 At least in the classical liberal tradition, according to which individuals have rights prior to the institution of government and in which governments are viewed as trustees, agents of the people, the attitude toward revolution is generally more permissive. There is a right to revolt when government violates those natural rights for the protection of which it was created. Locke (1689) apparently goes further: on one interpretation, he holds that the people at its own discretion may rightly revoke the trusteeship, that is, dissolve the government, even in the absence of the state’s violation of natural rights or failure to protect them. They could, for example, dissolve the government in order to form a new one that they simply thought was more efficient. Locke apparently attempts to dull the edge of this rather radical conclusion by assuming, quite gratuitously, that revolution will not occur unless the people as a whole have already suffered greatly at the hands of the government. He might also have thought that in cases where the present government was not violating natural rights, dissolving it was only permissible if done through a constitutionally sanctioned process, not through revolution.