1. For example, see Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Jefferson, p. 1517. On divine right theory, see chapter 1 of this book.
2. For a review of the possibilities, consult the historical survey in Tuck, Natural Rights Theories; Höpfl and Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” p. 940; Tierney, “Origins of Natural Rights Language,” pp. 615–46.
3. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist 14.
4. Cf. Lienesch, New Order of the Ages, p. 3.
5. Cf. Hoffer, Revolution and Regeneration, pp. 14–69.
6. Quoted in ibid., p. 53.
7. Quoted in ibid., p. 55.
8. Jefferson to Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Jefferson, p. 1517.
9. Jefferson to John Norvell, June 4, 1807, in ibid., p. 1176.
10. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, pp. 83–84; Pocock, Three British Revolutions, p. 74; Kerber, “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” p. 480; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic.
11. Paul Conkin, review of Steven Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 497.
12. Consider Plumb, The Origins of Political Stability in England.
13. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, p. 3; Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England; Western, Monarchy and Revolution. For a less positive account of the accomplishments of the Glorious Revolution, consider Kenyon, Stuart England, pp. 245–67; idem, Revolution Principles pp. 4–34; Johnson, “Politics Redefined,” pp. 692–702; Dickinson, “How Revolutionary Was the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688?” p. 125. Schwoerer (“The Contribution of the Declaration of Rights to Anglo-American Radicalism,” p. 105) calls attention to the current “scholarly fashion” of disparaging the significance of the revolution of 1688–89. I share her opinion that this is an unsound point of view motivated to a large degree by inappropriate comparisons to the (unsuccessful) revolution that preceded it in England in the 1640s or to the revolutions that succeeded it in France and Russia.
14. Quoted in Fink, The Classical Republicans, pp. 188–89.
15. Cf. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, p. 57. I shall explicitly discuss the issue of the Lockeanism of the Declaration later.
16. Cf. Schwoerer, “Contribution,” p. 117.
17. Cf. Chesterton’s contrast between American and English political theory in What I Saw in America, p. 16.
18. Dickinson, “How Revolutionary,” p. 129.
19. On the difference between the theory of the Glorious Revolution and the Lockean notion of “dissolution of government,” see Pocock, “The Fourth English Civil War,” pp. 161–64; see also Dickinson, “How Revolutionary,” p. 127; Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, pp. 87–126.
20. Schwoerer (“Contribution,” p. 225) seems to accept this inference. See also Dickinson, “How Revolutionary,” p. 130.
21. See Pocock’s important exploration of the theme in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law; also Schwoerer, Declaration, pp. 37–38, 162. Although the Declaration of Rights echoes the language of the “ancient constitution” in many places, it ought to be noticed that there are important differences as well. Compare “known laws and statutes and freedoms” with the emphasis on “immemorial custom” discussed by Pocock. Consider also Straka, “The Nation Contemplates Its Revolution,” p. 44; Dickinson, “How Revolutionary,” pp. 127–28.
22. Cf. Franklin, John Locke, p. 94.
23. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 75; cf. Kenyon, “The Revolution of 1688,” p. 47.
24. Schwoerer, Declaration, pp. 25, 159–62, 176–77, 206–10, 217–18, 225, 228. Cf. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, p. 558; Thompson, “The Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,” p. 188; Kenyon, “Revolution of 1688,” pp. 47, 49, 50, 69. For discussion of ambiguities arguably inherent in the very notion of abdication, see Slaughter, “ ‘Abdicate’ and ‘Contract’ in the Glorious Revolution,” pp. 323–37; Miller, “The Glorious Revolution,” pp. 541–55; Slaughter, “ ‘Abdicate’ and ‘Contract’ Restored,” pp. 399–403. Slaughter argues that according to a now obsolete meaning, “abdicate” could (and did for some in 1688–89) mean “depose,” “renounce,” or “disinherit” in a transitive sense.
25. Thus Schwoerer concludes that “the Declaration of Rights affirmed the ultimate sovereignty of parliament” (Declaration, p. 58). I would add “at most” to her conclusion, for she is correct to imply that the document does not recognize popular sovereignty, as the American Declaration does, but that, aside from other hesitations about parliamentary sovereignty, the English documents seem to come closer to affirming the sovereignty of the nation understood as the three estates and represented by Parliament. (However, since the nation so understood could hardly act except as a parliament, perhaps this is a distinction without a difference.) See Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 81–83, for the Whigs’ general “reluctance to locate sovereignty anywhere but in the ancient constitution.” Nenner (“Constitutional Uncertainty,” pp. 294–95, 297) also doubts the assertion of parliamentary sovereignty. So does Franklin: “The Whigs were no more inclined to invoke Parliamentary supremacy in 1687 and 1688 than they had been in 1680” (John Locke, p. 98; cf. p. 90). Also see Dickinson, “Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 38. For discussion of a very explicit assertion of popular sovereignty in the Convention Parliament, see Nenner, “Constitutional Uncertainty,” p. 298.
26. Schwoerer, Declaration, pp. 74–78.
27. Straka, Anglican Reaction to the Revolution of 1688; Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 4–34. Dickinson, “How Revolutionary,” pp. 127–28; cf. Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument,” pp. 484, 491.
28. As Nenner put it, “Certainly it is true that rather than a run of generalization on the abstract rights of man, the list of claims that emerged from the convention was closely tied to common assumptions about English law and history” (“Constitutional Uncertainty,” p. 299).
29. See Zuckert, “Thomas Jefferson on Nature and Natural Rights,” pp. 157–63.
30. See Nenner: “The Declaration was being regarded solely as an expression of a political desire that placed no binding obligations on the crown” (“Constitutional Uncertainty,” pp. 298–99).
31. Suárez, De Legibus I.ii.5.
32. Schwoerer, Declaration, p. 22. See also Frankle, “The Formulation of the Declaration of Rights,” p. 269; Nenner, “Constitutional Uncertainty,” pp. 304–5.
33. See chapters 4 and 6.
34. See chapter 2.
35. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, p. 208. Cf. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 65–66, 217; Frankle, “Formulation,” p. 265.
36. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist 14.
37. Schwoerer, Declaration, p. 168; cf. p. 287.
38. Frankle, “Formulation,” p. 270. For a thorough survey of the case for and against the Declaration as a contract, see Nenner, “Constitutional Uncertainty,” pp. 301–3; Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 75.
39. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, p. 155.
40. Jefferson’s original draft is reprinted in Robert Ginsberg, ed., A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1966), p. 260.
41. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a5–15. Also see Pufendorf, Elementorum Jurisprudentiae Universalis III Obs. V. 2–15.
42. Cf. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, chapters 15, 18.
43. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a25–30. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises I 54.
44. Cf. Parry’s observation that the historicity of the contract is not crucial to Locke’s case, that he is presenting a “rationalist reconstruction” (John Locke, p. 99).
45. See chapters 2, 4–5.
46. Wills, Inventing America, chapter 11.
47. See Lynn, “Falsifying Jefferson,” pp. 66–70; Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment,” pp. 503–23; Jaffa, “Inventing the Past,” pp. 3–19; Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics pp. 9, 37, 49, 53–54, 60ff.; Pangle, Spirit, p. 37; Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 16–17. These critics of Wills have presented in some detail the parallels between the Declaration and Locke’s text. Below, I present a summary of the main instances, depending in part on Laslett’s helpful annotations in his edition of Two Treatises:
Declaration of Independence |
Locke’s Two Treatises |
“all men are created equal” (final version) |
II 54 |
“all men are created equal and independent” (original draft) |
II 6, 7 |
“laws of nature and nature’s God” |
I 93, 116, 126; II 142, 195 |
“to dissolve those bands” |
II 219 |
“to secure those rights” |
II 123, 219 |
“deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” |
II 99 |
“the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government” |
II 220, 222 |
“the frames to which they are accustomed” |
II 223 |
“mankind are more disposed to suffer” |
II 230 |
“long train of abuses” |
II 225 |
A recent, thorough survey of Jefferson’s debt to Locke is in Sheldon’s Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 41–52.
48. See Hamowy, “Jefferson,” for Jefferson’s testimonials to Locke’s Treatises.
49. See Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Jefferson, p. 1501.
50. Ibid., pp. 511–12, 514, 521–22; also Jefferson to Lee, p. 1501.
51. Wills, Inventing America, pp. 238–39.
52. Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader in America.”
53. Wills, Inventing America, p. 171.
54. Lundberg and May, “Enlightened Reader,” pp. 263ff.
55. Ibid., p. 268.
56. Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, pp. 200–232. Cf. Dworetz’s review of Colbourn’s own use of his surveys, in The Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 40–41.
57. Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America,” pp. 74–80. Somewhat along the same lines as Dunn are Handlin, “Learned Books and Revolutionary Action,” and Handlin and Handlin, Liberty and Expansion, pp. 379–89.
58. Rossiter, Political Thought of the American Revolution, pp. 67–70; cf. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 36; Conkin, Self-Evident Truths, p. 101; Koch, Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers, pp. 29, 31.
59. See Zuckert, “The Recent Literature on Locke’s Political Philosophy,” p. 295.
60. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 200–232.
61. See Dunn, “Politics of Locke,” pp. 69–72. Bailyn (Ideological Origins, pp. 43–45) provides further evidence for Locke’s early presence in America, as does Miller, in The New England Mind, pp. 420, 432.
62. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution, pp. 7–8; cf. Newlin, Philosophy and Religion in Colonial America.
63. Baldwin, New England Clergy, p. 65.
64. Williams, “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants,” pp. 56–59.
65. Baldwin, New England Clergy, pp. 66–68.
66. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, p. 45; Baldwin, pp. 10, 44; Conkin, Self-Evident Truths, pp. 103–5.
67. Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 32, 34–35, 44; Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, chapter 11 (Lutz did not survey earlier writings).
68. Dworetz, pp. 43, 45.
69. Rossiter, Political Thought, pp. 12, 70.
70. See Bailyn, Ideological Origins, p. 35; Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, passim.
71. Dunn, “Politics of Locke,” pp. 74–77.
72. Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 28, (italics in original).
73. Dunn, p. 80.
1. Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Jefferson, p. 1517. On Locke, see Two Treatises I 6. Jefferson took the image from Algernon Sidney’s, Discourses Concerning Government III.33.
2. See, for example, Allen, English Political Thought, p. 119.
3. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, pp. 5, 86. Cf. Dunning, A History of Political Theories From Luther to Montesquieu, p. 254.
4. “An Homily against Disobedience and Wylful Rebellion,” p. 95.
5. Manwaring, “A Sermon Preached before the King at Oatlands,” July 4, 1627, p. 15. On the royalist respect for security of property, see Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought, p. 55.
6. James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in The Political Works of James I, pp. 64–65, 69. On James’s concession of the difference between king and tyrant, see Schochet, Patriarchalism, pp. 87–88. On the King’s duties, see McIlwain’s, introduction to James’s Political Works, pp. xliv–xlv. On the context for James’s thought, see Dunning, History, pp. 212–17.
7. Filmer, Patriarcha, in Patriarcha and Other Political Works, pp. 89–91. On Filmer’s relation to other divine right theorists of the seventeenth century, consult Daly, Sir Robert Filmer; Schochet, Patriarchalism; Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 7.
8. For a discussion recognizing some of these distinctions, see Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 97–115.
9. Cf. Filmer’s judgment on Hobbes in Observations Concerning the Origin all of Government, in Patriarcha, p. 239; also Manwaring, “Sermon,” p. 14; Bramhall, Serpent Salve, pp. 87–88. This issue is further complicated by the findings of James Daly (“The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England,” pp. 240–41), who tracked the meanings of “absolute” over the course of the seventeenth century and discovered that in the early years, at least, it did not have a stable meaning of an “absolutist” sort. Indeed, he claims that the identification of absolute with arbitrary power did not occur until the 1640s, and insists that not all royalist thought was absolutist. J. W. Allen (English Political Thought, p. 101) goes so far as to conclude that “there are but very few traces in English writings before 1642 of any theory of royal absolutism by divine right.”
10. Earl of Salisbury, speech in Parliament, March 8, 1610, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 12; James I, A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, and the Independence of Their Crowns (1615), in Political Works, p. 213. Cf. James, Trew Law, p. 69; also Charles I, speech to Parliament, January 25, 1641 (Kenyon, p. 17), in which James’s son accepted traditional legal limits on the royal power. Cf. Wootton, Divine Right, p. 32; Spelman, The Case of Our Affaires, p. 57.
11. Höpfl and Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” p. 933.
12. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 9–10.
13. “Homily against Disobedience,” p. 98.
14. James I, Trew Law, p. 69.
15. James I, “A Speech to Parliament,” March 21, 1609, in Political Works, p. 309.
16. Manwaring, “Sermon,” p. 14. Cf. Filmer, “The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest,” in Patriarcha, pp. 135, 142–43, 156–57, 184.
17. Charles I, speech to Parliament, March 17, 1628, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 81.
18. James I, “Speech to Parliament,” p. 309. Cf. the even stronger statement along the same lines in Spelman, Case of our Affaires, pp. 95–96.
19. James I, Trew Law, p. 63; McIlwain, introduction to Political Works of James I, p. xxxix; cf. pp. xli–xliii.
20. Cf. Locke’s claim in the preface to Two Treatises that Filmer’s argument was built wholly on scriptural proofs.
21. Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 2:13–14.
22. Romans 13:3–4. Cf. the very similar point in 1 Peter 2:15.
23. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 759. Other anti–divine right interpretations can be found in Palmer, Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Arms, pp. 63–65; Burroughes, A Brief Answer to Dr. Ferne’s Book, p. 75.
24. See Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 54–55, 155–72, on the use of this interpretation in America before the revolution.
25. James I, Trew Law, p. 64.
26. James I, “Speech to Parliament,” p. 307; in Political Works, see also the sonnet reproduced on p. 3, which was used by James to preface his Basilikon Doron (1599). On James’s great familiarity with Aristotle (and classical political philosophy more generally), see the citations in Basilikon Doron, in Political Works.
27. Schochet, Patriarchalism, p. 87.
28. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1252b9–1253a6; idem, Physics 192b9–35.
29. Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas, p. 106.
30. Aristotle, Politics 1253a20–23. On organic thought in the seventeenth century, cf. Höpfl and Thompson, “History of Contract,” p. 931.
31. An especially picturesque version of the nature of the common good in the organismic understanding appeared in Nicholas Breton’s sixteenth-century work A Murmurer: “If the head (king) of the body ache, will not the heart (the hearts of the subjects) be greatly grieved. . . . Can the eye (the council of the king) of the body be hurt or grieved, and neither the head, heart nor any other members be touched with the pain of it? . . . Can the labourer, the foot, be wounded, but the body of the state will feel it, the head be careful, the eye searchful and hand be painful in the cure of it? And can the commonwealth, the body, be diseased, but the king, his council and every true subject will put to his hand for the help of it?” (quoted in Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, pp. 89–90).
32. James I, Trew Law, p. 65.
33. Cf. Machiavelli’s revealing phrase “the common benefit of each” (Discourses I, preface), which captures well the natural rights conception.
34. James I, Trew Law, p. 65; idem, Remonstrance, p. 234.
35. Trew Law, p. 99; cf. Remonstrance, p. 234.
36. Aristotle, Politics 1253a19.
37. Trew Law, pp. 64–65.
38. Politics 1254a23–1254b5.
39. Ibid., 1252a30–31, 1255b16–20.
40. Parker, “Some Few Observations upon His Majesties Late Answer,” p. 133. Another astute reply to the absolutist implications of the similitudes is Herle’s Answer to Dr. Ferne’s Reply, p. 145.
41. Aristotle, Politics 1259b10–11. On Aristotle’s doctrine of the naturalness of the political association, see Ambler, “Aristotle’s Understanding of the Naturalness of the City.”
42. Politics, 1260a5–19.
43. Wootton, Divine Right, p. 92. One commentator calls the similitude of the body a “well-worn analogy” that had been previously used extensively by James’s teacher, George Buchanan (Burns, “The Political Ideas of George Buchanan,” p. 63). Cf. the appearance of one of the similitudes in Bate’s Case (1606), a legal case involving the power of impositions (Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 62). See also Sir Edward Coke’s Case (1623) (Kenyon, p. 106). Cf. Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture; Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, pp. 6, 8, 142.
44. Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, chapter 2.
45. James I, Trew Law, p. 66.
46. Aristotle, Ethics 1094a27-b10.
47. James I, Basilikon Doron, in Political Works, p. 3.
48. James I, “Speech to Parliament,” p. 307; Basilikon Doron, p. 12; Remonstrance, p. 234. For a sense of how distant this similitude is from Aristotle’s politics, consider his Politics 1252b24–27.
49. James I, “Speech to Parliament,” pp. 307–8.
50. For medieval precedents, consult Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Höpfl and Thompson, “History of Contract,” p. 934 n. 29.
51. Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta, p. 107; Morgan, Inventing the People, p. 19. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises II 6, for a suggestion of the potential blasphemy in the similitude.
52. “Homily against Disobedience,” pp. 94–95. Cf. Manwaring, “Sermon,” p. 13.
53. “Homily,” p. 97.
54. For other expressions of this attitude in the divine right literature, see Bramhall, Serpent Salve, p. 54; Spelman, Case of Our Affaires, p. 57; Ferne, The Resolving of Conscience, pp. 90–91; Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta, p. 105; James I, “A Speech in the Starre-Chamber,” June 20, 1616, in Political Works, p. 333. On Luther and the attitude of obedience, see Nietzsche, Morgenrote, p. 207. On divine right theory as essentially concerning the duty to obedience, see Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 99–108, 509–19. On Calvin and the attitude of obedience, see Walzer, Revolution, pp. 24–25, 28, 35–37, 41, 45.
55. In The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1874).
56. On law and grace in Calvin, see Walzer, Revolution, p. 56.
57. Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited and Mixed Monarchy, in Patriarcha, pp. 277–78; Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings; Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta, discussed in Wootton, Divine Right, 47–48. Cf. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:301; Oakley, “On the Road from Constance to 1688.” See also Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, for a statement that brings out the connection between reformist Christianity and obedience. For an alternative view, connecting Filmerean divine right not to Portestantism but to “the extreme republicans,” see Dunning, p. 255.
58. Cf. McIlwain’s Introduction to James I’s Political Works p. xxv; Morgan, Inventing the People, p. 18; Skinner, “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” p. 173.
59. The best discussion of the relation between Filmer and run-of-the-mill royalist thought is Daly, Sir Robert Filmer. Also useful is Schochet, Patriarchalism. I disagree with Daly, in that I find Filmer far more “representative” than he does.
60. Locke, Two Treatises I 14. Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, in Patriarcha, p. 241.
61. Filmer, p. 241.
62. Filmer, Observations upon Aristotles Politiques Touching Forms of Government, in Patriarcha, pp. 203–4. On Filmer’s use of Aristotle, see also Patriarcha, pp. 75–80. See also Filmer, Anarchy, p. 278.
63. Cf. Walzer: “Zwingli had sacrificed natural law—even as Calvin was to do—to the radical Protestant theory of the Fall” (Revolution, p. 40; also see p. 15).
64. For the Calvinist parallel, see Walzer, p. 39.
65. Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. 60–61 (emphasis added).
66. Ibid., p. 62.
67. John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus (1579), A Commentary upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (1583), quoted in Walzer, Revolution, p. 38; also see pp. 58–59.
