John Dunn has not only been one of the leading interpreters of John Locke's political theory in our time; he has also become an increasingly deep admirer of what he describes as the soundness and sober realism of Locke's political stance. Dunn's strong sense that Locke has something of vital importance to tell us here and now was by no means his initial reaction to the Two Treatises of Government. When in 1969 he published his classic monograph, The Political Thought of John Locke, he declared in his Preface that ‘I simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters.’ Dunn had already begun to reconsider this verdict some time before he formally recanted it in an essay of 1990 entitled ‘What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke’, in which he characterised his original response as ‘peculiarly ill-considered’. He had already maintained in his Introduction to Rethinking Modern Political Theory in 1985 that Locke's view of political power ‘has a trenchancy and a relevance’ that are in some respects ‘unmatched by any other major political thinker’, and in the same collection of essays he went so far as to add that we have good reason to treat Locke's conception of political philosophy as exemplary for our times.