When one tries to decide whether Locke was misguided in trying to account for all the legitimate functions of government in terms of "the preservation of property", it is important to qualify the statement by deciding what exactly Locke meant as property in the first place. Locke states that "every Man has a property in his own Persons", this is a difficult notion to grasp given our own modern definition of property. Our "persons" are …showed first 75 words of 1890 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1890 total…the tentative balance that exists between the right for people to make their own mistakes and the right of the government to intervene for the greater good of society as a whole, if this is indeed the case and Locke was misguided in attempting to explain a government in terms of "the preservation of property", we have not yet found a better method of justifying the legitimate functions of a government three hundred years on.