Constituent Force: Creation and Destruction in Locke’s Political Thought

This article makes the case for Locke as an early and important theorist of constituent power. His politics rests on the distinction between a constituent people or “Society” capable of generating its own laws and the constituted order or “Government.” The people are taken to possess not just ultimate sovereignty but also the agency to enforce that sovereignty if the need arises. The implications of this framework are traced through the lifecycle of the Lockean constitution—its birth (state of nature), maturity (civil condition), decline (prerogative), fall (dissolution), and renewal (promises and agreements).