John Locke on Wa

1. 79
Few passages in John Locke’s political writings are more controversial
than the incongruous descriptions of the state of nature in chapters 3 and 9
of the Second Treatise on Government. A hodgepodge of opposites where
men live at once in a “State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and
Preservation” while remaining “very unsafe, very unsecure,” Locke’s
state of nature is, according to John Dunn, “probably the most misun-
derstood idea in the English radical’s political philosophy.”1
Owing to
the heterogeneity of Locke’s description of natural society, A. John Sim-
mons observes, “any social characterization of the state of nature given by
Locke would represent a confusion on his part.”2
This view, reinforced by
the writings of a number of distinguished Locke scholars, alternately char-
acterizes the philosopher’s natural state as one of idyllic peace, Hobbesian
war, or, for some readers, a state devoid of “empirical content.” Why this
is the case is apparent from Locke’s disparate descriptions of the state of
nature in chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise, but what is less clear is
whether the level of disagreement over these chapters is the result of the
philosopher’s own errors or those of his readers. If one is willing to accept
Peter Laslett’s conclusion that chapter 9 was simply a late addition to the
Second Treatise, it is possible to concur, perhaps not unfairly, that Locke
is to blame.3
But a number of recent and less recent commentaries aimed
1. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the
Argument of the Two Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 46.
2. A. John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of
Society (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), p. 29.
3. In a footnote to chapter 9 of the Second Treatise, Laslett writes: “There is nothing
in this short chapter to connect it with what goes before, or what comes after....It seems
Ethan Putterman
Locke and “War by Design”
Telos 186 (Spring 2019): 79–95
doi:10.3817/0319186079
www.telospress.com

2. 80 Ethan Putterman
at integrating the arguments of chapters 3 and 9 would indicate that this
confusion rests, by and large, beyond the text.4
In this essay, I examine the epistemology behind humankind’s com-
prehension of natural law in Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature (1664),
the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and other writings
to argue that his state of nature is more consistent than appears from the
varied descriptions in chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise. Reject-
ing the bleak Hobbesian reading of Lockean natural society made famous
by Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson years ago, as well as the idyllic,
peaceful view espoused by much later scholars such as Richard Ashcraft
and Kirstie McClure, I argue that the symmetry between chapters 3 and
9 of the Second Treatise is made most apparent by way of the theory of
knowledge espoused in the Essays on the Law of Nature and the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding. Adopting a bifurcated view, I argue
that the state of nature is both an analytical construct or “set of jural co-
ordinates on which...[moral] situations must be placed if they are to be
understood accurately,”5
as John Dunn famously argues, and a span of
time when humankind’s misunderstandings and misapplications of nat-
ural law produce conflagrations of a fundamentally different order than
what Locke defines as “War.” It is Locke’s belief that war is dependent
upon men’s comprehension of the natural laws and that the dearth of such
knowledge produces something else: “Confusion and Disorder.”
Examining this dependency, I show that Locke’s varied descriptions
of natural society refer to a single, uniform non-rational state in which
persons remain formally at peace so long as they do not knowingly violate
the laws of nature, even if, for the most part, their social condition remains
“very unsafe, very unsecure.” This recognition, emphasizing the salience
of human motivation to war and reconciliation, is meaningful because, ac-
cording to the philosopher, it is only the latter condition that allows for
the possibility of “friendship and trust” following violent conflict. Locke
reveals the necessary conditions for lasting peace, what ought to be done
therefore, like chapter XV...to be an insertion of 1689.” John Locke, Two Treatises of
Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960), p. 350n. Subse-
quent references will be cited parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation TT.
4. With the exception of Laslett, Dunn, and Simmons, most Locke scholars believe
that chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise are not inconsistent. Unfortunately, there is
nothing close to a consensus concerning the nature of Locke’s supposed consistency. The
philosopher is said to be consistently arguing for a state of peace, of war, or neither.
5. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, p. 110.

