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nydus/Two Treatises of GovernmentPublic

Locke critiques the concepts of absolute monarchy and divine right, arguing instead for a government founded on natural rights, individual freedom, and the consent of the governed, which protects the fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property.

Page 67 of 315
Table of Contents

VI

If anyone will suppose, in favour of our author, that he here meant, that parents, who are in subjection themselves to the absolute authority of their father, have yet some power over their children: I confess he is something nearer the truth: but he will not at all hereby help our author; for he nowhere speaking of the paternal power, but as an absolute unlimited authority, cannot be supposed to understand anything else here, unless he himself had limited it, and showed how far it reached; and that he means here paternal authority in that large extent, is plain from the immediately following words: “This subjection of children being, says he, the foundation of all regal authority,” p. 12. The subjection then that in the former line, he says, “every man is in to his parents,” and consequently what Adam’s grandchildren were in to their parents, was that which was the fountain of all regal authority, i.e. according to our author, absolute unlimitable authority. And thus Adam’s children had regal authority over their children, whilst they themselves were subjects to their father, and fellow-subjects with their children. But let him mean as he pleases, it is plain he allows “Adam’s children to have paternal power,” p. 12, as also all other fathers to have “paternal power over their children,” O. 156. From whence one of these two things will necessarily follow, that either Adam’s children, even in his lifetime, had, and so all other fathers have, as he phrases it, p. 12, “by right of fatherhood, royal authority over their children,” or else that Adam, “by right of fatherhood, had not royal authority.” For it cannot be but that paternal power does, or does not, give royal authority to them that have it: if it does not, then Adam could not be sovereign by this title, nor anybody else; and then there is an end of all our author’s politics at once: if it does give royal authority, then everyone that has paternal power has royal authority; and then, by our author’s patriarchal government, there will be as many kings as there are fathers.

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