The Second Treatise goes to the root of the matter.  Why does political power, “a Right of making Laws and Penalties of Death and consequently all less Penalties,” exist?  It can only be for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience.  Locke thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his Leviathan though he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker.  To Hobbes the state of nature which precedes political organization had been a state of war.  Neither peace nor reason could prevail where every man was his neighbor’s enemy; and the establishment of absolute power, with the consequent surrender by men of all their natural liberties, was the only means of escape from so brutal a regime.  That the state of nature was so distinguished Locke at the outset denies.  The state of nature is governed by the law of nature.  The law of nature is not, as Hobbes had made it, the antithesis of real law, but rather its condition antecedent.  It is a body of rules which governs, at all times and all places, the conduct of men.  Its arbiter is reason and, in the natural state, reason shows us that men are equal.  From this equality are born men’s natural rights which Locke, like the Independents in the Puritan Revolution, identifies with life, liberty and property.  Obviously enough, as Hobbes had also granted, the instinct to self-preservation is the deepest of human impulses.  By liberty Locke means the right of the individual to follow his own bent granted only his observance of the law of nature.  Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident.  It promotes the initiative of men by defining in terms which by their very statement obtain acknowledgment the conditions upon which individual caprice may have its play.  Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled his labor with some object.  This labor theory of ownership lived, it may be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of modern socialism.

The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character.  There may be war or violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is integral to their character.  But the state of nature is not a civil State.  There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature.  Each man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it.  But because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient variety in the conceptions of justice.  The result is uncertainty and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable.  It is here that the social contract emerges.  But just as Locke’s natural state implies a