Launching Liberalism - On Lockean Political Philosophy 0700611738, 0700611746, 2001008169

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IAUNCHING LIBERALISM ON LOCKEAN POLlTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Michael P. Zuckert

0

Univcrsity Press of Kansas

C 2002 by the University Press of Kansas All rights reserved Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66049), which was organized by the Kansas Board of �gents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University Library of Congrcu Cataloging-in-Publication Oat.a Zuckert, Michael P., 1942Launching liberalism : on Lockean political philosophy / Michael P. Zuckcn. p . cm. Includes index. I SBN 0-7006-1173-8 (cloth: allt. paper)- ISBN 0-7006-1174-6 (pbk . : allt. paper) l. Locke, John, 1632-1704--Contributions in political science. 2. Liberalism-History. 3 . Political science-History. I. Tide. JC1S3.L87 Z83 2002 3S0.Sl '2'092-dc2l 2001008169 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 S 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

To my father and Dorothy and to the memory of my mother

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

l

PART ONE. LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

l. P roblematic Perspectives on Locke

2. Appropriation and Understanding in the Histor y of Political Philosophy: On Quentin Skinner's Method

3. Of Wary Physicians and Weary Readers:

The Debates on Locke's Way of Writing

4. Fools and Knaves: Reflections on Locke's Theory of Philosophical Discourse

25 57

82 107

PART TWO. LOCKE AND THE TRADIDON 5. An Introduction to Locke's First Tre11,tise: Loclcc and the Old Testament

129

6. Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion: Locke on Christianity

147

7. Do Natural Rights Derive from Natural Law? Aquinas, Hobbes, and Locke on Natural Rights

169

PART THREE. FO RGING THE LOCKEAN AMALGAM 8. Locke in America: The Philosophy of the Declaration of Independence

203

viii

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

9. Social Compact, Common Law, and the American Amalgam: The Contribution of William Blackstone IO. Natural Rights in the American Revolution: The American Amalgam

235 274

PART FOUR. LOCKE IN I.ATE MODERNI'IY 11. Hobbes, Locke, and the Problem of the Rule of Law 12. Big Government and Rights: Locke, Rawls, and Liberalism 13. On the Contemporary Critique of Rights-Talk: A Maclntyrade

297

Index

369

311 331

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I assembled these essays because they have all been written from a common perspective and because in the aggregate they make a useful contribution, I believe, to an understanding of Locke and the emergence of the liberal tra­ dition. Much of the book (Introduction, Chapters 8, 9, and 13) is appear­ ing in print for the first time. Most of the rest of the chapters arc reprinted here just as they were originally published, though in a few cases changes were made to make them fit into this context. The justification for reprint­ ing them as they originally were is the usual one-they have had a life of their own in their original form, and it seemed best to leave them as they were. There is necessarily some repetition and perhaps some lacunae that a book. written more in one piece would not have. There arc a few chapters where I have changed my mind on some matters; but the usual reasons, as cited above, led me to stay my hand here, too. Chapter l originally appeared as "The Recent Literature on Locke's Po­ litical Philosophy" in the Political Science Re11iewer for 1975. It is reprinted with permission of the publishers, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Chapter 2 appeared in the journal Interpretation for fall 1985, under the same title; Chapter 5 also appeared originally in Interpretation for winter 1979. Both arc reprinted with permission of the editor. Chapter 3 originally appeared in the Independent Journal of Philosophy for fall 1977. Chapter 4 originally appeared in 11,e Rmew of Politics, October 1974, under the same title. It is reprinted with permission. Chapter 6 was presented first at a conference of the Claremont Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and originally pub­ lished by the Claremont Institute as an occasional paper. It was reprinted in a collection of essays edited by Robert Horwitz, 11,e Moral Foundations of ix

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LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

the Americ11n Republic, 3d edition, published by the University Press of Vir­ ginia. It is reprinted with permission. Chapter 7 was first published in the H11r1111rd Journ11l of Lllw 11nd Public Policy (1997). It is reprinted with permission. Chapter 8 is adapted from a Friday lecture at St. Johns College, Annapo­ lis, Maryland, delivered in the fall of 1998. Chapter 9 is a version of a paper first presented at a conference at the Uni­ versity of Dallas, "The Social Compact and the American Founding." The conference was held in the spring of 200l and was sponsored by the McKcnna Foundation. Chapter 10 was first published in Hum11n Rights 11nd Modern Re11olutions, edited by J. Wasserman, L. Hunt, and M. Young, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2000. It is reprinted with permission. Chapter 11 first appeared in the Nomosvolume for 1994, The Rule ofLllw, edited by Ian Shapiro and published by New York University Press. It is reprinted here with permission. Chapter 12 originally appeared in Politics 11t the Turn of the Century, ed­ ited by R. Zinman and J. Weinberger. It is reprinted with permission of the publisher, Rowman and Littlefield. In addition to those who have allowed these essays to be reprinted I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Geoff Bowden, who helped pre­ pare this volume for publication; John Schowengerdt, who ably succeeded Geoff; Catherine Zuckert, who, as always, helped in more ways than I can mention; Rachel Zuckert, who gave the essay on Gewirth a good Kantian reading; and all my friends, colleagues, and critics who over the years have read and commented on them. There arc also institutions that require acknowledgment. Many of the chapters were written at Carleton College, and I received aid, financial and otherwise, from the dean and my colleagues there. I particularly will men­ tion my philosophy colleague, Professor Perry Mason, with whom I dis­ cussed the matter of Chapter 4 on several occasions, and Professor Richard Crouter of the Religion Department, with whom I have had many years of ongoing conversations about hermeneutics, Christian theology, and politics. My graduate school friend and colleague from across the river at St. Olaf College, Charles Umbanhowar also shared his thoughts and reacted to mine on several of the chapters. On two separate occasions, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities helped launch this book. Very valuable aid came as well from the Center for Social and Political Philoso­ phy at Bowling Green State University, where I spent a highly productive

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

.

XI

semester and did the research and preliminary writing for several of the chapters. Finally, my current home, the University of Notre Dame, has been incredibly helpful. It is a delight to be a member of a department that takes political philosophy so seriously and contains so many fellow students of that subject. The university has helped in more tangible ways as well, with re­ search funding, time for writing and thinking, and a generally supportive at­ mosphere. I am grateful to Mary Keys and Geoff Bowden for probing discussions of Chapter 13. One of the ways Notre Dame has helped to produce lAunching Liber11l­ ;,,,, was by providing its clerical services office. As one who skipped typing class in order to play more basketball, I have been more dependent than most on others to type for me. My largest debt in this regard is to Cheryl Recd of Notre Dame, who retyped all the pieces of this volume with great competence, speed, and perhaps most important, great good cheer. She is a treasure of our university. Others have also helped with the typing of this manuscript, including two of my former students, Katie Weitz and Cheryl Schotten. They, too, were of great assistance. For h elp with my title I am grateful to Vickie Sullivan. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Sol and Cele Zuckert and Dorothy Zuckert, parents and stepmother, who did not entirely agree with my chosen path in life but who supported it every step of the way. For better or worse, without them this would not have been �ible.

INTRODUCTION

u»nching Uber.Jin,, is a book a long time abuilding, many parts of which have already set out on trial voyages in the journals and other such seas. The focus of Lli»ndn1J8 Liber,ilimt is John Locke, more particularly, Locke's re­ lations to his predecessors and successors. That emphasis has something to do both with the nature of Locke's political philosophic enterprise and with our twentieth- and twenty-first-century reasons for being interested in him. As I read him here, Locke is a decidedly modem philosopher-admittedly a somewhat controversial claim within the literature on his political philoso­ phy, where many arc impressed with his biblical or at least theological foun­ dations, or with his links via Richard Hooker back to Thomas Aquinas and ultimately Aristotle. I devote much of my space to attempting to stake out and defend a position on Locke's modernity, and therefore on his relation to bis predecessors (and in some cases contemporaries), that overlaps but, I be­ lieve, is not quite identical to any taken in the literature to date. Readers who have already seen some of the parts of this volume steaming around the boat pond know that I am much more sympathetic to the very controversial ap­ proach to Locke taken by Leo Strauss than arc many other Locke scholars. Strauss, it may be recalled, stunned the Locke-speaking world about a half century ago by arguing that Locke was so far from being the anti-Hobbes he had been taken to be that he was rather an almost orthodox but covert fol­ lower of the philosopher of Malmesbury. In order to make that point, Strauss further argued that Locke had engaged in a more or less systematic effort to conceal ( some of the) key clements and commitments of his own thinking, soft-pedaling the Hobbcsian clements, overstating the traditional philosophic and theological clements, writing in a way that was misleading if not quite duplicitous. Strauss's claims won some following, but mostly earned him vi­ tuperation and denunciation. The debate he set in motion has by now been 1

2

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

consigned by the demons who control such things to the memory-hole re­ served for old and best forgotten scholarly contests, but it is a debate I make a serious effort to revive. My sense of the outcome of those battles of a quarter century or more ago is that in most "respectable" circles Strauss is held to have lost, perhaps de­ cisively so. In many bibliographics on Locke nowadays, Strauss's book is, in­ excusably, completely absent, not meriting even the slight notice that listing along with fifty or sixty items on Locke would elicit. The dismissal of Strauss has not been universal, of course, for there remains a lively tradition of writ­ ing on Locke that draws strongly off Strauss's work, a very recent example of which is Peter C. Myers's excellent Our Only Star and Comp11SS: Lode and the StrulJBle for Political R.Ationality. Although there is some variety in the non-Straussian approaches to Locke, on the whole the triumphant one ap­ pears to be that associated with Cambridge , loosely centered around Quentin Skinner. The Cambridge school rejects both pillars of Strauss's reading-the csotericism thesis and the Hobbcsian provenance of Locke's political philosophy-and puts forth its own, much more historical approach to the reading of texts in political philosophy. Using that technique, it pro­ duces a far more traditional Locke than Strauss did. I revive these old battles for the simple reason that I am not persuaded that the Cambridge school and the various other alternatives to Strauss arc correct in any of the three areas of relevance here-in its general historical approach to texts in the history of philosophy, in its root and branch rejec­ tion of Strauss's csotericism thesis and as applied to Locke in particular, or in its traditionalist reading of Locke. Part One, on the hermeneutics of study in the history of political philosophy, reconsiders both the general stance of the Cambridge school and the specifics of the debates over Locke's manner of presentation of his philosophy. Although methodological, and therefore in a sense merely preliminary, I consider such reflections indispensable to orienting ourselves fruitfully toward Locke. At stake is both the "why" and the "how" of the study of Locke. Skinner argues that an interest in histori­ cal thinkers can be only historical, and that our method of approaching them must be historical as well. I do not contest the dual emphasis on history in the Cambridge approach, but I do question the exclusivity of the commit­ ment. As I will explain later, I tum to Locke for reasons not solely histori­ cal; I argue that he has philosophically important things to say to us about politics, especially about the kind of politics we practice, and therefore has politically relevant things to say to us as well. I do not accept the Cambridge view that finding Locke able to speak to us automatically disqualifies us from

INTRODUCTION

3

understanding him historically, that is, as he could have understood himself in his own historical context. This is a false either/or. The hermeneutic question looms so large here because Locke can neither speak to us nor to his own age unless we understand how to read him. In Part One I review the evidence adduced by Strauss and his critics in those old de­ bates and conclude that the current scholarly consensus has not correctly identified the winners and the losers. In a word, I side with Strauss against his critics on the issue of Locke's "csotericism." Knowing that I am sailing into the wind on this issue, I only ask readers to review with me the evidence and arguments and set aside for this brief voyage their preconceptions.

II I agree with Strauss on Locke's manner of writing, but not on his identifi­ cation of Locke as, in fundamental ways, a Hobbcsian. I believe Strauss's thesis on Locke is the indispensable point of departure for understanding him, for Locke did indeed go through a "Hobbesian moment" in his own development, a moment that continues to have a certain place within his mature thought, but like, say, the "Kantian moment" in Hegel's thought, Locke assimilates, rejects, and moves beyond the Hobbesian. Up through his lectures on the law of nature in the early 1660s, it would not be far wrong to sec Locke as essentially in agreement with Hobbes, although in that work we sec the epistemological orientation characteristic of the mature Locke already a nascent presence, and it is this orientation that ultimately drives Locke beyond Hobbes. In tum, it is this moving beyond Hobbes that allows Locke to "launch liberalism." Strauss conceded that Locke had modified Hobbes by making the latter more consistent in building security from government as well as through government into his political theory. Or, as Strauss also put it, Locke realized, on the basis of a Hobbesian concern with self-preservation, that the most pressing need was not a revolver but a square meal, account­ ing for the much greater emphasis on property, labor, and production in Locke than in Hobbes. Strauss is certainly correct so far as he goes, but he docs not bring out the most significant way in which Locke breaks with Hobbes-the modification of the doctrine of natural right that he effects. Like Hobbes, Locke begins his account of political life with human be­ ings in an apolitical condition, a state of nature, the residents of which pos­ sess natural right or rights. For Hobbes, "natural right" is not, as was said so often in the tradition prior to him, just another way to speak of the natural