68. Filmer, Patriarcha, pp. 60–61. For the parallel in Calvin, see Walzer, Revolution, p. 38.
69. Cf. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.v.8–15, I.xvi; on Calvin’s political philosophy, see Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, and Walzer, Revolution, p. 35; on the Protestant God, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 244–45.
70. See Strauss, Natural Right and History; Zuckert, “An Introduction to Locke’s First Treatise”; idem, “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” pp. 201–3.
1. Thus I do not follow Michael Walzer in drawing such sharp lines between Lutheran and Calvinist politics. See, for example, his Revolution of the Saints, pp. 26–27.
2. James I, “A Proclamation Enjoining Conformity to the Service of God Established,” July 16, 1604, in Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, p. 136. On the “conservative” character of James’s claims, consider Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 3–12.
3. Bate’s Case (1606), in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 62–64. A valuable account of the events leading up to the Civil War in terms of the unsettled and ambiguous character of the constitution is in Hume’s History of England, vol. 1. A very useful summary account of some of the underlying reasons for novel initiatives by the monarchy is Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution, esp. chapter 2. A very moderate account of the judges’ arguments in Bate’s Case and related cases is in Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 13–23.
4. Cooper, “The Fall of the Stuart Monarchy,” p. 550.
5. “The Form of Apology and Satisfaction,” June 20, 1604, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 32.
6. Commons Petition of Grievances, July 7, 1610, In Kenyon, p. 72 (emphasis added).
7. “Prohibition del Roy” (1607), in Kenyon, p. 180. The parliamentary reaction severely calls into question Wootton’s claim that “Englishmen since 1603 had . . . been willing to accept that they lived in an absolute monarchy” (Divine Right, p. 34).
8. “Form of Apology” p. 31.
9. John Pym, “Speech at Manwaring’s Impeachment,” June 4, 1628, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 15. Wootton (Divine Right, p. 35) is not true to Pym’s thought when he describes him as seeking “a new contract between king and people.”
10. Commons Petition of Grievances, in Kenyon, p. 72. Many of the Parliamentary denials of absolute royal power are gathered in the 1620 “Petition of Right,” in Kenyon, 82–85.
11. Cf. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution, pp. 37, 46, 51–52, 234. Cf. Allen’s judgment that doctrines of an original contract had “little or no relevance to thought in England before 1642” (English Political Thought, p. 114).
12. Introduction to the Commons Journal, March 19, 1604, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 10.
13. Canon II, in Kenyon, p. 11. Allen (English Political Thought, p. 104) identifies Buchanan as the target of this critique.
14. Pym, “Speech,” p. 15.
15. For an early statement that developed both the naturalness of political society and the need for rule, consider Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, esp. chapter 13. Fortescue’s treatise, written c. 1470, was doubtless a major source of the Parliamentary arguments we are now examining. Cf. Herle, An Answer to Dr. Ferne’s Reply (1643), p. 145. For general observations on the role of Aristotelian theories in seventeenth century political thought, see Sharp, Political Thought, p. 20; Wootton, Divine Right, p. 16.
16. Cf. Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 21, 31–36, 42–43, 50, 233; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 340–48; Sharp, Political Thought, pp. 6–9. Cf. Coke in Calvin’s Case, quoted in Pocock, Ancient Constitution, p. 35.
17. Davies, Le Primer Report des Cases et Matters, p. 132.
18. Cf. Pollingue, “An Interpretation of Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae,” pp. 20–29, 43–44.
19. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1274b30–1275a21, 1275b35–1276a15.
20. Fortescue, De Laudibus, chapter 13.
21. On the Aristotelianism of parliamentary thought, see Mayer, “The English Radical Whig Origins of American Constitutionalism,” pp. 143–44. On the power of Aristotole in the seventeenth century, see Ashcraft, “Hobbes’s Natural Man,” p. 1081.
22. Pym, “Speech at Manwaring’s Impeachment,” p. 15.
23. See the prologue to this book.
24. Pym, p. 15.
25. Fortescue, De Laudibus, chapter 4. Contra Pollingue, “Interpretation,” pp. 11, 46, and esp. her discussion of law as “expression of rights” with Fortescue’s definition of right in chapter 3; in light of which, also consider Pocock’s questionable claim that to Fortescue the individual is “primarily a possessor of rights” (Machiavellian Moment, p. 335).
26. Aristotle, Politics 1252a5, 1252b29.
27. A comprehensive list of Parliament’s grievances against the king, financial and otherwise, is contained in Pym’s speech of April 17, 1640, reprinted in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 183–89.
28. Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution, p. 97.
29. Pym, “Speech in the House of Commons,” November 7, 1640, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 189.
30. The Triennial Act, 16 Car. I c. 1. (1641), in Kenyon, pp. 197–200.
31. “An act for regulating the Privy Council and for taking away the court commonly called the Star Chamber,” 16 Car. I c. 10, and “An act for repeal of a branch of a statute primo Elizabeth concerning commissions for causes ecclesiastical,” 16 Car. I c. 11 (1641), in Kenyon, pp. 223–26.
32. The Grand Remonstrance (1641), in Kenyon, pp. 207–17.
33. The Nineteen Propositions, June 1, 1642, in Kenyon, pp. 222–27. Weston, “The Theory of Mixed Monarchy under Charles I and After,” p. 428.
34. King’s speech, January 25, 1641, in Kenyon, p. 17; Allen, English Political Thought, p. 411.
35. Parker, Observations upon Some of His Majesty’s Late Answers, p. 181.
36. A mere two years earlier, Charles had reaffirmed the divine right doctrine, more or less in all its splendor. See Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, pp. 166–68; Allen, English Political Thought, p. 410.
37. Charles I, His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament, p. 173. Pocock (Machiavellian Moment, p. 365) gives a slightly different account of the motive behind the Answer.
38. Weston, “Theory,” p. 426; cf. pp. 436, 437. Cf. Mayer, “Radical Whig Origins,” p. 153.
39. Charles I, His Majesties Answer, p. 171. A fuller summary of the constitutional doctrine of the Answer is in Weston, pp. 428–29.
40. Declaration of the Commons, April 1646, in Sharp, Political Thought, p. 36.
41. Charles I, Answer, p. 173.
42. Sharp, Political Thought, p. 40; Weston, “Theory,” p. 430; Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 406–12, 483, 507.
43. For an attempt to synthesize the appeal to the ancient constitution as such and the theory of the balanced constitution, see Herle, A Fuller Answer to a Treatise Written by Dr. Ferne (1643), p. 151.
44. “A Declaration of the Lords and Commons in Parliament Concerning His Majesty’s Proclamation of the 27th of May, 1642,” June 6, 1642, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 226. Cf. Herle, Fuller Answer, p. 151. On antecedents, see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought II.iii.7.
45. These incoherences have been the subject of scholarly notice for some while. Consider Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History; Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, p. 18. The most thorough attempt to supply a rationale for Parliament’s position was apparently William Prynne’s “The Sovereign Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes” (London, 1643). For a discussion, see Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 436–48.
46. “Remonstrance of Both Houses in Answer to the King’s Declaration Regarding Hull,” May 26, 1642, in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 243. Franklin (John Locke, p. 20) identifies this as the clearest statement of a Parliamentary right to resist the king. On the public character of political power, cf. Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays, p. 152. A different understanding of the parliamentary position is in Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 393–98. For an explanation of the precedents for the distinction between the king’s person and his office in sixteenth century Protestant thought, see Skinner, Foundations, 2:222–24.
47. Cf. the formulation of the problem of resistance within the theory of mixed monarchy in Franklin, John Locke, pp. 3, 7, 11, 17. On parliamentary hesitations over its radical legal fiction, see Allen, pp. 393–98.
48. Franklin, pp. 17–20, 39, 48–49. Cf. Franklin’s similar conclusion regarding one group of Parliamentary writers: “All publicists in the early 1640s were still attached to the existing constitution” (p. 33).
49. Allen, pp. 397–98.
50. Höpfl and Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif,” pp. 927–28.
51. Gough, The Social Contract, pp. 1–3. See also Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition; Dunning, A History of Political Theories, p. 49.
52. Another important effort to draw distinctions is Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism.
53. Höpfl and Thompson, “History of Contract,” p. 941. Cf. Gough (Social Contract, pp. 96–97), who associates the social contract proper with some of these same ideas.
54. Höpfl and Thompson, p. 942; cf. p. 943. Dickinson (Liberty and Property, pp. 74–75) characterizes the debate in terms of an appeal to “an older medieval idea.” Also cf. Gough, Social Contract, p. 90.
55. Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 80. Two other examples of the assimilation of all contractarianisms, one with an English, the other with an American, context, are Furley, “The Whig Exclusionists,” p. 29, and Tate, “The Social Contract in America,” esp. pp. 378, 385. Höpfl and Thompson cite many other examples.
56. Höpfl and Thompson, “Contract,” p. 942; cf. Thompson, “Reception of Locke,” pp. 187–88.
57. Henry Ferne, The Resolving of Conscience, quoted in Allen, English Political Thought, p. 495.
58. Weston, “Theory,” p. 434.
59. Herle, Fuller Answer, pp. 148–49. On Herle, see Allen, pp. 400–61.
60. Weston, p. 434.
61. Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchy, p. 192.
62. Weston, p. 435; Allen, English Political Thought, p. 449.
63. Hunton, p. 200. For Hunton’s treatment of Parliament’s extraordinary powers, see pp. 202–11. On Hunton’s parallels to Ferne on the practical question of the day, see Allen, pp. 454–55.
64. Hunton, pp. 177, 183, 192.
65. Ibid., pp. 175–77, 195–211.
66. Ibid., p. 175.
67. Romans 13:5.
68. Hunton, p. 175. On the relation between contractarianism and the Reformation, see Gough, Social Contract, p. 84; Patrick Riley, “How Coherent is the Social Contract Traditon?” 543–44.
69. Hunton, pp. 178, 189–90. Cf. Gough (Social Contract, p. 89) on the Puritan use of contract “to justify the subordination of the individual to the state, rather than to vindicate his rights against it.”
70. For example, Gough, pp. 89–90. Hunton can be read in quite another manner, as a Grotian, for, as will be shown in chapters 4 and 5, Grotian doctrine contained many of the same basic features as Hunton’s, including a very similar treatment of the right of resistance, the original contract, and the moral authority of human will. I am not convinced such a reading would be mistaken, but as opposed to Grotius and the Whig Grotians, Hunton makes much less of natural law and natural theology and much more of biblical theology. Hunton’s contractarianism, moreover, is entirely communal and not individual. Nonetheless, Hunton certainly was seen to be relevant by the later Whigs, as witness the fact that his 1643 treatise was reprinted in 1680 and twice in 1689 (Wootton, Divine Right, p. 211).
71. This seems to distinguish Hunton from the earlier Catholic contractarian doctrine, such as that found in the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Francisco Suárez. For a discussion of the differences among Christian contractarianisms, see chapters 3–5.
72. Hunton, Treatise, pp. 178, 183, 189; cf. p. 191. Consider also Hunton’s definition of a “limited contract,” p. 183.
73. Ibid., p. 182; cf. p. 177. Emphasis added.
74. Ibid., p. 186; cf. pp. 184, 194. On Herle’s similar identification of the fundamental law or constitution with the original contract, see Gough, Social Contract, p. 91.
75. Cf. Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 190–91.
76. Hunton, pp. 185–88, 202–9.
77. Parker, Observations, pp. 189–90, 198–213.
78. Ibid., pp. 184–85; see also pp. 207, 210. On contract as itself an analogy, cf. Gough, Social Contract, p. 6. On hostility to the familial similitude within Calvinism, see Walzer, Revolution, pp. 32–33, 183–98; on the organic similitude, pp. 171–83.
79. Parker, p. 167. On beginning according to method, cf. Aristotle, Politics 1252a20–26.
80. Parker, p. 168; Aristotle, Politics 1278b5–1279a20. Parker (pp. 168, 176, 186) identifies Machiavelli as sponsor of the view he opposes.
81. Parker, p. 167.
82. Ibid., p. 169. Parker’s adaptation of an Aristotelian contractarianism based on salus populi points toward a possible link with the similar position of Marsilius of Padua. Cf. Defensor Pacis, Discourse I, chapters 4, 9, 12; Allen, English Political Thought, p. 429.
83. Parker, p. 210.
84. Ibid., p. 182.
85. Hunton, Treatise, pp. 187–88, 195.
86. Parker, pp. 209–10. For Parker’s similar arguments regarding the king’s powers over Parliament, see pp. 173–75. Cf. Weston, “Theory,” pp. 435–36.
87. Parker, p. 202; cf. pp. 211–12.
88. Ibid., p. 181; cf. pp. 188, 194, 200.
89. Ibid., pp. 188, 200. Cf. Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 430–31.
90. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 46; Filmer, The Anarchy of a Limited and Mixed Monarchy, passim, in Patriarcha; Allen, pp. 431–32.
91. Parker, p. 200. Parker drew the conclusions for his commitment to supremacy for issues of church government and relation of church and state in The True Grounds of Ecclesiastical Regiment, esp. pp. 23–25.
92. Parker, Observations, pp. 210, 212. Cf. Tuck’s claim that Parker was a “radical natural rights theorist” (Natural Rights Theories, p. 147).
93. Parker, pp. 171, 174. Cf. Allen, p. 428.
94. Parker, p. 171.
95. On Parker as a non-Puritan, see Allen, p. 339.
1. “A Declaration of the Parliament House of Commons,” January 4, 1649, in Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, p. 324.
2. Ibid.
3. Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchy, p. 185; cf. pp. 203, 204.
4. Ibid., p. 186.
5. Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesty’s Late Answers, p. 210. This rejection of the right to use force against the person of the monarch was the dominant and authoritative position up until 1649, but it was not the only view in the earlier years. Herbert Palmer, for example, rejected the distinction between resistance to the king and resistance to his agents and officers as part of his argument in favor of the rightfulness of resistance (Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Arms). Sharp (Political Thought of the English Civil Wars, p. 4) points out, however, that Presbyterians allied with Palmer rejected the actions taken against the king in 1649 on the grounds that they never meant “to bring his majesty to justice.” That is, even though there was a much closer connection between Palmer’s position in 1643 and Parliament’s in 1649, there was still a sense that 1649 represented a major shift from 1643. The Palmerean Presbyterians seem to have remained committed to the mixed monarchy; the logic of that doctrine was better grasped by Hunton, for example, than by Palmer.
6. Hunton, p. 195.
7. See chapters 2 and 4 for discussions of resistance and the original contract.
8. Milton was singled out for disapproval after the Restoration: several of his works were burned in 1660, the faculty at Oxford selected propositions from his books for special denunciation, and numerous royalist writers attacked him in print. See Hill, Milton and the English, Revolution, pp. 222–30; Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, pp. 239–39. In general, on 1660 as a repudiation of everything Milton stood for, see Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, pp. 89–91.
9. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, p. 757. Cf. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, p. 148.
10. Milton, pp. 759–60.
11. Ibid., p. 764. Cf. Milton, Eikonoklastes, p. 212.
12. Milton, Of Reformation in England, p. 46; idem, The Reason of Church Government, pp. 685–86. Cf. Hill, Milton, p. 114.
13. Milton, Tenure, pp. 754, 755.
14. Cf. Wolfe, Milton, p. 213; Sanderson, But the People’s Creatures, p. 132; Andrew, Skylock’s Rights, p. 81.
15. Filmer, Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, in Patriarcha, pp. 252, 255. For a good account of how Milton went beyond the standard parliamentary writers of the period, see Barker, Milton, pp. 145–48; on potentially anarchic consequences, pp. 151–52. On the people and Filmer’s critique, pp. 159–62, also Hill, Milton, p. 168.
16. Milton, Tenure, p. 754. See Bennett, Reviving Liberty, esp. pp. 108–14, on the relationship between Milton’s “antinomianism” (his interpretation of Christian liberty) and the natural law. Her account fits best with Milton’s own vacillation between Christian and natural liberty, as in his On Christian Doctrine, pp. 521–41, esp. p. 537. See also Hill, p. 302.; Wolfe, Milton, p. 226.; Milton, The Ready and Easy Way, pp. 891, 898.
17. Locke, Two Treatises II 87, 129–31. For fuller discussion of inalienability of rights in Locke, see chapter 9.
18. Cf. Dunning, A History of Political Theories, p. 246: “Liberty, then, was the first and controlling preoccupation of Milton in his political philosophy.”
19. Milton, Tenure, p. 754.
20. Milton, On Christian Doctrine, p. 300; on the errors of the philosophers who ascend only to knowledge of nature, see pp. 400–401.
21. Milton, Paradise Regained IV.309–13. On Calvin on the necessary limits of pagan understanding, see Walzer, Revolution, p. 37.
22. Cf. Hill, Milton, p. 461; but to the contrary, see Dunning, History, pp. 242–45. The rhetorical character of Milton’s argument in the Tenure somewhat obscures the status of his argument. Above all, he aims to persuade of the rightfulness of the trial and execution of the king, and, as a good rhetorician, attempts to use the most effective arguments for his audience that he can deploy. He uses a distinctly latitudinarian strategy in the Tenure, and perhaps even more so in The Ready and Easy Way. In both places he suggests that he stands on common ground with the ancients, especially Aristotle, but not only the testimony of On Christian Doctrine, Paradise Regained, and Paradise Lost (see Alvis, “Philosophy as Noblest Idolatry in Paradise Lost,” pp. 263–84), but the substance of his argument makes his suggestion implausible. Many scholars (e.g., Wolfe, Milton, pp. 216–47, 391) miss the real foundation of Milton’s theory because they misapprehend his relationship to non-biblical thought. (Better is Barker, Milton, pp. xv, 123–25, 184, 293.) In the Tenure Milton also claims that his position is in accord with the doctrines of all the most approved authors, especially Protestants, and most especially Presbyterians. Despite that claim, and a lengthy appendix intended to make it good, Milton’s position differs from standard Protestant political theology, too, as can be seen by a careful comparison of what Milton quotes from his “authorities” and his own doctrine in the Tenure, especially on the question of tyranny and the role of lower magistrates in resistance. See, for example, Tenure, pp. 753–54: “If the power be of God, it belongs to anyone.” Cf. Barker, Milton, p. 159. On Milton’s use of his Protestant sources, see Hughes’s introduction to vol. 3 of Milton’s Complete Prose Works, p. 122, and articles cited there.
23. See On Christian Doctrine, pp. 644, 717–807.
24. On the relation between “property” and “rights” in Locke, see chapter 10.
25. Cf. the alterative account of the generation of inalienable rights from Grotius, in Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 143.
26. Milton, On Christian Doctrine, p. 353. I have slightly revised the translation to make Milton’s point clearer.
27. Ibid., p. 351. Cf. Paradise Lost VIII. 325: “The pledge of thy obedience and thy faith.”
28. Paradise Lost III.98–111, 124.
29. Ibid., VII.625–31.
30. Ibid., XII.67–71.
31. Cf. On Christian Doctrine, book 2.
32. Ibid., p. 516.
33. Milton, Tenure, pp. 754, 765–66.
34. Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, p. 229.
