42 pages • 1 hour read
John Locke, C. B. Macpherson, ed.Second Treatise of Government
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1689A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Of Slavery”
In Locke’s view, “freedom of nature, is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature” (17). He disagrees with the fundamental idea of slavery because it completely ignores the natural liberties and basic freedoms granted to men under the state of nature and through the laws of God. However, he does describe “the perfect condition of slavery” (17), meaning the actual relationship that exists between a slave and a master. Ideally, the two would form an agreement that would instantiate their relationship as something with dignity; however, according to Locke, there is no such thing as a man who can make a compact with another man for his own life, as his own life is something over which he has no real power of determination.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Of Property”
This section covers one of Locke’s most famous and important ideas: property rights. For Locke, property is what a man “removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” (19).
As he goes on to explain, property is not simply an object like a piece of land or a tool; rather, it is something that has been produced by a person through an act of creation, which involves a person taking something from the state of nature and, by way of their own faculties, making it their own.
There are conditions to this, however. One of the biggest is that a man cannot take more than what he can use. In Locke’s opinion, “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy” (21). Under this framework, appropriating more than is necessary isn’t just greedy or wasteful—it’s practically a sin. By indulging in excess and letting things go to waste, man is invariably taking resources away from those who share the community and its common land with him. Doing so puts him in conflict with those around him, as he is infringing upon their property rights and the rights they’re given under the state of nature and through God.
A further development in property rights is the introduction of money, where relatively few coins can stand for vast sums of land, or material, or a spate of resources in general. Locke sees money as a relatively positive addition to the equation of property, saying, “as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them” (29).
In other words, money has helped further the advancement of different forms of property, for different kinds of men, which means more people are able to enjoy the benefits of property, even if they don’t own swaths of land or the physical resources themselves.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Of Paternal Power”
This chapter is dedicated to the idea of paternal, more specifically parental, power, and how it relates to a monarch’s power over his people. Locke asserts that parental power in a relationship—though the father may be the de facto head of household—is split between the mother and the father equally, across different spheres of influence. There are certain areas that the father cannot question the mother on, and vice versa for the mother relating to the father.
However, Locke’s critics and contemporaries, and proponents of absolute monarchy like Robert Filmer, run with the idea that monarchical power stems from the paternal, patriarchal dominion of the father in the family. Locke heavily disagrees with this, arguing that if the basis for an absolute monarch’s power is grounded in abstracting out the supposed absolute power of a father over his children and wife in a family structure, then the entire theory is baseless. A father may have power over his children and wife, but he has no right to their person or their property. Any attempt to justify monarchical power through such a jury-rigged apparatus is both intellectually dishonest and rationally unsound.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Of Political or Civil Society”
Locke argues that political and civil society are subordinate to the community, which both predates and originates political and civil structures. This point is consistently reiterated throughout the Second Treatise, and Locke makes sure to specify it here.
With the community, and therefore the people, being the originators of political society, it’s impossible for the political society to be naturally more superior to the people than the people are to it. Much in the same way a child may not be naturally superior to its parent, and therefore its needs and desires do not override the parent’s needs and the desires, Locke wants emphasize that the same state exists between communities and their political societies.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
These chapters could be called the first of Locke’s “Foundation” section, as they introduce his beliefs about the foundations of political society, which he asserts does not stem from the political system but from the community—the people who banded together in common relation—that chose to appoint it in the first place.
Two important points are reiterated throughout this section. First is the idea that men can only enter into a political society as long as they have agreed to it. This argument is one of many that helped shape the Enlightenment era’s social contract theory, which holds that a people must consent to governance. There is no way for any government to lay claim to a people, to a community, if the people and community have not consented to be under that system of government. This is because one of the only reasons people create political societies is to protect their property—both the product of their labor and their own person—meaning they have to willingly consent to that protection, otherwise they are essentially under a form of blind slavery in relation to the ruling political framework.
This is the origin of one of Locke’s most enduring ideas: that the political society of a given community is subordinate to that community, and that in no way, shape, or form can the political society ever claim supremacy over the will of the people.
Second is the idea that if political societies take their base model from parental or paternal power, then the leaders of that society must be completely aware of the true nature of that basis. Locke repeatedly stresses that, in the family structure, the father may be regarded as the “monarch,” but his power over his children and wife is not absolute. In fact, Locke notes several times that not only does the mother have certain jurisdiction and power in areas the father does not, but even the children, as helpless and reasonless as they may be, still possess property the father cannot touch, in the scope of their own person. This is a critical point because the family model is arguably the base model for political societies, and in Locke’s time, many thinkers—like Filmer—used their own interpretation of that model, mixed with mutilated readings of the Bible, to defend absolute monarchy. Locke stresses that the family structure, and by extension political structure, is far more complex than the dynamic in which a mother and children are domineered by an all-power father.
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