Dissolving Government
Locke writes about the usurpation of power from a rightful ruler as well as what might be done when a rightful rule transformed into a tyrant. At no point is the answer ever a complete dissolution of government altogether. In fact, on this subject in the aptly title “Of the Dissolution of Government” Locke engages imagery which is pretty much absolute and the final say on the subject:
“there wants not much argument to prove that where the society is dissolved the government cannot remain, that being as impossible as for the frame of a house to subsist when the materials of it are scattered and dissipated by a whirlwind, jumbled into a confused heap by earthquake.”
When Great Minds are Clueless
Little argument exists to strongly suggest that Locke was not in possession of a mind capable of thinking outside the box. In many ways, he was assuredly a great progressive. Unfortunately, he was also far too beholding to ideas instilled by the traditions of the Church. This blind spot did not allow him to see that the reality of human behavior and the theory of Christian principles rarely blend seamlessly:
“The nourishment and education of their children is a charge so incumbent on parents for their children's good, that nothing can absolve them from taking care of it: and though the power of commanding and chastising them go along with it, yet God hath woven into the principles of human nature such a tenderness for their off-spring, that there is little fear that parents should use their power with too much rigor; the excess is seldom on the severe side"
Labor and Property
Locke makes his case in “Of Property” of the link between the right to private ownership of property and the responsibility of such. To read this imagery is almost to peer into the mind Henry George some time later as it was developing his land use theories of property rights. Private property, this imagery strongly argues, should not be considered any sort of natural right, but rather one that can only be earned and, furthermore, continually shown to be earned:
“He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labor put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature…had done; and so they became his private right.”
Freedom Under Government
Locke is quick and clear to distinguish the difference between actual freedom as endowed by natural laws and the realistic expression of freedom under government. And since society cannot exist without government without eventually crumbling under the whirlwind of an earthquake, it is only the second kind of freedom that really counts. Herewith, Locke’s image of freedom within the constraints of a liberal democratic government:
“But freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man; as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.”