35. Milton, Paradise Lost XII.13–37.
36. Cf. Barker, Milton, p. 153: “the natural right of the people to break its contract.”
37. The role these three central notions play in Milton’s political thought stands forth clearly when his position is compared with an earlier work, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, a sixteenth-century French treatise most often attributed to Phillippe du Plessis Mornay, to which it is often compared and which is frequently seen as an important source for the Tenure. (For the comparison, see, for example, Dunning, History, p. 242.) The Vindiciae was a spirited defense of the right of resistance against tyrannous rulers, and it won the honor of being the best-known and most authoritative statement of Protestant theory on that subject at least up until the publication of Milton’s Tenure. Like Milton, Mornay presented a version of contractarian theory. The Vindiciae’s influence on Milton is fairly clear in several places; for example, Milton’s brief sketch of the stages of the development of political society from the first kings to the development of laws and mixed regimes very closely parallels Mornay’s similar sketch (cf. Vindiciae, pp. 169–70, and Tenure, pp. 273–75). Nonetheless, there are decisive differences between Milton and Mornay: (1) Mornay rests his theory on a version of the old Roman law doctrines of natural law (p. 169), according to which natural human liberty is understood to be natural in the sense of the condition shared by all animal beings (pp. 169, 187; cf. Corpus Juris Civilis, Institutes I.ii pr.2). This is very different from Milton’s grounding of natural liberty in man as “image of God”; Mornay did not rely on knowledge derivative from the Bible, as Milton did, and Mornay’s “natural liberty” is universal (it applies to dogs and all animals) and purely naturalistic, as Milton’s is not. (2) Mornay, likewise, has no role for the Fall. Rather, he accepts the doctrine of the Roman law that the natural liberty as provided by natural law gives way to subjection under the jus gentium (law of nations) and human civil law (pp. 169, 188). (3) The different grounding of the two doctrines produces different results in their doctrines of resistance. Mornay adheres to the doctrine as developed by Calvin and Beza, according to which resistance is justified only against tyrants and only by “magistrates” (see pp. 190, 191, 194–97). Milton’s rejection of these two limitations has already been detailed. Why Milton refused to follow Mornay in looking to the Roman law is a matter for conjecture; one reason surely had to do with Milton’s ideas about the nature of the divine image and its relation to freedom. Another reason may be more negative: Mornay’s appeal to the Roman law has difficulties, because he attributed a status to the natural law that the Roman jurists pointedly did not. For discussion, see Zuckert, “Bringing Philosophy Down from the Heavens,” pp. 71, 74, 76, 81. Despite its difficulties, the Vindiciae was hugely influential during the seventeenth century in England; consider, for example, John Lilburne’s Regall Tyrannie Discovered, cited in Hughes’s introduction to vol. 3 of Milton’s Complete Prose Works, p. 26.
38. Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII.403–14, XI.508–10; idem, On Christian Doctrine, pp. 395–97.
39. Cf. Hill, Milton, p. 64: “Idolatry is a short summary of what he detested”; see also pp. 126, 178–80, 193.
40. Milton, Paradise Regained IV.313–15. On what was lost in the Fall, see Paradise Lost XII.180ff.
41. Cf. Hill, p. 158.
42. Paradise Lost, XII.25–27.
43. Paradise Regained III.109–44. In this context, the interpretation of the “end of time” sponsored by Empson and endorsed by Hill appears as an artifact of fallenness, and therefore contrary to Milton’s understanding; see Hill, Milton, pp. 296–305.
44. Milton, On Christian Doctrine, p. 661.
45. Milton, Reason, p. 672; see also pp. 671, 673, 674, 680, 683–84.
46. Milton, De Doctrina, p. 461; Reason, pp. 656–57, 684; cf. p. 661: “Your prelaty is nothing else but your ambition, an insolent preferring of yourselves above your brethren.”
47. Milton, Tenure, p. 756; cf. Bennett, Reviving Liberty, pp. 34–47.
48. Milton, Eikonoklastes, pp. 208, 209; cf. pp. 212, 214.
49. Milton, A Defense of the English People, quoted in Wolfe, Milton, p. 226. A pamphleteer of the Glorious Revolution captured extremely well this aspect of Milton’s thought: “We cannot believe our excellent religion has anything in it of such servile tendency as to incline us to part with our civil liberties and rightful properties. We do not believe Christianity should unman us or that protestancy can make us slaves and beggars” (“A Remonstrance and Protestation of all the good Protestants of this kingdom, against deposing their lawful sovereign king James II [1689], in Somers, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts 10:247.). This Miltonic emphasis on the lack of servility of true Christianity is, on the one hand, an answer to Machiavelli’s charge that Christianity effeminated men, and, on the other, the chief basis for Milton’s partial synthesis with classical republicanism: Christianity, properly understood and practiced, produces a manliness that has something in common with ancient manliness. In my account of Milton I have deemphasized one theme of some importance, the kind of synthesis or common ground between the politics based on true Christian-biblical principles and classical republicanism. As I have indicated above, I believe Milton was aware of the limits of the common ground, but I do not mean to dismiss this theme as pure rhetoric. A fuller treatment than I can provide here would have to consider how that synthesis works, so far as it does. It is important for Milton, for it provides a link between his “humanist” and “Puritan” motives. I would therefore reverse the emphasis in Walter Berns’s otherwise fine essay “John Milton.” On Milton’s early awareness of the conflict between ancients and moderns, see Hill, Milton, pp. 34, 36, 40, 158.
50. Milton, Ready and Easy Way, pp. 881, 885–87.
51. Cf. Bennett, Reviving Liberty, pp. 59–63, on liberty as the standard of good rule, even of God’s good rule. For an alternative identification of the chief elements and their connections in Milton’s political thought, see Barker, Milton, p. 141. My disagreement with Barker over the elements of Milton’s political thought may account for our differences over the question of the relation between the Tenure and Milton’s later political writings (see Barker, p. 157). Also see Sanderson, But the People’s Creatures, p. 137.
52. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, pp. 111–13; cf. Berns, “John Milton,” pp. 442–43; Wolfe, Milton, pp. 63, 224, 246; Hill, Milton, pp. 160–62.
53. Milton, Ready and Easy Way, pp. 888–90; cf. Paradise Regained IV.131–42. There is little basis for Hill’s claim that this scheme “was far from Milton’s ideal solution” (Milton, pp. 200, 334).
54. Milton, Second Defense of the People of England, p. 352.
55. Zagorin, History, p. 111. On Milton’s aristocratic leanings, also consider Allen, English Political Thought, pp. 334–38.
56. Milton, Of Reformation, p. 26; cf. Berns, “John Milton,” pp. 451–53; Wolfe, Milton, p. 64. I thus disagree with Hill that “liberty for Milton was always largely negative” (Milton, p. 128; cf. pp. 262–67).
57. Milton, Paradise Lost IV.178–82.
58. For another account of the central tension in Milton’s political thought, see Barker, Milton, pp. 176–80; Hill, Milton, pp. 266–67, 336. For a similar treatment of the ends of political life, see Barker, pp. 300–303.
59. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises II 6, 11.
60. Milton, On Christian Doctrine, p. 396. See Walzer, Revolution, p. 31, for (weaker) parallels in Calvin.
61. Hill, Milton, p. 393; cf. p. 396.
62. See Adam’s reaction to Michael’s account of the scheme of redemption:
O goodness infinite, goodness Immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce, and
Evil turn to good; more wonderful than that
Which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness.
What Adam finds so wonderful about the scheme of redemption is that in it
To God more glory, more good will to man
From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.
Paradise Lost XII.469–73, 477–78. Cf. On Christian Doctrine, p. 415.
63. Cf. Strauss, “Progress or Return,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, pp. 227–30.
64. Herein lies the core of my differences with Walzer’s parallel effort to explicate Protestant politics: he sees the Fall at the center of Protestant thinking about politics, while, without denying the importance of the Fall, I find the Creation to be more definitive (cf. Walzer, Revolution, chapter 2). Walzer himself brings forward evidence unsupportive of his emphasis on the Fall. Consider, for example, the passage quoted from Calvin, p. 36 bottom. The importance of Creation remains visible in as secular a thinker as Locke (see my chapter 8).
1. Jones, The First Whigs, p. 215.
2. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, p. 361.
3. The Declaration of Breda, April 4, 1660, in Kenyon, pp. 354–58.
4. “An Act for the uniformity of public prayers and administration of sacraments and other rites and ceremonies,” 14 Car. II c. 4 (1662), in Kenyon, pp. 378–82; idem, Stuart England, p. 183.
5. “An act for the assembling and holding of parliaments once in three years at the least,” 16 Car. II c. 1 (1664), in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 382.
6. “An act declaring the sole right of the militia to be in the King,” 13 Car. II c. 6 (1661), in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 374.
7. “An act for the well governing and regulating of corporations,” 13 Car. II, St. 2, c. 1 (1661), in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, p. 377; “An act for uniformity of public prayers . . . ,” in ibid., p. 381.
8. This is not to say, of course, that anti-Catholocism had no presence during the first half of the century. As J. W. Allen observes, “Anti-Catholic sentiment, in 1640, pervaded England so generally that it may be called a national sentiment.” English Political Thought, p. 312.
9. For narratives of the emergence of the Whigs, see Jones, First Whigs; Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury, esp. pp. 349–50, 352–53, on the character of the early Whigs and on Shaftesbury’s role.
10. Thompson, “Reception of Locke,” pp. 184–85.
11. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 65; idem, “How Revolutionary was the Glorious Revolution?” pp. 127, 131; idem, “The Rights of Man from John Locke to Tom Paine,” p. 42.
12. Thompson, p. 185.
13. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 578, both cites some of the chief purveyors of the old story and summarizes the more recent revision of it.
14. Ibid., p. 184.
15. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 58.
16. Kenyon, “The Revolution of 1688,” pp. 45, 62.
17. Locke, letter to Edward Charles (c. 1689–90), in Farr and Roberts, “John Locke and the Glorious Revolution,” pp. 395–98; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 597–600; cf. Goldie, “The Revolution of 1689,” p. 491.
18. Ashcraft, pp. 184, 573; cf. p. 181 n.1.
19. Goldie, pp. 480, 482, 486, 490.
20. Ashcraft, pp. 140, 207. On the Whigs’ efforts to make peace with Protestantism, see Horwitz, “Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis,” p. 201.
21. “England’s Appeal to the Parliament at Oxford” (London, 1681), p. 2.
22. Furley, “The Whig Exclusionists,” pp. 21–23; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, chapter 5.
23. “Percat Papa,” p. 2.
24. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 185: Cf. 212–15.
25. Earl of Shaftesbury, speech in the House of Lords, March 24, 1679, in State Tracts in Two Parts, p. 24.
26. See, for example, the anonymous pamphlet “A Letter to a Friend in the Country,” p. 3.
27. Furley, “Whig Exclusionists,” pp. 19, 21. Cf. Jones, First Whigs, pp. 214–15.
28. “Letter to a Friend,” p. 4; cf. “Percat Papa,” pp. 3–4.
29. “Letter to a Friend,” p. 3.
30. See, for example, the pamphlet “Vox Populi,” pp. 2–3; Hunt, “The Great and Weighty Considerations, etc. Considered,” pp. 4, 22; idem, “An Answer to a Pamphlet Lately Published,” pp. 32–37. Cf. Furley: The Whigs “set great store by the fact that some previous heirs had been excluded by King and Parliament” (“Whig Exclusionists,” p. 25, and further examples, p. 26.).
31. “A Letter From a Gentleman of Quality in the Country to His Friend,” p. 1.
32. “A Letter to a Friend,” p. 3. Cf. Furley, p. 28.
33. “Percat Papa,” p. 3. Cf. “Vox Populi,” pp. 2–3.
34. Hunt, “Great and Weighty Considerations,” p. 4.
35. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 190; cf. pp. 194, 210.
36. Ibid. p. 210. The tendency to dichotomize appears to stem from Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution.
37. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Christopher Morris, ed., (London, 1907), Book I.
38. See, for example, Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis III.iv, vii.
39. Cf. Hunt, “Great and Weighty Considerations,” pp. 9, 12.
40. On Grotian methodology, see chapter 5.
41. Goldie, “Revolution of 1689,” pp. 490–91.
42. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 65
43. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, pp. 117–18. Ashcraft identifies Burnet’s pamphlet as marked by the very ideas which are also leading ideas in Locke: natural rights, the state of nature, and contract (Revolutionary Politics, p. 561). Also see Franklin, John Locke, pp. 131–35.
44. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, p. 117. Cf. Goldie, “Revolution of 1689,” p. 519, on the general role of William in “instigating doctrines.”
45. Franklin, John Locke, p. 99.
46. Burnet, “Enquiry,” p. 1.
47. Ibid., p. 4.
48. Höpfl and Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” p. 941.
49. Burnet, p. 1.
50. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
51. Cf. Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights, p. 117.
52. Burnet, p. 1. For differences between Burnet and Locke on the naturalness of family relations, see Second Treatise, chapter 6.
53. Burnet, p. 3.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., p. 6.
56. Ibid., p. 7.
57. Locke, Two Treatises of Government II 95, 116, 119 (emphasis added). An intelligent discussion of Locke on consent in comparison to other seventeenth-century writers is in Wootton, Divine Right, pp. 43–45.
58. Burnet, pp. 3–4.
59. For testimony to Grotius’s immense influence in the seventeenth century, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 3, 58 and passim.
60. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis I.iii.8, I.iv.2, 6; cf. II.iv.8 (rejection of the doctrine of Vindiciae contra tyrannos). On Grotius on the alienablity of liberty, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 58–81, and Andrew, Shylock’s Rights, pp. 81–97.
61. Grotius, I.iii.16, 17; I.iv.7, 8. Cf. II.v.30, 31; II.vi.3, 4.
62. Defoe, “Reflections upon the Late Great Revolution,” pp. 29, 33, 34, 41, 42, 45–49, 57, 62, 65, 66. Conservative emphases remained in Defoe’s later works, even after his writings began to reveal strong Lockean influences; cf. “The Original Powers of the People of England, Examined and Asserted,” pp. 135, 136, 157, 158, 160.
63. Julian Franklin (Locke, pp. 131–35) takes up the question of whether Locke’s Treatises had perhaps influenced Burnet in the latter’s preparation of the “Enquiry.” The Treatises was yet unpublished, but both men were living in Holland. Franklin rejects the idea, but not, it seems to me, for the really decisive reasons. He notes, importantly, that Burnet could have taken over his doctrine from Grotius, but he fails to note the differences between Burnet-Grotius and Locke–Declaration of Independence.
64. Thus Goldie says of Locke, “He presented the unacceptable face of Whiggism” (“Revolution of 1689,” p. 518). Even in this very conservative form, Burnet’s contractarianism may have seemed too radical for his sponsors. Shortly after his “Enquiry,” he issued several other pamphlets in which contractarian arguments dropped out. As Goldie suggests, this may also reflect William’s efforts to straddle Whig and Tory positions. In this respect, William played his hand much as the Convention Parliament did. See pp. 510–21.
65. In addition to Defoe, consider, for instance, Robert Ferguson’s “A Word to the Wise for Settling the Government,” in A Compleat Collection of Papers. It is perhaps significant that Ferguson was with Burnet (and William) in Holland. On Ferguson, see Höpfl and Thompson, “History of Contract,” p. 942; Goldie, “The Roots of True Whiggism,” p. 211; Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights, pp. 160–61. Consider also William Atwood, The Fundamental Constitution of the English Government (1690). On Atwood, see Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 587. See also Hampden, “Some Short Considerations Concerning the State of the Nation,” esp. pp. lxxii–lxxiii. According to Dickinson, the Whigs typically attempted “to conflate the contract theory with the more conservative notion of the ancient constitution” (Liberty and Property, p. 71; cf. pp. 72, 77 for explicit contrast to Locke).
66. I am not the first to find a two-sidedness in Grotius’s political philosophy that spawned both a conservative and a liberal following. Cf. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, for a sustained treatment of Grotius along these lines. It is also of interest to consider Filmer’s discussion of Grotius in his Patriarcha, pp. 66, 69, 71, 72, and in his Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, p. 271, both in Patriarcha and Other Political Works. My conclusion about the essentially un-Lockean character of this group of Whig writings runs counter to the explicit conclusion of Franklin (John Locke, pp. 100–101, 108, 119–20, 122) that they (or some of them) were “Lawsonians,” which Franklin considers Locke also to have been. My difference with Franklin is simple to state: They were Grotians and Locke was not. How George Lawson relates to Grotius I am not in a position to say, other than to note that Franklin concedes Lawson’s frequent reliance on Grotius (cf. pp. 53–86). A treatment of Grotius relevant to his relation to Locke is Cox, “Hugo Grotius,” pp. 386–95. Franklin (p. 122 n. 71) concedes that his Lawsonians press a theory that Locke did not explicitly discuss, although he believes Locke did or would accept it.
67. Cf. Sexbie, Killing Noe Murder, pp. 372, 373, 375, cf. 377, 378. Sexbie’s work was actually written in the closing years of the Protectorate, but it, like Milton’s Tenure, was reprinted at the time of the Glorious Revolution. (Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights, pp. 155–56). For other references to Grotius, see “Some Short Considerations Relating to the Settling of the Government” in Somers, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts 10:275; Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government I.11; II.7, 24, 27, 30; III.1, 2, 9, 10, 23, 29, 31, 38, 42.
68. Wildman, “A Letter to a Friend,” pp. 14, 15. Cf. “Short Considerations Relating to . . . Government,” p. 274; Sexbie, Killing Noe Murder, pp. 365–73.
69. Humphrey, “Good Advice Before It Be Too Late,” p. 21.
70. Ibid., pp. 21, 22. Cf. Robert Ferguson’s “A Brief Justification of the Prince of Orange’s Descent into England,” as discussed in Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 567–69; on the evidence of this pamphlet he probably belongs here, with the “left Grotians,” rather than with Burnet.
71. “Short Considerations Relating to . . . Government,” pp. 274–75. Defoe (“Reflections,” pp. 42–51, 63–64) also runs through the Grotian list. See also Sexbie, who draws a more radical conclusion than Grotius, but on Grotian premises (Killing Noe Murder, pp. 375–78, and esp. p. 364).
72. “Short Considerations,” p. 274; Grotius, De Jure II.ix.8.
73. See also Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 72–77.
74. Some fine examples of Whig writings that, on balance, appear to betray more of Richard Hooker than of any of the thinkers we have discussed are Hunt’s, “The Great and Weighty Considerations, etc. Considered,” its companion piece “An Answer to a Pamphlet Lately Published,” and “A Word Without Doors Concerning the Bill for Succession.” See also Sexbie, Killing Noe Murder, p. 373; although he shows much Grotian influence, there is something of Hooker in him also. Hooker, along with Grotius, is frequently identified by Whig speakers and writers as an authority (Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights, p. 206). On Hooker and Locke, see Zuckert, “Of Wary Physicians and Weary Readers,” pp. 59–60; Cox, Locke on War and Peace, pp. 49–64.
75. Consider Grotius on punishment under the law of nature (De Jure II.xx), and Sexbie’s development of Grotius on this theme. Grotius was both more conservative and more radical than the Vindiciae on the issue of resistance. He did not accept the argument of the Vindiciae that lower magistrates had a general exemption from the duty to obedience; but on the other hand, when resistance was justifiable it was not limited to the lower magistrates (I.iv.6).
76. Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 53, I.i.11. I therefore largely accept Tuck’s conclusion (Natural Rights Theories, p. 3) that Grotius is the chief source of Whig theory.
