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Coming into One's Own: John Locke's Theory of Property, God, and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2012

Stanley C. Brubaker
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Abstract

In the three centuries since the publication of the Two Treatises, a trail set down by Locke, although scarcely concealed, has gone unremarked—as has its final destination. If we miss this trail, we miss the work's coherence. If we follow this trail, we find a compelling, even shocking, case against Revelation as an independent source of authority. And we find a theory of property so powerful—certainly in Locke's own estimation—it compels the reconstitution of the relation between children and parents, wives and husbands, servants and masters, persons and polities, and ultimately between man and God. Indeed, Locke's story of the right of property is also the story of man's coming into his own, his coming into his own mind, freed from the irrational claims of Revelation. Thus, Locke's theory of property is nothing less than a story of man's Enlightenment.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 2 , Spring 2012 , pp. 207 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 Those not familiar with the controversy might consult Zuckert, Michael P., Launching Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 1–129Google Scholar, and Forster, Greg, John Locke's Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Where Strauss (Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 220–21Google Scholar) finds the “Reader” addressed by Locke to be more Englishman than philosopher, I find him to be a political theorist in the root sense of the word, theōros, that is, one who sees.

2 The smaller the unit one takes from a work and the more liberally one combines such unit with others, the easier it is to make an author say something quite different from what he intends; ransom notes can usually be spelled from the letters in a cover story of a newspaper. Accordingly, my strict adherence to Locke's sequence of presentation is meant to avoid the hazards of cut-and-paste scholarship. Though Yolton (“Locke on the Law of Nature,” Philosophical Review 67 [1958]: 483n10Google Scholar) criticized Strauss, with perhaps some justice, for reassembling in single paragraphs “brief words, phrases, sentences” from several of Locke's works, the critique has more bite against analytic and historical schools of thought as I will indicate below.

To facilitate clarity in this essay, I focus on Locke rather than the now truly vast scholarship on Locke, but I will at various points note the principal ways in which my reading differs from those common to the Cambridge, analytic, and, more subtly, the Chicago schools of thought.

3 Cf. Cox, Richard, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 34–44Google Scholar.

4 Fatherly authority is supposed to be embodied in God's creation of Adam, so Locke will also characterize this doctrine as the “Sovereignty of Adam” (1.11), a phrase not found in Filmer.

5 The full sense of which he completes fifty-six sections later (1.11 and 1.67; cf. Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Sommerville, Johann P. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

6 See Filmer, Patriarcha, 138, and Gen. 3:16. Filmer understands Eve's “desires” (he had pluralized the term) to refer to Eve's “wishes”—that is, her wishes should be subordinate to her husband's—rather than sexual longing; he suggests Eve should regard her husband as a “Father,” as in a traditional family; and he then conjoins this train of reasoning with the fifth commandment, “Honor Thy Father.” Ergo, by Filmer's logic, we have “the original grant of government” (Patriarcha, 138).

7 Peter Laslett, note on Treatises 1.57, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 182Google Scholar.

8 Locke writes that God did not allow "the authority of practice” and “fashion” to prevail "against his righteous Law,” but rather charged the wayward Hebrews with murder as well as idolatry (1.58). It's easy to get the impression that Locke vindicates here the reasonableness of God, but if we consider the source and context of Locke's quotes, Psalms 106. 34–38, we find that God's wrath is kindled less because the Hebrews had abandoned reason than because they had abandoned His will. God had commanded the Hebrews to “destroy the [Canaanites]” (Psalms 106.34–35) and here they were consorting with them, sacrificing their children to their gods.

9 Waldron uses “By our Savior's Interpretation” as the title of one of his chapters, but, ironically, he cites it only to argue that “Locke's point is to criticize the poor intellectual standards that Filmer displays in his exegesis” (Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar). We might note that just as Filmer was so enamored with the Royalist cause that he clipped off “and thy mother” from the fifth commandment, Waldron is so taken by the cause of equality that he clips off the filicidal character of this equal power.

10 As should be apparent, I have followed most Straussians in understanding Locke to treat Filmer as a sort of stalking horse for his true target, authority by revelation. Under the thin cover that Filmer got scripture wrong, Locke here has trained his sights on scripture itself.

