POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY English philosophers In 1680, the year after the death of Hobbes, a book called Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings was published This had been written years earlier by a royalist landowner, Sir Robert Filmer, who had died during the commonwealth It compared the monarch’s power over the nation to a father’s power over his family The king’s authority, it claimed, derived by patriarchal descent from the royal authority of Adam, and should be free of all restraint by elected bodies such as Parliament Filmer’s book presented an easy target for the most politically inXuential philosopher of the age, John Locke Like Hobbes, Locke in his Two Treatises of Civil Government takes his start from a consideration of the state of nature Filmer’s great error, he maintains, is to deny that by nature men are free and equal to each other In the natural state, men live together without any earthly superior ‘All men’, he maintains, ‘are naturally in that state and remain so till by their own consents they make themselves members of some politic society’ (TG, 2, 15) Locke’s view of the state of nature is much more optimistic than Hobbes It is not a state of war, because everyone is aware of a natural law which teaches that all men are equal and independent, and that no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or possession This law is binding prior to any earthly sovereign or civil society It confers natural rights, notably the rights to life, self-defence, and freedom No one can take away a right to life, whether his own or others’; and no one can take away the right to liberty by enslaving himself or another What of property in the state of nature? Is the whole earth the common possession of mankind, as earlier political theorists had argued, or did God assign diVerent portions of it to diVerent peoples and families? Or is there no such thing as private property prior to all organized society? Locke’s answer is ingenious What gives a title to private property, even in a state of nature, is labour My labour is undoubtedly my own; and by mixing my labour with natural goods, by drawing water, clearing forests, tilling the soil, and collecting fruit, I acquire a right to what I have worked on and what I have made of it But my right is not unlimited: I am entitled only to such fruits of my labour as I can consume, and only to the amount of land that I can cultivate and use (TG, 5, 49) However, what I have thus acquired I can pass on to my children; the right of inheritance is natural and precedes any civil codiWcation 291