Locke establishes that government is limited because it is held on trust. Mill, two centuries later, finds that the limit constrains only the state, and that a democratic society can be more oppressive than any government.
This is chapter 12 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Western Political Thought in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.
UPSC syllabus
Western Political Thought: Locke, John S. Mill.
In one page
- Locke‘s state of nature is governed by a law of nature knowable by reason: no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions. It is inconvenient, not a state of war.
- Property arises pre-politically when a person mixes their labour with what nature supplies, limited by the spoilage and sufficiency provisos, both of which money is said to relax.
- Government is a trust, not a contract with the ruler. Two defects it remedies: no settled known law, no indifferent judge, no power to execute.
- The right of revolution follows directly: a government that acts contrary to the trust dissolves itself, and the people, as judge, may resume power. Locke insists rebellion is committed by the ruler who breaks the trust, not by those resisting.
- Mill recasts liberalism around the harm principle: the only purpose for which power may rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community against their will is to prevent harm to others.
- His argument for free expression is epistemic, not merely a right: silencing an opinion robs the human race, and even a false opinion is needed to keep a true one from becoming dead dogma.
- Mill fears the tyranny of the majority in its social form more than its legal form, because social pressure penetrates further and leaves no escape.
- On democracy he is ambivalent: representative government is the ideally best polity because it develops citizens, but he proposes plural voting and educational qualifications to protect competence.
Locke
Thinker
John Locke (1632–1704)
Key works. Two Treatises of Government (1689), A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Core claim. Individuals in a state of nature hold natural rights to life, liberty and estate under a law of nature. They institute government as a trust to remedy the inconveniences of enforcing that law themselves. Its powers are therefore limited to that purpose, and breach of the trust returns power to the people.
Standard critique. The labour theory of property justifies unlimited accumulation once money is introduced, which Macpherson reads as possessive individualism supplying capitalism its charter; and Locke’s involvement with colonial administration, together with his treatment of unenclosed land as waste, has been read as licensing dispossession.
Exam hook. The foundation of constitutionalism, consent, limited government and the right of revolution. UPSC has asked Locke twice in three years.
State of nature and the law of nature
Locke’s state of nature is a state of perfect freedom and of equality, but not of licence. It has a law of nature to govern it, which is reason, and it teaches that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. Everyone holds the executive power of that law, meaning the right to punish transgressors.
The inconveniences, which are the reason for leaving it, are precisely three: there is no established, settled, known law accepted by common consent; there is no known and indifferent judge with authority to determine differences; and there is often no power to back and support a just sentence. Because the defects are procedural rather than substantive, the remedy is limited to correcting them, which is the whole basis of limited government.
Locke separates the state of nature from the state of war, which is what Hobbes conflates. War arises when someone uses force without right; it can occur inside civil society and can be absent in the state of nature. This single distinction generates the difference between the two systems.
Property
Every man has a property in his own person; the labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his; and when he mixes his labour with something removed from the common state, he annexes to it something that is his own and thereby makes it his property. This is the labour theory of property, and it is pre-political: property exists before government, which therefore cannot dispose of it at will.
Two limits are stated. The spoilage limitation: nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy, so one may take only as much as one can use before it perishes. The sufficiency proviso: appropriation is legitimate where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Then comes the step everything turns on. The tacit consent to the use of money, a durable thing that does not spoil, allows a person to accumulate beyond immediate use without violating the spoilage rule; and Locke argues that enclosure increases total product so greatly that others are not made worse off. Unequal possession thus becomes legitimate, by consent, outside government.
Macpherson’s reading, that this is the charter of possessive individualism and that Locke has quietly justified unlimited accumulation and a differential rationality between the propertied and the labouring poor, is the standard critique and should be named. The counter-reading, from Tully and others, is that the provisos remain binding and that Locke retained a robust duty of charity toward those in need.
Trust, and the right of revolution
Locke’s decisive innovation is that political power is a trust, not a contract between ruler and ruled. Two contracts exist in his scheme: one among individuals to form a community, and thereafter the community’s fiduciary grant of power to a government. Because the government is a trustee and not a party, it has no rights against the people, and the people remain the beneficiaries who judge whether the trust has been kept.
The 2024 paper asked about his views on revolution, and the argument runs:
- The legislative is supreme but fiduciary. It cannot rule by arbitrary decree, must judge by promulgated standing laws, cannot take property without consent, and cannot transfer its lawmaking power to anyone else.
- Breach of these limits dissolves the government, without dissolving society. This distinction is essential: the people do not return to the state of nature, they resume the power to constitute a new government.