3. Locke and “War By Design” 81
and, significantly, what actions ought to be avoided during war to ensure
that the psychological underpinnings essential to achieving and sustaining
peace are not undermined.
Competing Views of the Lockean State of Nature
Locke’s state of nature is said to be a realm of opposites in which the
“very principles” of such a right are violated inevitably. It is a moment in
time when the laws of nature are “plain and intelligible” (TT, II.ix.124,
351), and yet human beings remain “full of fears and continual dangers”
owing to certain “inconveniences” (TT, II.ix.127, 352). Of these inconve-
niences there are, arguably, three dominant competing views of his state
of nature (and transition to political society) in the secondary literature.
The first and least controversial of these interpretations is that Lockean
precivil society is a peaceful place where occasional violent skirmishes
remain the exception. This view is consistent with the belief that “acci-
dents” or “inconveniences” owing to the absence of a common judge are
the chief problem of primitive man and that prior to the creation of private
property there was little “room for Quarrels and Contentions” (TT, II.v.31,
290; II.v.39, 296). According to this reading, the state of nature is exactly
what Locke describes in chapter 3: “a State of Peace, Good Will, Mu-
tual Assistance, and Preservation” owing to collective reason and general
comprehension of the natural laws. Peace, rather than strife, is the norm,
and those who “confound” or conflate this placidity with what Locke la-
bels as “war” are wrong. The former is neither an actual nor a de facto
state of war owing to men’s ability to rationally comprehend the natural
laws. Though not all persons willingly abide by these laws, the vast ma-
jority is observant. This is a subtext of Richard Ashcraft’s famous essay
in which he characterizes Locke’s state of war as “a particular incident
between an ‘aggressor’ and an ‘innocent party’ occurring within the con-
text of a peaceful state of nature.”6
In his later and much more developed
elaboration upon this condition, Ashcraft reaffirms this idea by explain-
ing how
the most generalized form of social relations in the state of nature...sees
the individual as a member of a natural community. Locke presupposes
that ‘the preservation of all mankind’ is a constitutive element of human
6. Richard Ashcraft, “Locke’s State of Nature: Historical Fact or Moral Fiction,”
American Political Science Review 62, no. 3 (1968): 904.

4. 82 Ethan Putterman
consciousness in the state of nature. It is the ability of individuals to act
on the basis of such a belief that ensures that the precepts of natural law
can, in any degree, be enforced in that state.7
Similarly, Kirstie M. McClure writes that for persons living within natu-
ral society, “human judgment is invested with a clarity and immediacy
with respect to property that lends support to Locke’s characterization of
the natural condition as one of ‘Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and
Preservation.’”8
These positive attributes are attainable because the phi-
losopher’s “epistemology of right yields knowledge of the moral law” and
“unlike Hobbes...Locke represented that state as governed by a law of
nature, discoverable to human reason.”9
Against this peaceable view, the most well-known competing com-
mentary emphasizes that “accidents” result from the absence of a common
judge rendering violent conflict in the state of nature to be the norm. Vio-
lent run-ins and civil strife prevail to produce a de facto state of war that
is indistinguishable from what Locke categorizes as war more formally.10
The philosopher believes that avoiding war “is one great reason of Men’s
putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature” (TT,
II.iii.21, 282). Political society is seen as a solution to conflict by erecting
a sovereign who will make the natural laws “settl’d,” known, and enforce-
able. Intermittent violence and unrest within the state of nature (before
and after the emergence of private property) renders such a political so-
lution mandatory. Thomas L. Pangle, for example, writes that individuals
confederate out of fear and that “Locke exaggerates...the peaceful and
reasonable possibilities of the precivil condition in order to mask the ex-
tent of his agreement with the unpalatable Hobbesian conception of human
nature.”11
Similarly, D. A. Lloyd Thomas asserts that Locke agrees “with
7. Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen and
Unwin: 1987), pp. 100, 108.
8. Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), p. 140.
9. Ibid., pp. 154, 140; Peter A. Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlight-
enment (Ithaca NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 43, 53.
10. Peter C. Myers, Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political
Rationality (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1998), pp. 114–20; Thomas L.
Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of America’s Founders and
the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 250.
11. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 246; R. M. Lemos, Hobbes and
Locke: Power and Consent (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 87; C. B. Macpher-
son, “Natural Rights in Hobbes and Locke,” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval

