apparently be plainer than Locke's case, although on a closer look it turns out to be full of ambiguities" (Locke vii).
The most important ambiguity is that Locke argues for liberal government and at the same time argues for unlimited private property.
In fact, the liberal government which is described by Locke in this book is used as a means to support the right to private property.
In his Preface, Locke argues that his book is meant to "justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, saved the nation when it was on the brink of slavery and ruin" (Locke 5).
Locke argues first that man from his beginning has had a freedom to determine his own government which is not a matter of "force and violence." He writes that "Political power . . . I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death . . . for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good" (Locke 8).
Therefore, Locke argues that the state "all men are naturally in . . . (is) a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other men" (Locke 8).
Locke goes on to argue that men in the state of nature, or perfect freedom, were able to find out and live by the moral law.
In other words, there is a natural moral law which all men can understand. It means that all men know how to see that every other individual is a free being who must be valued for his freedom and for his right to be free and to own property. It a
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