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John Locke believes that everyone has natural rights. Natural rights are absolute freedom where no one has power over each other. But, when you join a country/government you lose your natural rights. The governments should preserve your rights through law and order. According to the John Locke, the government should not have an oppressive leader who has despotic power over it's citizens. The citizens have the right to oppress their leader. In this government, people consent to be governed.

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Essential John Locke: Natural Freedom and Rights

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This is important to the founding fathers because the colonists did not consent to be governed by the British. They had many conflicts with the British, specified the king had despotic power, and had the final decision in everything.

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Constitutional Principles: Consent of the Governed

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"This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name, property." -John Locke

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The American revolutionary generation drew many of its ideas from the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Often credited as a founder of modern "liberal" thought, Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law, social contract, religious toleration, and the right to revolution that proved essential to both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution that followed.

Locke argued against the 'paternal' supervision of government

Locke was born into a prosperous family that held parliamentary sympathies during the English Civil War. Trained in medicine at Oxford, he worked as a family physician and adviser for Anthony Ashley Cooper (later to be the Earl of Shaftesbury), who emerged as the most prominent leader of the Whig opposition after the "Restoration" of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. During political exile in Holland, Locke refined his most famous works of philosophy and political theory: the Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, respectively. Both works are based on the premise that since human beings are capable of exercising reason, they can be trusted to manage their own affairs without the "paternal" supervision of government, as he argues in his Second Treatise (1952 edition: 30).

Locke published these works only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Parliament had deposed the absolutist James II in favor of a constitutional monarchy, and even then he kept the authorship of the Treatises anonymous. Whereas the First Treatise dismantles the philosophy of the "divine right of kings," the more influential Second Treatise lays out Locke's positive theory of government. It proved essential to the American founders, although later historians have engaged in wide-ranging debates as to whether Locke was chiefly a radical libertarian, an apologist for capitalism, a social democrat, a moral individualist, an atheistic hedonist, or a deeply religious reformer.

Locke said mankind's 'original' condition is 'a state of perfect freedom'

The core ideas in the Second Treatise are deceptively simple. To understand government, Locke begins with mankind's "original" condition, which he describes as a prepolitical "state of nature": men and women in "a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man."

This is also a state of equality: absent any natural hierarchy, each and every human being is born with equal rights to "life, liberty, and estate," all of which qualify as "property," the most essential natural right (1952: 48). Nonetheless, the state of nature is an undesirable condition; as creatures of passion, individuals tend to be biased in their own favor and lack both a neutral "umpire" to decide disputes and an impartial enforcer to carry out natural law (1952: 49).

When the state of nature descends into a "state of war," these free and equal individuals rationally choose to form a social contract, one grounded in mutual "consent" and guided by the "determination of the majority" (1952: 55). Individuals give up their natural rights to judge disputes and enforce the law of nature, and in thus giving up their individual rights they create the original powers of government: the legislative and executive, a distinction that Locke uses to justify a fundamental separation of powers. If either branch exceeds its proper authority, the people retain a right to revolt after a "long train of abuses" (1952: 126).

Americans were influenced directly by Locke's principles

American revolutionaries often drew a direct line between Locke's principles and their own. They frequently cited him during the Stamp Act protests and the Pamphlet War. Thomas Jefferson, describing his writing of the Declaration of Independence, commented that "All its authority rests then upon the harmonizing sentiments of the day," taken from "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c." (1999 edition of his Political Writings: 148).

Although Locke's name was invoked less often during the framing of the Constitution, his concerns about the protection of "life, liberty, and estate" were universally shared by the delegates in Philadelphia, who worried that the state governments had failed in this basic Lockean task. Prominent Anti-Federalists, disappointed by the initial lack of a bill of rights, appealed to Locke's philosophy as well. As Richard Henry Lee wrote, "There are certain unalienable and fundamental rights, which in forming the social contract, ought to be explicitly ascertained and fixed" (1985 edition: 232).