5. Locke and “War By Design” 83
Hobbes on what the state of nature will be like,” and Peter C. Myers ex-
plains that “the actual distance between Locke’s and Hobbes’s accounts is
much shorter than would appear,” owing to the antisocial desires that stem
from men’s “uneasiness” over the pain associated with labor.12
Although a number of other authors reject this comparison with
Hobbes, many still recognize that “human egotism” renders “peaceful
coexistence...extremely difficult to maintain.”13
Some of these commen-
tators acknowledge the existence of natural differences and biases between
persons in the state of nature but disagree upon the extent to which per-
sons are either Hobbesian combatants (Myers, Strauss) or rational beings
knowledgeable of the natural laws (yet who are incapable of applying this
knowledge to particular cases for want of a common judge). The arrival of
a sovereign settles this question as it enacts its judgments with the collec-
tive force of the community.
Rejecting each of these disparate readings of Locke’s state of nature,
John Dunn famously repudiates any and all efforts to imbue Locke’s nat-
ural state with a “transitive empirical content.”14
It is Dunn’s belief that
“what defines the state of nature is that it is neither the state of war nor
a properly political condition...[but] any relationship between any men
which is not modified by particular acts of direct aggression or by the
particular explicit reciprocal normative understandings which institute a
shared political society.”15
Lockean natural society is not intended as a
“sociological fantasy, a conjectural pre-history or a hypothesis about be-
havior” or a “graphic depiction of the actual moral situations of men,” but
it “represents the set of jural co-ordinates on which such situations must
be placed if they are to be understood accurately.”16
Dunn’s thesis can be
deduced, in part, from Locke’s statement that “where-ever there are any
number of Men, however associated, that have no such decisive power
to appeal to, there they are still in the state of Nature” (TT, II.vii.89, 325)
and “’tis plain the World never was, nor ever will be, without Numbers of
Men in that State” (TT, II.ii.14, 276). According to Dunn, Locke’s state
(Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1973), p. 232; R. H. Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford:
Clarenden Press, 1966), pp. 74–78; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 227–33.
12. Myers, Our Only Star and Compass, pp. 114, 110; D. A. Lloyd Thomas, Locke on
Government (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 24.
13. W. M. Spellman, John Locke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 112.
14. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, p. 103.
15. Ibid., p. 111.
16. Ibid., p. 110.

6. 84 Ethan Putterman
is fundamentally transhistorical and contentless and there is a “clear but
limited sense” in which the philosopher’s “conjectural history of social
development...is sociologically so ludicrous that the concept becomes
gravely contaminated.”17
More recently, A. John Simmons concurs that
“any social characterization of the state of nature given by Locke would
represent a confusion on his part”18
and that
Locke’s concept of the state of nature does nothing to limit the possible
social descriptions of persons in that condition. When Locke attempts a
social characterization of the state of nature...he succumbs to a confu-
sion, for he is entitled to no particular social characterization. The state
of nature is not necessarily characterized by the inconvenience of having
no common judge. There is only the inconvenience of having no legiti-
mate common judge, which may or may not be a social problem (and
where it is a social problem, it will not always be of the same sort).19
It can be asserted that each of these three competing readings of Locke’s
state of nature intersect at various points depending upon whether or not
the natural laws are construed as being “plain and intelligible.” Whether
this intelligibility is truly as plain as Locke describes, or whether it must
be qualified by various criteria, is a question that is central to any effort to
reconcile chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise.
“Confusion and Disorder” in Precivil Society
Although, “’tis plain the World never was, nor ever will be, without Num-
bers of Men” living in the state of nature, this is not entirely evident
from the developmental account of the emergence of political society
in the Second Treatise. This is particularly so owing to the historically
bounded descriptions of the emergence of private property, the invention
of money, and the origin of consensual government, according to Locke
(TT, II.v.38–51, 295–302; II.xiii.101–12, 334–44). Although it is possible
that the philosopher errs in imbuing his state of nature with a positive so-
cial or historical content, as Simmons and Dunn assert, a more plausible
reading is that Locke sees his natural state as being both a historical epoch
and a transhistorical “set of jural co-ordinates on which...[moral] situa-
tions must be placed.”
17. Ibid., p. 113.
18. Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy, p. 29.
19. Ibid., p. 30.

