This is also a state of equality: absent any natural hierarchy, each and every human being is born with equal rights to “life, liberty, and estate,” all of which qualify as “property,” the most essential natural right (1952: 48). To understand government, Locke begins with mankind’s “original” condition, which he describes as a prepolitical “state of nature”: men and women in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.” The core ideas in the Second Treatise are deceptively simple. Locke said mankind's 'original' condition is 'a state of perfect freedom'

It proved essential to the American founders, although later historians have engaged in wide-ranging debates as to whether Locke was chiefly a radical libertarian, an apologist for capitalism, a social democrat, a moral individualist, an atheistic hedonist, or a deeply religious reformer. Whereas the First Treatise dismantles the philosophy of the “divine right of kings,” the more influential Second Treatise lays out Locke’s positive theory of government. Locke published these works only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Parliament had deposed the absolutist James II in favor of a constitutional monarchy, and even then he kept the authorship of the Treatises anonymous. Both works are based on the premise that since human beings are capable of exercising reason, they can be trusted to manage their own affairs without the “paternal” supervision of government, as he argues in his Second Treatise (1952 edition: 30). During political exile in Holland, Locke refined his most famous works of philosophy and political theory: the Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, respectively. Trained in medicine at Oxford, he worked as a family physician and adviser for Anthony Ashley Cooper (later to be the Earl of Shaftesbury), who emerged as the most prominent leader of the Whig opposition after the “Restoration” of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Locke was born into a prosperous family that held parliamentary sympathies during the English Civil War. Locke argued against the 'paternal' supervision of government Often credited as a founder of modern “liberal” thought, Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law, social contract, religious toleration, and the right to revolution that proved essential to both the American Revolution and the U.S. The American revolutionary generation drew many of its ideas from the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). (Image via Wikimedia Commons, painted by Godfrey Kneller 1697, public domain)

Locke & key vol 6