Harold J. Laski

Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.

But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his fellows.

They are born subjects of no government or country; and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State has been accepted.

Yet Locke urged that the primitive members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any satisfactory sense, would be impossible.

The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously insisted, it is not a contract.

If legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent?

Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had before the institution of political society.

The State has power only for the protection of natural law.

On the contrary, it is a contract with the community as a whole which thus becomes that common political superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish infractions of it.

Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group.

The contract is thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character.

It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains them--life and liberty and property--will be…

But just as Locke's natural state implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of hard necessity.

The result is uncertainty and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable.

But because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient variety in the conceptions of justice.

Law, in such an aspect, is clearly a means to the realization of freedom in the same way that the rule of the road will, by its common acceptance, save its observers from accident.

Locke thus traverses the ground Hobbes had covered in his Leviathan though he rejects every premise of the earlier thinker.

It can only be for the public benefit, and our enquiry is thus a study of the grounds of political obedience.

Few great thinkers have so little perceived the psychological foundations of politics.

But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown.

For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral…

He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible retort to the theory of Divine Right.

But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.

He yet stated more clearly than either the general problem of the modern State.

Locke may not possess the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first of English political thinkers.