Thoreau and Locke on the right to renounce governmental allegiance

¶ … Thoreau and Locke acknowledge the right of the people to renounce their allegiance to their government, what is the difference between their understandings of this right and what different conditions would warrant such an act?

When do citizens have the right to throw off the yoke of a sovereign and adopt a new form of governance that is more in keeping with the wishes and their needs of the majority of the populace? During the age of the Enlightenment in Great Britain, the philosopher John Locke wrote in his "Second Treatise of Governance," that all governments of the world must protect the life, liberty, and property rights of the common citizens. Locke wrote that if a government fails to honor this function, then its citizens had the right to revolt against the government, as the social contract between the governed and the government was not being honored. For example, if a king raised taxes merely to enrich his coffers and throw lavish parties, bankrupting the ruled for the king's own delight and to the detriment of the majority of his people, that king should be overthrown. However, a king that waged a war designed to protect the majority should not, in Locke's view, be overthrown.

In Locke's version of the social contract between citizen and sovereign, the citizens had agreed to sacrifice their liberty for protection of their rights, in exchange for loyalty to the reigning government, but if their rights were not being protected, their loyalty was forfeit. In America, many years later during the Mexican-American War, the New England Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau similarly advocated the philosophy that when government did not honor its obligations to its principles and citizens, then the citizen's obligation to obey the government no longer existed. But for Thoreau, the individual never sacrificed his or her rights to the collective institutions of governance, even when the majority democratically elected those institutions.

In Thoreau's case, the philosopher wrote his essay on "Civil Disobedience" after he had engaged in an act of civil disobedience. He wrote that he believed that the rights of Americans had been violated when the American government perpetuated an unjust war. The will of the minority had co-opted the will of the majority, he wrote, and as an individual American citizen he thus refused to fund such a minority-led, self-aggrandizing war. Thoreau refused to pay his taxes and was subsequently thrown in jail.

Note that the wrongs being perpetuated in Thoreau's case were not upon the citizens of America, but the citizens of another country. Furthermore, there was no sovereign possessing rights, rather there was an elected government that was behaving in a way that Thoreau disagreed with, after it had been elected. This elected government, Thoreau believed, was not acting in accordance with the principles under which it had been elected to serve in the name of Americans and had engaged in fraud to sway the will of the American people to its side.

Thoreau stated that he as an individual had the right not to support such fraud. But in contrast, Locke was primarily concerned with notions of sovereignty in relation to the majority, and the balance of rights between sovereign and the majority of the ruled, rather than the individual. Thoreau believed that government and sovereignty, however was merely an idea created by individuals. In other words, without the individual inhabitants of America there was no collective government, and no government or human-created body could be larger than the individuals of the population that it was designed to serve.

Hence, Thoreau's advancement of the idea that the government that governs best, governs least and the primary obligations at stake are those of the (non-human, constructed) government towards protecting the individual rights of the humans it was created to serve, one by one. Locke, in contrast, puts forth the idea that there are mutual foundations of political obligation between the ruled and ruler. True, in Locke's view, all rights begin in the individual property interest and the individual person. In this, his viewpoint echoes Thoreau and thus does have an individualistic component commensurate with Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience." But Locke always stressed that the collective nature of the social structure or commonwealth required a certain sacrifice of individual rights of the governed to the soverign. No collective mode of governance, in Locke's view, could serve all of the people, all of the time.

True, Locke would agree that the soverign or government depends for its formation and maintenance on the express consent of those inidviduals who are governed by its political powers. But not every citizen can individually consent to such an accordance, on every single matter, such as a war that may arise during an administration, as was contended by the American administration during the supposed crisis that led up to the Mexican-American War.