7. Locke and “War By Design” 85
Similar to Jürgen Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere, to make a dis-
tant comparison, Lockean natural society can be said to refer to an actual
historical moment in the same way that Habermas’s public sphere existed
in the reading rooms, coffee houses, libraries, and salons of eighteenth-
century European bourgeois society and as a idealized analytical construct
for discursive debate. Intellectual historians dispute the reality of Haber-
mas’s claims about the emergence of a liberal-bourgeois public sphere in
late eighteenth-century Europe, yet Habermas argues beyond its actual
historical reality for an ideal type whose formal features are useful for in-
forming and legitimizing rational-critical dialogue.
Likewise, Locke’s “confusion” may arise from his readers’ unwill-
ingness to entertain the possibility of there being both historical and
transhistorical renderings to his natural state.Arguably, this notion appears
to be more reasonable and better grounded in the text than the alternative
view that the philosopher imbues his state of nature with a moral and so-
cial content because he was unable to break with the larger natural rights
tradition that preceded him.20
Locke was an original enough thinker to
have executed this breach or, assuming that he was not, at least profound
enough to have been aware that any social characterization of his state of
nature risked being “gravely contaminated”21
for all of the reasons that
Dunn and others emphasize.
To make this alternative reading persuasive, though, it is necessary to
demonstrate that the epistemology behind humankind’s difficulties at un-
derstanding the laws of nature in the Essays on the Laws of Nature and the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding establishes his precivil state to
be more coherent than it appears in the wildly discordant descriptions of
human relations in chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise. Of this dis-
cord, the cardinal problem for natural society in the Second Treatise is that
only a minority of its members is capable of rationally comprehending the
natural laws and even fewer are willing to act upon this knowledge.22
With
respect to this comprehension, it is Locke’s belief that any knowledge
of natural law is not innate but derives from sense-experience.23
Sense-
20. As Simmons argues in On the Edge of Anarchy, p. 30.
21. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, p. 113.
22. Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, pp. 43, 53; McClure, Judging Rights, p. 140; Pan-
gle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 245.
23. John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, in Political Essays, ed., Mark Goldie
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), II, p. 94. Subsequent references will be cited
parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation ELN.

8. 86 Ethan Putterman
perception and the “due use of our natural faculties”24
facilitate reason by
stimulating rational discourse and discovery (ELN, IV, 101).
In the Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke writes that “the founda-
tion of all knowledge” of the laws of nature is “derived from those things
which we perceive through our senses” (ELN, II, 94). The senses introduce
knowledge of natural law “into the deep recesses of the mind” (ELN, IV,
101), and “without the help of the senses, reason can achieve nothing more
than a labourer can working in darkness behind shuttered windows” (ELN,
IV, 101). This dependency between reason and sensual perception reveals
the “plain and intelligible” natural laws to be the end result of an experien-
tial process that, arguably, never entirely shutters the windows. For most
persons natural law does not lie “open in our hearts” but rather remains
“secret and hidden” and the privy of only those persons who actively en-
deavor to develop their reason to a level where the laws can be known
(ELN, II, 89; I, 85–86). For the unschooled, natural law is even more diffi-
cult to understand than mathematics (EHU, IV.iii.20, 552).25
Locke claims
that to acquire this understanding, individuals must endeavor to search out
and discover the laws’ true meaning:
We do not maintain that this law of nature, written as it were on tablets,
lies open in our hearts, and that, as soon as some inward light comes near
it (like a light approaching a notice board hung up in darkness), it is at
length read, perceived, and noted by the rays of light. Rather, by saying
that something can be known by the light of nature, we mean nothing
else but that there is some sort of truth to the knowledge of which a man
can attain by himself and without the help of another, if he makes proper
use of the faculties he is endowed with by nature. (ELN, II, 89)
Generally, this objective is difficult to achieve, and the natural laws re-
main obscure:
Who, as I might say, is there in a commonwealth who knows the laws
of his state, though they have been promulgated, hung up in public plac-
es, are easy to read and to understand, and are everywhere exposed to
24. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975 [1689]), I.iii.13, p. 75. Subsequent references will be
cited parenthetically in the text using the abbreviation EHU.
25. J. B. Schneewind, “Locke’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), p. 218.

9. Locke and “War By Design” 87
view? And how much less will he be acquainted with the secret and hid-
den laws of nature? (ELN, I, 85–86)
It is only the rare few who “in matters of daily practice...surrender them-
selves to the jurisdiction of reason and follow its lead” (ELN, I, 85). Most
persons are “either led astray by the violence of passions or being indiffer-
ent through carelessness or degenerate through habit...readily follow the
inducements of pleasure or the urges of their base instincts rather than the
dictates of reason” (ELN, I, 85).
These passages clash with Myers’s belief that it is “the pain of want
or the necessity of laboring” that is the “root of the disturbances of the
state of nature”26
by highlighting the difficulties that human beings expe-
rience at comprehension. Myers may be correct that Locke believes that
men “lacked a maturely developed faculty of rationality” and that “the
extreme difficulties that human beings at all times encounter” is “in dis-
covering, interpreting, and conforming with the law of nature,”27
but this
is not necessarily attributable to problems associated with labor. Also,
such difficulties do not mean that the bulk of humankind is irrational or
struggling to exist under Hobbesian conditions of war, but rather that all
socialize under conditions marked by a general non-rationality and inter-
mittent conflict stemming from pride, ambition, and other attributes that
foment turbulence in the passions.
Of these conditions, Locke explains that in society men listen to the
“law of fashion” before civil, political, or religious law: “[A]s to the pun-
ishments due from the laws of the commonwealth, [men] frequently flatter
themselves with the hopes of impunity. But no man escapes the punish-
ment of their censure and dislike, who offends against the fashion and
opinion of the company he keeps....Nor is there one of ten thousand,
who is stiff and insensible enough, to bear up under the constant dislike
and condemnation of his own club” (EHU, II.xxviii.12, 479). Locke ele-
vates fashion and opinion above civil, political, and religious law because
of its superior power; all will obey this intangible force before any writ-
ten legal code.
Each of these excerpts from the Essays on the Laws of Nature and
the Essay Concerning Human Understanding reveals the natural basis for
any written code to be “secret and hidden” to the unschooled majority.
26. Myers, Our Only Star and Compass, p. 118.
27. Ibid., p. 115.