11 Given the notoriety of Locke's reference to the Peruvian cannibals and the fame of his phrase “Star and compass,” remarkably few have attended to their context and none have situated them on Locke's trail. Those who have noted the context seem to miss Locke's point. Tarcov fails to note that Locke has made a detour from Filmer and simply bundles “Reasons others give” with those of Filmer (Tarcov, Nathan, Locke's Education for Liberty [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 59Google Scholar). Pangle, after taking due note of Locke's meditation on Peruvian cannibalism, fails to continue on course with Locke's shocking comparison to Hebrews and Christians; instead he comments that Locke at this point “returns to a long-winded, pedantic, and even nit-picking criticism of Filmer” (Pangle, Thomas L., The Spirit of Modern Republicanism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 176Google Scholar). Myers, who takes the title of his work from these passages, likewise makes no effort to follow along Locke's trail (Myers, Peter, Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998], 126Google Scholar). Cox (Locke on War and Peace), alert for esoteric signals, missed this one. And Greg Forster, whose work is devoted to demonstrating the unity of faith and reason in Locke, while dwelling on these passages, turns a blind eye to God's command to do what reason forbids (John Locke's Politics of Moral Consensus, 39 and 208–10).

12 See Strauss, Natural Right and History; Cox, Locke on War and Peace; Pangle, Spirit of Modern Republicanism; Zuckert, , Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Launching Liberalism.

13 Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. McGrade, Arthur S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1.8.7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To make more the parallel more explicit, I have converted Locke's statement from the third person to the second person.

14 See, for example, Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 113–14.

15 Zuckert, Natural Rights, 234–40.

16 Ibid., 241.

17 Ibid., 240–46.

18 Locke speaks of man's “ages” (in the sense of stages of development) but does not use these categories, which are borrowed for convenience from contemporary anthropology. In that regard, we should also note that while Locke makes a passing reference to the life of herders during his analysis of the age of the hunter-gatherer (2.38), he does not treat this as a separate stage of development (contra Wood, Neal, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 49–71Google Scholar), presumably because herding does not involve a clear claim to a fixed territory.

19 Tully, James, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 175–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ashcraft, Richard, Locke's Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 126, 131Google Scholar.

21 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

22 Peter Laslett, introduction to Two Treatises; Waldron, Jeremy, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

23 Epstein, Richard A., Simple Rules for a Complex World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)Google Scholar; Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar.

24 Grant, Ruth, John Locke's Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 69–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldron, Right to Private Property, 177–78.

25 Epstein, Simple Rules, 60; Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 174–75; Waldron Right to Private Property, 184–91.

26 Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 174–78) and Waldron (Right to Private Property, 184–91) seem excessively amused by the quaintness of Locke's phrase “mixed his Labour with” (2.27) and thus miss its significance as a common 17th century term for procreation (see also, 2.80 and 2.105, where Locke uses the term in this sense). Locke's point is indeed that labor is bringing into being what had not been there before.

27 Zuckert, Natural Rights, 256.

28 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 176.

29 Although Locke had claimed a productivity ratio of 99/100 in the preceding section, that estimate anticipated the Age of Commerce as it compared 1000 acres “left to nature” in America with 10 acres in Devonshire in his time (2.37).

30 “And more so than it is now”: Locke adds the qualification apparently because the nations of America did have money of some sort (2.184), though it was not accepted in international trade (2.45). Like many who endeavor to situate Locke in his historical context, Wood (John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism) unfairly confines him to it, maintaining that Locke was an advocate of “agrarian capitalism.”

31 The conflict of reason with revelation here has been detailed by Pangle (Spirit of Modern Republicanism, 141–71) and Zuckert (Natural Rights, 247–88), among others. Locke was acutely aware of, and concerned with, the powers and rights that are granted in different theological moments (see 1.15–49). He also makes the point in the First Treatise that by the standard of reason, man has the right to eat meat from the beginning (1.86, 1.88, 1.92).

32 Cox, Locke on War and Peace, 40; Tully, Discourse on Property, 175.

33 Waldron notes that Locke draws only two quotes from the New Testament in the Second Treatise, but misses entirely the significance of each; he refers to this quote as “an innocuous observation” (God, Locke, and Equality, 194). Dunn as well misses entirely the irony in Locke's conspicuously limited used of the New Testament, arguing that “Jesus Christ (and St. Paul) may not appear in the text of the Two Treatises, but their presence can hardly be missed” and that the whole work is “saturated with Christian assumptions” (Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

34 Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.45-5.

35 Aquinas, Summa II-II.78-1.

36 Tully, (Discourse on Property, 120, 144–45)Google Scholar and Olivecrona, Karl (“Locke's Theory of Appropriation,” Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 96 [1974]: 225–26)CrossRefGoogle Scholar correctly note that it would be heretical to make such a claim; they fail to note that Locke makes it.

37 Indeed, in the short-lived first printing of the Two Treatises (referred to by scholars as the “first state” of the First Edition), Locke had made the point even more starkly: he referred to this “keeping of faith,” as in a bargain between “two men in Soldania,” a region of long-standing interest to Locke because its people had no idea of God.

