*Two Treatises of Government* appeared anonymously in late 1689 (with 1690 on the title page). Locke never publicly admitted authorship during his lifetime — the ideas were too dangerous. Although often read as a justification of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, most of the text was actually written earlier, during the political crisis of opposition to Charles II.

The First Treatise is a meticulous demolition of Robert Filmer's *Patriarcha*, which had derived royal authority from Adam's inheritance. The real weight of the book, however, lies in the Second Treatise.

The opening scene of the Second Treatise resembles Hobbes' but is tonally opposite. The 'state of nature' is not, for Locke, a state of war but one in which individuals live under natural law, equal in their rights to *life, liberty, and property*. The law of nature is knowable by reason: 'no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.' The trouble is the absence of an impartial judge to enforce it. So people contract — not, as in Hobbes, to surrender almost all their rights, but only to delegate the executive power of the law to a government.

Three consequences follow. First, legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed; without consent, there is no government, only force. Second, property arises through labour: when a person mixes their labour with a part of nature, it becomes theirs. This is the philosophical seed of capitalist theories of property — and also the rationalisation of colonial doctrines of 'unused land', whose two-hundred-eighty-year critique continues. Third, when government violates the trust placed in it — arbitrary detention, taxation without consent, religious coercion — there arises a *right of resistance* in the people. That last claim returns almost verbatim in the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789).