Locke and other natural rights philosophers said that the purpose of government is to protect natural rights. Thomas Jefferson agreed and in the Declaration of Independence argued that the protection of rights is the main purpose of government. Another of Locke's ideas that Jefferson stated in the Declaration of Independence is that government gets its right to govern from the consent of the people. Its powers are delegated to it by the governed. People give their consent in several ways. People can give explicit consent by agreeing to the contract that establishes the society whose members then establish the government and choose its officers or joining a society that already is established. People give implicit consent, also called tacit consent, by accepting the laws and services of the government and nation of their birth.
Locke believed that since the people give the power to the government, they have the right to take it away if the government is not serving the purposes for which it was established. They can then create a new government. Locke argued and the Founders agreed that if a government fails to protect the people's rights, the people have a right of revolution. Locke and the Founders said that the people have the right to make that decision. This position is in the following words from the Declaration of Independence:
"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government..."
Revolution, however, is an extreme way in which to deal with bad government. Government should be designed or organized to limit its powers in order to protect individual rights and thus reduce the need for such extreme measures. The Americans who ratified the Constitution in 1787 gave explicit consent to their new government. So did the many immigrants who came to America to seek a better life. Those who are born here have implied their consent by remaining in this country and living under its laws. Every native-born American, as he or she grows up, has the choice of seeking the citizenship of another country. By remaining in this country, accepting its laws, and enjoying its benefits, they imply their consent to be governed by the federal, state, and local governments. They also affirm their consent every time they take the Pledge of Allegiance, participate in an election, or engage in other civic actions.
What Locke has to say about the origin of civil society is also of interest in connection with the concept of property. It is apparent that property is very important in Locke's political theory. He says that the law of nature commands one not to harm another's possessions; and he also says that men enter into society in order to preserve more perfectly their liberty and property. Thus the right to property is protected both by the law of nature and the civil law; in fact, one of the reasons for the existence of civil society is the preservation of property. In Chapter V, Locke takes up the question of property in detail. By property Locke means private property; for that is a man's property which is his own. In this chapter, Locke considers how it comes about that anyone has private property, i.e., owns something to the exclusion of all others. He concludes that it is labor which gives the laborer a right to, or property in, that which he produces or adds his labor to. He summarizes his view as follows:
Though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property...
Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property, wherever any one was pleased to employ it, upon what was common ...
We must realize that Locke uses the term "property" to refer not only to land or goods, but also to anything else that is a man's own, as the following passage indicates:
Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property -- that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law...
Since man has a natural right to property in this wider sense (i.e., life, liberty, and estate), the state cannot take it away from him, but must rather protect his right to it. The Declaration of Independence echoes Locke, substituting, however, "pursuit of happiness" for "estate":
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...
Were the writers of the Declaration of Independence any less believers in the right to "estates" (i.e., private property) than Locke? That is hardly likely, if we examine the other writings of the Declaration's authors and signers. Nor is it likely that the substitution is altogether insignificant, constituting merely a slip of the pen, or the substitution of a more euphonious phrase for one less so. There was disagreement among the Founding Fathers about the political significance of private property. Franklin, for example, opposing the limitation of suffrage to property-holders, asked, "Why should property be represented at all?" "Pursuit of happiness" seems to take in a wider territory than "estate." Perhaps it can be maintained that that was the reason for the change. If pursuit of happiness requires a man's estate to be secure, then the Declaration of Independence affirms that to be part of man's inalienable right; but if other things are also required, it also asserts his right to those.
John Locke, to whom the Founders looked as the ablest spokesman of the first principles of government, is sometimes said to teach a "selfish system of morals," in which one has no genuine moral obligations to others. This is arguably untrue of Locke, and it is certainly untrue of the Founders, who emphatically placed honor and duty ahead of narrow self-interest. The Declaration says that when a people is subjected to a long train of abuses aiming at absolute despotism, "it is their right, it is their duty," to change the government. As a sign that this duty is higher than one's own personal survival or selfish interest, the end of the Declaration affirms, "We pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." The Founders' sense of honor taught them that they must be ready to sacrifice their lives and property for the sake of their duty, establishing and preserving a free government.