4

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

law but is rather its opposite. Law binds and obliges, says Hobbes, while right is "a liberty to do or not to do." That is the position on natural law and natural right that Locke endorses in his lectures, published as Q,,estions on the IAw of N11ture. By nature, Hobbes is saying, human beings possess natural right, that is, a liberty to secure their preservation. When carefully thought through, Hobbes informs us, liberty amounts to a "right of every man to everything, even to one anothcrs body." If we all have such a right, then, Hobbes logically concludes, there can be nothing like property by na­ ture, for property is an exclusive claim to something, such that others have no right to it. For Hobbes, human beings in the state of nature do not own even their own bodies, for others have a liberty to make incursions on them. Locke is famous, however, for somewhat mystifyingly calling natural rights (or the objects of rights) "property" and for having argued, much contrary to Hobbes, that property is natural. In a famous place in his argu­ ment he directly contradicts Hobbes's equally famous claim about rights when he asserts that "every man has a property in his own person." He thereby signals the difference between his notion of natural right and Hobbes's: the rights that human beings have by nature arc not pure liber­ ties as they arc for Hobbes, but moral entities of the sort that imply limita­ tions or obligations on all. For Locke, the other side of one person's right is an obligation in another. For Hobbes, there is no other sidc--all have equally a right to everything, including the person of the other. In principle, then, Locke can and docs recognize natural justice and in­ justice: the violation of the right (or property) of another is unjust. For Hobbes, it is impossible to find anything unjust before sovereign-made pos­ itive law establishes it so. Locke in practice then finds himself much closer to the traditional views of nature and justice that Hobbes had rejected and is thus able to join hands with more traditional thinkers like Hooker against Hobbes. Yet Locke's philosophic commitments arc in many ways closer to Hobbes's than to, say, Thomas Aquinas or Hooker. Locke grounds his doc­ trine of natural rights in two alternative arguments, both of which arc novel relative to the tradition. On the one hand, he appeals to the "workmanship argument": we arc all made by God and, as his product, owned by him. His ownership rights preclude the sort of juridic availability of each to all af­ firmed by Hobbes. That God owns George implies that Alex docs not have free juridic access to George's life and body. On the other hand, Locke af­ firms self-ownership, which has the same implication but perhaps a different foundation. According to both arguments, the Hobbesian right of nature is ruled out of court, and instead fundamental moral bearings (at least for the

INTRODUCTION

5

sake of thinking clearly about politics and political authority) arc taken from rights understood as exclusive claims. The two arguments for Lockean rights have identical or at least overlap­ ping implications, but their relation to each other is far from clear. They largely converge in their implications, but it is not entirely clear how consis­ tent they arc or how Locke means to coordinate them. One way to under­ stand the relation might be to understand this as "Locke's wager," courtesy of Pascal. Since both arguments get to the same place, more or less, it is not crucial to identify which is truer. Some readers surely will be disposed to one rather than the other, and Locke supplies these two alternate grounds for his position in the spirit of a thinker who attempts to find and present the best, that is, most persuasive, argument for the context in which he is writing. Locke seems to prefer the workmanship argument, for that is surely both more prominent and more fully developed. Yet he may have had some un­ certainty or even reservations about how successfully he could demonstrate the existence of the creating God to whom he appeals in that argument. In the Ess11-y Concerning Hu#Uln U,u/,erst11,u/.ing, he tried his hand at a proof of a creating God, but as I argue later, he signals in various ways his uncertainty about this argument. In the face of that uncertainty, he may have appealed to the self-ownership argument as one with similar moral and political con­ sequences, yet one about which he had fewer hesitations about his ability to make g ood his foundation. The workmanship argument depends on a natural theology that Hobbes apparently docs not share; the self-ownership argument depends on a deeper analysis by Locke of the very central concepts definitive of Hobbes's politi­ cal philosophy. Self-ownership for Locke derives from the nature of the self, the self whose preservation, according to Hobbes, we arc all naturally di­ rected toward. Locke's point is that Hobbes has not sufficiently considered what this thing, the self, is; once one docs that, one discovers it is not a nat­ urally given entity, as Hobbes assumes it is, and that it has a structure such that the Lockean rather than the Hobbesian system of rights follows. From this alternate starting point the most characteristic features of Lockean liberalism follow as well as his most characteristic differences from Hobbes. Both thinkers affirm a state of nature, but for Hobbes that state is conceptually indistinguishable from a state of war, for the use of force against others is not only warranted but completely rational in the state of nature. For Locke the two arc conceptually and juridically distinct: a state of war involves the "use of force without right," not at all identical to a state with "no common superior." Given his ability to affirm natural justice and

6

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

injustice, Locke can sensibly speak of the use of "force without right" in the state of narure; Hobbes can do no such thing. The state of war is thus quite different for Hobbes and Locke: for Hobbes, a state of war involves the use or the threat of the use of force per sc; for Locke, it is the use or threat of "force without right." For Hobbes, the state of narurc and the state of war arc identical because without a sovereign power in place, force will be used. To say that Locke has the conceptual tools to recognize the difference between the state of narurc and the state of war is not to deny what is evi­ dent from his discussion of the state of narurc: even though it is conceptu­ ally different, it tends to degenerate into a state of war, in part because rightful and unrightful uses of force arc difficult to distinguish from each other in a state of narure. Nonetheless, the possibility of distinguishing be­ tween the two states proves to have great consequences for further distin­ guishing these two state of narure philosophers and contributes to Locke's liberalism. Although Hobbes and Locke are classified together as "social contract" or "state of narure" philosophers, they arrive at that beginning point by sub­ stantially different routes. For Hobbes, the state of narurc is "an inference from the passions"; the passions arc the naturally given directive force in human beings, and left to themselves, they point to the dissociated, con­ flictful situation that is the Hobbesian "narural condition." Although Hobbes is clear that he docs not mean the state of narurc for a properly his­ torical doctrinc-"it may peradvcnrurc be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world"-nonethelcss he docs mean it for a factual condition. It describes what the passions mandate. Locke arrives at his state of narurc quite differently. It is not an inference from the passions per sc but from narural rights. Human beings, either di­ vinely owned or self-owned, arc, vis-a-vis others, owners of their persons and actions. This ownership has the character of exclusivity mentioned earlier. It follows that human beings arc morally free, that is, naturally equal and in­ dependent of each other, for no one has the right to command and espe­ cially not the right to use force against another, unless, on the divine ownership track, God has delegated his ownership rights to some human being( s ), a delegation Locke can find no evidence for in either reason or rev­ elation. Human beings arc, therefore, morally in a state of narurc, that is, a situation of equality with respect to authority. Perhaps more precisely one might call it a state of anarchy-a state of no-rule, a state where no person has authority (legitimate coercive power) over another. This is not a claim

INTRODUCTION

7

by Locke that human beings, in Robert Filmer's phrase, spring up #JOnfan9on1.-in the manner of mushrooms. It is not a claim that human beings originally wandered the forests alone, sprung from nowhere. The state of nature is a consequence of the structure of the human self, and Locke makes clear in his Ess.y Concerning Hum11n Untlent11ntling that the self arises on the basis of developed linguistic capacity and, therefore, in society. Locke's state of nature is not what it is often taken to be, an affirmation of an ahistorical, asocial atomistic individualism. Locke not only can but docs accept many of the claims of our contemporary communitarians about the social rootedness of humanity. He varies from them chiefly in reading differ­ ently the structure of the self and taking more seriously the problem of au­ thority that follows therefrom. The Lockean self is both the most simple and abstract of beings and a concrete, richly determined being. The self is both the I that stands outside and above and persists through all its concrete con­ tents and changing experiences and the very concrete situated being defined by its modes of social, cultural, and personal embededncss. The abstract "I" caricatured by communitarians as the liberal self is only one part of the story, but as Locke develops it, a very crucial part indeed: Many important things follow from the concreteness of the self, but what follows from the self>s ab­ stractness arc rights, equality, and the liberal problem of authority. The last is another name for the state of nature. The state of nature, then, is preemi­ nently a moral condition or a moral description of the situation God and na­ ture leave human beings in, a situation of "no superior on earth." The point of Lockean theory is not, of course, to establish the anarchist thesis that no authority can be legitimate but to press the question of how authority can become legitimate, how it must be constituted and what it must do in order to be and remain legitimate, morally justified. Locke's an­ swen arc familiar: governmental power must be constituted "with the con­ sent of the governed." This consent contains at least two features: the recognition that the "original" of political power lies with the people, not with the rulen or in direct divine appointment; and the commitment to the view that government exists to secure rights and, more broadly, to punue the legitimate interests of the people. Undentanding the origin and end of government in that way Locke has no difficulty affirming, with none of the equivocation common in the entire tradition before him, that rulen hold power on sufferance of the people or, rather, that governments which do not operate within these bounds forfeit their claim to authority and allegiance. Locke thus becomes the most clear-cut philosopher of revolution yet to ap­ pear in Western thought.

8

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

From the state of nature flow three of the most characteristic features of Lockean liberalism: popular sovereignty, liberal or limited ends of political life, and the right of revolution, or perhaps more broadly put, the ultimate accountability to the community of the holders of all authority. The most significant aspect of the new politics Locke attempted to fashion was a new understanding of the foundation and purposes of political life. It was to be a revolution in the opinion people had of their politics. But it was not to be only that. Locke laid down the outlines of modem constirutional structures as mandated by his new understanding of the foundations and ends. These included, among other things, the theory of the separation of powers (car­ ried further by his successor, Montesquieu), a commitment to a representa­ tive legislature ( carried further by many successors of a more democratic bent than he himself), and governance via "rule of law." In most of these re­ spects Locke deviated greatly from Hobbes, deviations mandated by his doc­ trine of narural rights. Two other features of Lockean liberalism also departed from the most characteristic clements of Hobbesian thought. In place of Hobbes's Eras­ tianism, Locke put his doctrine of religious toleration; in place of Hobbes's emphasis on social integration through fear of the sovereign power, Locke, without ignoring the role of force in politics, put his "economizing" solu­ tion. Both of these also have played a very large part in post-Lockean liber­ alism. Both shifts can be vnderstood formally in terms of the differences between the rights theories in the two thinkers. Hobbes's narural man has a right to everything, and he constirutes a sovereign power by resigning this right, abandoning his own and leaving only the sovereign with the right of nature, or, alternately, "authorizing" the sovereign to exercise the right of nature. To the sovereign thus accrues the most plenary power: the right to everything that everyone had in the state of nature. Among other things this power allows the sovereign the right to regulate the opinions, or at least the expression of opinions, including religious opinions, of his subjects. Locke, on the other hand, docs not begin with the undifferentiated right to everything; he docs not conceive political power to derive from the res­ ignation of such an unlimited right to the authorities. Rational actors resign only so much of their right as is possible and necessary for them to achieve their rational goods in political life, the security of their rights. The regula­ tion of religion is no part of the charge of the civil authorities, for the man­ dating of religious belief is neither part ofthe end of civil life nor a necessary means to the achievement of that end. As Locke observes, the attempt to mandate or prohibit religious belief more often than not leads to civil sttifc

INTRODUCTION

9

and insecurity of rights, an observation certainly valid for his time and place. At the same time, Locke emphasized the naruralncss of the property right. At the least, this view implied for Locke that the property of the citizens could not merely lie open for the taking by the sovereign; if it did, it would not truly be property. Thus there had to be safeguards for their property; one consequence of making property secure is the unleashing of labor power, itself the source of most of the valuable things present in society. The rational sovereign, Locke tried to show, was the one who respected his citi­ zens' property, which not only bound them to him but also led to the de­ velopment of a much wealthier and therefore much stronger society. "And that prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbors." The analysis in terms of rights is not so revealing of the ground for these Lockean revisions as the modifications in the theory of the self that accom­ panied Locke's new theory of rights. Probably the most perspicacious for­ mulation of the difference is to say that where Hobbes saw the human self as moved primarily by fear, Locke saw it as moved by unease. These may seem very close, but as Locke works it out, they point in radically different directions. That difference leads to or is bound up with the fact that Locke leaves us with an analysis of human being as free, responsible, and rational, where Hobbes more or less denies all three. Hobbes builds his analysis of human being on a broad analysis of nature; human being is merely a special case of the general laws of matter in motion that govern all nature. As parts of nature, human bein gs can no more be free of determining causes of their motions than can billiard balls, although the transmission of motion is admittedly more complex in living than nonliving entities and even more in human than nonhuman beings. Because of his es­ timate of the role of the laws of nature on humanity, Hobbes concludes that there can be no such thing as freedom in the sense of free will, as had been strongly affirmed within most of the precedent Christian-Aristotelian tradi­ tion. Without freedom, there could be no responsibility. Reason entered into the determination of human action, but made no fundamental differ­ ence; the passions, themselves part of the economy of natural motion, com­ prise "the interior beginnings of voluntary motions"; thoughts make no fundamental contribution to action, for they "arc to the Desires as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired." Delib­ eration is thus merely the alternation of appetites and aversions in the mind;

10

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

will, nothing but the "last appetite or aversion, immediately adhering to the action, or the omission thereof." To say that thought adds nothing funda­ mental is, of course, not to say that it adds nothing. Mind can search out means and hindrances; it can quench desire when it proves impossibility of attainment; together with imagination it can add liveliness and intensity to some appetites or aversions and diminish others. Yet, mind cannot provide knowledge of ends or move the person to seek some ends over others. Hobbesian reason is solely instrumental reason. The passion most reliably attached to the natural end of human appeti­ tion is fear. If human beings act reliably on the basis of fear, they arc more likely to achieve preservation than when fear is more quiescent in them. Human life is disordered because fear is not as unambiguously powerful as it might be, nor docs it point unambiguously to civil peace, itselfthe surest means to preservation. The Hobbesian political philosophy consists prima­ rily of the discernment of the need to mobilize fear more unambiguously and reliably in service of the true natural end of humanity. The overwhelm­ ing power of the Leviathan sovereign is the first and primary means to do this: the sovereign needs to be able to dispose of sufficient power to arouse sufficient fear to overcome at the level of the passions all competing passions that might lead to civil disorder. In this conten Hobbes saw religion to be a great problem. Religion, "fear of powers invisible," was potentially a mighty combatant against fear of the sovereign, that is, fear of powers visi­ ble. Hobbes himself lived through a civil war in which fear of powers invis­ ible led some to make war on the powers visible. The disruption made possible by the presence of religion could be healed if and only if the pow­ ers visible also controlled discourse about powers invisible. The result would be the enlisting of both sorts of fear on the same side, and thus religion, far from being a source of disorder and a threat to civil peace, could become a further and powerful support to civil order. But this outcome required that the sovereign be the supreme religious head as well as supreme civil head. Locke launched liberalism when he rejected the Hobbcsian sovereign and the Hobbesian unification of civil and religious authority. These important modifications derived from the rethinking of the self and the nature of human action that was part of Locke's development of a new theory of rights. Locke rejected Hobbes's determinism but did not return to the pre­ modem understanding of the nature of the soul with which Hobbes had broken. Like Aristotle before him, Locke was impressed with the structure of human action as aiming at some end. Phenomenologically it did not ap­ pear to Locke that the Hobbesian stimulus-response, or appetite-action,

