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JOHN LOCKE AND THE FABLE OF LIBERALISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2018

TIMOTHY STANTON
TIMOTHY STANTON*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York, yo10 5dd[email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the ways in which John Locke was claimed by liberalism and refashioned in its image. It was Locke's fate to become the hero of what I term ‘the fable of liberalism’, the story liberalism recounts to itself about its origins and purposes. Locke is a pivotal figure – perhaps the pivotal figure – in this story, because he put into currency conceptions which contributed centrally to the emergence and spread of liberal ways of thinking about politics which continue to ramify. It was Locke who established that the legitimacy of a political authority was a necessary condition of obedience to it and that its legitimacy was a product of the consensual route by which it came into existence; it was Locke who established that the route by which it came into existence determined the ends for which it existed and, with these, the scope of its authority. All this was explained in an exemplary way by Locke (the story goes), and he remains the great exemplar for understanding and conducting politics legitimately even today. This article puts question marks beside the Locke who emerges from this story. It substitutes a new and very different Locke in his place.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 597 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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24 Smith, Adam, Lectures on jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Oxford, 1978), p. 540Google Scholar. Compare Montesquieu, The spirit of the laws, iv.20, p. 338.

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69 Mill, John Stuart, On liberty, ch. 1, in his Collected works, ed. Robson, John M. et al. (33 vols., London, 1963–95)Google Scholar, xviii, p. 224.

70 See Rawls, Lectures, p. 107: ‘In Locke…legitimate government can be founded only on the consent of free and equal…persons, …all being…equally sovereign over themselves.’ Compare e.g. Ryan, Alan, ‘Self-ownership, autonomy, and property rights’, Social Philosophy & Policy, 11 (1994), pp. 241–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seagrave, The foundations of natural morality, ch. 2 (‘Self-consciousness, self-ownership, and natural rights’); Waldron, Jeremy, The right to private property (Oxford, 1988), pp. 398–412Google Scholar; Zuckert, Launching liberalism, p. 194: ‘The foundation or ground of rights, is, according to Locke, self-ownership’; and, among libertarians, Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, state and utopia (New York, NY, 1974), p. 172Google Scholar; Otsuka, Michael, ‘Self-ownership and equality: a Lockean reconciliation’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 27 (1998), pp. 65–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul, Jeffrey and Paul, Ellen Frankel, ‘Locke's usufructuary theory of self-ownership’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 61 (1980), pp. 384–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 See Perry, The pretenses of loyalty, pp. 5–9, 204–16.

72 Dryden, John, ‘Almanzor and Almahide, or, The conquest of Granada, The first part’, act i, scene i, lines 207–15, in The works of John Dryden (20 vols., Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1978)Google Scholar, xi, p. 30.

73 On Dryden and Hobbes, see Parkin, Jon, Taming the leviathan: the reception of the political and religious ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 302–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 [Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury], Several letters written by a noble Lord to a young man at the university (London, 1716), p. 39Google Scholar.

75 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times (3 vols., Indianapolis, IN, 2001)Google Scholar, i, pp. 68–9: ‘’TIS ridiculous to say, there is any Obligation on Man to act sociably, or honestly, in a form'd Government; and not in that which is commonly call'd the State of Nature’; see p. 72 for ‘that social Love, and common Affection, which is natural to Mankind’. For Locke and Shaftesbury, see Stuart-Buttle, Tim, ‘Shaftesbury reconsidered: Stoic ethics and the unreasonableness of Christianity’, Locke Studies, 15 (2015), pp. 163–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Hume, David, An enquiry concerning the principles of morals, ed. Beauchamp, T. L. (Oxford, 1998), p. 165Google Scholar.

77 Hume, David, A treatise of human nature, ed. Norton, D. F. and Norton, M. (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar, 3.2.8, p. 347.

78 Ibid., 3.2.9, pp. 353–4; idem, ‘Of the original contract’, in Haakonssen, ed., Political essays, pp. 186–201, esp. p. 189: ‘Were you to preach, in most parts of the world, that political connexions are founded altogether on voluntary consent…the magistrate would soon imprison you, as seditious, for loosening the ties; if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious, for advancing such absurdities.’

79 Hume, ‘Of the original contract’, pp. 189–90.

80 See R. G. Collingwood, ‘The nature and aims of a philosophy of history’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 25 (1924–5), pp. 151–74, at pp. 171–2: ‘The world of every historian is limited by the limits of his knowledge…Any two historians will find that they share a large number of interests, of problems, of beliefs, but that each has a number of problems, urgent for himself, which for the other are wholly non-existent…Each historian sees history from his own centre, at an angle of his own: and therefore he sees some problems which no other sees, and sees every problem from a point of view, and therefore under an aspect, peculiar to himself.’ My interest in Locke was ignited and cultivated by the teaching of Ian Harris, who (typically) directed me to Dunn's, John seminal work, The political thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar rather than to his own monograph, The mind of John Locke (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. In giving central place to Locke's (natural) theology, readers will recognize this article's debt to both works, even as it implicitly dissents from some of the conclusions drawn there, as e.g. the conclusion that ‘the key to Locke's moral vision lies…in the traditional conception of the calling’ (Dunn, The political thought of John Locke, p. 245).

