The claim that the account given here of Locke's argument in the Two Treatises of Government is ‘historical’ implies that its status depends upon the adequacy of its identification of Locke's own meaning. It is often assumed that there is little serious problem about identifying the meaning of the argument of such a book—that we can see readily enough what Locke meant or, at the very least, what Locke said. In so far as the present work resembles an attempt at an extended archaeological excavation of Locke's mind, it may seem at first glance that the entire enterprise is supererogatory, that it is an exercise in the painful excavation of what is already wholly above the ground. However plausible such an expectation may be a priori it will, I hope, be disconfirmed by a reading of the ensuing work.

By ‘historical’, then, is meant an account of what Locke was talking about, not a doctrine written (perhaps unconsciously) by him in a sort of invisible ink which becomes apparent only when held up to the light (or heat) of the twentieth-century mind. More precisely, what I attempt is to give an account of what Locke was maintaining in the central argument of the Two Treatises. It is not a critique of this argument and, in particular, it does not expand on the theme of how inadequate Locke's argument is to resolve the puzzlements of contemporary political theory.