10. 88 Ethan Putterman
Owing to “Self-love,” “Partiality,” and a general “negligence and uncon-
cernedness” with others, most individuals remain unaware of the natural
laws rendering all “constantly exposed to invasion” (TT, II.ix.125, 351;
II.ix.123, 350). In this uncertain condition, each seeks to escape a “very
unsafe and unsecure” peace (TT, II.ix.127, 352; II.ix.123, 350).
Critically, it can be argued that man’s ignorance of natural law does
not produce war but a type of chaos that Locke terms “Confusion and
Disorder” (TT, II.v.31, 290; II.ii.13, 275). “Confusion and Disorder” is
what occurs when individuals clash owing to differences that are irrec-
oncilable. More than anything else, this vulnerable status is characterized
by an “irregular and uncertain exercise of power” among those who are
“passionate and hasty” (TT, II.iii.16, 278). This irregular and uncertain ex-
ercise of power can be shown to be very different from violations of the
laws of nature in which there is a conscious “varying from the right Rule
of Reason” (TT, II.iii.19, 280; II.ii.10, 273) or a “declared design against
the person of another” (TT, II.iii.16, 278; II.iii.17, 279; II.iii.19, 280). Al-
though, the consequences and the punishment for both conditions are the
same—both are dangerous violators of natural law—the two conditions
vary in key respects. It is only such “declared design[s]” that constitute
war, as each is marked by a regularity or orderliness that allows for de-
signs against others. In the Second Treatise, Locke writes:
The State of War is a State of Enmity and Destruction; And therefore
declaring by Word or Action, not a passionate and hasty, but a sedate
setled Design, upon another Mans Life, puts him in a State of War with
him against whom he has declared such an Intention. (TT, II.iii.16, 278)
And:
But force, or a declared design of force upon the Person of another,
where there is no common Superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the
State of War. (TT, II.iii.19, 280)
And similarly:
And hence it is, that he who attempts to get another Man into his Ab-
solute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him; It
being to be understood as a Declaration of a Design upon his Life. (TT,
II.iii.17, 279)

11. Locke and “War By Design” 89
This “declared design against the person of another” is very different
from the “passionate and hasty” dangers of Locke’s disorderly state of
nature.28
Although, persons are in general “no strict Observers of Equity
and Justice” (TT, II.ii.13, 275; II.ix.123, 350), few have designs in the
sense of deliberate transgressions of equity and justice. Each is merely
guilty of negligence with respect to natural law. This is the opposite of
war or a situation in which persons are cognizant of natural law and yet
intentionally reject it. Of the latter, individuals have “renounced reason,
the common rule and measure, God hath given to Mankind” (TT, II.ii.11,
274).
Within Lockean natural society, the epistemological differences be-
tween “Confusion and Disorder” and “War” directly challenge Strauss’s
belief that Locke is merely a “Hobbes in liberal clothes” by revealing the
philosopher’s natural state to fall far short of a lethal war of all against
all. This divide between the two thinkers can be witnessed in a number
of ways, the most conspicuous of which is Locke’s belief that it is only
a small number of “Degenerate men” who have “quit the Principles of
Human Nature” (TT, II.ii.10, 273).29
It is only a small minority of persons
who actively wage sustained warfare against one another, while the re-
mainder of those living within natural society experience run-ins, disputes,
conflagrations, “accidents,” and “inconveniences” that are “irregular and
uncertain” (TT, II.ii.13, 275; II.ix.127, 352) but generally arbitrary in di-
rection and ephemeral in length. It is this status that allows for possible
reconciliation after civil conflict; critically, it is an accidental status that is
relevant to the creation of a common space for “friendship and trust” be-
tween former belligerents.
Importantly, what Locke highlights about the indispensability of
“friendship and trust” in this regard in the Second Treatise highlights the
intractability of the problem. As one recent theorist characterizes the prob-
lem, “How do groups of people who have been killing one another with
considerable enthusiasm and success come together to form a common
government? How can you work together, politically and economical-
ly, with the people who killed your parents, siblings, children, friends
28. Ashcraft writes that “an incident of war is an expressly ‘declared’ action. War
is the result of ‘a declaration or design’ to commit injury because men are presumed by
Locke not to harbor attitudes of ‘enmity and destruction’ toward each other.” See Ashcraft,
“Locke’s State of Nature,” p. 905; Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, p. 52.
29. Schouls discusses this briefly in Reasoned Freedom, p. 51.

