1688 Revolution

The 1688 Revolution matters here less as a narrated episode than as a test case in the argument over political legitimacy. It helps explain why John Locke made government depend on the continuing consent of the governed, while also sharpening the contrast with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s demand for an active, recurring expression of popular agreement.

The Revolution as a Challenge to Royal Authority

The account places the Convention Parliament of 1688 within the older theory that political society rests on a contract between ruler and people. It accused James II of having “endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people.” The charge framed resistance not as a rejection of political obligation, but as a response to a ruler’s breach of it: a king was bound by the terms of the political relationship, and those terms could be invoked in defense of popular liberties.

This contract theory could nevertheless support sharply different conclusions. If the people were understood to have surrendered themselves once and for all, the arrangement might leave them with no further claim against their rulers. Its more common constitutional interpretation treated the agreement as reciprocal: rulers were obliged to govern according to its terms. The appeal against James II thus belongs to a tradition in which inherited customs and liberties could be restated as obligations binding the monarch.

Locke and Consent

The Revolution also supplies the immediate political purpose attributed to Locke. His theory is presented as aiming largely to justify the Revolution of 1688: government depends on the consent of the governed not only when it is first established, but throughout its existence, and rulers who govern tyrannically may be displaced. In this account, the Revolution is therefore connected to a principle of conditional political authority, rather than to an unconditional transfer of obedience to a ruler.

The limits of Locke’s account are part of the comparison. He provides no machinery short of revolution through which the people can express their opinions, and popular consent appears largely tacit and assumed. His emphasis on the State’s protection of life and property accompanies cautious claims for popular rights. The political rupture gives force to the right of displacement, but the theory, as described here, does not specify a regular constitutional means of making consent effective.

Rousseau’s Contrast

Rousseau’s alternative is distinguished by the problem he sees in consent that remains only tacit. If popular consent is to be more than a name, he argues, it needs constitutional means of expression. In place of Locke’s assumed consent, Rousseau proposes an active agreement periodically renewed. The Revolution’s significance in this comparison is thus twofold: it exemplifies the possibility of resisting tyrannical government, yet it does not by itself supply the continuing political participation Rousseau considers necessary.

Rousseau’s preferred examples are the city-states of ancient Greece and, in his own time, the Swiss free cities, especially Geneva. Seeing no European nation-state in which representative government worked democratically, he could not conceive how active agreement might be secured on that scale. He consequently held self-government to be possible only in a city and wished to replace Europe’s nation-states with federative leagues of independent city-states. Set against those proposals, the 1688 Revolution marks an important defense of liberties within a kingdom, but not the fully renewed popular sovereignty Rousseau seeks.