81 That is to say, it sets out what Locke actually presupposed in the course of his thinking as opposed to what he did not. I do not claim that it exhausts what is true. See Collingwood, ‘The nature and aims’, p. 172, continuing directly from the passage cited above: ‘No one historian, therefore, can see more than one aspect of the truth; and even an infinity of historians must always leave an infinity of aspects unseen.’ For presuppositions, see idem, An essay on metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), pp. 21–57Google Scholar. A fuller discussion of the methodological commitments which underpin this peremptory assertion is offered in Stanton, Timothy, ‘Logic, language and legitimation in the history of ideas: a brief view and survey of Bevir and Skinner’, Intellectual History Review, 21 (2011), pp. 71–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Locke, Two treatises, ii.vi.58, p. 306.

83 Ibid., ii.vi.63, p. 309.

84 Ibid., ii.vi.61, p. 309; compare ii.vi.57, p. 305.

85 Locke, John, An essay concerning human understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar, iii.xi.16, p. 517: ‘For were there a Monkey, or any other Creature to be found, that had the use of Reason, to such a degree, as to be able to understand general Signs, and to deduce Consequences about general Ideas, he would no doubt be subject to Law, and, in that sense, be a Man, how much soever he differ'd in Shape from others of that Name.’

86 Locke, Two treatises, ii.ii.6, p. 271.

87 Locke, Essays on the law of nature, no. 7, p. 194.

88 Locke, Two treatises, ii.ii.5, p. 270. On which, see Ian Harris, ‘Locke on justice’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., English philosophy in the age of Locke (Oxford, 2000), pp. 46–85, esp. pp. 64–9.

89 Locke, Two treatises, i.iv.42, p. 170.

90 Ibid., ii.viii.101, p. 334.

91 John Locke, ‘Defence of nonconformity’ (1681–2), Bodleian MS Locke c. 34, pp. 19, 23, 76–7. For this document, see Stanton, Timothy, ‘The name and nature of Locke's “Defence of nonconformity”’, Locke Studies, 6 (2006), pp. 143–72Google Scholar.

92 Locke, ‘Defence of nonconformity’, pp. 76–7.

93 Ibid., p. 23, for the ‘great ends of religion to be attaind onely in societyes’ – the edification of their members, the public worship of God, and the propagation of truth – ‘one of these [the second] containing my duty to God the other [the third] to my neighbour, & the other [the first] to my self’; see p. 108, for Christians uniting ‘into one body & Society by the Common tyes of charity brotherly love & kindnesse’ as ‘their duty’; p. 148, for ‘Love to one another’ as the bond of, and the bond between, these ‘separate communions’. See also ‘Pacifick Christians’ (1688), Bodleian MS Locke c. 27, fo. 80, and compare Dunn, John, ‘From applied theology to social analysis: the break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Rethinking modern political theory: essays, 1979–1983 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 55–67Google Scholar, at p. 61, for the Lockean church as ‘a tissue of…friendship’.

94 Harris, Ian, ‘John Locke and natural law: free worship and toleration’, in Parkin, Jon and Stanton, Timothy, eds., Natural law and toleration in the early Enlightenment, Proceedings of the British Academy, 186 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 59–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 82–7.

95 John Locke, ‘Pleasure and pain: the passions’ (1676), Bodleian MS Locke f. 1, pp. 325–47, printed (from Locke's shorthand) in Essays on the law of nature, pp. 265–72, at pp. 266–7. For an interesting discussion of the implications of this position, see Sheridan, Patricia, ‘Locke's latitudinarian sympathies: an exploration of sentiment in Locke's moral theory’, Locke Studies, 15 (2015), pp. 131–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 John Locke, ‘Amor’ (1679), Bodleian MS Locke d. 1, p. 57.

97 Matt. 7:12. See Locke, John, The reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, ed. Higgins-Biddle, J. C. (Oxford, 1999), pp. 123–4Google Scholar, and compare Two treatises, ii.ii.5, p. 270, and ii.vii.93, p. 328, there expressed as ‘Love of Mankind and Society, and such a Charity as we all owe one to another.’

98 John Locke, ‘Law’ (1693?), Bodleian MS Locke c. 28, fo. 141.

99 Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, ii.xxi.55, pp. 269–70.