12. 90 Ethan Putterman
or lovers? On the surface, it seems impossible, even grotesque.”30
Dunn
likewise notes Locke’s “pervasive insistence on the centrality of the psy-
chological and moral relation of trust to the benign working of political
authority.”31
Centuries ago, this Lockean idea is anticipated by earlier thinkers
who underscore the salience of human motivation to political stability and
peace without developing or elaborating upon its importance to peace. In
the Republic, for example, Plato emphasizes that domestic conflict ought
always to be prosecuted in a manner that is most conducive to resolu-
tion. Though all “will have their differences,” they must in the end “be
reconciled.”32
In the case of Athens the philosopher recommends that citi-
zens do not “ravage Greece or burn houses” and recognize that there are “a
few enemies who are to blame for their differences,” rather than the whole
population of “men, women and children.” Soldiers ought never to delib-
erately “ravage lands or tear down houses, since the many are friendly,”
and ultimately it is the “blameless ones who are suffering.”33
Similarly,
centuries later, Machiavelli asserts that a wise prince must never “be ra-
pacious and a usurper of property and the women of his subjects. From
these he must abstain, and whenever one does not take away either prop-
erty or honor from the generality of men, they live content.”34
The hatred
of the people is what most upsets stable political rule, and thus Machia-
velli recommends his prince “not to depart from good, when possible” and
only to “enter into evil, when forced by necessity.”35
This idea is echoed
30. As a reverse problem, it can be argued that the intentional subverting of “friendship
and trust” colors the most bestial of criminal atrocities committed against non-combatants
by warring armies and militias. Since the end of World War II, crimes against humanity
such as torture, mass rape, and genocide have been undertaken often with the express
intent of permanently and irretrievably upsetting any future conditions of “friendship and
trust” between foes. As a strategic rather than a tactical war aim, violence against civilians
is utilized on a wide scale to deliberately foster a level of ill will that will leave any viable
peace in tatters. See Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil
Wars, 1945–1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 681.
31. John Dunn, “The Concept of ‘Trust’in the Politics of John Locke,” in Philosophy
in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneed-
wind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 296.
32. Plato, Republic 471a.
33. Plato, Republic 471b.
34. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 2nd ed., trans. and intro. Harvey C. Mansfield
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 72.
35. Ibid., p. 70.

