Two Treatises of Government

⚖The case for it

Locke circles, restates, and takes a long time reaching his point; reading him is work, not pleasure. What pays is the Second Treatise's central move: political power is held in trust, never owned outright. Once you accept that, the party who breaks the trust is the ruler, and resistance stops looking like a crime and starts looking like a remedy. He then does the hard part and spells out the conditions under which a government has dissolved itself. Skim the first half if you must. Read the second slowly and watch the argument turn on the people in charge.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Skip the First Treatise and you skip half the book; it is a page-by-page demolition of Robert Filmer, a royalist nobody has cared about for three centuries. The Second's labor theory of property conveniently declared America vacant and improvable, and Locke held Royal African Company stock while theorizing natural liberty. The contradictions are instructive; the prose is not.

— the honest librarian