Enlightenment Ideas Behind Modern Democracy

Here is something worth sitting with: every government on Earth makes a claim about WHY it has the right to rule. Monarchs once said, 'God gave us this authority.' The Enlightenment thinkers we study today said, 'No — that authority comes from the people.' John Locke (1632–1704) argued that all human beings are born with natural rights — life, liberty, and property — that no government can legitimately take away. In his own writings, Locke described this arrangement as a compact or original contract: people agree to form a government, but only to protect those rights. Later theorists — most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau — would popularize the phrase 'social contract,' and today that term is often applied to Locke's framework as well, but it is worth knowing that Locke himself used 'compact' or 'original contract.' Locke's core claim was that if a government destroys the rights it was created to protect, the people have the right to overthrow it. You can hear this idea in the Declaration of Independence — though note that the two passages below are from two distinct sentences in the original second paragraph: '[A]ll men are created equal, [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' '[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.' [second and third sentences, second paragraph] Jefferson compressed Locke's 'property' into 'pursuit of Happiness,' but the Lockean logic is unmistakable. Montesquieu (1689–1755) tackled a different but related problem: even a government created with good intentions can become tyrannical if the same people who make laws also enforce and judge them. His solution, laid out in 'The Spirit of the Laws' (1748), was the separation of powers — divide government into legislative (makes laws), executive (carries them out), and judicial (interprets them) branches, and give each branch ways to check the others. The framers of the U.S. Constitution built this architecture almost directly from Montesquieu's blueprint. Here is the key insight that ties both thinkers together: legitimate government is not about force — it is about consent and structure. Power must come FROM the people (Locke) and must be DIVIDED so no one person or faction can abuse it (Montesquieu). Together, these two ideas explain why the American founders rejected a king and designed a republic with three branches and a Bill of Rights. One more thing you must hold alongside this intellectual history: these ideas were genuinely radical for their era — and yet the founders did not extend natural rights or consent of the governed to enslaved people, women, or Indigenous people. The contradiction was real and documented at the time; some founders debated it openly. Objective 5 asks you to grapple with exactly this tension: ideas can be historically transformative and simultaneously, deliberately incomplete in their application. That gap is not a footnote — it is a central fact of American political history. One common confusion: natural rights are not the same as legal rights. Legal rights are granted by governments and can be changed by law. Natural rights, in Locke's view, exist before any government — they are pre-political. That distinction matters when you read the Declaration, which argues the British Crown violated rights that existed independently of British law.