James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, I.2.5

Otis treats it as axiomatic that the legitimacy of governmental authority is dependent upon the consent of the people. The deification of kings was a trick used to obviate this axiom, since only God's authority trumps that of the people. Otis mocks and ridicules such deification and notes that the prevention of this ruse is a good reason for separating religion from government.

Otis states the purpose of government succinctly:

The end of government being the good of mankind, points out its great duties: It is above all things to provide for the security, the quiet, and happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property....In solitude men would perish; and yet they cannot live together without contests. These contests require some arbitrator to determine them.

Note the trio "life, liberty, and property."

Otis notes that the unwieldiness of direct democracy makes it necessary that the people appoint representatives of their will in government. The form of government (democracy, aristocracy, or monarchy) and the division of executive and legislative branches are questions which Otis says are for each society to decide. In any event, the people may depose their government when it acts against their interests.

David Hume "Of the Original Contract" I.2.4

The sleepy ready might be forgiven for nodding a bit at the beginning of this excerpt of Hume's essay and taking Hume to be merely voicing assent to the Lockean view of the basis of political authority. However, the point of the essay is to demolish Locke's view. The beginning of the excerpt acknowledges only that in the time before government, there must have been some consent to be governed in order for government to have been created since people are roughly equal in power and one could not easily subdue another.

Hume contends that such original government would have been short-lived and small in scope had its chieftain been able to solidify it by the use of force. The frequent persuasion of force caused an habitual acquiescence to his rule and became no longer necessary. In fact there is no actual case of government by consent in the Lockean sense, Hume points out. Authority is instead based on particular cultural conditions everywhere we look and never based on the consent of the governed. A lengthy history and the habits resulting from it (i.e., the tradition and culture) produce this authority and the reverence for it and also conceal from us a more distant past of forced subjection resulting itself from the exigencies of inter-tribal warfare and the power of a general over his soldiers which lasts even after military victory. Consent is a chimera which cannot be reconciled with actual historical knowledge.

Furthermore, if some original contract were the basis for authority, this would assume that the consent of ancestors could obligate descendants, which is certainly objectionable to "republican writers." Moreover, elections are not only rare but always by the suffrage of a tiny few, which shouldn't obligate all members of society on the republican view. These wise electors choose leaders who can keep order and master a people who need one but are not wise enough to choose the right one. Again, the man on the street will say that the authority of his revered prince has nothing to do with whether he consents to it or not but rather that he consents to it because it is authority. There isn't even tacit consent in the obedience we observe in actual societies. Finally, the duty of allegiance to political authority is based on the apprehension of the utility of an orderly society, rather than consent. (This is a rule-utilitarian calculus where a person sees that if everybody disobeyed the chief, conditions would be intolerable.)

Hume agrees that consent is "the best and most sacred" basis of government. But he contends that it is hardly ever to be found as the basis of actual observed authority.

Let me propose two Lockean responses to Hume's critique. First, the utility of social order may well be part of the basis for obedience to political authority, but it is also a reason to give consent to be governed. Moreover, the Lockean might contend that the legitimacy of any governmental authority depends upon that government's being of a kind to which an informed and rational subject would consent, namely a just and competent kind. The Lockean consent, then, might be seen as not only tacit but logically implicit in the sense that although few members of a given society consciously recognize that there are sufficient reasons for consenting to the authority of the government, any reasonable and informed member of society should come to this conclusion if he thought it through. Of course there are good qualities of a government which call forth consent to be governed but these qualities constitute authority itself only with the addition of this implicit, tacit consent. Hume is right that history, tradition and culture cover up this logic, but perhaps it is nevertheless real.

Montesquieu, "Spirit of Laws (II.2)" I.2.3

Here we find the following key ideas of government:

Suffrage should be given and limited to the right people. For this is precisely choosing a sovereign.

The people should decide everything they can decide. What they can't decide, because of its complexity or its need for quick decision ("the motion of the people [being] always either too remiss or too violent."), should be decided by the representatives of the people Therefore, these representatives should be chosen by the people. The people are quite able to select representatives using common sense (see quote below.)

Suffrage should be public so that the upper classes can influence the vote of the lower who otherwise might vote for their own destruction.

Montesquieu says that "[t]he people are extremely well qualified for choosing those whom they are to intrust with part of their authority," because the facts required for them to do so (for example who has been a good general and who is talented in business) are obvious. However, he warns that when they "are gained by bribery and corruption," they "grow indifferent to public affairs and avarice becomes their predominant passion. Unconcerned about the government and everything belonging to it, they quietly wait for their hire."

Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letter 38, I.2.2

The gist of this letter is that many politicians will try to make the they govern believe that government is for experts and not for them to stick their noses into. They will then misrepresent the voice of the people in the political forum and proceed to plunder and oppress the people. These are "not Governors, but Jaylors and Spunges, who chain them and squeeze them, and yet take it very ill if they do but murmur; which is yet much less than a People ought to do." Politicians need not be experts. For governing "Honesty, Diligence, and Plain Sense are the only Talents necessary...."

According to Gordon, the voice of the public should have influence in government because it is in the public's interest that the government be good and it cannot be bribed. A politician, on the other hand, can be bribed and can find it in his interest that the government be oppressive and plundering.

On this last point, Gordon is mistaken. Votes can be bought. There is no unified voice of the people. Perhaps Gordon didn't realize this because he didn't conceive of a government which would command enormous wealth redistribution schemes with which to bribe the people by having them share in the plunder. For his definition of government is "a Trust committed by All, to the Most, to One, or a Few, who are to attend upon the Affairs of All, that every one may, with the more Security, attend upon his own[.]"

Also, Gordon draws a stark contrast between England and other countries, namely Turkey, as if English government weren't prone to precisely the corruption he describes. I doubt that.

Locke, 1.2.1, Post 2

Locke sees government as a remedy for the unavoidable disorder attaching to the state of nature in which every man is judge of every other's transgressions. It is not, as Hobbes thought, that government is absolutely necessary in order to stop us from following the law of nature which, in the absence of government, bids each man to treat every other with extreme prejudice and preemptive violence. For the natural law bids us to respect the liberties of others insofar as they do not impinge upon our own, all men being equal and independent, and all being the property of God. Rather, it is only the confusion of having as many judges as members of a society and the proneness to bias which a victim has in judging his assailant that makes the institution of government appropriate. The government having this basis, it is answerable to the citizens of a commonwealth for its miscarriages of justice (a view which Hobbes would likewise have disagreed.) The people of a commonwealth may even get laws defining the role of the government. These are not arrogant encroachments upon the prerogative of a ruler, as if the people were irrational and benighted beings who ought to submit to their superiors without reservation. Rather, they are stipulations on the way in which the government is to fulfill its purpose, which is precisely the good of the rational beings who will submit to it.

The basis of government is that it is reasonable for member of a society to have an institution which protects their liberty and property. Anyone in the region of a society with a government and who enjoys that government's protections, tacitly submits to its jurisdiction over his property. If, and only if, he explicitly consents to subject himself to this government, he becomes, irrevocably, a full member of this society.

Locke, I.2.1, Post 1

In these selections from The Second Treatise Locke says something which it is critically important to understand. It comes in paragraph 54.

Naturally, all men are created equal. And yet they are unequal in talents and character, alliances and family bonds. These differences may make it reasonable for us to hold certain people in higher regard than others, and they are not the basis of moral equality, the equality under moral judgment amongst all men. This equality is like equality under the law, but here the law is the moral law, rather than political law. The respect in which we are morally equal is that every man has a right to be free and not subjected to another's will.

No one is to receive arbitrarily special favor or disfavor when he is judged by others. This is because no one has less or more right to liberty, the right to be left to act unmolested by others (except insofar as his prior violations of others' similar rights have made it appropriate to sanction his behavior.) This is the sense of equality underlying political equality under the law.

There is no trace here of equality as equality in character or talent - these Locke explicitly denies - or equality in desert of wealth. These are simply not there. Equality in desert of wealth is incompatible with the property rights Locke propounds in the treatise because redistribution of wealth in order to spread it evenly must violate these rights.

(An aside: Some libertarians have maintained that this is a violation of liberty, as well, such that to be the victim of redistribution of wealth is to be at least partially enslaved. I disagree with this. I think that violation of property rights is theft and not enslavement, since to have one's wealth stripped away is not to be forced to act or restrained from acting. Plunder is not enslavement. In any event, the salient point is that Locke distinguishes these types of equality and it is crucial to understanding our political system that one understand its basis in moral equality.)

(Another aside: One might notice two senses of "moral equality" here: equality in moral character and equality under the moral law. The latter holds amongst all people. The former is very rare.)

(A final aside: One might wonder what the grounds for equality under the moral law itself are. Here one might appeal to the meanings of moral terms and to human nature. Moral language embodies a conceptual system in which it is nonsensical to allow arbitrary differences in judgment where descriptions of events are the same and only personal identities differ; for more on this see the archives of Philosoblog. Also, human nature is such that the right to act without being subjected is innate. I think this basis in human nature may be reduced to conceptual facts about moral language, but that issue takes us far afield.)