishment and hands it over to the community—except in the situations where he is not allowed to appeal to the law for protection.

Once private judgment is removed from each individual member, the community becomes the referee. It does this through:

• standing, settled rules (laws)
• rules that are the same for everyone
• officials with authority from the community to apply and enforce those rules

So the community decides disputes about rights between members and punishes offenses against the society using penalties set by law. This makes it easy to tell who is in civil society and who isn’t:

• People are in civil society when they are united under one body with a common law and a common court (a “judicature”) that can decide disputes and punish offenders.
• People are still in the state of nature when they have no common authority on earth to appeal to. In that case, each person remains judge and executioner for himself—which is the pure state of nature described earlier.

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Where lawmaking and enforcement come from

§ 88. Once a community exists, it gains two major powers for a single purpose: preserving the property of its members as far as possible.

• The power to assign punishments to offenses committed within the society: the power of making laws.
• The power to punish injuries done to members by outsiders: the power of war and peace.

Even though each person has surrendered his private power to punish according to his own judgment, he hasn’t become passive. By joining the commonwealth, he has also given the community the right to use his force when needed to carry out the community’s judgments. In a sense, those public judgments are still “his,” because they are made either directly by him (as part of the people) or by his representatives.

This is the origin of the two great powers of civil society:

• Legislative power: judging, by standing laws, how internal offenses should be punished.
• Executive power: judging, case by case, how external injuries should be answered, and enforcing decisions.

Both ultimately rely on the combined force of the community when required.

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The threshold: when you leave the state of nature

§ 89. Wherever a group of people gives up, one by one, their private executive power of the law of nature and transfers it to the public, there—and only there—does political (civil) society exist.

This happens in two ways:

• A group in the state of nature forms a new community: one people, one political body, under a supreme government.
• An individual joins an already-existing government, incorporating himself into it.

In either case, he authorizes the society (that is, its legislature) to make laws for him as the public good requires—and he owes his assistance in carrying those laws out, because they function as his own decisions through representation.

That is what moves people out of the state of nature and into a commonwealth: establishing an earthly judge with authority to decide controversies and remedy injuries among members. That judge is the legislature, or the magistrates empowered by it. And wherever people have no such authority to appeal to, they remain in the state of nature—no matter what other associations they may have.

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Why absolute monarchy can’t be “civil government”

§ 90. From this, one conclusion follows sharply: absolute monarchy is incompatible with civil society. It cannot be a genuine form of civil government.

Why? Because the whole point of civil society is to escape the problems that arise when each person is judge in his own case. The remedy is to establish a known authority that everyone can appeal to when harmed or in conflict—and that everyone is obligated to obey.

So wherever people lack an authority they can appeal to for the decision of disputes among them, they are still in the state of nature. And that means an absolute prince is, in relation to those under his rule, in the state of nature as well.

§ 91. In an absolute monarchy, the prince is assumed to hold both legislative and executive power entirely in himself. That leaves no independent judge, no open appeal—no person or institution able to decide fairly, with authority, and offer real relief if the prince harms someone, or orders harm.

So whether you call him Czar, Grand Seignior, or any other grand title, he stands with his subjects in the same condition two strangers occupy without a common judge: the state of nature. The difference is that it is far worse for the subject—or really, the slave.

In the ordinary state of nature, a person at least has the freedom to judge what is his right and defend it as best he can. Under an absolute monarch, when the ruler’s will invades a person’s property, the subject has no appeal and is not even permitted the ordinary human liberty to judge or defend his own right. He is exposed to everything a person can fear from someone who is both:

• outside restraint (living, effectively, in the state of nature), and
• corrupted by flattery and armed with overwhelming power

§ 92. If someone believes absolute power somehow “cleans up” human nature—making rulers nobler, calmer, less petty—history is the quickest cure for that illusion. Any age will do.

Someone who’d act like a bully in the “state of nature”—say, out in the woods of the Americas—doesn’t magically become wiser or kinder just because you sit him on a throne. In fact, the throne can make the problem worse: education and religion can be recruited to justify whatever he does, and the sword can quickly silence anyone who questions it. If you want a real-world picture of what “the protection of absolute monarchy” looks like—what kind of “father of the country” it tends to produce, and how much happiness and security it actually brings when that system is fully developed—you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. Contemporary reports about places like Ceylon make the pattern plain.

§ 93. Law for everyone else, not for the ruler

In absolute monarchies—as in most governments—subjects usually have courts, laws, and judges for disputes among themselves. If I steal from you, hurt you, or threaten you, there’s a process for resolving it. Nearly everyone agrees this is necessary. And anyone trying to remove those protections gets treated as an open enemy of society.

But it’s worth asking why such systems exist. Is it because rulers genuinely love humanity, or because they want a stable machine that keeps producing wealth and obedience? There’s a darker explanation: a ruler who cares about his own power and profit has every reason to stop his subjects from tearing each other apart—just like an owner keeps work animals from injuring each other, not out of affection for the animals, but because broken animals don’t pay.

Now ask the question that really matters: what protects people from the absolute ruler himself? In many absolute monarchies, that question is treated as nearly unforgivable. Some will tell you it’s practically treason even to ask about safety from the sovereign.

Between subject and subject, they’ll happily admit you need:

• rules (so people know what counts as wrong),
• judges (to decide disputes),
• enforcement (to restrain violence).

But for the ruler, they insist on the opposite: he must be absolute, “above” the law, exempt from the very limits everyone else lives under. And the logic is as upside-down as it is dangerous: because he can do the most harm, whatever he does is presumed right. If you ask how to be protected from the strongest hand—the one most capable of hurting you—you’re branded a faction-maker, a rebel.

That’s like claiming that when people left the state of nature and entered society, they agreed to this bizarre bargain:

• Everyone except one person will live under law.
• That one person will keep the full freedom of the state of nature.
• And he’ll have more power than anyone else, plus impunity.

It’s as if people carefully guard themselves against small predators—foxes and polecats—but then call it “safety” to hand themselves over to a lion.

§ 94. A ruler above the law puts you back in the state of nature

Flatterers can talk all they want. Words may charm the mind, but they don’t stop the body from feeling harm. When people realize that someone—no matter how high his position—stands outside the rules of their community, and that there is no earthly appeal against the damage he might do, they naturally conclude something important:

With respect to that person, they are still in the state of nature.

And once they see that, they start looking for a way—as soon as they can—to regain the very safety and security that civil society was created to provide. That safety is the reason people formed societies in the first place, and it’s the only reason anyone would rationally enter them.

It may be true that, early on, communities sometimes began with something like informal rule by an exceptional person. A good and admirable man rises above the rest; people defer to his virtue; and, without saying so out loud, they let him arbitrate disputes. At that stage, the only “safeguard” is trust in his integrity and judgment.

But time changes the equation. Authority hardens into custom, and custom starts to feel “sacred.” Successors arrive who don’t have the same virtue. People discover that their property—meaning their lives, liberties, and estates—is no longer secure under a system built around one person’s will. And since the whole point of government is the preservation of property, they can’t feel safe, settled, or truly “in civil society” until the legislative power is placed in a collective body—call it a senate, a parliament, or whatever name you like.

That shift matters because it changes who is subject to law. In a properly formed civil society:

• every person, including officials, is bound by the laws;
• the laws are made by a legislature representing the community;
• no one can dodge a law once it exists by claiming personal superiority;
• no one can excuse his own misconduct—or the misconduct of his dependents—by pretending to be exempt.

In short: no one in civil society can be outside its law. If someone is allowed to do whatever he thinks fit, and there is no appeal on earth against the harm he might cause, then he is still living in the state of nature—and he can’t be a true member of that civil society.

Unless, of course, someone wants to claim that the state of nature and civil society are the same thing. But that would be an argument for pure anarchy, and I’ve never met anyone bold enough to defend that openly.

CHAP. VIII.

Of the Beginning of Political Societies.

§ 95. People are born free, equal, and independent. So no one can be pulled out of that natural condition and placed under someone else’s political authority without agreeing to it. The only way you give up your natural liberty and take on the obligations of civil society is straightforward: you and others choose to join together as a community so you can live more comfortably, safely, and peacefully—enjoying your property securely and protecting yourselves better against outsiders.

Any number of people can do this, because it doesn’t take away anyone else’s freedom. Everyone who doesn’t join stays exactly where they were: in the liberty of the state of nature. And once a group has consented to form a community or government, they immediately become a single political body—one “people”—and the majority gets the right to act and decide for the whole.

§ 96. Here’s why majority rule isn’t optional. The only thing that can make a community act is the consent of its members. But a body that’s supposed to act as one has to move in one direction. So, in practice, it has to follow the side with the greater “force”—meaning the larger share of consent, the majority. If it didn’t, the community couldn’t act as a unit or even remain a unit—the very thing everyone agreed to create when they joined.

That’s why, in assemblies authorized to act by law, when the law doesn’t require some special number, the majority’s decision counts as the act of the whole. By nature and reason, it has to.

§ 97. So when you consent to join a political community under one government, you also take on an obligation to everyone in that society: you agree to accept the majority’s decision as binding. Without that, the “compact” that formed the society would be meaningless. What kind of agreement would it be if, after joining, you were still free to follow only the rules you personally liked and only the decisions you personally approved? That would leave you with the same freedom you already had in the state of nature—no new commitment, no real union.

§ 98. And if the majority’s consent doesn’t count as the act of the whole, then nothing can—except unanimity. But unanimity is practically impossible. People get sick. People have jobs and obligations. Even in groups far smaller than a full commonwealth, lots of members will inevitably miss meetings.

Add in the fact that people disagree and their interests collide, and a society built on requiring everyone’s approval for every action would be like Cato’s famous move of walking into the theater only to walk right back out again. It wouldn’t last. The “mighty Leviathan” would die sooner than the weakest creature—gone the same day it was born. And it’s absurd to think rational people would form societies only so they can instantly dissolve them. If the majority can’t bind the rest, then the group can’t act as one body—and it will fall apart immediately.

§ 99. So anyone leaving the state of nature to unite into a community must be understood to hand over to the majority all the power needed to achieve the purposes of joining together—unless they explicitly agreed to require some larger number than a majority.

And this happens by the simple act of agreeing to become one political society. That’s the whole compact, and it’s all the compact that’s needed among the individuals who form a commonwealth. In short: what starts and actually creates any political society is the consent of any number of free people, able to form a majority, to unite into a community. That—and only that—did or could give rise to any lawful government in the world.

§ 100. Two objections are commonly raised:

• First: “History shows no examples of free and equal people meeting up and creating a government this way.”
• Second: “People can’t do this by right, because everyone is born under some government, and therefore must submit to it rather than start a new one.”

§ 101. Start with the first objection. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that history tells us very little about people living together in the state of nature. The inconveniences of that condition—and the desire and need for society—would push people to unite quickly. And once they meant to stay together, they would naturally incorporate into a community almost immediately.

Saying “we don’t hear much about people in the state of nature, therefore they never existed” is like saying the armies of great conquerors were never children because the records mostly start once they were grown and organized. Government comes before written records. Writing usually appears only after a society has already existed long enough to secure safety, comfort, and plenty. Only then do people start researching their founders—often long after the living memory of the beginning is gone.

That’s why commonwealths, like individual people, are usually ignorant of their own “births.” When they know anything about their origins, it often comes from chance records others happened to keep. And the beginnings we do have—aside from the Jewish polity where God directly intervened (which doesn’t support the idea of paternal rule anyway)—either plainly show this voluntary kind of founding, or at least leave clear traces of it.

§ 102. Anyone who refuses to admit obvious facts because they clash with a favored theory is simply choosing denial. Rome and Venice didn’t begin with some built-in natural hierarchy, where one person was born to rule the rest. They began through the union of people who were free and independent of one another.

And if we accept Josephus Acosta’s reports, many parts of the Americas had no government at all. He says there are strong reasons to think the people of Peru, for a long time, had neither kings nor commonwealths, but lived in groups—as some peoples did (and, in his account, still did) in places like Florida, the Cheriquanas, Brazil, and many other nations. They had no permanent kings; instead, as circumstances demanded—peace or war—they chose captains when they wanted.

If someone replies, “But each man was born subject to his father or the head of his family,” that doesn’t settle the issue. A child’s duty to a father doesn’t cancel the adult freedom to join whatever political society he judges best. In any case, it’s clear these people were actually free. Whatever “natural superiority” some modern theorists might try to assign, the people themselves didn’t claim it. They treated one another as equals until, by consent, they set rulers over themselves. Their societies began in voluntary union and mutual agreement, with people freely choosing their governors and their forms of government.

§ 103. And consider those who left Sparta with Palantus (as Justin mentions). It’s reasonable to count them as freemen, independent of one another, who created a government over themselves by consent.

So there are historical examples of people who were free and, coming together, incorporated and formed commonwealths. And if someone insists that the lack of examples would prove government couldn’t begin this way, defenders of “paternal empire” should be careful. If they can produce heaps of examples of governments founded on paternal right, they might try to press the argument. (Though honestly, arguing from “what happened” to “what ought to happen” isn’t very strong.) But if I were advising them, I’d warn them not to dig too eagerly into the real beginnings of governments. They may find, at the bottom of most of them, origins that do not support the kind of authority they want to justify.

§ 104. In the end, reason is clear: people are naturally free. And history shows that governments that began peacefully were founded on that freedom—they were made by the people’s consent. So there’s little room to doubt where the right lies, or what humanity’s common judgment and practice has been when it comes to first establishing governments.

§ 105. Still, I won’t deny this: if you trace nations back as far as records go, you often find government in the hands of one person. That makes sense. Where a family became large enough to support itself, stayed together, and didn’t mix much with outsiders—as often happens where land is abundant and people are few—government typically started with the father.

Why? In the state of nature, every person has the power to punish violations of natural law as he thinks fit. A father could use that power to punish his children when they wronged others—even when those children were adults. And the rest of the family would likely support him against the offender, giving him the practical power to enforce his judgment. In effect, that could make him the family’s lawgiver and governor.

He was also the easiest person to trust: paternal affection protected the family’s property and interests under his care. And years of childhood obedience made it simpler to accept his authority than to accept someone else’s. So if a group felt they needed a single ruler—and it’s hard to live together without some form of government—who seemed more natural than their common father, unless he was plainly unfit through neglect, cruelty, or some other failing?

But once the father died, if the next heir lacked age, wisdom, courage, or other qualities needed for rule—or if several families came together and agreed to live as one—people would naturally use their freedom to choose the person they judged most capable of governing well. We see something like this, for example, among some peoples in the Americas: even if they often prefer the heir of a deceased king when all else is equal, they’ll bypass him if he’s weak or incapable and choose the strongest and bravest as ruler.

§ 106. So even if records commonly show government concentrated in one hand, that doesn’t refute what I’m arguing: political society begins with the consent of individuals to unite into one society. Once united, they can set up whatever form of government they think best.

But that early pattern—often choosing one leader—has tempted some people into thinking monarchy is “natural” and belongs to the father by right. It’s worth pausing to ask why early societies tended to choose that form. Even if a father’s prominence sometimes helped place power in one person at the start, the reason monarchy continued wasn’t a special reverence for paternal authority. After all, almost all early “petty” monarchies—nearly all monarchies near their beginnings—were commonly elective, at least on occasion.

§ 107. One big reason is simple habit. A father’s rule over his children trained people from the start to live under the direction of one person. And when that rule was careful, competent, and affectionate, it could deliver much of the practical “political happiness” people wanted: order, safety, and a stable life. So it’s no wonder early communities gravitated toward the model they already knew.

Add to that another factor: monarchy is the simplest, most obvious form for people who haven’t been taught to think in terms of constitutional design. They didn’t yet have experience with different systems. They also hadn’t learned—through ambition, empire, or hard experience—to fear how easily prerogative can expand or how dangerous absolute power can become, especially when monarchy becomes hereditary and begins to claim more than people originally granted.

So early societies often didn’t bother to design complicated checks, limits, or “balanced” institutions that distribute power across different hands. They hadn’t suffered under tyranny, and their way of life—simple and relatively equal, with few possessions worth fighting over—didn’t create the kind of greed and ambition that makes people anticipate oppression.

Their situation called for defense against outsiders more than for elaborate internal law. With small property and modest desires, there were fewer disputes, fewer offenses, and therefore less need for many laws or a sprawling set of officials to administer justice. And since people who join into society usually have at least some familiarity and trust among themselves, they tend to fear strangers more than neighbors. So their first, most urgent question was often: How do we protect ourselves from outside violence?

Given that, it was natural to choose a form of government suited to that job—placing themselves under a leader who could guide them in war. They chose the wisest and bravest person to lead armies, face enemies, and in that capacity be their chief ruler.