77. Franklin, John Locke, p. 117.
78. Ibid., pp. 104, 113. Cf. Thompson, “Reception of Locke,” p. 188; Nenner, “Constitutional Uncertainty,” p. 295, where he speaks of an “incapacitating fear of extending the revolution too far.” On the consequences of Whig hesitancy to follow the radicals, see Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 598.
1. Cf. Tuck (Natural Rights Theories, p. 3), who concludes that Grotius was the chief source of Whig political theory.
2. Lee, Hugo Grotius, p. 50.
3. On Grotius as attempting to “protestantize” the natural law, see Dunning, A History of Political Theories, pp. 153–54. On Suárez’s unpopularity in seventeenth-century Europe, especially in England, see St. Leger, The “Etiamsi Daremus” of Hugo Grotius, pp. 106–8. According to St. Leger, Grotius was eager for a good reception both from France’s Louis XIII—a fact evident from the dedication of his book—and from the Catholic Church. Grotius did not, however, tailor his book very well to the latter, in that he failed to recognize the “titles” of the Pope (p. 22).
4. See Bellarmine, De Postestate Summi Pontificis in Rebus Temporalibus, chapters 2, 3, 6, 13; Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae et Apostolicae III.xxiii; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard II.44 (quoted by Dino Bigongiari, ed., in The Political Ideas of Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1953), p. xxxiv).
5. For speculation on why De Jure was placed on the Index, see St. Leger, Etiamsi, p. 22.
6. “List of Editions and Translations,” in Grotius, De Jure, 2:877–86.
7. Laslett, introduction, to Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 137–38.
8. “List of Editions,” pp. 885–86.
9. On Grotius’s general fame in Europe, see Dunning: “For twenty-five years before [Hobbes] wrote, Protestant Europe and the most progressive thinkers of all nations had recognized Grotius as the exponent of ultimate truth in political theory” (History of Political Theories, p. 301; cf. p. 303).
10. See Lee, Hugo Grotius, pp. 35–36.
11. I do not believe this claim to be inconsistent with Grotius’s description of his relation to the “controversies of our age.” He had not formulated his theory with an eye to these controversies, he said, but “just as mathematicians consider figures separated from bodies, so I have led my mind away from every individual fact in treating law (right)” (De Jure, Proleg. 58). Cf. Lee, pp. 56–57.
12. Grotius, De Jure II.xv.8. Cf. Giorgio Del Vecchio’s recognition of the religious and political necessities that led Grotius “to place law on a more secular foundation” (St. Leger, Etiamsi, pp. 32–33).
13. De Jure, Proleg. 48.
14. Ibid., Proleg. 50; cf. esp. II.xiii.3 (on God’s immutability). For forerunners who develop a doctrine of separation between natural and divine positive law, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II Q 71 A 6 ad 5; Suárez, De Legibus II.vi.3. On the mixing of Scripture and the law of nature, cf. Edwards, Hugo Grotius, pp. 35–39. For examples of the greater stringency of Christianity than the law of nature, see De Jure II.ii.6; regarding war and the right of self-defense; see III.i.8, 10. Relevant is Grotius’s depreciation of oaths, II.xiii.21.
15. De Jure I.i.10. See Proleg. 12, on the great difference between the law of nature and the will of God. See also Lee, Hugo Grotius, p. 54; Edwards, Hugo Grotius, pp. 56–59, 63–64; Ingber, “The Tradition of Grotius and Human Rights,” p. 368.
16. De Jure, Proleg. 11. According to Grotius, it would be a serious moral fault to grant that there is no God, or that God does not care about human affairs. He apparently did not consider it to be an equally great intellectual fault. Cf. Locke, Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, Question I (fol. 9). St. Leger has canvassed the role of Grotius’s hypothesis in prior scholastic natural law philosophy; he challenges the view that Grotius was altogether innovatory in positing a natural law perhaps entirely independent of God, and maintains that the Spanish writer Vasquez made an assertion similar to Grotius’s, and was probably Grotius’s source for the idea (Etiamsi, pp. 3, 112, 116, 118, 120, 121, 130–33). St. Leger overstates Grotius’s congruence with Vasquez, however, because he considers only the etiamsi (pp. 1–2); he therefore may overstate his genuinely helpful challenge to common views about Grotius’s innovativeness (cf. pp. 28–30). Grotius’s relation to his predecessors is considered later in this chapter.
17. De Jure, Proleg. 46.
18. Ibid., Proleg. 28, 32, 36. An important part of his effort was to limit the religious grounds of just war. Cf. II.xx.40, 45, 46; cf. also II.xxv.8, on “pretexts” for war.
19. Ibid., Proleg. 39, 40, 56; I.1.10 (but cf. I.iii.1). On the role of the quest for certainty in Descartes as prompted by Christianity see Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4:102–38. The case of Grotius goes a long way toward discrediting Heidegger’s account of the origins and character of modernity.
20. Cf. Cook, History of Political Philosophy from Plato to Burke, p. 428; Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought, pp. 61–62. On Grotius’s concern for certainty, see his chapter “On Interpretation”: not only does he develop the law of nature so as to consist of principles of a clarity and definiteness comparable to mathematics, but he develops a set of rules for interpreting human promises as agreements in order “to establish some degree of certainty,” which is necessary for there “to be any binding obligations” (De Jure II.xvi.1). Grotius does concede, however, that there are limits to the certainty possible in “moral reasonings” and that there is “much truth” in Aristotle’s assertions to this effect (II.xxiii.1). Cf. Samuel Pufendorf’s reaction to this concession (De Jure Naturae et Gentium I.ii.9).
21. Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 5. Part of Grotius’s practical effort was the encouragement of Christian unity against non-Christians; thus his advocacy of a “Christian league” (II.xv.12).
22. Ibid., Proleg. 42: “Among the philosophers Aristotle deservedly holds the foremost place.” This is not to deny that Grotius openly deviates from Aristotle—indeed, he does on the very issue of virtue as a mean (see Proleg. 43–44). Nonetheless, the quest for moderation marks nearly every part of Grotius’s great treatise; he seeks “a true middle ground” (Proleg. 29). Grotius aims at Aristotelian moderation so far as that is compatible with the kind of certainty he also seeks. That quest for certainty compromises his commitment to moderation, but since it is in the service of opposing the even greater immoderation of his age’s theo-politics, one might say that Grotius chooses the lesser immoderation for the sake of countering the greater.
23. A good discussion of Grotius’s distinction between the nature of supreme power (sovereignty) and absolute possession of it is in Cox, “Grotius,” p. 392. This distinction allows Grotius to accept the doctrine of sovereignty but to reject the necessary absolutism that might seem to follow from it.
24. Ingber, “Tradition of Grotius,” p. 367.
25. Consider Ernst Troeltsche’s estimate that Grotius was the first to elevate contract to importance (cited in St. Leger, Etiamsi, p. 35).
26. There persists a fundamental uncertainty over Grotius’s place in the natural law tradition. Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, and many others following them saw in Grotius “the founder of the modern theory of natural law.” Some more recent scholars have emphasized instead Grotius’s fundamental continuity with medieval natural law theory. See D’Entreves, Natural Law, pp. 50–51 and references therein, and Dunning, History of Political Theories, pp. 153–57. Also important are Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, chapter 3; St. Leger, Etiamsi; Edwards, Hugo Grotius. Although I cannot here attempt a systematic statement regarding all the issues in the debate over Grotius’s place in the tradition, the attentive reader will probably understand my views as somewhat intermediary between the contesting parties. I believe both parties are correct, in a sense. Grotius did make an important break with the natural law tradition he inherited, but that break was not as fundamental as the further shift away from his position (and the tradition) that characterized later natural rights theory, including, most importantly for this discussion, that of Locke and the American founders. From the perspective of Lockean doctrine, Grotius looks conservative and rather traditional; from the perspective of Thomas or Suárez, Grotius looks innovatory.
27. Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae VI.iv.15.
28. For other elements of difference, consult the earlier discussion of Burnet and the “left Grotians,” and cf. Suárez, Defensio VI.iv.2, 4, 12, 13, 14. For an instructive presentation of Grotius’s doctrine, see De Jure I.iv.7. Many commentators (e.g., Dunning, History of Political Theories, p. 153, and Edwards, Hugo Grotius, passim) overstate the similarities between Grotius and Suárez. Edwards (pp. 152–54) concedes the important differences on the right of resistance.
29. Suárez, De Legibus III.i.1, 2; cf. III.ii.3.
30. Ibid., III.i.5, 11; III.ii.1, 3.
31. Ibid., III.iii.1; II.xvi.12; III.iv.1, 2, 5.
32. Ibid., III.ii.4. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II Q 90 A 3 ad 2; Q 97 A 3 ad 3.
33. De Legibus III.ii.2.
34. Bellarmine, De Laicis, chapter 6, quoted in Roger, Political Philosophy of the Blessed Cardinal Bellarmine, pp. 51–52. Richard Hooker, too, taught a doctrine very similar to that of Suárez and Bellarmine (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.x.4–5). Cf. the conclusion, on the relations of Grotius to the scholastics, in St. Leger, Etiamsi, pp. 46–55. In general, see my chapter 8.
35. The failure to appreciate the force of will or convention in Grotius mars James Tully’s otherwise thoughtful discussion in A Discourse on Property (e.g., p. 82).
36. Grotius, De Jure II.xx.7, 40; cf. I.x.10 and II.xx.3, 8, 9. On the relation between the power to punish and the doctrine of just war, see II.xx.40 and II.xxv.1, 6, 7, 8. On the very different role of the Fall in originating coercive power in Suárez, see De Legibus III.i.12. Grotius’s clear affirmation of natural equality relates to his discovery of the source of political power in an original individual power (cf. De Jure II.xx.4).
37. Suárez, De Legibus II.xviii.4, III.iv.4. One must, however, consider the slightly complicating issue of private war. See Grotius, De Jure I.iii.1–2, III.iii; Suárez, Opus de Triplici Virtute Theologico: De Charitate, Disp. XIII 1.4, on private war, and that disputation generally on just war.
38. De Jure, Proleg. 1, 3. Cf. St. Leger, Etiamsi, p. 10, on Grotius and the “Machiavellian abyss.” For an especially clear case of Grotius’s anti-Machiavellianism, cf. III.xxii.5 with Machiavelli, Discourses II.12.
39. De Jure, Proleg. 5, 6; cf. Cicero, De Re Publica III.xxi.
40. See De Jure, Proleg. 4.
41. The source for Grotius’s version of Carneades appears to be Lactantius, The Divine Institutes V.xvi.2–4.
42. De Jure, Proleg. 5. Cf. Cicero, De Re Publica III.xi; Suárez, De Legibus II.ix.8.
43. De Jure, Proleg. 5.
44. Ibid., Proleg. 3, 5.
45. The challenges were perhaps not entirely unrelated to each other. Cf. Lactantius (Institutes V.xvi.2–13), who endorses the Carneadean critique over and against the defenses of natural right by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
46. See De Jure, Proleg. 41.
47. Corpus Juris Civilis, Institutes I.ii, Digest I.i. Cf. Villey, Leçons d’histoire de la philosophie du droit, p. 228. For discussion of the view that jus naturale is mere “rhetorical ornament,” see Zuckert, “Bringing Philosophy Down from the Heavens,” pp. 70–71.
48. Sigmund, Natural Law, pp. 24–25; Schulz, Geschichte der romischer Rechts-Wissenschaft, p. 88; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1373b-1375b. For discussion of the philosophic roots, see Villey, Leçons d’histoire, pp. 20, 30–32; cf. Schulz, Geschichte, pp. 84–91.
49. Institutes I.ii; Digest I.i.
50. Institutes, II.i.11; I.ii.pr.
51. Cicero, De Legibus I.2; Digest I.i.2. For brief accounts of the Stoic position, see Sigmund, Natural Law, pp. 20–26, and Holton, “Cicero.”
52. See D’Entreves, Natural Law, pp. 31–32.
53. Institutes I.ii.1, 2.
54. See D’Entreves, p. 30.
55. See Institutes I.iii; Digest I.i.1, 4, 5.
56. Digest I.i.1.
57. See Lee, Elements of Roman Law, p. 35; Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 146–52.
58. Digest I.i.6.
59. Institutes I.ii.2.
60. The jurists’ treatment of the themes of nature and natural right is thus very close to Aristotle’s treatment of the same themes. On the coexistence of several notions of nature in Aristotle, see Politics, book 1. On the nature of natural right, see Ethics, book 5; and cf. Strauss’s controversial interpretation in Natural Right, pp. 156–63.
61. Cook, History of Political Philosophy, p. 434. Cook claims that Grotius deploys “the same distinction” between jus naturale and jus gentium as the Roman lawyers did. Perhaps also to the point is Dunning’s claim that Grotius’s theory is more like Cicero than like Thomas (History of Political Theories, p. 164).
62. Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 53. See III.ii for examples of natural law provisions the Roman law endorses.
63. Ibid., Proleg. 40, 53.
64. Ibid., Proleg., 30, 37, 38, 40, 56. See II.xv.5, 6 and III.iii.6, 8, 11 for good examples of Grotius’s attempts to distinguish the three kinds of law on particular questions. See also the discussion of Burnet in my chapter 4. On the distinction of laws, see Ingber, “Tradition of Grotius,” p. 370.
65. De Jure, Proleg. 30–1.
66. Ibid., Proleg. 40; cf. I.i.10, III.i.1.
67. Ibid., Proleg. 5.
68. Ibid., Proleg. 6.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., Proleg. 11; Aristotle, Politics 1278b19–21; cf. 1280a25–1281a6.
71. De Jure, Proleg. 7; cf. Politics 1253a1–18.
72. See Grotius’s definition of the unjust as “what conflicts with the nature of the society of beings endowed with reason” (De Jure I.i.2); also Cox, “Grotius”, p. 387.
73. De Jure, Proleg. 8; I.i.10.
74. Ibid., I iii.
75. See Sabine, A History of Political Theory, p. 430.
76. Tuck, Natural Rights, p. 81; Cox, “Grotius,” p. 394.
77. De Jure I.ii.1; II.v.9, 15.
78. Ibid., I.i.12.
79. Ibid., I.ii.1, I.iv.2; cf. I.ii.5. Grotius’s comments at II.i.4 and III.i.2 complicate, but do not say anything different from, the passages cited in the text, as, for example, III.i.4 shows. Cf. Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae VI.iv.5. Cf. Grotius’s interesting discussion of the primacy of social needs over individual rights at II.xxv.3 (the law of nature allows sacrifice of an innocent to an enemy).
80. This is the context of Grotius’s use of “state of nature” in II.vii.27.
81. See previous chapters, esp. chapter 4.
82. De Jure, Proleg. 10. Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1281b38–1282a24, 1282b14–1283a23; Ethics 1131a1-b24.
83. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II Q 94 A 3; cf. I-II Q 90 A 4.
84. De Jure I.i.8.
85. Terminology becomes very difficult at this point, for in the passage in question Grotius contrasts jus (right or law) and lex (law or statute). F. J. C. Hearnshaw (Some Great Political Idealists, p. 100) suggests that Grotius prefers jus to lex because the former term “connotes ‘right’ irrespective of its origin,” whereas lex “suggests statutory enactment.” Hearnshaw sees a connection to Grotius’s well-known attempt to make the law of nature independent of God’s will, as opposed to Suárez, for example, who used the term lex naturalis. Hearnshaw’s suggestion is persuasive up to a point, but two considerations need to be added to his discussion. First, as Edwards (Hugo Grotius, pp. 54–59) nicely shows, Suárez goes very far toward the purely rationalist notion Grotius defends, and Grotius goes far toward the voluntarist notion Hearnshaw associates (too simply) with Suárez. Secondly, Grotius’s terminology relates to his differentiation of jus in the strict and proper sense from a more extended sense of jus. In making this distinction, Grotius both follows and modifies the Ockhamist tradition wherein the doctrine of right as subjective right developed (cf. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, passim). In Grotius’s case, but not so clearly in the case of the earlier Ockhamists, there is the further factor that Grotius means to limit the notions of law in the proper sense to justice which—on etymological grounds, if no other—must have suggested to Grotius the superiority of jus over lex.
86. De Jure I.i.9. See also III.xi.3 for the distinction between different sorts of obligations. Cf. III.i.8, where failure to note adequately the place of obligation is identified as one problem with the Roman lawyers’ treatment of jus gentium. Also see II.xi.6.
87. Ibid., Proleg. 19, 20; I.i.9.
88. Ibid., Proleg. 8, 9.
89. Ibid., Proleg. 10, 41; I.i.8. Cf. esp. Plato, Republic I.
90. De Jure, Proleg. 10, 44; cf. I.ii.4 (definition of civitas). (Cf. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 67, 72.) This is the context in which to take up Grotius’s critique of Aristotle’s treatment of virtue as a mean (Proleg. 44–46).
91. Grotius suggests that his usage is the same as the Roman lawyers’, but this claim is quite untenable as a general description of their practice. For a discussion, see Zuckert, “Bringing Philosophy Down,” pp. 74–75. The distinction between objective and subjective right is, of course, not to be confused with the similar-sounding distinction casually made between objective and subjective statements, in which the latter are taken to be “merely subjective,”, that is, illusory or invalid. A subjective right inheres in a subject, but that casts no doubt on its validity. Compare the distinction between “the naturally right” and “natural rights,” drawn by Ewart Lewis in “The Contribution of Medieval Thought to the American Political Tradition,” p. 467.
92. Suárez, De Legibus I.ii.5. On the primacy of objective right in Roman law, see Villey, Seize essais, pp. 149–53; idem, Leçons d’histoire, pp. 29–30, 183–88, 224–40.
93. Cf. note 26, above. I thus disagree with the oft-expressed view that Grotius is not original, that he essentially follows Suárez. For a typical expression, see Dunning, History of Political Theories, p. 164; also Edwards, Hugo Grotius, passim.
94. De Jure I.i.8.
95. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II Q 94 A 3.
96. Ibid., A 2.
97. Ibid., Thomas explicitly quotes the Digest in this context.
98. Ibid.
99. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 175–76. For a survey of assessments of Grotius’s position as founder of modern natural law, see Edwards, Hugo Grotius, chapters 2 and 3. On the other side, see Dunning, who argues that Hobbes’s system was an undisguised attack on that of Grotius (A History of Political Theories, p. 301).
100. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 6.
101. Ibid., chapter 46.
102. It is tempting to see Grotius as more or less equivalent to Marsilius of Padua: both thinkers who remained within the broad confines of Aristotelian political philosophy but who were driven to reformulate the Aristotelian philosophy in order to respond to political deformations produced by Christianity—in Marsilius’s case, the deformities caused by papal pretensions, in Grotius’s, the deformities caused by the Reformation. Both generated new political doctrines that later became disassociated from their Aristotelian roots and became central elements of modern political philosophy. On Marsilius, see Strauss, “Marsilius of Padua,” pp. 276–95. Cf. Dunning, History of Political Theories: “Grotius’s ethical system is essentially that of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics” (p. 164).
103. Grotius, De Jure I.i.3; Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 14 (pp. 89–90). On the related theme of the relation between modern doctrines of rights and Grotius, see Ingber, “Tradition of Grotius,” pp. 358–65.
104. See Hearnshaw, Some Great Political Idealists, p. 82.
105. ”See Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 73: the law of nature obliges human beings to seek the preservation of social peace, to which end respect for each other’s rights is a chief means.
