Second Treatise of Government

Locke’s argument that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, and that its purpose is the preservation of life, liberty, and property. He derives property from labour — mixing your work with what nature left in common makes it yours — and argues that men leave the state of nature to secure an impartial judge, not to hand over their rights. The closing chapters defend the right of a people to dissolve a government that has broken its trust. It is the single most direct philosophical source for the American Declaration of Independence.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in McCord’s Renaissance and Enlightenment Political Thought section, directly after Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Hobbes’s “On the Citizen” — the sequence in which the curriculum moves from power as such, to the sovereign as the answer to disorder, to consent and property as the answer to the sovereign.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas part, section Renaissance and Enlightenment Political Thought — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Marked with a ☑️ on the source page. The page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted.

Connections

• John Locke — the author.
• Liberalism — the tradition this book largely founds.
• Founding Fathers — the readers who carried the argument into the American founding documents.
• The Prince — the entry immediately before it in the same section of McCord’s list.
• Government — the institution whose legitimacy the book is about.