Written in 1690, the Second Treatise of Government outlines the governmental principles of individual liberty, rule of law, government by consent of the people, and the right to private property. Though taken for granted as fundamental to the human condition now, these rights were not so common Locke's day. Most liberal theorists look back to Locke as the source of their ideas. Some maintain that religious fundamentalism, 'post-modernism', and socialism are today the only remaining ideological threats to liberalism. To the extent that this is true, these ideologies are ultimately attacks on the ideas that John Locke, arguably more than any other, helped to make the universal vocabulary of political discourse in the Second Treatise of Government.

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