That government should be rooted in the consent of the governed may be the most accepted aspect of John Locke's liberal theory. Yet to this day Lockeans have reached no consensus over what constitutes consent or whether Locke even intended consent to be a standard of legitimacy.

Peter Josephson now takes a close look at Locke's writings on both consent and the art of governance to show how each informs the other. Moving beyond previous scholarship, he gives us a Locke as much concerned with the effective functioning of government as with the roots of its moral legitimacy.

According to...