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John Locke on Custom's Power and Reason's Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2012

Ruth W. Grant
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Abstract

Locke stresses the power of custom in shaping opinion and behavior, though this aspect of his thought has been underappreciated. Recognizing its importance raises critical issues, particularly the relation between custom and reason and the role of authoritative custom in supporting political and social power. Locke explains in detail the various psychological and sociological mechanisms by which the power of custom is manifested; but he nonetheless consistently and emphatically rejects its authority. Instead, Locke is a champion of the authority of reason. Because custom is powerful, but reason is authoritative, Locke attempts to enlist the power of custom in the service of reason and of reasonable politics, and because custom is powerful and its impact unavoidable, individual intellectual independence cannot mean being without cultural prejudices. At best, it means the ability to gain some critical distance from them. These observations place Locke's relation to the Enlightenment in a new perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , Fall 2012 , pp. 607 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

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2 MacPherson, Nozick, and Strauss contributed to this view, though in different ways. See Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possesive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar. As long ago as 1988, I wrote, “the opinion persists, despite general agreement among contemporary Locke scholars to the contrary, that Locke's individualism is ‘atomistic’ individualism” (Grant, Ruth, “Locke's Political Anthropology and Lockean Individualism,” Journal of Politics 50, no. 1 [1988]: 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Surprisingly, the same can be said today. The persistence of this view can be attributed in part to influential works, which are not studies of Locke per se, that associate Locke with liberal individualism, Enlightenment individualism, or modern individualism. For example, see MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 33, 259–61Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187–90, 291–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159–76Google Scholar.

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13 Alternatively, we might think of these as aspects of culture: tradition, custom properly speaking, what Locke calls “fashion,” and orthodoxy. By “orthodoxy,” I mean the unquestioning acceptance of established beliefs.

14 Locke, Conduct, par.12.

15 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, 142.

16 Locke, Essay, I.iii.22.

17 Ibid., I.iii.22–26; Essays on the Law of Nature, 141–43.

18 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, par. 1.

19 Locke employs this idea in the context of a particular dispute over whether or not there are innate ideas imprinted on the mind from birth. It has been taken to mean that Locke is a thoroughgoing empiricist or a devotee of the “nurture” side of the nature/nurture debate. See Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 5–6Google Scholar; and see Vogt, Philip, “Seascape with Fog: Metaphor in Locke's Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 1 (1993): 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for one challenge to this view. Vogt argues that Locke's use of the metaphor of a ship captures his ideas better than the blank slate metaphor and that Locke's epistemology contains both empiricist and rationalist elements. I tend to agree with his view.

20 Locke, Conduct, par. 41.

21 Ibid., par. 4; see also Waldron, Jeremy, “The Democratic Intellect,” chap. 4 in God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Locke, Essay, II.ix.10.

23 Locke, Conduct, par. 41.

24 Locke, Essay, II.xxxiii.17–18; see also II.xxxiii.6–9; Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode,” 836.

25 Locke, Thoughts, par. 110.

26 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.69.

27 Locke, “Credit, Disgrace,” 236.

28 Locke, Thoughts, par. 56; see also pars. 48, 53, 57–63.

29 Ibid., par. 216. How a child raised with great sensitivity to social approval becomes an adult capable of challenging prevailing views and practices is one of the puzzles of Locke's position taken up briefly later in this article.

30 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

31 One of Locke's examples is “rotten borroughs.” See Locke, Second Treatise, §§157–58.

32 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, in Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, ed. Higgins-Biddle, J. C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pars. 238, 241, 243Google Scholar; Second Treatise, §§92, 94 line 20; Essay, I.iv.24.

33 Locke, Conduct, pars. 10, 12, 14, 34 (my emphasis).

34 Ibid., pars. 10, 12, 14, 34.

35 Ibid., par. 34.

36 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

37 Locke, First Treatise, §58.

38 John Marshall argues that bold public expression of Locke's own religious views could have brought imprisonment even at the end of his life. See Marshall, John, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 454CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mahoney, Thomas H. D. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 38, 99Google Scholar; see also Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), I-II, Q. 97, art. 3Google Scholar, where Thomas argues that custom sometimes embodies reason: “when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgment of reason.”

41 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

42 Ibid., IV.xx.17; IV.xv.6.

43 Locke, First Treatise, §158.

44 Locke, Reasonableness, pars. 1–9.

45 Locke, Thoughts, par. 116. But the love of dominion in children is “the origin of most vicious habits that are ordinary and natural” (pars. 103–5).

46 Locke, “Labour,” in Political Writings, 442.

47 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

48 Locke, Essays Concerning the Law of Nature, 129.

49 Locke, Conduct, par. 24.

50 Ibid., par. 10.

51 Locke, Essay, II. 21. 48.

52 Locke, Second Treatise, §103; see First Treatise, §157.

53 Locke, Conduct, par. 1.

54 For the importance of a new conception of probability in seventeenth-century thought, see Shapiro, Barbara, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For a discussion of how the new language of probability offered an alternative to both skepticism and rationalism and made it possible for Locke to forge a public reason in politics and religion, see Casson, Douglas, Liberating Judgment: Fanatics, Skeptics, and John Locke's Politics of Probability (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Locke, Essay, IV.xvi.

56 Joshua Mitchell argues for the importance of Christ's first coming, in Locke's account, for clarifying reason's authority. But Christ's first coming does not establish reason's authority. Men are always and everywhere subject to the Law of Reason as God's law, including before Christ and in places where Christ is not known. See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

57 Locke, Conduct, pars. 11, 14.

58 Locke, Essay, I.i.5, IV.xii.11; Conduct, 8.

59 Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.24; see Conduct, par. 41.