- Since there is no earthly judge between the people and a government that has broken the trust, the appeal is to heaven, meaning to force; but the people, as beneficiaries, are the judges of when that point has come.
- The charge of rebellion is inverted: those who bring back a state of war are the rebels, so the ruler who breaks the trust is the rebel, not those who resist.
- Locke’s practical safeguards against disorder are strong. People do not rebel over small mismanagements; revolution comes only after a long train of abuses making the design visible; and the risk of licensing resistance is smaller than the risk of leaving power unaccountable.
John Stuart Mill
Thinker
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
Key works. On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1861), The Subjection of Women (1869)
Core claim. Liberty may be restricted only to prevent harm to others. Freedom of thought and discussion is defended on the ground that truth emerges only from open contest, and individuality is defended as an element of well-being, not merely as a permission. Utility remains the ultimate appeal, but utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.
Standard critique. The self-regarding and other-regarding distinction will not hold, since almost no conduct is without effect on others; his exclusion of barbarians from the principle underwrites a civilising defence of empire; and plural voting concedes that he trusted competence more than equality.
Exam hook. The reference point for free speech, for the tyranny of the majority, and for the transition from classical to modern liberalism.
The harm principle and its difficulties
The principle is stated once and precisely: the sole end for which mankind are warranted in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection; the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. A person’s own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant, which rules out paternalism, and offence to others’ feelings is not harm, which rules out moralism.
Three difficulties, each of which an answer should name.
- The self-regarding sphere is hard to isolate: the drinker’s family, employer and society bear costs. Mill’s reply distinguishes harm from mere affected interest, and accepts that duties may be enforced where a distinct assignable obligation is breached.
- Mill exempts those in the nonage of the race, holding despotism a legitimate mode of government with barbarians provided the end is their improvement. This is not a marginal remark; it connects to his employment with the East India Company and is the basis of the post-colonial critique of him.
- The famous liberty-limiting exception he accepts, that a man may not sell himself into slavery, is inconsistent with pure anti-paternalism, though he defends it on the ground that the principle of freedom cannot require that one be free not to be free.
Why free discussion, specifically
Mill’s defence of expression is the strongest passage in liberal thought because it does not rest on a right at all. Silencing an opinion is an evil that robs the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation, and those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold it. The argument is fourfold: the suppressed opinion may be true, and to deny this is to assume our own infallibility; it may contain part of the truth, and only collision supplies the remainder; even a wholly true received opinion, if not contested, is held as prejudice rather than rational conviction; and its meaning itself decays into a formula, becoming a dead dogma rather than a living truth.
The tyranny of the majority
Mill’s opening move in On Liberty (1859), and the reason he matters after the extension of the franchise, is that the danger has changed shape. When the rulers were an alien power, liberty meant limits on them. When the rulers are the people’s own delegates, the will of the people means the will of the most numerous or most active part, and the people may desire to oppress a part of their number.
More importantly, the tyranny of the majority operates socially as well as through law. Society can and does execute its own mandates through the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling, which penetrates far more deeply into the details of life, enslaving the soul itself, and leaving fewer means of escape than political oppression. This is Mill’s most original contribution and the source of every later argument about conformity, moral panic and social media pile-ons.
Representative government, and its qualifications
Considerations on Representative Government (1861) argues that the ideally best form of government is representative, on two grounds: the protective, that each person’s rights are secure only when they can stand up for them, and the developmental, that participation educates and elevates the citizen. The second is the argument that puts Mill in the developmental model in Chapter 6 and makes him Pateman’s ancestor.
His qualifications are as famous and less flattering. He proposed plural voting, additional votes for the educated and for those in occupations requiring judgement; supported an educational qualification, holding that a person unable to read, write and do arithmetic should not vote; and argued for open rather than secret ballot, on the ground that the vote is a trust exercised for others and should be publicly answerable. He also advocated Hare’s system of proportional representation, to secure the representation of minorities and of instructed opinion.
On women he is unequivocal, and The Subjection of Women (1869) is treated in Chapter 9: the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and one of the chief hindrances to human improvement, and the existing nature of women is an eminently artificial thing, since it has been observed only under conditions of subjection.
| Locke | Mill | |
|---|---|---|
| Ground of liberty | Natural right, pre-political | Utility in the largest sense, grounded on man as a progressive being |
| Chief danger | Arbitrary government breaching its trust | The majority, acting through law and still more through opinion |
| Limit on the state | The purpose of the trust: life, liberty, estate | The harm principle; self-regarding conduct is immune |
| Property | Pre-political, from labour; limited by provisos | Distribution is a matter of human institution, unlike production |
| Democracy | Not a democrat; a propertied electorate assumed | Representative government as the ideal, with plural voting |
| Legacy | 1688, 1776, constitutionalism, judicial limitation | Free speech doctrine, modern liberalism, the developmental case for participation |
Debate: Does the harm principle survive its critics?
