Of tyranny. (Kapitel XXVIII des zweiten Treatise of Government [1689])
§ 199.
As usurpation is the
exercise of power, which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the
exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. And
this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the
good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate
advantage.—When the governor, however intitled, makes not the law, but
his will, the rule; and his commands and actions are not directed to the
preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of
his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.
§ 200.
If one can doubt this to be truth, or reason,
because it comes from the obscure hand of a subject, I hope the
authority of a king will make it pass with him. King James the first, in
his speech to the parliament, 1603, tells them thus: “I will ever
prefer the weal of the public, and of the whole commonwealth, in making
of good laws and constitutions, to any particular and private ends of
mine; thinking ever the wealth and weal of the commonwealth to be my
greatest weal and worldly felicity; a point wherein a lawful king doth
directly differ from a tyrant: for I do acknowledge, that the special
and greatest point of difference that is between a rightful king and an
usurping tyrant, is this, that whereas the proud and ambitious tyrant
doth think his kingdom and people are only ordained for satisfaction of
his desires and unreasonable appetites, the righteous and just king doth
by the contrary acknowledge himself to be ordained for the procuring of
the wealth and property of his people.” And again, in his speech to the
parliament, 1609, he hath these words: “The king binds himself by a
double oath to the observation of the fundamental laws of his kingdom;
tacitly, as by being a king, and so bound to protect as well the people,
as the laws of his kingdom; and expressly, by his oath at his
coronation; so as every just king, in a settled kingdom, is bound to
observe that paction made to his people by his laws, in framing his
government agreeable thereunto, according to that paction which God made
with Noah after the deluge: Hereafter, seed-time and harvest, and cold
and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease
while the earth remaineth. And therefore a king governing in a settled
kingdom, leaves to be a king, and degenerates into a tyrant, as soon as
he leaves off to rule according to his laws.” And a little after,
“Therefore all kings that are not tyrants, or perjured, will be glad to
bound themselves within the limits of their laws; and they that persuade
them the contrary, are vipers, and pests, both against them and the
commonwealth.” Thus that learned king, who well understood the notions
of things, makes the difference betwixt a king and a tyrant to consist
only in this, that one makes the laws the bounds of his power, and the
good of the public the end of his government; the other makes all give
way to his own will and appetite.
§ 201.
It is a mistake to think this fault is proper
only to monarchies; other forms of government are liable to it, as well
as that: for wherever the power, that is put in any hands for the
government of the people, and the preservation of their properties, is
applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue
them to the arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it;
there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are
one or many. Thus we read of the thirty tyrants at Athens, as well as
one at Syracuse; and the intolerable dominion of the decemviri at Rome
was nothing better.
§ 202.
Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law
be transgressed to another’s harm; and whosoever in authority exceeds
the power given him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under
his command, to compass that upon the subject, which the law allows not,
ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may
be opposed as any other man, who by force invades the right of another.
This is acknowledged in subordinate magistrates. He that hath authority
to seize my person in the street, may be opposed as a thief and a robber
if he endeavours to break into my house to execute a writ,
notwithstanding that I know he has such a warrant, and such a legal
authority, as will impower him to arrest me abroad. And why this should
not hold in the highest, as well as in the most inferiour magistrate, I
would gladly be informed. Is it reasonable that the eldest brother,
because he has the greatest part of his father’s estate, should thereby
have a right to take away any of his younger brother’s portions? or,
that a rich man, who possessed a whole country, should from thence have a
right to seize, when he pleased, the cottage and garden of his poor
neighbour? The being rightfully possessed of great power and riches,
exceedingly beyond the greatest part of the sons of Adam, is so far from
being an excuse, much less a reason for rapine and oppression, which
the endamaging another without authority is, that it is a great
aggravation of it: for the exceeding the bounds of authority is no more a
right in a great, than in a petty officer; no more justifiable in a
king than a constable; but is so much the worse in him, in that he has
more trust put in him, has already a much greater share than the rest of
his brethren, and is supposed, from the advantages of his education,
employment, and counsellors, to be more knowing in the measures of right
and wrong.
§ 203.
“May the commands then of a prince be
opposed? may he be resisted as often as any one shall find himself
aggrieved, and but imagine he has not right done him? This will unhinge
and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave
nothing but anarchy and confusion.”
§ 204.
To this I answer, that force is to be opposed
to nothing but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any
opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both
from God and man; and so no such danger or confusion will follow, as is
often suggested: for,
§ 205.
First, As, in some countries, the person of
the prince by the law is sacred; and so, whatever he commands or does,
his person is still free from all question or violence, not liable to
force, or any judicial censure or condemnation. But yet opposition may
be made to the illegal acts of any inferiour officer, or other
commissioned by him; unless he will, by actually putting himself into a
state of war with his people, dissolve the government, and leave them to
that defence which belongs to every one in the state of nature: for of
such things who can tell what the end will be? and a neighbour kingdom
has showed the world an odd example. In all other cases the sacredness
of the person exempts him from all inconveniencies, whereby he is
secure, whilst the government stands, from all violence and harm
whatsoever; than which there cannot be a wiser constitution; for the
harm he can do in his own person not being likely to happen often, nor
to extend itself far; nor being able by his single strength to subvert
the laws, nor oppress the body of the people; should any prince have so
much weakness and ill-nature as to be willing to do it, the
inconveniency of some particular mischiefs that may happen sometimes,
when a heady prince comes to the throne, are well recompensed by the
peace of the public, and security of the government, in the person of
the chief magistrate, thus set out of the reach of danger: it being
safer for the body that some few private men should be sometimes in
danger to suffer, than that the head of the republic should be easily,
and upon slight occasions, exposed.
