Nothing, however, can soften the challenge to Locke that Bolingbroke poses.  Locke’s ideas on the origin of political society were directly relevant to the emergence of bourgeois, liberal, and individualist notions of politics in his day; Bolingbroke’s rejection of these Lockean ideas was part of his overall rejection of the liberal world, which increasingly justified its existence with these very ideas: Bolingbroke’s political ideals are aristocratic and paternal.  Men are not naturally free and equal, nor is government instituted to protect natural rights.  His opposition to Locke is inevitable; the social forces he represented are very different from those whose champion Locke had become.  Locke’s political thought became the ideology of a middle class individualism that stressed individual freedom, self-interest, and competition as positive social values.  Bolingbroke’s political thought is the ideology of a family-centered aristocracy and gentry.  Fathers, paternal authority, subordination, rank, cooperation, and public service are the dimensions of this ideology’s superstructure.

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In his polemical writings, Bolingbroke also decries as the great evils of his age the individualism, self interest, freedom, and equality depicted by these theorists as the state of nature.  These very ideals were those he found in the new economic and social order that was destroying the traditional structure of society.

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It bears repeating, however, that Bolingbroke did not think of the covenant that is the basis for artificial civil government as a product of universal participation, and did not think it a covenant to protect rights.  There is no initial coming together of all to form a political community; political community already exists as a natural and God-given phenomenon….There is no mention of natural rights or their protection as the foundation of civil governments in the terms of the covenant….The ultimate end of government is to achieve the good of the people, and through contract “governors are therefore appointed for this end.” ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle