In God’s House (which is the universe) are many mansions.
—Isaac Newton
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
—John Locke
We talk a lot about rights in modern society. Some say too much. We have civil rights, human rights, legal rights, even animal rights. This way of talking, too, comes out of the struggle between Plato and Aristotle, but in a more complicated way than, say, the emergence of medieval logic or the Renaissance. This is because as European civilization advanced, the influence of Plato and Aristotle would reflect more and more in the spirit and less in the letter of people’s thinking. It is also part and parcel of the age of new science Galileo had launched.
Galileo died in 1642. He was buried in Florence in the Church of Santa Croce, directly opposite the tomb of Michelangelo. This is only right, since together they had remade the Renaissance world in a distinctly Platonist frame.
Galileo’s new science showed it was possible to think of that higher order not just in religious or artistic terms, as Michelangelo had, but in mathematical terms of the utmost precision. It was a precision that also explained how nature worked far better than Aristotle could. When a nineteen-year-old mathematical prodigy named Isaac Newton arrived at Cambridge University in 1661, Galileo’s insight that mathematics could explain the workings of nature in terms of geometric mechanical motion had carried away the imagination of northern Europe.
What was true of planets and soccer balls, men realized, might also be true of plants, animals, and the formation of minerals. Mathematical mechanics might even explain the workings of the human body—as the English physician William Harvey discovered when he realized that the circulation of the blood followed the laws of hydraulics and that the human heart was nothing more than a mechanical pump.
Aristotle’s science of final causes wasn’t just dead. Except among a few diehard stragglers, it was as if it had never existed. What was left in people’s minds was a universe that looked like one of those magnificent cathedral clocks we find in cities in Germany and Switzerland. Great descending weights run the clock hands as they turn on their axles; mechanical men blow horns and ring bells; doors open and saints appear. Mechanical angels circle and turn on grooved tracks, and mechanical cocks lift their wings to crow out the hour and half hour with daily precision.1
It all looked very impressive. It was also, as Galileo and Kepler had both shown, finely tuned and programmed. However, something was missing, what we might call the human factor. Where did humanity fit into all this? Where does a cosmos governed by impersonal mechanical laws leave us as rational creatures?
Harvey’s fellow Englishman, Sir Francis Bacon, supplied one answer: It leaves us firmly in charge. As self-declared pundit of the new science, Bacon was delighted to see Aristotelian natural philosophy with its “contentiousness” (an odd complaint from a lawyer) and its fetish for words, not deeds (ditto), get swept away.2 Now men could get down to the business of forcing Nature to reveal her secrets for our use, Bacon said. He liked to speak of putting Nature “on the rack” through constant experiment and verification, like a helpless prisoner being questioned in front of a judge and jury. “Nature exhibits herself more clearly,” Bacon wrote, “through the trials and vexation of art than when left to herself.”3
Across the English Channel, the biggest champion of the new mechanical worldview was René Descartes. Bacon was entirely ignorant of mathematics. Descartes was steeped in it. Reducing the operations of the universe to a series of lines, circles, numbers, and equations suited his reclusive personality. His most famous saying, “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), could be stated less succinctly but more accurately as “Because we are the only beings who do math, we rule.”
For Descartes, the essence of mind is to think, and the essence of matter is to exist—and the two never meet. The physical world around us is governed by exact and necessary laws imposed by God, which we watch, analyze, and manipulate. Otherwise, nature never touches us at any point. “What is beyond geometry, is beyond us,” as Blaise Pascal once put it—and therefore is of no interest to us. Descartes’s worldview makes us spiders at the center of an enormous web not of our making. Or in his other famous formulation, we are the ghosts in the machine: souls in a world machine that operates inexorably and impersonally according to the laws of geometry and mechanics, while we operate the levers and spin the dials.
Before his death in 1650, Descartes had spread Galileo’s fame up and down Europe, and with it the mechanical philosophy. In France and Holland, Cartesianism became virtually the official creed of scientists, mathematicians, and everyone else involved in the investigation of nature.4 Descartes’s books found eager readers in England, including the father of modern chemistry, Robert Boyle, and a shy, rather retiring teacher at Cambridge named Henry More.