Locke defended relgious toleration

Locke's most direct contribution to the First Amendment lies in his defense of religious toleration. Although toleration in the American colonies predates Locke, especially in the pluralistic middle colonies and in the writings of Rhode Island's Roger Williams, Locke lent considerable support to the cause in his Letter concerning Toleration (1689). As a Christian rationalist, Locke renounced the ideas that faith can be forced and that piety demands a particular organizational or doctrinal orthodoxy.

If government exists simply to secure property, it can have no say over religion: "the Care of Souls is not committed to the Civil Magistrate, any more than to other Men. . . . Nor can any such Power be vested in the Magistrate by the consent of the People; because no man can so far abandon the care of his own Salvation, as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other" (1983 edition: 26). He added that "the Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the Commonwealth. The boundaries of both are fixed and immovable. He jumbles Heaven and Earth together . . . who mixes these two" (1983: 33).

Although Locke, responding to the fevered religious battles of his day, conceded the impracticality of extending tolerance to atheists, who he thought lacked morality, or Catholics, who he felt despised the rule of law, he still sought to distance religious belief from the coercive and corrupting force of the state. For in Locke's opinion, it was politically imposed unity, rather than religious diversity, that caused conflict.
This article was originally published in 2009. Robb A. McDaniel is an Associate Professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
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The American revolutionary generation drew many of its ideas from the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Often credited as a founder of modern "liberal" thought, Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law, social contract, religious toleration, and the right to revolution that proved essential to both the American Revolution and the U.S.

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The Founding Fathers were inspired by John Locke's Civil Government Document. From this, they referenced Natural Rights in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers made their government based off of Natural Rights and the "consent to be governed." From the British, they experienced a despotic leader where their voices were not heard. Therefore John Locke's Civil Government inspired the Founding Fathers profoundly.

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The third part of the solution followed from liberalism's basic commitment to the freedom and integrity of the individual, which the limitation of power is, after all, meant to preserve. From the liberal perspective, the individual is not only a citizen who shares a social contract with his fellows but also a person with rights upon which the state may not encroach if majoritarianism is to be meaningful. A majority verdict can come about only if individuals are free to some extent to exchange their views. This involves, beyond the right to speak and write freely, the freedom to associate and organize and, above all, freedom from fear of reprisal. But the individual also has rights apart from his role as citizen. These rights secure his personal safety and hence his protection from arbitrary arrest and punishment. Beyond these rights are those that preserve large areas of privacy. In a liberal democracy there are affairs that do not concern the state. Such affairs may range from the practice of religion to the creation of art and the raising of children by their parents. For liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries they also included most of the activities through which individuals engage in production and trade. Eloquent declarations affirming such rights were embodied in the British Bill of Rights (1689), the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and Constitution (ratified 1788), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the basic documents of countries throughout the world that later used these declarations as their models. These documents and declarations asserted that freedom is more than the right to cast a vote in an occasional election; it is the fundamental right of people to live their own lives.

Economic foundations

If the political foundations of liberalism were laid in Great Britain, so too were its economic foundations. By the 18th century parliamentary constraints were making it difficult for British monarchs to pursue the schemes of national aggrandizement favoured by most rulers on the Continent. These rulers fought for military supremacy, which required a strong economic base. Because the prevailing mercantilist theory understood international trade as a zero-sum game-in which gain for one country meant loss for another-national governments intervened to determine prices, protect their industries from foreign competition, and avoid the sharing of economic information.

These practices soon came under liberal challenge. In France a group of thinkers known as the physiocrats argued that the best way to cultivate wealth is to allow unrestrained economic competition. Their advice to government was " laissez faire, laissez passer" ("let it be, leave it alone"). This laissez-faire doctrine found its most thorough and influential exposition in The Wealth of Nations (1776), by the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith. Free trade benefits all parties, according to Smith, because competition leads to the production of more and better goods at lower prices. Leaving individuals free to pursue their self-interest in an exchange economy based upon a division of labour will necessarily enhance the welfare of the group as a whole. The self-seeking individual becomes harnessed to the public good because in an exchange economy he must serve others in order to serve himself. But it is only in a genuinely free market that this positive consequence is possible; any other arrangement, whether state control or monopoly, must lead to regimentation, exploitation, and economic stagnation.