106. De Jure, Proleg. 23.
107. Cf. Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 163–64. I have deliberately passed over the complex issue of the status of positive laws that are not congruent with natural law. It should be obvious that Grotius does not accept the Thomist notion that civil law is a deduction from natural law (Summa Theologica I-II Q 45 AA 1, 2). Ingber’s claim that the natural law serves as “the criterion of the validation of the law of nations” (“Tradition of Grotius,” p. 374) is problematical if he means that the contents of the two laws must converge in order for the jus gentium to be valid. The jus gentium (as well as the jus civile) often speaks when the natural law is silent—that is, it adds legal requirements where none existed according to nature alone—and in such cases there can be no question of congruence of content. Grotius even usually concedes a kind of validity to positive law that goes against the natural law. Such, he usually says, creates an immunity, if not a perfect right. See De Jure I.i.10; II.ii.6; II.xii.22, 26; III.iv.2–3.
108. De Jure, Proleg. 30. For Grotius, this science of law was also truly autonomous from political science (Ibid., Proleg. 57).
109. See, for example, Dunning, History of Political Theories, pp. 169, 175; Sabine, History of Political Theory, p. 429; Friedrich, Inevitable Peace, p. 122; Edwards, Hugo Grotius, p. 105. These claims are often based on inattentive readings; cf. Dunning, p. 176.
110. De Jure, Proleg. 8.
111. Ibid., Proleg. 15.
112. Sabine, History of Political Theory, p. 430. See also Ingber, “Tradition of Grotius,” p. 366, for a similar claim.
113. De Jure II.xi,4. Cf. Edwards’s helpful but somewhat different account of obligation in Suárez and Grotius (Hugo Grotius, pp. 54–69). On reason and obligation of promise, consider also Grotius’s very non-Kantian discussion of deception and truth-telling (De Jure III.i.7–22). Ingber makes a helpful observation when he notes that in Grotius the “obligation to keep one’s word is no longer, as in St. Thomas’s time, the consequence of a universal duty of truth rooted in the natural order, but a rule, a form of self-will, the result of man’s ability to associate” (“Tradition of Grotius,” pp. 363–66). Ingber’s observation (and essay) would be yet more valuable if he could settle on an understanding of the relationship between “self-will” and “sociability”; the statement just quoted captures his confusion on the question.
114. De Jure, Proleg. 17, 21.
115. Cf. Grotius’s explicit efforts to show the effectiveness of jus (Ibid., Proleg. 19–22).
116. I agree, therefore, with Tuck’s claim (Natural Rights Theories, p. 58) that Grotius made possible the late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of rights, but I understand that claim in a very different way.
1. Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution; cf. Becker, The Declaration of Independence, passim; Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution,” pp. 4–6; idem, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. vii; Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, pp. 260–88; Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 9–10; Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” p. 59; Tate, “The Social Contract in America,” pp. 370–85; Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 5–6, 13–38; Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 5–6.
2. See Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” p. 49; idem, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” p. 334–35; Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, p. 9; Greenstone, “Against Simplicity,” p. 455; Sherry, “The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution,” p. 326. See O’Brien, “The Framer’s Muse,” p. 122, for reference to the role of the “republican revival” in recent constitutional studies.
3. Lienesch, The New Order of the Ages, p. 5. See also Kramnick, Republicanism, pp. 261–63; Shalhope, “Republicanism,” p. 335.
4. Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” p. 461.
5. Lipset, The First New Nation.
6. Appleby, p. 462.
7. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” p. 51; cf. pp. 54, 57, 70–71; Wood, Creation, pp. 47, 53; Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 6, 7: “The republican synthesis has completely replaced the Locke model.”
8. There are exceptions, esp. Thomas Pangle in The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (esp. pp. 28–39); and Diggins in Lost Soul. Both Pangle and Diggins are “root and branch” critics of the republican synthesis. Others are revisionists, challenging various features of the synthesis but accepting important parts of it as well; see, for example, Kramnick, Republicanism, chapter 6; Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order. Dworetz, in Unvarnished Doctrine, stands somewhere between the revisionists and the others.
9. One scholar who does notice is Greenstone, “Against Simplicity,” p. 439.
10. See, for example, Greenstone, pp. 439–40; Diggins, Lost Soul, pp. 9–11; Sherry, “Intellectual Origins,” pp. 335–40; Lienesch, New Order, p. 5. A more sophisticated version is Dworetz, in Unvarnished Doctrine, who recognizes real differences between the synthesizers (e.g., pp. 107–8), but who does not take his insights in this regard far enough, continuing to treat republicanism as a single “paradigm.”
11. Shalhope, “Republicanism”, p. 334. A thorough discussion of pre-Bailyn contributions can be found in Shalhope’s “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” pp. 51–65; On Bailyn’s role, cf. pp. 65ff; Lienesch, New Order, pp. 4–5; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 216.
12. Cf. Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 23; Matthews, Radical Politics, pp. 5–7.
13. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, p. vii. Cf. Peter Onuf’s judgment that the great achievement of the synthesizers was to redefine the American Revolution as an ideological transformation (“Reflections on the Founding,” p. 346).
14. Bailyn, “Central Themes,” pp. 4–6; Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” pp. 21–22.
15. Bailyn, pp. 6, 7, 10, 11.
16. Ibid., p. 11; cf. pp. 14–15. For a thoughtful critique of ideology as thus understood, see Lerner, Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 1–38. For an appreciation of the shift Bailyn effected in the role of ideas, see Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” p. 462.
17. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 22–34; idem, “Central Themes,” pp. 7–10.
18. Ideological Origins, p. 26. Thus Lienesch overstates the case in claiming that Bailyn ultimately traced the American ideology “to its earliest origins in the classical republican thought of Aristotle, Cicero, and certain of the Greek and Roman historians” (New Order, p. 5). Such statements are part of the effort to “paper over the fissures” in the so-called republican synthesis.
19. Ideological Origins, p. 31.
20. Ibid., p. 32.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
22. Ibid., p. 30; cf. “Central Themes,” p. 10.
23. Ibid., p. 28.
24. Cf. Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 111–13.
25. Ideological Origins, p. 45.
26. Ibid., pp. viii, 34.
27. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, esp. pp. 22–56. On the shallowness of Robbins’s analysis, see Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 107–8. A more substantial and yet still inconclusive statement appears in Bailyn, “Central Themes,” p. 9.
28. “Central Themes,” pp. 7–8.
29. Ideological Origins, p. 77. For a fine discussion of Bailyn’s ambiguity, see Webking, The American Revolution, pp. 163–64.
30. “Central Themes,” p. 10. A critique of Bailyn’s understanding of Locke’s “ambiguous” ideas is in Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 10.
31. “Central Themes,” p. 9.
32. Ideological Origins, pp. 95, 102, 121–22, 144–48; “Central Themes,” p. 12.
33. Cf. Ideological Origins, pp. 199–200; Wood, Creation, p. 200; Greene, “The Ostensible Cause Was . . . the True One,” p. 201.
34. Ideological Origins, p. 77; cf. pp. 188–89.
35. Webking, American Revolution, pp. 13–14; Schmitt and Webking, “Revolutionaries, Anti-Federalists, and Federalists,” p. 199.
36. Wood, Creation, pp. ix, 18–28.
37. Ibid., pp. 14–16.
38. Ibid., pp. 48, 49; idem, “The Intellectual Origins of the American Constitution,” p. 6.
39. Creation, p. 50; cf. “Intellectual Origins,” p. 6.
40. Creation, p. 29. Wood’s qualifying “perhaps” must be noted, clearly distinguishing him from Pocock and his followers (cf. p. 14). In “Illusions and Disillusions in the American Revolution,” Wood explicitly labeled the Americans as Lockean in their acceptance of “sensationalism” and a (modified) “Lockean environmentalism.” Wood’s hesitation followed from his clear recognition of the great role of Lockean ideas, which his intimate knowledge of the source material could not allow him to ignore. For example, he spoke of how “meaningful” the “Lockean notion of a social contract” was in the years after 1776 (Creation, p. 283). But he did downplay its role before 1776, for reasons we shall see below.
41. “Intellectual Origins,” p. 7.
42. Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” p. 464. Thus Shalhope spoke more truly than he realized when he looked to Wood as the chief locus of “the republican synthesis” (“Toward a Republican Synthesis,” pp. 70–72); cf. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 216–17.
43. Wood, Creation, p. 47.
44. Ibid., pp. 53, 58. For a partially concurrent and partially dissenting understanding of Wood, see Banning, “Some Second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of Revolutionary Thinking,” pp. 197–200.
45. Creation, pp. 67, 68, 69.
46. Ibid., pp. 29, 53, 58; cf. Sherry, “Intellectual Origins,” p. 336.
47. Creation, p. 60.
48. Virtue did play some role in Bailyn; see Ideological Origins, pp. 65, 133, 138.
49. Ibid., pp. 24, 61; cf. Sherry, “Intellectual Origins,” p. 334. A more nuanced view may be found in McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, pp. 37, 39, 82.
50. But cf. Wood’s vacillating statements on rights: Creation, pp. 4, 10, 20–23, 63.
51. Schmitt and Webking, “Revolutionaries,” p. 198.
52. Wood shrank from consistently pressing the differences. He knew the primary materials too well not to see the pervasiveness of the Declaration’s alternative conceptions, but he either lamely and inconsistently attempted to integrate these elements into his classical republicanism, or he ignored, as far as he could, the competing data. As Schmitt and Webking point out, he nowhere discussed the Declaration of Independence (Ibid., p. 199). For testimonial to the either/or character of republicanism and the Declaration, see Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” p. 59; Lerner, Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 9–10; Lutz, “Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and Whig Political Theory,” p. 141. But also consider Wood, “Ideology and the Origins of Liberal America,” p. 634. See also Agresto, “Liberty, Virtue, and Republicanism,” Banning, “Some Second Thoughts,” p. 209 n. 22.
53. Wood, Creation, p. viii.
54. Ibid., p. 606.
55. Ibid., pp. 606–8, 610.
56. Sherry, “Intellectual Origins,” p. 326.
57. Wood, Creation, pp. 513, 519 (but cf. pp. 523–24), 543.
58. Bailyn, “Central Themes,” pp. 22, 26; more generally, see pp. 18–21, 25, and Ideological Origins, chapters 5 and 6.
59. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideology in the Eighteenth Century” (1965), in Politics, Language, and Time.
60. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 106–7. Cf. Pocock’s misleading description of Bailyn in “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited,” pp. 49–50.
61. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 90; idem, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 58, 90; idem, “Machiavellian Moment Revisited,” p. 49; idem, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 38.
62. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 112, 114, 128.
63. Machiavellian Moment, p. 545.
64. Aristotle, Politics 1253a20–23.
65. Politics, Language, and Time, p. 85. Cf. Ross, “The Liberal Tradition Revisited and the Republican Tradition Addressed,” p. 117. On the adequacy of this interpretation of Aristotle, consider Zuckert, “Aristotle on the Limits and Satisfactions of Political Life.”
66. Machiavellian Moment, p. 67.
67. Politics, Language, and Time, p. 86.
68. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 68–71. Cf. Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited,” pp. 11–12.
69. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 71–74.
70. Ibid., p. 75; Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 87, 90, 93; Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 41–43; Pocock, introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 146–47.
71. Machiavellian Moment, p. 212. There is, of course, an implicit rejection of Wood’s position in this characterization. It becomes a little more explicit in Pocock’s “Between Gog and Magog,” p. 342.
72. Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 41.
73. I have emphasized the differences between Pocock and Wood; there are also significant differences between Pocock and Bailyn. Consider Pocock’s reinterpretation of the American Revolution in “1776: The Revolution against Parliament,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 73–88.
74. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 75–76; Politics, Language, and Time, p. 87.
75. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 204–5.
76. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” p. 122. An indication of Bailyn’s stance toward Pocock’s version of republicanism can be garnered from the former’s observations on the American attitude toward change. Prior to the 1760s, changes had “often . . . been condemned as deviations, as retrogressions”; but after 1765 the Americans took a very positive attitude toward change. (Ideological Origins, p. 20). Bailyn also argued that the “nostalgic” or “reactionary” attitude of Bolingbroke “was simply ignored” in favor of a new progressive attitude (“Central Themes,” p. 28).
77. Kramnick, Republicanism, p. 167. A concentrated statement by Pocock himself is in “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism.”
78. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 66. Cf. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 107, 144, 145; “Between Gog and Magog,” p. 339; Machiavellian Moment, p. 335.
79. Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 40, 45, 49; cf. pp. 59–60, 71.
80. Representative examples of the Pocockian denial of the “end of republicanism” thesis are Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 586–92; idem, introduction to Political Works of Harrington, pp. 149–50; Banning, “Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution”; idem, The Jeffersonian Persuasion. A review of the controversy over whether and where the republican tradition died is in Onuf, “Reflections on the Founding,” pp. 349–50, 352–53. Consider also the exchange between Lance Banning and Joyce Appleby: Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited”; Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts.” See also Lienesch, New Order, p. 6.
81. Wood, “Ideology,” p. 634. Cf. Appleby, “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology,” pp. 936–37.
82. Locke, Educational Writings, p. 400.
83. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 30, 1790, in Life and Selected Writings, pp. 496–97; “Minutes of the Board of Visitors, University of Virginia, 1822–25,” in Jefferson, p. 479.
84. But cf. Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 205.
85. Wood, “Ideology,” p. 634.
86. The republican sythesis, moreover, rests not only on the discovery or invention of a “republican” tradition, but on the strenuous reassessment of Locke’s role in the political thinking of the eighteenth century. The synthesizers endorse with enthusiasm Dunn, Wills, and other recent inventories that find Locke to have been relatively unimportant both in England and America, a conclusion Dworetz and others have shown to be unreliable. See Prologue.
87. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 341, 350, 359.
88. Ibid., pp. 365, 383, 384.
89. Pocock, introduction to Political Works of Harrington, pp. 136, 144; Davis, “Pocock’s Harrington,” p. 683. Cf. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 108, 130.
90. Machiavellian Moment, p. 386. Cf. Goodale, “J. G. A. Pocock’s Neo-Harringtonians,” p. 238.
91. For pre-Pocock readings of Harrington, consider Tawney, “Harrington’s Interpretation of His Age”; Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, chapter 6. Pocock’s critique of the quasi-Marxist Harrington seems to be the germ from which the whole of his amazing edifice has risen, for it was a major theme of his first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (see pp. 128–47) and the center from which his republicanism interpretation spread out in both directions. His specific response to Macpherson is in Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 108–11.
92. Machiavellian Moment, p. 390. Cf. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 90–91, 112–13. Pocock’s new reading has Harrington saying things about property “more important than anything Locke had to say” (introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 145). Cf. Sherry, “Intellectual Origins,” pp. 333–34.
93. Politics, Language, and Time, p. 114. Since my real concern is the Whig opposition tradition, that is, Pocock’s “neo-Harringtonians,” I do not pursue the question of the validity of Pocock’s interpretation of Harrington himself. Many questions have been raised about it, however. J. C. Davis, in “Pocock’s Harrington,” suggests that Pocock greatly distorts the real Harrington, or at least misses the real tension in the man, a tension constituted by his initial striving for civic virtue and his aspiration to a perfectly successful, machinelike republic, operating quite independently of the virtue or moral character of its citizens (pp. 695–96). Davis finds Harrington against civic virtue, and finds no basis in him for Pocock’s emphasis on man as zoon politikon (p. 696). J. R. Goodale, in “Pocock’s Neo-Harringtonians,” sees the problem in much the same way. He, too, sees the real Harringtonian legacy in terms of a political technology that makes of government “a mere piece of clockwork” (p. 218). Debates, then, that have emerged between republican synthesizers and others over the character of the political thought of the American founding (e.g., The Federalist) also exist over the thought of the alleged founder of the tradition, Harrington. These criticisms of Pocock on Harrington seem to me to be, at the least, very weighty. His response to them has been unsatisfactory, for he treats them as though they were a challenge simply to his terminology rather than to his understanding of the character of the thought in question. On Harrington’s Machiavellianism, see Mansfield, Taming the Prince, pp. 183–84.
94. See Machiavellian Moment, p. 450; and cf. Pocock’s own characterization of his contribution to the “republican synthesis” in Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 218: “It was a cardinal thesis with him [Pocock] that a persistent emphasis on the armed citizen . . . had entailed as an ideological consequence the ideal superiority of real over personal property, and that this had imparted an agrarian and classical character to eighteenth-century republicanism, infecting it with ineradicable doubts and ambivalences regarding the growth of a world commerce.”
95. Pocock’s most comprehensive list of neo-Harringtonians is in Politics, Language and Time, p. 340: Bolingbroke, Neville, Fletcher, Moyle, Toland, Molesworth, and Trenchard and Gordon.
96. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, p. 135; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 49; Machiavellian Moment, p. 385; cf. “Machiavellian Moment Revisited,” p. 60; Politics, Language, and Time, p. 120.
97. Politics, Language, and Time, p. 120; cf. p. 135. Cf. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, p. 261: “None will deny, that to alter our Monarchy into a Commonwealth were treason.”
98. Machiavellian Moment, p. 416; Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 133, 136, 138; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 129.
99. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 130, 133; “Machiavellian Moment Revisited,” p. 61. For speculation on the motive for transformation, see Politics, Language and Time, p. 128.
100. Introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 145; Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 92, 130–32. See also Machiavellian Moment, pp. 406–22.
101. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 90–92, 123, 131; cf. Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 48.
102. See Pocock, “Between Gog and Magog,” p. 340; Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 68.
103. Politics, Language, and Time, p. 136: “The neo-Harringtonians . . . were making an open attempt (as Harrington had not) to win support from country gentlemen discontented with the progress of Court government.” See also pp. 131, 132; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 138; Machiavellian Moment, p. 420; Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 94, 122, 124, 132 (also pp. 136–37, 141, on the historical deficiencies of the neo-Harringtonians).
104. Introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 129, 146.
105. Ibid., p. 129; Machiavellian Moment, p. 406; Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 115–16.
106. Cf. Machiavellian Moment, p. 415. The pamphlet has sometimes been attributed to John Locke, who at that time was a member of the earl’s household. A copy in his hand is the chief piece of evidence for this attribution, for the pamphlet has struck few readers as particularly Lockean in style. The authorship issue is discussed in Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury, pp. 391–93, and Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises, pp. 120–23. On the connections between Shaftesbury and Locke at the time of this pamphlet, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 65. There are elements in the pamphlet that speak against Shaftesbury’s authorship, especially the very flattering references to the earl sprinkled liberally throughout it.
107. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 406, 409, 417; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 130. Pocock thus conceded in advance the point raised in criticism by Davis (“Pocock’s Harrington,” p. 697), that Harrington had no “theory of corruption.”
108. Machiavellian Movement, pp. 406, 411, 412, 414; Politics, Language, and Time, p. 119.
109. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 406, 414–16. Consider Pocock’s summary statement: “The House of Lords, frequent parliaments, and the militia are being enlisted on the same side, that of the mixed and ancient constitution, whose enemy is something Harrington never thought of, the corruption of parliament by patronage and military professionalization. And the militia, to Harrington a new and revolutionary force, is being made ancient, Gothic, and compatible with a hereditary aristocracy—all things he had denied it could ever have been” (Machiavellian Moment, p. 416). Also see Politics, Language, and Time, p. 117: Harrington’s point “was something very far removed from what Shaftesbury was saying.”