I NTRODUCTION

11

model was true to human action. As Aristotle pointed out, there is a more integrated character to action than the Hobbesian model allows. Like Aris­ totle, Locke identified the goal of human striving, the ultimate aim of ac­ tion, as happiness. Happiness is more a goal to be sought than a state to be experienced, however. It is a "general idea" human beings form from the particular ex­ periences of partial happiness they do have. Once formulated, it is the goal of their action; there is a kind of satisfaction that human beings strive for be­ yond and more stable than any specific pleasure or satisfaction they seek or achieve. The idea of happiness operates at the level of the passions and there­ fore shares in the causal efficacy of the passions. But it has an amazing and quite transforming effect: it allows human beings (often) to suspend the op­ erations in themselves of their immediate appetites and aversions and allows them rationally to consider their action in the light of their overall and su­ pervenicnt goal of happiness. The idea of happiness not only derives from reason but also provides an entering wedge for reason in the mechanism of cause and effect. Reason can pronounce on the likely consequence of action in pursuit of one or another desire and on the coherence of this or that action with the agent's overall goal of happiness. It allows in principle the construction of a life with an overall shape and integrity. It also allows human beings to con­ sider their actions in terms of their relation to moral and legal rules. The Lockean self is a potentially responsible being in that it can know and con­ form to rules. It is responsible in the further sense that the self, the "I," as a center of conscious continuity over time, both acts in the present and ex­ periences the consequences (natural and moral) of those actions in the fu­ ture and can understand itself to do both. The self can thus take responsibility for its action and their consequences, both in the sense that it recognius the connection between the two and can relate the consequences to its own agenda of pursuing happiness. The Lockean self is thus, among other things, far more "positively" ori­ ented than the Hobbesian person. Where fear is primary for Hobbes, hap­ piness and its pursuit are primary for Locke. Yet happiness is not fully positive either. It is defined in terms of a negation-the absence of unease. The signal for action is more the presence of unease ( a pain of some sort) than the positive pursuit of happiness itself. "We constantly desire happiness; and whatever we feel of uneasiness, so much, 'tis certain, we want of happi­ ness." Action derives from the effort to overcome this unease. Fear is not particularly privileged.

12

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

The Lockean understanding of the self and its motivation to action via the pursuit of happiness as the overcoming of unease helps make clear the meaning of the Lockean liberal commitments to religious toleration and economic development. Humanity finds itself caught between the idea and desire for happiness and the experience of the absence of an abiding state of happiness. From this state, it might be concluded that happiness, ever elu­ sive here, is not a thing for this world, instead transcending our natural life and our merely human powers. Our natural situation naturally drives us to think of religion and indeed to put much weight on the hope and perhaps even promise of real happiness hereafter as the gift of a being beyond us as much as the attainment of happiness itself is beyond us. Once the pursuit of happiness becomes linked to the hereafter, fear of powers invisible is not as central to religion as it appeared to be to Hobbes. Religion is an om­ nipresent possibility for mankind. All unease in this world points us to it. Locke was not less aware than Hobbes of the possibility for the disrup­ tiveness of religion in public life, but he saw that Hobbes gravely misdiag­ nosed the source of that problem and prescribed very badly for its cure. Not religion per sc but the attempt to impose it led to the difficulties religion had posed. Because human beings arc attached irresistibly to the pursuit of hap­ piness, nothing produces more resistance than the effort to dictate to them the nature and source of happiness in the hereafter. Since in themselves the religious hopes focus elsewhere there is a deep compatibility between leaving religion free and securing civil order. Indeed, under the Lockean order of tol­ eration, if men give up the hope to dictate others' path to ultimate happiness, the freedom of religion can be a source of great civil stability, for all can sec the civil order as an aid to their strivings toward transcendent happiness. This Lockean solution is possible so long as one orients civil life around one implication of the notion of the sclf.-rights, including the right to free exercise of religion-and leaves to the private or personal life other aspects of the sclf.-the pursuit of ultimate or perfect happiness in the hereafter. This is not to say there is no point of overlap, however. As I argue in Chapter 6, the sphere of morality is relevant to both pursuits, but this point of connec­ tion between the here and the hereafter supplies no particular problem of principle. Morality, so long as it is related to the legitimate ends of civil so­ ciety, is properly cognizable by civil authorities, and nothing in Lockean principles says that religious doctrine cannot or should not come to the sup­ port of moral principles. On the other hand, morality, so long as it aims only at the next world or expresses duties to God unrelated to civil ends, ought not to be enforced or suppressed by civil authorities.

INTRODUCTION

13

The Lockean theory of human action relates even more obviously to the emphasis on economic production. Like other living beings, humans suffer the paim and unca.,c associated with the biological life proccs.,cs, hunger, sexual desire, vulnerability to climate, to predators, and so on. Humans suffer from unease to a much greater degree than other animals, however, in that, pos­ sessing reason and foresight, they suffer the unease of anticipation: even after finishing a good meal, they can worry about where their next meal is coming from. This unconquerable unease spurs men to labor, to amass what goods they can, to seek security in plenty. Human unease is far better addressed by a regime organized under laws of liberty, which allow men to labor, confident that their efforts will come to fruition and that they can keep the fruits of their labor. Just as leaving men free to pursue happin� in the next life through pri­ vate religion binds men to the social order, so leaving men free to pursue ma­ terial security and wealth through private labor binds men to the social order. Religious and economic freedom, in their pooitivc effects, do more for social peace and the pursuit of human happin� than Hobbes's Leviathan, with all his "matchl� strength," in which "terror dwells" (Job 4:4-6 ).

III Locke's relation to his predecessors, other than Hobbes, is rendered com­ plex by the latter's negative stance toward his predecessors. Lockean liberal­ ism emerges via the negation of important clements of the Hobbcsian philosophy, raising the question whether the negation of a negation is an af­ firmation. For a long while, that was the dominant view of Locke, and some version of that view still has great force in the literature. The argument of LA11ncbing Libn-11,lum is that Locke's relationship to his predecessors is far more complex than either the traditional view (of large areas of continuity) or the opposite view (of Hobbcsian rejection). Perhaps the most significant claim raised here about Locke and his predecessors is not the overall verdict of how he relates, but the insistence that he relates, that is, that he self-con­ sciously faces his predecessors; he takes far more seriously than he might ap­ pear to do the grounds and implications of the thinking he has inherited. 1bat insight is, I believe, one of the chief and best fruits of the hermeneu­ tic approach to Locke defended in Part One. The degree and manner of Locke's address to his predecessors is visible only when he is read with an open hermeneutic mind. Admittedly the three studies of Locke and his predecessors that arc part of LA11ndnn9 Libn-11,lis,,, arc far from presenting a complete account of the

14

LAUNCHING LI BERALISM

subject; such a complete account would require a very large book. It would also involve repeating some of what I have argued in my 1994 book, N11t­ ur11l Rights 11nd the New Republic11nism, where Locke's relation to the prece­ dent natural law tradition is extensively discussed. I sec these parts of that earlier book as a needed supplement to what is presented here. Lllunching Liberlllism rcrums to the question of Locke and the natural law tradition, es­ pecially on the all-important issue of the relation between natural law and natural rights, but devotes even more attention to the religious question. It is evident, of course, that the religious question was one that Locke pondered regularly. Many of the discussions in An Essay Concerning Hu,,,11,n Understanding relate directly or indirectly to it, Locke's various writings on toleration propose a practical regime for accommodating religious differ­ ences, and his Reason11bleness ofChristianity explores the topic announced in its title. My claim here goes beyond these clear instances, however. Locke, I suggest, engaged in a detailed and concrete exploration of the biblical reli­ gions in part out in the open, as in the texts cited above, but in part clan­ destinely. The puzzling First Treatise, for example, a long and tedious refutation of Robert Filmer's strange political theory, when read alertly proves to be something of much greater interest than it first appears. Not Filmer but the authority behind Filmer, the authority to which he appeals for his argument, proves to be the real or central subject of Locke's analysis in First Treatise. Accordingly, Locke (knowingly, I argue) misrepresents Filmer's argument in a way that allows him both to identify and explore the understanding of the whole and man's part in it contained in the Old Tes­ tament. That exploration is partly appreciative and partly critical. Like many of his fellow early enlightenment thinkers, Locke brought to bear standards of natural reason on the text and claims of the biblical books and found them wanting in important ways. He accordingly mounts a cri­ tique of several of the most characteristic features of the Old Testament un­ derstanding and points to ways in which these misunderstandings stand in the way of improvements in the human order. On the other hand, Locke is far from unambiguously critical of the biblical orientation; indeed he secs it as containing a decisive advance over Greek philosophy-the emphasis on freedom, first in the free and freely creating God, then in man as the image of that God. Locke differs from many other philosophic critics of biblical re­ ligion, critics both medieval and modern, in that he builds his new liberal vi­ sion around that insight. Thus those who sec in Locke a critic of biblical religion arc correct, up to a point, as arc those who sec him building on bib­ lical religion.

INTRODUCTION

15

In a parallel way, I argue, Locke uses his Re111on11bleness of Christlinity as a vehicle for exploring the New Testament. The explicit argument of Locke's ten holds that Christianity is "reasonable," that is, in content, form, and knowability rational. I argue that such a claim is not only not the most interesting feature of the Re111on1Jblmess, but also that as his argument un­ folds, Locke shows that it is in fact false. Nonetheless, as with the First Tre11tise and the Old Testament, Locke is appreciative as well as critical of the New Testament orientation. In particular, he develops in Re11Son11blmess the central role of religion in establishing morality and the particular suitability of Christianity (properly understood) to serve that function. As was observed in his own time by hostile critics of his writings on reli­ gion, Locke's discussions do bear the marks of a Hobbesian influence. This similarity is particularly true of the Re111on1Jblmess, which identifies the sole indispensable doctrine of Christianity in the same proposition ("Jesus is the Messiah") that Hobbes had. Contrary to his own testimony, it is clear that Locke read and was influenced by Hobbes. Nonetheless, Locke differs from Hobbes on religion just as he differs on so many other matters. The strongest and most general way to put the difference is to say that Locke is far more positively oriented to religion. As argued earlier, Hobbes, with his emphasis on "fear of powers invisible," is (at bottom) convinced that reli­ gion is an intellectually deficient grasp of natural causation and a politically dangerous set of practices. Locke secs religion as both more true and more salutary than Hobbes docs. Locke takes the possibility of natural theology far more seriously than Hobbes docs, and he finds the biblical understand­ ing importantly correct on issues like freedom and atonement. Moreover, while Locke docs not believe that a rational prooffor immortality of the soul can be given, he nonetheless remains profoundly open to it as an expression of the truth about happiness, the ultimate goal of human striving. One of the many things that distinguishes Locke from Hobbes is his far greater absorption of Cartesian thinking: Locke is a devotee of "the new way of ideas." This predilection keeps him at some distance from the metaphysi­ cal materialism Hobbes proposes and leaves him much less dogmatic on issues related to religion than is Hobbes. The most significant suggestion Part Two of Ll11nching Liberlllim, leads up to, but docs not explore fully, is that in his treatment of his predecessors Locke is working toward a theory of the pre­ modem consciousness. As a (much modified) Cartesian, Locke carries with him a deep sense of the difference between the pre-Cartesian consciousness, not transformed by the experience of the Cartesian doubt, and post-Cartesian thinking. Where Dcscartcs himself explored that difference largely in the

16

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

realms we now call natural science and mathematics, Locke widens his net to include the whole sphere of the premodcm consciousness, especially the human world, broadly understood, as grasped therein. Locke engaged in quasi-systematic critique of the world construed by the premodcm con­ sciowncss, presenting (unsystcmatically, to be sure) a version of what Hegel later accomplished in his PhfflO#lfflO/ogy of Spirit, a historical account of the significant forms of consciousness, together with a critique of those forms. My readings of Locke as attempting such a thing may strike some read­ ers as fanciful, in part because I do depend on Sttaussian methods. I have defended these methods at length in Part One and believe I have shown some of their fruits in Part Two. I will not repeat all of that here, but I will add a few comments that speak in favor of the plausibility of what I have done. As a (modified) Cartesian, Locke knew he was breaking with the dominant way of thinking characteristic not only of his society but also of all human societies hitherto. The "way of ideas" led Locke to sec many things diffcrently-wimcss the very orientation around "ideas" in Locke's &st,,y as well as some of his leading conclusions-an antitelcological doctrine of na­ ture, a critique of the doctrine of substance, a reconceptualization of moral­ ity as mixed mode, an analysis of "infinity" that undcnnines most of traditional natural theology, a novel theory of personal identity. Locke saw the world quite differently from the way Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or even Duns Scotus did, and even more differently, probably, from the ways his nonphilosophic compatriots did. Assuming that Locke did not wish to be a pariah, it makes sense that he might downplay some of his nov­ elty and divergence from ordinary opinion and present that novelty and di­ vergence in a somewhat indirect manner. To repeat a point made in Part One, we cannot rule out in advance and universally the possibility that Locke did indeed think himself to these unorthodox views, and that having done so, he would accept the desirability of muting his expression of them. Of course, it is also true that mere possibility docs not mean he actually did so. It will nec­ essarily be a matter of interpretation and philosophic judgment as to what Locke did achieve in &ct, but I merely wish to insist that interpretive effort cannot be dismissed in advance as illegitimate or hopelessly arbitrary. Compared to Hobbes and Spinoza, say, Locke's doctrine has a second &cc that contributes to the complexity of assessing his relations to his pre­ decessors. He turns out to have more in common with those predecessors than some of his fellow enlightenment thinkers. As I have suggested already, Locke affirms much more of the precedent moral, political, and religious traditions than they do. His understanding of politics has more in common

INTRODUCTION

17

with medieval constitutionalism, his understanding of morality echoes any number of earlier positions, including Stoicism, his undemanding of reli­ gion shares much with Protestantism contemporary with him. Thus Locke's "conservative" or "traditionalist" face is by no means merely a facade. The difficult mk in understanding Locke is to give both faces their due weight and to avoid one-sidedly emphasizing one to the exclusion of the other, as I believe most of the literature docs.