100 The ‘image of God’ has at least two aspects in Locke. In the first place, it refers to an assumed similarity between man and God in the make of their intellects. In the second place, it refers to a destiny which extends beyond the present life into immortality. See respectively Locke, Two treatises, i.iv.31, p. 162: ‘God makes [man] in his own Image after his own Likeness, makes him an intellectual Creature…For wherein soever else the Image of God consisted, the intellectual Nature was certainly a part of it, and belong'd to the whole species’, and The reasonableness of Christianity, pp. 113–15, esp. p. 115: ‘we shall, at the Resurrection…after [Christ's] Image, which is the Image of the Father, become Immortal’. On the first, going beyond Locke, see Craig, Edward, The mind of God and the works of man (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, and Waldron, Jeremy, ‘The image of God: rights, reason, and order’, in Witte, J. Jr and Alexander, F. S., eds., Christianity and human rights (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 216–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 See Locke, Two treatises, ii.ii.6, p. 270.

102 Ibid., ii.xviii.199–200, pp. 399–400, ii.xix.228, pp. 416–17.

103 John Locke, A second vindication of the reasonableness of Christianity, in Vindications of the reasonableness of Christianity, ed. Nuovo, V. (Oxford, 2012), p. 71Google Scholar. This tripartite division of freedom echoes Dunn, James D. G., Christian liberty: a New Testament perspective (Carlisle, 1993), pp. 69–71Google Scholar.

104 Locke, A letter, p. 64. See Essays on the law of nature, no. 4, pp. 156–8, and ‘Defence of nonconformity’, p. 23, respectively for duties to God, one's neighbour, and oneself, at once cognoscible by sense experience and reason and ‘plainly set downe in Scripture’.

105 Dunn, John, ‘Consent in the political theory of John Locke’, Historical Journal, 10 (1967), pp. 153–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Harris, ‘John Locke and natural law’, passim.

107 The central point in Locke's political theory is that man owes everything to God. The liberal assumes, by contrast, that ‘the fundamental debt is the one owed to the self’. See Alexander, ‘The major ideologies’, p. 986.

108 Mark Goldie, ‘Introduction’ to Locke, A letter, p. xiii.

109 Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and equality: Christian foundations in Locke's political thought (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Readers must judge whether any were located.

110 Matt. 26:11. The same point might be made by observing just how idiosyncratic and difficult to assimilate to existing regimes of thought appear those accounts of modern European intellectual history in which liberalism is disregarded as a distraction or discounted as an irrelevance. Compare Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and religion (6 vols., Cambridge, 1999–2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Oakeshott, Michael, On human conduct (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar, esp. ‘On the character of a modern European state’, in conjunction with his Lectures in the history of political thought, ed. Nardin, T. and O'Sullivan, L. (Exeter, 2006)Google Scholar. Pocock expressed himself about Locke and liberalism in characteristically stimulating terms in ‘The myth of John Locke and the obsession with liberalism’, in Pocock, J. G. A. and Ashcraft, R., eds., John Locke (Clark Library Lectures, 1980), pp. 1–24Google Scholar.

111 Waldron, God, Locke, and equality, p. 20.

112 Ibid., pp. 206, 215. Waldron seeks to explain away that absence as indicative of a strategy ‘on Locke's part to avoid unnecessary controversy’ (p. 216), a strategy which, if it existed, was conspicuously unsuccessful. Compare Goldie, Mark, ed., The reception of Locke's politics (6 vols., London, 1999)Google Scholar, esp. ‘Introduction’, i, pp. xxx–xlix, and i and ii generally; and, for an alternative explanation, Stanton, Timothy, ‘Christian foundations; or some loose stones? Toleration and the philosophy of Locke's politics’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 14 (2011), pp. 323–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 The germ of the mature position is evident in John Locke, ‘Lex na[tur]a’ (1678), Bodleian MS Locke f. 3, pp. 201–2: ‘God having given man above other creatures of this habitable part of the univers a knowledg of himselfe wch the beasts have not, he is thereby under obligations wch the beasts are not, for knowing god to be a wise agent he cannot but conclude yt he has that knowledge & those facultys wch he findes in himself above the other creatures given him for some use & end. If therefor he comprehend the relation between father and son & finde it reasonable that his son whom he hath begot (only in pursuance of his pleasure without thinkeing of his son) & nourishd should obey love & reverence him & be gratefull to him, he cannot but finde it much more reasonable yt he & every other man should obey & rever love & thank the author of their being to whom they owe all that they are. If…he findes it reasonable that his children should assist & help one another & expects it from them as their duty will he not also by ye same reason conclude that god expects ye same of all men one to another. If he findes that god has made him & all other men in a state wherein they cannot subsist without society & has given them judgmt to discerne what is capeable of preserveing yt society can he but conclude that he is obleiged & yt god requires him to follow those rules wch conduce to ye preserveing of society.’

114 See Skinner, Quentin, ‘Introduction: seeing things their way’, in Visions of politics, i: Regarding method (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–7Google Scholar.