Let's discuss a bit of Locke proposed by the Commission as an example. Belongs to the cap. XII POWERS OF LEGISLATIVE, EXECUTIVE AND STATE FEDERATIVE, the Second Treatise on Civil Government.
text
And because of the fragility of men (who tend to accumulate power), they may be tempted to get their hands on the power of making laws and executing them in order to be exempted to obey the laws they themselves make, and as could also be tempted to make laws to suit and run for profit, thus leading to established interests than those of the rest of the community and contrary to the purposes of society and government, it is common practice in the States either organized (where the good of all is duly considered) that the legislative power is handed over to various people, which in formal assembly, have each, or together with the other, the power to make laws.
Locke, J., Treatise on Civil Government. Cap. XII, LEGISLATIVE POWERS, EXECUTIVE AND STATE FEDERATIVE . Art.143.
comment Text Format (Selectivity: second paragraph)
Paragraph a) Explanation of the two expressions underlined.
Paragraph b) Presentation of the theme.
Paragraph c) Justification from the author's philosophical position.
terms
'fragility of men ".:
understand that the term' fragility of men" in the context in which it appears to be understood as a moral weakness, this is a moral quality as opposed to the integrity, understood as a moral quality that practiced the virtues of line with what conscience dictates is not subjective but is guided by the dictates of a higher reason that is not subject to individual interests. Locke himself is giving us a clue about what he means by this term and then bracketing the term 'fragility of men "clarification" (which tend to accumulate too much power), "clearly referring to self as an equivalent , that is, as a moral evil. It is clear, moreover, from this same term if selfishness was presented as a moral value by one of the founders of liberalism (Adam Smith) in the case of Locke this principle, the goodness of egoism, is far of be an acceptable value for our author.
'legislature'
Although the political doctrine of the division and the unsuitability of the influx of power into one is yet to develop in the way we now know ( De L'esprit de lois , Montesquieu was released in mid-eighteenth century) we find in this text with a clear sign that the outlines of such a political theory are already in this Second Treatise of Government Civ il. Locke tells us that the "well-organized country 'is an assembly of' different people 'that has the power to legislate. Which is the same as saying that this function should not be exercised by a single person (the king) or a favorite chamber appointed by it, as is usual in absolute monarchies then prevailing in Europe (although in England he met the publication of the Second Treatise in 1688/1698 had already taken a political revolution, the 'Glorious' by 1688 - which could well earn him the recognition of 'well-organized country'). Locke understood that the three branches of the fundamentally political society were the legislative and the executive, who should exercise their functions separately and to guarantee individual freedom and private property (but the legislature was to vote no, but call of notable citizens), and also a federal power to unite the country and abroad present a well-formed political community.
Exhibition of the subject.
The theme of the issue here is clear from the very title of the chapter to which it belongs: on the legislative, executive and federative State. It is therefore a text of political theory, political theory but in a very doomed to directly influence social and political events that are living in England that the Declaration of Rights arising after the final deposition of the Stuarts (1688: Glorious Revolution). This dynasty is then aligned with the maintenance of the privileges associated with the ancien regime and even came to support the restoration of Catholicism in England. This initiative was also supported by the landed gentry and some institutional means allocated to the management of estates and disaffected to the new, 'class'. This new arrangement by which the bourgeoisie struggled commerce, banking, manufacturing and engineering, and that drove in the fields an 'agricultural revolution' (the figure of the gentleman farmer ) that was already brewing as a prelude to and history of the Industrial Revolution.
between the first and the second edition of Treatise on Civil Government (1688/1698), Locke published in 1690 a book not too long, the Treaty Concerning Human Understanding ( An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ) in which it made a frontal critical innate mechanism and Cartesian, and which also posited a reform of the philosophy that knowledge become a 'morally useful', and certainly there is a relationship line between criticism of nativism and the mechanistic (as it is of fatalism) and criticism of the political system embodied by the absolute monarchy which stood against the political thought of Locke. Quite the opposite, in turn, tested Thomas Hobbes Leviathan with (1651) in this political essay based on the assumption that the principle of evil of a man (the famous homo homini lupus, Hobbes argued that Tito's Latin playwright Plautus Macio), argues that the state must institutionalize repression to avoid a state of perpetual civil war. Far
This anthropological and political pessimism that Hobbes justified and legitimized the institution of absolute monarchy, Locke, based on Aristotle's proposal that what justifies the policy is achieving the common good, examines the institutional fabric of the state and discover, much before Montesquieu, whom influence, which are a short series of powers - "the legislative, judicial and federal", as stated in the title of the chapter we are discussing, which constitute the backbone of the state, with legislative power the most decisive of them all. In absolute monarchies that power is the prerogative of the monarch, while in states which are under the principle of promoting freedom and independence from the powers (which are justified only as seeking the common good) that power is to focus on a camera legislators whose duty, they have to swear to fulfill , is none other than to propose laws that seek the common good. In this sense, the search or pursuit of happiness (the pursuit of happines ) and the provision of such human-contention of being happy or as happy as can be, it must also be contemplated by the legislators.
Justification from the author's philosophical position
As to the philosophical justification of this political doctrine that since subsequent applications such as Adam Smith (Locke after about three years) or those of Jeremy Bentham (much later, and nineteenth century) is known by the name of liberalism or 'liberalism political ', we have already pointed out that is critical to innate Cartesian mechanistic fatalism defends it on matters of psychology and las'pasiones matters of the soul' where they can find the foundations of his political theory. Yet Locke's philosophy, which is destined to become as an entire autonomous philosophical doctrine, which we know as the of empiricism (from the Greek word ' Empeiria' : experientia ), is based on the assertion that the source of all knowledge is in the feelings (again the Aristotelian influence) and that ideas, simple complex, which give rise to a process of reflection from which you are certain complex mental representations whose relations with the sensory experiences are not always easy to establish, as, for example, thought the idea of \u200b\u200b'substance', which is referred to by Locke as 'a something' ( a je ne sais quoi ).
A 'do not know what' we can not deny, despite not being able to establish such complex forms of thought, a direct link to a sensory experience. Will the Scotsman David Hume who take these premises final conclusions pro-empiricist Locke (a kind of philosophical skepticism compatible with epistemological and moral relativism.) Thus, if Locke stated that the I, as subject of knowledge, the Cartesian cogitans -res, there was an intuitive certainty, Hume denied this possibility by stating that that I could not be 'impressions' (this is the term Locke used instead of 'feelings'), if Locke said that the World -the Cartesian "res extensa could be an empirical certainty, Hume denied this possibility to be impossible to have impressions of an object so poorly defined (Hume said that only impressions of the world could be closer to the subject, which will directly and significantly affected ), and if Locke argued that God had a demonstrative certainty, by linking the idea of \u200b\u200bGod with the Platonic or the doer 'first cause' of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Hume also denied that certainty and stating that the object 'God'-the unextended Cartesian res-only approach was permissible for theological belief (by faith) but not by natural or empirical knowledge.
Such were the philosophical basis from which the pro-empiricist Locke, anti-nativist, the antifatalista operated to develop his political theory. A political theory also anti-nativist (the monarchy is an institution 'innate', and liberalism is a naturally Republican political doctrine but can support a parliamentary monarchy), anti-fatalistic (we are not forced to resign in a social order that denies us the possibility of happiness), and resolutely revolutionary as incompatible with its own political fixity of the theorists of absolute monarchy. For these reasons, it Once Locke has to recognize as the first constitutional history of the law applied to politics.
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