Locke's State of Nature and Natural Rights

John Locke (1632–1704) was born in Wrington, Somerset, educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, and spent much of his career associated with Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, a leading opponent of the succession of the Catholic James, Duke of York, to the English throne. Locke's Two Treatises of Government were published anonymously in 1689 (with the title page dated 1690), shortly after the Glorious Revolution that replaced James II with William III and Mary II, though modern scholarship, following Peter Laslett's critical edition of 1960, has established that most of the text was actually drafted around 1679–1683, during the Exclusion Crisis, considerably earlier than its publication. The First Treatise is devoted entirely to a point-by-point refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's posthumously published Patriarcha (1680), which had derived the absolute authority of kings from the patriarchal authority God supposedly granted to Adam; the Second Treatise, subtitled "An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government," then lays out Locke's own constructive theory.