IV Just as Locke stands in complex relation with his predecessors, so his stance relative to his successors is complex. The two complexities arc no doubt re­ lated and in tum have much to do with the unparalleled practical success that he had as a political actor. A large part of the history of political thought in the century immediately following Locke's involves the assimilation of and reaction to him. His impact was, naturally, first discernible in his native land, where thinkers like Daniel Defoe and the great opposition writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, writing as Cato, adopted and adapted Lockean political philosophy. From the start, one of the most striking features of the absorption of Locke's thinking was the tendency to incorporate him into some broader system of thought. He seemed remarkably absorbablc into highly syncrctis­ tic and often quite original amalgams. The tendency is already visible in Trenchard and Gordon's Cii.to's Letters, where the authors work out a syn­ thesis of Lockean politics, not only with such modem philosophers as Machiavelli and Hobbes but also add in a heavy dose of the republican tra­ dition as exemplified by thinkers like John Milton, James Harrington, and Alcgemon Sidney. Cato stayed on the periphery of English political culture-although he became a great and lasting favorite in colonial America-and it remained for others to bring Locke more firmly into the mainstream of British political thought, from which position he enjoyed an immense influence. One of the most significant of the mainstream thinkers to adopt Locke was William Blackstone, the first teacher of English common law in a British university and the author of a commentary on the common law that became an au­ thority on both sides of the Atlantic. Blackstone not only helped spread Lockean principles, but he also broadened in a very significant way the amalgam Cato had fashioned. Perhaps it is better to say that Blackstone con­ structed a similar amalgam, but one containing somewhat different clements

18

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

from the one Cato had formed. Like the latter, Blacbtone took from Locke (with some modification and adaptations) his understanding of the funda­ mentals of politics and political right; unlike Cato, however, he was not in­ terested in the republican tradition but rather in the English common law. He wrote a commentary on the law that attempted to reveal that, properly understood, properly systematized and interpreted, the common law em­ bodied Lockean principles of legitimacy and achieved substantive Loclccan political aims. Blackstone's was an amazing achievement, for he not only created this amalgam but also used it to bring system and order to the common law, a task that had eluded centuries of commentators. His efforts had the further effect of making the common law accessible to the layperson-this had been one of his goals from the outset-and thus he contributed to the wrenching of the law free from the monopoly control of the guild-trained common lawyers, and made it, potentially, a possession of the political nation as a whole. He also made the law exportable in a way it had never been, for he freed it from the specific and contingent form in which it had lived up to his day and showed how the apparently adventitious set of customs and judicial opinions that made up the common law served universal and philosophically validated ends of political life. Both Locke and the common law had, of course, crossed the Atlantic to America long before Blackstone's Co,n,nentaries, but his amal­ gam helped Americans to sec the way that the Lockean philosophy and the inherited legal order could be harmonized and thus reinforce each other. Lockean political philosophy in the eighteenth century was thus a bit like the carbon atom, entering readily into compounds with a wide variety of other, sometimes apparently inconsistent, clements and producing new mol­ ecules of great power in the world. The Blackstonian amalgam is a good ex­ ample, for the common law, the product of history and custom, seemed at the farthest extreme from the rationalistic Lockean philosophy. The Black­ stoncan amalgam, in articulating the compatibility of Locke and common law, in tum had consequences that would be difficult to overestimate. In the American context, for instance, it seems responsible to a large degree for the course the American Revolution took as opposed to that of the French and later modernist revolutions. The amalgam led the Americans to the view that the inherited legal and social order was not only compatible with but also served remarkably well the Lockean politics they endorsed. The amalgam lent support to Locke as well in that it showed his philosophy to be sup­ ported (or supportable) by the most traditional and authoritative clements of the Anglo-American legal tradition.

INTRODUCTION

19

The amalgam helps explain how Locke came to hold such influence in the eighteenth century, particularly in America. It also helps answer some historiographical puzzles that have plagued twentieth-century students of the founding era. We have been struggling for several decades now with a series of either/or judgments regarding the key clements and commitments in American political culture in the late eighteenth century. Was America lib­ eral (Lockean) or republican? Christian or Whig? These and other clements arc often said to have been at war with each other in a struggle for domi­ nance of the American soul. One problem with this popular story, however, is that nobody at the time seems to have seen it that way. The amalgam ex­ plains why not. So, the debate about the American Revolution itself has cen­ tered on the relation between the commitment to natural rights and the commitment to "the rights of Englishmen." The fact is, there was no ei­ ther/or. Once again, the Americans produced a synthesis of Lockean natu­ ral rights philosophy and whig theories of the English constitution and constitutional rights, a synthesis that allowed them to avoid the either/or that bedevils scholars in our century. The most perspicuous statement of the political philosophy of the found­ ing period remains the so-called Declaration of Independence, a document that, read in its own terms, yields up an essentially Lockean understanding of the first principles of politics, but that also shows how thoroughly the Americans blended Lockean political philosophy with Whig constitutional­ ism and natural theology. The opening chapter of Part Three is thus an at­ tempt to provide a fairly comprehensive reading of the Declaration; to bring out, among other things, how the Americans understood Locke and how Lockean they were. It is also my effort to explicate the political philosophy ( as opposed to the political science) of the founding era.

V The Americans of the eighteenth century were blenders; following Locke's lead and the lead of predecessors like Cato, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, they developed a rich and powerful amalgam of Locke and other clements in their intellectual and cultural universe. We Americans of the late twenti­ eth and early twenty-first century arc splitters; our reigning philosophic ap­ proach is called analysis. In this frame of mind, Locke ( and his successors) have not fared especially well. Locke himself is often seen to be confused or shallow, in part because of his own syncretistic tendencies and in part be­ cause of his moderate way of presenting himself, a way that led him to

20

LAUNCHING LIBERALISM

downplay some of the sharp edges that characterized his thinking. His suc­ cessors, with their penchant for amalgamating, have suffered from the de­ constructive impulses of our time, in that we seek to take apart what they insistently put together. As a historical, if not a philosophic matter, this de­ constructive agenda has for the most part served us badly, for we persist in forcing them into pigeonholes and cubbyholes they did not sec and would not accept. We arc failing at the first task of historical understanding-to un­ derstand our subjects as they understood themselves. The fate of Lockean philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first century is not merely a matter of historical study, however. It has became trite to ob­ serve that we live at a moment when liberal democracy, a system clearly de­ scended from Lockean liberalism, is triumphant in the world on a scale perhaps no set of political principles has enjoyed heretofore, and yet there is a crisis of sorts in this very liberalism, for we arc no longer confident we can justify or even explain the foundations of our "triumphant" system. Contemporary political philosophy, in the wake of the demise of Marx­ ism, thus reveals two chief wings: one group, liberal theorists, attempts to put together an account of liberalism that will pass muster in our skeptical age. The other group, more diverse, attempts to exploit the weaknesses of liberal theory by adumbrating alternatives to it, alternatives made necessary, it is said, by the deficiencies of liberal theory and practice in its current or past forms. The studies of Locke and the Lockean tradition that compose Ltiunching Liber11lism arc meant to address this crisis, although I have no pretensions to have settled it. I wish to make a contribution to these current discussions by putting Locke back on the table, so to speak, as someone whose liberal political philosophy can still speak to us. Part of my effort is to show that Locke's political philosophy is much less vulnerable to the stan­ dard criticisms raised against it than it is normally ta.ken to be. Of varieties of liberal theory and of alternatives to liberal theory, there is no end. In Part Four as in other parts of Ltiunching Liber11lism, I make no effort at completeness but pick out instead a few of the most representative and significant of liberal theorists and critics for consideration next to Locke. Thus I promote a discussion between Locke and John Rawls in Chapter 1 2 and one between Locke and Alan Gewirth in Chapter 1 3 . The ultimate claim in the discussion of Locke and Rawls is that Rawls fails as a liberal the­ orist because he has given up on a theory of rights; the ultimate claim of the discussion of Locke and Gcwirth is that Gcwirth, a notable and important rights theorist, falls short of Locke in that respect. Locke is not only a the­ orist of rights superior to our contemporary liberal theorists, I argue, but he

INTRODUCTION

21

also has a more flexible an d politically sound conception o f what a liberal polity should be, in part because of the amazing absorptive powers of his philosophy as developed earlier in IA"ncmng Liber11lum. Thus Locke points us toward a liberal polity that is not hostile to religion, morality, and the family, contrary to the positions taken by many contemporary liberal theo­ rists and attacked by many contemporary critics of liberal theory. Locke docs not require "liberal neutrality" or the extreme forms of "personal auton­ omy" that threaten to dissolve society into self-seeking sybaritism. Locke is an (old-fashioned) liberal, but for all that, not a libertarian; he provides a ra­ tionale for active, if limited government and a moral claim for a limited wel­ fare state. Of the outspoken critics of liberal theory and practice of our time I have selected for consideration here Alasdair MacIntyre. My ingress to MacIntyre is his intransigent critique of the very idea of natural rights. Since I have put so much weight on rights, a reply to MacIntyre seemed especially required. The theme of rights turns out to be a good ingress into Maclntyrc's broader antiliberal, anti-Enlightenment, anti.modernist moral philosophy, and there­ fore a good platform for considering some of the broad themes of contem­ porary antiliberalism. Locke comes out of these various confrontations well, I believe, but he was, of course, a seventeenth-century man, and one who cast his political philosophy in terms particularly related to the political disputes of his age. Therefore, even if I sought such a thing, l.A u nching Liber,dism is not meant to be a call for "Lockean originalism." We cannot be Locke, we cannot fol­ low him in any precise sense. The most we can do along that path is to learn to think in a Lockean manner as a part of our efforts and need to think for ourselves. That, in any case, is the enterprise to which l.Au nching Liberalism hopes to contribute.

PART ONE. LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

1 PROBLEMATIC PERSPECTIVES ON LOCKE

I The volume John Yolton has edited, John Loclte: Problems 11ntl Perspectives,"1 consists of thirteen cs.uys by twelve scholars and is nearly unique in ranging aCl'C>M almost the full field of Locke's interests-politics, religion, science, epistemology. But far more than half take his political doctrines or political activities and influence as their major emphasis, in which we shall follow them. The contributors include many of those prominent in the Locke schol­ arship of the past quarter century, but absent arc such important names as C. B. Macpherson, Leo Sttauss, and Wtllmoorc Kendall. The subtitle Yolton has selected for his collection, "Problems and Perspectives," reveals as well as anything the character of both Locke's thought and ofthe recent Locke crit­ icism. Locke's political thought is problematical in the extreme, hardly any aspect of it being free from difficulty. The literature on Locke, properly con­ cerned with those problems, consists of a series of "perspectives" or at least of conflicting, sometimes acrimoniously conflicting, ways of dealing with these problems. The problem par excellence of Locke's political philosophy is his doctrine of the law of nature. In every characteristic feature of his political doctrine­ the state ofnature, the formation of government, the origin and limitation of private property, the end of government, the relation of parents and chil­ dren-in all these features and almost any other one could name, the law of nature supplies the main contours of Locke's discussion. But the centrality of this doctrine is at least matched by the difficulties to which it is, or appears to be, exposed. From these difficulties flow the disagreements within the litera­ ture over the meaning of the law of nature and ultimately of the other con­ cepts essentially bound up with it. Whether, for example, Locke's state of 25

