Sublime

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror

In Locke’s form of the doctrine, however, the government is a party to the contract, and can be justly resisted if it fails to fulfil its part of the bargain. Locke’s doctrine is, in essence, more or less democratic, but the democratic element is limited by the view (implied rather than expressed) that those who have no property are not to be recko

Le philosophe libéral anglais, en tant qu’actionnaire de la Royal African Company, s’intéresse à la traite des esclaves, mais il s’intéresse aussi, en tant que secrétaire (dans les années 1673-1674) du Council of Trade and Plantations, à l’avancée expansionniste des colonies blanches. On a observé très justement que « [l]e fait que tant d’exemples

Property is very prominent in Locke's political philosophy, and is, according to him, the chief reason for the institution of civil government: “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.”