§ 108. That’s why many Indigenous kings in the Americas—often compared to early stages in Asia and Europe, when populations were sparse and there was little temptation to fight over land—look less like absolute monarchs and more like military commanders. In wartime they may command with full authority, because war doesn’t tolerate multiple competing leaders. But at home, in peacetime, they exercise little control. Their sovereignty is moderate, and decisions about peace and war are typically made by the people or by a council—except that the actual conduct of war naturally concentrates command in the king.

§ 109. Even in Israel, the central work of the judges and the first kings seems to have been military: captains in war and leaders of the armies. The phrase about “going out and coming in before the people” points to that—marching out to battle and returning at the head of the forces. And the story of Jephtha shows this clearly.

In the Bible’s early political stories, “king” and “judge” often mean something much closer to “wartime commander” than to a modern head of state.

Take Jephthah. When the Ammonites threatened Israel, the people of Gilead—desperate—went back to Jephthah, a man they’d previously rejected, and made a deal: help us beat the Ammonites, and we’ll put you in charge. Scripture sums it up bluntly: “the people made him head and captain over them.” In other words, they hired him as their top military leader. And when it says he “judged” Israel for six years, the story shows that “judging” mainly meant commanding their forces.

The same pattern shows up with Gideon. When Jotham scolds the people of Shechem for how they repaid Gideon, he doesn’t point to laws Gideon wrote or courts he ran. He points to a single fact: Gideon fought, risked his life, and saved them from Midian. That’s the core job description.

Even Abimelech—flat-out called “king” in the text—looks, at best, like a general with a crown-shaped title.

And when the Israelites later demanded a king, they described what they wanted in almost entirely military terms: someone to “judge” them, to go out in front of them, and to fight their battles. God’s response to Samuel matches that framing. The man Samuel is told to anoint is described first as “captain” over the people, chosen to rescue them from the Philistines. When Saul is inaugurated, the same word is used again: he’s anointed to be their captain.

So when some people objected to Saul’s rule after he was publicly chosen, their complaint wasn’t philosophical. It was practical: “How shall this man save us?” Meaning: can he actually lead? Can he defend us? If not, he’s not fit for the role.

Even the transfer of power from Saul to David is announced in the same key. David is named as the one God has “commanded… to be captain over his people.” That wording makes it sound as if the heart of kingship is still military leadership. And when the tribes who had resisted David finally come to Hebron to submit, one of their strongest arguments is basically: you’ve already been acting as our real leader. Back when Saul was king, you were the one who “led out and brought in” Israel—an idiom for leading campaigns and bringing the army home. And, they add, God had said David would “feed” (that is, shepherd and care for) the people and be their captain.

So what does this tell us about the first political societies? It suggests two common pathways, both grounded in ordinary human needs rather than divine magic.

1) A family slowly turns into a commonwealth.
Imagine a household that grows over generations. The father’s authority continues, then passes to the eldest son, and so on. People grow up under that leadership, get used to it, and—because it’s relatively even-handed and not humiliating—most simply go along with it. Over time, what began as a practical arrangement starts to look like an established “right” of succession, confirmed by long habit.

2) Separate families join together and pick a leader.
Or picture several families—neighbors, trading partners, or people thrown together by circumstance—deciding to unite. If they face outside threats, especially war, they’ll naturally look for a single person whose judgment and courage can coordinate defense. In the early “infancy” of a society, when people are still living simply and tend to trust one another, they often hand power to one person with few formal limits—not because they believe in unlimited authority, but because they assume the leader’s honesty and because the goal is obvious: survival and public safety.

Whichever route you choose, the underlying point is the same: no one is trusted with authority except for the public good and common security. And in the earliest stages, leaders usually use power for exactly that. If they didn’t, the society wouldn’t make it. Young communities are fragile. Without leaders who function like “nursing fathers”—careful, protective, and focused on the shared welfare—both rulers and ruled would often collapse together.

Why, then, do we end up arguing so fiercely about political power? Because the “golden age” doesn’t last.

In the earlier, simpler period—before ambition and the “cursed love of having” warped people’s ideas about honor and power—there tended to be more virtue. That meant better rulers and less corrupt citizens. There was less temptation for rulers to stretch their prerogative into oppression, and less incentive for people to fight about privileges as a way to cut government down. In short, fewer power struggles.

But later ages changed the incentives. Ambition and luxury pushed rulers to cling to power and expand it, even while neglecting the very work power was supposed to do. Flatterers helped teach princes that they had interests separate from—sometimes opposed to—their people’s interests. Once that happens, it becomes rational, even necessary, for ordinary people to ask hard questions:

• Where did government get its authority in the first place?
• What rights does it truly have?
• How can we restrain power before it becomes abusive?

Because the key fact is this: people entrusted power to rulers for their own good, and then discovered it could be used against them.

Consent, not divine right, explains peaceful beginnings.
When we look at history—at least where governments begin without conquest—it’s highly likely that naturally free people either:

• accepted continued leadership within a family, or
• joined with others and chose a leader,

and in both cases did so by their own consent. Early communities often didn’t spell out detailed constitutional limits, because they believed the leader’s prudence and integrity were enough. But that doesn’t mean they imagined monarchy was a God-given entitlement.

The idea that kings rule by divine right—that monarchy is jure divino—is not something we see as a universal human belief. And neither did people generally treat paternal authority as a license for political domination, or as the foundation of all government. The evidence points the other way: as far as history gives us light, peaceful governments begin with the consent of the people. (Conquest is a different topic, and it deserves separate treatment.)

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There’s another objection some people raise against this account, and it goes like this:

“Everyone is born under some government, so no one is ever truly free to form a new one. Therefore, you can’t ‘start’ a lawful government by consent.”

But if that argument worked, it would wreck the very monarchies it’s often used to defend. Ask yourself: how did the many “lawful” monarchies of the world ever get started? If someone can show even one person—born under another’s rule—who nonetheless had the right to set up a new, legitimate monarchy, then they’ve admitted the principle that people born under government can be free enough to form a new political community. And if one person can be free enough to become the ruler of a distinct new government, then other people born under government can be free enough to become either rulers or members of distinct new governments too.

Push their logic to the end, and it becomes absurd: either

• everyone is free despite being born under government, or
• there is only one lawful government and one lawful prince on earth.

If it’s the second, the job is simple: they just need to tell us who that one rightful ruler is. Once they do, surely all humanity will calmly agree to obey him.

That’s enough to show the objection defeats itself. But we can go further and see why it doesn’t match reality.

People say: “Everyone is born under government. Everyone is born a subject—either to his father or his prince—and therefore owes lifelong allegiance.” But humanity has never generally recognized any such built-in, involuntary political subjection that automatically binds a person (and their heirs) without consent.

History—sacred and secular—is full of people doing the opposite. Over and over, we find groups who:

• leave the jurisdiction they were born under,
• withdraw their obedience from the family or community they grew up in, and
• set up new governments elsewhere.

That’s where so many small commonwealths and little kingdoms came from in early times. They multiplied whenever there was room—until stronger or luckier ones absorbed weaker neighbors. Later, large states fractured and dissolved into smaller dominions again. This constant forming and reforming is powerful evidence against the idea of paternal sovereignty—the claim that political authority naturally descends from father to heir as a kind of inherited dominion.

Because if paternal right were the true root of government, the world should have looked very different. There should have been, in principle, only one vast universal monarchy. The only way we get many kingdoms and commonwealths is if people were free to separate from their families and from whatever government existed among them, and to form new political societies as they judged best.

And that freedom hasn’t disappeared with time. Being born under an old, established government with laws and institutions doesn’t trap humanity any more than being born in open wilderness would. The people who insist that birth alone makes you a natural subject typically fall back on one main reason (besides paternal power, already answered): they claim our ancestors “gave away” their natural liberty and bound both themselves and their descendants into permanent subjection.

Here’s the crucial distinction: yes, a person is bound by promises and agreements they themselves make. But no agreement can, by itself, permanently bind their children and future generations. When a son becomes an adult, he is as free as his father was. The father cannot hand away the son’s liberty any more than he can hand away the liberty of a stranger.

There’s one important caveat, and it explains a common confusion. While a father can’t sign away his child’s freedom, he can attach conditions to property he owns. If land is his, he may settle it so that anyone who inherits it must accept certain terms—like belonging to a particular commonwealth—in order to enjoy that inheritance. That doesn’t bind the son as a person; it binds the estate as an estate.

And this is how the mistake usually happens. A commonwealth typically won’t allow its territory to be carved up or held by outsiders. So a son often can’t enjoy his father’s property unless he accepts the same civic terms his father lived under—becoming a member of that society, and thereby placing himself under its government like any other citizen. Because that consent happens one person at a time, as each new adult steps into property and civic life, people don’t notice it. It’s quiet. It isn’t done by crowds all at once. And because it’s not dramatic, many assume it doesn’t exist—then jump to the false conclusion that people are naturally subjects simply because they are born.

But governments themselves behave as if that conclusion is wrong. They don’t claim authority over children merely because they had authority over the father. They don’t treat children as automatic subjects because their parents were.

Consider a simple case. Suppose an Englishman and an Englishwoman have a child in France. Whose subject is that child?

• Not automatically the King of England’s, since the child must be admitted to the privileges of English subjecthood.
• Not automatically the King of France’s either—otherwise, how could the father freely take the child away and raise him elsewhere?

And more generally: who has ever been treated as a traitor or deserter simply for leaving a country, or even fighting against it, when they were only born there to foreign parents? The practice of governments—and basic reason—both point to the same conclusion: a child is not born the political subject of any government.

A child is under a father’s care and authority until he reaches the age of judgment. After that, he is a free person, at liberty to choose what government he will place himself under and what political body he will join. If an Englishman’s son born in France has that freedom, then the father’s allegiance to England clearly doesn’t automatically bind the child. And if it doesn’t bind him there, why would it bind him anywhere else? A father’s natural authority is the same wherever the child is born, and the basic duties between parent and child aren’t limited by the borders governments draw on maps.

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So if every adult is naturally free, and nothing but his own consent can place him under the authority of an earthly government, the next question is practical:

What counts as consent?
People commonly distinguish between:

• express consent (stated outright), and
• tacit consent (shown through actions).

No one doubts what express consent does. If you openly join a society, you become a full member and a subject of its government.

The harder question is tacit consent: what actions are enough to show you’ve agreed, and how far does that agreement bind you?

Here’s the principle: if a person enjoys any part of the benefits of a government’s territory, he thereby gives tacit consent and must obey that government’s laws for as long as he enjoys those benefits. This applies whether the benefit is large or tiny:

• owning land forever, to you and your heirs,
• renting a room for a week,
• or even simply traveling freely on the public roads.

In practice, it reaches as far as this: being within a government’s territory, and enjoying the protections and conveniences that come with it, is itself a form of consent—enough to oblige you to follow the laws while you’re there.

To see why, think about what happens when someone first joins a commonwealth. By joining, he doesn’t only unite his person—he also, at the same time, places under the community’s authority the possessions he has (or will later acquire) that aren’t already under another government. It would be a contradiction to enter society for the purpose of securing and regulating property, but then claim your own land is exempt from the society’s jurisdiction. The owner can’t be a subject while the land pretends to be independent.

So the same act that ties a formerly free person to a commonwealth also ties his formerly free possessions to it. From that point forward, both person and property fall under the government of that commonwealth for as long as it exists. And anyone who later comes to enjoy any of that land—by inheritance, purchase, permission, or any other route—takes it with the conditions attached to it: submission to the government whose jurisdiction covers it, as fully as any other subject.

Government’s authority, in practice, grabs you through land.

It has direct legal power over the territory itself, and it reaches you—especially before you’ve formally joined the society—mainly because you live on that land and benefit from it. That matters because it draws a clean line around what you owe the government when your “yes” is only implied.

Tacit consent: you owe obedience only while you’re enjoying the property

If all you’ve ever given the government is tacit consent—the silent kind you give by residing on and using its land—then your obligation lasts only as long as that benefit lasts.

• Live on the land, use it, enjoy its protections → you’re expected to follow the laws there.
• Leave the land—sell it, give it away, walk away from it → that particular obligation ends.

So if you quit the property, you’re free to move and attach yourself to some other commonwealth. Or, if you and others can find genuinely unclaimed territory, you can even agree to start a new one in an empty place.

Express consent: you can’t just “take it back”

But there’s a stronger, stickier kind of commitment: express consent.

If you’ve actually agreed—openly and deliberately—to be part of a particular commonwealth, then you’ve bound yourself to it in a way you can’t casually undo. You’re not free to slide back into the “state of nature” whenever you feel like it. You remain a subject of that society—permanently and necessarily—unless one of two things happens:

• The government you’re under is dissolved by some catastrophe.
• The public authority, by a formal act, cuts you off from membership.

Short of that, your explicit “yes” keeps holding.

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§ 122. Living under a government doesn’t automatically make you a member of it

Here’s the key distinction: obeying a country’s laws isn’t the same thing as belonging to that political society.

If you live quietly in a place, accept its protection, and enjoy its privileges, you do owe compliance with its laws—at least as long as you’re within the reach of its legal force. That’s simply the exchange any non-enemy makes with a functioning government: protection on one side, obedience on the other.

But that kind of arrangement is local and temporary. It doesn’t turn you into a permanent member of the commonwealth.

Think of it like staying in someone’s household because it suits you for a while. While you’re there, you follow the house rules and respect the authority in charge. Still, that doesn’t make you part of the family forever.

That’s why foreigners can spend their entire lives under another government—working there, enjoying its laws, taking its protection—and yet not become full political members of that society. They’re bound, even morally, to submit to the government’s administration as far as any resident is. But they don’t become citizens or members just by being present and benefiting.

What actually makes someone a political member

Only one thing does:

• A deliberate act of joining through a clear commitment—an express promise, a compact, a positive engagement.

That explicit agreement is what creates political society in the first place, and it’s what makes any individual a genuine member of a commonwealth.

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1. How early political societies learned the hard way

In the beginning, once a community had accepted some particular form of rule, they often didn’t think much about the details of governing. They basically left it to the wisdom and discretion of the people in charge, trusting them to steer things well.

But experience tends to be a brutal teacher.

Over time, they discovered that this loose approach was inconvenient—and not just mildly. The “remedy” they had chosen to fix social problems sometimes made the illness worse. They realized that letting everyone’s lives depend on one person’s will was a recipe for shared misery.

So they were driven to something more stable: laws—public rules that let everyone know, ahead of time:

• what their duties are, and
• what penalties follow if they break those rules.

CHAP. IX.

Of the Ends of Political Society and Government.

§ 123. If people are as free in the state of nature as we’ve said—if each person is the absolute owner of their own body and belongings, equal to the most powerful, and answerable to no one—then why would anyone ever give that up? Why step down from being their own boss and accept the authority of any government?

The answer is simple: even if you have that right in the state of nature, you can’t reliably enjoy it. Your freedom and your possessions are always sitting on shaky ground, because everyone else is just as “sovereign” as you are. Everyone is your equal, and most people aren’t careful, consistent followers of fairness and justice. So whatever “property” you have in that condition—your life, your liberty, your goods—is constantly exposed to other people’s interference. It’s precarious.

That’s why people are willing to leave a condition that’s technically free but practically full of anxiety and constant danger. And that’s why it makes perfect sense that they look for safety in society—either by joining a community that already exists or by forming one with others who also want to unite. The goal is mutual protection of what matters most: their lives, their liberties, and their estates—all of which I’ll group under one umbrella term: property.

§ 124. So the big, central reason people join together into a commonwealth and place themselves under government is this: to protect their property. And the state of nature, for all its freedom, is missing several things you’d need for that protection to be secure.

First, it lacks an established, settled, publicly known law—one that people generally recognize and accept as the standard for right and wrong, and as the common yardstick for resolving disputes. Yes, the law of nature is understandable to any rational person. But in real life, people’s interests bend their judgment. Many are also ignorant of it because they haven’t thought about it carefully. So when the law of nature has to be applied to a specific case—their case—people are rarely eager to treat it as binding.

§ 125. Second, the state of nature lacks a known, impartial judge with the authority to decide disagreements according to that settled law. In that condition, each person acts as both judge and executioner of the law of nature. And since people naturally favor themselves, passion and revenge easily push them beyond what’s reasonable when they believe they’ve been wronged. On the other hand, when someone else is the victim, people can be careless, indifferent, and far too slow to act.

§ 126. Third, the state of nature often lacks the power needed to support a rightful judgment and actually carry it out. Someone who has acted unjustly will rarely fail—if they have the strength—to defend their wrongdoing with force. And once people resist enforcement, punishment becomes dangerous, and often ruinous, to those who try to impose it.

§ 127. Put those together, and you get the real picture: despite the “privileges” of the state of nature, people are in a poor situation if they stay there. That pressure quickly drives them into political society. That’s why we hardly ever find groups of people living together for long in a pure state of nature.

