The political discussions of the eighteenth century contributed to the development of a new mode of political thought and to the creation of new governmental forms in America and France after a violent revolution in each. John Locke was key in the development of the philosophy of liberalism, and he was countered by the conservative view of Edmund Burke. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered a more radical critique than had Locke, seeking in fact a fundamental revision of all political and social arrangements in order to develop an ideal structure that would perpetuate the liberal philosophy of government.
The ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a great influence on the American Founding Fathers, providing them with a rationale for their development of an independent government by offering an analysis of the relationship between the people and their government. John Locke discussed the matter in his The Second Treatise of Civil Government, a work in which he developed the idea that government could rightfully operate only with the consent of the governed and that any attempt to govern in defiance of the will of the people was tyranny. Locke's thinking would become a vital element in constitutionalism, the theory that the people give authority to governments conditionally as part of a contract, a social contract.
Locke differed from the norm of his time and did not see the power of kings as being given to them by God but rather as deriving from some social condition, and to analyze this condition he asked first what state human beings would be in if there were no government. He looked back to the state of nature, to the state of human beings before the creation of government or even of society. He saw the individual as born into a state of perfect freedom, with no necessity to ask any other person before determining their own actions or disposing of their own property. The individual in society does not have absolut...