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The whole function of rights in Locke's theory is to provide an independent criterion for judging the legitimacy (and not only the moral appropriateness) of government action, including legislation. It is this structural point about contract theory which constitutes the strongest objection against Tully's interpretation. (GF)

A review essay on books by Richard Ashcraft: Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1986); & Locke's Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987 [see listings in IRPS No. 51]). Much has changed in the study of the work of John Locke since the days when Leo Strauss saw him as an acquisitive immoralist, & Crawford Macpherson described him as exemplifying seventeenth-century bourgeois liberalism. Richard Ashcraft continues in the vein of new studies of Locke in which Locke's opposition to any system of property that does not enact distributive economic rights has come to the fore. Ashcraft has undertaken vast amounts of archival research in order to establish the nonphilosophic context of those who, like Locke, attacked the defense of absolute monarchy in Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (seventeenth century). The earlier of Ashcraft's two books, Revolutionary Politics, presents the results of this research, & of his reading of hundreds of tracts written during the attempt to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession to the throne of England at the end of the 1670s; the book is a monumental achievement, which will undoubtedly be the starting point for Locke studies for some time. Locke's Two Treatises develops Ashcraft's interpretation of Locke's views on property through a textual analysis based on the historical foundations laid in the earlier volume. Ashcraft's view of Locke as an economic radical is not borne out by biographical evidence nor by textual examination of his theories of political right & social obligation. The fundamental tension in Locke's thought lay in his attempt to use the radical, egalitarian requirement of individual consent to government in the service of the Earl of Shaftesbury's liberalism; the doctrine of "tacit consent" had to be developed in such a way that it could be applied to any government that pursued the public good. F. S. J. Ledgister