13. Locke and “War By Design” 91
by Rousseau in his view that “war does not at all consist in one or several
unpremeditated combats, not even in homicide and murder committed in
an outburst of anger, but in the constant, reflective, and manifest will to
destroy one’s enemy” where “coolness and reason are necessary.”36
And it
is these conditions, specifically, that render the essential conditions of rec-
onciliation, friendship and trust, impossible.37
According to Locke, “inviolable friendship” makes individuals better
and brings them together in a manner that gives society “great force.”38
This
“great force” is expressed concretely in the form of a general “friendship
and mutual assistance one of another”39
that is strengthened by the increase
in trust that accompanies improved morals. As a support for morals, it is
the “prevalencies of friendship and all the arts of persuasion” that provide
“the true motives to practice them and the ways to bring men to observe
them.”40
Friendship might be said to be the sine qua non to all legitimate
government because popular confidence in representatives is the basis of
consent. In this regard, friendship can be argued to be a vital albeit indirect
support to legitimate government by providing all with a personal stake in
its success. For individuals “preserve those things they have pleasure in”
and they “care to preserve with their persons and friendship those good
things which they do love and which they cannot have without them.”41
Ideally, this sentiment ought to be politically stabilizing to the extent that
36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Plan for Perpetual Peace, On the Government of
Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith
Bush, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, Univ. Press of New
England, 2005), p. 71.
37. To cite a more recent tragic example of this problem and the difficulty it poses
to “binding up the nation’s wounds,” as Abraham Lincoln famously characterized the U.S.
Civil War, the enduring antipathy between Serbs and Kosovars following the mass killing
of Kosovo in 1999 continues into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Today, the
burden of achieving peace in this troubled region can be best explained not only by the
scale of the war crimes committed but by the nature of the crimes: specifically, the “sedate
setled Design” behind the expulsion of 800,000 Kosovars and the orchestrated mass rape
and genocide that followed. Not unlike the site of the greatest war crime in Europe since
the end of World War II, the massacre of 8,300 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in
eastern Bosnia in July–August 1995, the people of Kosovo appear to fit Locke’s view of
tumultuous spirits devoid of trust or friendship in their need for permanent supervision by
the international community.
38. John Locke, “Philanthropy,” in Political Essays, p. 225.
39. John Locke, “Pacific Christians,” in Political Essays, p. 305.
40. John Locke, “Ethica B,” in Political Essays, pp. 319–20.
41. John Locke, “Pleasure, Pain, the Passions,” in Political Essays, p. 239.

14. 92 Ethan Putterman
it engenders support for government by facilitating other “good things”
that men take “pleasure in” and by reducing the “accidents” or personal
misunderstandings that harm society. Such accidents are reduced, in part,
by way of a greater tolerance toward diversity of opinion. It is not only
that persons will tolerate or indulge others’moral interventions in the form
of “arts of persuasion” by friends, but that they will be more accepting of
the diversity of opinion generally.
Likewise, it is Locke’s belief that when persons are untrustworthy,
they not only destroy the bonds of society but violate God’s law. Trans-
gressors undermine the “one great reason of Men’s putting themselves into
Society, and quitting the State of Nature” to “avoid this State of War” (TT,
II.iii.21, 282). Within society an indispensable function of government is
to prevent such a loss of faith and the moral and political consequences of
untrustworthiness. According to the Englishman, “power and trust which
is in the lawmaker’s hands produces greater and more unavoidable mis-
chiefs than anything else to mankind,”42
and as Laslett comments, for
Locke this means that “the relation between government and governed is
not contractual, for a trust is not a contract”43
but something greater than
a legal document with a basis extending beyond positive law. When po-
litical leaders fail to honor their duties as trustees of the popular will their
political power devolves to the people by plan or by force. Beyond such
views concerning the trustworthiness of government, it can be demon-
strated that Locke employs the term “trust” in the more conventional sense
of understanding or honesty between natural equals and that this idea, spe-
cifically, is what highlights its bearing in conflict. Writing that those “who
liked one another so well as to join Society, cannot but be supposed to
have some Acquaintance and Friendship together, and some Trust in one
42. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (New York:
Hackett, 1983 [1689]), p. 142.
43. Laslett, introduction to Locke, Two Treatises of Government, p. 114. Similarly,
Hugo Grotius emphasizes the importance of trust to stable government in De Jure Belli
ac Pacis. Highlighting how a “right to make war may be conceded against a king,”
Grotius believes that public judgment alone decides whether a monarch has “with evil
intent departed from the rules of government” and behaves as a tyrant. Hugo Grotius, De
Jure Belli ac Pacis libri tres, vol. 2 (English translation) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925
[1646]), p. 102. Likewise, Samuel Pufendorf writes that “our safety and happiness depend
in large part on the good will and assistance of others” and that no monarch can safely
“renounce respect for all others” owing to the public’s trust in him as the basis of his rule.
Samuel Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium libri octo, vol. 2 (English translation)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934 [1672]), p. 1063.