26

LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

nature is a real historical condition or hypothetical construct; whether it is, as some have argued, on the whole warlike or, as others have it, more peace­ able; whether Locke sanctions "unlimited appropriation" and thus embod­ ies "the spirit of capitalism," or whether he endorses the duty of charity and other traditional limits on the natural right to property arc all controversial questions, the settlement ofwhich depends on understanding the law of na­ ture in Locke's thought, for it is the "bottom" or the apparent bottom of the whole edifice. The apparent difficulties with Locke's law of nature arc many. One set, traditionally emphasized, concerns, in Raymond Polin's words, Locke's si­ multaneous and apparently incompatible professions of "a theoretical phi­ losophy of empirical style and a practical philosophy of innatist inspiration" ( 1 ). At its strongest, the claim here is that "the ESS11y [on human under­ standing] has no room for natural law," at the same time that "the objective existence of a body of natural law is an essential presupposition of his polit­ ical theory. "2 Or, within the Ess11y, difficulties arc seen in reconciling the var­ ious strands of Locke's ethical doctrine with themselves, much less with the Two Tre11tises. How to combine, for example, his emphases on the demon­ strability of ethics on the one hand, with his "hedonism," his uncompro­ mising affirmation that "things arc good or evil only in reference to pleasure or pain" ( II ECHU xx 2 ), and both of these with his repeated claims that the law of nature is of, and must be referred back to, God for its validity, content, and sanctions? 3 At the root of almost all the difficulties with Locke's natural law, and indeed with his philosophy as a whole, it is now al­ most universally recognized, is the problematical relationship between the rational and the religious in his thought. Within the Second Tre11tise, the difficulties appear in an even simpler form; Locke says that "it would be beside my present purpose, to enter here into the particulars of the Law of Nature" (II Tr. 12). As Peter Laslett comments on the passage, "It was always beside his present purpose." Not only docs he fail to "enter into the particulars," but even though he assures us repeat­ edly that reason can know the law of nature, that it is "intelligible and plain to a rational creature," he never tells us in the Tre11tise how reason can know it.4 There is certainly nothing in the Second Tre11tise resembling a proof for the existence, content, foundation, or method of derivation ofthe law of na­ ture. At one point, Locke docs suggest that the law of nature is "plain," is "'writ in the Hearts of all Mankind," that is to say, is available in some im­ mediate or innate way (II Tr. 11 ). But elsewhere he emphasizes that it is available only to "a Studier of that Law"; and, he tells us, "the Law of Na-

PROBLEMATIC PERSPECTIVES ON LOCKE

27

turc being unwritten" is "nowhere to be found but in the Minds of Men," that is, not "writ" in their "hearts" (II Tr. 12, 136). The law of nature, someone has suggested, appears to come on and off stage as required to get Locke where he is going, a veritable lex ex m11cm,111,. In the recent literature, three quite different kinds of approaches arc taken to the problems of the law of nature and the other issues bound up with it. The first, represented by several authors in the Yolton volume (e.g., Hans Aarslcff, Raymond Polin, M. Scligcr), attempts to show that the difficulties arc only apparent, that is, that a coherent natural law teaching can be con­ structed for Locke ( 1 3 1 ) . A second approach, associated preeminently with the name of Leo Strauss, is not directly represented in the Yolton volume but is there as the target fur Hans Aarsleff's critical "Some Observations on Recent Locke Scholarship" and as a point of reference for many of the oth­ ers. Strauss maintains that the difficulties in the text arc real, not just appar­ ent, but he denies that those indicate similar difficulties in Locke's thought. He argues that Locke's doctrine is perfectly coherent and intelligible, but that his expression of it has been, for various reasons, accommodated to opinions of his day more orthodox than his own. This accommodation is re­ sponsible both for the troublesome contradictions and for the troublesome reticences in Locke's writings. The third approach is taken by several other authors in the Yolton volume (e.g., Peter Laslctt and John Dunn): Locke never presented the "particu­ lars" of his law of nature because he could not do so. His philosophic in­ vestigations had left him unable either merely to reproduce the traditional natural law doctrine or to come to another doctrine compatible with his own principles. At the same time, however, "the objective existence of a body of natural law is an essential presupposition ofhis political theory," and he proceeds then, inconsistently and unsatisfactorily, to employ such a doc­ trine in the face of his actual inability to provide the philosophical founda­ tions or "particulars" of the law. s Those who take the 6.nt approach all agree that, in the words of M. Scligcr, the contradictions so emphasized in the other approaches to Locke "arc fur the most part no contradictions at all. "6 Much of the inconsistency that has so troubled Locke's interpreters, Raymond Polin suggests, is due not to Locke but to the too simplistic, precstablished categories into which the interpreters attempt to squeeze Locke's thought ( 1 1 ).7 Scligcr, whose 11,e Liber11I Politics ofJohn Loclte presents a modest version of this approach, explains Locke's reticence on the law of nature in the Tre11tises as follows: "Since he never did [ enter into the particulars of the law of nature] he ob-

28

LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

viously thought that his natural law concept needed no further epistemo­ logical elaboration to serve as the moral foundation of his political theory, in other words, that no radically new conception was required. "8 No "new conception" was required, because the law of nature in Locke is not so different from traditional doctrines as it is often alleged to be and needs, therefore, no further elaboration of its foundations than they re­ ceived. Scligcr's formulation, however, leaves as an open question whether the epistemological principles of the Ess11y can in fact support the traditional law of nature he finds in the Tn11tises.9 It also conflicts somewhat with his own showing that Locke's law of nature docs in fact depart from "all previ­ ous doctrines of natural law" in several very important respects.IO That in turn raises the question whether it is plausible to rest the Lockean doctrine, with its important novelties, on the traditional foundations of the natural law doctrines from which he deviates. Scliger leaves off then at the very point where hard questions ought to be asked. That he is chiefly interested in a historical problem, the character of the liberal tradition (sec his contri­ bution to the Yolton volume, "Locke, Liberalism and Nationalism"), is no doubt responsible for the case with which he slides over the difficult philo­ sophical issues. More satisfactory in many ways is Aarsleff's essay, "The State of Nature and the Nature of Man in Locke," and Polin's "John Locke's Conception of Freedom," both in the Yolton volume, and especially Polin's 1A, PolititpU Mor11le de John Loclte. Aarslcff supplies an altogether ingenious explanation for Locke's peculiar reticence in the Tn11tises: "It was the aim of the Second Tn11tise to give an account of the 'true original, and extent [sic] [and end] of civil government,' but it was not its aim to spell out the grounds and rea­ sons ofthe assumptions that necessarily had to be employed in that account" (99). Those "grounds" and "reasons" arc to be found in the more theoret­ ical Emiy, and, says Aarslcff, they altogether absolve Locke of charges of in­ consistency or concealment ( 131). If we understand the law of nature properly, according to Aarslcff, we can also understand the coherence of what Locke says about the state of nature; especially we can account for the seeming contradiction between the peace­ ableness and rationality of that state and the "unreason and violence" also attributed to it. The "peaceable" state of nature corresponds to "the state of reason" and is a "purely abstract state." "It has a necessary place in Locke's political philosophy as a guide and model" (101-102). There is also a "non­ abstract" state of nature, which refers to "the actual behavior of men in their dealings with one another" (102).1 1 This latter state is neither "always

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wholly peaceful and reasonable [nor] wholly violent, brutish, and unreason­ able" ( l 02). The more violent state of nature docs not replace the peaceful one, as some have maintained, nor docs the coexistence of the two consti­ tute a conttadiction, "since they operate on different planes" ( 102).12 The two states correspond to "Locke's conception of the nature and capabilities of man," especially man's capability to know and abide by the law of nature ( 104). The absttact state of nature is an affirmation that there is a law of na­ ture, which makes for peace and sociability, knowable by man, and to which he can conform his actions. The other natural state reflects the fact that knowledge of the law is not innate to man but must be won with intellec­ tual effort, and when once won, not necessarily the guide of action. To understand the law of nature, then, as this knowable but not neces­ sarily known, potential but not necessarily effective thing is one set of re­ quirements Aarslcff sets for himself. Indeed, probably the greatest virtue of Aarslcff's study is the clarity with which he identifies the different clements that must find a place in a coherent account of Locke's law of nature. All knowledge concerning the law of nature must be available to the unassisted reason (106-108); the law must be known to be the expression of the will of a lawmaker, i.e., of God ( 1 09); and the sanctions for the law must be known; otherwise "it would, as Locke himself often insists, be nothing" ( 1 10). Ac­ count must also be taken of Locke's "hedonism" and of the place of the afterlife in Locke's scheme ( 1 1 1 , 1 14). To show that man is "able to sec that there is a law of nature" is, accord­ ing to Aarslcff, relatively easy. For Locke, the "argument from design," to which Locke "was fully committed," supplied this knowledge ( 103, 108). This argument, "most fully explained" in Locke's early but only recently published F.ss11ys on the I.Aw of N11ture, establishes that there is a God, and that, since everything has a purpose, man also "is required to do something" ( 108, 109).13 But then comes a serious problem: How is man to know what he is required to do? The answer, says Aarsleff, is in Locke's "hedonism": "Far from conflicting with natural law, the hedonism . . . is the means by which man is guided to the moral rules that pertain to the law of nature" (121, 12�127). The universal moving force of the will in man is desire, and desire is always for "happiness" or "good," which arc defined as avoiding pain and gaining pleasure. Men are not bound to follow every desire that presents itself, however, for they have the power to suspend the operation of immediate desire, but only in the service of calculating pleasures and pains more distantly consequent on their actions. Reason can generate a series of "moral rules" based on

30

LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

long-range and general considerations of pleasure and pain to guide action and opposed to immediate desire. These "rules" would be the law of narurc, i.e., God's legislation for man, because "pleasure and pain also come under the wise dispensation of the Creator and law-maker whose rewards and pun­ ishments they arc." The "machinery, as it were, of pain, pleasure, and uneasi­ ness" is both the way in which the law is to be known (its "promulgation") and its sanctions-and all ofit is accessible to the unaided reason (Ill, 1 1 3). Herc seems to be the solution to the problem of natural law. Yet, Aarslcff docs not leave it at this. In his calculations of more distant pleasures and pains, man will be led ultimately to "direct and control his conduct" according to "the possibility of a future life that will depend on our conduct in this one" ( I l l , 1 14). The hedonistic mechanism remains but is directed toward the "exquisite and endless happiness" and the "dread­ ful state of misery" of the next life ( 1 14; II ECHU xxi 47). Now on the basis of the reasoning that he has been pursuing, there is no evident reason why the afterlife should be brought in here, and there is a fairly good reason to resist it. As Aarsleff well says, "It may be objected that man cannot without special revelation know what conduct is lilccly to be rewarded in a possible future life" ( 1 14). That is, the natural knowability of the whole strucrurc is threatened by this addition. Be that as it may, Aarsleff's position would be simply untenable if he did not posit the furure life as the locus for the law's sanctions, because that is just what Locke says wherever he speaks of that law in the Essay. In a typical thematic passage, for example, Locke as a matter of course speaks of the sanctions God provides for the "rule he has given whereby men should govern themselves" as the "rewards and punishments, of infinite weight and duration, in another life" (II ECHU xxviii 8). It is not the plea­ sures and pains of this life, then, which serve as the law's sanctions. But how do those pleasures and pains of this life, so nicely knowable, relate to the conduct required for a favorable outcome in the afterlife, perhaps so much less knowable? The key move of Aarsleff's argument occurs at this point. The future life and its sanctions disrupt nothing of the rational strucrure so far uncovered: "It is clearly Locke's conception that the total wisdom of cre­ ation is such that the steady pursuit of happiness under the guidance of rea­ son, disengaged from any immediate and contrary passions, will in fact constitute virtuous conduct" ( 1 14 ). That is, the same conduct is required by the law of narure to attain "eternal bliss" as is required to pursue rationally our this-worldly happiness. Thus, the knowability of the law of narurc is maintained.

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In order to evaluate Aarsleff's reconstruction, it is necessary to take note of a cenain ambiguity or vacillation on the place of the this-worldly plea­ sures and pains in his formulations. On the one hand, he says, "pleasure and pain also come under the wise dispensation of the Creator and law-maker, whose m,,11,r,ls 11,ul punisJmlents they 11re" ( 1 1 1 ; emphasis added). On the other hand, he speaks of "the hedonism" as "the ,ne11,ns by winch ""'" is guuled to the mor11l rules that pertain to the law of nature" (121; emphasis added). The this-worldly pleasures and pains arc, then, either themselves sanctions for the law of nature or merely the means by which reason can know what the law of nature requires, that is, the means by which the law is promulgated to reason. Aarslcff vacillates because there arc difficulties that he hopes to avoid by shifting back and forth. If the pleasures and pains of this life arc taken as the sanctions for the law of nature, as he sometimes docs take them, Aarslcff leaves us with a kind of "over-determination" in that the law of nature then has two sets of sanc­ tions. What real role is left for the eternal rewards and penalties; arc these not simply superfluous? Aarsleff supplies no account of why they arc there and ( cf. 128) leaves us with the following strange doctrine: the probability of a future life is to lead men to "the steady pursuit of happiness" (i.e., ra­ tional hedonism) "against wh11,tner pleasures or pain this lift can shew" (i.e., rational hedonism) ( 1 15, II ECHU xxi 70; emphasis added). An even more decisive difficulty, however, in making the pleasures and pains of this life the sanctions for the law of nature is that this approach flatly contradicts Locke's distinction between natural good and evil and moral good and evil: "'We call that naturally good and evil, which, by the natural efficiency of the thing produces pleasure or pain in us; and that is morally good or evil which, by the intervention of the will of an intelligent free agent, draws pleasure or pain after it, not by any natural consequence, but by the intervention of that powcr."14 This thrust of Aarsleff's argument would collapse the two kinds of good and evil, and it sets up as sanctions for the moral the "natural consequences," a situation Locke explicitly rejects. As Locke says in another place, it is necessary to the "true nature of all law" that the reward and punishment that serve as its sanction be "some good and evil that is not the natural product and consequence of the action itscW ( II ECHU xxviii 6 ). Aarsleff's shift away from natural pleasure and pain as sanction to mode of promulgation of the law of nature is thus perfectly intelligible but no more , viable. According to Aarslcff, we have seen, "it is clearly Locke s conception" that the natural "machinery, as it were, of pain, pleasure, and uneasiness" is

