TODAY THE practice as well as the theory of foreign policy is divided between the traditions of liberalism and realism (or realpolitik). Ever since the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, international politics has been influenced by the discourse of “human rights,” rooted in the tradition of natural-rights philosophy that dates back to the seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke. The idea of human or natural rights is commonly identified with the liberal tradition in foreign affairs. The liberal tradition, favoring international organization, international law, free trade and national self-determination, is often identified with Locke as well as with Adam Smith and Woodrow Wilson.

Liberalism is often contrasted with realism, the tradition identified with practitioners of power politics like Otto von Bismarck and Henry Kissinger and theorists like Hans Morgenthau. Realism is divided among several schools, but most realists agree that the central fact of world politics is the competition for relative power among sovereign states in a condition of global anarchy.

In the actual practice of contemporary statecraft, the two traditions are usually combined. Most countries, including the United States, the most powerful state in the system, mix power politics with moral and legal arguments in their foreign policies. But this commingling of realism and liberalism is expedient, rather than principled. It does not rest on any coherent moral and political philosophy in which elements from the realist and liberal tradition can find appropriate places. Attempts to produce a synthesis, a “realist liberalism” or a “liberal realism,” seem more forced than natural.

This dilemma makes John Locke’s thinking about world politics particularly interesting. Although he is usually classified as a liberal, Locke’s natural-rights theory frequently leads to conclusions closer to modern realism than liberalism. In an era when the stale debate between liberals and realists often frustrates foreign-policy practitioners and thinkers alike, Locke’s unusual combination of realist and liberal themes bears surprising relevance to contemporary debates about human rights, power politics and world order.

ALTHOUGH HE was careful never to mention his notorious precursor Thomas Hobbes, John Locke followed Hobbes in rooting social and political order in the natural rights of human beings in a “state of nature.” Chief among these natural rights is the right of self-preservation of life, a right aided by the auxiliary natural rights of liberty or “property,” a term used broadly to mean the right of individuals to labor for their own subsistence. Hobbes’s description of the state of nature is well known:

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Unlike Hobbes, Locke distinguishes between the state of nature and the state of war. According to Locke, moral norms exist even in a prepolitical condition of anarchy. Individuals have a right to defend themselves and take what they need to survive from nature by their own labor, but they have no right to kill or enslave others, except in self-defense. Each individual possesses the “executive power” necessary to enforce the law of nature, in their own defense and that of others. When they form a community by means of a hypothetical (not historical) social contract, the members of the community delegate their power to enforce the law of nature—that is, to preserve their lives, liberties and property—to the government. But the contract is among the members of the community, not between the community and the state, which is merely the agent of the sovereign people, who delegate limited powers to it as a trust that they can revoke at any time.

Although Locke differed from Hobbes in asserting that a minimal morality precedes community, his depiction of the prepolitical condition is similar to Hobbes’s famous description of the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short.” Locke’s state of nature is not in itself a state of perpetual war, as it is for Hobbes. But Locke emphasizes that the absence of settled laws enforced by government make the state of nature one of “disorder,” “uncertainty” and “anarchy,” from which individuals flee to the “sanctuary” of a commonwealth created by a social compact. Defense against outsiders and criminals is the chief purpose of a state:

“Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death and, consequently, all less penalties 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 commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good.”

The Lockean commonwealth exists primarily to defend the community against violence from without and within.

IN HIS hostility to imperialism and colonialism, as well as in his solicitude for the rights of conquered peoples, Locke is closer to the liberal tradition that invokes his name than to versions of realpolitik that dismiss attempts to limit the legitimate goals and methods of war as sentimental and utopian. Unlike many liberals, however, Locke does not base his opposition to wars of conquest and annexation—or his ideas about the proper treatment of defeated enemies—on humanitarian sentiments or moral duties that transcend borders. Instead, his arguments about these topics are rigorously derived from his specific claims about the limited ends of legitimate governments.

In his study Locke on War and Peace, Richard H. Cox points out that Locke’s limitation of legitimate war to the defense of the lives, liberties and estates of a state’s own citizens means that wars of glory or conversion are illegitimate by definition:

“The individual’s right to make war is given up to the commonwealth with the express limitation that it shall be employed only “in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury,” which is to say only for “the public good.” Consequently, rulers who use the war power only to achieve personal glory and power through conquests . . . have broken the fundamental law of the commonwealth, violated the law of nature regarding the preservation of their own subjects, and exposed themselves to punishment and removal from office. . . . Finally, the public force of the commonwealth can never legitimately be used to instigate a war on religious grounds, such as in an attempt to stamp out heresy and idolatry. . . . Since a war waged for any of the preceding causes is fundamentally unjust according to the law of nature, the aggressor, if victorious, acquires no rights whatever, under the law, over the victim of the conquest.”

