As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of the literature on leadership. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we turn to John Locke.
Locke took Hobbes a step further. Much further. It is not too much to say that Locke went a long way toward balancing the scale between leaders and followers. According to Locke, followers had much more than just the right to life, and to concur on who should be their otherwise all-powerful leader. Locke maintained that followers’ rights – your rights and my rights – included liberty and the all-important right to property. To own it. It could reasonably be argued then that Locke – a figure of the early Enlightenment – built not just the foundation of democracy but of capitalism.
There are good reasons then why Locke was the ideological rock and intellectual bastion on which America’s founders chose to stand. Bernard Bailyn, author of the classic, The Ideological Foundations of the American Revolution, observed that the influence of the European Enlightenment on eighteenth century Americans is “profusely illustrated in the political literature.” Moreover, Locke especially was quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed to be politically aware, especially in the 1770s. Bailyn writes that “in pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract.”
The importance of Locke ’s contribution to the idea that between the governors (leaders) and the governed (followers) should be a contract – a social contract – is impossible to overestimate. For among other things it assured that those without power and authority had the right to unseat those with. Ideas like these were critical to American political thinking. And to the documents on which the American system of government since has been based: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
This short course will give evidence of how over time the balance of power gradually shifted – from leaders to followers. The beginnings of these stirrings are evident in these excerpts.
From Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690):
- Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
- There remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them…. [Power] may be placed anew where [the people] shall think it best for their safety and security.
- [Power can have no purpose other than to] preserve the members of that society in their lives, liberties, and possessions, and so cannot be an absolute, arbitrary power over their lives and fortunes, which are as much as possible to be preserved …. And this power has its original only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.