The constant exposure to harm—caused by the irregular and unpredictable way each individual exercises the power to punish others—pushes people to take shelter under established government. They look to law for the security of their property. And this is why people so willingly hand over their personal, individual power of punishment: they agree that it should be exercised only by those appointed to do it, and only by rules the community (or those authorized by the community) lays down. In that transfer you can see the origin and foundation of legislative power and executive power, and with them the rise of governments and political societies.

§ 128. In the state of nature—setting aside the harmless pleasures people can enjoy—each person has two main powers.

1. The power to act for preservation: the ability to do whatever they judge necessary for preserving themselves and others, as far as the law of nature allows. Under that shared law, all humans form one community, one society, distinct from other creatures. And if it weren’t for the corruption and vice of humans who’ve gone bad, we wouldn’t need anything beyond that natural community. There’d be no reason to split into smaller groups through explicit agreements.

2. The power to punish: the authority to punish offenses against the law of nature.

When someone joins a particular political society—when they incorporate into a commonwealth distinct from the rest of humanity—they give up both of these powers.

§ 129. The first power—the freedom to do whatever one thinks necessary for self-preservation and the preservation of humankind—gets handed over to be regulated by the laws of the society, as far as the well-being of the person and the society requires. Those civil laws often narrow the liberty a person had under the law of nature.

§ 130. The second power—the power to punish—gets surrendered entirely. A person commits their natural strength (which they once could use on their own authority to enforce the law of nature as they saw fit) to support the society’s executive power, in whatever way the society’s law requires.

And the trade makes sense. By entering this new condition, a person gains real advantages from the work, help, and company of others in the same community, along with protection from the community’s combined strength. In exchange, they must also give up as much natural liberty—especially the liberty to provide for themselves in whatever way they please—as the society’s good, prosperity, and safety demand. This isn’t just practical; it’s fair, because everyone else in the society makes the same concession.

§ 131. Still, even though people give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature into the hands of society—so that the legislative can direct it as the public good requires—they do so for one reason: to better preserve themselves, their liberty, and their property. No rational being can be assumed to change their condition intending to make it worse.

So the power of society—and therefore of the legislature established by the people—can’t reasonably extend beyond the common good. It is obligated to secure everyone’s property by fixing those three failures that made the state of nature so unsafe and miserable. That means whoever holds the legislative or supreme power in a commonwealth is bound to govern:

• by established, standing laws that are publicly announced and known to the people, not by spur-of-the-moment decrees;
• by impartial and upright judges who decide disputes using those laws; and
• by using the community’s force
  • at home, only to execute those laws, and
  • abroad, to prevent or remedy foreign harms and to protect the community from raids and invasion.

And all of it must be aimed at one end: the peace, safety, and public good of the people.

CHAP. X.

Of the Forms of a Common-wealth.

§ 132. When people first join together to form a society, the majority (as we’ve seen) naturally holds the full power of the community. What happens next depends on what the majority decides to do with that power—especially the power to make laws.

They have a few basic options:

• Directly govern themselves by making laws as needed and carrying them out through officials they choose. That setup is a perfect democracy.
• Hand lawmaking to a small group of selected people (and possibly to their heirs or successors). That’s an oligarchy.
• Hand lawmaking to one person. That’s a monarchy—with important variations:
  • If the power stays with that person’s heirs, it’s an hereditary monarchy.
  • If the person holds it only for life, and when they die the community regains the authority (keeping only the right to name the next person), it’s an elective monarchy.

From these building blocks, a community can also design mixed or blended governments, combining elements however it thinks best.

And here’s the key point: if the majority originally gives the legislative power to someone (or some group) only for life, or for a fixed term, then when that period ends the supreme power returns to the community. Once it returns, the people are free to place it again wherever they choose—and that means they can create an entirely new form of government.

Why? Because the form of government follows the location of the supreme power, and that supreme power is the legislative. A lower authority can’t dictate terms to a higher one, and no one except the supreme power can properly make laws. So wherever the lawmaking power is placed, that’s what the commonwealth is.

§ 133. One more clarification about words. When I say commonwealth, I don’t mean “a democracy,” or any particular kind of government. I mean any independent political community—what the Latin writers called civitas. In English, commonwealth is the closest match. Words like community or city don’t quite work, because:

• A government can contain subordinate communities inside it.
• And city, in ordinary English, carries a very different idea than commonwealth.

So to avoid confusion, I’m going to keep using commonwealth in this broad sense—the way I find it used by King James I—and I take that to be its natural meaning. If anyone dislikes the term, I’m happy to swap it for a better one.

CHAP. XI.

Of the Extent of the Legislative Power.

§134. Why legislatures exist—and why their authority matters

People join together in society for one big reason: to enjoy their property in peace and safety. And the main tool for making that possible is law. So the first, foundational man-made rule of any commonwealth is this: it must set up a legislative power.

But there’s an even deeper rule that limits every legislature—a rule that comes before any constitution or statute. Call it the fundamental law of nature: preserve the society, and, as far as the public good allows, preserve every person within it.

That’s why the legislature is the supreme power of the commonwealth. And once the community places that power in certain hands, it’s “sacred” in this practical sense: no other person or body can issue something that counts as law unless it gets its force from that legislature the public has chosen. Without that, a rule is missing the one ingredient it can’t do without: the consent of the society.

In other words, nobody can have authority to make laws over a people except by the people’s consent—either directly or through power the people have granted. So whenever you ask, “What do I ultimately owe obedience to?” the answer is: the legislature, acting within the trust the community gave it, and the laws it properly enacts.

This also means:

• No oath to a foreign ruler can cancel your duty to obey your own legislature when it’s acting within its mandate.
• No promise to a lower domestic authority can release you from that duty either.
• And no obligation can bind you to obey against the laws your legislature has enacted, or beyond what those laws permit.

It makes no sense to imagine you’re ultimately bound to obey some power inside the society that isn’t the highest one.

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§135. Limit #1: the legislature can’t be an all-powerful owner of your life and property

Even though the legislature is supreme—whether it’s one person or many, permanent or meeting only at intervals—it still isn’t, and can’t be, absolutely arbitrary over people’s lives and fortunes.

Here’s why. The legislature’s power is just the combined power of individuals, pooled together and handed to the lawmaking person or assembly. But you can’t give away more power than you have. And in the state of nature, no one has an absolute right over themselves—or over anyone else—to destroy their own life, or to take another person’s life or property at will.

So when people enter society, they don’t—and can’t—grant the legislature some new superpower that nobody ever had to begin with. They grant only what the law of nature allowed them: enough power to preserve themselves and humankind, and to protect the community’s shared safety.

So the legislature’s authority, even at its outer edge, is bounded by the public good. Its purpose is preservation. And because that’s its purpose, it never has a rightful claim to:

• destroy people,
• enslave them,
• or deliberately impoverish them.

The moral obligations that exist under the law of nature don’t vanish when you form a society. What changes is enforcement: society tightens those obligations in practice by attaching known penalties through human law. The law of nature remains an enduring rule for everyone—legislators included.

So when lawmakers set rules for others, those rules must align with the law of nature (that is, with God’s will as that law expresses it). And since the core of the law of nature is the preservation of humankind, no human law is valid if it contradicts that.

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§136. Limit #2: lawmakers can’t rule by spur-of-the-moment decrees

The supreme authority can’t claim a right to govern through improvised, arbitrary orders. Instead, it must administer justice and settle people’s rights through:

• published, standing laws, and
• known, authorized judges.

This is not a technicality—it fixes the central mess of the state of nature. The law of nature isn’t written down, and it lives only in people’s minds. That makes it easy for someone, driven by passion or self-interest, to misquote it or twist it. And without an established judge, it’s hard to prove they’re wrong.

Worse, in the state of nature each person is often judge, interpreter, and enforcer—and in their own case. Even if you’re right, you typically have only your own strength to defend yourself, which often isn’t enough to resist injury or punish wrongdoing.

So people form societies to solve those problems. They unite so they can use the combined strength of the whole community to secure and defend property, and so they can have fixed rules that set clear boundaries—so everyone can know what belongs to whom.

That’s why people hand their natural power over to the community, and why the community places legislative power where it thinks best: on the explicit condition that they will be governed by declared laws. Without that, peace and property remain as uncertain as they were before government existed.

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§137. Why “rule by will” defeats the whole point of government

Absolute arbitrary power—government without settled, standing laws—can’t coexist with the purpose of society and government. People don’t leave the freedom of the state of nature just to trade it for a worse kind of insecurity. They submit to government to preserve their lives, liberties, and fortunes—and to secure peace through stable rules of right and property.

So it’s not credible to think people meant to give any person (or group) an unlimited power over their bodies and estates, along with force to execute an unchecked will. That would be worse than the state of nature, where you at least keep the liberty to defend your rights and stand on roughly equal footing with others—whether you face one attacker or many.

If you assume people handed themselves over to a legislator’s absolute will, then they’ve disarmed themselves and armed someone else to prey on them at convenience. And someone exposed to the arbitrary power of one person who commands 100,000 is in a more dangerous position than someone exposed to 100,000 individuals acting separately. There’s no guarantee the will of the commander is better—only that his force is vastly greater.

So whatever the form of the commonwealth, those who rule should govern by declared and accepted laws, not by sudden dictates and shifting impulses. Otherwise people end up worse off than in the state of nature: they’ve armed one or a few with the combined force of many, only to be driven by “whatever they feel like today,” without any public standards that can guide or justify anyone’s actions.

Since all governmental power exists only for the good of society, it must not be arbitrary, and it must be exercised through established, published laws—so:

• the people can know their duty and feel secure within legal limits, and
• rulers are kept within bounds and not tempted to use their power in ways they wouldn’t openly defend.

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§138. Limit #3: the supreme power can’t take property without consent

The supreme power can’t take any part of a person’s property without that person’s consent. This follows directly from the point of government: to preserve property. People enter society to secure what they have, not to lose it. If entering society meant you could be stripped of your goods at someone else’s discretion, then society would defeat its own purpose—an absurd bargain no rational person would accept.

So when people in society have property—meaning goods recognized as theirs by the community’s law—no one has the right to take their substance, or any part of it, without consent. If someone else can rightfully take what’s yours whenever they like, then you don’t truly own anything.

That’s why it’s a mistake to think the legislature can do whatever it wants with the estates of subjects, taking any portion at pleasure.

This danger is smaller in governments where the legislature is, wholly or partly, a changing assembly. Members return to being ordinary subjects under the same common laws as everyone else once the assembly dissolves. But where the legislature is a permanent body always sitting—or a single person, as in absolute monarchy—there’s a real risk: rulers start to think they have interests separate from the community, and they may try to increase their own wealth and power by taking what they want from the people.

And if the person who commands also has the power to seize whatever portion of any private person’s property he pleases, then property isn’t secure—even if there are otherwise fair laws governing disputes between subjects.

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§139. Even “absolute” power has a purpose—and that purpose limits it

No matter who holds it, government is entrusted on this condition and for this end: that people may have and secure their property. So even if a prince or senate can make laws regulating property disputes between subjects, it can never have the right to take the whole—or any part—of the subjects’ property for itself without their consent. Doing that would leave people with no property at all.

And if you want proof that necessary absolute power isn’t the same thing as arbitrary power, look at the ordinary practice of military discipline. To preserve an army—and through it the commonwealth—soldiers must obey superiors absolutely. Disobedience, even to dangerous or seemingly unreasonable orders, can rightly be punished by death, because that level of obedience is necessary to keep the whole force from collapsing.

But notice the boundary:

• A sergeant can order a soldier into extreme danger—toward cannon fire, into a breach where death is likely—yet can’t command that soldier to hand over a penny.
• A general can sentence a soldier to death for desertion or disobedience, yet still can’t lawfully take a farthing of the soldier’s estate or seize a scrap of his goods.

Why? Because the commander’s harsh authority exists for one specific end—preserving the rest. Taking a soldier’s money has nothing to do with that end.

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§140. Taxes can be necessary—but they still require consent

It’s true: governments can’t function without significant expense. And it’s fair that everyone who benefits from protection should pay a proportionate share for its maintenance.

But even then, it must be done with consent—meaning the consent of the majority, given either directly or through representatives they choose. If anyone claims a right to impose and collect taxes by their own authority, without that consent, they violate the fundamental principle of property and undermine the purpose of government.

Because what do I really own, if another person can rightfully take it for themselves whenever they want?

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§141. Limit #4: the legislature can’t hand off the lawmaking power

The legislature can’t transfer the power of making laws into other hands. It is a delegated power from the people, and those who receive it can’t pass it on.

Only the people can set the form of the commonwealth by establishing the legislature and deciding who will hold it. Once the people have said, “We will live under rules made by these people, in this form,” nobody else can step in and say, “Actually, different people will make your laws.” And the people can’t be bound by laws except those enacted by lawmakers they have chosen and authorized.

Since legislative power comes from a voluntary grant, it can be only what that grant conveyed. And because the grant is a grant to make laws, not to make new legislators, the legislature has no authority to shift its lawmaking power elsewhere.

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§142. The four boundaries of legislative power

These are the limits set by the trust society places in its lawmakers, and by the law of God and nature, for every commonwealth—whatever its form.

• First: Govern by published, established laws, not by ad hoc changes for particular cases—one rule for rich and poor, for the court favorite and the farmer in the field.
• Secondly: Aim these laws, ultimately, at the good of the people—not the private advantage of rulers.
• Thirdly: Do not raise taxes on people’s property without their consent, given by themselves or by representatives they choose. (This point most directly targets systems where the legislature is always in being, or where the people haven’t reserved a share of legislative power to deputies chosen from time to time.)
• Fourthly: The legislature must not and cannot transfer the power of making laws to anyone else, or place it anywhere except where the people have placed it.

CHAP. XII.

Of the Legislative, Executive, and Federative Power of the Common-wealth.

§ 143. Legislative power is the authority to decide how the community’s collective strength—its laws, resources, and enforcement—will be used to protect the whole society and each person in it.

But there’s an important practical point: the laws that need to exist long-term can usually be written in a relatively short burst of work. Once the rules are set, they don’t require the lawmakers to stay permanently “on duty.” So there’s no good reason for the legislative body to be continuously in session.

There’s also a deeper, more human reason not to keep it constantly in being, and not to let the same people both make the laws and carry them out. Power tempts. If the people who write the rules also control the machinery that enforces them, they’ll have a built-in incentive to:

• carve out exceptions for themselves,
• dodge the burdens they impose on everyone else, and
• shape both the wording and the enforcement of laws to serve their private advantage.

That’s how a governing group can quietly develop an interest that’s separate from—and hostile to—the rest of the community. And that directly contradicts the whole purpose of forming a society and establishing government in the first place.

So in a well-designed commonwealth—one that genuinely keeps the public good in view—the legislative power is placed in the hands of multiple people. They gather when needed, make laws (sometimes alone, sometimes with the participation of others), and then disperse. When they return to ordinary life, they fall back under the very laws they created. And that’s not a minor detail—it’s a tight, immediate constraint that pushes them to legislate for the common good, because they’ll personally live under what they pass.

§ 144. Still, even if lawmaking is occasional, law enforcement is continuous. Rules that are created quickly can remain binding for a long time, and they need steady, day-to-day execution. That means a community needs a power that’s always “on”—a standing authority that makes sure the laws in force are actually carried out. This is why legislative and executive power often end up separated.

§ 145. Beyond those, every commonwealth has another kind of power—one that’s almost “natural,” because it mirrors the authority each person had before joining a political society.

Here’s the idea. Inside the commonwealth, citizens are still separate individuals in relation to one another, and they’re governed by the society’s laws. But in relation to the rest of humanity—people who aren’t members of this society—the members don’t act as isolated individuals. They act as one body. And as a body, the community stands toward outsiders the way individuals once stood toward everyone else: in what you could call a state of nature.

That’s why disputes between a citizen and someone outside the society aren’t treated as merely private matters. The public, acting as a single body, manages them. And if an outsider harms one member, the injury doesn’t stop with that person; it implicates the whole community, which becomes responsible for seeking repair. In this outward-facing sense, the community is one unified actor, dealing with other communities and persons that lie beyond its membership.

§ 146. This outward-facing authority includes the power to handle:

• war and peace,
• treaties and agreements,
• alliances and partnerships,
• and, more generally, all dealings with people and communities outside the commonwealth.

You can call this the federative power if you like. The label isn’t the point; what matters is understanding the function.

§ 147. Executive power and federative power are genuinely different in what they govern:

• The executive enforces the community’s internal, municipal laws—rules citizens owe one another within the society.
• The federative manages the community’s safety and interests in relation to outsiders—anyone who might benefit or harm it.

