Articles & Papers
The Escape Hatch
How Locke builds a Commonwealth that carries the state of war inside it — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689).
The Commonwealth depends upon majority rule while simultaneously preserving the individual’s ultimate judgment over whether that rule remains legitimate.
The Logic, Step by Step
Phase I · Building the Commonwealth
State of Nature
§§ 4–13The individual is his own judge and executor of the law of nature.
Formation of the Commonwealth
§§ 95–97Individuals consent to leave that condition and submit themselves to the determination of the majority, because otherwise there is no functioning political body.
Majority Rule
§§ 96–99The majority therefore has authority to coerce the individual. The individual cannot simply say, “I disagree, therefore I am no longer bound.” Mere disagreement does not constitute a state of war.
But the Majority Is Not Sovereign
§§ 135, 149The majority’s authority is itself limited by the purposes for which the Commonwealth was created, principally the preservation of life, liberty, and property. Government is a trust, not an absolute sovereign.
Continues to Stage 5 · Who Decides?
Phase II · The Fracture
The Critical Problem
§§ 240–242When the individual believes the majority or government has violated that trust, who decides whether it has?
That would let government define the limits of its own power.
The majority might itself be the violator.
There is no ordinary superior earthly judge left to appeal to.
Therefore: the individual must ultimately judge. Locke says explicitly that in the final dispute over whether the government has violated its trust, there is no ordinary superior earthly judge to whom the matter can be submitted. The people are ultimately the judge.
The State of War Reappears
§§ 16–19, 232Once the individual judges that the government is exercising force without right, the relationship changes. Locke’s state of war is precisely the condition in which force is exercised without legitimate authority.
The Commonwealth contains within itself a permanent escape hatch back into the state of nature.
Back to Stage 1 — The State of Nature
The Circuit
The loop inside the Commonwealth, laid out end to end:
↻ Loops back to the State of Nature
NO HIGHER EARTHLY JUDGE — THE LOOP NEVER CLOSES FOR GOOD
Not Constant War. Permanent Exposure.
The problem is not that every disagreement produces a state of war. It doesn’t. The problem is that there is no objective institutional mechanism within Locke’s system that finally settles the disagreement between the individual and the Commonwealth concerning the limits of legitimate coercion.
“The majority has decided; therefore you are bound.”
“The majority has exceeded the authority that I consented to; therefore its coercion is without right.”
There is no higher political authority capable of conclusively deciding between them. That means the Commonwealth is never completely insulated from the state of war. Its stability depends upon individuals continuing to recognize the government’s coercive acts as legitimate. Once an individual judges that the government’s force has become illegitimate, the very authority that was supposed to remove him from the state of nature becomes, in his judgment, the aggressor.
Locke solves the problem of the state of nature by creating a Commonwealth, but he preserves within the individual the ultimate jurisdiction to determine when the Commonwealth has forfeited its authority.
The Commonwealth requires the individual to surrender his judgment to the majority.
Locke’s theory requires the individual to retain enough judgment to determine when the majority itself has become illegitimate.
The result is not necessarily perpetual actual war. It is a permanent potential state of war embedded within the Commonwealth.
SOURCES · John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), cited by section