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 régime. 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