Adam Smith Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Every economic system must determine not only what goods will be produced but also how those goods are to be apportioned, or distributed ( see distribution of wealth and income). In a market economy both of these tasks are accomplished through the price mechanism. The theoretically free choices of individual buyers and sellers determine how the resources of society- labour, goods, and capital-shall be employed. These choices manifest themselves in bids and offers that together determine a commodity's price. Theoretically, when the demand for a commodity is great, prices rise, making it profitable for producers to increase the supply; as supply approximates demand, prices tend to fall until producers divert productive resources to other uses ( see supply and demand). In this way the system achieves the closest possible match between what is desired and what is produced. Moreover, in the distribution of the wealth thereby produced, the system is said to assure a reward in proportion to merit. The assumption is that in a freely competitive economy in which no one is barred from engaging in economic activity, the income received from such activity is a fair measure of its value to society.

Presupposed in the foregoing account is a conception of human beings as economic animals rationally and self-interestedly engaged in minimizing costs and maximizing gains. Since each person knows his own interests better than anyone else does, his interests could only be hindered, and never enhanced, by government interference in his economic activities.

In concrete terms, classical liberal economists called for several major changes in the sphere of British and European economic organization. The first was the abolition of numerous feudal and mercantilist restrictions on countries' manufacturing and internal commerce. The second was an end to the tariffs and restrictions that governments imposed on foreign imports to protect domestic producers. In rejecting the government's regulation of trade, classical economics was based firmly on a belief in the superiority of a self-regulating market. Quite apart from the cogency of their arguments, the views of Smith and his 19th-century English successors, the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, became increasingly convincing as Britain's Industrial Revolution generated enormous new wealth and made that country into the "workshop of the world." Free trade, it seemed, would make everyone prosperous.

In economic life as in politics, then, the guiding principle of classical liberalism became an undeviating insistence on limiting the power of government. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham cogently summarized this view in his sole advice to the state: "Be quiet." Others asserted that that government is best that governs least. Classical liberals freely acknowledged that government must provide education, sanitation, law enforcement, a postal system, and other public services that were beyond the capacity of any private agency. But liberals generally believed that, apart from these functions, government must not try to do for the individual what he is able to do for himself.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Bentham, the philosopher James Mill, and James's son John Stuart Mill applied classical economic principles to the political sphere. Invoking the doctrine of utilitarianism-the belief that something has value when it is useful or promotes happiness-they argued that the object of all legislation should be "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." In evaluating what kind of government could best attain this objective, the utilitarians generally supported representative democracy, asserting that it was the best means by which government could promote the interests of the governed. Taking their cue from the notion of a market economy, the utilitarians called for a political system that would guarantee its citizens the maximum degree of individual freedom of choice and action consistent with efficient government and the preservation of social harmony. They advocated expanded education, enlarged suffrage, and periodic elections to ensure government's accountability to the governed. Although they had no use for the idea of natural rights, their defense of individual liberties-including the rights to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly-lies at the heart of modern democracy. These liberties received their classic advocacy in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859), which argues on utilitarian grounds that the state may regulate individual behaviour only in cases where the interests of others would be perceptibly harmed.

The utilitarians thus succeeded in broadening the philosophical foundations of political liberalism while also providing a program of specific reformist goals for liberals to pursue. Their overall political philosophy was perhaps best stated in James Mill's article "Government," which was written for the supplement (1815-24) to the fourth through sixth editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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liberalism - liberalism - Rights: The third part of the solution followed from liberalism's basic commitment to the freedom and integrity of the individual, which the limitation of power is, after all, meant to preserve.