More was very impressed by Descartes. Other modern philosophers, he wrote to a friend, “are mere shrimps and fumblers in comparison [with] him.”5 Yet the more he read, the more More had his doubts.
More couldn’t help comparing Descartes’s view of man and the universe with those of another author he revered, Marsilio Ficino. Descartes’s dualism, his way of seeing the world as shaped by the action of the soul on matter, bore a superficial resemblance to Ficino’s and also Plato’s. However, while Ficino’s message seemed full of life and hopeful possibility, Descartes’s seemed positively gloomy. Matter in Descartes had become an inert oppressive presence, doing its job in a reliable robotlike way but surrounding and confronting us with its essential lifelessness everywhere we look—even in the eyes of our favorite pets.*
Where do we find love and comfort in this comfortless, mechanical world? And above all, More wanted to know, where is God?
Descartes’s answer was confident and pat. God was the omnipotent Legislator who has made everything and installed all the necessary rules that govern the universe, including the laws of mathematics, rather the way the manufacturer installs software on a new Android. Then God steps aside and lets His creation “do its thing.” As part of the original installation, God has also put the idea of His existence into our minds.6 But we can go for months or even years without clicking on that particular icon. And if we don’t click on it, More realized, then we may never notice what’s missing.
Descartes was no atheist. But More worried that his view of the world must inevitably lead to atheism. It was simply not possible that God would set up the cosmos and then walk away—and men should not be allowed to think so. In a universe in which everything has its place, He must still be somewhere.
But how to prove it? More and his friends, the so-called Cambridge Platonists, were stumped. Then in 1661 there arrived in their midst the young man who would, surprisingly enough, give them with the answer.
I say surprisingly, because Isaac Newton was hardly the person people would pick to be the cultural guru of his age. Everyone recognized that this son of a clergyman from northwestern England (born the same year Galileo died, in 1642) was an incredible math prodigy. He was twenty-seven when he took the prestigious Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge. His predecessor willingly resigned in recognition of Newton’s genius.7
The new Lucasian professor lectured to a largely empty classroom. The mathematical theories he expounded were so complicated, no student could follow him. Newton was also deeply secretive. He hid all his most important research from his colleagues and even friends. He invented integral calculus and used it for years in his own work, before finally, reluctantly, he was forced to let the rest of the world in on the secret.8 And every minute Newton didn’t spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.
After Newton’s death in 1727, when he was the acknowledged scientific genius of his age, the dozens of folio notebooks he had filled with his biblical studies were discovered. People shook their heads. The last stages of a great mind sliding into senility, they concluded. Some even said they were the deluded products of mercury blood poisoning from Newton’s years of chemical experiments.
The truth was that Newton’s biblical research was central to his entire scientific career. They form the essential backdrop for his most famous work, the Principia Mathematica. For like a true son of Plato, Newton never lost sight of the Big Picture, including the problem that had so perplexed Henry More and the other Cambridge Platonists. Where do we find God in a material and mechanical universe?
Descartes’s works had helped to push Newton’s mind away from pure mathematics toward the problems of the new science like optics. Then in the late 1660s, Newton turned decisively against him. The “notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute, and independent reality in themselves,” he decided, was not only misleading but dangerous. By separating body from mind and spirit, Descartes was denying the dependence of the material world on God’s will and His providence. “A God without dominion, providence, and final causes,” Newton later wrote, “is nothing else but Fate.”9
By denying God, we deny our own spiritual freedom. We surrender ourselves to a world of pure material necessity. The intellectual tyranny that Newton had seen in the darkest chapters in the history of the medieval Church, he saw repeated in the tyranny of a godless, soulless science. He intended to correct that view and free men’s minds for the future.
It was this goal that finally persuaded him to agree to publish his decades of research in physics, as The Principles of Nature Mathematically Explained, or the Principia Mathematica, in 1687—incidentally, the last major work of Western civilization written entirely in Latin. Most read it as the last word on Galileo’s new science, as it set out the mathematical laws of nature that governed everything from the movement of the planets and comets to fluid mechanics and the lunar tides. From start to finish, however, Newton’s own goal was to demonstrate the dependence of matter on God.10
He did this through his revolutionary concept of force. Nature as described in the Principia is a complex matrix of forces, from centripetal and centrifugal force, to magnetic force and inertial force (as in, “Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest”), to the most famous of all, the force of gravity. These forces, Newton showed, exert a palpable and mathematically predictable influence on the behavior of all physical bodies. Yet they are entirely invisible and beyond any purely physical or mechanical explanation.
