John Locke’s Political Philosophy

Locke based the foundation of his political theory on the idea of inalienable rights. Locke said that these
rights came from God as the creator of human beings. Human beings were the property of God, and Locke
claimed that the denial of the rights of human beings that God had given them was an affront to God. In
this way, Locke had established “negative rights” for all human beings. Humans had the inalienable rights
of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of their own goals. This is in contrast to “positive rights” such as the
right to equality, health care or a living wage that have been claimed as rights by political philosophers since
Locke.

Locke adopted the idea of social contract theory to form the basis of what he considered to be a legitimate
government. The most famous previous version of social contract theory was that of Thomas Hobbes where
he used the theory to form the basis of a monarchy. Locke found this form of government to be in
contradiction to his ideas of inalienable rights and while he agreed with the idea that governments were
formed by the agreement of society he disagreed with the idea that they were looking for security as the
primary goal of society. Locke instead based his primary value of government on the idea of liberty, and he
claimed that the only legitimate form of government was one that operated on the explicit consent of the
governed.

This is where Locke’s philosophy becomes a bit complex. His ideal government was that of a Democratic
Republic where policy was dictated by the will of the majority, but individual rights were to be respected.
Contemporary governments have accomplished this through a series of checks and balances. Locke
believed that the rights that I have described above had come from God, but at the same time, he also
believed that Democracy could result in some of the property of the citizens to be redistributed. His
justification for this was that once a government was formed it had to function as a ruling body and as
functioning as a single body majority rules was the most fair way to implement any policy.

However, because each individual in the body politic would know that while sometimes they would be on
the winning side of the majority other times they may not, the urge to wield tyranny against their fellow
citizens would be somewhat curbed. In this way, what Locke was saying was that while the majority could
become an oppressive force the individual’s fear of that force justified the upholding of certain rights among
the citizens. The majority would respect the rights of others on the basis of wanting their own rights to be
respected on similar issues and Locke felt that “the golden rule” would ultimately dictate action.

This proved wrong in the short term but governments that have formed on these principals have been
essentially progressive and the rights of individuals have increased over time as Democratic Republics
have developed. Still, both the ideas of individual liberty and democratic principles are often at odds with
each other and the question of positive rights instead of Locke’s strictly negative rights still remain.
The significance of Locke’s vision of political society can scarcely be exaggerated.
His integration of individualism within the framework of the law of nature and his account of the origins and
limits of legitimate government authority inspired the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and the
broad outlines of the system of government adopted in the U.S. Constitution. George Washington, the first
president of the United States, once described Locke as “the greatest man who had ever lived.” In France
too, Lockean principles found clear expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and
other justifications of the French Revolution of 1789.
The civil rights movement
The American civil rights movement came to a head under the Johnson
administration. Many had seen the March on Washington in August 1963 as
the apotheosis of the nonviolent struggle for civil rights. Some 200,000 people
had come from all over the country to gather at the Lincoln Memorial,
where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Earlier
in the decade, black and white Freedom Riders had been violently attacked
when they rode through the South together on buses, hoping to provoke the
federal government into enforcing its bans on segregation in interstate bus
travel and in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with
interstate travel. With passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil rights
movement saw many of its goals embodied in federal law.

Freedom Riders preparing to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, May 24, 1961.Perry Aycock/AP Images

Despite the Civil Rights Act, however, most African Americans in the South
found it difficult to exercise their voting rights. In the summer of 1964,
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which both had been instrumental in the
Freedom Rides—and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), whose history reached back to W.E.B. Du Bois and
the Niagara Movement—organized a massive effort to register voters
in Mississippi. They also conducted “Freedom Schools” in which the
philosophy of the civil rights movement, African American history, and
leadership development were taught. A large number of white student activists
from the North had joined this “Freedom Summer” effort, and, when one black
and two white volunteers were killed, it made headlines nationally and greatly
heightened awareness of the movement. These murders echoed, on a small
scale, the violence visited upon countless African Americans—those who had
participated in demonstrations and many who had not—during the previous
decade, in forms that ranged from beatings by police to bombings of
residences and black institutions. In 1965, mass demonstrations were held to
protest the violence and other means used to prevent black voter registration.
After a peaceful protest march was halted by police violence on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Johnson responded with the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, which abolished literacy tests and other voter restrictions and
authorized federal intervention against voter discrimination. The subsequent
rise in black voter registration ultimately transformed politics in the South.

Selma MarchSelma March.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

These gains were considerable, but many African Americans remained
dissatisfied by the slow progress. The nonviolent civil rights movement was
challenged by “black power” advocates, such as Stokely Carmichael, who
called for a freedom struggle that sought political, economic, and cultural
objectives beyond narrowly defined civil rights reform. By the late 1960s not
just King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP but
also SNCC and CORE were challenged by militant organizations, such as
the Black Panther Party, whose leaders dismissed nonviolent principles, often
quoting black nationalist Malcolm X’s imperative: “by any means
necessary.” Race riots broke out in most of the country’s large cities, notably
in 1965 in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which left 34 dead, and two years
later in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Four summers of violence resulted
in many deaths and property losses that left whole neighbourhoods ruined
and their residents more distressed than ever. After a final round provoked by
the assassination of King in April 1968, the rioting abated. Yet the activist
pursuit of political and economic empowerment for African Americans
continued, reflected culturally in the Black Arts movement—which
pursued populist art that promoted the ideas of black separatism—and in the
politicized soul music that replaced gospel and folk music as the sound track
of the freedom struggle.