Talk:Two Treatises of Government

message: Why is there no mention of Locke's complete disregard for the African slave trade in this article?  All his arguments concerning slavery obliterate any rationale for the African trade, so how could this be justifiable from a Lockean perspective?  It is interesting to note that Locke had substantial investments in the trade.  Either way, Locke completely ignores the natural rights of Africans and their slavery which is infinitely more prominent in his society than the slavery he depicts.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.238.22.96 (talk) 03:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Slavery 

message: Hi. I do Lincoln-Douglas Debate and it would be a great help if someone could answer this: Did Locke believe that only the people had the right of revolution, or did he believe that an outside force had the right to maintain human rights? Sir Elderberry 14:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question: Outside Force? 

message: This was requested on June 4, 2005!  Of Civil Government refers to the Second Treatise only:  the title of the whole work is Two Treatises of Government.  Those with university access can probably check a page image of the title page at Early English Books Online, if your university subscribes to the service, but I don't think this should be a controversial change.  I'd post the picture, but ProQuest has the copyright for this particular image. --RJC 17:54, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification 

message: This article has been renamed as the result of a move request. --violet/riga (t) 20:17, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved 

message: I'm removing this heading, which has no information. It seems adequately covered under the "Property" section and I don't see how it could be divided without essentially fracturing the section. I suppose if someone was willing it could be added but it is currently useless. --Jackson 10:35, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-Capitalism 

message: It is required both grammatically and stylistically to maintain the present tense when writing about a literary work or other writing. Although I have only made minor grammatical changes to improve the mechanical aspects of this article, I would sincerely recommend that the entire article be written as to maintain the present tense. At the moment, it is slightly awkward to read. For example, before my changes, a sentence read: "If a state overstepped its..." Clearly, "if" applies to a future situation, and should not be referred to in past tense. Further, Locke's ideas and concepts are not limited to the text's time period. Though people may no longer agree with it, or it is not considered a 'contemporary' political document, the text is still in existence, and therefore, applies in a present tense. Although this in itself is not a large change with regards to the general content (which I find correct), it is an important edit that effects the overall readability, and by extension, the academic 'feel' of the article.LifeScience 17:39, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literary Present 

message: Does anyone have the citations for the rest of this page? I don't want to put little fact tags everywhere, but a lot of this material needs to be cited. Awadewit Talk 04:02, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The ones I see are started in Laslett's introdution to the Two Treatises, but I don't have time to go through just yet and fill them in.  I am reading an article of his that notes that the First Treatise breaks off midsentence, however, and so will replace that fact tag.  RJC Talk 21:45, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was not referring specifically to the tags - I was referring to the rest of the page. I could add tags everywhere that we need a citation, but I don't really want to do that. What I was wondering was whether you or someone has the citations for the rest of the page (the First and Second Treatise section and the "Modern controversies" section). Awadewit Talk 23:41, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, I think that what is said in the "Controversies" section points rather unambiguously to the works by the named interpreters in the the bibliography, so I don't think you need fact tags for that.  What sort of statements do you feel need citation?  RJC Talk 14:28, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I was thinking of trying to improve this article rather significantly and attempting in a few months to go for FA. For that, we will need inline citations. We would need them even for GA. I agree with you that if this were a regular academic work, we wouldn't need the citations, but wikipedia's citation standards are working off of a different philosophy (for obvious reasons). WP:ATT. Awadewit Talk 18:44, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

text: I'd like to second Awadewit's request for inline citations for that section; that's why I added the "Unreferenced Section" template to that section. Cooljeanius (talk) (contribs) 18:03, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Citations

message: i have added republicanism category, because locke was a typical representative of classical republicanism. but i would like to remowe classical liberalism category because liberalism is modern invention and there were no classical form of it.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.112.35.81 (talk) 00:13, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Such an edit would be a violation of NPOV, given the fact that the majority of scholars identify Locke with liberalism rather than with republicanism.  Majority view or minority, it is a view with prominent adherents in the secondary literature.  RJC Talk Contribs 01:20, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  republicanism or liberalism? 

