John Locke
Liberalism / empiricism · England, 1632–1704
The lens
The Lockean lens reads an event by asking whether government is acting within the trust for which it was established—the preservation of life, liberty, and property—or has begun to exceed it. Its vocabulary is natural rights held prior to government, consent as the ground of legitimate authority, property arising when labor is mixed with the common store, and political power held in trust rather than owned. This lens asks, with the Second Treatise of Government, whether rulers are governing by settled, promulgated law or by arbitrary decree, since Locke defines tyranny as the exercise of power beyond right. It treats the people as retaining a residual authority to judge when that trust is broken, and reads major controversies for signs that consent is being manufactured or ignored. From A Letter Concerning Toleration it distinguishes the magistrate's care of civil goods from matters of belief the state cannot rightly compel. It asks whether appropriation and accumulation still leave enough for others or have slipped their original proviso. Where other lenses accept established authority as such, the Lockean lens asks whether authority remains within its commission. It notices the drift from law to prerogative, and the difference between consent and mere acquiescence.
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