Two Treatises of Government

Two Treatises of Government is the principal work of political philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, published anonymously in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution but likely drafted in 1680-81 during the Exclusion Crisis. The First Treatise refutes, sentence by sentence, Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which argued for a divinely ordained, hereditary, absolute monarchy. The Second Treatise sets out a society based on natural rights and contract theory, in which government requires the consent of the governed and, under limited circumstances, the people may overthrow the ruler. The book is a key foundational text in the theory of liberalism.