Introduction John Locke's Second Treatise of Government is not philosophy but political propaganda—a grievance dressed in the language of natural law and ruined by relentlessly bad prose. It is repetitive not from depth but from devotion: to God, to property, and to a theological framework that denies its own contradictions. It lacks structure because it lacks a central idea beyond "the king is bad, consent is good." And it reads less like a reasoned argument than like the lament of a man who fled England and wanted revenge on paper, yet lacked the courage to name his enemies directly. This is not liberalism. This is a rant with footnotes. The Prose: Bad, Repetitive, and Structurally Incoherent The Second Treatise is a chore to read—not because its ideas are complex, but because its prose is clotted, its arguments meander, and its structure is nearly absent. Locke writes like a man dictating to a clerk while distracted, piling qualification upon qualification until the original point is buried. One might excuse this as a product of its time, but the defense fails. Erasmus's Praise of Folly—written over a century earlier and translated into multiple languages—is witty, elegant, and coherent. Hobbes, Locke's contemporary, writes with force and memorability: "The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Locke gives us nothing comparable. Translation does not explain this; translation affects meaning, not syntax or rhythm. The problem lies with Locke himself—a writer who either lacked the craft or did not care to exercise it. The repetition is particularly telling. Locke hammers the same few points—consent, property, the state of nature—as if repetition substitutes for argument. But the repetition serves a purpose beyond laziness: it is devotional. He is not trying to persuade; he is trying to preach. The Second Treatise is not a philosophical inquiry but a theological homily, and its prose reflects that origin. The Personal Grievance Behind the Treatise Locke wrote the Second Treatise while in exile in the Netherlands, having fled England due to his association with the Earl of Shaftesbury and his involvement in the Exclusion Crisis. This context matters. The treatise is not a dispassionate exploration of political legitimacy—it is a personal reckoning with a government that had expelled him. Yet Locke never names his grievance directly. He does not critique Parliament or the monarchy by name; he speaks in abstractions. His discussion of the separation of governmental powers reads less like a theory than a lament—a yearning for a world in which he might have had influence rather than exile. He never dares to criticize his own government openly, choosing instead to veil his complaints in the language of natural law and divine will. This is not courage. This is circumvention. Contrast this with philosophers who lived their ideas. Spinoza, Locke's contemporary, questioned the status quo directly and endured excommunication for it. He differentiated between the understood and the miraculous, remaining a believer in his own terms while laying the groundwork for secular thought. Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens by planting seeds of doubt—a revolutionary act precisely because it trusted ideas to germinate. Sartre lived his philosophy so thoroughly that it implicated him in scandal; he was the ideas he professed. Smith lived modestly on a single draft of The Wealth of Nations and died in relative obscurity, letting the market—the very mechanism he described—decide his legacy. Marx, whatever one thinks of him, refused to sell his ideas, thereby enacting his critique of capitalism through his own poverty. Locke did none of this. He wrote from exile, aimed at a specific political faction, and refused to take personal or intellectual risks. His treatise is not a philosophy one lives; it is a pamphlet one uses. Property: The Central Confusion Deemed the founder of property rights by libertarians and academics alike, Locke's definition of property is philosophically trivial and historically ignorant. He famously argues that a person acquires property by mixing their labor with nature—an act of appropriation that transforms a common object into a private one. This is a category error. Labor is an action; property is a relation. One performs an action; one holds a relation. Locke collapses the two without justification. When I pluck an apple, the labor is gone—expended. What remains is the apple. To claim that the labor "mixes" with the apple and thereby transfers ownership is a metaphysical leap, not a logical deduction. The Latin origin of the word confirms this. Proprietas means "ownership" or "peculiarity"—a term of relation, not action. Locke's labor theory inverts this classical meaning without acknowledgment, revealing either ignorance or willful distortion. Modern libertarians exploit this confusion to argue that any effort, no matter how trivial, creates an unassailable claim to ownership. But Locke's logic would also imply that squatters own the properties they inhabit—a conclusion his defenders reject. It would also imply that national parks, preserved by collective labor, should be free to all, a conclusion I am happy to accept but which Locke himself would have rejected. Locke's ignorance is not innocent. The Enclosure Acts were debated during his lifetime, formalizing the theft of common land and the dispossession of peasants. Laws existed punishing laborers for stealing produce from the fields they tilled. Locke, an investor in the Royal African Company and a beneficiary of the slave trade, knew these realities well. He chose to ignore them. Slavery: The Omission That Undermines Everything Locke's treatise begins with a bold claim: all men are equal in the state of nature. But this equality conveniently excludes the enslaved—a category of human beings Locke never mentions. His investments in the slave trade are well documented; he helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which explicitly legalized slavery. He knew that human beings could be property. He simply refused to address it. This is not a minor oversight. If Locke's theory of property cannot account for the most glaring property relation of his time—the ownership of human beings—then it is not a theory of property at all. It is a justification for the property of the powerful, dressed in the language of universal right. The omission is structural, not incidental. Revolution: An Open-Ended Invitation Locke famously justifies revolution—but only vaguely. He argues that when the government violates its trust, the people may resist. But he does not specify who decides, what constitutes a violation, or what form resistance should take. This vagueness is politically useful: it justified the Glorious Revolution (a parliamentary coup) without endorsing popular uprising. But it also invites misappropriation. This is where libertarians enter. They read Locke's open-ended revolution doctrine as an endorsement of armed resistance to any state action they dislike—taxation, regulation, vaccine mandates. Locke's vagueness is not an accident; it is a strategy. He wanted his theory to serve his faction while remaining usable by others. But that makes him politically clever, not philosophically deep. Why Locke Endures Given these flaws—bad prose, theological captivity, confusion over property, silence on slavery, and vague revolution—why does Locke remain influential? The answer is not philosophical merit but political utility. Locke is useful to libertarians who need a foundational text for property absolutism. He is useful to academics who need a secular-sounding ancestor for liberal universalism. He is useful to anyone who wants to claim the authority of "natural rights" without defending the substance of their claims. His vagueness allows him to be all things to all people—a weakness in philosophy, but a strength in propaganda. His popularity among modern intellectuals is telling. Art dealers invoke labour and hardship to inflate the value of mediocre work; libertarians invoke Locke's labour theory to inflate the value of their ideas and art. In both cases, labour itself becomes a rhetorical shield against criticism. Conclusion: History, Not Philosophy Locke's Second Treatise deserves a place in history—as a document of its time, as a piece of Whig propaganda, as an artifact of the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution. It does not deserve a place in the canon of great thinkers. I have not compared Locke to Smith, Marx, or Rousseau, and I have done so deliberately. They had access to more knowledge, built on or criticized Locke's ideas, and articulated more sophisticated positions. But even by the standards of his own time, Locke falls short. Erasmus and Hobbes wrote better. Spinoza lived braver. Locke wrote from exile, took no risks, and produced a work that is remembered not because it is profound but because it is politically useful. Great philosophy germinates ideas, asks uncomfortable questions, and lives by its own principles. Locke's Second Treatise does none of this. It is a lament, a plea, and a propaganda piece—nothing more. That it has been mistaken for liberalism is the greatest unexamined assumption of modern political thought.