Have you seen The Lone Ranger with Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp? I saw it when it first came out in 2013 and just watched it again—despite remembering it as not being a particularly good movie. Hammer and Depp are enjoyable, but their talents could not overcome the lackluster script or the over-the-top barrage of stunts and explosions.
So, why did I watch
it again?
In my current
lecture series, Pilgrims and Puritans: A Theocracy in New England, I am
about to introduce John Locke (1632–1704), a philosopher of the Age of
Enlightenment—and that is where The Lone Ranger comes in.
Pilgrims, Puritans,
John Locke, and The Lone Ranger? Really? Anyone who has followed my
lectures over the years knows my mantra: everything is related.
unwavering believer in the rule of law. Reid is animated by John Locke’s social contract theory. Locke envisioned society as a mutually binding contract between the people and their government: the people voluntarily surrender certain freedoms and delegate power to a governing entity, which in turn is obligated to protect the people’s rights and uphold social order.
Reid, like a
missionary preaching in the wilderness, rides into the Wild West with a copy of
Locke’s 1689 Two Treatises of Government tucked under his arm, quoting
it chapter and verse as if it were scripture.
But Reid’s Lockean
ideals collide with the chaos of the frontier. Disillusioned by the failure of
the legal system to deliver justice, he trades his faith in institutional law
for vigilantism, becoming the Lone Ranger. Some might interpret this shift as a
rejection of Locke’s principles. I would argue otherwise.
Locke’s social
contract theory holds that government derives its authority from the governed for the express purpose of protecting rights and maintaining order. When a
government violates those rights—when it breaks the contract and becomes
tyrannical—Locke insists the people have the right to protest, resist, and ultimately rebel against the government. Crucially, it is the people who decide that the contract has been
broken, not the government.
The author of the
American Declaration of Independence took Locke’s principle a step further. Jefferson
interpreted the right to rebel as a duty to rebel: when a government engages in “a long
train of abuses and usurpations,” it becomes the people’s “duty to throw off
such Government.”
So yes, The Lone
Ranger may be a flawed film—but buried beneath the spectacle is a
surprisingly rich philosophical thread. John Reid’s journey from idealistic
lawyer to masked vigilante is not a rejection of Locke’s social contract; it is
a dramatization of it. When the institutions meant to uphold justice collapse
into corruption, Locke does not call for passive endurance. He calls for
action. Reid’s transformation is not lawlessness, but a Lockean reckoning: a
citizen reclaiming the moral authority to resist tyranny and restore justice.
In that sense, The Lone Ranger gallops straight out of Enlightenment
philosophy and into the American mythos, reminding us that even in the dust and
chaos of the frontier, ideas endure—and sometimes, they wear a mask.
