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What History Can Show: Jeremy Waldron's Reading of Locke's Christian Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John Dunn
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Extract

It is no easy matter to do justice to Locke or any other capable seventeenth century thinker: to judge them in terms which are wholly appropriate to them, but which also give due weight to our own necessarily very different needs and preoccupations. Yet if equality is a normative relation which holds in time as well as space (and not a purely pragmatic relation which characteristically fails to hold anywhere at all), there must be a justice which sets a limit to the permissible inroads of all subsequent concerns on the part of other human beings: a personal entitlement to consideration in their own terms and on their own terms before we decide how far to set those terms aside to implement our own purposes in ways which may put their reflections to uses in which they could have held no conceivable stake. So seen the duty is a side constraint on interpretive licence, not an arbitrary restriction of subject matter, or a taboo on cognitive interest. It is fully discharged once we have done our best to grasp what it is they were talking about, and what led them to affirm and deny what they did. After that point, it holds no guarantee whatever (though it may, of course, hold some potential) of contributing further, even heuristically, to our capacity to judge what to make for ourselves of what they affirmed or denied.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Summer 2005 , pp. 433 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. For efforts of varying felicity to focus this thought see, in sequence, Dunn, John, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” Philosophy 43 (1968): 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; “Practising History and Social Science on Realist Assumptions,” Action and Interpretaion, ed. Hookway, C. and Pettit, Philip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 145–75Google Scholar; Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; “‘Bright Enough for All Our Purposes–: John Locke's Conception of a Civilised Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 43 (1989): 133–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke?,” in Dunn, J., Interpreting Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 9–25Google Scholar; The History of Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; “Measuring Locke's Shadow,” in John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Letter on Toleration, ed. Shapiro, Ian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 257–83.Google Scholar

2. Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. See Skinner, Quentin, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Gelderen, Martin van and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and by conscious association Pettit, Philip, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

4. Compare especially Dworkin, Ronald, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, and on a more specific issue Life's Dominion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).Google Scholar

5. Cf. Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

6. Waldron, , God, Locke, and Equality, p. 1.Google Scholar

7. Carlyle, R. W. and Caryle, A. J., A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1903–1936).Google Scholar

8. See especially Waldron, Jeremy, “Locke, Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1891–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 88–114Google Scholar; The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar

9. Though compare Cavanagh, Matt, Against Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

10. Waldron, , God, Locke, and Equality, p. 1.Google Scholar

11. Waldron, , God, Locke, and Equality, p. 1.Google Scholar

12. In the end, as it turned out, he was not really anything by profession in his life seen as a whole.

13. This was the principal point I wished to bring home in The Political Thought of John Locke in 1969.Google Scholar For all the weight of disagreement on many other matters, it must also in some form be common ground with the cumulating tradition of commentary which draws its initial inspiration from Strauss.

14. Cf. “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” and perhaps less clearly part 3 of The Political Thought of John Locke. Compare the judgments of “Measuring Locke's Shadow.”

15. For anyone who chooses to comb carefully through the accumulated scholarly record, there is, naturally, no shortage of individual error, either in my own less considered juvenile rhetorical gestures, or in those of earlier historical scholars like Peter Laslett or subsequent ones like Richard Ashcraft. What is still worth looking for carefully is explicit analytic procedures or enunciated principles which can reasonably be judged to have ensured it.

16. Compare, from very different schools: Marshall, John, Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Harris, Ian, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and the essays by Harris, and Marshall, in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. A.Stewart, M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–85, 111–82Google Scholar; Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights and On the Edge of Anarchy (each Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Josephson, Peter, The Great Art of Government: Locke's Use of Consent (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

17. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1960)Google Scholar, Introduction and Notes.

18. Waldron, , Liberal Rights, pp. 88–114.Google Scholar Cf. Dunn, John, “The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?,” The History of Political Theory, pp. 100–120.Google Scholar

19. Waldron, , The Right to Private PropertyGoogle Scholar, summarizing and systematizing work going back at least nine years earlier.

20. Waldron, Jeremy, The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Cf. Williams, Bernard, “Internal and External Reasons,” Moral Luck (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Cf. the works of Harris (fn 16 above).

23. Cf. Tuck, Richard, “History,” Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. E.Goodin, Robert, and Pettit, Philip (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 72–89Google Scholar; Wootton, David, ed., Divine Right and Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; Runciman, David, “History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (2001): 84–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. This has been, from the outset, one of the weightiest and most compelling themes in Skinner's work: Visions of Politics, vol 1; Liberty before Liberalism.

25. This is the principal question consistently pressed by the interpretive lineage of Strauss. There is no question at all, given Locke's temperament and circumstances, that it has been a question worth pressing. What is tricky about it is to see what range of materials holds most promise of furnishing a reliable answer.

26. Cf. the two monographs by A. John Simmons cited in note 16 above. Compare, on the other flank, the picture which emerges from the work of Harris (footnote 16 above).

27. What makes sects sectarian, as Locke repeatedly insisted, is the self-serving circularity of their thought processes. The permanent challenge they face is how to combine due attention to the arguments of others with a refusal to surrender a primary interest in their own questions. There could hardly be a method for meeting this challenge honorably, though there are innumerable ways of evading any attempt to meet it.

28. Cf. especially Wootton, (ed), Divine Right and Democracy, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

29. Here I simply reiterate the central claim of The Political Thought of John Locke. For a richer and more nuanced and accurate historical tracing of the process of formation see the texts by Marshall and Harris in fn 16 above.

30. Waldron, , God, Locke and Equality, pp. 197–206Google Scholar; Compare Farr, James, “So Vile and Miserable an Estate: The Problem of Slavery in Locke's Political Thought,” Political Theory 14 (1986): 263–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Williams, Bernard, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).Google Scholar

32. Locke, John, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed Higgins-Biddle, John C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. xlix.Google Scholar For William Molyneux's letter to Locke on this occasion, 20/7/1697, see The Correspondence of John Locke, ed Beer, E. S. de (Oxford:Clarendon Press,) 6: 62–66.Google Scholar

33. Dunn, , “The Claim to Freedom of Conscience,” note 18 above; compare also Alex Tuckness, “Rethinking the Intolerant Locke,” American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002): 288–98Google Scholar, and more broadly Locke and the Legislative Point of View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar

34. Dunn, “Measuring Locke's Shadow,” note 1 above.