Descartes’s clockwork universe couldn’t account for them. Newton’s universe could. The Principia is the culmination of Galileo’s insight that if you can describe something mathematically, then it must exist. Newton never tried to give an explanation for gravity. “To us,” he wrote, “it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act[s] according to the laws we have explained.…” All the same, “gravity must be caused by an agent acting according to certain laws.”11 The identity of that agent was self-evident to Newton. It was God.
Nature’s laws implies a lawgiver: it’s an idea as old as the Bible or Plato’s Timaeus. However, Newton now carried this further by making the physical nature of the cosmos itself proof of God’s spiritual presence. “He is omnipresent,” Newton wrote. “In Him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other; God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipotence of God.” In other words, the rich diversity of nature, combined with its symmetry and regularity, reflects the will of a benevolent God.12
Newton’s God is a God who constantly watches over His creation. He provides it with universally true general laws, then thoughtfully provides man with the means to decipher them, namely reason. Newton also finally answered Henry More’s question about where God Himself was in this meticulously ordered universe. He is in between. His spirit provides the space through which all objects pass, from birds and trees to comets and stars in the sky; and His infinitude is found in the infinity of the cosmos, stretching out beyond our solar system into eternity. “He is not duration and space, but He endures and is present.… He exists always and everywhere.”13
The fact that the study of nature proved beyond refutation the existence of a perfect and benevolent Creator was for Newton both exhilarating and liberating. Men could now move forward with a new freedom, confident that such a Supreme Being supervised and guided the complex workings of the universe, including their own actions.
Others felt the same sense of freedom. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, to which Newton submitted his Principia, had been moving down the same path since its foundation in 1660. Its members, which included churchmen as well as scientists like Robert Boyle, discoverer of the famous comet, embraced the Principia’s message with enthusiasm. Newton became an overnight hero and an icon of his age, as described by Alexander Pope in the epitaph for his tomb in Westminster Abbey:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay
hid in night:
God said, “Let Newton be!”
and all was Light.
Newton’s drawing of a comet. Where is God? He is in between.
However, while Newton was putting the final touches on his Principia Mathematica, a crisis was brewing. There was a growing political force across the English Channel, a force that was as fearsomely modern as its roots were ancient. Some in England feared it. Others wanted to emulate it. Either way, the notion of a cosmic order built on the will of God was about to show a very different, more sinister face.
“Sire, it is time.”
It was seven-fifteen in the morning. The man who uttered these words stood in the dim light of a single candle, which, like the flame in a church altar, burned in the king’s bedchamber all night—as it did every night. He was the first valet of the king’s bedchamber. His elegant clothes and hair were still slightly rumpled from sleeping at the foot of the king’s bed, as the valet did every night. Behind him, servants lit a fire and opened the window shutters onto the gray morning, as a dull red glow rose over the gardens of Versailles.
The middle-aged, muscular but pudgy man rolled over in his bed. He sat patiently as servants removed his nightshirt and put on a richer, more ornate nightshirt. The door opened quietly and an elderly man and woman entered. The man was the king’s doctor, who silently examined his patient as the servants rubbed the royal legs and arms back to life. The woman was Perette Dufour, the king’s former wet nurse, who remained the first female to greet him every morning for more than half a century. Dufour had been the only person who could bear the pain of suckling the greedy royal infant, who by the time he was two years old had chewed off the nipples of all his other wet nurses.14
Dufour planted a kiss on her former charge as he sat upright and nodded to the valet. The bed curtains were still drawn. However, Louis-Dieudonné de Bourbon, King of the French and the Fourteenth of that name, was ready to receive visitors. The Sun King was about to shine.