§ 206.
Secondly, But this privilege belonging only
to the king’s person, hinders not, but they may be questioned, opposed,
and resisted, who use unjust force, though they pretend a commission
from him, which the law authorizes not; as is plain in the case of him
that has the king’s writ to arrest a man, which is a full commission
from the king; and yet he that has it cannot break open a man’s house to
do it, nor execute this command of the king upon certain days, nor in
certain places, though this commission have no such exception in it; but
they are the limitations of the law, which if any one transgress, the
king’s commission excuses him not: for the king’s authority being given
him only by the law, he cannot impower any one to act against the law,
or justify him, by his commission, in so doing; the commission or
command of any magistrate, where he has no authority, being as void and
insignificant, as that of any private man; the difference between the
one and the other being that the magistrate has some authority so far,
and to such ends, and the private man has none at all: for it is not the
commission, but the authority, that gives the right of acting; and
against the laws there can be no authority. But notwithstanding such
resistance, the king’s person and authority are still both secured, and
so no danger to governor or government.
§ 207.
Thirdly, supposing a government wherein the
person of the chief magistrate is not thus sacred; yet this doctrine of
the lawfulness of resisting all unlawful exercises of his power, will
not upon every slight occasion endanger him, or embroil the government:
for where the injured party may be relieved, and his damages repaired by
appeal to the law, there can be no pretence for force, which is only to
be used where a man is intercepted from appealing to the law: for
nothing is to be accounted hostile force, but where it leaves not the
remedy of such an appeal: and it is such force alone, that puts him that
uses it into a state of war, and makes it lawful to resist him. A man
with a sword in his hand, demands my purse in the highway, when perhaps I
have not twelve-pence in my pocket: this man I may lawfully kill. To
another I deliver £100 to hold only whilst I alight, which he refuses to
restore me, when I am got up again, but draws his sword to defend the
possession of it by force, if I endeavour to retake it. The mischief
this man does me is an hundred, or possibly a thousand times more than
the other perhaps intended me (whom I killed before he really did me
any;) and yet I might lawfully kill the one, and connot so much as hurt
the other lawfully. The reason whereof is plain; because the one using
force, which threatened my life, I could not have time to appeal to the
law to secure it: and when it was gone, it was too late to appeal. The
law could not restore life to my dead carcase, the loss was irreparable:
which to prevent, the law of nature gave me a right to destroy him, who
had put himself into a state of war with me, and threatened my
destruction. But in the other case, my life not being in danger, I may
have the benefit of appealing to the law, and have reparation for my
£100 that way.
§ 208.
Fourthly, But if the unlawful acts done by
the magistrate be maintained (by the power he has got) and the remedy
which is due by law, be by the same power obstructed: yet the right of
resisting, even in such manifest acts of tyranny, will not suddenly, or
on slight occasions, disturb the government: for if it reach no farther
than some private men’s cases, though they have a right to defend
themselves, and to recover by force what by unlawful force is taken from
them: yet the right to do so will not easily engage them in a contest,
wherein they are sure to perish; it being as impossible for one, or a
few oppressed men to disturb the government, where the body of the
people do not think themselves concerned in it, as for a raving madman,
or heady malecontent, to overturn a well-settled state, the people being
as little apt to follow the one, as the other.
§ 209.
But if either these illegal acts have
extended to the majority of the people; or if the mischief and
oppression has lighted only on some few, but in such cases, as the
precedent and consequences seem to threaten all; and they are persuaded
in their consciences, that their laws, and with them their estates,
liberties, and lives are in danger, and perhaps their religion too: how
they will be hindered from resisting illegal force, used against them, I
cannot tell. This is an inconvenience, I confess, that attends all
governments whatsoever, when the governors have brought it to this pass,
to be generally suspected of their people; the most dangerous state
which they can possibly put themselves in; wherein they are less to be
pitied, because it is so easy to be avoided; it being as impossible for a
governor, if he really means the good of his people, and the
preservation of them, and their laws together, not to make them see and
feel it, as it is for the father of a family, not to let his children
see he loves and takes care of them.
§ 210.
But if all the world shall observe pretences
of one kind, and actions of another; arts used to elude the law, and the
trust of prerogative, (which is an arbitrary power in some things left
in the prince’s hand to do good, not harm, to the people) employed
contrary to the end for which it was given: if the people shall find the
ministers and subordinate magistrates chosen suitable to such ends, and
favoured, or laid by, proportionably as they promote or oppose them: if
they see several experiments made of arbitrary power, and that religion
underhand favoured (though publicly proclaimed against) which is
readiest to introduce it; and the operators in it supported, as much as
may be; and when that cannot be done, yet approved still, and liked the
better: if a long train of actions show the councils all tending that
way; how can a man any more hinder himself from being persuaded in his
own mind, which way things are going; or from casting about how to save
himself, than he could from believing the captain of the ship he was in,
was carrying him, and the rest of the company, to Algiers, when he
found him always steering that course, though cross winds, leaks in his
ship, and want of men and provisions did often force him to turn his
course another way for some time, which he steadily returned to again,
as soon as the wind, weather, and other circumstances would let him?
(wer sich übrigens über die hohe Häufung an Philosophen-Geburtstagen in den letzten Tagen wundert, rechne neun Monate zurück...)