60 Locke, Reasonableness, par. 252. Edwards's attacks focused primarily on charges of Socinianism. Locke wrote both a first and a second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in response to Edwards's attacks. See Parker, Kim Ian, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, ON: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 2004), 32–33Google Scholar. Despite this dispute, Edwards was indebted to Locke in some respects, quoting Locke's Essay in some of his writings.

61 To take another's interpretation as authoritative is to put that person in Christ's place. See Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (London: C. Baldwin, 1824), xiiGoogle Scholar.

62 In taking this position, Locke is entering a theological dispute that goes back at least as far as the famous exchange between Erasmus's On the Free Will: A Diatribe or Discussion and Luther's The Bondage of the Will. According to Luther, faith and grace, not doubt and reason, are the only ways that fallen man can have access to the word of God as revealed in scripture. As a result of the Fall, human beings are entirely unworthy. Our capacity for reason itself is corrupted, such that reason cannot give us access to knowledge of God's will, according to which we could guide our actions. See Gillespie, Michael, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151ff.Google Scholar, and Skinner, Quentin, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 3ffGoogle Scholar.

63 Locke, Essay, II.xxiii.8; IV.xix.4; Reasonableness, pars. 241, 252; see also Forde, Steven, “What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?,” Review of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 242Google Scholar.

64 His position in this follows Richard Hooker's closely. Hooker is cited in the Second Treatise very heavily.

65 Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.24.

66 There is a vast literature on the question whether Locke was sincere in his claims about God and the Law of Reason or the Law of Nature. The argument that he was not can be found in Strauss, Natural Right and History, 202–51, and What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), chap. 7Google Scholar. For a recent alternative view that Locke's thought is grounded in religious ideas see Waldron, God, Locke and Equality. I do not need to engage this debate here. For my purposes, it is enough to show that Locke portrayed reason as the enemy, not of the Christian religion in particular or of religion in general, but only of sectarianism and bigotry, i.e., the effects of blindly following custom.

67 Locke, Essay, IV.xx.18.

68 Ibid., IV.iii.20 (last emphasis mine).

69 Locke, Conduct, par. 34.

70 Ibid., par. 28.

71 I am not alone in recognizing Locke's project of cultural reform. Casson (Liberating Judgment, 18–20) describes Locke's political project as a kind of pedagogical project, shaping the sorts of citizens who can sustain legitimate institutions and shaping a new conception of what constitutes reasonableness. Smith (“Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode”) argues that Locke alters the concept of culture and “attempts to recuperate custom by identifying it as a possible site of social reform.” Ward takes in the entire scope of Locke's efforts to reform family, polity, church, and education around the idea that the autonomous individual is the only determinant of truth. He even argues that Locke anticipated public education. See Ward, John Locke and Modern Life, 832.

72 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.69.

73 Locke, “Labour,” 440.

74 Locke, Conduct, par. 3

75 Locke, Second Treatise, §172; see also Laslett, introduction to Two Treatises, 96.

76 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

78 Locke, “Credit, Disgrace,” 237.

79 Here I disagree with Ward (John Locke and Modern Life, 192) who sees the Conduct, in contrast to the Thoughts, as unconcerned with habit formation.

80 To regulate assent according to the evidence is the core of reasonableness for Locke.

81 Locke, Conduct, par. 4 (my emphasis).

82 See text accompanying note 25 above.

83 Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in Political Writings, 404, 427.

84 Locke, Thoughts, par. 200.

85 Ibid., pars. 54, 189.

86 Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, 119.

87 See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone, 86ff., for the theoretical importance of this transition for Locke's attack on patriarchal government.

88 Tully, “Governing Conduct”; Mehta, Uday, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

89 Neill, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education.”

90 See Thoughts, par. 200, quoted above.

91 Ibid., pars. 36, 61.

92 Some Thoughts Concerning Education was written as a series of letters to Locke's friend, Sir Edward Clarke, who presumably could be characterized as both reasonable and sensitive. As I already mentioned, the work is addressed to parents bold enough to challenge custom.

93 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.48; Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 173.

94 Neill, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education,” 244.

95 Locke, Second Treatise, §§6, 22, 63.

96 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

97 Much current psychological research is finding that people's moral decisions are powerfully affected by emotions or “gut” reactions as opposed to rational judgments. For a summary of recent findings see Lehrer, Jonah, How We Decide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), chap. 6Google Scholar. But to argue for the importance of rational moral judgment is not to deny that emotional “gut” reactions govern most people most of the time. The crucial thing is the possibility of resisting those initial impulses.

98 Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 94; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 171, 173ff.

99 Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode,” 833.

100 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 277Google Scholar. I am indebted to Matthew Cole for this reference. Cole writes: “while Locke acknowledges the intransigence of prejudice in human understanding, he vindicates the capacity and the right to challenge any specific prejudice, and denies that tradition or authority ought to enjoy any presumptive validity when confronted on evidentiary grounds. Locke stops short of a theory of epistemic autonomy, but he is an unambiguous champion of intellectual freedom” (Cole, “Was John Locke Prejudiced against Prejudice? Should He Have Been?” [unpublished manuscript, 2010]).

101 Locke, “Letter,” p. 431: “It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of toleration to those who are of different opinions (which might have been granted), that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world on account of religion.” Locke does not see a diversity of heterodox opinions as a problem in itself. See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone, 78.

102 Forde, “What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?,” 233, 255–56.

103 See McCann, Edwin, “John Locke” in A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Nadler, Steven (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 373Google Scholar. McCann characterizes Locke's Two Treatises and the Essay this way: “both evince a decisive rejection of any claim to authority, whether epistemological, moral, political, or religious, licensed merely by tradition or by the social position of the claimant.”