Even so, they’re almost always joined together in practice.

And there’s a reason the federative power, although extremely important, can’t be directed as neatly by pre-written, standing laws as executive power can. Domestic laws are meant to guide citizens’ actions toward one another, so the rules can be laid down in advance with decent precision. Foreign affairs can’t be handled that way. What you should do with other states depends heavily on what they do—on shifting intentions, sudden threats, changing alliances, and competing interests.

So much of the federative power has to be left to the judgment of those who hold it. They must manage it with prudence and skill, aiming—ideally—at the advantage of the commonwealth as a whole.

§ 148. Even though executive and federative power are distinct in principle, it’s incredibly hard to separate them in practice and place them, at the same time, in the hands of different, independent people.

Why? Because both powers require the community’s force to function. If you try to split them across separate hands that aren’t subordinate to one another, you effectively split command of the public’s strength. You create competing chains of control over the same instruments—military force, enforcement capacity, and the ability to act decisively. That kind of divided command almost inevitably produces confusion, conflict, and—sooner or later—disorder that can destroy the society.

CHAP. XIII.

Of the Subordination of the Powers of the Common-wealth.

§ 149. One “supreme” power—and the people behind it.
In any properly formed commonwealth—one that exists to protect the community—there can be only one supreme power: the legislature, because it makes the laws everyone else must live under. Every other power has to sit below it.

But there’s an important catch. The legislature doesn’t own that supremacy the way a monarch “owns” a crown. It holds lawmaking power in trust. And because it’s a trust, it has a purpose and limits: it must be used for the ends the people set—public safety, liberty, and the protection of property. When lawmakers plainly abandon those ends, or work against them, they break the trust. At that point, the authority they were given doesn’t magically stay with them; it returns to the people who granted it, and the people may place it somewhere new—wherever they judge best for their own security.

That’s why a community always retains a last-resort, supreme right of self-defense—even against its own legislators—if those legislators are foolish or wicked enough to plot against the people’s liberties and property. No person, and no society, has the moral power to sign away its own survival, or the means of survival, to someone else’s absolute and arbitrary will. So if anyone tries to drag a people into slavery, the people are always entitled to protect what they never had the right to surrender, and to remove those who violate this basic, sacred, unchangeable law of self-preservation—the very reason they formed a society in the first place.

In that sense, the people can be called “supreme.” But notice the timing: this popular supremacy doesn’t operate within an ongoing government. It only comes into play when the government has effectively dissolved—when the normal constitutional machinery has been broken.

§ 150. While government exists, the legislature sits on top.
As long as the government is functioning, the legislature is the highest authority. It has to be: whatever can set rules for another must be above the one it rules. The legislature is “the legislature” only because it has the right to make laws for every part of society and every person in it—laying down rules for conduct and establishing enforcement when rules are broken. Since all other powers inside the commonwealth are derived from that lawmaking authority, they are necessarily subordinate to it.

§ 151. When one person runs the executive and shares lawmaking, he can seem “supreme”—but only in a limited sense.
Some governments don’t keep their legislature constantly in session. In those systems the executive may be a single person—often someone who also has a role in making laws (for example, by having to consent before laws can pass). In a reasonable sense, that person can be called “supreme”—not because he personally contains the whole supreme power of making laws, but because he holds the supreme execution of the laws. Lower officials get their authority from him (or at least most of it). And since no law can be made without his consent, there’s no higher legislative power above him that could realistically force him to submit to the other lawmaking partners. In that narrower meaning, he can be described as supreme.

Still, don’t confuse the object of loyalty. When people swear allegiance and fealty, they aren’t swearing to him as the supreme lawgiver. They’re swearing to him as the chief executor of laws made by a joint authority—him plus others. Allegiance is simply obedience according to law. The moment he violates the law, he loses any rightful claim to obedience. He can demand compliance only insofar as he acts as the public officer carrying out the public law.

Seen properly, he is the public face—the representative—of the commonwealth, acting not from private desire but from the community’s will expressed in its laws. In that role, he has no legitimate will or power except what the law grants. But if he abandons that public role and starts acting on his own private will, he strips himself of authority. He becomes just another private person, with no rightful claim to obedience. Citizens owe obedience only to the public will of the society.

§ 152. Executives without a lawmaking share are plainly subordinate—and everyone else even more so.
When executive power is placed in someone who does not share in the legislature, it’s obviously subordinate and accountable to the legislature, and can be replaced when the legislature chooses. So the issue isn’t that “executive power” in general escapes subordination. The only executive that tends to escape it is the supreme executive lodged in a single person who also holds part of the legislative power—because then there is no distinct superior legislature over him that he must answer to unless he agrees to it. Which, realistically, won’t be much.

As for the many other ministerial and subordinate offices in a commonwealth—there are too many, and they vary too widely across different countries and constitutions, to catalogue here. But one rule matters for our purposes: none of them has any authority beyond what is explicitly granted to them by commission, and every one of them is accountable to some other power within the commonwealth.

§ 153. The legislature can pause; the executive can’t.
It isn’t necessary—nor even convenient—for the legislature to sit continuously. But it is absolutely necessary for executive power to be continuously available. Why? Because society doesn’t constantly need new laws, but it constantly needs the laws it already has to be enforced.

When the legislature assigns enforcement to other hands, it still retains the right to take that power back when there’s reason—and to punish officials for mismanaging their duties in violation of the law.

The same logic applies to the federative power (the power dealing with a community’s relations with other societies): it, like the executive, is ministerial and subordinate to the legislature, which remains the supreme power in a properly constituted commonwealth.

Also, when the legislature is made up of multiple people, it will meet and exercise lawmaking at times set by (a) the original constitution, (b) its own adjournments, or (c) its own decision—if no time is fixed and no other method of calling it is specified. The people placed supreme power in it, so that power always remains there. The legislature may act when it chooses, unless the constitution limits it to certain seasons, or unless the legislature itself has adjourned until a certain date—at which point it has the right to assemble and act again.

(If the legislature were a single person, it would naturally be always in being, and as supreme it would also naturally hold the supreme executive power along with the legislative power.)

§ 154. When representatives rotate back into private life, the people must keep choosing them.
If part (or all) of the legislature consists of representatives elected by the people for a limited term—after which they return to being ordinary subjects and regain lawmaking authority only if re-elected—then the power of choosing must be exercised by the people either:

• at fixed, scheduled times, or
• when the people are summoned to elect.

In that second arrangement, the power to convene the legislature is usually placed in the executive, and it is typically limited in one of two ways:

• Fixed-interval model: The constitution requires the legislature to meet at set intervals. The executive’s role is purely ministerial: issuing directions so elections and assemblies happen in the proper form.
• Discretionary-call model: The executive is trusted to call new elections when public needs demand it—when old laws need updating, new laws are required, or pressing harms need fixing or preventing.

§ 155. If the executive blocks the legislature by force, the people may answer force with force.
A natural question follows: what if the executive—who controls the commonwealth’s force—uses that force to prevent the legislature from meeting and acting when the constitution or public necessity requires it?

If he uses force against the people without authority, he violates the trust placed in him and enters a state of war with the people. The people then have the right to restore their legislature to the exercise of its power. After all, they set up a legislature precisely so it would make laws—either at fixed times or whenever necessity arises. If force blocks the legislature from doing what is essential to the safety and preservation of society, the people may remove that obstacle by force.

More broadly, in every condition of life, the real remedy for force without authority is to oppose force to it. Anyone who uses force without right makes himself the aggressor, puts himself in a state of war, and becomes liable to be treated as such.

§ 156. Convening and dismissing the legislature is a trust, not a rank.
When the power to assemble and dismiss the legislature is placed in the executive, that does not make the executive superior to the legislature. It’s a fiduciary trust—given for the people’s safety—because human affairs are too uncertain to be managed by a perfectly fixed schedule.

The founders of a government cannot foresee the future well enough to set meeting periods that will always match what the commonwealth needs. If meetings are too frequent or last too long without necessity, they burden the people and can create their own dangerous problems. But circumstances can also change fast, and delays in calling the legislature can put the public at risk. Sometimes, too, the legislature’s work is so heavy that a short session cuts deliberation short and deprives the public of the benefit of careful judgment.

So what’s the practical solution? Trust the timing to someone who is always present and whose job is to watch the public good—namely, the person entrusted with executing the laws for the same end. In that arrangement, if the original constitution doesn’t set the legislature’s schedule, the power naturally falls to the executive—not as an arbitrary personal privilege, but as a duty to be used only for the public welfare as conditions require.

Which option produces the fewest downsides—fixed meeting dates, executive discretion, or a mixture—isn’t the question here. The point is simpler: even if the executive has the prerogative to convene and dissolve legislative assemblies, that does not make him their superior.

§ 157. When society changes, representation can become wildly unfair—and it looks absurd.
Everything in human affairs shifts over time. Populations move. Wealth changes hands. Trade routes rise and fall. Power relocates. Cities that once flourished collapse into ruins, while quiet places grow into crowded, wealthy regions.

But change isn’t evenly distributed, and private interests often keep old privileges alive long after the reasons for them have disappeared. That’s why, in governments where part of the legislature is made up of representatives chosen by the people, representation can slowly become grossly unequal and no longer match the purpose it was meant to serve.

The absurdity is obvious in extreme cases: a “town” that no longer even exists—maybe not even ruins, perhaps just a shepherd’s hut—can send as many representatives to the national lawmaking assembly as a large county packed with people and wealth. Outsiders are stunned by this, and anyone honest must admit it needs a remedy.

Yet many think the problem can’t be fixed, because the design of the legislature is the original and supreme act of the society, prior to all ordinary law, and dependent entirely on the people. No lower authority can change it. And since, once the legislature is set up, the people in such a government have no direct power to act while the government continues, the imbalance is treated as incurable.

§ 158. The public’s safety is the highest law—and fair representation can be restored as legitimate prerogative.
Salus populi suprema lex—the safety of the people is the supreme law—is so basic and so true that anyone who sincerely follows it can’t go dangerously wrong.

So consider this: if the executive, who has the power to convene the legislature, sees that representation has drifted out of proportion, and he acts to restore the real proportions—following reason rather than outdated custom—he can regulate the number of representatives in each place that has a right to distinct representation. The guiding principle should be proportionality: representation should reflect how much each place contributes to the public, not just what ancient habit says it should get.

Done this way, the executive has not created a new legislature. He has repaired and restored the old, genuine one—correcting disorders that time introduces gradually and almost inevitably. The people’s interest and intention is to have a fair and equal representation; whoever brings the system closer to that is a true friend and stabilizer of government, and will not fail to gain the community’s consent and approval.

This also clarifies what prerogative really is: a power in the executive’s hands to secure the public good in situations where unpredictable events make rigid, unchangeable laws unsafe guides. When something is done plainly for the people’s good, and to put government back on its proper foundations, it is—and will always be—legitimate prerogative.

The very power to create new incorporated towns and grant them representatives assumes that representation may have to change over time: places that once had no right may later justly deserve it, and by the same logic, places that have become too small or insignificant may cease to deserve the privilege they once had.

What truly threatens a government isn’t “change” as such—even change away from a status quo shaped by decay or corruption. The real danger is change that tends to injure or oppress the people by elevating one faction or region into a privileged class and pushing the rest into unequal subjection.

But whatever can be plainly recognized as a general advantage to society—based on fair, durable measures—will justify itself once done. And whenever the people choose their representatives by clearly equal rules consistent with the original design of the government, there’s no reason to doubt that it expresses the will and act of the society, no matter who first enabled or allowed them to choose on those terms.

CHAP. XIV.

Of PREROGATIVE.

§159. Why governments need discretion in the executive

In any well-designed government—especially a “mixed” monarchy where the legislature and the executive are separate—the public good requires leaving some decisions to the person (or office) that carries out the laws. Legislators can’t predict every situation that might help the community, and they can’t write rules for every surprise the future will throw at us. So when the executive has power in hand, the law of nature—the basic logic of government—gives them room to use that power for the community’s benefit in cases where local law is silent, at least until the legislature can meet and provide guidance.

Some problems simply don’t fit neatly into prewritten statutes. In those cases, the executive has to choose what to do based on what best protects the public.

And sometimes, it’s not just that the law is silent—it’s that following the law to the letter would make things worse. Picture an emergency: a fire is spreading, and the only way to stop it is to demolish a house that belongs to someone who did nothing wrong. A rigid, “no exceptions” approach can cause real harm. Or consider a person who technically violates a law in a way that plainly deserves praise or mercy—because the law, by design, doesn’t tailor itself to every individual case. In situations like these, it makes sense for the ruler to have the power to soften the law’s harsh edge, including the power to pardon. The point of government is preservation—protecting the community as much as possible—so even the guilty should be spared when that mercy doesn’t endanger the innocent.

§160. What “prerogative” means

This ability to act for the public good without a specific law telling you what to do—and sometimes even against what a law literally says—is what we call prerogative.

Here’s why it exists. In many governments, the lawmaking body:

• isn’t always in session,
• is large and slow-moving,
• and can’t respond fast enough for emergencies.

On top of that, no one can foresee every crisis or need that might affect the public. And even well-written laws can do damage if they’re enforced with absolute rigidity in every case and against every person who happens to fall under them. So governments inevitably leave the executive some freedom to choose actions the laws don’t spell out.

§161. When prerogative is accepted—and when it’s challenged

When this discretionary power is used the way it’s supposed to be—for the community’s benefit and in line with the purpose of government—it’s clearly legitimate prerogative, and people rarely object. Most of the time, people don’t obsess over the fine boundaries of prerogative as long as it’s being used in a tolerable way for the people’s good and not obviously against it.

But when a dispute arises—when the executive claims “this is prerogative” and the people doubt it—the question usually resolves itself by looking at outcomes: does this use of prerogative help the people, or does it harm them?

§162. How prerogative grows—and why laws later fence it in

Early governments were small. A commonwealth didn’t have many more people than a large family, and it didn’t have many more laws either. Leaders functioned almost like parents watching over a household, and government was “mostly prerogative”: a few standing rules handled routine matters, while the ruler’s judgment and attention filled in the gaps.

Problems began when weak rulers—helped along by flattery or self-deception—started using this flexible power for private advantage instead of public benefit. When people felt the damage, they responded the only practical way they could: they passed explicit laws to pin down prerogative in the areas where it had hurt them.

In other words, later generations often had to put formal limits on powers their ancestors had left broad, back when their princes used that freedom responsibly—meaning, for the people’s good.

§163. Defining prerogative by law isn’t “stealing” it

So it’s a mistake to say the people “encroach” on prerogative whenever they get part of it defined by positive law. They aren’t taking away something that belonged to the prince by right. They’re clarifying what they always meant: that the open-ended discretion they left with the ruler was left there only to be used for their good, not to be used against them.

Since the end of government is the good of the community, any change that better serves that end can’t be an encroachment. No one in government can have a rightful claim to power aimed at any other purpose. The only true “encroachments” are the ones that injure or obstruct the public good.

People who talk as if the prince has an interest separate from the community’s good—like the ruler exists for himself, not for society—are feeding the root idea behind many of the disasters of monarchy. If the ruler’s good and the people’s good can come apart like that, then the people aren’t really a society of rational equals who formed a community for mutual benefit. They’re more like a herd under a master, kept and worked for someone else’s pleasure or profit. If human beings were irrational enough to accept that bargain, then prerogative really could be what some want it to be: a license for arbitrary harm.

§164. Prerogative as the people’s permission—and why bad rulers trigger limits

But a rational person, born free, can’t be presumed to submit to another person for his own injury. True, if people find a wise and good ruler, they may not bother to draw sharp boundaries around every power. Still, that doesn’t change what prerogative is.

Properly understood, prerogative is simply this: the people allow their rulers to make certain choices where the law is silent—and sometimes even to act against the law’s literal wording—when doing so is necessary for the public good. And they accept those actions when they’re genuinely taken in that spirit.

That’s why:

• a good ruler, faithful to the trust placed in him, can hardly have “too much” prerogative—meaning too much power to do public good; but
• a weak or corrupt ruler, who treats the discretionary acts of better predecessors as a permanent right of the office—something he can use however he likes to build a private interest separate from the public—gives people every reason to reclaim and limit what they once allowed quietly.

People tolerated that latitude when it helped them. When it stops helping them, they insist on boundaries.

§165. England as an example: the best princes had the widest freedom

Look at English history and you’ll see a pattern: prerogative was greatest under the wisest and best kings. Why? Because when people saw that the overall direction of a king’s actions aimed at the public good, they didn’t pick fights over acts done without a specific law authorizing them.

