ABSTRACT
These resounding lines from the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 paraphrase the message at the heart of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, written almost a century earlier. Locke published his Two Treatises of Government anonymously in 1689, but there is evidence that he wrote them in the early 1680s when the idea that the people had a right to overthrow an unjust government would have been considered radical treason and could easily have incurred the death penalty. Much of the detail of the Two Treatises is directed at the turbulent political events of the 1680s; but the Second Treatise, with its attempt to establish basic human rights, has had an influence which extends well beyond the concerns of the seventeenth century.
