John Locke's 1689 work of political philosophy, published anonymously shortly after the Glorious Revolution. The First Treatise is a sustained refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha and its theory of the divine right of kings, arguing point by point against the claim that royal authority descends from Adam's own God-given paternal authority. The Second Treatise, the work's philosophically central and far more influential half, sets out Locke's own positive theory: humans in a state of nature possess natural rights to life, liberty and property; legitimate government arises only from the consent of the governed to protect those rights; and a government that violates that trust may justly be resisted. Together the two treatises profoundly shaped later constitutional and revolutionary thought, including the American Declaration of Independence.
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The Second Treatise of Government is the second and philosophically central of this work's two parts, already minted here as its own entity; this edge lets each page point at the other rather than silently overlapping.
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