Abstract: Most people are familiar with Locke’s argument that the roughly equal
capacities of human beings is a sign of God’s intention that human beings are not to
destroy each other. But the Two Treatises also contains a parallel line of argument that
the natural law is visible in the unfolding of human history. This lesser-known historical
line of argument establishes premises that are important to the Two Treatises’
understanding of natural law, its refutation of Filmer, and its support for the right to
revolution.
An author will very often put forward more than one line of argument to support his
position. The reason for this is obvious – a man wearing both a belt and a pair of
suspenders is very unlikely to be caught with his pants down. But an author who employs
multiple lines of argument introduces the difficulty of keeping them all straight.
Audiences always prefer a simple story, and if you don’t make the story simple they will
very often do the job themselves, absorbing only one element of what you give them
while disregarding the rest. Scholars of political theory are, regrettably, not immune from
this tendency. No doubt a certain degree of simplification and systematization is
unavoidable – when we discuss “Plato’s metaphysics” or “Rousseau’s civil religion,” we
understand that these labels represent somewhat simplified concepts that we have
abstracted out of much more complex bodies of thought, and we accept this
simplification as the necessary precondition of talking about these things at all. However,
as long as scholars are human, they will sometimes fall into the trap of simplifying too
much, allowing whole lines of argument to simply vanish from view because it is so
much easier to identify only one line of argument per thinker on a given topic.
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a little-noticed but very important
line of argument in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Everyone is familiar with
Locke’s argument in Sections 4-6 of the Second Treatise that the roughly equal capacities
of human beings is a sign of God’s intention that human beings are not to destroy each
other. The standard practice in Locke scholarship is to treat this as Locke’s only
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Convention