John Locke is often associated with the phrase “Life, liberty, and property,” which were the three natural rights he believed people should be free to enjoy. However, Locke’s philosophy on government and society was much more complex than that one simple axiom.
In his 1689 work “Two Treatises of Government,” Locke asserts that people are born with certain inalienable rights that cannot be taken away by the government. He also states that the purpose of government is to protect those rights, not to infringe upon them. Furthermore, he believes that government should exist solely for the protection of the natural rights of the people, not to promote the general welfare. While some scholars have claimed that Locke’s ideas on government can be boiled down to the basic three-word phrase mentioned above, there is more nuance to Locke’s philosophy than this simple sentence allows.
Locke believed that people have a right to overthrow a government that violates their natural rights. He also stated in “The Second Treatise” that slavery was wrong because it violated an individual’s natural right to freedom. In this way, he differed from Thomas Hobbes, who believed in a social contract theory wherein a person only had rights if they were given those rights by the ruler of a country.
