Second Treatise of Government

The Second Treatise of Government is the second and more influential part of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published anonymously in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution though likely drafted around 1680 during the Exclusion Crisis. Where the First Treatise is a sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha and its case for a divinely ordained, hereditary, absolute monarchy, the Second Treatise sets out Locke's own positive account of political society: government rests on natural rights and a contract among the governed, requires their consent to be legitimate, and can, under limited and extreme circumstances, be lawfully overthrown by the people it fails to serve. This positive argument, rather than the polemic against Filmer, is what made the work a foundational text of liberal political theory and, in the judgment of historians of the period, a genuinely revolutionary document for its time and place.