In Chapter 2, Locke shares his understanding of human nature and the "natural law" that governs human behavior. At one moment, he uses a metaphor to describe those who break these fundamental laws:
In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men, for their mutual security; and so he becomes dangerous to mankind, the tye, which is to secure them from injury and violence, being slighted and broken by him.
In this small but significant metaphor, Locke compares these natural-law breakers to those who have broken free from literal, physical bindings set in place by God: straps or “tyes” that God has fastened in order to “secure” humanity from acting against its best interests.
While much of the Second Treatise describes Locke's philosophy of civil society and government, this second chapter grounds that scholarly conversation in existential questions of divine, rather than civil, law. Locke understands this divine (or "natural") law to be the ultimate source of human behaviors and social norms, and he sees this law as the fundamental foundation of all subsequent socio-political structures (societies, governments, and the like). According to Locke's vision, this law is so powerful that it has a physical (or physically restricting) effect on humanity.
Throughout The Second Treatise, Locke thinks about the relationship between the power dynamic of a family and the power dynamic of a federal government—and the relationship between these two societal structures as forms of small-scale and large-scale government. In this passage from Chapter 7, he compares the two directly, using metaphor to compare parental power to the power of an absolute monarch:
…or if [a family] must be thought a monarchy, and the paterfamilias the absolute monarch in it, absolute monarchy will have but a very shattered and short power, when it is plain, by what has been said before, that the master of the family has a very distinct and differently limited power, both as to time and extent, over those several persons that are in it; for excepting the slave […] he has no legislative power of life and death over any of them, and none too but what a mistress of a family may have as well as he.
Locke casts this metaphor aside almost as soon as he makes it: a family makes a very poor substitution for an absolute monarchy, as parents—husband and wife alike—have no power of life and death over their family members. Instead, Locke believes that the example of the family structure is proof that humanity has a “natural” inclination toward society and societal structures, but not necessarily a natural inclination toward giving the leadership absolute power.
