second treatise of government · locke

John Locke's Second Treatise, published in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution, derives government from a state of nature in which everyone is free and equal and holds natural rights to life, liberty and property. Government rests on consent and exists to protect those rights, and a people may resist a ruler who breaks the trust, the argument the Declaration of Independence would later compress into a paragraph.

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Hackett Publishing, 1980). Read in full, Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors.