The End Of Law Is Not

From Chapter 57 of the Second Treatise of Government (1689). John Locke was responding to the Hobbesian view that law is primarily a constraint on human freedom. On the contrary, he argued, law — understood as the rule of reason — is what makes ordered liberty possible: it restrains the arbitrary will of the powerful, thereby expanding the freedom of everyone else. This conception of law as the guarantor rather than the enemy of freedom was enormously influential on liberal political theory and on John Stuart Mill's later arguments for liberty.