Even when ordinary human mistakes showed up—and kings are human, like anyone else—the main drift of those good rulers’ conduct still plainly served the public. So when such princes acted without law, or even against the law’s strict letter, the people generally went along. They let those rulers stretch prerogative as far as they wished, rightly judging that this didn’t threaten the legal order, because the rulers were following the deepest foundation and purpose of law: the public good.

§166. The danger: good rulers set precedents bad rulers try to weaponize

In a way, these almost “godlike” princes might seem to support an argument for absolute monarchy—the argument that, just as God governs the universe, the best government would be a single ruler endowed with wisdom and goodness.

But that flattering idea hides a serious political danger. It explains a famous observation: the reigns of good princes have often been the most dangerous to the liberties of their people. Not because good princes attack liberty, but because their successors try to convert exceptional, public-spirited actions into permanent precedents. They treat what was done solely for the people’s benefit as though it created a standing right to do the same kinds of things for the people’s harm, whenever they feel like it.

That move—turning benevolent discretion into a general entitlement—has repeatedly sparked disputes and sometimes public unrest, until people regain their original right and make clear, by declaration or law, that what was done for the public good was never a prerogative to do public harm. No one in society can ever have a right to injure the people.

At the same time, it’s entirely reasonable that people won’t rush to fence in the prerogative of rulers who never cross the boundary of the public good. That’s the heart of the idea: prerogative is the power to do public good without a fixed rule.

§167. A concrete case: calling Parliament

Take one clear example in England: the king’s power to call Parliament—choosing the exact time, place, and duration of its sitting—is certainly a royal prerogative. But it’s a prerogative held in trust, meant to be used for the nation’s good, as circumstances require.

Why leave those details to the executive? Because it’s impossible to know in advance what location will be safest or most convenient, or what season will be best, in every future crisis. So the choice was placed with the executive as the option most likely to serve the public good and to support Parliament’s purpose.

§168. The hard question: who judges misuse of prerogative?

A classic question comes up here: Who gets to judge whether prerogative is used properly?

Between:

• an executive currently in power, claiming prerogative, and
• a legislature that can only meet when the executive summons it,

there is no earthly judge with authority over both. And the same is true if either the executive or the legislature—once they hold power—sets out to enslave or destroy the people. In those cases, there’s no higher court inside the system to appeal to.

So what remedy is left? The only remedy people have in such situations—like all situations where there is “no judge on earth”—is to appeal to heaven. That phrase means: when rulers attempt to use a power the people never granted (because no rational people can be presumed to consent to being ruled for their own ruin), they act without right. And when a whole people—or even a single person—is stripped of their right by a power that has no right, and there is no appeal available within human institutions, then they retain the liberty to make that ultimate appeal when they judge the cause important enough.

Even though the people may not be the judge in the technical constitutional sense—meaning they don’t have a standing superior authority within the government to issue an “effective sentence”—they still reserve, under a law older and higher than any human statute, the final decision that belongs to all humankind when no earthly appeal remains: to judge whether they have just cause to make that appeal.

And they cannot give up that judgment. No one can submit so completely to another as to give that person the freedom to destroy them. God and nature don’t allow a person to abandon self-preservation like that. Since a person can’t rightly take his own life, he also can’t hand another person the rightful power to take it.

Don’t misunderstand this as a recipe for constant chaos. This last-resort power doesn’t kick in over minor irritations. It operates only when the burden becomes so heavy that the majority feels it, grows tired of it, and sees a genuine necessity for change. Wise rulers don’t need to fear reaching that point—because the surest way to invite it is also the most dangerous mistake they can make.

CHAP. XV.

Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power, considered together.

§ 169. I’ve talked about parental, political, and despotic power separately before. But a lot of recent confusion about government, I think, comes from mashing these very different kinds of power into one. So it’s worth laying them side by side and looking at what each one is—and what it definitely isn’t.

§ 170. Parental (or paternal) power is simply the authority parents have over their children, and it exists for one reason: the child’s good. It lasts only until children can use reason—until they’ve reached the level of understanding where we can expect them to grasp the rules they’re supposed to live by, whether that’s the law of nature or the written laws of their country.

That built-in parental affection—call it nature, call it God’s design—makes the point clear: this isn’t meant to be harsh, arbitrary rule. It’s guidance. It’s education. It’s protection.

And even if parents sometimes misuse that role, there’s still no good argument that parental authority includes a right of life and death over a child. Parents don’t have that power over their children any more than they have it over anyone else.

Just as important: once the child becomes an adult, parental power doesn’t keep him permanently under his parents’ will. What adulthood leaves in place isn’t political subjection; it’s lifelong obligations of respect, honor, gratitude, help, and support toward both father and mother, because they gave him life and raised him.

So yes, parental power is “natural” in the sense that it arises from the parent-child relationship. But it does not reach the goals or legal authority of political government. In particular, a father’s power doesn’t extend to owning or controlling his grown child’s property. An adult’s property is his to dispose of.

§ 171. Political power is different in kind. In the state of nature, each person has certain powers: to protect what’s his, and to punish violations of the law of nature, using the best judgment he can, in ways that help preserve himself and—more broadly—humanity.

When people form a society, they hand that power over to the community, and then to the governors the community sets in place. They do this with an explicit or implicit trust: that political power will be used for the public good, especially for the protection of their property.

So the “same” power changes hands, but it doesn’t change purpose. If its end in the state of nature was preservation, then its end in the hands of a magistrate must still be preservation—specifically, preserving the members of that society in:

• life
• liberty
• possessions

That means political power cannot be absolute and arbitrary over people’s lives and fortunes. Those are the very things it is supposed to protect. Government does have the authority to make laws and attach penalties to them, but only to the extent that punishment serves the health and safety of the whole community—like removing a dangerously “infected” part that threatens everyone else. And even then, severity is justified only against those—and only those—who are so corrupt and harmful that they endanger the rest. Without that preservation-focused purpose, no harshness is legitimate.

Finally, political power has only one origin: agreement and consent—a compact among those who make up the community.

§ 172. Despotic power is the opposite of political power. It’s an absolute, arbitrary power one person holds over another—so absolute that it includes the power to take the other’s life whenever the ruler pleases.

Nature doesn’t grant this, because nature doesn’t mark some people as born with that kind of authority over others. And no contract can grant it either. Why? Because no one has an arbitrary right over his own life, so he can’t hand such a right to someone else.

Where does despotic power come from, then? From forfeiture. When an aggressor puts himself into a state of war with another person, he abandons reason—the common rule meant to govern human relations—and replaces it with force. He rejects the path of peace and uses violence to pursue unjust ends where he has no right. In doing that, he steps out of human society, making brute force his standard, like a dangerous animal. And so he becomes liable to be destroyed by the person he wronged, and by others who join in enforcing justice—just as people may destroy any wild or harmful creature with whom they can have neither safety nor cooperation.

This is why captives taken in a just and lawful war—and only those—fall under despotic power. Notice what follows: since this power doesn’t arise from agreement, it can’t be stabilized by agreement. It’s simply the state of war continuing.

Ask yourself: what kind of “contract” can you make with someone who isn’t master of his own life? What condition can he reliably perform if his life can be taken at any moment? But if you once allow the captive to be master of his own life again, then the master’s despotic, arbitrary power ends. A person who controls his own life also has a right to the means of preserving it.

So the moment a real compact enters—conditions agreed to and honored—slavery ends. The captor gives up absolute power to that extent, because he has chosen to leave the state of war and accept a relationship governed by terms rather than violence.

§ 173. Put cleanly, these three powers come from three different sources, and they aim at three different benefits:

• Nature gives parental power to parents, for the benefit of children during their minority, because children lack the ability and understanding to manage their property.
• Voluntary agreement gives political power to governors, for the benefit of the governed, to secure them in the possession and use of their property.
• Forfeiture gives despotic power to a master, for the master’s own benefit, over those who have been stripped of all property.

And to be clear about what “property” means here: it includes not only external goods, but also the property people have in their own persons.

§ 174. Once you keep the origins, limits, and purposes of these powers distinct, the picture snaps into focus. Parental power falls far short of the magistrate’s political authority, while despotic power goes far beyond it.

And here’s the key point: absolute dominion—wherever you try to place it—is not a form of civil society at all. It clashes with civil society as directly as slavery clashes with property.

Each power fits a different condition:

• Parental power applies where a child’s minority makes him incapable of managing his property.
• Political power applies where people have property in their own disposal.
• Despotic power applies over those who have no property at all.

CHAP. XVI.

Of CONQUEST.

§ 175. Governments don’t start just anywhere. In the beginning, they arise the way I described earlier: people agree to live under shared rules, and they authorize a political system by consent. But history is loud. Ambition, chaos, and war take up so much space in the human story that this quiet requirement—consent—often gets ignored. That’s why many people have mistaken the force of arms for the agreement of the people, and they’ve treated conquest as if it were one of the legitimate “origins” of government.

It isn’t. Conquest no more creates a government than smashing a house counts as building a new one. Yes, conquest can clear the ground by destroying an old political order. But without the people’s consent, it can’t legitimately put a new one in its place.

§ 176. Start with the obvious case: an aggressor launches an unjust war, invades someone else’s rights, and wins. Does victory magically turn wrongdoing into political authority?

No—unless you also think robbers and pirates earn a right to rule anyone they’re strong enough to overpower. Or that promises count as binding when someone extracts them at knifepoint.

Imagine a burglar breaks into my home, presses a dagger to my throat, and makes me sign papers transferring my property to him. Did those signatures give him a real title to my estate? Of course not. An unjust conqueror has exactly that kind of “title,” just written in steel instead of ink.

And the moral math doesn’t change because the attacker wears a crown. The crime is the same whether it’s done by a king or a thug. If anything, power and numbers make the offense worse, not better. The only real difference is that big robbers often get away with it: they punish small criminals to keep order among their own, while they themselves collect parades, medals, and “triumphs” because no court on earth is strong enough to hold them accountable.

So what can I do against the robber who invaded my house? In a functioning society, I appeal to the law. But maybe the courts refuse me justice. Maybe I’m injured, powerless, or too poor to pursue it. If every practical path is cut off, all that’s left is endurance—for now.

Still, my son, once he’s able, can try again. And if he can’t, his son might. The claim can be renewed until the right is restored.

The conquered, and their children, are in a harsher position. They often have no human court, no neutral judge on earth to hear them. In that case, the only appeal left is the one Jephtha spoke of—an appeal “to heaven”—and they may repeat that appeal until they recover what was originally theirs: the right to live under a legislature that the majority approves and willingly accepts.

If someone objects, “That would mean endless upheaval,” the answer is simple: it would mean no more trouble than justice always creates when it’s available to everyone. In normal courts, the person who drags a neighbor into litigation without cause gets punished for it. Likewise, anyone who “appeals to heaven” had better be sure:

• they truly have right on their side, and
• the right is worth the cost and gravity of that appeal,

because the tribunal they’re appealing to can’t be fooled, and it repays people according to the harm they’ve done to others—that is, to any part of humankind.

So the conclusion stands: a person who conquers by an unjust war gains no title to the obedience of the conquered.

§ 177. Now suppose the opposite. Suppose the victorious side is actually the side with justice. What power does a conqueror gain in a lawful war, and over whom?

First: conquest gives him no power over those who fought alongside him. Your allies don’t become your slaves because you all won. At minimum, they remain as free as they were before. And in reality they typically fight on terms—expecting a share of the spoils, some advantage, or even grants of land in the subdued territory.

A conquering people shouldn’t have to wear victory wreaths as proof they’ve become sacrifices to a leader’s “triumph.”

The theorists who claim that absolute monarchy is founded on “the right of the sword” treat their celebrated founders like cartoon tyrants who somehow conquered alone—as if they had no officers, no soldiers, no partners in victory, no fellow claimants in what was taken.

Some people say the English monarchy rests on the Norman Conquest, and that later princes therefore inherit a right to absolute dominion. Even if we pretended this were historically accurate (and the historical record points otherwise), and even if William had been justified in waging war here, his “conquest-right” could extend only over the Saxons and Britons who were then living here. The Normans who came with him—and everyone descended from them—aren’t subjects by conquest. They are free people, whatever dominion conquest is supposed to create.

And if I (or anyone) claims freedom by descent from them, it’s hard to see how you’d prove the opposite. The law itself draws no line between “Norman” and “Saxon” in our liberties and privileges. That’s a strong sign it never meant such a difference to exist.

§ 178. Next, suppose something that rarely happens: the conquerors and the conquered never merge into one people under the same laws and shared freedoms. What power does a lawful conqueror then have over the defeated?

In that case, his power over them is purely despotic—but only in a very specific sense. He has absolute power over the lives of those who, by unjustly warring against him, have forfeited their lives. But he does not have that kind of power over:

• people who didn’t take part in the war, or
• the property of those who did take part (simply because they fought).

§ 179. To put it more sharply: the conqueror’s power reaches only those who actually helped, supported, or consented to the unjust force used against him.

Why? Because a people never gave their governors the authority to do what is unjust—like start an unjust war. They couldn’t have granted that power, because they never legitimately had it themselves. So the population shouldn’t be treated as guilty of an unjust war any further than they personally participated in it. That’s no different from this: if rulers oppress their own people, the victims aren’t guilty of the oppression just because it was done “in their name.” The rulers were empowered to govern, not to commit injustice.

Conquerors, of course, rarely bother with these distinctions. War is messy, and victors often let that mess sweep everyone into one heap. But the confusion of war doesn’t change what’s right. If the conqueror’s power over life exists only because some people used force to commit or uphold injustice, then that power can extend only to those who took part in that force. Everyone else is innocent. And he has no more rightful claim over the peaceful inhabitants of that country than he has over any other people who never harmed him and lived on fair terms with him.

§ 180. Third point: even in a just war, the power a conqueror gains over the offenders is completely despotic with respect to their lives—because by entering a state of war, they have forfeited them. But he does not gain a right to their possessions just because he defeated them.

That probably sounds bizarre at first, because it clashes with how the world usually talks. We casually say, “He conquered the country,” as if that sentence alone transfers ownership. But the widespread practice of the strong isn’t the same thing as moral right. And part of what it means to be conquered is that you’re rarely in a position to argue about the terms the victor forces on you.

§ 181. Here’s the underlying logic. War usually involves both violence and damage. An aggressor almost always harms property when he attacks people. Still, what actually puts someone into a state of war is the unjust use of force.

That can happen in two main ways:

• He starts the injury by force.
• Or he injures you quietly—by fraud or stealth—and then refuses to repair the harm, and uses force to hold onto what he took. In effect, that’s the same as doing it by force from the beginning.

This matters because we’re talking about a situation with no common judge on earth—no shared court that both sides must obey. In that setting, unjust force is what triggers the state of war. And the person who chooses force over reason forfeits his life: he abandons the rule of reason that governs human relations and acts like a beast. That makes him liable to be destroyed by the person he attacks, just as you may destroy a dangerous, predatory animal threatening your existence.

§ 182. But a father’s wrongdoing isn’t his children’s guilt. Children can be reasonable and peaceful even if their father was brutal and unjust. So by his violence, the father can forfeit only his own life; he cannot drag his children into his guilt or destruction.

And his goods—which, by nature’s aim to preserve humankind as far as possible, belong to his children so they don’t starve—still belong to them. If the children didn’t join the war (because they were infants, absent, or simply refused), they did nothing to forfeit their share. The conqueror therefore has no right to take it from them merely because he defeated the father who tried to destroy him.

Now, the conqueror may have a right to some of the father’s goods as reparation for the damage the war caused and for the cost of defending his own rights. How far that claim can reach is something we can measure—but the key point is this:

Even if conquest gives the victor power over a person’s life, it does not automatically give him a right to that person’s estate.

Why not? Because the right to kill in self-defense comes from the aggressor’s brutal force—treating him as a dangerous creature. But the right to someone’s goods comes only from actual damages suffered.

Think of a highway attacker. I may be justified in killing a thief who assaults me on the road. But I may not then take his money and let him go. That would make me the robber. His violence put him in a state where he forfeited his life; it did not give me title to his property.

So the right of conquest extends only to the lives of those who joined in the war—not to their estates, except as needed to repay damages and the costs of war, and even then with the rights of innocent wives and children kept intact.

§ 183. Even if we give the conqueror the strongest possible case—assume he’s entirely in the right—he still can’t seize more than the defeated person could legitimately forfeit.

The defeated aggressor’s life lies at the victor’s mercy. And the victor may take service or goods to make himself whole. But he cannot take what belongs to the aggressor’s wife and children, because they already have a claim to the estate.

Here’s a concrete example. In the state of nature (and every commonwealth stands in the state of nature with respect to other commonwealths), I wrong another person. I refuse to make it right, and we fall into a state of war. By defending with force what I unjustly took, I become the aggressor. I’m conquered.

