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John Locke's Historical Sense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Mark Glat
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Extract

The most common assumption made about John Locke's historical sense is that he had none. In his lifetime, Locke was many things: a doctor, a philosopher, a political theorist, a policymaker and a biblical scholar. But few, if any, would say that Locke was a historian as well. Unlike Hobbes before him and Hume after him, Locke would write no history of England or of English politics. My intention in this paper then is not to make the claim that he was a “historian” in the strict sense of the word. I would therefore agree with John Pocock when he writes that Locke was the only major political writer of his age who did not try “to understand English politics through the history of English law (and English political institutions).”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 3 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 In addition to the writing of J.G.A. Pocock, John D unn, and Quentin Skinner cited below, there is the characteristic judgment of Peter Laslett in his “Introduction” to Locke, 's Two Treatises of Government (New York: Mentor, 1965)Google Scholar: “As a theorist, then, Locke made no appeal to history or tradition. … Neither Machiavelli, nor Hobbes, nor Rousseau succeeded in making the discussion of politics so completely independent of historical example, so entirely autonomous an area of discourse” (p. 91). Two notable exceptions to this widespread assumption about Locke have been Seliger, Martin's The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1968)Google Scholar, see for example pp. 230–39; and Ashcraft, Richard “Locke's State of Nature: Historical Fact or Moral Fiction?” American Political Science Review, 42 (1968), 898–915.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (New York, 1967), p. 237.Google Scholar

3 Pocock, , Ancient Constitution, pp. 46, 187, 236Google Scholar. Cf. his Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1973), p. 144Google Scholar; and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975) pp. 423; 436.Google Scholar

4 The “plain historical method” is the phrase which Locke coined to describe his empiricist philosophy in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. with Introduction by Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar. Hereafter referredto as Essay, with book, chapter and section designations.

5 Pocock, , Ancient Construction, p. 236; n.2 p. 238Google Scholar: cf. similar statements about Locke, 's ahistorical thinking in Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 7–8; 144Google Scholar; and in Pocock, 's review article “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3, no. 1 (1972), 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 This has been the major theme of Pocock, 's Machiavellian MomentGoogle Scholar especially Part 3. There is also most notably Wood, Gordon's The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).Google Scholar

7 See for example Pocock who wrote in The Machiavellian Moment that: “The historical context [of early Modern political thought in England] must be reconstructed without him [Locke] before he can be fitted back into it” (p. 423). Indeed exploding the “myth” about Locke's influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has always been a central concern of Pocock's from the Ancient Constitution through the Machiavellian Moment.

8 Pocock, , Ancient Constitution p. 8Google Scholar and chap. 1 in general. See also Franklin, Julian's Jean Badin and the 16th Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

9 Thus according to von Lyden, W. in his “Introduction”Google Scholar to Locke, 's Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar, Locke assigned Bodin, 's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566) to his students at Oxford (p. 20).Google Scholar

10 Here I have used “historicism” in the sense that Popper, Karl discussed it, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1962, 1966), 1: 7–10.Google Scholar

11 Cited in Watkins, J. W. N., Hoboes' System of Ideas (London, 1965) p. 25.Google Scholar

12 Thus in addition to the statements of Pocock and Laslett cited above, there is Dunn, John's observation in his The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thus for Locke, according to Dunn: “It is not merely the language of morals that history has in fected, it is also the set of moral concepts. In order to rectify these defects it is necessary to find some criterion for human morality which is outside history. Hence the necessity for a law of nature” (pp. 96–97).

13 See for example Two Treatises, 1:57Google Scholar and 11:103. In both instances, Locke is eager to point out that “at best, an argument from what has been to what should of right be, has no great force” (II:103).

14 Cited in King, Lord's Life of John Locke, rev. ed., 2 vols. (London, 1830), 1:179.Google Scholar

15 King, , Life, 1:203Google Scholar. Bodin described history as a “true narration of things” in Method, ed. with Introduction by Reynold, Beatrice (New York: Columbia, 1945), p. 15.Google Scholar

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18 Locke's principal discussion of language is found in Essay, Book III, entitled “Of Words.”

19 The political significance of linguistic ambiguity has been discussed at length by Skinner, Quentin in his “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” Political Theory, 2 (1974), 294–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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24 Pocock, , Ancient Constitution, pp. 236–38Google Scholar. Cf. Skinner, Quentin, “Thought and Action,” p. 286.Google Scholar

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27 Locke, John, Collected Works, 9 vols. (London, 1794) 2:205Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to in Notes as CW with volume and page numbers.

