ABSTRACT
The current revival of academic interest in contract theory has produced almost as many reinterpretations of Locke as of Kant.1 Two aspects of these will occupy my attention here: the one general; the other much more specific. The first is the development of different classificatory schemes designed to highlight the variety of contractualist ideas and to organize historical understandings of past contractualist thinking. Of obvious relevance here are Michael Lessnoffs and Richard Saage’s recent refinements to the distinction between governmental and social contracts, a distinction that served as the organizing idea behind J.W.Gough’s standard history of the subject.2 Jean Hampton has offered new insights by exploring a different classificatory pair: Hobbesian ‘alienation’ contract theory versus Lockian ‘agency’ contract theory.3 Thomas P.Slaughter and John Millar have applied less formal distinctions between Hobbesian and Lockian contract theories in attempting to understand the contractualisms of the 1688 Revolution.4 And, as a final example, David Gauthier has identified four different kinds of contract theories: original contractarianism, explicit contractarianism, tacit contractarianism and hypothetical contractarianism.5 In each of these classifications, Locke’s Second Treatise features prominently. But for all the differences in the interpretation of that work that arise from locating it within these various classificatory contexts, there is one point which these commentators have not challenged. This is that Locke’s Second Treatise contains a relatively abstract logical theory of the origins, extent and end of civil government.
