Analysis: writings by John Locke - Essay Example

This paper compares and contrasts the treatment of liberty in these two chapters. Chapter Four and Chapter Nine share similarities in declining absolute authority to both slaveholders and the monarchy and in promoting the natural rights of human beings for liberty, though there are differences in their treatments of the kinds and boundaries of liberties surrendered under slavery and the commonwealth. Chapter Four and Chapter Nine possess similarities in rebuffing absolute authority to both slaveholders and the monarchy.

Locke defines slavery in its “extreme condition” (Paley, Malcolmson, and Hunter 263), where the masters have “absolute, arbitrary, despotical power” (2831) over their slaves. By absolute, he refers to slaveholders who insist on having the power of ending a slave’s life. Instead, Locke supports slavery in the sense that it only refers to complicit “drudgery” (2831). He indicates that slavery is a form of dualistic contract, where the slave allows the master to control him/her to some extent that would benefit them both.

Locke, however, stresses that a slave remains free to resist absolute and tyrannical ownership of his/her liberty and this can be expressed by the remaining liberty of taking his own life: “…tis in his power by resisting the will of his master to draw on himself the death he desires” (2831). Masters can hurt their slaves but not decide on when and how to end the latter’s lives. Locke does not also agree with the absolute power provided to the monarchy, and he insists that the power of the state rests in the submission of and participation of the people in its legal and executive functions.

For Locke, the people, once entering the social contract with the state, only relieves themselves of two rights: the first is the right to preserve themselves and others and the second is the right to punish others who transgressed laws. As a result, people give up the “law of