Second Treatise of Government (Hackett Classics)

This chapter concerns Locke’s conception of the division of political powers into three distinct forms: legislative, executive, and federative.

As he discussed in other chapters, Locke believes that the legislative is the most important—though not superior—power in a government because it is responsible for directing “how the force of the common-wealth shall be employed for preserving the community and the members of it” (75).

However, it is because of this immense power and responsibility that Locke describes the second power, the executive, which exists because “it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them” (76). By this, Locke means that even the most upstanding and devoted legislators are still human beings, and the legislative body as a whole cannot, and should not, be entrusted with the ability to both make and enforce the laws of the commonwealth. Therefore, it’s necessary to create an executive branch that has final say on which laws should be actively installed into the society, which ones need to be revised by the legislators before they can be executed, and which laws need to be discarded or shut down altogether.