While the image of good government that Locke had in mind was a constitutional monarchy, in which the legislative power of Parliament was supreme but in which the king retained certain executive prerogatives, the republican form of government set up by the Constitution of the United States is a more thoroughgoing embodiment of his ideal of government by law rather than by men. All our political liberties are rooted in the rule of law. It is this which makes constitutional government "free government" -- government that secures to all of us "the blessings of liberty." No American can ever afford to forget this basic truth. The reading of Locke's essay will never permit him to.
In retrospect, his views on citizens’ rights and constitutionalism are a curiously double-edged sword. One of the jobs that Locke undertook was in preparing the articles for the settlement of Virginia in North America. The articles he drafted were extremely liberal and democratic, drawing heavily on his views on rights, toleration and constitutional government. These articles were in stark contrast to the puritan absolutism of colonies farther North and also to the almost feudal oligarchy of the aristocratic landowners farther South (who became the ante-bellum slave owning gentry we see in every movie about the American Civil War). The constitution of Virginia became an extremely important influence on the framers of the Constitution of the United States and as a result Locke has had an enormous practical influence on the development of liberal and democratic thought in the modern age.
Conversely his ideas about sovereignty and the rights of property were also very influential in the colonial age. Because the states that emerged from this colonial era have received much of their law and constitutional doctrine from the Law of Nations in the Age of Empires the way in which settler-indigenous were and are carried on have been shaped by Locke’s thought. This is not necessarily a good thing. You will notice in his work many references to the “Indians” of North America, who Locke assumes do not have property rights in land and natural resources. He thinks that the New World is a terra nullius wherein all land is still in the commons. He not only justifies colonial appropriation of indigenous lands, but also defends the idea that a colonial power can extend its indivisible and absolute sovereignty to this land as well. (Recall the idea we found in Hobbes that sovereignty is indivisible and eternal.) Indigenous people are assumed not to have been harmed because they had no property rights. He also thinks that as long as we can satisfy ourselves that they have been compensated by receiving the benefits of our technology and law then there has been no harm. Finally, once sovereignty is established in a place Locke believes that any person who walks on that land, makes use public amenities, acts in accordance with the law or otherwise accommodates themselves to the local authority that they have implicitly accepted this authority. In a colonial context this means that when indigenous people attempt to adapt to changed circumstances their claims to original possession of the land and to rights derived from pre-colonial sovereignty or sovereign rights are ruled out as attempting to divide or undermine the sovereignty of the State. In Australia these various strands of Locke’s thinking (and the thinking of his near contemporaries) has shaped the ways courts have dealt with indigenous claims. The famous Mabo decision recognized “Native Title”, but only as a right to continue to use land and resources where the State has not yet explicitly extinguished these rights. Courts have consistently refused to recognize or give force to any indigenous claims felt to be at odds with the sovereignty of the crown or any rights or titles the Crown has given to anybody else. Even where rights, such as grazing leases, have been awarded but then abandoned, the previous indigenous rights have been taken to be extinguished an unrecoverable.
Locke was on the side of the People. He believed that the fountain of sovereignty was the People of the state. Statists prefer Hobbes. Populists choose Locke. In California, the Government Code sides with Locke. Sections 11120 and 54950 both say, "The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them." The preambles of the U.S. and California Constitutions also affirm the choice of Locke by the People.
Locke is a rationalist and empiric. He expounds the empirical theory of mind. The man is born with ready made ideas and principles, his mind is formed by experience, and human ignorance is greater than human knowledge. Therefore, the man should not possess dogmatic beliefs. Locke fails to build the unified system of societal laws, although he offers the hope that the man can develop himself by the forces of education and spiritual exertion. Freedom, individualism, creativity remain the basic elements of his theory.
