In order to discern the conditions which must be satisfied if a polity is to be judged legitimate, and in order to differentiate such a community from the broader set of human social arrangements which Filmer held to be so, it was necessary to perform two separate operations. The logical preconditions for the existence of a legitimate authority of one human being over another had to be elaborated and the sociological prerequisites for claiming that such a legitimate authority existed in a particular political society had to be analysed. In order to carry off the entire project for which his book was devised—the justification of revolutionary action or at least the threat of such action under certain circumstances—and in order to destroy the Filmerian position, Locke needed to pay much closer attention to the analysis of the logical preconditions than to the character of their embodiment in particular political societies. In the book as he finally published it what he provided in this latter respect were less accounts which analysed this issue with any philosophical adequacy than perfunctory sketches of the shapes which such arguments would take if anyone wished to elaborate them fully. This would have been a slightly peculiar procedure if his intention had been to write any sort of sufficient moral apologia for a particular political society, let alone a particular social structure.