Abstract
A reading of the Second Treatise reveals Locke’s commitment to individual rights, representative government, and popular consent to government as less than robust and his assertion of a right to revolution as much qualified. Any assertion of such ideas, however tame, in the circumstances of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1683 would have jeopardized Locke’s life. Although written at that time, the Second Treatise was not published until 1689 and even then anonymously. Locke ended his more than five years of exile in Holland and returned to England in the train of the victorious armies of William of Orange.
The bibliographical essay addresses the many controversies regarding the Lockean teaching. Ashcraft, Dunn, Grant, Macpherson, Pangle, Simmons, Strauss, and Waldron, among others, figure prominently in the secondary literature. The bibliography identifies the new editions of Locke’s works from the Clarendon Press.
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Notes
- 1.
I have drawn upon Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green, 1957) in the writing of this sketch.
- 2.
E. S. de Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vs. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989), v. 1, 303–304:#219.
- 3.
IV.xix.14.
- 4.
W. von Leyden, ed., John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 109, 153, 109, 157, 157.
- 5.
Ibid., 157, 119, 187.
- 6.
Roger Woolhouse, ed., (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), IV.xi.1, III.ix.23.
- 7.
John Locke, “A Defence of Non-conformity” in Lord Peter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke (New York: Garland, 1984 [1884]), 346–358.
- 8.
Philip Abrams, ed., John Locke: Two Tracts on Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 117–181.
- 9.
Ibid., 118.
- 10.
Ibid., 211–212.
- 11.
Ibid., 119.
- 12.
Ibid., 121.
- 13.
De Beer, Correspondence, v. 1, 124–126:#82 and 136–137:#91.
- 14.
Abrams, Two Tracts, 146.
- 15.
“An Essay on Toleration” in Mark Goldie, ed., Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138, 144, 137.
- 16.
Ibid., 137. See also A Letter Concerning Toleration in Raymond Klibansky and J. W. Gough, eds., Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 135.
- 17.
J. R. Milton, “Locke at Oxford” in G. A. J. Rogers, ed., Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 29–47.
- 18.
Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), 38.
- 19.
Benjamin Rand, ed., The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 328–334.
- 20.
K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 242–248; J. R. Milton, “John Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Locke Newsletter, 21 (1990), 111–133; and David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory, 32 (2004), 602–626.
- 21.
Goldie, Locke, 179–180.
- 22.
John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), has extracts from Locke’s journal. Dewhurst, John Locke, provides the medical entries which Lough omits entirely.
- 23.
De Beer, Correspondence, v. 3, 545–547:#1102.
- 24.
Jonas Proast, The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration (New York: Garland, 1984 [1690]).
- 25.
The Works of John Locke. A New Edition, Corrected, 10 vs. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1963 [1823]), Volume 4 has the whole exchange.
- 26.
John Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes … of Atheism … With Some Brief Reflections on Socinianism: and on … The Reasonableness of Christianity, etc. (New York: Garland, 1984 [1695]).
- 27.
A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in Locke, Works, v. 7, 233 and 358.
- 28.
Patrick Hyde Kelly, Locke on Money, 2 vs. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); “Venditio” in David Wootton, ed., Political Writings of John Locke (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 442–446; and in the latter “Labour,” 440–442.
- 29.
“Liberty of the Press” in Goldie, Locke, 330–339.
- 30.
Peter Laslett, ed., Locke: Two Treatises of Government, Student Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), §42.
- 31.
Second Treatise, §6 in ibid.; see also Von Leyden, Essays, 195.
- 32.
“An Essay on the Poor Law” in Goldie, Locke, 183–198.
- 33.
An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles by Consulting St. Paul himself in Arthur W. Wainwright, ed., John Locke: A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 115.
- 34.
H. F. R. Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2 vs. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969 [1876]), v. 2, 559–560.
- 35.
Klibansky and Gough, Epistola, 123–125.
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Bookman, J.T. (2019). The Second Treatise. In: A Reader’s Companion to The Prince, Leviathan, and the Second Treatise. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02880-0_4
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