ABSTRACT
For millennia, the assumption that nature has an infi nite capacity to offer up its bounty and an infi nite capacity to absorb our waste was an unquestionable truth, a condition of life so obvious it didn’t need to be articulated; as such it was easily encoded into the theoretical foundations of modern democracy as that foundation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In no place is this clearer, or more relevant to the experience of the US, than in the work of John Locke, specifi cally in his infl uential Second Treatise of Government, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government. If we’re interested in cataloging ways that rhetorics of unsustainability shape our political experience today, we’d do well to examine the Second Treatise with a critical, ecologically wary eye. That examination makes clear: democratic theory needs some rethinking if it is to accommodate itself to a fi nite planet.
