We are accustomed to considering John Locke the quintessential theorist of free, equal contract among those “born to all the same advantages of Nature and the use of the same faculties.” Within the robust limitations imposed by the natural law and what laws they craft themselves, Locke's subjects enjoy a “perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit” (TT 2.4). Indeed, within the bounds of these rules, each is at “Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property” (TT 2.57). Carefully preserved from the power of others by the obligations imposed by God and reason, Locke's men jealously guard their freedom, governing themselves through laws and institutions that preserve and enlarge their liberty.

Though this is how we understand Locke, this is not how Locke himself envisions the government of men. For beyond and beneath the metaphysical imperatives of the law of nature, he offers discipline that constructs citizens as industrious, decent, and reasonable by enticing them to regulate the conduct of their conduct. By carefully controlling space and visibility, by gently tugging the levers of yet unformed minds into place, Locke encourages the children of the wealthy to internalize a core of habitual virtues enabling self-government and liberal politics. For the poor, his methods are more brutal, but even their hardness is tempered by gentler correction. Locke's focus on careful government—government in the sense of Foucauldian “governmentality”— has been obscured by insistently reading him as an individualist, a natural law theorist, and a thoroughgoing contractarian. Locke is undeniably these, but we simply cannot understand him, or contemporary liberal politics, without appreciating his deep disciplinary commitments.

This is not to deny Locke's confident assertions about natural law in his Second Treatise. But as is well known, he elsewhere expresses powerful doubts about these laws and about the willingness of men to govern their conduct by reason. I suggest that we cannot see how these reservations function with his theorization of the malleable subject without decentering the Second Treatise in his political thought.