The same notions of natural rights and social contracts limit what victors in a just, defensive war can legitimately do to their defeated enemies. While the victors may punish the foreign leaders who launched an aggressive war, they cannot engage in collective punishment. Locke’s reasoning is subtle and somewhat paradoxical. Remember, according to Locke, a state’s powers are delegated by its people and limited to a few (not all) of the powers that each individual possesses in the state of nature. The individual’s power of self-defense, transferred by the members of a particular community to the government, becomes the legitimate power of waging war for the defense of the community. But if individuals in the state of nature have no right to murder, rob or enslave innocents without violating the law of nature, then they cannot delegate a power to murder, rob and enslave foreigners to their government.

It follows, then, that the leaders of a foreign country that has engaged in an aggressive war must be assumed to have been acting ultra vires, that is, to have violated their duties as agents of their own people. (Living in an era of dynastic monarchies and patrician city-republics following the age of European barbarian invasions and preceding the age of mass politics, Locke says nothing about cases in which entire populations support aggressive wars.) The victorious defenders of the state that was attacked can punish the foreign leaders and exact reparations for the damage they have suffered, but if possible, says Locke, the reparations should not lead to the starvation of the defeated population. Furthermore, the victor in a defensive war cannot annex enemy territory, which still belongs to the people of the former enemy state. And if the enemy government has been destroyed, the victors cannot install a new one. The people of the defeated country must organize a new government themselves.

The sole exception Locke makes to his principled opposition to imperialism is that productive populations are entitled to appropriate and develop “waste” land, if it is left undeveloped by primitive nomads or others who make only light use of it. No environmentalist, Locke considers nature that has not yet been transformed for human use to be worthless. Locke argues that such relatively empty and undeveloped territory is, in essence, still part of the global commons which individuals and commonwealths can appropriate for their own uses. This theory was used by Anglo-Americans to justify the colonization of thinly inhabited North America, Australia and New Zealand by settlers at the expense of their aboriginal peoples. But it could not be used to justify the rule of the Spanish over dense Indian populations in Central and South America or the later rule of the British empire over the inhabitants of India and other sedentary, agrarian populations.

MANY CONTEMPORARY liberals support the idea of a “responsibility to protect.” The term is used to mean both the responsibility of every state to protect the natural rights or “human rights” of its citizens and an alleged duty of outsiders to intervene in countries where the local government has failed to carry out its own responsibility to protect its people because of criminality or incompetence. In the last generation, the idea of a “responsibility to protect” has been invoked to justify “humanitarian war” or “liberal imperialism,” in the form of foreign interventions that would depose tyrannical states or impose temporary foreign protectorates in anarchic “failed states.”

The use of such arguments by supporters of the disastrous Iraq War has reduced the appeal of the concept, but the idea of an international responsibility to protect retains its power among some liberal thinkers. But “humanitarian wars” justified by an alleged responsibility to protect are illegitimate in the Lockean system, for the same reason that aggressive wars are illegitimate. Neither wars of altruism nor wars of aggression can be justified by military self-defense, which is the primary purpose of the state.

Political scientist Jeremy D. Bailey explains why a government of limited, delegated powers in the Lockean system must limit its efforts to protecting its own citizens:

“In the state of nature, all individuals are part of the same society and thus have the right to punish any violation of natural law of which they are aware. In international relations states have a more constrained power. They have been given the executive power of the law of nature by citizens, but they are only allowed to use that power for the end for which the citizens gave it up, namely, the protection of their property, broadly construed. In the state of nature, an individual who decides to engage in altruistic punishment puts only his own life at risk. Governments, because they have a delegated power, do not have this liberty. This asymmetry explains why Locke consistently says that governments exist to protect the interests of their citizens, but not to help those citizens better fulfill their duty to preserve the rest of mankind.”

Locke’s logic might seem heartless, but the duty of a statesman to minimize the expenditure of the blood and treasure of citizens is like the fiduciary duty of a banker to clients. Individuals who give away their own money to the poor might be meritorious, but a banker who gave the needy the deposits of the bank’s clients, far from being admirable, would be guilty of dereliction of duty. The Lockean state is an association for mutual protection against crime and invasion, not a charity.

