For the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drew from Locke's argument that government must protect the people's life, liberty and property or it may be legitimately overthrown.
James Madison embraced Locke's concepts of checks and balances in the Constitution. Madison even thought the Bill of Rights unnecessary because such rights are presumed.
"A man, as has been proved, cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another," Locke wrote in "The Second Treatise of Civil Government" in 1690, "and having in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, or possession of another, but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind; this is all he doth, or can give up to the common-wealth, and by it to the legislative power, so that the legislative can have no more than this. Their power, in the utmost bounds of it, is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power, that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects."
Rights come from nature, not government.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Declaration and the Constitution
An essay in the Las Vegas Review-Journal outlines the connection between the Declaration and Constitution:
