liberty of a state of nature for membership of a state where some liberty would
be lost, and hence endowing the state with authority.
At the same time, because he feared the growth of executive power, he
insisted on aseparation of powersbetween thelegislature, the representa-
tive of the people’s sovereignty, and theexecutive. Although he hinted at the
further separation of the judicial system from the executive, this model of the
separation of powers and of government acting in a trust capacity to achieve
limited objectives went to the hearts of the newly-independent American
politicians in the Constitutional Convention (as did similar arguments by
Montesquieu, though his were later than Locke’s), and his influence is beyond
doubt. Though his theory is, in its end result, an encapsulation of many
modern liberal values, Locke himself was neither a democrat nor an advocate
of equality. Indeed the principal value he wished the political system to
preserve was the right to private property, which he defends with an odd
but ingenious theological argument. He is quite clear in theSecond Treatisethat
he does not expect the ordinary people to play any role in the running of the
state, and his famous reliance on free consent to create authority in fact ends
up, by sleight of hand, as being very much less liberal than it seems. Politically
he was on what would pass as the left-wing of the period: his family had fought
for Parliament in the Civil War, and his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was
implicated in an attempted revolution against the restored monarchy. Some
critics, indeed, regard theSecond Treatiseas, in part, an attempted justification of
Shaftesbury’s position, and he certainly was unusual in writing into his theory a
defence of the need occasionally to rebel against government. But the left-
wing position of his day can more easily be seen as the intellectual support for
the rise of the bourgeoisie, and his advocacy is indeed for the form of
government and ideas on property particularly convivial to the development
oflaissez-faireeconomies. Probably his better intellectual work was as a
philosopher, and in that capacity he is studied today almost as much as he is
analysed as a political theorist.
Luxemburg, Rosa
Rosa Luxemburg’s reputation and ideas still play a vital, if controversial, role in
modernMarxism. She was involved in theBolshevikmovement and the
development of Marxism into an active revolutionary movement and creed
from the beginning, helped build a post-war attempt at revolution in Germany,
in 1918, and was murdered by soldiers when the uprising was crushed. Her real
importance, apart from as a romantic martyr symbol, was that she repeatedly
criticizedLeninand his Russian version ofcommunism, especially after their
coming to power in 1917. Although in many ways she was a perfectly
orthodox Marxist, stressing the inevitability of a proletarian revolution, she
Luxemburg, Rosa