What makes a government legitimate, according to Locke?

A government that can tax you, jail you and send you to war needs more than power to be obeyed rightly. It needs a claim to be obeyed. Political theory calls that claim legitimacy, and John Locke's Second Treatise of Government gives the answer that liberal democracies still lean on: a government is legitimate because the governed consented to it, and only for as long as it does what they consented to.

What is Locke's state of nature?

It is a state of freedom, not of war. Locke describes people before any government as living in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature” (chapter II).

That last phrase is the difference from Hobbes. Locke's state of nature already has a law. Reason is that law, and it teaches that, all being equal and independent, “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”. Hobbes's people need a sovereign to have any rules at all; Locke's people have rules, but no one to apply them fairly. (The Hobbes essay in this series: Why would anyone give up their freedom to a Leviathan?)

What does Locke mean by property?

More than land. Property starts with the person: “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself” (chapter V). What a person makes by mixing their labour with what nature provides becomes theirs too.

When Locke says why people form governments, he widens the word on purpose. They unite for “the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property” (chapter IX). So “property” in Locke means life, liberty and estate together. An answer that reads it as land alone misses his argument.

Why leave the state of nature at all?

Because rights with no one to protect them fairly are not safe. In chapter IX Locke names what the state of nature lacks: a settled, known law; a judge with no stake in the quarrel, since everyone is otherwise judge in their own case; and a power to carry out the judgment. People join a society to supply all three, and he says what for:

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” (chapter IX)

What makes a government legitimate?

Consent, and the purpose it was given for. The rule that decides legitimacy is in chapter VIII:

“Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.” (chapter VIII)

Each person agrees with the others to form one society, and from then on the majority acts for it. Locke also counts tacit consent: someone who owns land or enjoys the protection of a government is taken to have agreed to its laws, even without saying so (chapter VIII).

The government consent creates is not a master but a trustee. The legislative is “only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends” (chapter XIII), and its limits follow from those ends: “the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent” (chapter XI). Taxes are the test case. A government “must not raise taxes on the property of the people, without the consent of the people, given by themselves, or their deputies” (chapter XI).

When may the people resist?

When the government breaks its trust: when the legislators try to take the people's property, or to rule by arbitrary power, the government is dissolved and the people may set up a new legislative (chapter XIX). Who decides that the trust is broken? Locke's answer is short: “The people shall be judge”, because the one who gives a trust is the one who can say it has been betrayed.

He is not describing a right to rebel over every bad law. Revolutions, he argues, do not follow small failures: great mistakes by rulers, many wrong laws and all the slips of human frailty “will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur” (chapter XIX). Resistance answers a pattern of abuse, not a single wrong decision.

What did his critics say?

The hardest question is whether most people ever consent at all. David Hume, in his essay “Of the Original Contract” (1748), says tacit consent means little for someone who cannot afford to leave their country. To call staying put consent is like saying a man, “by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master”, when he was carried on board asleep and would drown if he jumped off.

Hobbes had made the opposite objection before Locke wrote. Limiting the sovereign and dividing its power, he argued in Leviathan, invites the civil war a sovereign exists to prevent, and he called the idea that a sovereign is “subject to the Civill Lawes” “repugnant to the nature of a Common-wealth” (chapter XXIX). Hume doubts that consent happened; Hobbes doubts that a government held to conditions can keep the peace. An answer should show both, and say which danger each one fears.

Where is Locke in India's Constitution?

In its first words, and in the history of one right. The Constitution names its source as the governed: “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA” … “DO HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION”. Consent is renewed at every election, held on adult suffrage (Article 326), and the legislatures that make laws are the people's “deputies” in Locke's sense.

Property is where the comparison gets sharp. The Constitution of 1950 made it a fundamental right, in Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31. The Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978 omitted both, with effect from 20 June 1979, and put this in their place:

“No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law.” (Article 300A)

Property stopped being a fundamental right and became a constitutional right outside Part III. Read with Locke, Article 300A keeps his core condition, that property is taken only by law, which elected legislatures make. What it drops is the protection Part III gives to the fundamental rights.