JUST AS self-preservation is the chief duty as well as chief right of the individual, so the foremost duty of a state in foreign policy is to preserve its own independence from other states. As Locke observes, “for the end why people entered into society being to be preserved one entire, free, independent society, to be governed by its own laws, this is lost whenever they are given up into the power of another.” Although states could preserve their independence by means of alliances, treaties among states according to Locke do not alter the fact that they are still living in a state of nature with one another,

“for it is not every compact that puts an end to the state of nature between men, but only this one of agreeing together mutually to enter into one community and make one body politic; other promises and compacts men may make one with another and yet still be in the state of nature.”

Locke assumes that genuine safety requires the state to be as strong as possible on the basis of its own internal resources. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke says that

“the pravity of Mankind . . . obliges Men to enter into Society with one another, that by mutual Assistance, and joint Force, they may secure unto each other their Properties in the things that contribute to the Comfort and Happiness of this Life . . . But forasmuch as Men thus entering into Societies . . . may nevertheless be deprived of them, either by the Rapine and Fraud of their Fellow-Citizens, or by the Hostile Violence of Foreigners; the remedy of this Evil consists in Arms, Riches, and Multitude of Citizens; the Remedy of the other in Laws . . .”

For Locke, military power, economic growth and population growth are mutually reinforcing, and all enhance the ability of the state to defend its people in an anarchic world. In a journal entry in 1674, Locke writes,

“The chief end of trade is riches and power, which beget each other. Riches consists in plenty of moveables, that will yield a price to foreigners, and are not likely to be consumed at home, but especially in plenty of gold and silver. Power consists in numbers of men, and ability to maintain them. Trade conduces to both these by increasing your stock and your people, and they each other.”

Mainstream economic liberalism holds as an article of faith that all countries can gain from free markets and free trade; it does not matter if some gain more than others. The ideal of free trade was originally justified by the Stoic (and, later, Christian) argument that God distributed resources unevenly around the world to encourage human beings to cooperate with each other. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in contrast, provided secular rationales, as eighteenth-century Christian/Deist “natural theology” evolved into nineteenth-century neoclassical economics (without, it should be noted, any diminution in the quasi-religious fervor of free-trade proponents).

Although he is often described as an economic liberal, Locke completely ignores the ancient Stoic argument for free trade along with Stoic ideas of benevolent cosmopolitanism. He places himself firmly in the realist/mercantilist/economic nationalist tradition of economic thought by insisting that what counts is not absolute prosperity, but a country’s relative share of global wealth, the basis of military power. “Riches do not consist in having more gold and silver, but in having more in proportion than the rest of the world, or than our neighbors . . . who, sharing the gold and silver of the world in a less proportion, want the means of plenty and power, and so are poorer.”

For Locke, the primary purpose of economic growth is not to make individuals more prosperous; it is to make them more secure. Economic growth increases the economic and human resources that the state can mobilize in defending its citizens against foreign attack. In the words of Locke,

“that prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and the narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard [powerful] for his neighbors . . .”

Among other state-sponsored industrial policies, Locke advocated preventing the Irish from competing with the English woolen trade, encouraging domestic manufacturing and using a board of trade to promote exports. As Rogers Smith notes, Locke “has been properly described as one of the chief architects of mercantilism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.”

Population growth within a state’s own territory should be an important goal of public policy, Locke writes, because “numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions.” In addition to encouraging valuable immigrants, the state should encourage a high birth rate among natives, in the interest of maximizing its relative wealth and military power. In journal notes for what might have been an unpublished utopia, under the title “Atlantis,” Locke, a childless bachelor himself, describes draconian and illiberal laws to encourage reproduction by discouraging bachelors and late marriages:

“Multitude of strong and healthy people bring the riches of every country and that which makes it flourish. . . . Whoever marries a woman more than five years older than himself (or more than ten years younger) shall forfeit one half of all she brings him in marriage (to the public). . . . A bachelor after 40 years old during his celibate [celibacy] shall be incapable of being heir or legataire [legatee] to anybody but his father or mother unless he has been maimed in the wars for his country. The will and testament of him that dies a bachelor past 50 shall be null unless he be killed in the wars of his country [or] maimed.”

Locke’s pronatalism has nothing to do with concerns about the relative proportions of groups within a state. Its purpose is to maximize the number of productive workers in the domestic economy of the mercantilist state, a purpose also promoted by generous immigration policies.

