The Social Contract Tradition's Influence on Constitutional Government

Locke's theory of consent, limited government, and the right of revolution exercised an especially direct influence on the constitutional politics of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Thomas Jefferson, drafting the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, restated in near-paraphrase Locke's claim that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that when any government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted, the people retain a right "to alter or to abolish it" — Jefferson's famous formula of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" substituting Lockean "estate" or "property" with a more expansive term, while preserving the underlying structure of Locke's argument concerning trust, breach, and dissolution of government found in the Second Treatise's final chapters. Locke's functional distinction among legislative, executive, and federative power, further developed by Montesquieu in De l'esprit des lois (1748) into the now-classical tripartite separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power, in turn shaped the institutional design debated at the Philadelphia Convention and embodied in the United States Constitution of 1787.