In the year of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, Paris and indeed the whole of France was in turmoil because of the Fronde, a civil insurrection against the government of the infant King Louis XIV and his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. It was prompted by the burden of taxes that had been raised to pay for the military expenses of France’s participation in the Thirty Years War and war with Spain. The Fronde was a dangerous affair, because the aristocracy sided with the parlements (especially of Paris) in defending the feudal liberties of the latter, which meant in effect that the country had risen against the Crown, in what was a straightforward rebellion. Cardinal Mazarin, a much hated figure, triggered the uprising by arresting the leaders of the parlement of Paris when they refused to pay a new tax. Their arrest brought the citizens of Paris on to the streets; there were barricades, and as turmoil spread through the country it became increasingly violent, turning into a civil war. The troubles continued until the early months of 1653, making nearly five years of unrest and uncertainty in all.
The sequence of events constituting the Fronde (the word means ‘sling’; the frondeurs used slings to hurl stones as did the Old Testament’s David) need not be recounted; the important point is its outcome, namely, an eventual victory for the monarchy in the person of Louis XIV, and his determination – highly successful as it proved – to assert absolute rule over France.
In this respect France and the way it was governed in the second half of the seventeenth century represents a step backwards, moving against the current of progress in both political theory and practice that was running elsewhere, notably in England. The absolute monarchy of Louis XIV brought great prestige and power to France; it became the leading country in succession to Spain, by then much enfeebled, and it so far impressed its culture and language on the world that all the ruling classes of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals spoke French, and French remained the language of international diplomacy into our own era. But of course the eventual cost of absolutism was the French Revolution, and Louis XIV might be regarded as the last great despot ruling by a supposed divine right.
To illustrate how different matters were elsewhere, and at the same time to get a sense of how the mind of the seventeenth century was changing, it is instructive to look at the evolution of political circumstances in just one notable country – England – between the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the accession of Queen Anne in 1702. In that hundred years the world shed the last hints of medievalism. Take the single example of kingship: the distance from the horror of King Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, staged in 1606, to the execution of King Charles I in 1649, to Parliament’s placing a crown on the head of William of Orange in 1688, is immense. After this last event Parliament had the ultimate say on the royal succession, and on the powers – as time went by, increasingly limited – that monarchs could wield. This achievement was the proximate outcome of the Civil War a quarter of a century before.
Histories of the English Civil War call it ‘the English revolution’. So it was; but it denotes a larger event, of more extended duration than the years of actual fighting between supporters of Crown and Parliament in the 1640s. This is because it is also the forerunner to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, which chased James II from the throne and replaced him with the joint monarchs William (of Orange) and Mary, daughter of James II. Mary was a Protestant, crucially unlike her father. James II had invited trouble by attempting to reinsinuate Catholics into English institutions and Catholicism into English life. In choosing William and Mary to replace James II, Parliament significantly diminished the Crown’s powers by the Bill of Rights – a document specifying the rights of Parliament vis-à-vis the Crown, not the rights of individuals, as later Bills of Rights in the Western political canon did.1 The history of events in England in the sixty years between 1630 and 1690 have their very different theoretical justifications in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.2 The latter’s contribution, in particular, in giving a rationalisation of the aims and outcome of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, establishes much of the foundation for the political liberalism of the following centuries.
The dramatic change in the politics and government of England in this period was not replicated anything like so dramatically in the rest of Europe. As already noted, France moved in the opposite direction in becoming an even more centralised and autocratic state. Louis XIV’s position was ultimately strengthened by the Fronde not least because of his sense of outrage at having been subjected to profound indignities by it; he and his mother, Anne of Austria, had experienced hunger, fear and cold while in hiding during the worst of the uprising. As soon as he could he established his court at Versailles, away from the Parisian mob, and he weakened the aristocracy by making it waste its time, energy and money in pointless attendance at Court. He also diluted the aristocracy by creating thousands of new nobles, much to the old nobles’ disdain. In the event, his doing so only provided extra food for Madame Guillotine during the Terror which followed the Revolution of 1789, itself the long-term consequence of the absolutism that Louis practised.