In treating the economy, along with the population, as an instrument of military power in an anarchic world, Locke has affinities with other seventeenth-century mercantilists, eighteenth-century continental cameralists, nineteenth-century economic nationalists like Friedrich List, contemporary “technonationalists” and proponents of the “developmental state.” Locke’s subordination of economic policy to security policy sets him apart from champions of free markets like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, with whom he is usually classified in discussions of the liberal tradition.

WAS LOCKE a liberal at all? Locke’s support of an activist state engaged in mercantilism, pronatalism, sumptuary legislation and other policies that are usually denounced by classical liberals and libertarians raises the question of whether he should be defined as a liberal. As the Hobbes example shows, a philosophy that bases political legitimacy on natural rights and the social contract does not necessarily lead to liberal or democratic conclusions. Many if not most ideas that have been incorporated into the modern liberal tradition—utopian beliefs in free markets and free trade, the minimal state, John Stuart Mill’s principle of noninterference, support of world federalism or global governance schemes, the justification of government policy as a correction of “market failures”—are not to be found in Locke’s philosophy. As political theorist Michael Oakeshott pointed out in a 1932 essay, the concepts of “the rights of nationality” and “the perfectibility of the human race” are unknown to Locke. Harvard’s Richard C. Tuck noted in Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979) that

“most strong rights theories have in fact been explicitly authoritarian rather than liberal. . . . When Rousseau repudiated the entire tradition as conservative . . . his instincts were absolutely right, however unfair he may have been to the more liberal thinkers such as Locke.”

It was only after the Napoleonic Wars that the term “liberal,” to refer to support for limited, constitutional government, came into widespread use. Neither Locke nor Jefferson nor any of the other thinkers before the mid-nineteenth century who are today called “liberals” used the term to describe themselves or their views. Separating Locke from Hobbes and lumping him together with Smith, Ricardo, post-Walrasian neoclassical economists and supporters of international collective-security leagues in the tradition of Kant, Gladstone and Wilson produce only confusion.

Locke certainly would not have agreed with the premises of contemporary “democratic peace theory” and “liberal peace theory.” Locke believed that all legitimate governments should restrict themselves to securing the natural rights of their citizens. But those rights were minimal—the right to life, freedom from slavery and the right to eat in return for work—and they did not include civil rights like press freedom or political rights like universal adult suffrage. Moreover, according to Locke a people could legitimately consent to a variety of rights-securing regimes other than representative democracies with universal suffrage.

Nor would Locke have accepted the premise of liberal peace theory that universal free trade would eliminate war by giving states a stake in peace with their trading partners. As we have seen, Locke was a mercantilist, not a free trader, and would have scoffed at the idea of peace through mutual economic interdependence. When it came to trade, he had more in common with contemporary realists who argue that the security dilemma in an anarchic world requires each state to be concerned about its relative power and its relative wealth, not merely its absolute safety and its absolute prosperity.

One might contrast liberal peace theory and democratic peace theory with “Lockean peace theory.” A Lockean world would not necessarily be a world of representative, liberal democracies. Particular communities could consent to other forms of government that were not inherently tyrannical and that did not respect many of the civil and political rights taken for granted in today’s advanced industrial democracies. But every government, whether democratic or not, would acknowledge that it was a government of limited, delegated powers whose sole purpose was to protect the natural rights of its citizens to life, liberty and property (including “property” in free labor).

A Lockean world would be free of aggression, but it would not be free of military and economic rivalry. While no state would engage in aggressive war against others, each state would have to prepare for the possibility that other states would engage in unjust wars of glory, conversion or annexation, in violation of the law of nature and in defiance of the limitations on the powers entrusted to them by their own people. States might seek to defend themselves by taking part in alliances or concerts, but they would remain in a state of nature even with respect to their alliance or concert partners. And the alliances or concerts in a Lockean world would be extremely limited in their scope and authority. There would be no talk of “pooling of sovereignty,” because no Lockean state would have the authority to delegate the powers that its people had delegated to it to a multinational alliance or supranational organization without violating the trust that empowered it to act as agent of a particular people. Nor could the people themselves authorize such a delegation, without going all the way and merging with one or more other peoples in a new social compact. The people can assign different powers to different branches or levels of the government they create, but the sovereignty of the people or community as a whole, created by the social compact, remains indivisible and incapable of being combined with that of other peoples or communities.

The legacy of Lockean thought explains why Americans, who are untroubled by delegating different powers to the federal and state governments, have always been suspicious of delegations of power to international institutions and anxious about participation in multinational alliances. The United States refused to join the League of Nations and joined the United Nations only because the charter made national participation in UN actions voluntary, not mandatory. And it is striking that NATO was the first peacetime military alliance in American history.

