Locke and “War by Design”

Few passages in John Locke's political writings are more controversial than the incongruous descriptions of the state of nature in chapters 3 and 9 of the Second Treatise on Government. A hodgepodge of opposites where men live at once in a “State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and Preservation” while remaining “very unsafe, very unsecure,” Locke's state of nature is, according to John Dunn, “probably the most misunderstood idea in the English radical's political philosophy.”1 Owing to the heterogeneity of Locke's description of natural society, A. John Simmons observes, “any social characterization of the state of nature given by

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