Locke the Declaration of Independence and Today's Government

John Locke

Locke believed in the law of liberty and held that an ethical system for society should strive to maintain the law of liberty. He wrote in his Second Treatise that a society had a right to overthrow a government if that government did not serve the cause of liberty: “For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no law” (p. 57). Indeed, the government of the US made liberty the cornerstone of its foundation in the Declaration of Independence (1776): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The US government was essentially built on the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which is where Locke’s views came from: like Rousseau in The Social Contract, Locke emphasized that government’s main concern should be the protection of individual freedom. The problem seen today is that the US took the idea of Locke to justify the American Revolution and then immediately turned on that same idea and convened a centralized government that would usurp authority from individuals, effectively putting restrictions on individual liberty. Today, the situation is such that most people look around and see Orwell’s Big Brother asserting totalitarian control over individual lives via lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and so on. Locke argued for liberty in terms of self-government, as Sharon (2022) points out. Yet for fear of conflict and desire for control, most societies of today have done away with Locke’s view of life and liberty in favor of a centralized authority. Why did this happen? This paper will argue that it happened because there is a fundamental flaw in Locke’s theory, which is this: ultimately, Locke promotes self-interest, and in an ethical system wherein self-interest is the ideal, the only outcome is Ethical Egoism and the law that might makes right.

Locke argued that self-preservation is a natural right and as such every person has the natural right to pursue his own self-interest. Locke wrote: “Everyone is obliged to preserve himself and not opt out of life willfully, so for the same reason everyone ought, when his own survival isn’t at stake, to do as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind; and except when it’s a matter of punishing an offender, no-one may take away or damage anything that contributes to the preservation of someone else’s life, liberty, health, limb, or goods” (p. 4). In other words, every person has the right to self-interest. It is perhaps a utopian idea to believe that every human being should be allowed to support himself and be free to do so. Of course, America was founded on the idea of liberty—but it really only paid lip service to the idea, since it allowed slavery for nearly a century after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

What the Founding Fathers disputed was the extent to which liberty should be permitted. The problem with liberty and self-interest ala Locke was that sooner or later people’s self-pursuits would clash with one another—and nowhere was this more evident than in the great debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Federalists were for a strong central government. The Anti-Federalists were for states’ rights, i.e., the right of the individual state to determine its own government, i.e., self-government. The Anti-Federalists were more in line with Locke’s idea of self-governance and self-determination. The Federalists acted sympathetic to these ideas but really wanted power in the hands of a few.

In the US, the Federalists wanted centralization, but they justified it by calling for a balanced division of powers via three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judicial in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self–appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” (Madison, 1788). But Jefferson saw through this argumentation: he knew that by virtue of the judicial branch’s Supreme Court’s power, the judiciary would wield ultimate power over the other branches—which is why he said that a tyranny of the judiciary would be the ultimate result of things in the US (Nelson, 2018).

Yet in the end, the Anti-Federalists caved to the pressure put on them by the Federalists, and accepted the Constitutional government in which a federal government had rights clearly stated that were over and above individual state rights. One might think that Locke’s ideas were inherently defeated in the ratifying of the Constitution. But the fact of the matter is that Locke’s ideas were basically upheld in the ratification of the Constitution. For the Federalists were seeking their own self-interest, and attempting to show that their model of government would protect the rights of all; it did not of course do so—but they made it sound as though it would.

The Federalists focused on legalistic solutions to problems, which was actually in line with Locke’s legalism. Locke (1997) argued that “We should not obey a king just out of fear, because, being more powerful he can constrain (this in fact would be to establish firmly the authority of tyrants, robbers, and pirates), but for conscience’ sake, because a king has command over us by right; that is to say, because the law of nature decrees that princes and a lawmaker, or a superior by whatever name you call him, should be obeyed.” What is Locke’s argument in essence? Might makes right. The might of the king is the force that sets the law by which one is obliged to act. Yet, Locke’s whole argument that a government that does not preserve individual liberty should be overthrown falls apart under this weightier argument of the laws of nature and authority and morality. Locke thought a system could be put in place that preserved liberty. The Federalists acted as though their separation of powers—the three branches—would do so. Jefferson saw through it and regretted the system that had been put in place.