The first to enter were the king’s brother, the princes of the blood, the grand chamberlain, the four first gentlemen of the king’s bedchamber, the grand master and masters of the king’s robes, the four first valets of the royal bedchamber, and the first valet of the wardrobe. The chamberlain pulled aside the bed curtain to reveal, as if in a theater, the king in bed. Servants poured spirits of wine into a silver ewer so that Louis could wash his hands and then cross himself with holy water from another basin presented every morning by either the grand chamberlain or the first gentleman.15
Then one or the other presented Louis with his prayer book. The page was marked for the Office of the Holy Spirit. There were no clergymen present for the king’s grand levée, and none who attended ex officio for the second or petite levée in another half hour, when the four secretaries of the dressing room, the two lectors of the chamber, the two majordomos and wardens of the royal plate, along with distinguished visitors, ambassadors, and other members of the French nobility, were allowed to see him be dressed and watch him choose his wig for the day.
The clergy were not excluded from the rest of the Sun King’s daily routine. Louis regularly had a prayer service and then Mass later that morning, like clockwork, at ten o’clock.16 The object of this daily ritual, however, was not the worship of God, but the worship of the king: a king who, in 1687, saw himself as omnipotent as any Roman emperor and sacrosanct as any pope.
For “all men are the image of God,” one of Louis XIV’s propagandists wrote, “but His true portrait is in the person of the sovereign; his authority represents His power; his majesty His éclat; his goodness His charity; his rigor His justice.”17
The Sun King ruled a heliocentric universe as absolutely as the actual sun dominated Copernicus’s and Galileo’s solar system. He ran his kingdom with the mechanical clockwork precision of Descartes’s cosmos. Like a caricature of Newton’s God, he “governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.” Every morning Louis rose like the sun, in a bedroom at the center of his magnificent palace at Versailles, which after twenty years was still under construction (one of the last rooms to be built, ironically, was the royal chapel). On every side for a quarter of a mile ran gardens with five thousand statues and five hundred elaborate fountains, while more than ten thousand servants, courtiers, and royal officials kept the palace in constant motion.
Then as now, Versailles overawed every visitor with its grandeur. Then as now, tourists were allowed to wander the grounds, gape at the statues and fountains, and even watch their king eat his dinner in public. As servants bore the gold and silver platters overflowing with meats and vegetables through the palace, every person was expected to bow and murmur reverently, “The food of the king.” Then, surrounded by his family and dozens of courtiers, Louis XIV would consume four plates of soup, an entire pheasant, and a brace of partridge, followed by large slices of mutton and ham with garlic and gravy and a tray of hard-boiled eggs—all washed down with flagons of champagne.18
What the visitors were seeing was more than a prodigious appetite in action. They were witnessing how the richest and most populous kingdom in Europe had been made to revolve around a single man, in a ritual of obedience as solemn as the Last Supper. They were also watching the poverty of politics in 1600s’ Europe.
The seventeenth century would be the great “century of genius” in science. It was the age of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and of course Newton. The political and social systems of Europe, however, seemed to have stalled out. Through his dark reading of Aristotle, Machiavelli had left behind a dilemma and a paradox.
Self-governing societies seemed doomed to be free but unstable. Because they existed in time, and were therefore subject to the vicissitudes of change and to men’s passions, they would inevitably hit a wall.† Like ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, they were doomed to fall into the hands of a despot in order to save society from mob rule. Freedom, in short, must eventually lead to unfreedom.
If this was true, Europeans asked, then why not start with unfreedom and be done with it? The solution seemed to be ceding all authority to a single absolute sovereign, who consciously modeled his power and glory after the ancient Roman emperors and their Neoplatonist propagandists.
What is usually called the Age of Absolutism in Europe in the 1600s was actually the age of Neoplatonist kingship. Louis XIV was not the only monarch who insisted that he was the living image of God, or that his authority must be as absolute and unquestioned as God’s sovereignty over His creation. The portraits of the others cram the palaces and art galleries of western Europe: Philip III and Philip IV of Spain, Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, Victor Amadeus of Savoy, James I and Charles I of England. They appear dressed in the trappings of imperial glory. They are shown surrounded by clouds of angels and admiring courtiers and blessed by the gods of classical antiquity.
Like the Sun King, all of them turned their nation’s printing presses and church pulpits into royalist propaganda machines. What was then “the mainstream media” routinely pointed to the monarch as an essential link in the Great Chain of Being, the center of a divinely preordained and fixed order. A king was more than just a political leader. Heaven had placed him on the throne not only to be obeyed, but to be loved and revered.
