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The Notion of Civil Disobedience According to Locke
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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The notion of resistance to the state has come to be bandied about a great deal, and a great many political movements place themselves under its sign. This intrusion of violence into the realm of the law seems to be spreading since the advocates of insurrection, who accuse the state of betraying its mission, are not those who consider revolt to be the necessary first step towards any kind of affranchisement. Where the partisans of revolution believe that violence is, in Marx's words, “the midwife of every old society that carries a new one within it” and that it is “the instrument by which the social movement sweeps it away and breaks to pieces the political forms that are fixed and dead,” the partisans of the right to resist the state do not share these hopes for political and social upheavals. Marxist theory, which praises revolutionary insurrection, stands opposed to a kind of philosophy that admits of armed opposition to the state, but can nevertheless be called liberal in two respects: formally, from its present perspective, where it appears opposed to Marxist thought, and also historically, in the evolution of political ideas, where it is opposed to absolutist conceptions of the state. For, as R. Derathé remarked, the question of the right to resist “cast light on the chasm that separated the theologians from the legal experts.” The doctrines of divine right left no room for envisaging a limitation on the duty of obedience, without turning such a limitation into the equivalent of a revolt against God. Bossuet, in his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, asserts that “God has made the kings and the princes his lieutenants on earth so as to render their authority sacred and inviolable.” The result is unconditional obedience to the kings and to all those who hold a parcel of authority: “Declared impiety and even persecution do not exempt the subjects from the obedience they owe to their princes.” The only possible attitude in the face of “the violence of the princes” is to submit “respectful remonstrances, without mutiny and without a murmur, and with prayers for their conversion.” It is also necessary to ban “remonstrances full of bitterness and grumbling” since these “are the beginnings of sedition, which must not be tolerated.”
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- Copyright © 1961 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, part II, ch. IV, p. 157. Cf. also Das Kapital, vol. I, ch. XXIV, sect. 7., p. 728.
2 The authors of the Declaration of Rights and of the Constitution of the year I do nevertheless constitute an exception. Their articles expressed a certain idea of the state, "that of a social democracy which intervenes in order to establish, to the profit of the poor, the equilibrium that was destroyed by money" (G. Le febvre, Les Thermidoriens, p. 165). The Constitution of the year I is the only French constitution that proclaims the right of resistance, in its Article 35: "When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most binding of duties." Similarly, in the projected declaration presented by Maximilien Robespierre to the society of the Jacobins on April 21, 1793, and adopted by this society, Article 25 stipulates that "the resistance to oppression is the consequence of other rights of man and of the citizen."
3 R. Derathé, J.-J. Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, p. 36.
4 De l'obéissance due au Prince, bk. VI, art. II, prop. I.
5 Ibid., bk. VI, art. II, title of prop. 3.
6 Ibid., title of prop. 6.
7 Ibid., prop. 6.
8 R. Derathé, op. cit., p. 33.
9 A. Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government.
10 G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts, vol. I, p. 101.
11 Calvin admits that God "evidently calls up some of his servants and arms them with his mandate to mete out punishment for unjust oppression and to deliver the people who suffer iniquities from their calamity" (Institution de la religion chrétienne, text of 1541, reprinted under the direction of Abel Lefranc, p. 781). This was the case with Moses, when he delivered the people of Israel, and with Othniel, when he delivered them from the Syrians. In this case, God inspires just men, "called by God and by legitimate vocation, to undertake such matters: in rebelling against the kings, not to violate by any means the royal majesty which was given them by God, but to punish an inferior power by a greater one, in the very same way that a king has the right to chastise his lieu tenants and officers" (p. 781). The inspired man becomes an intermediary between God and his lieutenant on earth; or if you prefer, the presence of the inspired man, called by "legitimate vocation," reverses the positions in the hierarchy so as to place the tyrant in relation to him in the position of lieutenants in relation to their princes. Rebellion is no more than the legitimate right of punishment.
12 Locke's Works, vol. V, p. 209, preface to the Treatises of Civil Government.
13 "Examination of the question whether it be permitted to defend one's religion by the use of arms."
14 Défense de la nation britannique.
15 9 e Lettre pastorale, p. 208.
16 Op. cit., p. 336.
17 Ibid., pp. 372-4.
18 Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, vol. II, pp. 165-7.
19 Gough, John Locke's Political Philosophy, ch. VIII, pp. 172-96.
20 C. E. Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy before and after Rousseau. Cf. also R. Polin, La Politique morale de John Locke, Paris 1960, in particular the appendix: "Locke et le libéralisme," pp. 237-50.
21 H. J. Reesink, L'Angleterre et la littérature anglaise dans les plus anciens périodiques français de Hollande de 1684 à 1709, p. 60.
22 In view of the actuality of the problem, it is necessary to distinguish sharply between insubordination and resistance. Insubordination is the fact of evading one's military obligations; resistance is the armed challenge to the whole of a government's actions. Whatever the motives of insubordination may be, this attitude implies such a distance from violence that it even constitutes the negation of armed resistance. In Locke, the two concepts remain side by side. It may even be that the extent to which resistance is recognized is proportional to the extent to which insubordination is proscribed. As Léo Strauss has noted (Droit naturel et histoire, Plon, 1954, p. 243), the people "still retain a right to revolution. But this power (which lies dormant in normal times) does not attenuate the individual's subjection to the community or to society. On the contrary, it is only just to say that Hobbes insisted more strongly than Locke on the individual's right to resist society or the government when his self-preservation was endangered." And in a note (note 56, p. 362), Léo Strauss adds: "This is why Locke affirms more clearly than Hobbes the individual's duty to do military service."
