Controversies Regarding Interpretation
The Second Treatise was traditionally taken to be a refutation of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, the latter's support of absolute monarchism seemingly antithetical to Locke's ideal majoritarian government. Scholarship in the 20th century has modified this view somewhat, though the views of Locke that result from these interpretations often have little in common.
Leo Strauss in his Natural Right and History contentiously argues that Locke is more or less Hobbesian in his conception of politics. Strauss claims that the supposed egoism of Hobbes' natural law and the ostensible altruism of Locke's can be reduced to an identical moral framework, one in which people are to treat others as others treat them, to be selfless when others are selfless, selfish when others are selfish. Strauss argued that Locke only distanced himself from Hobbes rhetorically, in order to make his system more publicly acceptable. In this way, Locke corrects Hobbes on Hobbesian principles, and so should not be read as breaking from him philosophically.
At about the same time, C. B. Macpherson argued in his Political Theory of Possessive Individualism that Hobbes and Locke stood together in laying the groundwork for proto-capitalism. He saw them both as instigators of the liberal tendency to view the subject as a possessive entity in an economic sense, and argued that Locke's striking account of property rights in the state of nature should be read primarily as a justification for market economic relationships.
The Cambridge School of political thought, led principally by Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, Richard Ashcraft, and others, developed in opposition to interpretations such as Strauss's and, to a lesser extent, Macpherson's. It focuses on placing much of Locke's political philosophy within its historical context, following the trail laid by Peter Laslett in the Introduction to his edition of the Two Treatises. Laslett argued that, contrary to the traditional view that Locke had composed the Two Treatises in order to legitimize the 1688 Glorious Revolution, they were actually written surrounding the Exclusion Crisis a decade earlier. Laslett declined to establish a firm relationship between Locke's thought and that of Hobbes, but did note some similar themes.
Richard Ashcraft argued in Revolutionary Politics and Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" that Locke instead wrote the Two Treatises later, and that he should therefore be associated with the Radical Whigs and the intrigues surrounding the Rye House Plot and the Monmouth Rebellion. These associations, and the economic system prevalent in England at the time, Ashcraft argued, render Macpherson's interpretation historically implausible. He also asserted that the absence of any reference to Hobbes, the questionable utility of refuting Hobbes when he was a non-issue in the most immediate debates, and the fact that Locke claims to have never read Hobbes or Spinoza, "those justly-decried names," harms any interpretation that interprets Locke as in any way responding to Hobbes. This last point is leveled most vociferously against Strauss's interpretation.
Regarding the relation between Locke's thought and that of Hobbes, the core of the dispute centers on the literary character of the Two Treatises. Those who support a connection of any sort treat the work as having been intended, at least in part, as a philosophic tract, and therefore as potentially speaking beyond the immediate political context. Those who deny such a connection insist that the Two Treatises are nothing more than a particularly popular remnant of an ideologically driven political contest, and were not meant to address any broader questions.
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