The natural rights of man is perhaps one of the broadest, and most singularly important, themes of both the Second Treatise and the Enlightenment. While Locke didn’t invent concepts like the state of nature, the state of war, property rights, or the right to revolution, he did articulate them in such a way that his interpretation and presentation of those ideas have come to represent the central definitions for them. Locke’s work wouldn’t become popular for another century or so after publication—but when it did, it led to some of the greatest, and bloodiest, periods of social upheaval in Western history.

Again, Locke’s assertion that men exist in a natural state of peace without a monarch, sovereign, or general leader was not new, but his belief that this state is the base relationship between human beings, something that can’t ever really or fully be left, was a fundamentally unique perspective. Conversely, a political predecessor of his, Thomas Hobbes, viewed the state of nature as an ancient and temporary state that human beings abdicated when they opted to live in

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