The idea that a just government must be based on the consent of the people who live under its jurisdiction. Government must be an expression of the popular will. This concept is found in the writings of theorists from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, especially John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. Locke's work influenced the Founding Fathers, and the Declaration of Independence states that "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."