23 John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, sects. 168 and 176; referred to hereafter under the title: Essay.
24 Essay, sect. 235.
25 Essay, sect. 208.
26 Essay, sect. 223.
27 Essay, sect. 204.
28 Essay, sect. 221.
29 Essay, sect. 222.
30 Essay, sect. 136.
31 Essay, sect. 222.
32 Gough, John Locke's Political Philosophy, pp. 136-71.
33 Essay, sect. 238.
34 Essay, sect. 230.
35 Essay, sect. 225.
36 Essay, sect. 230.
37 Essay, sect. 230.
38 Essay, sects. 223 and 240.
39 G. H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion, p. 112.
40 See above, our note on Calvin.
41 Essay, sect. 168.
42 Essay, sect. 208.
43 Essay, sect. 208.
44 Essay, sect. 208.
45 Essay, sect. 223. Cf. the Declaration of Independence, voted for by the representatives of the United States of America, assembled in congress at Phila delphia, on July 4, 1776: "All experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
46 Essay, sect. 230.
47 Essay, sect. 230.
48 Essay, sect. 225.
49 Essay, sect. 230.
50 Essay, sect. 226.
51 Essay, sect. 224.
52 Essay, sect. 224.
53 Essay, sect. 224.
54 Essay, sect. 225.
55 Edouard Laboulaye, Locke, législateur de la Caroline, p. 18.
56 Essay, sect. 106.
57 Essay, sect. 95.
58 Essay, sect. 202.
59 Essay, sect. 205.
60 Essay, sect. 202.
61 Essay, sect. 207.
62 Essay, sect. 206.
63 R. Derathé, op. cit., p. 291.
64 Essay, sect. 158.
65 Essay, sect. 18.
66 Essay, sect. 123; cf. also sects. 87 and 173.
67 L. Arénilla, "Propriété et liberté chez Locke," Cahiers de l'I.S.E.A. (Re cherches et dialogues philosophiques et économiques), No. 99, March 1960, Series M, No. 7.
68 Mary Coate, Social Life in Stuart England: "Finally with the revolution, which a territorial aristocracy, backed by national approval, had effected, the landed interest became still more powerful; once again land and political power were synonymous terms, and, in the writings of Locke, men found a reasoned defence of their most cherished idol, the individual ownership of the land, for property now found itself elevated into a natural right." (p. 12).
69 Gough, John Locke's Political Philosophy, p. 84.
70 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
71 John Locke, Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money.
72 John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as delivered in the Scrip tures (Works, vol. VI, p. 157): "Where the hand is used to the plough and the spade, the head is seldom elevated to sublime notions."
73 R. Polin, La Politique morale de J. Locke, p. 40, note 5, and p. 272, note 2.
74 M. Macpherson, "The Social Bearing of Locke's Political Theory," Western Political Quarterly, 1954 (vol. VII).
75 To the extent of incurring the blame of ignoring the religious meaning of 1688. Cf. E. Weil, "La Restauration des Stuarts et les historiens anglais," Critique, July 1951 (No. 50), pp. 628-34.
76 M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, p. 174.
77 Essay, sect. 238.
78 H. D. Foster, "International Calvinism through Locke and the Revolution of 1688," The American Historical Review, 1926-7 (vol. XXXII), p. 492.
79 Groethuysen, "Le libéralisme de Montesquieu et la liberté telle que l'en tendent les républicains," Europe, Jan. 1949.
80 In this connection it is interesting to note that, at the time of the French Revolution, the thermidorian republicans and the constitutional monarchists, anxious to block the road to democracy and to forestall the coming of a dictator ship, refused to write the right to resist into the constitution. The Commission of the Eleven, nominated on Germinal 29 of the year III (April 18, 1795) to draft bills in accordance with the constitution of 1793, assigned itself the different task of drafting a new constitution, and Boissy d'Anglas's declaration in the name of this commission is worth noting: "You will agree that it is impossible to describe with precision the cases in which insurrection is legitimate and becomes a right, and on the other hand, that if there is an occasion on which vague provisions can be disastrous, it is this. But there is a general truth, which is that when insurrection is general, there is no need for apologies, and when it is particular, it is always blameworthy. We have therefore suppressed Article 35 which was the work of Robespierre and which, on more than one occasion, has been the rallying cry of armed brigands against you."
81 December 1690.
82 May 1691.
83 Gazette nationale, March 26, 1796 (No. 186).
84 E. Laboulaye, Locke, législateur de la Caroline, p. 10.
85 To our knowledge, the republic of El Salvador is at present the only country whose constitution mentions insurrection as the most sacred of duties against a dictatorship that suppresses the fundamental liberties of man. The re public of El Salvador is not an especially revolutionary republic.
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