| Description |
In Two Treatises of Government, volume two, the origin of the state is attributed to the security it affords men in preserving their natural rights to equality, liberty, and property. To better understand the protective necessity of the state and Lockean rights, one must distinguish the exercise of these rights in the state of nature from their use in civil society. This paper argues that Locke's political theory compromises the full exercise of individual rights (existing in the state of nature) in order to secure partial exercise of these rights in civil society. This occurs at the expense of side constraints--the rights that other people possess limit the rights-gettings of another person--which underlie both Locke's and Nozick's conceptions of individual rights. In terms of Locke's violations of side constraints, Nozick's "minimal state" appears to be more faithful to the full preservation of individual rights. |
