John Locke, Social Contract, and Natural Rights

Kant asked what duty requires. Aristotle asked what character requires. John Locke asked a different question: what rights do we have simply by being human? And what happens to those rights when we form a government? His answer became the philosophical backbone of most modern constitutions — including the language of “life, liberty, and property” that echoes through the world’s founding documents.

MCQ Questions

Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude

John Locke: What Rights Do We Have?

1632–1704 — the “Father of Liberalism,” and social contract theory

Starting Point

State of Nature

Natural rights already exist, pre-politically

Core Claim

Natural Rights

Life, liberty and property, by being human

Why Government Exists

Social Contract

Consent forms government to protect rights

Legitimacy

Consent of the Governed

Not divine right

The Failsafe

Right to Revolution

Alter or abolish a rights-violating government

Key Text

Two Treatises, 1689

A rebuttal to the divine right of kings

📑 Contents

1Must Know
2Good to Know
3Test Yourself
4Great to Know

Must Know

John Locke (1632–1704), an English philosopher, is a foundational figure of social contract theory. People often call him the “Father of Liberalism.”
Locke argued that in a pre-political “state of nature,” people already have certain natural rights — to life, liberty, and property. They have these rights simply by being human, not because any government granted them.
For Locke, government arises through a social contract: people consent to form a government to better protect these already-existing natural rights — not to create rights that didn’t exist before.
A government’s authority rests on the consent of the governed. So Locke held that if a government keeps violating the natural rights it was formed to protect, the people keep a right to revolution — to alter or abolish that government.

Good to Know

Locke’s social contract differs sharply from Thomas Hobbes’s earlier version. Hobbes described the state of nature as a brutal “war of all against all” — which justified an all-powerful sovereign to keep order. Locke’s state of nature is comparatively peaceful and rights-respecting. It justifies only a limited government, bound by the consent of the governed.
Locke’s theory of property says a person gains rightful ownership by mixing their labour with what nature provides — the “labour theory of property.” This idea later influenced both classical liberal and early capitalist economic thought.
Locke’s ideas had a direct, traceable influence on Enlightenment-era political documents. The American Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a well-known adaptation of Locke’s “life, liberty, and property.” It reflects his broader influence on the constitutional design of consent-based, limited government.
In civil-service ethics discussions, Lockean thinking underlies a key idea: public authority is a trust that citizens hand over for a limited purpose. This gives a philosophical basis for why officials answer to the public, rather than holding power as an end in itself.

Test Yourself

Great to Know

Locke laid out this theory in Two Treatises of Government (1689). He wrote it partly as a rebuttal to theories of the divine right of kings. His argument instead: legitimate political authority can only rest on the reasoned consent of free and equal individuals.
Twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls revived and reworked social contract theory in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. He introduced the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance” — a thought experiment where people choose the principles of justice without knowing what position they’ll hold in the resulting society: rich or poor, majority or minority. The idea is to guarantee fairness.
A standard criticism of classical social contract theory, including Locke’s: it’s historically fictional. No one ever actually signed such a contract. Most contemporary defenders don’t treat it as a historical claim — they treat it as a thought experiment about what principles would justify a government’s authority.

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