Louis XIV’s favorite clergyman, Bishop Bossuet, proclaimed that a good subject must love his king “like the air which he breathes, like the light that fills his eyes, as much as his own life, indeed as more than his life.” It was a commonplace that God had placed kings at the head of kingdoms, in the same way that He placed fathers at the head of the family: as loving, beneficent images of His own authority, against which there was no appeal because none was necessary. “Oh God,” prayed another of Louis’s panegyrists, “conserve for us this prince You have given us through Your love of us.… Cover him with grace as he covers us with benefits.…”19
Equestrian statue of Louis XIV, Versailles palace. For John Locke, the Sun King was at war with his own people.
Aristotle and Plato would have dismissed this kind of obsequious language as unworthy of free men. By the seventeenth century, however, it had become commonplace. It was also a lie.
Louis’s propaganda machine disguised the sordid reality of the Sun King’s reign. The “benefits” that flowed to his subjects left nearly one in ten a homeless beggar, and as historian Pierre Goubert has noted, infant mortality was running at 25 percent.20 Even as Louis worried over which wig to wear, the countryside where the majority of Frenchmen lived was, as the Venetian ambassador noted in 1660, “a sinkhole of indigence and misery.”
Those who held government jobs or contracts, or attended the king at court, grew rich. The rest starved or saw their incomes steadily shrink away. France’s nobility were immune from taxation; those who could least afford taxes, the peasantry and small property holders in the towns, paid for everything from Europe’s largest army and navy to the fountains and statues at Versailles. And those who refused to adhere to the king’s formula of “one king, one kingdom, one faith,” like the Protestant Huguenots, were persecuted, beaten, and eventually driven into exile by the tens of thousands.
In 1680, Europe’s other kingdoms were scarcely better off. Yet to crowned heads everywhere, Louis XIV’s absolutist ways seemed the last best hope for peace and stability. More than a century before, the Reformation had split Europe into two and even three warring religious camps, culminating in the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. Civil wars, starvation, disease, and economic collapse had swept across the Continent, until the exhausted combatants made peace in 1648. Behind the trappings of loving authority and the reality of coercive power and chronic poverty, the message from Versailles was clear: Your only alternative is mob rule and apocalypse.
There were some, however, who were determined to set some limits on that awesome sovereignty and power.
Late one evening in August 1683, a man crouched in front of his fireplace with a pile of papers. As he fed pages into the fire, the flames would have lit up the rafters of the darkened room and the lean lines of his angular face. He was burning letters, memoranda, bills, published pamphlets, anything that might be incriminating. He knew he was being watched by spies. Although he had thrown them off his trail, at any moment he might be arrested for treason and join his co-conspirators in the Tower of London.
News of the arrest of the Earl of Essex, Lord William Russell, and Algernon Sydney had reached him at his rooms at Christ Church College in Oxford. He had prudently left town for a friend’s house in rural Somerset. Shortly afterward, the bishop of Oxford and the university’s vice chancellor were ordered to search his chambers. They had burned a pile of his books in the courtyard, the last such public burning in England. Other agents of the king began a massive search for anyone matching the description of John Locke.
Now Locke was destroying every trace of his associations and activities in the alleged plot against King Charles II—everything, that is, except a particular manuscript. He took it with him as he left Somerset for the coast. The remaining papers Locke sent to a friend: “What you dislike,” he wrote, “you may burn.” He also provided details on settling his debts and directions for selling his clothes, books, and furniture in Oxford, including two silver candlesticks and his “linens, flannel shirts, waistcoats, [and] stockings.” Locke also sent his friend a signed will, just in case the next stage of his plan went awry.21
A few days later, Locke turned up at one of the Channel ports. Money changed hands, and Locke slipped onto a boat bound for Holland. On September 7, 1683, he was in Rotterdam and free.
He would not return to England for another six years. By then his friends were dead, executed for their supposed complicity in the Rye House plot.‡ They had actually died for their part in the resistance to the growing tyranny in England and the spread of Louis XIV’s Neoplatonist message across the English Channel.
Locke had traveled to France and Versailles. He had seen Louis XIV’s petite levée and watched the elaborate rituals of absolute kingship, of total rule by one man. Locke’s one goal in life was to make sure the same thing never happened in England. But whereas others tried to fight for freedom with guns or plots or revolutions, Locke would fight for it with ideas.
