Where does the right to punish come from?
On the axis: The meaning of punishment · the state
What authorizes the state to inflict on a person what no private individual could: a power ceded by the social contract, or the moral order itself?
Justification
No one has authority over another by nature: all being free and equal in the state of nature, no political power can be legitimate without the consent of those who submit to it. From this premise Locke draws a contract of an altogether different kind from 's: one does not surrender one's rights to an absolute sovereign, one entrusts government with a mere trust, bound to an end, the preservation of lives, liberties and estates. Power thus stays conditional and revocable, where the Hobbesian pact was an alienation beyond recall. This is the foundation of political liberalism.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8 ("Of the Beginning of Political Societies")
Anchors: Beccaria · Hobbes · Locke
leads to: The origin of the social bond