Three hundred years after the publication of the Two treatises of government and A letter concerning toleration, one aspect of Locke's thought continues to stand out in sharp contrast to the prevailing conventions of both seventeenth- and twentieth-century political theory. This is his hypothesis that institutionalized forms of government are derived from and perpetually rest upon the prior freedom of the people to exercise political power themselves (summarized at 2.171). Locke had no doubt that it would ‘seem a very strange Doctrine to some’ in his own time (2.9). It is no less unconventional today. In the current debate between liberals and civic humanists, for example, the leading participants share the assumption that political freedom is derived from and rests upon basic institutions and traditions. The aim of this paper is to enable readers to understand Locke's strange doctrine by drawing attention to its distinctive features, first by means of a synopsis and then by a series of contrasts with more conventional views.

Prior to the establishment of institutionalized forms of government, people are capable of exercising political power themselves in an ad-hoc manner: ‘the Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Man's hands’ (2.7). The exercise of political power comprises the abilities to know and to interpret standards of right (natural laws), to judge controversies concerning oneself and others in accordance with these laws, and to execute such judgements by punishments proportionate to the transgression and appropriate for purposes of restraint and reparation (2.7–12).