If Louis XIV is the paradigm of an absolute monarch, the political philosophy of Locke is the period’s most significant theoretical rejection of absolutism. Locke was not a maker of the bloodless middle-class revolution of 1688, but rather its explainer and justifier. He wrote to describe the principles exemplified by the event, and to support them. This is why his writings proved of such importance for the political upheavals in North America and France a century after his time.
Locke was both physician and secretary to Lord Shaftesbury, opponent of James II and proponent of the idea of a new constitutional settlement. Being in opposition to the Crown was dangerous, and necessitated a period of exile in the Netherlands for Shaftesbury and Locke both before and during James II’s reign. This direct involvement at the heart of events that resulted in England becoming a constitutional monarchy informed all of Locke’s political writings. It is no surprise therefore that he is quoted, and at considerable length, in the documents of the American and French revolutions. To the philosophes of the French Enlightenment he was a hero.
To get a measure of Locke’s task in propounding the idea of political liberalism it is educative to look at the embodiment of what he was arguing against – namely, the absolute rule of Louis XIV and the ideas that were invoked in justification of it.
An absolute monarch is a ruler who is above the law – or more accurately, who is the law – and over whom there is no higher authority (some had enough respect for the consequences of hubris to say ‘other than God’ – but of course some thought they were God, e.g. Caligula; and officially some are God, e.g. the Japanese Emperor). An absolute monarch is therefore one who, at least theoretically, acts without any restrictions other than those he accepts from his own conscience and what he is willing to accept from his forebears’, country’s or people’s traditions. Of course, even absolute rulers are rarely without some constraint, whether it is the opinion of the people, the fear of an avenging deity, or his own ethics or sense of humanity. But being above the law and without equal, he has no otherwise recognised restraints; he has unlimited power over his subjects. There are of course qualifications to this definition – an absolute ruler is ‘theoretically’ and ‘technically’ without restraint – but these terms express the reality that rulers always have some term to their power, even if only in being assassinated or in provoking rebellion because of (say) the cruel and arbitrary exercise of that power.
Absolute monarchy of Louis XIV’s paradigmatic kind was the long-term outcome of the death of feudalism. Feudal kings were far from absolute; they were primus inter pares, the leading member of a group of leaders who worked together to keep control, mainly by force. The word ‘peer’ to denote a nobleman captures the near-equal status of barons with monarchs to whom they were anyway closely related, by blood as well as political necessity and convenience. In this dispensation kings relied on the loyalty of their barons and a complex structure of customs, traditions, rights and dues, together with the power to grant land, titles and privileges, that supported the Crown’s authority but at the same time imposed checks on it. With the evolution of more centralised government necessitated by taxation and the organisation of armies and navies, the power of kings grew while that of nobles diminished.
The central question in political theory is: from what source comes a governing agency’s right to govern? What confers authority on a ruler? We must suppose that in earlier phases of history the source of power was sheer strength. In feudal times this strength was jointly exercised by a self-interested cartel of nobles among whom the king was the senior member. In democracies the ultimate source of authority is the people’s will as expressed at the ballot box. But what was it in the period between the end of feudalism and the beginning of democracy?
For the increasingly centralised states that evolved from the fifteenth century onwards a new account of government authority was needed. Strength or might could no longer be a justification even if it were a possibility; peers were no longer genuinely equals; the monarch both reigned and ruled – but what conferred his right to do so? The answer was: ‘divine right’.
This answer was derived from a practice that the Church had eagerly promoted during the time of its greatest influence and power, which was in the high medieval period. It lay in the practice of the Pope giving his blessing – his seal of approval; his imprimatur – to a new king. From the Vatican’s point of view this was a direct expression of the principle that the throne of St Peter is first among all thrones, that Christendom is as it were a single kingdom to which more local kingdoms are subordinate. Even if the various kings of the ‘subordinate’ kingdoms were not particularly happy with this way of seeing things, they went along with it because of its utility when there were disputed successions or armed challenges to the tenure of their crowns.