32

LOCKEAN HERMENEUTICS

the means whereby man can be guided to knowledge "without special rev­ elation" of "what conduct is likely to be rewarded in a possible future life" ( 1 1 1, 1 1 3, 1 14). Now Aarslcffknows Locke's texts very well, and he quotes or cites Locke profusely throughout his article, but for this, the linchpin of the whole, he provides not one quotation, not one reference to any passage or any work of Locke. He cites none because none exists, and in fact there arc several showing the contrary: To him, I say, who hath a prospect of the different state of perfect hap­ piness or misery that attends all men after this life, depending on their behaviour here, the measures of good and evil that govern his choice arc mightily changed. . . . For if there be no prospect beyond the grave the inference is certainly right, "let us cat and drink," let us enjoy what we delight in, "for tomorrow we shall die." (II ECHU xxi SS, 60) 15 Moreover, Aarslcff simply ignores a decisive difficulty with his construction, pressed in advance so to speak by Leo Strauss: the unassisted reason cannot know of the aftcrlifc. 16 "That the dead shall rise and live again: these and the like, being beyond the discovery of re,uon, arc purely matters of faith, with which retuon has, directly, nothing to do" (IV ECHU xviii 7). Since, as Aarslcff himself emphasizes, a requirement of the Lockean natural law is that, among other things, the unassisted reason be able to know of the sanctions for the law, we have here an insuperable objection to Aarsleff's re­ construction. His sometimes identification of the natural "machinery of pain, pleasure, and uneasiness" with the actual sanctions for the law of nature is his attempt to circumvent this difficulty, for the natural machinery is of course in prin­ ciple accessible to the unassisted reason. But Aarslcff has another way of try­ ing to evade this problem: the "possibility of a future life," which possibility "cannot be denied," is enough ( 1 14-1 1S ). But enough for what? It is enough, so he paraphrases Locke, for man "ultimately [to] direct and con­ trol his conduct according to the mere probability that there is a future state that will depend on his conduct" in this state ( 1 1 1 ). It is worth noticing that Aarsleff speaks of the "mere probability" of a future life, where Locke speaks of it only as a "possible consequence" ( 1 14, II ECHU xxi 47; cf. 1 1 S, II ECHU xxi 70). In any case, Aarslcff is confusing two things here: the passages he cites purport to show how it is possible for man to conform his action to a future state that is a mere possibility. But the fact that men arc able to conform

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their conduct to whatever rules lead to that "eternal bliss" docs not at all prove there is a future state where there arc rewards and punishments, and, Locke is clear, more than the mere possibility of that is required in order for reason to know the law of nature as a law. In a word, the law of nature can­ not be a law in the proper sense. What is knowable and natural, the ma­ chinery of this-worldly plcasw-c and pain, is not a law; what might be law is not knowable and therefore not n11turlll law; these arc the incompatible cl­ ements that Aarsleff, by his fast footwork, tries to hold together. Thus al­ though his position fails, his attempt is extremely valuable, in that it makes clearer precisely where the difficulties in Locke's doctrine lie and precisely how insoluble they arc.

II The second, and most controversial, of the three main approaches to the problems of Locke's political philosophy was initiated by Leo Strauss. He ar­ gued, to the astonishment of many, that Locke's political understanding was not, as usually believed, opposed to that of Hobbes but actually agreed in the main with the earlier thinker on the most important matters of politics, in particular, on the state of nature and the law of nature. The substantive agreement with Hobbes is obscured, Strauss argued, by Locke's employ­ ment of the techniques of "esoteric writing," whereby he partially concealed his meaning through a combination ofreticence and prudential appeal to or­ thodox and traditional opinions with which he did not in fact agree. Strauss's exposition, and that of those who have adopted his approach, has been met with so much opposition at almost every point, and in many cases with a good deal of misunderstanding, that it is nearly impossible to sum­ marize this approach without taking some account of the criticisms raised against it.17 Not only Locke but other political philosophers as well have written "es­ oterically," Strauss argued. Indeed he has pressed a general theory of "per­ secution and the art of writing," a fact that led John Yolton to claim that "Strauss has an ulterior reason for dealing with Locke as he docs": to lend support to his "general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of csotericism."18 But this claim misappre­ hends the character ofStrauss's argument. His general argument on csoteri­ cism in no way depends on finding it in every philosopher and certainly not in Locke. Indeed, Strauss emphasized that not all writers wrote in this man­ ner, and the classic form of his argument applies not so much to modem as

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to ancient and medieval writers. 1 9 Strauss posits Locke's csotericism not as a deduction from his general theory, but on the basis of considerations pecu­ liar to Locke. Accordingly, he begins his discussion of Locke not with the question of Locke's "way of writing," but with the question of Locke's teaching on natural law or natural right, the subject of Strauss's book. Locke, he observes, "'seems to reject altogether Hobbes' notion of natu­ ral law and to follow the traditional teaching. "20 In particular, Locke seems to accept a natural law, whose ultimate source is God, which is knowable by natural reason and at the same time in conformity with the revealed law of the New Testament. But Strauss finds several great difficulties in Locke's doctrine, chief among which is the problem we have already seen in con­ nection with Aarsleff's attempted solution: if there is a true natural law, Locke holds, the natural reason must be capable of proving the existence of the afterlife, but, Locke also explicitly says, natural reason cannot do that. Therefore, by Locke's own criterion, there cannot be a law of nature such as he describes and seems to accept. Moreover, when what Locke accepts as the dictates of the law of nature arc compared with New Testament teachings on the same subjects, it seems dear, Strauss concludes, that Locke's "laws of nature" arc "not identical with clear and plain teachings of the New Testa­ ment or of Scripture in general. "2 1 The same conclusion holds when one looks into Locke's claimed reliance on Hooker. Only after he has perceived these substantive difficulties docs Strauss posit "Locke's peculiar way of writing" as an explanation for them. Thinking through the substance of Locke's thought, Strauss concludes that "Locke's natural law teaching can then be understood perfectly if one as­ sumes that the laws of nature which he admits arc, as Hobbes put it, �but conclusions, or theorems concerning what conduces to the conservation and defence' of man over against other men. And it must be thus understood, since the alternative view is exposed to the difficulties which have been set forth."22 A possible explanation for this strange character of the Lockean texts is that they were written with great "caution"; a cautious man of Locke's day who agreed with Hobbes might well be reluctant openly to advertise that fact.2 3 Many scholars besides Strauss note Locke's "caution" or "guarded­ ness," but there is some disagreement over its mcaning.24 Strauss suggests, however, that the "authentic interpreter of Locke's caution is Locke him­ self." Locke discussed caution and more generally the principles of public communication in several texts. In his The Re11Son11blmess of ChristUJnity, Locke adduces the examples of the ancient philosophers and ofJesus as per-

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sons who cautiously concealed their true mcanin� from their readers or au­ ditors. Strauss concludes from this Lockean discussion that, according to Locke, cautious speech is legitimate if unqualified frankness would hinder a noble work one is trying to achieve or expose one to persecution or endanger the public peace; and legitimate cau­ tion is perfectly compatible with going with the herd in one's outward professions or with using ambiguous language or with so involving one's sense that one cannot be easily understood. 25 John Yolton, in one of the earliest of the many critical responses to Strauss's argument, objects to it as follows: "Locke's point is that Christ did not come right out and say 'I am the Messiah' simply because he knew he had to fulfill his mission of preaching the gospel. Locke in no way general­ ized from this very special situation to a theory of the art of writing under pcrsccution."26 Apart from the fact that Yolton's summary of "Loe.kc's point" omits a great deal, including what Loe.kc saw as the «su89estio f•lsi" of Jesus' speaking, Locke docs not in fact treat Jesus as a special case in the respect relevant to this discussion.27 Jesus acted wisely in practicing the arts of concealment, because greater openness would have endangered himself, threatened the success of his project, and caused public disorder. Locke ex­ plains Jesus' behavior not from the special character ofhis mission, but from a general consideration of prudential behavior in the circumstances. Indeed, as Strauss points out and Yolton ignores, Locke attributes a similar caution or concealment to the pagan philosophers. So while Locke docs not "gcn­ craliu . . . to a theory of writing under persecution," such a general theory seems implicit in his discussion. Strauss concedes that proceeding on the basis of such a view of caution as Loe.kc held would involve one in "procedures which [present-day scholars], from their point of view, justly regard as verging on the unseemly. "28 In­ deed, many "present-day scholars" sec Strauss's claims as implying that Loe.kc is guilty of some impropriety, that he is, for example, "the most shifty and esoteric of the treasonous clerks. "29 Strauss's point, however, is that the scholars ought not to conclude from their own feelings about such matters that Locke and others therefore would not have proceeded in this way: these procedures "might have been regarded in other ages, and by men of another type, as entirely unobjectionable." The proper guide to how Locke regarded such procedures is surely Locke himself, and it appears that he did not con­ sider such conduct at all "reprehensible. "30

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Nor did he or his contemporaries consider the employment of such tech­ niques at all implausible. Richard Cox notes the description, in the First Tn11tise, of Filmer as a "wary physician." I do not think our author so little skill'd in the way of writing Dis­ courses of this nature, nor so careless of the Point in hand, that he by oversight commits the fault he himself . . . objects to Mr. Hunton. . . . But perhaps Sir Robert found, that this Fatherly authority . . . would make a very odd and frightful Figure . . . if he should have given us the whole Draught together in that gigantic form, he had painted it in his own Phancy; and therefore like a wary physician, when he would have his Patient swallow some harsh or corrosive liquor, he mingles it with a large quantity of that, which may dilute; that the scatter'd Parts may go down with less feeling, and cause less aversion. (I Tr. 7) Cox notes the very suggestive (in light of Locke's own training and profes­ sion) use of the physician image and shows how well the method of read­ ing suggested and the reasons for it apply when Locke's own "scatter'd" presentation on the state of nature is read as if the statement applied to him.31 And not only docs Locke attribute arts of concealment to Filmer of the same nature as Strauss and Cox attribute to him, but Filmer in turn at­ tributes the very same techniques of concealed writing to Grotius. Filmer shows that Grotius, for example, "disperses" dangerous statements he wished to conceal, that he is less than candid in some of his outward say­ ings, which either subtly or "in plain words" he elsewhere contradicts to re­ veal his true mind. 32 The pervasiveness of these charges, whether justified in particular in­ stances or not, surely shows that seventeenth-century writers took the prac­ tice of concealment far more for granted than we do.33 Scliger maintains, to the contrary, that Locke in the "wary physician" passage "rejected the method of diluting 'some harsh or corrosive liquor' . . . and castigated Filmer. " 34 But there is nothing in that passage or elsewhere that rejects the method of dilution, the metaphor of the wary physician suggesting instead that such would be appropriate if one were administering unpalatable med­ icine. And as Cox points out, no matter how much Locke "castigates" Filmer for other things, he frequently, and surprisingly, praises "that great master of style's" writing. Aarsleff, in making "Some Observations on Re­ cent Locke Scholarship" in the Yolton volume, responds to Cox's complex discussion with the claim that "the argument is surely unique, in print," and

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even "rises to comic proportion" (266). But just how docs this amount to an adequate response to, much less a refutation of, Cox's argument? In addition to paying due regard to Locke's "caution," the csotcricism the­ sis, according to its advocates, has the advantage of dealing more adequately with Loe.Ice than the "accepted interpretation," which finds Locke very illog­ ical, attributing to him "inconsistencies . . . which arc so obvious that they cannot have escaped the notice of a man of his rank and sobriety," or even, Strauss says elsewhere, of a reasonably bright high school student. One way in which the "accepted interpretation" of Locke's Tre11rises goes wrong, ac­ cording to Sttauss, is by not paying attention to the distinction between civil and philosophic discourse made by Locke in his 'Esslly: "The accepted inter­ pretation . . . somehow assumes that the Tre11tise contains the philosophic presentation of Locke's political doctrine, whereas it contains in fact only its 'civil' presentation. In the Tre11tise, it is less Locke the philosopher than Locke the Englishman who addresses not philosophers, but Englishmen."35 So, according to Sttauss, Locke hesitates to reveal the full enent to which his thought departs from that around him and docs not hesitate to attempt to leave the impression that he is in fundamental accord with that thought, which is revealed especially well in his use of "authorities." According to Sttauss and Cox, Locke's use of sources, particularly Hooker and the Bible, reveals both the enent of his actual divergence from the ttadition and the cnent of his conscious obfuscation of that divergence. Although Locke cites various scriptural texts, for example, to convey "the impression that the state of nature is based on, or at least compatible with, the biblical story of man's original condition; in fact, the rights he ascribes to man in that state arc fun­ damentally incompatible with the biblical teaching. "36 Loe.Ice emphasizes in the First Tre11tise, for example, that the donation to Adam of "every plant yielding seed . . . and every tree with seed in its fruit . . . for food" docs not include the right to cat meat, a right added only at the time of Noah: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything" (Gen. 1 :29; 9:3). Locke, speaking for himself, however, "doubts not, but before these words were pronounced, Gen. I :28-29, . . . and without any such verbal donation, man had a right to a use of the Creatures . . . . Reason, which was the voice of God in him, could not but teach him . . . he had a right to make use of those Creatures, which by his Reason or Senses he could discover would be serviceable thereunto" (I Tr. 86 ). This "Right" to "use any of the Inferior Creatures" means "that he may even destroy the thing that he has Property in by his use of it" (I Tr. 92), a point Locke reiterates at the beginning of

