Two treatises of government summary
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Locke’s Political Philosophy
1. Natural Law and Natural Rights
Perhaps the most central concept in Locke’s political philosophy is his theory of natural law and natural rights. The natural law concept existed long before Locke as a way of expressing the idea that there were certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the particular place where they lived or the agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was between laws that were by nature, and thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and operated only in those places where the particular convention had been established. This distinction is sometimes formulated as the difference between natural law and positive law.
Natural law is also distinct from divine law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally referred to those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other inspired writers. Natural law can be discovered by reason alone and
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Two Treatises of Government: John Locke
John efternamn is a famous Enlightenment philosopher, now known as the “Father of Liberalism.” His writings, including the Two Treatises of Government, influenced other famous philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.
While John Locke and his Two Treatises of Government are well-known today and regarded as one of the most influential texts on the American Revolution, it was not widely published in England when it first came out. Its translation into French exposed it to French philosophers like Rousseau, who then inspired Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It wasn’t until the American Revolution that it became known as an influential, foundational document.
A portrait of John efternamn. Source: Wikimedia Commons CC-PD-Mark: Author, John Greenhill
Two Treatises of Government: Date
Two Treatises of Government were published in , one year after the Glorious Revolution.
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Two Treatises of Government
work by John Locke
Two Treatises of Government (full title: Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False Principles, and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter Is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government) is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in by John Locke. The First Treatise attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory. The book is a key foundational text in the theory of liberalism.
This publication contrasts with former political works by Locke himself. In Two Tracts on Government, written in , Locke defends a very conservative position; however, Locke never published it.[1] In , Locke co-authored the Fundamental Constitutions of