Two Treatises of Government by John Locke was one of the greatest works perhaps in premising American Republican Government and the writing of the U.S. constitution. Locke expanded upon Hobbes’ thinking about the provision of a sovereign being the best means of protecting ourselves from the destructive power of individual disputes to focus upon property. For Locke, our purpose and right is our property, both upon our person, and the property we accumulate through our work, the fruit of our labour. Individuals have a natural right to defend the results of their enterprise, their creativity, from intrusion. The just state should afford people the liberty of guarding and accumulating property, and it is by way of this that the happiness of each individual is facilitated. This in turn provides the moral basis of a capitalist limited government and a free market.

The second treatise also considers how individuals might consent to be regulated by a sovereign, how that individual chooses to participate in a political community. Unlike in Hobbes’ Leviathan, where a state depends only on unitary force to resolve disputes, Locke’s notion of government relies on the consent of the governed to surrender their natural liberty so that the state can better protect them. It is at moments of constitutional crisis, where the consent of the majority is withdrawn ‘there is no judge on earth’ [the people must] ‘appeal to heaven’ that a government loses its legitimacy to legislate, and revolution becomes the resulting step.

Locke’s ideas were produced near-verbatim almost a century on by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Locke also advocated for the allowance of flexibility within modern democracies, the idea being that the prerogative power may be briefly delivered the power to override individual rights in states of emergency, where it serves the interest of greater enduring individual liberty, when legislation is ineffective. Abraham Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports and suspension of Habeus Corpus was eventually supported on these terms by the U.S. Supreme Court during the American civil war, though the ‘inalienable’ rights of individuals suffered under the state. To this day Locke’s notion of prorogation is harnessed at moments of conflict or where public safety is under threat, and manifests as a vulnerable but expedient part of many a liberal democracy.