HKB
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Often appears with: rights and liberties · public good · public finance and debt · property, inheritance, and title · penalties of death · magistrate’s lawmaking power · legislators against trust · laws as guards and fences · erecting a new legislative · crime and punishment · constitutions and founding law
Usually: argument (2) · the fall of the great (1) · detachment (1)
Locke defines political power as a magistrate’s right to make laws with penalties (including death) to regulate and preserve property and defend the commonwealth, only for the public good.
OF THE STATE OF NATURE. Sect. 4. TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, 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, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality…
Locke argues that when government is dissolved the people may establish a new legislative for their safety, but doing it too late is useless; he then adds that legislatures or princes that act against their trust dissolve government by violating property.
is all one as if there were no laws; and a government without laws is, I suppose, a mystery in politics, unconceivable to human capacity, and inconsistent with human society. Sect. 220. In these and the like cases, when the government is dissolved, the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, differing from the other, by the change of persons, or form, or both, as they shall fi…