15. Locke and “War By Design” 93
another,” Locke describes the state of nature as being a condition where,
at least at its origin before the advent of money, “there were but few Tres-
passes, and few Offenders” (TT, II.viii.107, 339).44
Unlike the “Confusion and Disorder” of the state of nature, where
friendship is still possible despite the “small number of “Degenerate men,”
war is characterized as being a general “trespass against the whole Species”
and all may take up arms to “punish the Offender” (TT, II.ii.8, 272). It is
not any kind of a “particular injustice” resulting from skirmishes not great
enough to be deemed war (TT, II.xix.230, 418).45
Locke believes that citi-
zens of a commonwealth know when war has been waged against them and
can rationally decide when “either Ruler or People, by force goes about to
invade the Rights of either Prince or People,” as opposed to the “mischief”
of a “turbulent spirit” that causes “particular Injustice, or Oppression” (TT,
II.xix.230, 417–18). The “Pride, Ambition, and Turbulency of private Men
have sometimes caused great Disorders in Commonwealths,” but it is not
until “the mischief be grown general” enough that “Prince or People...is
guilty of the greatest Crime” (TT, II.xix.230, 417–18).
Of this slow-burning mischief leading to war, Locke asserts in the Sec-
ond Treatise that, at least in the beginning, amity prevails (TT, II.viii.107,
339). This is so because transgressions of natural law that arise from human
ignorance, bias, or passion are punishable yet forgivable offenses, as “it
is impossible that the primary law of nature is such that its violation is
unavoidable” (ELN, VIII, 131). Although such violations owing to confu-
sion may prove fatal, it is persons’awareness of the intent toward “Enmity
and Destruction,” specifically, that makes it difficult to remain “well as-
sured” of a past enemy’s future intent. After combatants harbor “attitudes
of ‘enmity and destruction’” and consciously plan for, and act upon, this
hatred, then “knowledge, friendship, and sincerity” prove elusive. Unlike
when battle is perceived to occur spontaneously from sentiments of “Ill
will,” “Passion,” or “Revenge,” the conditions for political reconciliation
are thwarted.46
44. Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 169–76.
45. See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Gov-
ernment (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), p. 331.
46. Interestingly, William J. Long and Peter Brecke show that empirical analysis of
conflict resolution in countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and South Africa in the
twentieth century demonstrates the prospects of peaceful reconciliation to be “substantially
‘home-grown’ rather than imposed from outside” and that this phenomenon is explained,

16. 94 Ethan Putterman
Conclusion:
The Consistency of Chapters 3 and 9 of Locke’s Second Treatise
Locke’s epistemology behind humankind’s difficulties at understanding
the laws of nature in the Essays on the Laws of Nature and Essay Con-
cerning Human Understanding establishes his precivil state to be more
coherent than would appear from the wildly discordant descriptions of
human relations in chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise. Of this dis-
cord, the cardinal problem for natural society in the Second Treatise is that
only a minority of its members is capable of rationally comprehending the
natural laws and even fewer are willing to act upon this knowledge.
Locke’s hodgepodge of opposites, in which individuals live in a “State
of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and Preservation” while remain-
ing “very unsafe, very unsecure,” refers not to two different states of nature
but rather to a unitary status in which conflict assumes many shades. It is
only the most dark and deliberate that he defines as “war,” even if the con-
sequences and their redress (punishment) are identical. Of this distinction,
any peaceable outcome to civil war requires that past belligerents be able to
distinguish between what Roy Licklider calls a “willingness to kill, which
is primitive and impetuous,” and a “willingness to use death as an instru-
ment of policy.”47
By and large, it is not that every political settlement will
be unsuccessful in the absence of friendship or trust but that without ei-
ther the likelihood of lasting peace is greatly diminished, for “force cannot
master the opinions men have, nor plant new ones in their breasts.”
Of these two tumultuous states, it is erroneous to conclude that
war is merely a term that Locke “sometimes substitutes for the state of
nature.”48
Likewise, it is mistaken that the philosopher is inadvertently
opaque because he does “nothing to limit the possible social descriptions”
of his original state.49
Rather, the English radical’s natural condition of
in part, by the motivations of warring parties in the way that Locke describes. According to
Long and Brecke, the possibility of “national forgiveness” is conditioned upon whether the
war in question is considered to be “criminal” or “legitimate,” and people make qualitative
distinctions about this differentiation in a way that influences the level of compromise that
they are willing to accept. People’s distinction between actions that were “criminal and
which were legitimate in warfare” explained, in part, why such conflicts were more or
less amenable to settlement. William J. Long and Peter Brecke, War and Reconciliation:
Reason and Emotion in Conflict Resolution (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press,
2003), pp. 70–71, 148, 151.
47. Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars,” p. 681.
48. Cope, John Locke Revisited, p. 100.
49. Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy, p. 30.

17. Locke and “War By Design” 95
man should be regarded as one in which combatants must refrain from
committing acts so heinous that the psychological conditions vital to
peace are destroyed and moral behavior in wartime matters. To paraphrase
Dunn, this condition is less of a spectrum of jural coordinates than a single
coordinate in which intent, rather than haste or ignorance, defines its ju-
ridical perimeters.