110. On Pocock’s “a priorism,” consider Politics, Language and Time: “We already know that [Shaftesbury’s ideas] required to be expressed in Harringtonian concepts.” Pocock has not, however, established that necessity, and it is difficult to imagine an argument that could do so, especially in light of his admission that “few if any of their lordships had read Oceana or would recognize the source of his ideas” (p. 117).
111. Machiavellian Moment, p. 415; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 132.
112. Shaftesbury, “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. lxv. Cf. “A Letter from a Parliament-man to His Friend,” p. lxix.
113. Montesquieu, On the Spirit of the Laws, book 3; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, esp. vol. 1. In his earliest interpretation of Shaftesbury’s speeches, Pocock correctly identified his theme as “the Lords as a pouvoir intermediaire,” but called this “straight Harringtonian doctrine.” (Politics, Language, and Time, p. 116). The intermediate-power theme drops out of later versions, perhaps because there is nothing peculiarly or uniquely Harringtonian about that idea, especially not in the way Shaftesbury employs it. Cf. Schwoerer, No Standing Armies, pp. 113–14.
114. Pocock, Introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 131; see also Machiavellian Moment, pp. 413, 416; Politics, Language, and Time, p. 124. Cf. Marvell, Account, p. 325, for a treatment of the army issue in accord with Pocock’s; but see also, pp. 293, 298, 302–3, 306, 315.
115. Better on the standing-army issue in 1675 is Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 201–2: The Whigs feared that the king “intended to rely upon the army and the use of force, rather than upon elections and Parliament to support his policies. . . . An insistence upon no standing army, therefore, was second in importance only to the antipopery theme in the Whig campaign for exclusion, and the two themes were frequently intertwined. Thus, one aspect of the meaning of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ referred to the propensity of Catholic monarchs to rule by ‘force,’ that is, through a standing army, rather than by ‘consent’ through a Parliament.”
116. For a sketch of the debates over control of the military in the struggles leading up to 1642, see Schwoerer, No Standing Armies, introduction and chapters 2–3. Charles I had tried to reform and centralize the militia, efforts that inspired much of the opposition to him. From 1648 to 1660, the army was a regular and decisive participant in politics (chapter 4). Charles II gave statesmen like Shaftesbury reason to worry that he, too, sought to overawe the nation with military force in his recurrent effort to constitute a standing military force (chapters 5–6); that is, there was very good reason for Shaftesbury, Marvell, and the other Opposition writers to fear a standing army and to suspect the Crown of seeking to use it for illicit ends.
117. Ibid., p. 5; cf. pp. 42, 97, 105, 190. She adds another ground for the opposition to standing armies: they entail the arming of the lower classes (p. 13).
118. Machiavellian Moment, p. 414; “Letter from a Parliament-man,” p. lxix.
119. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 126–27; “Letter from a Person of Quality,” pp. lxii–lxiii, lxvii.
120. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 124–27. See also Machiavellian Moment, pp. 407–9, 417; introduction to Political Works of Harrington, pp. 129–33, 145–46.
121. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. xlv.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., p. lxiii.
124. Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 3–41, 273–91; Zuckert, “Appropriation and Understanding in the History of Political Philosophy,” pp. 403–24.
125. On the relation between Milton and Marvell, whom Pocock does discuss, see Cherniak, The Poet’s Muse, pp. 6, 74–79, 101, 102–50.
126. Pocock’s explanation for his omissions is unpersuasive. He claims that after the republication of Filmer’s works the most pressing task for Whig writers after 1679 was the refutation of Filmer and then, after 1689, the defense of the Glorious Revolution. These were tasks, he claims, not well carried out “in republican terms” (Machiavellian Moment, p. 421). The fact, is, however that a writer like Algernon Sidney, devoted to the refutation of Filmer and making arguments that could easily be pressed into service in defense of the revolution, wrote “in republican terms” throughout. Pocock’s omissions tend to support the diremption he posits between “liberal” and “republican” modes of thought.
127. Pocock refers to the relevant context in passing (see Machiavellian Moment, pp. 409, 412), but his analysis bears few marks of taking it seriously (see also Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 219). Part of Pocock’s reason for slighting the context is his tendency not to take the Whig fears very seriously. The original inspiration for his studies came from his animus against Whig history. Consider his relationship to Butterfield’s attack on Whig history (Ancient Constitution, pp. viii, 46, 208–9, 250).
128. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. xxix. Cf. Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, pp. 387–92; part of Shaftesbury’s diagnosis of the aim of Crown policy was based on the king’s opening speech to Parliament in 1675 (pp. 373–74).
129. Haley, p. 380.
130. Shaftesbury discerned in the oath a device originated by Archibishop Laud in 1640. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. 1xvi; see also p. xlii.
131. Ibid., pp. xxxix, liv. At the time of the Exclusion Bill, the bishops openly and loudly pressed divine right doctrines against Shaftesbury’s efforts to exclude the Catholic James (Haley, First Earl of Shaftesbury, pp. 367–68).
132. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” pp. 1xiv–1xvii. A strong anticlerical air pervades Shaftesbury’s pamphlet; see pp. xxxix, lv. Haley makes clear the role of the bishops in the formulation of Danby’s policies, in First Earl of Shaftesbury, pp. 367–68.
133. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” pp. xxxix, liv. See also Schwoerer, No Standing Armies, pp. 76, 83, 110–11.
134. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” pp. xlii–xliii. Cf. the role of the dispensing power in the Bill of Rights and the conflict leading up to the Glorious Revolution. This is not to say that constitutional issues of a more traditional sort did not figure in Whig political thought—as, for example, in Exclusion-era debates over Parliament’s power to regulate the succession. But these were not prominent in Shaftesbury’s 1675 statements; instead, one finds there the somewhat new and different thrust of analysis described in the text.
135. See ibid., pp. lxi, 1xii. Cf. Marvell, Account, pp. 279–82.
136. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. lxii. According to Haley, Shaftesbury was sensitive to the role of “place men” by at least 1664 (First Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 352).
137. Haley, p. 367.
138. “Letter from a Person of Quality,” p. lii. This is the one theme in the “Letter” that contains more than a shadow of what would later be Lockean doctrine.
139. Ibid., pp. xlvii–l. Consider also Shaftesbury’s position on the case of Shirley v. Fagg (Haley, pp. 382–83, 394).
140. Marvell, Account, pp. 248, 383.
141. Ibid., pp. 255, 262, 263.
142. See chapter 5. On Marvell’s need to present a loyal face, see Cherniak, Poet’s Muse, pp. 92–93. A different interpretation is in Wallace, Destiny His Choice.
143. Marvell, Account, p. 252. How plausible Marvell’s fears were remains a matter of controversy, but there are scholars who find them generally persuasive, for example, Annabel Patterson: “Knowledge of the secret clauses in the Treaty of Dover has given credibility to Marvell’s conspiracy theory” (Marvell and the Civic Crown, p. 252); cf. Cherniak, The Poet’s Muse, pp. 88–97, and in general, Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics.
144. Pocock, introduction to Political Works of Harrington, p. 130.
145. Cf. Marvell, Account, p. 315.
146. Ibid., pp. 325, 327, 331–32, 337.
147. For two particularly clear instances in which Pocock’s interpretative framework produces Marvellean stances quite distant from the original, see Machiavellian Moment, p. 409 (cf. Marvell’s Account, pp. 329–30), and Politics, Language, and Time, p. 123.
1. See, for example, Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, chapters 6, 7; Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, pp. 35–36, 84, 100, 187, 249, 340–44; Mayer, “English Radical Whig Origins of American Constitutionalism,” pp. 174–75, 190.
2. Even Martyn Thompson, the diagnostician of unicontractarianism, falls prey to the disease when he finds Locke’s Treatises essentially like earlier works by Tyrell, Sidney, and Pufendorf, who, Thompson says, were in turn very like the earlier writers who served as authorities for them, Grotius and Hooker (Thompson, “The Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises,” pp. 184–85).
3. A recent post-“republican synthesis” survey of the American sources reaffirms the earlier (pre-synthesis) view that the Americans thought as Lockeans: “The historical-textual evidence testifies consistently and often explicitly in the language of ‘Locke on Government’” (Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 8; cf. pp. 43–44, 96, 171).
4. Two editions of the work have appeared since 1950: Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. von Leyden (1954) and Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, ed. Horwitz, Clay, and Clay (1990). The introductions to both editions may be consulted for details on the occasion for Locke’s work, and on the manuscript and its fate. I am using the more recent edition, by Horwitz, Clay, and Clay.
5. Locke, Two Treatises II 12; cf. Laslett, introduction to Two Treatises; Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, pp. 100–101.
6. See Diskin Clay, translator’s introduction to Locke, Questions, pp. 80–81. The editors of this edition and von Leyden agree in seeing Grotius as a source for the Questions. Cf. Essays, p. 33; Questions, p. 47.
7. I am accepting Horwitz’s argument regarding the titled but unexplicated Questions, that is, that they are part of the work and should be considered when identifying the structure and overall argument of the book. On the other hand, I disagree with both Horwitz and Leo Strauss regarding the structure of the work. The opening paragraph of Question VIII (fol. 82) convinces me that Question XI is part of the third section rather than a separate topic, as Strauss and Horwitz maintain. See Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Law,” p. 198; Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions Concerning the Law of Nature,” p. 304 n. 2. On the centrality of these topics to the philosophy of natural law, consider Simon, The Tradition of Natural Law, esp. chapter 5.
8. I am citing Locke’s Questions by the folio number as printed in both the von Leyden and Horwitz editions.
9. See Yolton, “Locke on the Law of Nature,” p. 483.
10. Cf. Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium I.vi.1, 5; II.iii.20.
11. Some of Locke’s predecessors, notably Suárez and Pufendorf, make very much the same point. See Locke, 2:191, 197.
12. Grotius’s treatment of obligation was one of the most frequently criticized elements of his system. Cf. Pufendorf, De Jure I.vi.1, 2; Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, pp. 30, 49, 51, 65.
13. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, I.i.9, 10 (emphases added). The emphasized phrases, and Grotius’s general point here, refute Edwards’s attempt to assimilate Grotius and Suárez on obligation (Hugo Grotius, pp. 56–69).
14. See Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 18, 39.
15. See Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 41.
16. Ibid.
17. Pufendorf, Elementorum Jurisprudentiae Universalis, preface.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., I Def. XIII.
20. Ibid., II Obs. IV. 3.
21. Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” p. 255.
22. Cf. Pufendorf, Elementorum I Def. XIII. 1 (will of superior), 4 (sanctions), 9 (norm for actions), 10 (promulgation). A good discussion of sanctions in other natural law theory is Lehrberger, “Crime without Punishment,” pp. 237–57.
23. Cf. Pufendorf, Elementorum I Def. XXII. 3, 7.
24. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 14. Cf. Grotius, De Jure II.ii.20.
25. Pufendorf, Elementorum I Def. XIII. 14.
26. On conscience, see ibid., II Obs. I. 5–8.
27. For speculation on Locke’s reasons for citing Juvenal rather than Paul, see Proietti, “Natural Right(s) and Natural Law,” p. 294.
28. Cf. Pufendorf, Elementorum I Def. XVI.
29. Singh, “John Locke and the Theory of Natural Law,” pp. 106, 112; cf. Drury, “John Locke: Natural Law and Innate Ideas,” pp. 531, 542; Hancy, “John Locke and the Law of Nature,” pp. 439–40, 448–49; Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, pp. 16–17; Polin, La politique morale de John Locke, pp. 96–97.
30. See Polin, p. 116.
31. Pufendorf, Elementorum I Def. I. 1, Def. XIII. 9, 14.
32. See Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” p. 252.
33. Cf. Culverwell, Elegant and Learned Discourse, p. 28.
34. See Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine,” p. 198.
35. See Yolton, “Locke,” p. 481; Polin, La politique morale, p. 102.
36. Polin’s failure to notice how Locke’s later discussions constitute a reconsideration of his initial disputation greatly mars his otherwise sophisticated and intelligent essay, La politique morale de John Locke. Following Locke too unself-consciously, he falls into numerous contradictions. Consider, for instance, pp. 97–103, on the presence of the law of nature to human beings.
37. Aristotle, Ethics 1134b25–30.
38. Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 40, I.i.12; cf. II.ix.6 for the a posteriori method in use against the Roman law treatment of jus gentium.
39. Von Leyden, in Locke’s Essays, p. 161 n. 3, and Lindahl, in A Critical Commentary on John Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature, p. 126, both note the connection of Locke’s discussion of consensus to Grotius. Lindahl (pp. 113–14) also emphasizes the connection of Question IV to Grotius.
40. See also Locke’s consideration of the Grotian qualification that natural law may be found in the consensus of “the most civilized nations” (fols. 66–67).
41. A hitherto unrecognized source for Locke’s discussion of consensus, or rather dissensus, is Montaigne’s essay “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law.” Locke takes over from Montaigne the organization of his discussion according to purported consensus in conduct and then in opinion. He also takes over some of the very examples Montaigne uses in his essay—for example, nations where children kill their fathers or where husbands share their wives with others. More generally, Locke’s Question VII gives off the same intensely relativistic odor as Montaigne’s essay. There is need for systematic study of Locke’s appropriation of Montaigne, not only in the Questions, but throughout his works. On Montaigne, see Schaefer, The Political Philosophy of Montaigne.
42. Cf. Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” pp. 257–58; Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine,” pp. 203–4.
43. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II Q 91 A 1.
44. Ibid., I-II Q 94 A 2.
45. Locke, Essay I.iii.13.
46. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics 1254b26–36.
47. Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” p. 259.
48. Locke, Essay I.iii.2; see also Horwitz, p. 268,
49. Pufendorf, Elementorum II Obs. III.
50. Grotius, De Jure II.xviii.1.
51. On natural sociability, cf. Polin’s insightful discussion in La politique morale, pp. 104–5, 114–15.
52. Cf. Pufendorf, De Jure I.vi.9; Suárez, De Legibus II.vi.3; St. Leger, Etiamsi, pp. 112, 116, 118, 120–21.
53. See Tully, Discourse, pp. 44–45; Polin, La politique morale, pp. 96–97, 114, 119, 197. Cf. Polin’s failure to assimilate the denial of natural inclinations (p. 113).
54. Pufendorf, De Jure I.vi.13.
55. Cf. Lindahl, Critical Commentary, p. 81, on the “completely hidden” natural law.
56. Cf. Pufendorf, De Jure I.vi.13.
57. For a good summary statement of the implications of Locke’s treatment of promulgation, see Lindahl, pp. 128–30.
58. Cf. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy III. For Cartesian reflections in Locke’s proof for the existence of God in the Essay, see Zuckert, “An Introduction to Locke’s First Treatise,” pp. 70–71. Cf. how Tully (Discourse, p. 39) passes over this argument without notice; cf. Parry, John Locke, p. 13.
59. Further indication of the significance of divine inimicality is visible in Locke’s parallel formulation in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (IV.iii.18).
60. Cf. Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” p. 285. The sanctions have a more intimate connection than Tully allows (Discourse, p. 43). Cf. Parry, John Locke, pp. 33–34; Ayers, Locke 2:198–99.
61. Locke, Essay IV.iii.29; idem, The Reasonableness of Christianity, paras. 242–45; cf. Zuckert, “Locke and the Problem of Civil Religion,” pp. 196–97; Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine,” p. 210; idem, Natural Right, pp. 203–4; Horwitz, “John Locke’s Questions,” p. 285.
62. See Polin, La politique morale, p. 114–15 n. 3.
63. Cf. Grotius, De Jure, Proleg. 5.
64. For a development of this theme in Locke’s later Essay, see Ayers, Locke 2:185. It is difficult to understand Ayers’s judgment that “genuine morality has an authority antecedent to organized society, and cannot be the creation of man for the sake of social harmony” (pp. 185–86); consider all the contrary evidence Ayers himself cites on pp. 186–87.
65. There are remarkable parallels between Locke’s critique and David Hume’s later dismissal of the “egoistic system.” See Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, esp. appendix II.
66. See Lindahl, a Critical Commentary, pp. 81, 91.
67. Locke, Two Treatises II 34. Grotius was one of those who held the Romans up as a model; See De Jure, Proleg. 46.
1. See Polin, La politique morale de John Locke, pp. 118–19.
2. Patrick Coby discerns a similar movement in the Second Treatise (“The Law of Nature in Locke’s Second Treatise,” pp. 299–312).
3. For a consideration of Locke’s use of Hooker, see Cox, Locke on War and Peace, pp. 41–42; Zuckert, “Of Wary Physicians and Weary Readers,” pp. 59–61, and further citations therein; Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, pp. 132–33, 235–36.
4. Cf. Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, III.ix.3, 8; Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 220–21; Zuckert, “Of Wary Physicians,” p. 58; Polin, La politique morale, pp. 97, 118. For a hint of the workmanship argument in the more philosophic Essay, see IV.iii.18. In the Essay there is an attempt to supply a proof for the existence of God (IV.x). For discussion of Locke’s proof, see Zuckert, “An Introduction to Locke’s First Treatise,” pp. 70–71.
5. Cf. Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 55
6. Contra Polin, La politique morale, p. 119; cf. p. 120, on “necessities and needs.”
7. See Simmons, “Inalienable Rights and Locke’s Treatises,” p. 191: “A person has no right to destroy human life, either his own or that of another.”
8. See Andrew, Shylock’s Rights, chapter 4; but cf. Simmons, “Inalienable Rights.”
9. See Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 120–30; Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, pp. 128–29.
10. See Ashcraft, p. 126: “All natural rights are traceable to some specific obligation laid upon individuals by the Law of Nature.” See also p. 135: “Lockean natural rights are always the active fulfillment of duties to God.” Also see Polin, La politique morale, p. 101: “Avant d’être des droits, ce sont des obligations”; also Parry, John Locke, p. 40; Lemnos, “Two Concepts of Natural Right,” pp. 55–63. An alternative derivation of natural rights from natural duties perhaps more characteristic of the texts cited above is as follows: Every duty to do X implies a right to do X, according to the principle that one may do what one ought to do. A good presentation of this view is in White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution, pp. 147–48.
11. See Ashcraft, p. 101; Pangle, Spirit, p. 160.
12. Cf. Locke, Questions, fol. 48.
13. On the chief premise of this construct see Two Treatises I 52: The one who gives something does not necessarily have a right to take it back. Cf. chapter 7 of this book, on mortality. Cf. Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, p. 101.
14. A fuller inventory of Lockean natural laws than is necessary here can be found in Coby, “Law of Nature,” pp. 299–300.
15. See ibid., p. 301.
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 14.
17. See, Coby, “Law of Nature,” pp. 301–03.
18. See, for example, Ruth Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, pp. 69–71; Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 130.
19. See Ashcraft, p. 102.
20. Cf. Shapiro’s attempt (Evolution of Rights, p. 111) to treat Locke’s natural law as though it were immanent, contrary to the testimony of both Questions and Two Treatises.
21. Cf. Ashcraft’s different account in Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 108.
22. Laslett, Introduction to Locke, Two Treatises of Government, p. 110 n. 5.
23. Aarsleff, “Some Observations on Recent Locke Scholarship,” p. 268n.
24. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:119.
25. See especially Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought, chapter 3, appendix 1.
26. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II Q 64 A 3; idem, De Regimine Principium I.4–11. Cf. Skinner, Foundations 2:118–19.