38 Cf. Cox, Locke on War and Peace, 65, and Zuckert, Natural Rights, 247, who have Locke restating these relationships before he develops the premise that compels and supports their reconsitution. Although Zuckert sees development in chapter 5, he does not see Locke's argument as a schema of human history, nor does he see it as the decisive pivot point of the Two Treatises. Indeed, he indicates that Locke wavers between the workmanship and self-ownership theses throughout the Second Treatise (Natural Rights, 257; Launching Liberalism, 5). Actually, only once after chapter 5 does Locke refer to the workmanship thesis and that is in reference to a child (2.56), where he refutes the claim, as he had in the First Treatise, that the father has made the child and thus owns it. This usage comports perfectly with my thesis that only with development does man become master of himself and that while our rights are rooted in divine authorship, they are not fully formed by it. We find greater disregard for the coherence of Locke's presentation in Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Simmons articulates two groundings of rights, one theological, where duty to God is the primary moral fact and individual rights are an implication thereof, and one secular, where individual rights are the primary moral fact and duty to others is an implication thereof, and he argues that while there is enough material in Locke to make a case that his thought lies at one extreme or the other (he mentions Dunn and Tully at one end and Strauss and Cox at the other), such arguments can be maintained only be ignoring the contrary evidence. According to Simmons, Locke “emphasizes the chief characteristics now of one and now of the other … trying always to leave room for both,” though inclining more towards the priority of duty. Razor sharp in his analysis, but ignoring the structure of Locke's argument, Simmons illustrates the hazards mentioned in note 2 of cut-and-paste scholarship (Lockean Theory of Rights, 68, 96–102).

39 Locke does not elaborate this idea in the Two Treatises. His most complete statement may be found in a chapter he inserted into the second (1694) edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.27; see esp. 2.27.17). One might state the idea roughly as follows: where Descartes argued, “I think, therefore I am,” Locke argued effectively, “I think, therefore these thoughts are my own.” For an excellent exposition of this chapter from the Essay, see Zuckert, Natural Rights, 275–88.

40 E.g., Macpherson, Theory of Possessive Individualism, 230–32.

41 Locke's reference to Ephesians is the second (and final) he makes to the New Testament in the Second Treatise (the first was at 2.31).

42 The phrase itself, “appeal to heaven,” does not appear in any of the biblical translations in use at the time the Two Treatises was written, but there is no shortage of instances when the people or their leaders might be said to have appealed to heaven for relief. From the book of Judges alone, Locke could have selected Juda, Othniel, Ehud, Deborah and Barak, or Gideon rather than Jephthah (Judg. 1–8). The name “Jephthah” appears in the Two Treatises more frequently than that of any biblical figure save Adam.

43 Sypherd, Wilbur Owen, Jephthah and His Daughter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

44 A concise summary is given by the sixteenth-century de Vitoria, Dominican Francisco (Political Writings, ed. Pagden, Anthony and Lawrance, Jeremy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991])Google Scholar.

45 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 214–15, mentions in passing Jephthah's “Appeal to Heaven,” but understands this to refer to the declaration that follows his failed negotiations with the Ammonites. He comments: “one is tempted to say that Jephthah's statement, which refers to the conflict between two nations, is used by Locke as the locus classicus concerning conflict between the government and the people.” The comment may be true as far as it goes, but it seems to miss the primary object of Locke's reference and its significance.

46 Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 7. Q 49; Locke, John, Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. Ewing, George W. (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), 228Google Scholar.

47 St. Augustine's careful analysis and assessment of Jephthah's decisions may be found in his Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 7.Q 48–49. To my knowledge this work has not been translated into English. The Latin may be found in the Patrologia Latina database, 34:547–824 (concerning Jephthah, see 34:809–22; concerning Jephthah's inclusion within Hebrew's honor roll of faith, see 34:812–13). The parallel of God's son and Jephthah's daughter had also been suggested quietly in a 1544 play by George Buchanan, the Jephthah. Buchanan's play is set in the form of a Greek tragedy. Such discretion, however, did not spare the play from being condemned as “seditious and impious,” “heretical and blasphemous,” and tossed into the flames of the infamous book burning of Oxford University in 1683. Locke took the precaution at this time of entrusting his own copy of the play along with a few other heretical volumes to friends for safekeeping. He also took the additional step of erasing from his catalog all evidence of having ever owned the Jephthah (Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], 96Google Scholar).

48 He uses the term once metaphorically (to refer to legislative authority [2.212]) and once sarcastically (to refer to the pusillanimous character of “Egyptian Under-Taskmasters” [2.239; cf. Exod. 2:11–12]).

49 See Locke, John, “Epistle to Reader,” Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 7Google Scholar.