Lockean states would not be content to rely on potentially unstable alliances to guarantee their safety against possible hostilities by others. To increase their ability to defend themselves on their own, if necessary, they would attempt to enlarge their relative shares both of global military power and of the economic power that supports military strength. States would peacefully but vigorously compete to maximize their relative power and wealth—“arms, riches and multitudes”—by internal development rather than external conquest. In addition to maintaining adequate militaries, Lockean states would promote productivity and output growth at home while seeking markets for their exports abroad. And they would try to maximize their productive populations by a combination of policies to increase native birthrates and to attract immigrants with economically useful qualities.

THE LOCKEAN world order I have described, while it blends elements from both, does not fit into the paradigms of contemporary liberalism or realism. And yet it is remarkably similar to the world of the twenty-first century.

Apart from radical Islamism, no politically influential ideology rejects the very idea of natural or human rights as did the fascists and Marxists who dismissed the idea as bourgeois. Even authoritarian regimes pay lip service to human rights, popular sovereignty and the public good.

Sovereignty in world politics, justified in the name of a particular people, is defended by existing states and sought by stateless groups. During the decade following the Cold War, there was much talk of an alleged irreversible erosion of sovereignty as a result of uncontrollable immigration and trade and transnational production. Following the terrorist attacks of September 2001, liberal and nonliberal governments alike have cracked down on illegal immigration; following the collapse of the world economy in September 2008, liberal and nonliberal governments alike have renationalized much of their banking and business sectors. The European Union, held up by many as a model of a new kind of transnational political organization, always fell short of being a Lockean “community” founded on a social compact, and the Greek financial crisis, itself a product of the post-2008 Great Recession, may set back the limited experiment of currency union in the form of the euro area.

The United Nations Charter of 1945 outlawed aggressive war. Almost none of the wars that have been fought since then have resulted in territorial annexations by the victors that have been given international recognition. The chief exceptions to the rule against involuntary annexation, other than the unification of all of Vietnam under the North Vietnamese government, are India’s incorporation of Goa, Israel’s alteration of its borders following the 1948 war and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Neither Israel’s post-1967 occupation nor Russia’s annexation of Crimea has yet been internationally recognized as legitimate. Thanks in part to the influence of Locke, the United States never considered annexing defeated Iraq as a state or as a U.S. protectorate like Puerto Rico or Guam. It was taken for granted that once the regime of Saddam Hussein was removed, the Iraqi people, not the U.S. occupiers, would create a new government.

As in an ideal Lockean world, the great powers today forego wars of territorial conquest and annexation. Instead, they compete with one another by means of rival alliances, occasional proxy wars, arms races and internal economic development. While avowing their commitment to the ideal of a free global marketplace, the major industrial capitalist powers, including the United States, practice mild versions of mercantilism by using subsidies, regulations, nontariff barriers and trade diplomacy to promote the interests of their national industries.

Even in the area of demography there are echoes of Locke’s mercantilist populationism. Neo-Malthusian fears of global overpopulation, prevalent a few decades ago, have given way to concern about below-fertility birth rates in Europe, Japan and other advanced industrial regions. France, Sweden and other countries have sought to boost fertility rates with pronatalist policies. At the same time, European countries are reforming their immigration policies to attract skilled immigrants. The United States is no exception. The child tax credit, adopted in the 1990s, is a pronatalist policy in its effects if not in its intent. American population growth continues to be driven by both skilled and unskilled immigration, as a result of which the U.S. population is expected to grow from 300 million today to 400–600 million in half a century. And the idea of shifting the basis of U.S. immigration policy from family unification to skill-based immigration is gaining support.

If Locke’s arguments, except for the idea of appropriating “waste” land from other communities, sound modern, it is not because Locke was ahead of his time. It is because he and others in his tradition have helped to inspire the norms which, thanks largely to U.S. influence, became the fundamental organizing principles of post-1945 world order. Among contemporary theorists of international relations, as among contemporary philosophers in the English-speaking world, John Locke has little influence or reputation. But a case can be made that the contemporary world corresponds to the vision of Locke more than of any other philosopher. In the words of the epitaph for one of Locke’s contemporaries, Sir Christopher Wren, in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Si monumentum requiris, circumspice—“If you seek his monument, look around.”

Michael Lind is a cofounder of the New America Foundation, a contributing editor at the National Interest and author of The American Way of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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