His weapon at hand was the manuscript under his arm. “Absolute monarchy,” it read in part, “is inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no form of Civil Government at all.” His book revealed why governments must serve the interests of everyone, rather than one person; and why one-man rule was the perversion, not the perfection, of nature—particularly the nature so brilliantly illuminated by his friend Isaac Newton.
It’s not surprising that Newton and Locke were close, even intimate friends. As a Newton biographer noted, “Each recognized in the other an intellectual peer.”22 Both were keenly interested in the new science (Newton actually gave Locke a special gift copy of the Principia, which is today in Cambridge’s Trinity College Library). Both were also keen readers of the Bible. Locke, in fact, told a biographer that he knew few men who equaled Newton in knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments.
And both were working on the same problem from different ends. This was figuring out how human beings fit into an infinite universe—and how we can salvage our freedom from the forces of blind necessity, in either the physical or the political realms.
The answer they found was the nature of nature itself, as the product of a Beneficent Creator. Like Newton, behind nature and reason Locke always recognized the person and voice of God.23 Newton’s Principia revealed that the physical universe was governed by certain laws of nature, “a constant and regular connection in the ordinary course of things.” That constancy reveals the will of an “all wise Agent,” as Locke later wrote, “who has made them to be, and to operate as they do.”24 Locke’s Two Treatises of Government revealed that the political universe is run the same way, through natural laws that guide men’s behavior in the same sure way that they guide the movement of the planets.
In discussing this, Locke had found a kindred spirit in Aristotle. This was not the Aristotle of the schoolmen or the civic humanist of the Florentines, but the shrewd analyst of human nature in the Ethics.
In Book V, Aristotle noted that some laws are common to all people, whether Persians and Greeks, Egyptians or Babylonians. All agree that murder and theft are wrong; all agree that our word is our bond and that contracts must be kept. The origin of these universal rules for conduct and justice can’t be written law, since all written law is based on them. So where did they come from? They come from our observation of nature, Aristotle said, and the experience of seeing what’s fair and what’s unfair in actual situations. From that experience, human beings extract a standard of justice that “has the same validity everywhere and does not depend on acceptance” by a particular people or government—but which is upheld by all of them and everywhere men institute fair and just laws.25
However different in other respects, Greeks and Persians, Egyptians and Nubians, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, all enshrine these principles of natural justice in their laws. However, Aristotle insisted, the source of that justice is always the same: observation of the underlying order of nature.
Thomas Aquinas had noticed Aristotle’s point and extended it. In his usual tidy way, Aquinas decided to divide man’s encounter with the concept of law into a three-part hierarchy of importance.26 Aquinas was a theologian, not a lawyer, so he put the actual legal codes of peoples and nations, including Roman law, at the bottom, while putting divine law, or lex divina, such as the Ten Commandments, at the top.
In between he put what he called the laws of nature, or lex naturalis. These included all the physical laws of nature (including motions of planets), moral principles like charity and self-preservation, and all those laws, including prohibitions against murder, incest, and theft, that all nations immediately see as just. Like divine law, this natural law reflects God’s will. But instead of learning His will directly through the Bible and revelation, we learn this natural aspect of His will through our reason. Wherever men use their reason, Aquinas concluded, we will see them respect the laws of nature; and wherever we see the practice of lex naturalis in human affairs, then we know we are dealing with rational beings like ourselves.27
Then Aquinas was prepared to move on. But Aquinas also left an ambiguity for future generations to ponder. Lex naturalis could also be rendered as jus naturale; the Latin is unclear. Natural laws, in other words, could become “natural rights,” meaning a legal claim we derive from nature and hold as individuals. But what kind of claim? And a claim against whom?
The answer the followers of Aquinas developed was that my natural rights are my claims against the community to protect and defend my person and those things essential to my well-being. These rights are mine by nature, “since all men are born free by nature,” as the Dominican Francisco Suárez wrote in the late 1500s.28 It was all too easy to see a close parallel between the way in which William of Ockham had borrowed from Aristotle’s Politics to talk about the community retaining its sovereignty over those who exercise power in its name, like a pope or prince, and the sovereign natural rights of the individual drawn from the Thomist reading of Aristotle’s Ethics.