My life, as forfeited, is at the victor’s mercy. But my wife’s life and my children’s lives are not. They didn’t make the war or aid it, and I had no right to “forfeit” them. My wife also has a share in my estate—whether because of her labor, agreement, or law—and I can’t lose what isn’t mine to lose. My children, simply by being my children, have a right to be supported out of my work or property.

So what happens when claims collide?

• The conqueror has a right to reparation for his losses.
• The children have a right to their father’s estate for survival.

If there isn’t enough to fully satisfy both—if paying the conqueror in full would leave the children to starve—then the basic law of nature kicks in: preserve life as far as possible. That means the person who has enough and more must accept less than complete satisfaction and yield to the urgent, higher-priority claim of those who would otherwise perish.

§ 184. But even if we imagine the harshest scenario—every penny of war damage must be paid, and the children are stripped of everything and left to starve—it still wouldn’t follow that the conqueror gains a legitimate title to the country he conquered.

Why? Because war damages almost never add up to the value of a substantial tract of land in a fully settled region where all land is already owned and none lies unused. If I’m conquered, I couldn’t have carried off the conqueror’s land; that’s not realistically possible. And the other harm I might have done—destroying crops, burning buildings—rarely equals the value of the land I possess, especially if our lands are similarly cultivated and comparable in size.

In most wars, the worst “spoil” is the destruction of a year or two of production. It rarely reaches four or five years.

As for money and treasure, those aren’t “nature’s goods” at all. Their value is largely a human invention. Nature doesn’t stamp coins with worth. By nature’s standard, European silver once meant no more than American wampum might mean to a European prince—or European coin would have meant to an earlier American society that didn’t use it.

And in a fully settled country, even five years of agricultural output isn’t worth the permanent inheritance of land. Remove the imaginary, inflated value we assign to money, and the imbalance is enormous—more like five compared to five hundred.

Now contrast that with places where there’s more land than people can use, where there’s still “waste” land available. There, half a year’s product might matter more than the title to a particular plot, because someone pushed off one parcel can often take up another. In such cases, conquerors often don’t even bother to seize the vanquished’s land.

So, in general, no damage that people in the state of nature (as rulers and states stand toward each other) inflict on one another can give a conqueror the right to dispossess the defeated person’s descendants forever and strip them of the inheritance that should pass down through generations.

The conqueror will, of course, feel like the master. And the conquered often can’t effectively dispute him—that’s what it means to be subdued. But if bare inability to resist were enough to create right, then “right” would just mean strength, and whoever is strongest could claim whatever he wants.

§ 185. So even after a just war, the conqueror gains no rightful dominion over:

• the people who fought on his side,
• the people in the subdued country who didn’t oppose him, and
• even the descendants of those who did oppose him.

They remain free from subjection to him. And if their former government has been dissolved, they are free to form a new one for themselves.

§ 186. In real life, conquerors often do the obvious thing: they use their power to force submission—figuratively, and sometimes literally, with a sword at the chest. They impose whatever government they feel like “granting” the defeated.

But the real question is: what right do they have to do that?

If someone answers, “The conquered consent,” then that answer concedes the main point: consent is necessary for legitimate rule. So we have to ask whether promises made under coercion count as consent, and whether they bind.

They don’t bind at all. Anything someone takes from me by force remains mine by right, and he is obligated to return it immediately. If someone steals my horse, he ought to give it back at once, and I still have the right to reclaim it. By the same logic, if someone forces a promise out of me, he ought to release me from it—meaning I may treat myself as free of that obligation and choose whether I will perform it. The law of nature can obligate me only through its own rules; it can’t obligate me through the violation of those rules. And forcing consent by violence is exactly that.

Saying “But I promised” doesn’t change the situation. A promise made under coercion doesn’t suddenly make the coercion legitimate—any more than you “freely” hand over your wallet to a mugger because you physically pull it out yourself while a gun is pointed at your chest.

§187. Conquest doesn’t automatically create legitimate government.
If a conqueror forces a government onto people he had no right to wage war against—or onto people who didn’t join the war even if he did have a right—then that imposed government carries no moral obligation for them. Force can make you comply, but it can’t make you owe obedience.

§188–189. Even in the harshest case, conquest doesn’t bind the next generation.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that every man in the conquered community counts as part of the unjust war, so that their lives are at the conqueror’s mercy. Even then, this doesn’t touch their children while they’re minors. A father doesn’t have the authority to give away—or forfeit—his child’s life or liberty, so nothing he does can legitimately strip it away. The conqueror’s absolute power, whatever it is, reaches only the adults who actually fought and were subdued, and it ends with them. If the conqueror treats those men like slaves under arbitrary rule, that still doesn’t grant him any rightful control over their children.

The conqueror can gain authority over the children (and over anyone else outside the group actually liable for the war) only by consent—not by whatever words fear squeezes out of them. As long as submission is driven by force rather than choice, it isn’t lawful authority.

§190. Everyone is born with two core rights.
Every person enters the world with a double claim:

• A right to personal freedom: your body and liberty belong to you, and no one else has rightful power over them.
• A right to inheritance: before strangers do, you and your siblings have the first claim to inherit your father’s property.

§191. If you reject the government, you also give up its legal benefits.
Because of that first right, a person is naturally free from being bound to a government just because they were born under its jurisdiction. However, if someone rejects the lawful government of the country they were born into, they can’t keep the special legal advantages that government grants—especially rights to property and inheritances that exist because of that country’s laws, assuming that government was originally formed by the people’s consent.

§192. But conquest can’t erase a people’s claim to their land—or justify permanent rule without consent.
By the second right, the descendants of people who were conquered and had a government forced on them without consent still have a rightful claim to their ancestors’ estates—even if they don’t freely consent to the government that was imposed on the original owners. Why? Because the first conqueror never had a legitimate title to the land in the first place. So the descendants of those who were compelled into political submission always retain the right to throw off that forced “yoke” and free themselves from what is, in effect, usurpation or tyranny introduced by the sword—until their rulers place them under a system of government that they accept willingly and by choice.

Who seriously doubts that Greek Christians—descendants of earlier inhabitants—could justly shake off the Turkish rule they’ve suffered under for so long, the moment they have a real chance? A government can’t claim a right to a people’s obedience unless those people have freely consented to it. And you can’t plausibly call consent “free” until at least one of these conditions is true:

• they’re genuinely at liberty to choose their government and governors, or
• they live under stable laws that they (or their representatives) have freely approved, and
• they enjoy their due property—meaning they truly own what they have, and no one can take any part of it without their consent.

Without those conditions, people aren’t living as free citizens. They’re living as slaves under the lingering force of war.

§193–194. Even if conquest could touch property (it can’t), it still wouldn’t create absolute power.
Even if we grant—though we shouldn’t—that a conqueror in a just war has a rightful claim to the conquered people’s estates as well as power over their persons, it still wouldn’t follow that his government becomes absolute. The descendants of the conquered are free by nature, and if the conqueror allows them to hold estates and possessions in his realm (without which the land would be nearly worthless), then whatever he grants becomes their property. And property, by definition, can’t be taken away without the owner’s consent.

Their persons are free by birthright. Their goods—large or small—are theirs to control, not his. Otherwise, the word “property” has no meaning.

Think about it. Suppose the conqueror grants one person a thousand acres “to him and his heirs forever.” Suppose he grants another person a thousand acres for life, on a fixed rent—say 50 pounds or 500 pounds a year. Doesn’t the first have a rightful claim to that land forever, and the second for the duration of his life as long as he pays the rent? And doesn’t the life tenant own whatever profit he earns beyond the rent through his labor—say he produces twice the rent’s value?

Now ask the obvious question: after making such grants, can the king or conqueror, simply by “right of conquest,” seize the land from the first man’s heirs, or from the second man during his lifetime even while rent is paid? Can he confiscate the money or goods either of them earned from the land whenever he feels like it?

If the answer were yes, then all voluntary contracts everywhere collapse. You wouldn’t need courts or arguments to dissolve a contract—just enough brute power. In that world, every grant, promise, or oath made by someone in authority is a joke: empty theater that can be revoked the next day. And nothing is more absurd than saying, “I give this to you and yours forever, with the strongest legal form we can invent,” while quietly meaning, “I still reserve the right to take it back tomorrow if I want.”

§195. No one is above the higher law that makes promises binding.
I won’t argue here about whether princes are exempt from the laws of their own countries. But I am sure of this: they are not exempt from the laws of God and nature. No person and no power can release them from the obligations of that eternal law.

Those obligations—especially around promises—are so serious that even omnipotence, so to speak, is depicted as bound by them. Grants, promises, and oaths are described as bonds that even the Almighty keeps. Whatever flatterers tell rulers, kings and their peoples together are, compared to God, like a drop in a bucket or a speck of dust on a scale: basically nothing.

§196. The bottom line on conquest.
Here’s the core point. If a conqueror truly has a just cause, he gains a despotic right only over the persons of those who actually helped and took part in the war against him. He also has a right to recover his damages and costs from their labor and estates—so long as he doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights.

But over everyone else—people who didn’t consent to the war, the children of the captives, and the property of any of these—he has no rightful power at all. And because he has no rightful power, he can’t, by conquest, gain a lawful title to rule them, nor pass such a title down to his descendants. If he reaches for their property anyway, he acts as an aggressor. He puts himself in a state of war against them.

In that case, neither he nor his successors have any better claim to rule than foreign invaders would have had here in England—or than a rebel slave like Spartacus would have had if he’d conquered Italy. Their “right” amounts to this: the people will throw off the yoke as soon as they have the courage and the opportunity.

That’s also why, whatever “title by the sword” the kings of Assyria claimed over Judah, God aided Hezekiah in breaking free from that empire’s rule. Scripture even praises him for refusing to serve the Assyrian king. So it’s clear that shaking off a power established by force rather than right—even if people label it “rebellion”—is not an offense before God. It’s something God permits and supports, even when promises or covenants were made under coercion.

And it’s entirely plausible, if you read the story of Ahaz and Hezekiah closely, that the Assyrians first subdued Ahaz, removed him, and installed Hezekiah as king while his father was still alive—and that Hezekiah, by agreement, had paid homage and tribute throughout that period.

CHAP. XVII.

Of USURPATION.

Usurpation is what conquest looks like at home.

You can think of conquest as a kind of foreign usurpation: someone from outside forces their way into power. Usurpation, by contrast, is a domestic takeover—one person seizes authority that already belongs, by right, to someone else. And that “by right” part matters, because if the power wasn’t someone else’s rightful possession, then it isn’t usurpation in the first place.

There’s a crucial limit here. Usurpation, strictly speaking, swaps the person, not the system. The government’s structure and rules stay the same; the only change is who’s sitting in the seat of power. But if the usurper goes further—if they claim or use powers beyond what the lawful ruler or magistrate was entitled to—then something else has been added. That extra overreach is tyranny piled on top of usurpation.

Why lawful governments need clear rules for succession

In any legitimate government, deciding who gets to govern isn’t some optional detail—it’s as essential as the form of the government itself. Both come from the people’s original settlement.

Because think about what “order” requires. You don’t really avoid chaos just by picking a label like “monarchy” if you never settle the method for naming the monarch. That’s basically the same as having no government at all: you’ve agreed on a shape, but left the most explosive question unanswered—who has the authority?

So every commonwealth that has established a form of government also establishes rules for appointing public officials and for passing authority on—clear, settled procedures for transferring the right to govern.

From this it follows: anyone who takes up public power by a route other than what the community’s laws authorize has no right to be obeyed, even if the outward form of the government still stands. The reason is simple:

• The law didn’t appoint them.
• Therefore the people didn’t consent to them.
• Therefore their claim to authority has no legitimate foundation.

And neither the usurper nor anyone who inherits power through them can ever gain a true title to rule until a real act of consent happens. The people must be free to choose—and then must actually choose—to accept, authorize, and confirm in that person the power they had previously seized.

CHAP. XVIII.

Of TYRANNY.

§ 199. Usurpation happens when someone uses power that actually belongs to someone else. Tyranny is different—and worse. Tyranny is when a person uses power beyond any rightful limit, because nobody can legitimately claim a right to harm others outside the law.

In plain terms: tyranny is what you get when a ruler uses the authority they hold for themselves, not for the people who live under it. A government turns tyrannical when the ruler stops treating the law as the rule and starts treating their own will as the rule—when their decisions aim not at protecting the people’s lives, liberty, and property, but at feeding personal drives like ambition, revenge, greed, or any other reckless passion.

§ 200. If that sounds like a biased complaint from “just a subject,” fine—listen to a king. King James I told Parliament in 1603 that a lawful king differs from a tyrant in one core way: the tyrant imagines the country and its people exist to satisfy his desires, while the just king understands he exists to secure the people’s welfare and property. In other words, the public good is the purpose of legitimate rule; personal appetite is the hallmark of tyranny.

James said something even sharper in 1609. A king, he argued, is bound—twice over—to keep the kingdom’s fundamental laws: implicitly, by the very fact of being king (because he’s supposed to protect both the people and the laws), and explicitly, by the oath he takes at coronation. That legal and moral pact is supposed to be as steady as the regular rhythms of nature—seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, day and night. And from that, James draws a blunt conclusion: the moment a king stops governing by law, he stops being a king in the proper sense and slides into tyranny.

He adds that any king who isn’t a tyrant—or a perjurer—will be glad to stay inside the boundaries of the law, and anyone encouraging him to break out of those limits is poison to both ruler and country. So even this “learned king” boils the difference down to one simple contrast:

• A lawful ruler treats the law as the limit of power and the public good as the goal.
• A tyrant forces everything to yield to personal will and appetite.

§ 201. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a monarchy-only problem. Any form of government can rot into tyranny. Whenever power is placed in hands to govern people and protect their property, but then gets redirected toward other ends—to impoverish, harass, or subdue people under arbitrary commands—tyranny has arrived, whether it’s carried out by one person or many. History gives plenty of examples: Athens had the “Thirty Tyrants,” Syracuse had a single tyrant, and Rome’s Decemviri ruled with an oppression that was tyranny in everything but name.

§ 202. Here’s a crisp rule: where the law ends, tyranny begins—especially when the law is crossed in a way that harms someone else. When a person in authority goes beyond the power the law grants and uses the force under their command to do what the law does not allow, they stop acting as a legitimate officer in that act. They’re no longer functioning as a magistrate; they’re acting as a private person using force against another’s rights—and they can be resisted the same way you’d resist any other attacker.

Everyone already accepts this with lower officials. An officer may have legal authority to seize me in the street, but if he tries to smash into my house to execute that warrant, I can treat him like a burglar. Even if I know he has a real warrant, the law doesn’t give him the right to break my door to carry it out. So why wouldn’t the same logic apply to the highest official as well as the lowest?

It’s no more reasonable to say, “He’s powerful, so he gets extra rights to violate others,” than it would be to say:

• the oldest brother, because he inherited more, may steal his younger brothers’ shares, or
• a wealthy landowner, because he owns a whole region, may grab his neighbor’s small garden whenever he wants.

Having great power and wealth doesn’t excuse oppression—it makes it worse. Overstepping legal authority isn’t any more justified in a king than in a constable; it’s simply more blameworthy in the king, because he has been trusted with more, already enjoys more than most, and—given education, office, and advisers—is expected to understand right and wrong better, not worse.

§ 203. But doesn’t that open the door to chaos? If people may oppose a prince’s commands, won’t everyone resist whenever they feel wronged—even on a whim? Wouldn’t that knock the pins out of every government and leave us with nothing but disorder?

§ 204. The answer is no, because force is only rightly met with force when the force used against you is unjust and unlawful. If you resist in any other case, you deserve condemnation—from human law and from moral law. So the nightmare scenario people like to warn about doesn’t follow from the principle itself.

§ 205. First: In some countries the law treats the prince’s person as legally untouchable—“sacred,” in the sense that you can’t bring violence or legal punishment against him personally. Even there, you can still resist illegal acts carried out by his agents and officers. And if a prince goes so far as to put himself in open conflict with his people—turning governance into war—he effectively dissolves the government and pushes society back toward the self-defense rights people have in a state of nature. At that point, nobody can predict where things will end; a nearby kingdom has already shown the world a strange example of how far this can go.

Still, when the government is functioning, protecting the ruler’s person can be a wise design. The personal harm a ruler can do with his own hands is usually limited and rare. He can’t, by sheer physical strength alone, topple the laws or crush the whole public. And even if an impulsive or badly tempered prince occasionally causes private injuries, that cost can be outweighed by the broader benefit: public peace and institutional stability, created by keeping the chief magistrate out of immediate danger. It’s safer for the whole body politic if a few private individuals sometimes face risk than if the “head” of the republic can be attacked easily and on flimsy pretexts.

§ 206. Second: That special protection—when it exists—belongs to the king’s person, not to every act done in his name. People may still challenge, oppose, and resist those who use unjust force while pretending they’re covered by royal authority—when the law doesn’t actually authorize what they’re doing.