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his chapter on property: "Natural reason tells us, that Men, being once born, have a right to their Preservation, and consequently to Meat and Drink, and such other things as Nature affords for their subsistence" (II Tr. 25; cf. also II Tr. 26). Natural reason then teaches that men have a right by nature, which the scriptural account, allegedly the same, actually denies. Aarslcff, in his critique of Strauss's approach, finds this argument "strange" and holds that it "depends on the remarkable misunderstanding that 'to use the creatures' means 'to cat animals of flesh and blood.' 'To use' is of course not the same as 'to cat,' and 'creatures' include all created things, such as water, soil, rain, sunshine, oxen, dogs, streams, and 'every herb bearing seed,' etc." (268 n). But since Locke is quite explicit, as Cox points out, that "to use" includes "to destroy" and "to cat" and "crcarurcs" includes "animals of flesh and blood," it is difficult to believe that Aarslcff read Cox's "strange argument" with even a modicum of care. Strauss's approach has attracted as much hostile attention in the recent lit­ erature as it has because it is both radical and powerful. Although I have pre­ sented only a small sample, it shows, as would a much needed more thorough review of these debates, that many of the criticisms raised against this approach arc rather weak. Especially weak arc the critics' response to the detailed textual arguments Strauss and the others have made ( for example, Aarslcff on the wary physician passage and on the right to cat meat). Their almost casual treatment of the texts reflects the fact that the critics essentially reject Strauss's approach on grounds quite other than those of textual de­ tails. Partly they reject it because it is, to them, implausible; partly because such a manner of writing appears to them improper. But as we saw above, these responses arc quite unhistorical, in that they take as their standards what is plausible to twentieth-century scholars and what is reprehensible in light of present-day academic conventions rather than what was plausible or reprehensible to Locke and his contemporaries. But there arc other, more weighty, general objections the critics have. The subordinate character of the textual concerns in Scliger's response to the Strauss approach is dearly indicated in his claim that although it is "ques­ tionable" on various grounds, "it is invalidated because [Locke's) unveiled justification of the right of revolt is left unexplained." "What," Scligcr asks, "docs the concealment of a radical political teaching amount to if revolution is openly advocatcd?"--an advocacy more dangerous and as unorthodox as the "thread-bare opinions" Locke is said to have concealed in csotcricism. The manifestation of Locke's "caution," legitimate in the light of Sidney's fate, is the Treatises' anonymity. And if Locke "felt safe in [the open advocacy

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of revolution] by concealing his authorship, it is altogether improbable that for presenting the philosophical argument he should have sought the addi­ tional security of hiding his true intentions behind contradictions. "37 This argument would be weightier if it were not so unhistorical. The sit­ uation in which Locke published his book, immediately after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which he claimed to justify in his book, was entirely dif­ ferent from that in which Sidney lost his life several years earlier under a Stu­ art king ( I Tr. Preface). Another, and decisive, difficulty with Scligcr's argument, however, is that he notices only one side of the line of reasoning with which Strauss (following Locke in the Re,uonableness) explains why Locke might write in this way. Not only docs such a procedure save Locke from the personal danger that might come to an advocate of hctcrodoxical or dangerous opinions, an end to which the anonymity is indeed an alter­ nate means, but it also is the device of a "wary physician," that is, of a man who wants to be effective but fears the doctrine without "dilution" would prove too bitter. This consideration makes much of Scligcr's argument be­ side the point. The most widespread as well as most substantial general objections to the Strauss approach cluster on its subjectivity, on the limited testability of the thesis itself and the readings it produces, and on the circularity of its princi­ ples. The most uncompromising but I think least tenable formulation of these objections faults the Strauss thesis for encouraging unintentional ( and even inviting intentional) distortions of the text for the sake of making good the interpretation. The latter is the position taken by John Yolton in the most intemperate reply yet published to the Strauss thesis. He speaks of the "lengths to which Strauss will go in making Locke say what [he] wants him to say," of "the unscholarly nature of Strauss' analysis," of Strauss's "glaring errors" and "irresponsible methods," of his "violently distorted" interpreta­ tion; and as we have already seen, he accuses Strauss of having "an ulterior reason" in interpreting Locke as he docs. 38 Among the most "unscholarly" and "irresponsible" of Strauss's tech­ niques arc his "use of omissions from crucial passages," which "prevents his readers from seeing the correct meaning of Locke's statements," and his practice of quoting "out of context, the context being ignored or carefully covered up. "39 One such distortion occurred, Yolton says , when Strauss, seemingly following Locke, affirmed "a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery" as "innate practical principles." But, says Yolton, "only impres­ sions of truth upon the understanding arc properly called 'innate practical principles,'" a conclusion he believes would have been clear from the end of

40

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the sentence, not quoted by Strauss, which shows "that Locke meant to contrast desires and aversions with impressions of truth upon the under­ standing. "40 But I do not sec how Locke's contrasting desires and aversions with impressions oftruth imply that "only impressions of truth . . . arc prop­ erly called "innate principles,' " especially when the passage both Strauss and Yolton quote says clearly that "Nature . . . has put into man a desire of hap­ piness and an aversion to misery; these indeed 11,re inn11te pr11ctic11l principld' (I ECHU iii 3; emphasis added). Yolton complains more generally of Strauss's methods of citation: "The pages devoted to Locke . . . arc filled with brief words, phrases, sentences quoted from Locke. After a long series of such quotations, a footnote lists a string ofreferences to the Locke texts. But the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation. . . . It takes literally hours to trace the references to single words and brief phrases."41 For the most part, Strauss docs quote "brief words, phrases, sentences" rather than long pas­ sages. But he docs this not for the sinister reason Yolton suggests, but be­ cause he covers a great deal in a relatively short space. As Yolton admits, he supplies ample footnote citations to supplement the texts he quotes. For all the "literally hours" Yolton spent with Strauss's footnotes, he never seems to have grasped the principle that governed their order: they refer to Locke's texts in the order in which they appear in Locke. That choice is not arbitrary, demonic, or unintelligible, for there were at least two good reasons why Strauss did it that way. The brief phrases he put in his text were illustrative of the points he was making, the basis for which were as much the other texts cited in the notes as the ones he quotes. Strauss also uses his footnotes to provide the interested reader with a fuller explication of the way Locke's argument unfolds and develops than he could fully present in his ten. Yolton complains in several places that "in many cases, the references arc quite irrelevant to the point Strauss has been arguing" or "actually go against Strauss' interpretation. "42 An example: The state of nature, Strauss says, is a "state of penury," but, says Yolton, "his reference to II Tr. 32 . . . speaks of a period of plenty. "43 In fact, II Tr. 32 says, "God, when he gave the world in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour, 11,,u/, the penury ofhis condition relJllired it ofhim" ( emphasis added). II Tr. 37 and 38, according to Yolton, "also speak ofplenty, not ofpenury." II Tr. 37 says, "For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated 11111St ofA#Uri,11 left to N11ture, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy 11,nd 1"1'etched inhabitants as many conveniences as ten acres of equally fertile land doc in Devonshire when they arc well culti-

PROBLEMATIC PERSPECTIVES O N LOCKE

41

vated?" ( emphasis added). Neither these nor any other accusation Yolton makes holds up under examination, as the reader can sec who loo.ks at Yolton's "evidence." The examples presented here were selected only be­ cause they could be stated most compactly; otherwise they arc quite typical of what he brin� forward to make his case against Strauss. Far more important than these charges of distortion is the concern that the Strauss methodology is circular, reading the texts in the light of "cncn­ sive • priori components." Strauss uses, it is said, "a question-begging hy­ pothesis" that "repeatedly ignores the characters of the texts analysed" by imputing to them "a degree of integration which can be shown, as a matter o f historical fact, simply not to have been there."'" The problem these ac­ counts do not bring out, however, is that the "circularity" problem is, so to speak, double edged. When Dunn, for example, claims that the Strauss the­ sis "ignores the character of the texts," he docs not seem to understand that the character of the texts is just what is at issue. Or when Monson, discov­ ering inconsistencies in the texts, asserts that "Locke is not a careful writer," and Aarslcff insists that we have "our own observations to tell us that his writin� do not have the qualities claimed for them to support the conceal­ ment hypothesis" (265), they ignore the fact that the "concealment hy­ pothesis" concedes, even emphasizes, that the texts do have a careless or loose appearance, but that the real character of Locke's writing can emerge only from a reading that docs not stop with "our observations."45 Their unwillingness to follow Strauss in calling into question "our obser­ vations" of the "character of the texts" rests in part on their view that Strauss's methodology fails to comport with proper standards of evidence and objectivity, that is, it is not a scientifically valid method. As Aarslcff puts it, "Even on general grounds, there is the strong objection against the hy­ pothesis that it cannot be tested: If it were claimed that all the divines of sev­ enteenth century England were really atheists who for the sake of caution and clever concealment continued to perform their duties as if they were not, I do not sec how it could be disproved, which surely is no reason to ac­ cept it" (267-268). I wonder though if Aarslcff understands what consti­ tutes "testing" in historical matters. If there were "no reason to accept it," that is, if no reasons and no empirical evidence were brought forward to support the hypothesis, would that not be sufficient disproof to reject the hypothesis? Conversely, if we found evidence, for example correspondence among the divines, which indicated they were atheists, would Aarsleff then respond that such evidence is to be overturned by the fact that they publicly performed the mass, that most or all people of the seventeenth century were

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not atheists, and therefore that "we have our own observations" that they were not atheists? No doubt, with the Strauss thesis we arc working with more subtle kinds of evidence, but there is no reason to say that either the one hypothesis or the other is in principle untestable. Strauss docs not begin, as Aarslcff seems to think he docs, with a mere un­ grounded hypothesis. He begins by reading Locke in a very literal way, more literally really than his critics, and finds that taking seriously all that Locke says, not just the overall impression or the most numerous statements or our prior "historical" knowledge of what Locke must have meant, leads to certain difficulties. Not only that, carefully following Locke again, Strauss secs that Locke himself suggested intentional caution in communication as a way of ac ­ counting for difficulties of the very nature found in Locke. On rereading Locke on this basis-that is, on the basis of the pombility that "caution" and "persuasion" have had a hand in determining the mode of presentation of his doctrine-Strauss again follows Locke's own guidance. He disregards noth­ ing that Locke himself docs not give him reason to disregard; he attributes no doctrine to Locke that is not in the text or clearly implied in the text.46 These arc not subjective or arbitrary methods. Of course, Strauss may be mistaken in any given interpretation he supplies with his way of reading, but then so may any other interpreter. This method of reading requires evidence and reasons just as any other, and it is the critics' failure to look with ade­ quate care at the reasons and evidence Strauss supplies that makes their re­ sponses generally so weak. Ironically, just as it is Strauss who reads literally and they who tend to "explain away" inconvenient parts of the text, so it is not Strauss but they who engage in circular reasoning: the Strauss thesis, they say, is untestable, because they have refused to look at the evidence put forward for it because it is untestable. Strauss's method docs not, as Dunn puts it, "demand that we apply to the writings of great philosophers what Professor Flew has gaily titled the Infal­ libility Assumption."47 His point is not that great philosophers arc "infalli­ ble," but that their errors arc not likely to be those even an average academic or bright young person would avoid, especially when those "errors" seem to fall into a pattern and center on matters that arc highly sensitive in the philosopher's environment. When Locke claims, for example, that there is a law of nature in the traditional sense and specifics certain conditions, in­ cluding natural knowledge of the immortality of the soul, for there to be such a law of nature, and that no natural knowledge of immortality is possi­ ble, is it attributing him with infallibility to doubt that he was unaware of this inconsistency? Or, for example, is it Locke's infallibility that leads Cox

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43

and Strauss to doubt that Locke did not know what he was doing in pre­ senting a teaching on the right to cat animals, which contradicted his own understanding of the biblical teaching on that subject, even though he claimed to be in agreement with the biblical teaching? In the final analysis, however, the critics, most of whom take the third, his­ torically oriented, approach to Locke, do not like the Strauss approach be­ cause it contradicts, or seems to, some of their deepest beliefs about the nature of history and the purposes of studies in the history of political phi­ losophy.48 So Dunn huffily claims that "the hidden truths, whether Whig, Marxist, or Straussian, arc only mechanistic superstitious models as inept to explain the microcosm of John Locke as they arc the macrocosm of the 'His­ torical Process.' "49 Or, in another place, "the Straussian position . . . implies that historical changes in values only happen in the minds of stupid men. "50 The "Straussian position implies" no such thing. It is certainly not an attempt to "explain the macrocosm of the historical process," and it makes no claim that Locke is a "microscosm"-rather the opposite, if anything. Dunn's large historiography keeps obtruding itself here and elsewhere, so that he finds ob­ jectionable "philosophy of history" wherever he turns, when in truth there arc no claims about the philosophy of history being raised at all. Dunn docs not seem to understand, for example, that "denying the presence of incoher­ ence in Locke's own thought" is not equivalent, as he seems to think it is, to "inflicting an illicit explanatory coherence upon the historical world as a whole. "5 1 To let history speak for itself, which is what these critics seem to desire, requires that Locke be allowed to speak for himself, which means that prior conceptions of history's "meaning" cannot be interposed between the texts and the reader or even between the critics and each other.