No. Almost no conduct is purely self-regarding; the distinction collapses on contact with families, dependants and public provision. Devlin’s objection adds that a society is held together by a shared morality, and is entitled to protect it as it protects itself from treason. And Mill’s own exceptions, on slavery contracts and on barbarians, show the principle cannot be applied consistently even by its author. Yes. The principle was never meant to settle cases; it allocates the burden of proof, and that is a substantial achievement. Anyone proposing coercion must identify a harm to an assignable person, which excludes distaste, offence and paternalism as sufficient grounds. Hart’s reply to Devlin holds: shared morality changes constantly without society disintegrating, and the alternative is to license the majority to enforce its preferences as such. The examiner’s line. Treat it as a presumption rather than an algorithm. Its practical work in Indian constitutional argument is visible: Navtej Singh Johar (2018) turned on whether private consensual conduct harmed anyone, and the answer that it did not is a harm-principle answer, even where the judgments reason through dignity and privacy.
The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths is the preservation of their property
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Where answers lose marks
- Saying Locke’s people contract with the government. They contract with each other to form a community; government holds a trust, which is why it can be dissolved without dissolving society.
- Giving the labour theory of property without the provisos and the money argument. The whole controversy, and Macpherson’s critique, lives in that step.
- Treating Locke as a democrat. He assumed a propertied electorate and legislative supremacy; he supplied the premises democracy was later built on.
- Defending free speech as a right when writing on Mill. His argument is epistemic: we cannot know we are right without contest, and unchallenged truth decays into dead dogma.
- Omitting the social form of majority tyranny. The legal form was already familiar; Mill’s contribution is the tyranny of prevailing opinion.
- Presenting Mill as an unqualified democrat. Plural voting, educational qualification and open ballot are his own proposals and must be reported.
Asked before
- The foundational base of western democracy has been shaped by Locke’s ideas of constitutionalism, freedom and property. Elucidate. (2025, Paper I, 20 marks)
- Locke’s views on Revolution. (2024, Paper I, 10 marks)
- “The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human development.” (J.S. Mill). Comment. (2023, Paper I, 15 marks)
Answer skeleton
Locke’s views on Revolution. (10 marks, 150 words)
Frame. The right of revolution is not an addition to Locke’s theory but a corollary of the trust doctrine. Say that in the first line.
The premise. Government holds a fiduciary trust for specified ends. It is not a party to a contract with the people, so it has no rights against them.
The trigger. Acting contrary to the trust: ruling by arbitrary decree, taking property without consent, delegating the legislative power, or obstructing the legislature. This dissolves the government without dissolving society.
Who judges. The people, as beneficiaries. Since there is no common judge on earth, the appeal is to heaven, which means to force.
The inversion. Locke’s sharpest move: the rebel is the ruler who breaks the trust and brings back the state of war, not those who resist.
The safeguards. Revolution requires a long train of abuses showing design, not mismanagement; people are slow to change accustomed forms; so the doctrine does not license disorder.
Close. Its influence: 1688, the American Declaration of 1776, and the general principle that constitutional limits without a remedy are not limits at all.
Last-mile revision
- Locke’s state of nature: free and equal, governed by the law of nature; three defects, no settled law, no indifferent judge, no power to execute. State of nature is not the state of war.
- Property: labour mixing; spoilage and sufficiency provisos; money relaxes spoilage and legitimises unequal accumulation. Macpherson’s possessive individualism as the critique.
- Trust doctrine: two contracts, community then fiduciary grant; dissolution of government without dissolution of society; appeal to heaven; the ruler as rebel; long train of abuses.
- Mill’s harm principle; rejection of paternalism and moralism; the self-regarding difficulty; the barbarians exception; the slavery-contract exception.
- Free discussion, four arguments: the opinion may be true; may be partly true; contest keeps true opinion living; otherwise it becomes dead dogma.
- Tyranny of the majority in law and, more dangerously, in social opinion, which enslaves the soul itself.
- Considerations on Representative Government (1861): protective and developmental arguments; plural voting, educational qualification, open ballot, Hare’s proportional representation.
- The Subjection of Women (1869): the law of the strongest surviving; women’s nature an eminently artificial thing.
Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.
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