The worthy, if slightly bumbling Locke we all used to know (just as we know that he wrote in defence of that worthy if slightly bumbling apotheosis of English constitutionalism, the Glorious Revolution) wrote to answer the terrible, if undeniably clever Hobbes. Both of these hallowed opinions were vigorously attacked by Mr Laslett in his edition of the Two Treatises and the attacks had an immediate impact. But, rather surprisingly, the complicated and difficult historical demonstration that the bulk of the work was written several years before the Revolution rapidly became the new orthodoxy, while the simple and wholly convincing dialectical demonstration that the shape of the Two Treatises was dictated by the attempt to answer Sir Robert Filmer's political tracts has never received a very enthusiastic response and its importance scarcely been sympathetically understood. One reason for this curious difference in the two responses, perhaps, is rather vulgar. The recognition that the Two Treatises was not the rationalization of a successful revolution in the past at most implied the abandonment of a particular historical doctrine about a single figure; brashly, it meant rewriting one lecture. But the historically supported argument that lining Locke up against Hobbes and comparing their various dimensions was not the way to approach the study of Locke (indeed, at its most disturbing, perhaps not even a way) had altogether more sinister implications.