An Agreement Among People In A Society With Their Government

Since the end of the Association of Men for the Common Good (paragraph 124) is the preservation of its wealth and the maintenance of one`s life, liberty and well-being in general, Locke can easily imagine the conditions under which the pact with the government is destroyed and people have the right to oppose the authority of a civilian government as a king. If the executive power of a government passes to tyranny, for example by dissolving the legislative power and thus denying the people the opportunity to legislate for its own conservation, the resulting tyrant places himself in a state of nature and, in particular, in a state of war with the people, and then they have the same right to self-defense as before the pact. to establish society in general. In other words, the justification for the authority of the executive component of government is the protection of the property and well-being of the people, so that if such protection no longer exists, or if the king becomes a tyrant and acts against the interests of the people, they have the right, if not the flagrant obligation, to oppose his authority. The social pact can be dissolved and the process of creating a political society can be revived. Mills` central argument is that there is an even more fundamental “race treaty” for Western society than the social contract. This racist treaty first determines who is considered a political and moral being, and thus defines the parameters that can be linked to the freedom and equality promised by the social contract. Some people, especially white men, are full-fledged persons under the treaty of race. As such, they have the right to enter into the social contract and to enter into certain legal contracts.

They are considered to be entirely human and therefore egalitarian and liberticidal. Their status as full-fledged persons gives them greater social power. In particular, it gives them the power to enter into contracts that are the subject of the treaty, while others are denied such a right and are placed in the status of contractual objects. After the introduction of private property, the initial conditions of inequality were strengthened. Some have property, others are forced to work for them, and the development of social classes begins. In the end, those who have property realize that it would be in their interest to create a government that protects private property from those who do not, but that can see that they could acquire it by force.

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