Two Treatises of Government

Two Treatises of Government

This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1728 edition by A. Bettesworth, London. Against the other great political thinker Hobbes, Locke believed in democracy and depicted the original human condition as one marked by independence, freedom and equality, which did not initially need the arbitration of the state. The Two Treatises of Government thus pursues two interconnected goals: 1) it rebuttals against the despotic power of the monarch and 2) reconstructs traditional theories about the relationship between the individual and state. The Treatises not only holds a power of persuasion that influenced the American Declaration of Independence, but it also contains Locke's theory of natural law and his labor theory of valueÑwhere each individual has the right to own the product of one's own labor.