The warrant example makes this obvious. An officer may hold the king’s writ to arrest someone, which is genuine authority. Even so, the officer still cannot:

• break into a house to make the arrest,
• carry it out on certain prohibited days, or
• execute it in certain prohibited places,

even if the writ itself doesn’t list those exceptions. Those limits come from the law. If an officer crosses them, “the king told me to” doesn’t excuse him. Why? Because the king’s authority exists only through the law; therefore he can’t authorize someone to act against the law. A command that reaches beyond lawful authority is as void as the command of a private person. The difference is that a magistrate has some authority for certain purposes, while a private person has none—but in both cases, where there’s no authority, there’s no right to act. And resisting unlawful officers doesn’t endanger the king’s person or the government’s rightful authority, which remain protected.

§ 207. Third: Suppose you’re in a system where the chief magistrate’s person isn’t treated as untouchable. Even then, the principle still doesn’t mean the ruler is endangered “at every slight occasion,” or that the government is doomed to constant turmoil. Here’s the key: if the injured person can be helped and compensated by appeal to the law, then there’s no justification for using force. Force is only appropriate when someone is blocked from appealing to the law at all.

In other words, the force that counts as “hostile” is the kind that leaves you no legal remedy—no time, no access, no practical way to seek protection. That kind of force puts the aggressor in a state of war with you, and that’s what makes resistance lawful.

Locke’s examples are vivid. If a robber points a sword at me on the highway and demands my purse, I may lawfully kill him—even if I have almost nothing on me—because the threat is to my life, and there’s no time to run to a court for protection. If I wait, the loss could be irreversible. The law can’t bring my life back once I’m dead.

But consider a second case: I hand someone a large sum—say one hundred pounds—to hold for a moment while I step aside, and when I return he refuses to give it back. If he then draws his sword to keep it by force, the financial harm might be far greater than the highway robbery. And yet I’m not automatically allowed to kill him. Why? Because my life isn’t under immediate threat, so I still have the option to appeal to the law and recover damages. The difference isn’t the size of the loss. The difference is whether the attacker’s force makes lawful remedy impossible.

§ 208. Fourth: Even when a magistrate commits unlawful acts, and then uses power to keep them in place—and even blocks the legal remedy that should correct them—this right of resistance still won’t instantly shake the whole system over minor disputes. If the injustice reaches only a few private people, those individuals may have the right to defend themselves and to reclaim by force what unlawful force has taken. But having the right and choosing to exercise it are different. A handful of oppressed people won’t usually launch a fight they’re certain to lose, especially when the rest of society doesn’t see itself as implicated. It’s as unrealistic to expect a few isolated victims to topple a stable government as it is to expect a raging madman or a reckless malcontent to overturn a well-settled state. The public is no more likely to rally behind the one than the other.

§ 209. Things change when the pattern is broader—or when a smaller set of abuses sets a precedent that looks like it could swallow everyone. If illegal acts spread to the majority, or if oppression hits only a few but in ways that clearly threaten the rest, people will start to believe—honestly and deeply—that their laws are in danger, and with them their property, liberty, and lives, and maybe even their religion. Once a whole people reaches that point, it’s hard to imagine what could stop them from resisting unlawful force.

Yes, that situation is a danger for every form of government. But notice who created it: governors who have made themselves widely suspected by their own people. That’s the most hazardous position rulers can put themselves in—and they deserve little sympathy for it, because it’s so easy to avoid. If a ruler genuinely aims at the public good and the preservation of both the people and their laws, it won’t be hidden. People will see it and feel it—just as children can’t miss whether their parent loves them and cares for them.

§ 210. And when people see one thing claimed and another thing done, suspicion becomes nearly unavoidable. If they watch rulers use technical tricks to dodge the law, and see prerogative—the discretionary power left to the prince for doing public good—used instead to harm the people, then the direction becomes clear. If they notice that ministers and lower magistrates are selected precisely because they’ll serve those harmful ends—and that officials are rewarded or sidelined depending on whether they advance or resist that agenda—the message gets louder.

Add more signals: repeated “tests” of arbitrary power; a religion quietly favored behind the scenes (even while publicly denounced) because it’s most likely to help introduce that arbitrary power; the people pushing that program protected as far as possible; and when they can’t be protected, still praised and treated as even more admirable. If a long chain of actions keeps pointing the same way, how can anyone stop themselves from concluding where the government is headed—or from thinking about self-preservation?

It’s like being on a ship and realizing the captain is taking you to Algiers. Even if crosswinds, leaks, and shortages occasionally force him to change course for a while, you still can’t help noticing what happens next: the moment the conditions ease, he returns, steadily, to the same destination.

CHAP. XIX.

Of the Dissolution of Government.

To talk clearly about the “dissolution of government,” we have to separate two different breakages that people often blur together:

• The dissolution of a society (the political community itself falls apart).
• The dissolution of a government (the community still exists, but its governing machinery collapses).

Those aren’t the same thing—and confusing them turns the whole discussion into mush.

Society Can Collapse First

A political society exists because individuals agree with one another to stop living as isolated, free-floating people and instead act as one public body—a commonwealth. That shared agreement is what turns a crowd into “a people.”

In practice, that union is usually destroyed in one main way: foreign conquest. When an outside force overwhelms the community so thoroughly that it can’t hold itself together as an independent whole, the bond that made them one society snaps. At that point, each person is pushed back into the position they were in before political union: free to look out for their own safety and to seek protection by joining some other society if they can.

And once the society is gone, the government can’t possibly remain. Conquest doesn’t just topple leaders; it often tears apart the relationships that made government meaningful in the first place—breaking the people into scattered, subdued groups no longer protected by, or dependent on, the society that should have defended them. Trying to keep a government alive after the society is shattered is like trying to keep a house standing after a tornado has flung its beams and bricks across the field, or an earthquake has dumped them into a heap.

Government Can Also Collapse From the Inside

Foreign invasion isn’t the only way governments end. They can dissolve from within.

1) When the Legislative Power Is Altered

A civil society is supposed to be a state of peace among its members. What keeps disagreements from turning into open conflict is the umpire the society creates: its legislative power, which sets rules and procedures for settling disputes.

That legislative authority is the community’s organizing center—its “soul,” if you like. It’s what gives the commonwealth one coherent will and keeps its parts connected. So when the legislative is broken or dissolved, the whole political body starts to die with it.

Here’s the key idea: the society’s union depends on having one public will—and once a majority establishes a legislature, that legislature is the recognized voice that declares and maintains that will.

The very first and most fundamental act of a society is to constitute a legislature: to set up a lawmaking authority, staffed by people authorized by public consent, so the community can continue as a unified body under known laws. Without that authorization, no individual—and no self-appointed group—has the right to make rules that bind everyone else.

So if someone starts making laws without being appointed by the people, those “laws” don’t carry legitimate authority. The people aren’t obligated to obey them. In that moment, the people are no longer under proper civil subjection and may establish a new legislature in whatever way seems best—because they remain free to resist those who would impose rules by sheer force rather than by rightful authorization.

In plain terms: when the rightful voice of the public is shut out and impostors take its place, each person is once again left to their own judgment about how to protect their freedom.

A Concrete Example: A Mixed Government

To see how this usually happens—and who is most likely to cause it—imagine a system where the legislature involves three parts:

1. A single hereditary ruler who holds the continuous supreme executive power and can summon or dissolve the other legislative bodies at set times.
2. A hereditary nobility assembled as a chamber.
3. Representatives elected by the people for a limited term.

In a system like that, the legislature can be “altered” in several recognizable ways.

A) When the Ruler Replaces Law With Personal Will

If the ruler substitutes their arbitrary will for the laws—laws that are supposed to express the society’s will through the legislature—then the legislature has effectively been changed. Why? Because, in practice, the “real legislature” is the one whose rules actually get enforced.

So when someone introduces new rules that weren’t authorized by the society’s foundational arrangement, or undermines old laws in a way that denies the authority that made them, that person isn’t just breaking laws—they’re setting up a new legislative power.

B) When the Ruler Blocks the Legislature From Meeting or Acting Freely

It’s not enough for a legislature to exist on paper. A legislature only functions if it can:

• meet at the proper times,
• debate freely,
• and have enough room to shape decisions aimed at the public good.

If the ruler prevents assembly, or strips away genuine deliberation, or rushes and constrains the process so the body can’t do what it was created to do, then the legislature has been altered. Governments aren’t defined by titles and names; they’re defined by whether the powers attached to those names are actually exercised.

So anyone who removes the legislature’s freedom or blocks it from acting in season effectively abolishes the legislature—and that ends the government.

C) When Elections Are Manipulated Without Consent

If the ruler uses arbitrary power to alter who gets to vote, or how elections work, without the people’s consent and against their common interest, the legislature changes again. If the wrong people choose representatives—or the right people are forced to choose in an unauthorized way—then those “representatives” aren’t the legislature the society appointed.

D) When the People Are Handed Over to Foreign Rule

If either the ruler or the legislature delivers the people into subjection to a foreign power, that’s certainly a change of the legislature and therefore a dissolution of government. The whole point of entering society was to remain one free, independent community, governed by its own laws. That goal is destroyed the moment the people are surrendered to someone else’s rule.

Why the Blame Often Falls on the Executive

In a constitution like the one described, it’s usually clear why the executive—the prince—gets the blame when the government dissolves in these ways.

The executive typically controls the real tools of power:

• force (military and police),
• money,
• public offices and appointments.

And executives are often tempted to believe—especially when courtiers flatter them—that as “supreme magistrate” they can’t be checked. That puts them in the best position to push through major constitutional changes while claiming it’s all “lawful,” and to intimidate opponents as if they were merely seditious troublemakers.

By contrast, if the other parts of the legislature or the people try to alter the legislature on their own, they usually can’t do it quietly. It tends to look like open rebellion—highly visible, easy to denounce, and, if it succeeds, not much different in its effects from foreign conquest.

There’s also a structural reason: in this kind of government, the executive can dissolve the other legislative bodies and reduce them to private persons. And since the executive’s consent is required to give legal force to legislative acts, those other bodies can’t legally reshape the legislature against the executive’s will.

Still, whenever other parts of the legislature play along—by actively helping, or by failing to oppose what they could have opposed—they share guilt in the attempt. Undermining the constitutional foundation of a community is among the gravest wrongs people can commit against one another.

Neglect Can Dissolve Government Too

There’s another route to dissolution: when the person holding supreme executive power abandons the job so completely that the laws can’t be carried out.

That doesn’t merely create inefficiency. It produces anarchy.

Laws aren’t written for decoration. Their whole purpose is to bind society together through enforcement—to keep each part of the political body doing its proper work. When execution collapses entirely, government visibly ends and the people become a disorganized crowd with no stable order or connection.

If there’s no administration of justice to secure rights, and no remaining authority able to direct public force or provide for public necessities, then there is no government left. When laws can’t be enforced, it’s exactly as if no laws existed. And a “government without laws” is a contradiction—something politics can’t make sense of and human society can’t live with.

What Happens After Dissolution

In these kinds of cases, once the government is dissolved, the people are free to protect themselves by establishing a new legislature—changing the persons, the form, or both—whatever best serves their safety and good.

The society doesn’t lose its basic right of self-preservation just because someone else betrayed their trust. The community’s original right remains: to secure itself through a settled legislature and the fair, impartial execution of the laws.

And we shouldn’t pretend that people only get this remedy when it’s already impossible to use. Telling a people, “You may set up a new legislature,” but only after they’ve been crushed by oppression, trickery, or foreign domination, is like telling them, “You can get help once the disaster is beyond repair.” It’s like telling them to become slaves first, and then take care of their freedom—like waiting until the chains are locked and then saying, “Now act like free people.”

That’s not relief; it’s mockery. People can’t be secure against tyranny if the only escape hatch appears after tyranny is complete. So they have not only the right to get out of tyranny—they have the right to prevent it.

A Second Internal Cause: Betrayal of Trust

There’s a second major way governments dissolve from within: when the legislature or the executive violates the trust placed in them.

When the Legislature Attacks Property

The legislature betrays its trust when it tries to invade the subject’s property—when it aims to make itself, or any faction within the community, the master and arbitrary disposer of the people’s lives, liberties, and fortunes.

Why is that such a fatal breach?

Because the whole reason people enter society is to preserve their property. And the reason they authorize a legislature is so there will be standing rules—legal “fences”—that protect everyone’s rights, limit power, and keep any person or part of society from dominating the rest.

It can’t plausibly be the society’s will to give the legislature power to destroy exactly what everyone joined society to secure. So when lawmakers try to take away or ruin people’s property, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people. At that point the people are released from further obedience and fall back on the common refuge against force and violence that is available to all.

So whenever the legislature breaks this fundamental rule—whether from ambition, fear, folly, or corruption—and tries to seize absolute power over lives, liberties, and estates (either for itself or for someone else), it forfeits the authority entrusted to it. That authority returns to the people, who may resume their original liberty and establish a new legislature in whatever form they judge best for their safety and security—the very purpose for which they formed a society in the first place.

The Same Logic Applies to the Executive

What’s true of the legislature is also true of the supreme executive, who holds a double trust: a share in legislation (in mixed governments) and the highest responsibility for executing the law.

The executive violates that trust when they try to make their personal will the law.

They also violate it when they use the community’s force, money, and offices to corrupt representatives and bend them to the executive’s plans—or when they rig the pipeline before voting even happens, by pressuring electors and steering them toward candidates already bought, threatened, or promised into compliance.

To “manage” elections this way—by controlling candidates, intimidating voters, and reshaping election procedures—isn’t just political hardball. It’s an attempt to rip the government out by the roots and poison the source of public safety.

The people reserved for themselves the right to choose representatives as a guard for their property. That only makes sense if representatives are:

• freely chosen, and
• able to deliberate freely after they’re chosen,
• guided by the needs of the commonwealth and the public good, as judged through careful debate.

A representative who commits their vote before hearing the arguments is incapable of doing that job.

So when an executive tries to pack the legislature with declared supporters of the executive’s will—treating them as the “true representatives” and the rightful lawmakers—that’s as clear a breach of trust, and as direct a sign of intent to subvert the government, as you can get.

Add to that visible rewards and punishments used to force compliance, plus legal tricks deployed to remove and destroy anyone who stands in the way, and the purpose becomes unmistakable. And the conclusion is straightforward: someone who has seriously attempted this can’t reasonably be trusted with public power any longer.

Objection: “Won’t This Make Government Unstable?”

Someone might object: “People are ignorant and always unhappy. If government rests on the shifting mood of the public, won’t it fall apart? Won’t people replace the legislature whenever they feel offended?”

The reality is the opposite. People don’t abandon long-standing political arrangements easily. They’re often hard to persuade even to fix obvious defects in the systems they’ve grown used to.

Even when everyone can see a chance to reform—whether the problem is built into the constitution from the start or has crept in over time through corruption—change is still slow and difficult. In fact, the history of political upheavals in this country shows how strongly people tend to return, after chaotic experiments, to the familiar structure of king, lords, and commons. Even when provocations were serious enough that some kings lost their crowns, the public rarely went so far as to move the crown to a different family line.

Objection: “This Theory Encourages Rebellion”

Another objection follows: “Doesn’t this view ferment rebellion?”

First: no more than any other view does. If people are made miserable and are exposed to the abuses of arbitrary power, then it hardly matters what stories you tell about their rulers. Call the rulers “sons of Jupiter.” Declare them sacred, divine, heaven-sent—whatever you like. If people are generally mistreated and denied their rights, they’ll look for a chance to relieve themselves of a burden they can’t bear. And because human affairs constantly shift—through accidents, weakness, and change—opportunities rarely stay away for long.

Anyone who has lived even a short time has seen examples. Anyone who has read even a little history can find examples across every kind of government.

Second: these upheavals don’t happen over every minor mistake. People will tolerate a lot—serious errors by those in charge, plenty of harmful and inconvenient laws, and the ordinary missteps that come with being human—without mutiny or murmur.

But when people live through a long run of abuses—constant stalling, bad faith, and political tricks—all aimed in the same direction, the pattern eventually becomes impossible to miss. They can feel the weight of what’s being done to them, and they can see where it’s headed. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone when they finally wake up, push back, and try to place power in hands that will actually protect the purpose government was created for in the first place.

Because if government stops doing that job, then old titles and nice-looking institutions don’t make things better—they make them worse. At least in a raw “state of nature,” the dangers are obvious and the exit is close. Under a broken government, the harms can be just as severe and just as immediate, but the cure is farther away and harder to reach.

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§ 226. Why this idea prevents rebellion, rather than causing it

Here’s the third point.

