Revision summary
Locke’s contract starts from natural rights and inconvenience, not from a war of all against all. Consent creates a community and a trustee legislature. The end is preservation of life, liberty, and estate. Betrayal of trust justifies revolution. Hobbes yields an absolute sword; Locke yields limited government.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
John Locke in the Two Treatises of Government treats political society as a contract among persons who already have natural rights. The contract creates a trustee government, not an unlimited sovereign.
Body
The argument
- In the state of nature, persons are free and equal under natural law. Reason teaches that none may harm another in life, health, liberty, or possessions.
- Inconvenience, not Hobbesian war, is the problem: there is no known standing law, no impartial judge, and no executive power to enforce.
- People consent, expressly or tacitly, to form a community and then to set a legislature as the supreme fiduciary power.
- Government is a trust for the preservation of property in Locke’s wide sense: life, liberty, and estate.
- When the trust is betrayed, the people have a right of revolution. James II is the historical target.
Contrast
- Hobbes’s covenant yields an undivided sword; subjects retain only the right of self-preservation against immediate death.
- Rousseau’s contract creates the general will; Locke keeps majority rule inside natural-law limits and private property.
- Rawls later rebuilt contract as a hypothetical original position. Locke’s contract is more historical and proprietary.
- Indian “We, the People” and the right to constitutional remedies echo trust and limited government more than Leviathan.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD N[State of nature] --> R[Natural rights] R --> C[Consent and trust] C --> G[Limited government] G --> REV[Right of revolution]
Conclusion
Locke’s social contract is consent to a limited, fiduciary state that protects natural rights. It is the classic liberal alternative to Hobbesian absolutism and the ancestor of constitutional trust.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Factors like community, culture and nation weaken the hegemony of neo-liberalism today. Discuss
Next question on this syllabus topic (2022 · Q2(a)). View answer →
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Did Locke support unlimited majority rule?
No. Majority is the decision rule of the community, but natural law and the trust still bind.
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Is the Indian Preamble a Lockean contract?
It is a popular founding text of limited government. It also adds socialist and secular aims that Locke did not write.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2022 · Q5(b) · PSIR GS 1 · 10 marks
The Preamble of the Indian Constitution reflects itself as a 'social contract'. Elucidate.
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