venient. Government must, in some sense, have a right to exact obedience, and the right conferred
by a contract seemed the only alternative to a divine command. Consequently the doctrine that
government was instituted by a contract was popular with practically all opponents of divine right
of kings. There is a hint of this theory in Thomas Aquinas, but the first serious development of it
is to be found in Grotius.
The contract doctrine was capable of taking forms which justified tyranny. Hobbes, for example,
held that there was a contract among the citizens to hand over all power to the chosen sovereign,
but the sovereign was not a party to the contract, and therefore necessarily acquired unlimited
authority. This theory, at first, might have justified Cromwell's totalitarian State; after the
Restoration, it justified Charles II. 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 reckoned as citizens.
Let us now see just what Locke has to say on our present topic.
There is first a definition of political power:
"Political power I take to be the right of making laws, with penalty of death, and consequently all
less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the
community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign
injury, and all this only for the public good."
Government, we are told, is a remedy for the inconveniences that. arise, in the state of nature,
from the fact that, in that state, every man is the judge in his own cause. But where the monarch is
a party to the dispute, this is no remedy, since the monarch is both judge and plaintiff. These
considerations lead to the view that governments should not be absolute, and that the judiciary
should be independent of the executive. Such arguments had an important future both in England
and in America, but for the moment we are not concerned with them.
By nature, Locke says, every man has the right to punish attacks on himself or his property, even
by death. There is political society