The claim that people have the power to secure their safety again by setting up a new legislature when the old one betrays its trust—especially by attacking their property—isn’t an invitation to rebellion. It’s one of the best safeguards against it.

Why? Because properly speaking, rebellion isn’t resistance to a person. It’s resistance to lawful authority—the authority that comes only from the constitution and the laws of a society. So the real rebels are the people—whoever they are—who use force to break through the legal order and then try to “justify” what they did with more force.

When people form a society and create a civil government, they do something crucial: they push force out and bring law in. They agree to settle disputes through rules so that:

• property is protected,
• peace is maintained,
• the community stays unified.

So anyone who reintroduces force against the law is doing exactly what rebellion means: they are dragging society back into a state of war—force without right. And the ones most likely to do this are usually the ones already in power, because they have:

• a ready-made claim to authority,
• the tools of violence close at hand,
• and a chorus of flatterers telling them they’re entitled to use it.

So the best way to prevent rebellion is to warn the people most tempted to commit it—those at the top—about how unjust and dangerous it is.

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§ 227. Changing the legislature is rebellion

In the two situations already discussed—when the legislature is replaced, or when legislators act against the purpose they were appointed for—the guilty party is guilty of rebellion.

If someone uses force to remove a society’s established legislature and the laws made under it, they destroy the “umpire” everyone agreed to use for peaceful decision-making. That legislature is the shared referee that keeps disputes from turning into violence. Take it away, and you remove the barrier holding back the state of war.

And notice what else happens: the power to decide for the community belongs to no one except by the appointment and consent of the people. So anyone who removes or alters the legislature without that consent:

• destroys the authority the people created,
• installs a power the people never authorized,
• and thereby creates a state of war—force without authority.

That’s what it means to “untie the knot” of society: it exposes the people again to open conflict, where nothing is settled by law, only by strength.

And if the person who forcibly removes the legislature is a rebel, then the lawmakers themselves can be rebels too—especially when they were entrusted to protect the people’s liberty and property, but instead use force to attack both. In that moment they stop acting as guardians and place themselves in a state of war against the very people who appointed them. That is rebellion in its most aggravated form.

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§ 228. “This will cause civil war” is not an argument against self-defense

Some critics say, “Fine—but telling people they’re released from obedience when rulers illegally attack their liberty or property will lead to civil wars and internal fighting. It’s bad for peace.”

But that argument proves too much. By the same logic, you’d have to say honest people shouldn’t resist robbers or pirates, because that might lead to bloodshed.

If violence erupts in these situations, blame belongs to the aggressor, not the person defending what’s theirs. A world where the innocent must quietly surrender everything “for peace” is not peace. It’s a system where violence and theft are protected, and only oppressors benefit.

Calling that an “admirable peace” would be like praising harmony between the powerful and the weak when the lamb calmly offers its throat to the wolf.

Or, to use a darker example: imagine the “peace” of Polyphemus’s cave, where Odysseus and his companions are expected to sit still and be eaten, because resisting might be “disorderly.” You can picture the tyrant’s apologists giving speeches about how important peace is, and warning of the “inconveniences” that might follow if the victims dare to fight back.

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§ 229. What’s government for, anyway?

Government exists for one reason: the good of humankind.

So which is better for humanity?

• that people should always be exposed to the unlimited will of tyranny, or
• that rulers should sometimes face resistance when they abuse power and use it to destroy—rather than protect—the property of the people?

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§ 230. “What if troublemakers use this as an excuse?”

Don’t worry that this principle means any restless person can justify an uprising whenever they feel like it.

Yes, some hotheaded, ambitious people will always try to stir things up. But unless the harm has become widespread, unless the rulers’ intentions have become plain, unless the attacks are felt by a large part of the public, those agitators will only succeed in ruining themselves. Most people are more inclined to endure than to revolt.

A few isolated injustices—one unlucky victim here, another there—usually don’t move the public. But when the majority becomes convinced, based on clear evidence, that their liberties are under an organized assault—and when the general direction of events makes suspicion unavoidable—then who is really at fault?

Who can blame people for thinking like rational beings, interpreting the world the way it actually appears to them and the way it actually hurts them?

If rulers create conditions that naturally produce fear and suspicion, they don’t get to complain that the public has become suspicious. The blame falls on those who put things into that posture while wishing people would pretend otherwise.

It’s true that private pride, ambition, and faction have sometimes wrecked societies. But which has more often started the disaster:

• the people’s “wantonness” and desire to throw off lawful authority, or
• rulers’ arrogance and their push to seize arbitrary power?

Let impartial history answer.

What I am sure of is this: whoever—ruler or subject—uses force to violate the rights of either side, and lays the groundwork for overturning the constitution of a just government, commits one of the greatest crimes a person can commit. They are responsible for the bloodshed, looting, and ruin that follow when governments are smashed apart. Such a person deserves to be seen as a common enemy of humankind—and treated as one.

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§ 231. Why officials don’t get a special exemption

Everyone agrees that if outsiders or private citizens attack a people’s property by force, they can be resisted with force.

What’s lately been denied is that the same can be true when magistrates do it—as if being granted legal privilege somehow gives you the right to break the very laws that elevated you.

In reality, an official’s wrongdoing is worse:

• they betray the trust others placed in them,
• and they repay lawful advantage with unlawful harm.

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§ 232. Force without law creates a state of war—even when it’s the king

Anyone who uses force without right—meaning, in a society, anyone who uses force without law—puts themselves into a state of war with the people they attack. And once you’re in that state, normal civic ties don’t bind the victim the same way. The right of self-preservation kicks in: people have the right to defend themselves and resist the aggressor.

This is so obvious that even Barclay—one of the strongest defenders of royal power and the “sacredness” of kings—admits that in some cases it’s lawful for the people to resist their king. And he admits it in a chapter where he’s trying to prove divine law forbids every form of rebellion.

That concession matters: if resistance is sometimes lawful, then not every act of resisting a prince counts as rebellion.

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§ 233. Barclay’s concession, in plain English

Suppose someone asks: So must people always offer their throats to tyranny? Must they watch their cities be looted and burned, their wives and children handed over to the tyrant’s cruelty and lust, their families pushed into ruin, hunger, and oppression—and still do nothing? Are human beings alone denied the natural right all other animals have: to meet force with force in self-preservation?

The answer is: self-defense is part of natural law, and it cannot be denied to a community, even against the king.

But revenge against the king must not be allowed, because that goes beyond defense and doesn’t fit that law.

So if a king doesn’t just persecute a few individuals, but turns himself against the commonwealth as a whole—against the body of the people, or a substantial part of them—with cruel and intolerable tyranny, then the people have the right to resist and defend themselves.

With two cautions:

• they may defend themselves, but should not attack their prince as an act of vengeance,
• they may repair damages, but should not, because of provocation, abandon the bounds of due respect.

They may repel the present assault, but they must not take revenge for past injuries. It’s natural to defend life and limb; it’s “against nature,” Barclay says, for an inferior to punish a superior.

Before the harm is done, the people may prevent it. After it’s done, they must not punish the king, even if he caused it.

This, Barclay concludes, is the community’s privilege over an individual’s: private persons, according to Barclay’s own side (with Buchanan as an exception), have no remedy but patience; but the people as a body may, with respect, resist intolerable tyranny—though they ought to endure it when it is “moderate.”

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§ 234. So even the monarchist grants resistance—up to a point

That’s as far as this major defender of monarchy is willing to go: he admits resistance is sometimes justified.

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§ 235. Why Barclay’s “limits” don’t actually work

Barclay tries to attach two limits to resistance, but they don’t hold up.

1. Resistance must be “reverent.”
2. Resistance must not involve punishment or payback, because “an inferior cannot punish a superior.”

Start with the first.

What does it even mean to resist force without striking back? Or to strike someone “reverently”? This is harder to make coherent than Barclay seems to realize.

If you try to defend yourself with nothing but a shield—absorbing blows in a “respectful posture,” without any way to reduce the attacker’s confidence or strength—you won’t be resisting for long. That sort of “defense” is a great way to invite worse treatment.

It’s an imaginary kind of resistance: like a fight where one side is forbidden to hit back. In practice it ends exactly the way you’d expect—bruised, broken, and begging to walk away with a few teeth left.

So if a person—or a people—has a right to resist, they must have a right to strike. And once striking is allowed, Barclay can try, if he wants, to combine a blow to the head or a cut to the face with “respect.” Anyone who can truly reconcile violence with reverence may also be the kind of person who would ask for a polite beating.

Now the second limit: “an inferior cannot punish a superior.”

That’s generally true while the relationship of superiority still holds. But once someone uses unlawful force, they create a state of war, and that state flattens the parties. It cancels the old relationship of deference, respect, and political superiority—because it cancels the conditions that made those relations possible.

And in that state, the key difference becomes this: the person resisting an unjust aggressor has the advantage of right. If they prevail, they have the right to punish the offender—not because they are “inferior” or “superior,” but because the offender broke the peace and caused the harms that followed.

In fact, Barclay is more consistent in another place, where he flatly denies that resisting a king is lawful in any case. But even there he admits two situations in which a king can, by his own actions, effectively unmake himself as king. He argues that the people have no power to rise against the king as long as he remains king—until he does something that, by law itself, makes him cease to be king. In that event, he strips himself of sovereignty and becomes, in effect, a private person, and the people recover the authority they held before the king was inaugurated.

He says there are two such cases. The first is when a king seriously sets out to destroy the kingdom itself, like the stories told of Nero and Caligula—men said to have plotted to devastate the senate, the people, even the city with sword and fire, and to treat the whole populace as disposable. When a king genuinely pursues such designs, Barclay says, he throws off the very care and purpose of ruling and therefore loses authority over his subjects, the way a master loses ownership of a servant he has abandoned.

What if people ever have the right, on their own authority, to protect themselves—up to and including taking up arms against a king who’s openly crushing them?

On the usual “absolute obedience” view, the answer is never—so long as he is still truly a king. “Honor the king,” and “whoever resists authority resists what God has established,” are treated as iron rules. Under that doctrine, the people can’t acquire power over the king.

But there’s a catch: the people can’t rule over a king—yet they can regain their original freedom if the ruler stops being a king in fact, because he has destroyed the very basis of his kingship. In that moment, he sheds the crown and status that made him something more than a private citizen. Power that had been placed in him returns to the people, the way it did in the gap before they crowned him in the first place.

That doesn’t happen over every mistake. After looking hard for edge cases, there are really only two kinds of behavior that make a king, by the act itself, “no king” and strip him of all rightful authority.

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1) When a king tries to destroy the government itself

The first is when the king sets out to overturn the government—not just to rule badly, but to ruin the kingdom and commonwealth as such.

Think of the stories told about Roman emperors:

• Nero, who was said to have planned to kill off the senate and people, burn Rome, and then move elsewhere.
• Caligula, who openly talked about no longer being a head to senate or people, fantasized about killing the best of both groups, and even wished the entire population had “one neck” so he could end them with a single blow.

A ruler who seriously entertains—and actively advances—plans like that isn’t governing anymore. He’s abandoning the public. And by abandoning the public, he forfeits the right to command it—much the way a master loses dominion over servants he has effectively thrown away and deserted.

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2) When a king hands his kingdom to someone else

The second case is when a king makes himself dependent on another power and submits his kingdom to a foreign dominion—a kingdom that his ancestors held, and that the people entrusted to him as a free community.

He might claim he means well. But the act itself destroys the core of what kingship is supposed to be: being supreme within the kingdom, immediately under God, not under some other ruler. Worse, he has betrayed the people’s liberty—something he was specifically obligated to guard.

By “selling off” or alienating the kingdom this way, he doesn’t successfully transfer the people’s rights to the new master. He simply loses his own authority and, by that very loss, sets the people free, leaving them to decide their own future. (One example of this, we’re told, appears in the Scottish annals.)

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Even absolutists end up conceding this

Here’s the revealing part: even Barclay—one of the major defenders of absolute monarchy—admits that in these situations a king may be resisted and, in effect, stops being king.

And his concession can be stated plainly:

• Wherever a ruler has no authority, there he is not king.
• Wherever authority ends, kingship ends too.
• And once he’s no king, he stands in the same position as any other person without authority—and may be resisted like any other aggressor.

Barclay’s “two cases” differ only slightly from the ones just described. What he leaves out is the principle that explains why they matter: breach of trust. The ruler has broken the trust by

• refusing to preserve the agreed form of government, and
• abandoning the purpose of government itself: the public good and the preservation of property.

Once a ruler has effectively dethroned himself and put himself in a state of war with his people, what could possibly prevent them from pursuing him as they would any other person who has made war on them? Barclay and his allies owe an answer.

Barclay also admits something else important: the people may stop the harm before it happens. In other words, resistance is allowed not only when tyranny is already underway, but when it’s clearly in the plan.

And what counts as evidence of such a plan? Barclay’s own words make it clear: a serious neglect of the public good can be taken as proof of the design—or at least as enough cause to resist.

His deeper reason is this: the king “betrayed or forced his people, whose liberty he ought carefully to have preserved.”

Notice what follows from that reasoning: it doesn’t matter whether the people are handed over to foreign rulers or enslaved by their own. The injury is the same—their liberty is taken—and so the right of defense is the same. History backs this up: what inflames people isn’t the passport of the person on the throne, but the change of government—the loss of their free political condition.

And if someone insists that authority is needed even where the logic is this obvious, there’s plenty of it. Bilson (a bishop and strong defender of princely power) acknowledges that princes can forfeit their authority and with it their claim to obedience. And one could also cite Bracton, Fortescue, the author of The Mirror, and others—writers who can’t reasonably be dismissed as ignorant of England’s constitution or hostile to it.

Hooker alone ought to satisfy anyone who leans on him for church polity—yet it’s oddly common for people to quote him in ecclesiastical matters while denying the very political principles he builds on. Whether they’re being used by craftier hands to tear down their own structure, they should consider. What’s certain is that this “new” civil doctrine—reducing all government to absolute tyranny—is so dangerous to rulers and people alike that earlier ages wouldn’t tolerate it being taught. One can hope future generations, freed from such oppressive taskmasters, will despise the memory of those servile flatterers who, when it suited them, tried to turn every government into tyranny and treat slavery as the natural destination of mankind.

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“Who gets to judge?”

At this point, a predictable question appears: Who decides whether a prince or legislature has acted against the trust placed in them?

Bad-faith agitators sometimes spread this question among the public when a prince is simply using legitimate prerogative. But the answer is straightforward:

The people are the judge.

Why? Because when someone appoints a trustee or deputy, the only person who can judge whether that agent has acted within the entrusted authority is the one who gave the trust—and who therefore must retain the power to remove the agent when he betrays it.

If that’s reasonable in private life, it’s even more reasonable in the highest-stakes case imaginable—where millions of lives are affected, where the damage (if not prevented) is far greater, and where fixing it later is difficult, costly, and dangerous.

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And if there’s no court on earth, the appeal is to heaven

The question “Who shall judge?” can’t mean “there is no judge at all.” When there is no earthly tribunal with authority to settle the dispute, God is judge.

God alone is judge of who is right. But each person must still judge for himself—as he does in other matters—whether another has put him into a state of war, and whether he should appeal to the Supreme Judge, as Jephthah did.

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When law is silent, the community is the natural umpire

If a dispute arises between a prince and part of the people over something where the law is silent or unclear, and the matter is of great importance, the most appropriate umpire is the body of the people.

The logic is simple: in the very situations where a prince holds a special trust and is not bound by ordinary legal rules, if people believe they’re harmed and believe he has acted beyond or against that trust, who could better interpret the scope of the trust than the community that originally lodged it in him?

But if the prince—or whoever governs—refuses that kind of determination, then the appeal has nowhere to go but to heaven. When two sides have no recognized superior on earth, and no route of appeal to an earthly judge, force between them is properly called a state of war. In that state, the injured party must decide for himself when to make that appeal—and to stake himself on it.

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What returns to whom when government dissolves

To wrap it up:

• The power each individual gives to society when entering it never returns to individuals as long as the society remains. It stays with the community, because without that shared power there is no community or commonwealth—and that would contradict the original agreement.
• Likewise, when the society places legislative power in an assembly (and provides for successors so that legislature can continue), that legislative power does not revert to the people while that government lasts. They have given up their political power to that continuing legislature and can’t simply take it back on a whim.

However, if the people set time limits on the legislature, making it temporary—or if the supreme power is placed in one person or assembly only for a set duration—then at the end of that term it returns to the society.

And if those in authority forfeit their power through serious misconduct—by breaking the trust and undermining the ends of government—then power likewise returns to the community.

In either case, when the time ends or the trust is forfeited, the people regain the right to act as the supreme power. They may:

• keep the legislative power in their own hands,
• build a new form of government, or
• keep the old form but place it in new hands,

as they judge best.