A reading of the Second Treatise reveals Locke’s commitment to individual rights, representative government, and popular consent to government as less than robust and his assertion of a right to revolution as much qualified. Any assertion of such ideas, however tame, in the circumstances of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1683 would have jeopardized Locke’s life. Although written at that time, the Second Treatise was not published until 1689 and even then anonymously. Locke ended his more than five years of exile in Holland and returned to England in the train of the victorious armies of William of Orange.

The Second Treatise of Locke's political writings shows a less robust commitment to individual rights, representative government, and popular consent, but also a qualified right to revolution.

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The Second Treatise

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