In the previous chapter, I argued that Locke employs discipline and power to construct elites who can govern themselves by contract. Far from assuming that men are capable of recognizing and obeying the laws of nature, he locates their agreement about the basic principles of moral and political right in nothing more august than habit and education. For this reason, it is impossible to abridge Lockean political theory to an attempt to ground legitimate political power in the limitations imposed by the natural law. Obviously, Locke trades in the language of the natural law to resist the overreach of the King, but it is far from clear how abstract metaphysical principles are to guide political life within the capacious bounds he sets in the Second Treatise.

Moreover, in light of his Education and Essay, Locke's readers should question his metaphysical commitments, for nowhere in the Second Treatise does he defend these higher foundations or make arguments in support of them. A universal, immediately apparent natural law flies in the face of his rejection of innate knowledge and dispositionalism in the Essay, where he argues against these easy answers. Moreover, his appeal to the natural law in the Second Treatise is an assumption, not an argument, relying on the background commitments of his audience of radicals and the language of notable pamphleteers.

Locke is more accurately and usefully understood as a theorist of a system of practices designed to educate self-ruling subjects to recognize a common set of virtues that seem to them to be the very voice of nature and God. Unable to remember a time before these ideas were lodged in their minds, they feel these laws to be universal truths. These beliefs notwithstanding, Locke locates power as the foundation of the natural law, the state, and the law of fashion—which is to say, as the foundation of the government of men.