message: I was the one who cut this paragraph of text from the article, which was then reversed.  
::Regarding the relation between Locke's thought and that of Hobbes, the core of the dispute centers on the literary character of the Two Treatises. Those who support a connection of any sort treat the work as having been intended, at least in part, as a philosophic tract, and therefore as potentially speaking beyond the immediate political context. Those who deny such a connection insist that the Two Treatises are nothing more than a particularly popular remnant of an ideologically driven political contest, and were not meant to address any broader questions.
Fair enough for the reversal; it was probably excessive on my part to cut it.  However, it is a problematic piece of text, because it combines two issues: 1. Locke's relation to Hobbes, 2. Whether Locke intended this as a philosophic tract or a merely political one.  The structure of the paragraph suggests that the answer to (1) hinges on our judgment about (2), but this seems clearly mistaken.  It's quite possible that Locke could have intended this as a philosophical tract without having ever read Hobbes: he could have been responding to other elements of natural law theory or theology, etc., even without Hobbes' involvement in any way.  So the question of their relation does not directly impact the literary character of the Two Treatises as a philosophic tract.
I described this as the introduction of POV because it coheres as an account primarily in light of an assumption that Locke was writing under persecution, so that he could not openly acknowledge his debts to Hobbes, even though he intended to write something that would be clear to attentive philosophical readers in the future.  Thus this paragraph sets up only two options: that Locke wrote a philosophical tract without naming Hobbes under conditions of persecution, or that he didn't have any view on Hobbes and should be read in light of historicist presumptions (meaning in this case historical determinism).  This set of options obviously doesn't exhaust the possibilities, however; plenty of people think Locke wrote a philosophic tract, but primarily in serious engagement with the religious and other views of his time - see e.g. Waldron's book.
Anyway, I've tried to rephrase the paragraph introduction, to make clear that the stakes of this paragraph only involve the Strauss/Cambridge School disagreement, rather than academic views on Locke as such.  Thoughts?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.130.39 (talk) 21:48, 6 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Addendum to the above: I started to revise the paragraph after writing the above, and came to the conclusion that it can't be saved in current form, and that it needs a fuller revision of its basic structure and presumptions.  However, I have no interest in starting an edit war.  So, what do others think about how its logical structure could be repaired?76.105.130.39 (talk) 21:53, 6 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  While the the two questions (Locke/Hobbes, character of the Two Treatises) are logically distinct, they are combined in scholarly discussions. I wrote that paragraph to describe the literature, not reveal every position that a future scholar could conceivably (or ought) to take.  True, this is a Straussian-Cambridge centered view, but I don't know of many people outside those camps that deal with the issue at all. I also don't see the POV issue here. It is true that each position is plausible only the basis of certain contested assertions, but neither position is presented as the truth. This is all that WP:NPOV requires. (By the way, Locke could have been responding to Hobbes without fear of persecution. Indeed, his failure to respond to Hobbes would mark the Two Treatises as an inferior work philosophically, as Hobbes was the last great philosophic thinker. The non-Straussians I know who see Locke as responding to Hobbes don't care why Locke didn't mention Hobbes. In any event, the paragraph says nothing about persecution.) RJC TalkContribs 02:43, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I've taken a cut at revising the paragraph in hopes of making the stakes clearer.  In the previous version, the intro to the sentence made it sound as if the stakes were general, rather than localized to the Strauss/Cambridge pairing, so I've tried to narrow that somewhat.  What concerned me as POV was the framing of the options, which sounded deeply Straussian in description to me in its terminologies and apparent philosophic tract/historicism pairing.  I've tried to rephrase in ways that are less distinctive of that portrayal.  (The description of Strauss's view higher up made a point of mentioning Locke's disavowal, so persecution was already implied by that, as I read this paragraph.)  I agree that the literature has this odd structure of positions that move together, but I think the previous version will confuse unwary readers.  Maybe there was something in the emphasis of the previous paragraph that I'm missing, however?2601:7:2340:10:1001:30B8:DC38:2D74 (talk) 07:19, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strauss, Armitage, and "Philosophic Tract" 

message: This section is not cited, and is written like a piece of Locke exegesis. It also contains claims that seem to be howlers, e.g., that there's some sort of near-consensus among Locke scholars that Locke wasn't trying to justify slavery. Look, a lot of people write about Locke in academia. Pick any bad thing, and there's probably someone who's trying to make a career showing that Locke defended it. Here's a good article evincing the lack of consensus about Locke's stance on slavery; "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709512?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents". (Even though it's a paywall, you can read the first paragraph to get the idea.) I realize that it's unpleasant to delete existing content, but as it stands the present section seems misleading more than informative. Or if someone wants to rewrite it, by all means.50.191.21.222 (talk) 02:31, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can we get rid of the "Conquest and slavery" section in its present form? 

message: I went back to this edit  and eliminated some old vandalism and a few paragraphs added by one of the vandals that is unsourced and appears to be unrelated to the topic (see ).  I'm not sure I caught everything so someone might want to followup. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 23:44, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Long term vandalism

message: The two sections on the two treatises need to be properly structured so that they both are similar in layout. The first is not sectioned out like the second and the intro to the second could use some expanding, along with proper citation of the first paragraph. 
The article could also use more information on the reception of the work, perhaps even a section on modern influence. This section could include a picture of the modern print of the book. 
Mikereynolds4444 (talk) 05:16, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consistent structure to first and second treatises