Both powers are held as a matter of right, or jus. Both are temporarily transferred as a matter of convenience (to a prince or head of state in the community’s case, to the laws of the state in the individual’s case), to make it easier to protect and defend that power’s original holders, the people and the individuals who make up “the people.” In fact, by the 1500s some were concluding that perhaps there was even more overlap. Perhaps it was in order to protect those same natural rights that individuals banded together in the first place.
At this point, Aristotle could provide no more help. He had never bothered to ask why men set up city-states or governments. The fact that it was their nature to do so, as political animals (zoon politikon), did the trick. But Aquinas and his followers could help, and did.
In a pristine “state of nature,” they decided, man was totally free but totally unsafe. He was prey not only to the elements and wild animals, but to his fellow man, for whom freedom was license to act not as zoon politikon, but as homo lupus. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, life ends up being “nasty, brutish, and short.”
To correct this, right reason dictates a solution. To avoid killing one another off, men make an agreement. They trade in their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, which are now recognized and protected by the community and those who wield authority in its name.
For example, the jurist Hugo Grotius (one of Locke’s predecessors in this way of thinking) said this exchange involves a trade-off. What I lose from the point of total freedom, I gain by way of security and predictability.29 Under the new arrangement, I won’t be able to help myself to your pile of grain whenever I feel hungry, or your bank account. But I know you won’t help yourself to mine, either; because if you do, the civil authority will punish you for it.
Steeped in the Latin of Roman law, Europe’s jurists branded this agreement the pactum societatis. In their minds, it marked the birth of legitimate government. A couple of centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave it a more famous name: the social contract. It’s not based on a signed piece of paper or original physical act. Like the axis of Galileo’s rotating earth, the social contract is imaginary, but it is still there, exerting its influence and power. Like any contract, it imposes obligations both on me and on my rulers. I am bound to obey the laws of the society in which I choose to dwell. The lawgivers, including a prince or king, are bound to respect my civil rights—or else.
Or else what? By 1600, that was the question every crowned head and magistrate felt entitled to ask. In a profound sense, it was the political question for Europe for the next two hundred years.
The problem was that many natural law theorists made breaking the contract too easy. It wasn’t necessary for the ruler to threaten people’s lives or seize their property; just being of the wrong religion, or not sufficiently committed to the right one, was enough. A generation of Catholic political writers, including Aquinas’s followers, used the social contract to threaten Protestant rulers with overthrow and assassination. Protestants responded by arguing the same about Catholic kings.30
Two French kings in a row died from an assassin’s dagger, while James I of England suffered a near miss in the Gunpowder Plot. His son Charles I did end up paying the ultimate price for supposedly breaking his covenant with his subjects; but as Englishmen learned, what was supposed to be a formula for liberty ended up being a formula for a decade of chaos and dictatorship.
No wonder many preferred the Louis XIV solution, to accept divinely ordained absolute rulership and be done with it. Others, like Locke’s older contemporary Thomas Hobbes, decided that social contract theory needed drastic modification. In his grand theory of the state published in 1651, titled Leviathan, Hobbes insisted that the transfer of a people’s self-sovereignty to a monarch and king did indeed take place but it was a onetime transaction. Once it was complete, there was no going back, ever. “For the Sovereign [must be] absolute … or else there is no Sovereignty at all.”31
Hobbes’s citizens realize that they must give up their natural liberty in order to protect them from themselves. They are like the alcoholic who hands the key to his liquor cabinet to a friend and says, “No matter what I say, don’t give me back the key.” He knows that unless someone stops him, he is a danger to himself and others.
Hobbes knew that some rights theorists, like the Calvinist Scot George Buchanan and the Spanish Dominican Juan Molina, still insisted that the alcoholic should get his key whenever he wants it—even at the price of civil war. Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into “loving tumults” and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign; and “the Liberty of the subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Sovereign hath permitted.…”32
Locke saw this line of argument as a complete perversion of the idea of natural rights. People aren’t alcoholics; by and large, they are the same sober and hardworking people as Aristotle’s householders in the Politics, who want to be left alone to live their lives. Instead, Locke insisted that the debate over natural rights return to its original framework of natural law. “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.”33 Was it possible that God would devise such a system of natural laws and put man in the middle of them in order to create a nation of slaves? Locke said no.
