CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

and has returned to the fore of political debate as a principal justification for external
intervention in the internal affairs of oppressive states.
Locke’s view of ‘man in the state of nature’ is not radically different from that of
Hobbes but he puts a different interpretation on it, drawing a consequently different
conclusion as to the remedy. For Locke the emphasis is on the freedom man enjoys in
the state of nature, but:
…though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in
that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions,
yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his
possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it.
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and
reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being
all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health,
liberty, or possessions… 38
An important difference between Hobbes and Locke, of course, is the latter’s
Christianity. Man is ‘sent into the world by his order …(and) made to last during his
and not another’s pleasure.’ Thus it is God who has ‘appointed government to restrain
the partiality and violence of men’ (following Aquinas’ view of the principium of
authority) and ‘civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the
state of nature.’ 39 Unlike Hobbes, Locke does not see that civil government must be
vested in an all-powerful, authoritarian ‘Leviathan’. For:
..it is evident that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted for the
only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so
can be no form of civil government at all. For the end of civil society being to
avoid and remedy those inconveniences of the state of nature which necessarily
follow from every man’s being judge in his own case, by setting up a known
authority, to which every one of that society may appeal upon any injury
received, or controversy that may arise, and which everyone of the society ought
to obey. 40
Locke’s concern is with civil (domestic) government. He says little about how relations
between states ought to be organised, though he does talk of conquest and the rights and
duties of conqueror and vanquished (in largely just war terms). That he envisaged no
international society is evident in that when he seeks an example of the ‘state of nature’
it is to states than he turns: ‘.. since all princes and rulers of independent governments
all through the world, are in a state of nature, ‘tis plain the world never was, nor never
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