There was an evolution at work in the process described here. Originally, getting hold of the symbols of power – the sceptre, the crown – mattered because power resided in possession of the symbols: symbolism and actuality were intimately connected. But then the imprimatur of divine choice or approval came to be necessary. Shakespeare’s way of writing about kingship is educative in this connection: in his account of it, regality is a mixture of the holy and the magical, something extraordinary and inviolable (and if violated then at great danger to the order of things), where everything otherwise normal to human life and experience is magnified into epic proportions.
But history was not kind to the useful doctrine that God was the author of the rights of kingship, as ratified by the liturgical nature of coronation ceremonies. For no sooner had the ordination of monarchs become the ground on which kings claimed their authority than Christendom began fragmenting into a variety of Protestant and one Catholic version of itself. In each of the political fragments resulting from this disruption, rulers demanded that their subjects follow their choice of religion – this being the Augsburg principle of cuius regio, eius religio: the religion of the ruler is the religion of the people. In Protestant countries there was no successor to the Pope to lay on hands and serve as the conduit of divine sanction; it now had to be thought of as coming directly and unmediatedly from the deity. Hence the idea remained that a king was divinely appointed and that allegiance was accordingly a religious duty.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, in his Politics Taken from the Very Word of Scripture (Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Ecriture sainte) (1679), was the theoretician who justified Louis XIV’s style of monarchy, rather as Locke had provided justification and theoretical underpinning for the ‘Glorious Revolution’ – but of course to quite opposite effect.3 Bossuet did not develop original ideas on the matter; he was influenced by the sixteenth-century lawyer and philosopher Jean Bodin, who was strongly in favour of independent centralised monarchical power, not so much as an instrument of authority over a populace but as a bulwark against papal power. Louis’ assumption of absolute power is famously captured in his claim that l’état, c’est moi.
Bossuet made full use of the scriptural passages which unequivocally support a divine-right theory. Proverbs chapter 8 verses 15–16 says, ‘By me kings reign, and princes decree justice. By me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth.’ In Romans chapter 13 verses 1–2 St Paul says, ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’ Commenting on these passages, Bossuet wrote,
We have already seen that all power is of God. The ruler, adds St Paul, ‘is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.’ Rulers then act as the ministers of God and as his lieutenants on earth. It is through them that God exercises his empire. Think you to withstand the kingdom of the lord in the hand of the sons of David? Consequently, as we have seen, the royal throne is not the throne of a man but the throne of God himself. The Lord ‘hath chosen Solomon my son to sit upon the throne of the kingdom of Israel.’ And again, ‘Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord.’ . . . It appears from all this that the person of the king is sacred, and that to attack him in any way is sacrilege. God has the kings anointed by his prophets with the holy unction in like manner as he has his bishops and altars anointed . . . Kings should be guarded as holy things, and whosoever neglects to protect them is worthy of death . . . The royal power is absolute . . . The prince need render account of his acts to no one.
Bossuet was not however an unintelligent apologist for absolute monarchy; he did not confuse the two different ideas of absolute and arbitrary power.
But kings, although their power comes from on high, should not regard themselves as masters of that power to use it at their pleasure . . . they must use it with fear and self-restraint, as a thing coming from God and of which God will demand an account . . . Kings should tremble then as they use the power God has granted them; and let them think how horrible is the sacrilege if they use for evil a power which comes from God. We behold kings seated upon the throne of the Lord, bearing in their hands the swords which God himself has given them. What profanation, what arrogance, for the unjust king to sit on God’s throne to render decrees contrary to his laws and to use the sword which God has put in his hand for deeds of violence and to slay his children!4
The intriguing contradiction in Bossuet’s account is that although the king is absolute in power, there is a limit: if he misuses his authority he violates God’s law, and if he violates God’s law, does he not thereby forfeit the right to rule? Can the Church oblige him to abdicate in such a case? Can the people – all the estates of the people: nobility, clergy, general populace – resist him? The question was intriguing because of a parallel consideration: in Church doctrine it is laid down that once a priest has been ordained it does not matter what sins he commits, he can still administer the sacraments because the powers conferred on him exist independently of him. Does this apply also to kings? Louis XIV embodies an answer to these questions, in regarding his right to rule as inalienable. This was not the majority view among Protestant theologians, however, which was a source of trouble for rulers who subscribed to their views.