27. Summa I Q 96 A 4.
28. Suárez, De Legibus III.iii.3.
29. Ibid., III.i.5.
30. Ibid., III.ii.3, III.iii.6. On Suárez, see Skinner, Foundations 2:157, 181–82.
31. De Legibus III.iii.6. Quentin Skinner’s claim about Almain requires a brief note. Skinner’s own account of Almain is sufficient to show how different the latter is from Locke. According to Skinner, Almain argues that “ ‘the right of the sword’ which a community grants to its ruler in the act of forming a political society must be a right originally possessed by the community itself” (Foundations 2:119). This doctrine differs from Locke’s in the decisive respect that Locke affirms as “strange” the possession of an original rightful power not in the community but in each individual. In a later discussion (2:157), Skinner appears to have a better grasp of the issue.
32. De Legibus III.iii.2; cf. III.i.4, 12. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises II 81–83.
33. Cf. Tully, Discourse, p. 66: “Although we have no definitive proof that Locke read Suárez, several historians have stressed the similarities between their political philosophies.” He cites von Leyden, the first editor of Locke’s Questions, and Quentin Skinner, among others.
34. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I.x.4; cf. Augustine, On the City of God XIX.13–15, 21.
35. Hooker, Laws I.x.1.
36. Ibid., I.x.3, 4.
37. Ibid., I.x.4.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Cf. Eccleshall’s insightful comments on the role of private judgment in Hooker’s polemics (Order and Reason in Politics, p. 25).
41. Laws I.x.8.
42. Ibid. I.x.4, 5. Cf. Eccleshall (p. 140): “Hooker posited consent as the legitimating factor of political power [because] he had been influenced by the medieval assimilation of political society to a corporation where authority was held to reside with the collectivity of the members.”
43. Cf. Parry, John Locke, p. 28, and Locke, Essay II.xxviii.6.
44. Hooker, Laws I.vii, ix, x.2. Cf. Suárez, De Legibus II.vii.7, 8, 10; II.viii.3–5; Cumberland, De Legibus Naturae, chapter 1.
45. Laws I.ix; cf. De Legibus II.vi.13.
46. Laws I.ix.2. On eternal rewards and punishments, cf. De Legibus II.vi.10, 24, and esp. II.ix.3–4.
47. Laws I.v.1.
48. Ibid., I.x.4. On the distance between Locke and Hooker on the state of nature, see Polin, La politique morale, p. 105: Locke admits “l’existence de l’homme à l’état de nature, état que n’envisageait pas Hooker pour qui l’homme sortant des mains du créateur, entrait directement dans une société civile et vivait dans un corps politique.”
49. See Laws I.x.5. Skepticism about the legitimacy of Locke’s reliances on Hooker is fully warranted by the recent scholarship on Hooker, for the Hooker scholars find it simply indispensable to get their man out from under the spell of Locke. Most recent Hooker scholars agree with W. D. J. Cargill Thompson (“The Philosophy of the ‘Politic Society’ ”) that “Locke’s political philosophy [is] essentially incompatible with Hooker’s.” Indeed, Thompson finds that the proper understanding of Hooker could only begin when people stopped reading him in the manner of Locke:
Hooker’s thought has been handicapped by the “politic use” that has been made of him in the past. For over two centuries his political philosophy was interpreted very largely through the distorting lens of Locke’s Second Treatise. . . . The manner in which Locke deliberately exploited Hooker’s reputation in order to give a semblance of respectability to his own revolutionary argument is now generally recognized. . . . Few myths have proved more difficult to dislodge than the belief that Hooker’s views were, in all essentials, identical with those of Locke.
D’Entreves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, pp. 125–30; Munz, Place of Hooker, esp. pp. 206–7; Eccleshall, Order and Reason, pp. 128–30.
50. Cf. the discussion of Locke and Burnet in chapter 4.
51. Hooker, Laws I.x.12. Cf. Faulkner, “Reason and Revelation in Hooker’s Ethics,” p. 684 n. 16. On Hooker’s attempt to accommodate the Fall more fully than Thomas had done, consider Suárez’s parallel efforts in De Legibus III.i.12.
52. Hobbes, Leviathan chapter 15.
53. Grotius, De Jure II.xx.7. Cf. I.ii.1; I.iii.2; I.x.10; II.xx.3, 8, 9.
54. Ibid., I.iii.2; II.xx.8, 9.
55. Ibid., II.xx.8, 9.
56. Ibid., II.xx.3.
57. Ibid., Proleg. 20.
58. Ibid., Proleg. 6, 13, 18.
59. Ibid., II.xx.40.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., I ii.
63. See Coby, “Law of Nature,” p. 304.
64. See Grant, Locke’s Liberalism, p. 67; Parry, John Locke, p. 58.
65. For discussion, see Zuckert, “Of Wary Physicians,” p. 61; Cox, Locke, pp. 56–57; Aarsleff, “Some Observations,” p. 268; Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke, p. 57.
66. See Pangle, Spirit, p. 160; Coby, “Law of Nature,” p. 304.
67. Goldwin, “John Locke,” pp. 479–80. Goldwin’s analysis corrects the judgment of standard interpretations like that of Parry, who concedes that the state of nature becomes a state of war and thus “seems” like Hobbes’s, but remains assured, on the basis of II 19, that this appearance is false (Locke, p. 59; see also p. 111).
68. See Coby, “Law of Nature,” p. 305.
69. Grotius, De Jure II.xx.28; cf. II.xx.1 (on proportionality), II.xx.4 (on revenge and sociability).
70. Pufendorf, Elementorum Jurisprudentiae Universalis II Obs. IV. 16; cf. idem, De Jure Naturae Gentium, VIII.iii.10.
71. Elementorum II Obs. IV.16.
72. Pufendorf, De Jure VIII.iii.7.
73. Elementorum II Obs. IV. 4, 16. Despite Pufendorf’s incorporation of the right of nature, even he remains more moderate in his view of legitimate force than Locke; see esp. II Obs. IV. 12.
74. Cf. Coby, “Law of Nature,” p. 305: Locke’s executive power “is little more than Hobbesian natural right dressed up in the splendiferous garb of legal rationalism.” Richard Cumberland, author of De Legibus Naturae (1672), deserves consideration in this context. The issues raised by his discussion require a far lengthier treatment than they can receive here, however. He shares much with Pufendorf, in that both attempt to reformulate the doctrine of natural law in a post-Hobbesian context. He, more clearly than Pufendorf, attempts to salvage natural law from Hobbes’s critique. In our immediate context Cumberland is exceedingly important, for in the course of his confrontation with Hobbes he makes an argument that, I believe, proved to be the germ from which Locke constructed his doctrine of the executive power of the law of nature. Cumberland attempts to salvage the natural law as a genuine law by arguing, among other things, that the power to enforce the law of nature that each can be supposed to possess in a Hobbesian state of nature supplies the sanction necessary to make the laws genuine laws. He insists that Hobbes recognizes such a power, implicitly at least, for Hobbes recognizes a right to war, which would include this power. Cumberland uses this notion of an executive power for the purpose of building a bridge back from Hobbes to his own more traditional notion of the law of nature as a set of precepts aiming at the common good and obligatory for all rational creatures. Locke uses the executive power for the same bridging purpose, but in the opposite direction. On Locke’s relation to Cumberland, see Tully, Discourse, p. 6.
75. Grant, Locke’s Liberalism, p. 67.
76. Pufendorf, Elementorum II Obs. V.11.
77. Laslett, in Locke, Two Treatises, at II 23. Dunn (Political Thought, p. 109n.) denies that Locke concedes the slave suicide as a right. This certainly saves a contradiction, but it does not cohere well with Locke’s text. See the end of II 24 for a use of “power” that rules Dunn’s interpretation out. A clear recognition of the contradiction and its implications for the workmanship argument is in Pangle, Spirit, p. 160. See also Coby, “Law of Nature,” pp. 302–3.
78. One interpreter who accepts the indirection argument is Andrew, in Shylock’s Rights, p. 93.
79. Simmons, “Inalienable Rights,” p. 191.
80. Pufendorf, Elementorum II Obs. IV.10. Pufendorf’s treatment of suicide is more broadly instructive for understanding Locke. Contrary to the conclusion Locke draws from the workmanship argument, Pufendorf concludes that suicide is permissable in the state of nature, in that no one has an obligation to self (ibid.). For the pre-Hobbesian Grotian approach, see De Jure I.xvii.2.
81. This forecloses the route Tully took to reconcile the two claims about ownership: “Man’s property [in his own person] is the right to use and preserve what is essentially God’s property, similar to a tenant’s property” (Discourse, p. 114). Even on its face this is an implausible solution, because although we might concede that a tenant had certain rights based in contract, the tenant (and Locke) would surely not claim ownership of property, much less a natural right.
82. Cf. Tully, Discourse, p. 53.
83. Simmons, “Inalienable Rights,” pp. 176, 185–86, 192. Simmons’s contention that Locke does not defend inalienable rights turns on the view that human beings do not have a right to those things they cannot give up—for example, their lives. This may be true at the transcendent natural law level of Locke’s argument, but even at that level Locke affirms repeatedly that individuals possess a right to life and that they also cannot give up that right. This would seem to justify calling it an inalienable right.
84. Tully, Discourse, p. 84.
85. The distinction between a right and the object of the right helps clarify a puzzle about rights that has led some scholars to postulate that the alienability of property accounts for Jefferson’s omission of that from his list of rights (cf. White, Philosophy, pp. 213–28; Wills, Inventing America, pp. 229–39). Whatever may have led Jefferson to skip property, it was not the inalienability problem. For a denial of the significance of Jefferson’s omission of a right to property, see Zuckert, “Thomas Jefferson on Nature and Natural Rights,” pp. 158–63.
1. Locke to Richard King, August 25, 1703, in Correspondence of John Locke, 8: 58; cf. Macpherson, The Political theory of Possessive Individualism, pp. 197–98.
2. See Pangle, Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 168; C. B. Macpherson astutely notices Locke’s reference to his “servant” in II 28, but concludes that Locke must be “taking the wage relationship entirely for granted” (Possessive Individualism, pp. 214–15; cf. p. 217). This is precisely what he is not doing. See also Waldron, The Right to Private Property, p. 225.
3. Tully’s ingenious account (Discourse on Property, pp. 136–45) gets Locke’s point exactly backwards because he fails to set the chapter on property in structural context. Cf. p. 137.
4. Laslett, in Locke, Two Treatises, at II 25; cf. Tully, Discourse, pp. 54, 96.
5. Filmer, Observations upon Grotius, pp. 271–74, and Patriarcha, pp. 63–66, both in Patriarcha and Other Political Works.
6. Cf. Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 125.
7. Grotius, De Jure I.i.10; cf. Filmer, Observations upon Grotius, p. 266.
8. Grotius, De Jure II.ii.2; cf. Tully, Discourse, p. 80.
9. Grotius, De Jure II.ii.2; Pangle (Spirit, p. 159) too much collapses the stages of the emergence of property, and thus overstates the biblical character of Grotius’s position.
10. Grotius, De Jure II.ii.2.
11. Filmer, Observations upon Grotius, p. 274.
12. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.10–11.
13. Ibid., IV.iv.9.
14. Ibid., IV.iv.2.
15. Ibid., Cf. Waldron, Private Property, p. 149.
16. See Filmer, Observations upon Grotius, p. 273: “Certainly it was a felicity, that all men in the world at one instant of time should agree together in one mind to change the natural community of all things into private dominion: for without such a unanimous consent it was not possible for community to be altered: for if but one man in the world had dissented, the alteration had been unjust, because that man by the law of nature had a right to the common use of all things in the world; so that to have given a propriety of any one thing to any other, had been to have robbed him of his right to the common use of all things.” On Pufendorf’s response to the “at one instant of time” issue, see De Jure IV.iv.6.
17. Cf. Tully, Discourse, pp. 71, 82. Pufendorf’s interpretation of Grotius’s common right as negative community is plausible and probably correct in the main, but, as he concedes, Grotius does appear to confuse positive and negative community on occasion. See Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.9.
18. Tully, p. 83.
19. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.9. Cf. Tully, Discourse, p. 86.
20. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.9. Cf. Waldron, Private Property, p. 150.
21. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.4, 5.
22. Ibid., IV.iv.9; cf. IV.iv.6, on express pacts and division of land.
23. Tully, Discourse, p. 74; cf. Goldwin, “John Locke,” p. 406: “The original universal common was a state of universal propertylessness”; Waldron, Private Property, pp. 155–56, takes very strong exception to Tully on positive commons.
24. See Laslett’s note (at II 8) connecting this argument to Pufendorf and Grotius. Laslett points to Blackstone and Barbeyrac as two early commentators who saw the connection of this discussion to Pufendorf (and Grotius).
25. Tully (Discourse, p. 79 and passim) makes the puzzling and textually quite indefensible claim that Locke rejects the exclusive property of Grotius and Pufendorf and substitutes an “inclusive right” instead. Tully, following Macpherson, defines private property as “an exclusive right because it is a right of the proprietor to exclude others from that to which the right refers.” On the other hand, “common property can be redescribed as an inclusive right because it is a right ‘not to be excluded from,’ or to be included in, the use of that to which the right refers” (p. 61) Tully’s claim here is just another version of his mistake about positive and negative commons. Also see Two Treatises II 26, on the exclusivity that must accompany any appropriation. My judgment on Tully parallels that of Waldron, Private Property, pp. 140–41: “The theory which Tully attributes to Locke is simply not Locke’s theory; and the attribution is based on what can only be described as a very seriously defective reading of the Two Treatises” (italics in original).
26. See Pangle, Spirit, p. 82. Waldron’s reflections on this argument are largely misplaced if the specific context is kept in mind (Private Property, pp. 168–69). See also Manent, Histoire intellectuelle du liberalisme, p. 96.
27. Ashcraft’s attempt to displace labor in favor of need as such has remarkably little textual support; compare Locke’s Two Treatises, pp. 126–27, with Locke’s II 27. See also Waldron, p. 139.
28. Cf. Tully, Discourse, p. 82: Grotius “cannot articulate a satisfactory natural principle within his framework of a use right and a duty to abstain.”
29. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.4.
30. Cf. Tully, p. 62: “Since preservation is one of God’s goods for man, and hence his natural duty is to bring it about, it follows that he has a natural right to do it.” Cf. his conclusion about Locke as a natural law thinker, p. 63. See also Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 126: “The basis for their rights claim [to property] is the obligation to preserve themselves by providing for their subsistence.” Perhaps, but it is striking that there is no good Lockean text making just this argument.
31. Locke also formulates that principle as “to preserve . . . mankind” (II 6; cf. II 8, 16, 183). This formulation appears to amount to the same as the no-harm principle, however, for Locke consistently treats it as posing negative duties (do not harm) but not positive duties (contribute in some further way to the preservation of others). Thus, there is (at best) a right to execute the law of nature to prevent harm, a right initially bounded in such a way as not to be a source of harm. There is no duty to enforce the law of nature (cf. II 8). The negative interpretation of the duty to preserve mankind makes possible the congruence between Locke’s transcendent natural law and natural rights. Some scholars have found broader kinds of duties, but they have had to import language into the text that Locke did not put there; see, for example, Tully, Discourse, pp. 71, 84.
32. Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 126; see also p. 131, where he repeats the same claim. Cf. Tully, pp. 95–96.
33. See Pangle, Spirit, p. 162; Goldwin, “John Locke,” pp. 489–90. Waldron’s extended discussion of the limitations would have been stronger had he connected them to the transcendent natural law, had he treated them in the order Locke presented them and thus picked up on the developing argument Locke is making, and had he noticed the important shift that occurs as Locke shifts his attention from consumables to the means of production (see Private Property, pp. 207–18).
34. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 236.
35. Consider, for example, the works by Laslett, Dunn, Grant, Tully, and Ashcraft cited earlier. Cf. the wavering account by Waldron (Private Property, pp. 141–47), which is much hampered in its development of the “theological premises” of Locke’s property doctrine by its failure to connect up firmly with the workmanship and no-harm argument.
36. For Pufendorf on taxation, see De Jure VII.iv.7, 11; VIII.v.4ff.; and on property in general the whole of VIII.v. Pufendorf’s allegiance to Hobbesian views on sovereignty takes him even further from Locke and the Whigs than Grotius is; see, for instance, VII.iv.11. Cf. Tully: “In general terms, Locke’s theory overthrows all his absolutist adversaries—Grotius and Pufendorf as well as Filmer” (Discourse, p. 172). On Locke’s theory as resisting the implicaton of political control contained in Grotius and Pufendorf, see Waldron, pp. 152–53.
37. Tully, p. 169; cf. pp. 122ff., and p. 130: “Locke provides a justification, not of private property, but, rather, of the English Common.”
38. Waldron’s thorough and otherwise thoughtful treatment suffers from his failure to see this shift in Locke’s arugment. Consider, for example, Private Property, pp. 177–94.
39. Cf. Locke Essay on Human Understanding, IV.xix.14.
40. Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises, p. 134; cf. also Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 218–19; Tully, Discourse, p. 110. Waldron’s treatment is very loose, but his conclusion is sound: the importance of labor for Locke “is purely instrumental and the basis of our secular recognition of its importance lies . . . in our common sense realization that we have to work in order to survive and flourish” (Private Property, p. 147; italics in original).
41. Cf. Pangle, Spirit, pp. 163, 166.
42. Cf. Strauss, Natural Right, p. 247.
43. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 12–19.
44. Cf. Dunn, Political Thought, pp. 87–95; Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding; Locke, Essay III.vi.12.
45. Locke, Essay II.xii, II.xiv, II.xxxi.6–11, III.vi, III.ix, III.x; cf. Strauss, Natural Right, p. 249.
46. Tully, Discourse, pp. 116–21. The teaching about the being of the beings forms Locke’s deepest reply to the kinds of objection to Locke’s “mixing one’s labor” argument raised by Waldron in Private Property, pp. 184–91.
47. Essay II.iv.1, IV.xi.8
48. See Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 115–17; Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 237–39.
49. See Goldwin, “John Locke,” p. 491; Pangle, Spirit, p. 163; also Manent, Histoire, p. 98: “Toute la démarche de Locke consiste à abolir les deux limites qu’il a d’abord posées.”
50. See Manent, Histoire, p. 98.
51. See Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, p. 199
52. Cf. Ibid., pp. 211–12, for a different reading.
53. See Waldron’s suggestive objections to Locke’s point (Private Property, pp. 223–24); he needs to make more explicit the model of society and economy he is invoking, however, in order to compare it with the model Locke is taking for granted.
54. Macpherson (Possessive Individualism, p. 214ff.) fails to appreciate fully the relation between negative commons, the right of preservation, and labor. This failure leads him into grave errors regarding the “social assumption” of Locke’s theory, missing, among other things, Locke’s quite self-conscious task of explaining and justifying wage labor.
55. See Ibid., pp. 212–14.
56. See Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, p. 14; Manent, Histoire, p. 102.
57. See Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 242–43.
58. See Pangle, Spirit, pp. 169–70; Waldron, Private Property, pp. 139, 145–47; Shapiro, Evolution of Rights, pp. 83, 126–28, 142.
59. Goldwin, “John Locke,” pp. 493–94; Pangle, Spirit, p. 168; Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 243–45.
60. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist 10, p. 79. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises II 48; also Pangle, Spirit, p. 170: For Locke “property has neither its source nor its purpose in politics. . . . Lockean property does not exist in order to provide the ‘equipment’ with which man as ‘the political animal’ may procure fulfillment in civic life and noble leisure.” On property in the old republicanism, also see chapter 6 of this book. Cf. Strauss, Natural Right, p. 245. On Locke and political economy, see Manent, Histoire, pp. 104–7.
61. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 14 (p. 91).
62. Cf. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, para. 14: “the law of reason, or as it is called, of nature.”
63. On Hobbes’s view of reason as merely calculation or “reckoning,” cf. Leviathan, chapter 5 (p. 32). For Locke’s parallel discussion in his mature philosophy, see Essay IV.xvii.
64. In general, see Shapiro’s discussion of “the purposes of rights” according to Locke (Evolution of Rights, pp. 118–22).
65. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 14 (p. 91).
66. See Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 234, 244–45.
67. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 15 (p. 101); Locke, Essay IV.iii.18.
68. Pufendorf, De Jure III.v.1, 3.
69. Ibid., I.i.20.
70. Contra Coby, “The Law of Nature in Locke’s Second Treatise,” p. 306, on the simple collapse of Lockean natural right into Hobbesean natural right; also pp. 307–10, on the merely rhetorical difference between Hobbes and Locke.
71. See, for example, Leviathan, introduction (p. 9), chapter 2 (pp. 15, 19); chapter 5 (p. 34); chapter 6 (pp. 37–38). Cf. Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, p. 230.
72. See Waldron, Private Property, pp. 143–44.
73. Cf. Pufendorf, De Jure IV.iv.4, 5.
74. Shapiro, Evolution of Rights, p. 124.
75. Locke, Essay II.xxvii.8; cf. II.xxvii.20.
76. Ibid., II.xxvii.9, 26. Cf. Allison, “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity,” p. 108.
77. Although it is not part of my purpose here to attempt to defend Locke’s theory of the self, the person, and personal identity against the many criticisms that have been raised against it, yet one must note the crucial term Locke deploys: “can,” not “does.”
78. Essay II.xxvii.9; cf. esp. II.ix.4. A different account is in Allison, pp. 108–9.
79. Essay II.ix. On perception and thinking, see II.i.1, II.v.2, II.viii.8. On perception as the distinctive feature separating “the animal kingdom, and the inferior parts of nature,” see II.ix.11, 15.
80. Ibid., II.xxvii.26.
81. Ibid., 16, 17. See Allison, pp. 120–22, on Locke’s theory in relation to Kant’s concept of the transcendental unity of apperception.
82. Essay II.xxvii.26.
83. Ibid., 10, 14. See Allison, p. 107, on the impetus to Locke’s theory in a “skepticism in regard to the nature of the soul”; also see Allison’s suggestive comments on person as an “abstract idea” (p. 111).
84. Essay II.i.4.
85. Ibid., II.x.1, 2, 8, 10.
86. Ibid., II.xi.1, 4, 5.
87. Ibid., 6, 7; II.xii.1.
88. Ibid., II.xi.9.
89. Ibid., 10.
90. Ibid., 11; cf. IV.xvii.1–2.
91. Ibid., II.vi.2.
92. Ibid., II.xxvii.26. I have adopted Yolton’s punctuation of the passages as in his edition of the Essay (1961).
93. Ibid., 17; cf. 9, 18, 25, 26 (beginning).
94. Ibid., II.vii.1.
95. Ibid., II.xxi.41. Locke’s use of I Corinthians 2:9 in this context is revealing of his view of the Christian promise.
96. Ibid., 42, 62.
97. Ibid., 59.
98. Ibid., II.xxvii.26.
99. Ibid., 17, 18.
100. Locke’s doctrine of happiness is considerably more subtle than this, however, and opens out toward other and more pluralistic possibilities for differently shaped human lives. For a brief discussion, see Zuckert, “Thomas Jefferson on Nature,” pp. 161–63.
101. Essay II.xxvii.17, 18.
102. Ibid., II.xxvii.26.
103. Ibid., II.xxviii.5.
104. Cf. Shapiro’s partly convergent and partly divergent conclusion, in Evolution of Rights, pp. 121–22.
105. For a discussion, see Zuckert, “Fools and Knaves,” pp. 544–64.
106. The failure to sort out these “Lockean paradoxes” accounts for the frequent perception by later scholars of Locke’s “confusion” or contradictions. An especially clear (but by no means uncommon) case is Shapiro, Evolution of Rights, pp. 102–5.
107. Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 33–34.
108. Ibid., pp. 184–91; Parry, John Locke, pp. 14–15; See also Shapiro, Evolution of Rights, pp. 145–46.
1. Thompson, “Reception and Influence,” p. 101.
2. Ibid., p. 107 (italics in original). Thompson cites H. T. Dickinson, J. P. Kenyon, and Julian Franklin. Also see chapter 6 of this book.
3. Ibid., p. 101.
4. Dunn, “The Politics of Locke,” p. 56. Cf. Thompson: Dunn’s “account exaggerates the lack of response” (“The Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises,” p. 185). Strangely enough, Thompson, too, “exaggerates the lack of response.” As Jeffrey Nelson points out, he misses or depreciates many early writings in which Two Treatises is noted appreciatively (“Unlocking Locke’s Legacy,” pp. 101–8). Thompson himself notes the Lockean presence in Political Aphorisms (1690), in William Atwood’s Fundamental Constitution (1690), in James Tyrell’s Bibliotheca Politica (1692), in William Molyneux’s application of Lockean principles to Ireland and Simon Clement’s and John Cary’s Lockean responses to Molyneux (all in 1698), and in a variety of anti-Lockeans who wrote against the Two Treatises in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The last is evidence the book had some weight by then.
5. Ashcraft and Goldsmith, “Locke, Revolution Principles, and the Formation of Whig Ideology,” p. 774.
6. Ibid., pp. 774, 789, 793.
7. Ibid., p. 798.
8. On the debate over the historical claim about the original contract, see Pocock, The Ancient Constitution. On the theoretical counterattack, consider the power of Filmer’s critical attack on Whig doctrines of the original contract.
9. Cf. Pangle, Spirit of Modern Republicanism, p. 287 n. 11; and especially Thomas Schrock, “Considering Crusoe.”
10. Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren (1709), quoted in Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 65.
11. Ashcraft and Goldsmith, “Locke,” p. 789.
12. An Argument for Self-Defence, pp. 277–82.
13. Ibid., p. 279.
14. See Schwoerer, Declaration of Rights, pp. 59–64, 71–72.
15. Argument, p. 280.
16. Ibid., pp. 277, 278. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises II 6, 7, 9, 15, 19.
17. Argument, p. 280; Two Treatises II 131.
18. Argument, p. 280; Two Treatises II 211–43.
19. Laslett, introduction to Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 58–79. On Locke’s general caution and secretiveness, see Cranston, John Locke, p. xi: “Locke . . . was an extremely secretive man.”
20. Argument, pp. 277, 278; cf. Two Treatises II 136, 138. Cf. Thompson (“Reception of Locke,” pp. 187–88, 190): Locke’s Treatises “were not exactly fitted to perform the task Locke intended when publishing them: the justification of the 1688 Revolution.” Instead of the favored “legal and historical” arguments, Locke presented “philosophical arguments.” Thompson concludes that “Locke had been led astray, as it were, by rationalist tendencies.” Thompson’s judgment assumes, of course, that Locke’s ambitions in Two Treatises were very limited and immediate.
21. The Argument’s author uses his common-law authorities in much the same way that Locke used Hooker, emphasizing partial agreements and ignoring important divergences.
22. There are known instances of people who meet these criteria and who were involved, moreover, in the Sacheverell affair. John Somers and Peter King, two Whig lawyer-politicians, who were close to Locke during the postrevolutionary period, fit all parts of this description. King, moreover, as Locke’s nephew, had custody of his papers.
23. On Blackstone and Locke, see Storing, “William Blackstone,” pp. 622–34.
24. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters 138 (4:281).
25. Charles Bechdelt Realey, “The London Journal and Its Authors, 1720–1723,” Bulletin of the University of Kansas 36 no. 23, Humanistic Studies 5, (Dec. 1935), p. 1, quoted in Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters,” p. 279.
26. Testimony to Cato’s later role in English thought is in Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 132, 283 n. 51; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 16; Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, p. 55; McDonald, “A Founding Father’s Library,” p. 13; Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, pp. 3, 175, 181, 202–5, 228, 236. Cf. Bailyn, pp. 51–52, for limits to Cato’s influence. For the publishing history of Cato’s Letters, see Jacobson, The English Libertarian Heritage.
27. The forerunners were Robbins (Eighteenth Century Commonwealthmen, pp. 115–25) and Rossiter (The Political Thought of the American Revolution, p. 68).
28. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 33–36. Cf. Bailyn, “Central Themes of the American Revolution,” pp. 7–10.
29. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 37, 43, 45, 59–60. On the “lifting” from Cato without attribution, also see Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, p. 46.
30. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 468, 507; Shalhope, “Republican Synthesis,” p. 58.
31. McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, pp. 47, 70, 77, 89, 93; Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters,” p. 278; Pangle, Spirit, p. 30. There are some recent scholars who question the importance attributed to Cato: “The claims put forward by Bailyn and others on behalf of Cato’s Letters . . . seem exaggerated” (Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, p. 44). Dworetz relies to some degree on information presented in Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, pp. 142–146, and Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader in America.” See the prologue to this book.
32. Letters 38 (2:35, 43).
33. Letters 59 (2:221).
34. See Letters 128 (4:190, 192–93).
35. See Letters 25 (1:184–95), 132 (4:225–36).
36. See Letters 13 (1:83–85).
37. See Letters 80 (3:119–20), 94 (3:227), 128 (4:195).
38. Letters 132 (4:233).
39. Thus Hamowy, in “Cato’s Letters,” somewhat overstates the case when he finds “no appeals to the ancient constitution nor to the traditional arrangements of English law” (p. 291), but he certainly has the main point right.
40. On Cato’s skepticism regarding the principles of Grotian natural law, see Letters 108 (4:30).
41. Hamony, p. 291. Cf. Leonard Levy, in Jacobson, English Libertarian Heritage, p. vii; Mayer, “English Radical Whig Origins,” pp. 189–96.
42. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, p. 45.
43. Anyone familiar with Cato’s Letters knows there is at least one serious difficulty with my attributing a fundamentally Lockean character to Cato’s political philosophy. Cato mentions Locke, only twice, although both times in ways that suggest Locke’s very great authority for him (105 [3:334], 116 [4:86]). That itself is not decisive, for reasons that should be clear by now. Cato explicitly mentions a number of other political writers, most important of whom is Algernon Sidney. He calls Sidney “an author, who can never be too much valued or read. . . . [He] has written better upon government than any Englishman, and as well as any foreigner” (26 [1:195]). Moreover, the motifs I identify as particularly Lockean might be argued to be found in Sidney also. Sidney is too complex a political thinker to include in this survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Whig thought, but in the final analysis I think it can be shown that Cato concludes that the best polity is the one geared toward peace, and he doubts the love of glory as a motive for political good. In a word, he favors the prudence of Sancho Panza over the noble aims of Don Quixote (cf. 91 [3:233]; also 74, 93). Sidney, in his Discourses Concerning Government, argues for the opposite of these positions: “All governments, whether monarchical or popular, absolute or limited, deserve praise or blame as they are well or ill constituted for making war” (II.23; see also II.22). Both Sidney and Cato are much touched by Machiavelli, but Sidney stays with the Florentine a much longer way than does Cato. The latter opts for Locke’s “economic” solution instead (see Letters 87 [3:176–84]. A full-scale comparison of Locke and Sidney is required, but that is beyond the scope of this work.
44. Letters 45 (2:85); see also 20 (1:131); Locke, Two Treatises II 4.
45. Two Treatises II 4; Letters 45 (2:85).
46. Two Treatises II 4; Letters 45 (2:85).
47. Two Treatises II 19; Letters 11 (1:66), 59 (2:218), 60 (2:227).
48. Two Treatises II 4; Letters 59 (2:216).
49. Letters 60 (2:226); Two Treatises II, chapter 8.
50. Letters 38 (2:35, 41)
51. Jefferson to Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Jefferson, p. 1517.
52. Letters 15–16 (1:96–111), 99–100 (3:283–300), 52 (2:135–43).
53. Ibid., 60 (2:227), 62 (2:245); cf. 59 (2:216).
54. Two Treatises II 131.
55. Letters 90 (3:201); cf. Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters,” pp. 293–94.
56. Letters 59 (2:216); cf. 60 (2:228); Locke, Two Treatises II 6; idem, Letter Concerning Toleration, pp. 26–28. Here, and occasionally elsewhere, Cato uses language reminiscent of Locke’s transcendent natural law. He does so less than Locke himself does, however, and raises as many questions for that style of argument as Locke does. In a series of letters perhaps oddly included in a work on politics of this sort, Cato addresses the metaphysical issues involved in claims about divine action and legislation in the human world. The decisive essay is Letter 77 (3:89–99), in which Cato, in effect, denies the possibility, or at least the knowability, of miracles, and thus of Creation in an argument echoing the discussions in places like Locke’s Discourse on Miracles. Cato appears to view the theological-political problem in much the same light as Locke does.
57. Letters 11 (1:66), 59 (II:216).
58. Ibid., 59 (2:216), 127 (4:181).
59. Ibid., Two Treatises II 240.
60. Letters 59 (2:217–18); Two Treatises II 240–42. Pauline Maier (Resistance, p. 36 n. 13) suggests there is some difference between Cato and Locke on the appeal to Heaven, but the texts do not bear out that judgment.
61. Letters 59 (2:218); cf. 55 (2:169); Also Locke’s Second Treatise, chapter 19 as a whole; Maier, pp. 27–28. Other scholars have noted important Lockean features in Cato’s thought; see, for example, Pangle, Spirit, esp. pp. 32–33, 286 n. 7; Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters”; Dworetz, Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 88 (on property), 105–6 (on capitalism), 109 (on closeness to Locke in general); Dickinson, Liberty and Property, chapter 5. Dworetz recognizes some of the Lockean themes in Cato but makes the curious claim that Cato is not committed to the Lockean principle of “no taxation without representation” (pp. 88–89). Cato does not spill much ink on this issue, to be sure, but he writes in a different context and with a somewhat different purpose from Locke. The post-1688 constitution securely embodied the principle that only Parliament could raise taxes. “Thanks be to Heaven and our worthy ancestors . . . we have a constitution in which the people have a large share: they are one part of the legislature and have the sole power of giving money; which includes in it everything that they can ask for the publick good,” Letters 24 (1:181). The peculiar character of Cato’s concerns, as in the letter Dworetz notes, will become clear in the next section. He never steps back from his acceptance of the Lockean argument of taxation only with representation. See also Letters 60 (2:233), 61 (2:236–40), 70 (3:12, 14).
62. Letters 108 (4:24).
63. Ibid., 40 (2:51, 54, 55), 43 (2:71).
64. Ibid., 108 (4:24). For a more detailed working out of a theory of rights almost identical to Cato’s, see Zuckert, “Thomas Jefferson on Nature,” pp. 152–61.
65. Letters 62 (2:245).
66. Ibid., 108 (4:24).
67. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 468; Wood, Creation, p. 16; cf. Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters,” pp. 278, 281; Lienesch, New Order of the Ages, p. 65.
68. Steven Dworetz (Unvarnished Doctrine, pp. 106–7) makes much of Cato’s explicit distancing of himself from the republican or commonwealth tradition. This is, of course, relevant, but Dworetz does not sufficiently consider two facts about Cato’s essays. First, whatever Trenchard and Gordon’s personal views might have been, it would have been impolitic in the extreme to openly proclaim themselves in favor of a republic. Second, Cato makes a very suggestive argument in Letter 85: whatever “the best government in theory” may be, the limited monarchy is the constitution best suited to English society (3:163). Some of Cato’s political principles suggest that he would indeed favor a more republican constitution, in theory.
69. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, p. 85.
70. Letters 33 (2:255).
71. Ibid., Dedication (1:v), 40 (2:50–52), 58 (2:206), 62 (2:245, 247, 249), 77 (3:89), S 2 (4:300); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 41.
72. Letters 14 (1:75), 62 (2:249–50).
73. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 390.
74. Letters 67 (2:305, 307, 308, 309).
75. Ibid., (2:307–8).
76. Wood, Creation, pp. 53, 58, 59, 61.
77. Letters 89 (3:192–93).
78. Ibid., 11 (1:66), 62 (2:245), 90 (3:200).
79. Ibid., 90 (3:199–200).
80. Ibid., 31 (1:31): “The study of human nature” leads “for the most part [to] melancholy discoveries . . . of the violent bent of human nature to evil.”
81. Ibid., 105 (3:335), 60 (2:230). In general, see Burtt, Virtue Transformed, pp. 10–11.
82. Ibid., 39 (2:44), 40 (2:54), 44 (2:77).
83. Ibid., 40 (2:50–51). Cf. Burtt, Virtue Transformed, p. 73.
84. Letters 40 (2:51–52); Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 251. Cato’s presentation of the “restless and selfish spirit of man” reminds a great deal of that other early Lockean presentation of the human self, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
85. Letters 40 (2:55), 108 (4:30).
86. Ibid., 60 (2:231); cf. Hamilton, Madison, and Joy, The Federalist 51; Burtt, Virtue Transformed, pp. 71–73.
87. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, p. 47; cf. Burtt, pp. 69–70.
88. Letters 25 (1:184, 192), 33 (1:257).
89. Ibid., 61 (2:237).
90. Ibid., 60 (2:231), 61 (2:236).
91. See chapter 6 of this book.
92. On Pocock’s civic humanist Machiavelli, see Sullivan, “Machiavelli’s Momentary ‘Machiavellian Moment’ ”; for Pocock’s civic humanist Harrington, see chapter 6 n.93 of this book.
93. Letters 70 (3:13–14).
94. Ibid., 85 (3:163).
95. Ibid., 60 (2:232).
96. Cf. Burtt, Virtue Transformed, p. 81: “Cato’s acceptance of Lockean premises plays a crucial role in allowing him to link the pursuit of private interest so successfully to the achievement of the public good.”
97. See Letters 23 (1:163–77).
98. Thus Burtt goes too far when she claims that Cato “rejects” the institutional solution characteristic of Harrington (Virtue Transformed, p. 76).
99. Letters 84 (2:150).
100. See Pangle, Spirit, pp. 31–33.
101. Letters 61 (2:238). Cf. Burtt, Virtue Transformed, pp. 78–79.
102. Cf. Burtt, pp. 83–85.
103. Letters 43 (2:71).
104. See ibid., 35 (2:14).
105. Ibid. (2:13).
106. Ibid., 62 (3:249–50). Burtt’s otherwise thoughtful account of Cato almost altogether omits this side of his thinking; see Virtue Transformed, pp. 77–86; but cf. p. 85.
107. Letters 62 (2:249).
108. Locke, Two Treatises I 1.
109. Cato thus helped bring out aspects of the Lockean doctrines similar to those emphasized by Nathan Tarcov in his important interpretation of Locke’s writings on education, Locke’s Education for Liberty.
110. Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 6, 1825, in Jefferson, p. 1501.