John Locke was a doctor, not a lawyer. He was less interested in the legal aspect of the social contract than in its moral face. Locke saw at once that God must have constructed the framework of natural law for the same purpose that He devised Newton’s universe: to set men free.
Therefore, that natural liberty was not something we surrender at all. Putting our trust in a beneficent God is one thing; trusting our liberty to a human ruler is quite another. Instead, we keep our liberty close and forever. It’s ours to use even in civil society; and protection of that liberty is the final end of civil society.
This includes liberty of our person and our lives and those things that are extensions of ourselves, like our family and property. “Though the earth and inferior Creatures be common to all men,” Locke wrote in his Second Treatise, “the labor that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them [which] no one has a Right to but [myself].” In fact, nowhere are we closer to God than when we create property from our own handiwork, just as man is the handiwork of his Lord God.34
Locke’s natural liberty includes liberty of thought, since reason is another of God’s gifts, including our thoughts about religion. This made Locke the first great advocate of religious toleration and author of three Letters Concerning Toleration, the second of which he sent to Newton for comment and approval.35 Liberty included an equality before the law, since all men are equal before God; and it included a generosity of spirit and independence of mind that Aristotle had recognized as the hallmark of the virtuous man and which Locke saw would prevent a state of normal liberty from degenerating into a “state of license”—in other words, a perpetual riot.
All these liberties or rights are protected, not hindered, by the original social contract. Proper government is not a restraint on our natural liberty, as Hobbes and others thought. It is a net increase, since it provides a framework of security in which we can enjoy our civil liberties in ways not possible in the state of nature. It “is the one great reason of men putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature.”36
With it, however, come certain duties. One is the duty to use our reason as God’s gift; another is to protect our liberty and the liberty of others. The most important, however, is the duty of the sovereign to respect that liberty: and when he doesn’t, when “he that in a State of Society would take away the Freedom that belongs to those of that Society,” and pretends to be our master rather than our servant, then it is he, not us, who is the real rebel against society.37
Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham. For Locke, it is an inescapable law of nature. It is what separates a society of free men from a society of slaves.
To others like his late friend Algernon Sidney, that “legislative body” representing the people was England’s Parliament, and always had been.39 To Locke, it really didn’t matter. The issue was not historical precedent, but natural right. The real power was power invested in the people, now and forever. It could not be taken away by any earthly man or institution, including Parliament itself.
This was a truly radical idea. It was too radical for an England weary of a century of tumults and intrigues. In 1688, the English replaced their monarch James II and brought another, James’s daughter Mary and her husband, William, from Holland. Locke returned to England with them in the royal yacht, but not in triumph. The arguments Parliament chose to justify its removal of one king and replacing him with another implicitly rejected Locke’s populist appeal and substituted the more conservative historical one of his dead friend Sidney.40
John Locke, former fugitive and would-be revolutionary, died in 1704. His last work was a series of paraphrases of the sayings of Saint Paul, which he sent to his friend Isaac Newton. No man had labored more to reconcile the God of the New Testament with the laws of nature expounded by Aristotle and Aquinas. “He that shall collect all the moral rules of the philosophers,” he once wrote, “and compare them with those contained in the New Testament, will find them to come short of the morality delivered by our Savior, and taught by his apostles; a college made up, for the most part, of ignorant but inspired fishermen.”41 Yet for other reasons no one’s influence would be more important in the secular age to follow: Locke’s belief that a government of the people, by the people, and even as for the people is a matter of natural law and right would take root across the Atlantic in the fertile soil of the New World.
* Descartes completely rejected the idea that animals had mental states or consciousness like those of humans, including feeling love or suffering pain. He has been the bête noire of animal rights activists ever since.
† Venice, which managed to maintain its republican system of government uninterrupted through the centuries, was the exception, but the exception that seemed to prove the rule. Everyone agreed its case was unique, the product of its closed oligarchic politics and unusual social stability, which no other European state could emulate.
‡ Whether a plot to kidnap Charles II was actually hatched at Rye House has been debated and redebated by historians ever since.
§ Something Louis’s wet nurses might have agreed with.