Louis perfectly understood everything implied by his divine right to rule. In his childhood a book called Educatio Regia was read aloud to him, urging him to remember every morning that he had to play the part of God in his kingdom, and every evening to ask himself whether he had succeeded: Hodie mihi gerenda est persona Dei . . . Deusne hodie an homo fui? In a memoir he wrote for his son the Dauphin he said, ‘holding as it were the place of God we seem to participate in his wisdom as in his authority; for instance, in what concerns discernment of human character, allocation of employments and distribution of rewards’.5
The jury is out as to whether Louis manifested any divine wisdom. The ministers he appointed were not as good as those in place when he attained his majority, which calls his judgment into question regarding the characters and abilities of men; but he was a ‘quick study’ when it came to mastering information and seeing how it might best be applied. What he certainly disliked was the labyrinth of traditions and customs that encumbered the throne, and he set about ridding himself of them as soon as he could. He took away from the parlement of Paris its role in the government of France. In less than three years from attaining his majority and beginning personal rule (in 1662) the Paris parlement was no longer a sovereign court. Louis did not summon the States-General until near the end of his reign, during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). Clergymen and nobles had only ceremonial positions at his Court, not government responsibilities. He ruled personally, helped by four ministerial councils and a small number of Secretaries of State.6
These Secretaries of State were drawn from two bourgeois families of professional civil servants, the Louvois and Colbert families, each of whom were personally loyal to Louis. They were not invariably good at their work. Among the worst judgments of Louis’ long reign was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, removing protection from France’s Protestants. This maladroit decision, coupled with persistent mishandling of the nation’s finances and Louis’ frequent and costly wars, damaged France’s economy so badly that it took more than a hundred years to recover.
Yet Louis kept his firm hold by ensuring two things: that the nobility were powerless and distracted, and that the populace loved him. He achieved the first of these aims very simply. Because he never forgot the nobles’ treacherous part in the Fronde, he carefully arranged that they would be in no position to do it again. Nobles by birth – the noblesse d’épée – were required to attend him at Versailles almost permanently, performing the elaborate rituals and observing the elaborate protocol that required the filling of scores of nominal offices. An apartment at Versailles went with such appointments, and nobles competed for them fiercely, devoting endless time and money to keeping up appearances and performing trivial tasks. Louis kept something coming into his always emptying coffers by selling peerages by the hundred, creating scores of new merely decorative offices with patents of nobility attached, and making the newly created noblesse de robe hereditary and thus closer in status to the noblesse d’épée.7
The love that the French people felt for Louis is in fact rather puzzling. Somehow they were in a mood to idolise their King, perhaps star-struck by the pomp and splendour of Versailles – which they knew about only at second hand, through illustrations and gossip. They did not know that Louis chose to build his palace at Versailles precisely in order to be as far from them as possible. He was a tall man, always emotionless in expression, which gave him an appearance of distinction and self-command. He imposed wars and taxes on his people – the taxes necessitated by the wars – but otherwise did nothing to improve or ameliorate their lot, or indeed do anything else that could explain their adulation of him.
Louis’ absolutism manifested itself in a variety of ways. He claimed ownership of all land in France; he said that what was considered to be private property in fact belonged to him, the titular owners merely having the usufruct. This was the logical conclusion of the doctrine that absolute sovereignty is equivalent to ‘dominium’ or ownership, in a king’s case of the entire kingdom. One of Louis’ few contemporary critics among Frenchmen, the Calvinist Pierre Jurieu, claimed that early in the King’s reign there had been a plan to take all private property into the Crown’s possession and then rent it back to its previous owners as a means of raising revenue. No such thing was done, but it is clear that having such a principle in place was useful in case of necessity. But it is a telling illustration of the principle of absolute monarchy, which entails it.
Another implication of the absolutist principle is that because the king answers only to God, he is not bound by promises or agreements with mortals, including other monarchs – which to Louis meant that he was not obliged to observe international treaties. He regarded them as temporary conveniences, and when they ceased to be convenient he had no hesitation in breaching them. In his memoir to the Dauphin there is a frank statement of this view; protestations of eternal friendship and permanent alliance are nothing more than diplomatic courtesies, Louis wrote, and have no meaning beyond the treaty’s usefulness.