28 CW, 2:326.Google Scholar

29 CW, 2:361–62.Google Scholar

30 “An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles, by Consulting St. Paul Himself.” CW, 7Google Scholar. For additional information on Locke's relationship with Newton see Cranston, Maurice, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957)Google Scholar. It should also be noted that Newton shared with Locke a great interest in the collection of historical ethnography and seventeenth-century travel literature, the importance of which for Locke will be discussed below. For details on the libraries of Locke and Newton, see Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar

31 CW, 7:v.Google Scholar

32 CW, 7:iv.Google Scholar

33 CW, 7:xvi–xviii.Google Scholar

34 CW, 7:xx–xxviiiGoogle Scholar. It is especially interesting to note Locke's use of the word “philosophy” here. As I will suggest in the final section of this essay it hints at some very important historical and political tasks of interpretation for philosophical thought.

35 CW, 7:xxi (emphasis added).Google Scholar

36 This is the opinion of Thompson, Martyn P., “A Note on ‘Reason’ and ‘History’ in Late Seventeenth Century Political Thought,” Political Theory, 4 (1976), 491–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Thus the title page to the 1690 edition of the Two Treatises reads in part “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government” (p. 169 of Laslett's edition).

38 For a discussion of Locke's dissent from the patriarchal arguments of Robert Filmer on historical grounds see Schochet, Gordon, Patriarchalism and Political Theory (New York 1975), pp. 195–96; 259–62.Google Scholar

39 See Two Treatises, 11:30 and 100.

40 Locke used the phrase “history of mankind” in Two Treatises, II:175Google Scholar. Cf. with the sense in which he uses the word “history” in II:100–108.Google Scholar

41 The importance of Renaissance historiography to the New World historians has been examined in detail by J. H. Elliot. See his “The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 57 (1972)Google Scholar and “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact,” in Chiapelli, F., ed., First Images of America, 2 vols. (California, 1976), 1: 11–23.Google Scholar

42 These are questions I have pursued in greater detail in my dissertation, “The Political Anthropology of John Locke and the Origins of Modern Politics” (Rutgers University, 1978), esp. chaps. 4 and 6.Google Scholar

43 Two Treatises, II:49Google Scholar. For specific references to primitive America in his discussion of property see II: 26; 30; 40–48. For his use of similar ideas in the discussion of “the begin nings of political society” see II: 100–108.

44 Two Treatises, IIGoogle Scholar: sec. 9. On the familiarity of Locke's audience with historical ethnography of primitive peoples see Ashcraft, Richard, “Hobbes's Natural Man: A Study in Ideological Formation,” Journal of Politics, 33 (1971), 1104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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47 For a discussion of the developmental theories of both Locke and Acosta, see Meek, Ronald I., Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 20–24; 42–49.Google Scholar

48 Aubery, John, Essay Towards the Description of the North Division of Wiltshire (1659)Google Scholar died in Fox, Levi, ed., English Historical Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (The Dugdale Society, 1956) p. 101Google Scholar. Pocock has identified “serious antiquarian thinking” in Hobbes as marking the latter as one of the “most advanced historical thinkers of his day” (Politics, Language and Time, pp. 260–61)Google Scholar. By identifying Locke with the same antiquarian thinking, his wholly opposite evaluation of Locke is seriously undermined.

49 Peggot, Stuart, “Antiquarian Thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,”Google Scholar in Fox, , Historical Scholarship, p. 102.Google Scholar

50 The most concise theoretical statements of Pocock's position are to be found in chapters 1 and 7 of Politics, Language and Time. For Skinner's general position as well as responses to several of his critiques see his “Thought and Action.”

51 Pocock, , Politics, Language and Time, p. 35.Google Scholar

52 This interpretation has been fully developed by Pocock in his Machiavellian Moment.

53 Pocock, , Politics, Language and Time, p. 144.Google Scholar

54 Ibid.

55 Locke introduced his notion of a “law of opinion and reputation” in the Essay, II, xxviii, 10Google Scholar. Given the fact that in earlier editions of the Essay, Locke referred to this same concept as a “philosophical law,” it is interesting to compare this discussion with Locke's use of the idea of philosophy as seen above, and note 34.

56 Pocock, , Politics, Language and Time, p. 21.Google Scholar

57 Skinner, , “Thought and Action,” pp. 292–300.Google Scholar