Abstract

There are no intimate connections between Locke's political thought and his general philosophical position — that, at least, is the longestablished view, the accepted orthodoxy. Locke's Second Treatise of Government, so it is held, presents doctrines which are unrelated to, or perhaps even in conflict with, those of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.For contemporary students and scholars this view is firmly established through Peter Laslett's influential ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government.At the moment it receives powerful support from a magisterial work by an author well known both as political theorist and as commentator on Locke: Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Treatises of Government. Ashcraft's reductive contextualism and his concomitant intentional neglect of certain philosophical dimensions of Locke's position would lead us to read the 2T more as a piece of parochial political propaganda than as a treatise of political theory.