“The natural liberty of man,” writes John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, “is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”
My instinct is to come at that assertion from a strictly Christian perspective, arguing that of course, man is created to be subject only to God, not to man, but I quickly catch myself and consider to the contrary. Please join me in the following onslaught of questions, which I promise are intentional, and not as stream-of-consciousness as they may seem.
Two things about God’s creation of the world seem to me to prove that man was made to be governed. First, in the creation of man and woman, it looks to me that God established a form of hierarchy – Eve was created to be Adam’s helper, not his co-ruler-of-the-beasts-and-plants, so does that not, in a way, imply that she was subject to him? That her femininity was subject to his masculinity? (Dear feminists, please hold your tar and feathers!)
Secondly, both Locke and Hobbes assert that man’s natural state is in conflict with some other state of war or disorder such that societies and leaderships do inevitably form wherever groups of homo sapiens are gathered. Why should we believe that there are two opposing forces of “natural” and “war” rather than believing instead that it is the most natural to man to be ordered into a hierarchy?
What, furthermore, does Locke truly mean by freedom? We have, he says, the rights to life, liberty, and property (a phrase borrowed by the Declaration of Independence, but adapted from “property” to “pursuit of happiness). While his definition is that freedom means not being subject to any man, I would like to counter that maybe, given our apparently natural tendency towards disorder, freedom is, rather, what we have when we are subject to a just government, one which provides order.
Of course, what do I myself mean by just? Furthermore, does a government have freedom when it is subject to serving the happiness of the people? If a people are immoral, can they ever be happy? Does their immorality enslave them? Is our natural freedom to be disordered, or is our freedom derived from order itself, which better enables us to pursue life, property, happiness, and whatever else we might desire?
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