Ill The third type of "solution" to the difficulties in Locke's political doctrine, is, in a sense, not a solution at all, for it accepts those difficulties as irre­ ducible givens. This approach is, above all, concerned with understanding Locke "historically." The most radical attempt to read Locke "historically" within the recent literature is undoubtedly Peter Laslett's. Partly on the basis of a new understanding of the genesis of the Two Tre11tises, Laslctt postulates a new, historical meaning for them. Relying on an ingenious but almost entirely circumstantial argument-it had to be circumstantial, for Locke destroyed every draft, every note, all cor­ respondence that might associate him with the book-Laslett maintains that

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the Two Tn11tiseswcrc conceived and substantially composed not at the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but almost a decade earlier, during the political movement to exclude the Catholic James from the succession, a movement led by Locke's friend and patron, the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The immediate occasion for the Tn11tises, Laslctt suggests, was the republi­ cation of the political works of Sir Robert Filmer and their great accession of popularity as ideological and propagandistic props among Shaftesbury's political opponents. Locke undertook the Tn11tises probably at Shaftesbury's instigation and aimed both of them ( actually begun, Laslett says, in the re­ verse order) at Filmer, whose writings were at the time ofsome political im­ portance, and not at Hobbes, whose writings were not. Accordingly, in the Tn11tises, "Locke did not write as a philosopher, applying to politics the im­ plications of his view of reality as a whole," but more or less as a political propagandist. 52 Laslctt is therefore neither surprised at nor docs he attempt at all to min­ imize or reconcile the inconsistencies between Locke's philosophical and political writings. "Locke's political thought is not a simple extension of his philosophy, but an explanation of contemporary political experience offered to his contemporaries in one, and not the only one, of the modes of dis­ course they were accustomed to adopt. "53 Laslett is very blunt: "Two Trea­ tises is an Exclusion tract. " 54 Its aim is political; the bases of its thought arc preexisting "modes of discourse," that is, the "Whig tradition" of political thought or "common sense" or the "rigidly conventional background" or the "vulgar ideology" of his time, such notions taken over from his envi­ ronment as the Great Chain of Being, the creating God, equality of men under God, the basic tenets of Christian morality, and so on. 55 Although Laslett's general line of argument has been very influential, in some respects it has also been very controversial. The controversy follows from some difficulties that seem to inhere in his formulations, many of which he himself is aware. One difficulty is the following: it would not seem possi­ ble for Locke to have been the original and profoundly influential political thinker he has traditionally been believed to be if his political thought is the propagandistic expression of a tradition of political thinking, widespread and influential independently of him, rather than the philosophic expression "of his view of reality as a whole." John Dunn's contribution to the Yolton vol­ ume, "The Politics of Locke in England and America," can be seen as a re­ sponse to this problem. The Tre11tises, Dunn argues, were, in fact, far more limited in influence and certainly not formative of the tradition of political thought within which they came to have a certain sort of preeminence.

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45

Above all, [ the '.nPo Tn11tues) was only one work among a large group of other works which expounded the Whig theory of the revolution [of 1688 ], and its prominence within this group is not noticeable until well after the general outlines of the interpretation had become con­ solidated. The readiness with which many scholars have detected the influence of the 11Po Tn11tises in England and America is at least in part a product ofthe fact that they have read so little else ofthe English po­ litical writing contemporary with it. . . . [In America] the book was of no great popularity before 1750 and the tradition of political behav­ iours within which the colonists conceived their relationship with En­ gland was already highly articulated by this date in its most general values. ( 79, 80) Dunn's researches into the actual reception of the Tn11tises, on which he bases the above conclusions, would have been extremely interesting to those concerned with the ways in which theoretical ideas influence ( or do not) events, if one could have more confidence in his conclusions. It is difficult to give them much confidence, for he consistently raises very enensive claims that he fails to support with adequate evidence, and he consistently interprets what evidence he has so as to tally with what look to be precon­ ceived conclusions. He says, for example, of the position of the Tn11tises in England: "It was only in the second half of the [eighteenth] century [that] Locke's vast philosophical eminence conferred an intellectual stature on the work despite its previous low reputation" ( 62 ). But Dunn has nowhere shown that the book had a "previous low reputation." At the most he shows that its reputation during Locke's lifetime, its period of anonymity, was not encnsivc--quite a different matter from "low"-and that after Locke's death "its reputation trailed that of his major philosophical work," the Ess11y (56-57). As a matter of fact, he brought forth no evidence, not even one footnote, to establish his claim that the Tn11tues "trailed" the Essay in repu­ tation, but even if he could show this, it certainly docs not mean the Tn11tises thereby had a "low reputation," given the well-known eminence of the &.y in the eighteenth century. Dunn's argument at times reminds of nothing so much as of what Locke said of Filmer: "Let his premises be what they will, this is always the con­ clusion" (I Tr. 44). Let the Tre11tises be unread and unknown, they arc of "low reputation." Let the Tn11tises be widely read and universally accepted, they arc ipso facto read in a "slackly ideological" way (57). Let them be widely read and sometimes rejected, there is evidence that "even in England

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the book at no time secured the sort of unquestioned acceptance and esteem which it is customary to assert for it today" (60-65).56 There is no poten­ tial set of facts able to falsify Dunn's picture of the Tre11tires' impact. One example from his treatment of Locke in America should show how he uses his evidence. Although Locke was not really very important for the colonists before the revolution, afterward his book did not even "display such an apparent relevance" as it had done before (78). For this claim Dunn supplies three pieces of evidence, the first of which may represent them all: "John Adams' remark that the Constitution of Massachusetts embodied the doctrines of Locke and Sydney was a piece of rhetoric rather than an analyt­ ical point." The only shade of evidence he provides for this assertion is a quo­ tation from Adams's Duiry 11nd A11tolnogr11phy, dated 1775: "I had read Harrington, Sydney, Hobbs, Ncdham, and Locke, but with very little appli­ cation to particular views: Till these debates in Congress . . ." (78). What ex­ actly is proved about the Massachusetts Constitution by this admission is not clear. In any case, the constitution that Adams claimed "is Locke, Sydney, and Rousseau and De Mably reduced to practice" comes well after his "ap­ plication to the particular views" of these thinkers, for he was referring to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of which he was the chief draftsman.57 Dunn is just not very persuasive in making the future of the Tre11tises har­ monize with the Laslett version of their past. That picture of their past has several difficulties in its own right as well. Laslctt claims, "The Tre11tises is an Exclusion Tract." But Dunn points out that "Locke's insistence on [the un­ changcablcncss of the 'original constitution'] involves him at times in gra­ tuitous problems [gratuitous from what point of view?] and leads him to propound a solution at one point which was sharply in tension with the Ex­ clusionist programmc."58 Locke ignores, Dunn points out, the cxclusionists' attempt to extend the use of the impeachment power; he emphasizes meth­ ods for controlling the executive, especially the power of the purse, which were not at all at issue at this time, and he directly contravenes the thrust of the cxclusionist program in emphasizing executive independence in foreign affairs.59 Moreover, the Tre11tises, both in structure and substance, differ substan­ tially from cxclusionist literature. 0. W. Furley, in the most extensive survey of this literature, finds that "the uniformity of Whig propaganda is remark­ able . . . . Most pamphlets owned a common construction, consisting first of simple, personal arguments against James as heir to the throne," arguments that centered on James's relations to the Popish Plot and to the French king and on the absolutist tendencies of Catholic rulers. The pamphlets' second

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part consisted of "more complex theories to prove that Exclusion was 'con­ stirutional' and not innovatory. "60 Now Locke's Tre11t ises contain neither of these features universal to the exclusion tracts. Indeed, on the central issue of the crisis, Locke's book is, as Dunn indicates, noncommittal: whether the succession may be altered depends on how "that consent, which Established the Form of the Government, hath so settled the Succession" (I Tr. 94), and he docs not discuss at all how the English Constirution settled that. On the whole then, the fit between the Tre11tises and exclusion is rather poor. There is also a kind of logical gap in Laslctt's movement from his conclusions about the Tre11tises' genesis to his conclusions about their nature: The fact that a man of the intcllccrual stature of Locke wrote a piece de circonst11nce [ says M. Scligcr] . . . is by itself no indication, and still less proof, that the Tre11tises arc a non-philosophical work. . . . After all, a book on politics can be both philosophical and an oeuvre de circon­ st11nce. There is no necessary contradiction between writing a book under the pressure of political demands and providing an answer to their challenge as a political philosophcr.61

Laslctt's construction, moreover, with the simple dircmption it posits be­ tween Locke the thinker and Locke the author of the Tre11tises, appears to lead to a picture of Locke as an intellect for hire, turning his hand to de­ fending causes and using arguments as required by his employers, which raises questions about Locke's integrity well beyond those raised by the Strauss thesis. For these reasons and others, Laslctt himself and some of his followers even more qualify his claims substantially. Impressed with the differences between the Two Tre11tises and other ex­ clusio n literature, between Locke's book and other polemics against Filmer, Laslctt says also that the Tre11tises arc "at once a response to a particular po­ litical siruation and a statement of universal principle, made as such and still read as such. "62 So far as they arc "a statement of universal principle," the Treatises arise out of what Laslctt calls the "Lockean attitude" as contrasted with the "Lockean philosophy." But he is far from satisfactory in giving sub­ stance to this "attirude" or in relating it to the philosophy, which, he is cer­ tain, "has no room for" natural law, the central concept of the political writings, i.e., is fundamentally opposed to them. He leaves us with perhaps a coherent picture of the Tre11tises but with an extraordinarily incoherent pic­ nuc of Locke. The more recent work on Locke by John Dunn and Richard Ashcraft can be seen as attempts to remedy this situation by supplying a

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picture of, in Dunn's phrase, "the coherence of [Locke's] mind." 63 Let us sec what this means in the case of Ashcraft, and what kind of solution he supplies to the difficulties of the Lockean law of nature. Ashcraft shares with Laslett the aspiration to read Locke "historically": "I propose to discuss Locke's philosophy, and especially his epistemology, in what I believe to be the seventeenth-century context within which the F.ssliy . . . was written" (194). Attention to that context reveals that "questions of religious dogma were of the greatest importance to Locke's contempo­ raries" and "suggests that Locke's primary comminnent was to certain prin­ ciples of the Christian faith," within which "conten the F.ss11y should be read in order to gain an appreciation of Locke's viewpoint" ( 194). Consequently, Ashcraft overcomes Laslett's distinction between the "Lockean philosophy" of the F.ss/Jy and the "Lockean attitude": the "Lockean philosophy," if prop­ erly understood, rests on the same "comminnents" as docs the Tre11tists. All the "Lockean philosophy" rests on "the revealed truth, which Locke accepts unquestioningly. . . . Locke's philosophy rises from the catacombs of an un­ shakeable Christian faith" (214). Ashcraft therefore agrees with Laslett that Locke never did supply the ra­ tional "particulars" or the foundations for his law of nature, because he could not do so. But he docs not follow Laslett in positing the political or rhetorical character of the Tre11tises as the explanation for Locke's employ­ ment of a doctrine he could not rationally defend. The problem of the Lock­ ean law of nature is "resolved definitively" within Locke's work in his The Re11Son11bleness of Christi11nity (218). There, Locke points to the New Tes­ tament as "the only certain and complete compilation" of the laws ofnature. His own failure to supply a rational account of the law of nature is the man­ ifestation of the necessary failure of reason itself: "It is not merely that, at some point in history, man's 'unassisted reason' failed him. That failure is less historical than ontological, since it was necessary that men fall short of a complete knowledge of natural law" (219). Ashcraft supplies a rather cu­ rious explanation of why that should be so: "If men possessed a complete knowledge of the law of nature, their actions would be 'unavoidable,' and the moral obligation they owe to God would not be 'freely' discharged" (220). For that claim he presents no textual evidence, however (for the "un­ avoidable," cf. 204, top, and II ECHU xvii 17). In any case, "to the end, Locke insisted upon human free will . . . . Para­ doxically, it is our ignorance of the law of nature that preserves our freedom to act as moral agents" (220). Moral action, Ashcraft would have it, is ac­ tion in conformity to the law of nature, but action taken in ignorance of the

PROBLEMATIC PERSPECTIVES ON LOCKE

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law. For Ashcraft's Locke then, moral action is chance conformity to the law of nature. Ashcraft secs this strange doctrine as following from Locke's ex­ planation that "it is necessary for the vindication of God's justice and good­ ness, that those who miscarry should do so by their own fault, and that their destruction should be from themselves; and they be left inexcusable" (220, from 11nrd Letter Concerning Toler11tion, Woris, v, 160 ). There arc even more absurdities than this in Ashcraft's account. Reason fails to arrive at the law of nature, he says, because in accord with "God's wisdom" ignorance of the law is necessary for morality. But how is it then that knowledge of the law through the revelation of the New Testament is, on Ashcraft's view, any less destructive of the "free discharge of moral obligation"? Apart from the inherent absurdity of Ashcraft's construction, it is clear this docrinc cannot be Locke's, for it violates all the criteria he establishes for a valid law of nature. In particular it denies entirely the criterion on which above all Locke insists: All that pertains to the law of nature must be accessible to the "unassisted reason" (cf. the discussion of .Aarslcff in Part One). Ashcraft even admits that in the Re11Son11blmess Locke "docs not abandon the belief that the law of nature is knowable, in principle, through the use of reasoning" (219, cf. 220-222). The construction Ashcraft attrib­ utes to Locke, however, not only "abandons" that belief but also has that abandonment as its core. Ashcraft substitutes for the very precise formula­ tions of the difficulties or contradictions in Locke's doctrine that come out of studies such as Aarslcff's and Strauss's an extremely vague construction, related to Locke's texts in about the same way as he believes men arc to re­ late their actions to the law of nature and consisting of a series of great ab­ surdities. As an interpretation or statement of what Locke thought, this construction cannot stand. There is a systematic vacillation in Ashcraft's essay, moreover, over whether he is presenting an interpretation or an explanation of Locke's thought, that is, an account of what Ashcraft knows Locke to be doing, whatever Locke might have thought himself to have meant. "Whatever the contradictory nature of Lockean statements on [the relation of reason and faith], in the end there is no escaping the 'unmoved foundation' of faith" (216). But if there is no escaping this unmoved foundation, why docs Locke contradict himself? And how docs Ashcraft know which of the con­ tradictory thrusts expresses Locke's "unmoved foundation"? Part ofthe an­ swer apparently comes from Ashcraft's knowledge of the "context" and "pwposc" of Locke's thought; that is, Locke lived in a Christian time, therefore his Christianity is the deepest commitment of his thought. 64 As

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an explanation of Locke's thought, if that is what he is presenting, Ashcraft's construction is unsatisfactory both because it is so confused about what it is trying to explain, Locke's thought as it stands or as Locke might have understood it, and because it is so arbitrary and ungrounded in itself. About the only basis for the explanation is the heavy dose of histori­ cal preconception Ashcraft brings to Locke's texts, and those same precon­ ceptions arc what he emerges with. Dunn's "Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Tre11tises of G