The Political theory of Locke is contained in his Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690. For Locke, political power exists and is exercised only for the public good. The basis of power is consent, and the powers which are wielded by power is consent, and the powers which are wielded by princes and rules inhere in them, not by any absolute right, but on conditions in the nature of a trust, and under liability to forfeiture if the conditions are not fulfilled. Locke here confutes the doctrine of absolute monarchy founded on divine right, and formulates a democracy in which government by the consent and with the goodwill of the governed is the ideal.
The influence of the theory on England at the close of the seventeenth century was immense, and it proved admirably suited to the practical politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It came to America not only to provide the basic ideas put forward in justification of the Revolution, but also to supply a formula by which written constitutions could be worked out.