Absolutism has it, thirdly, that the king is above the law, and with this idea Louis certainly agreed. It led him to invoke or ignore laws at whim, again depending on convenience. It was the tradition in France as elsewhere that succession to the throne descended through the legitimate male line only. Louis appealed to this ancient principle in supporting the claim of Philip V of Spain, thereby triggering the War of Spanish Succession; but he ignored the principle in saying that his bastards could stand in line to the succession if there were no legitimate heir. Everything to Louis was expediency; that seemed to be the only law he obeyed.
England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 was a complete and unequivocal rejection of the divine-right doctrine, and in its place were put the principles of parliamentary government. This is the great change that Locke set out to justify. Someone had to provide an argument defending this new basis for political authority, and Locke accepted the task. The new basis was established in practice when James II fled and Parliament announced on its own authority that the throne was vacant. It then invited William of Orange to sit on that throne, but only after long negotiations about what he could and could not do while he did so.
The legitimacy of these actions lay in the upheavals of the Civil War, when those on the Parliamentary side saw themselves as doing far more than resolving a quarrel between the Crown and Parliament. Independents and Levellers who demanded adult suffrage and annual parliaments were seeking a real change, notably the institution of a form of democracy. There were other campaigners too: the Diggers argued for common ownership of land so that all could be sure of eating; they were the victims of the heartless enclosures that had begun more than a century before, in which landowners drove many people from the land. Many of these many died of starvation.
The Diggers’ radical demands show how far the change in mind-set had gone. Their demands were not met, and what transpired was far too conservative and incremental to help them. Still, the trend of history was such as to aid a shift in the sources of political authority, though only from the Crown to Parliament. The events of 1688 gave the great Whig families, and in due time their Tory opponents, the levers of government; but the transfer of power thus begun was eventually to result, 250 years later, in full adult suffrage and periodic parliaments.
A striking example of the maturity of thinking in the radical political atmosphere of the mid-seventeenth century is An Agreement of the People for a Firme and Present Peace, upon the Grounds of Common-right and Freedome (November 1647). This document was produced by the Army Council in response to what the soldiers of the Parliamentary army demanded. It says,
Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom, and God having so far owned our cause as to deliver the enemies thereof into our hands, we do now hold ourselves as bound in mutual duty to each other to take the best care we can for the future to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition and the chargeable remedy of another war; for, as it cannot be imagined that so many of our countrymen would have opposed us in this quarrel if they had understood their own good, so may we safely promise to ourselves that when our common rights and liberties shall be cleared, their endeavours will be disappointed that seek to make themselves our masters.
The Agreement then demands that Parliament be reformed, with a proper distribution of seats by population, elections every two years, and universal adult male suffrage.
To this eloquent demand for parliamentary democracy – at fault only in one but very important respect, namely the exclusion of women from the franchise – is then added others: religious toleration, no military conscription, equality in application of the law to all, and with all this the aim of promoting the safety and well-being of the people. The Agreement continued,
These things we declare to be our native rights and therefore are agreed and resolved to maintain them with our utmost possibilities against all opposition whatever, being compelled thereunto by the examples of our ancestors, whose blood was often spent in vain for the recovery of their freedoms, [and] also by our own woeful experience who, having long expected, and dearly earned, the establishment of these certain rules of government, are yet made to depend for the settlement of our peace and freedom upon him [i.e. Charles I] that intended our bondage and brought a cruel war upon us.
It took several centuries more for these demands to be met – and it is debatable whether they have indeed all been met yet. Reforms were made in small steps, just enough each time to deflect revolt – the protesting crowds in London’s streets smashed windows in support of their demand for Parliamentary reform in 1832, yet were pacified by a very small extension of the franchise. This fact is significant in understanding Locke’s justification of Parliament’s assumption of increased power in 1688.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ established two linked points – more accurately, the reverse and obverse of the same point – the sovereignty of Parliament and the rejection of the divine-right doctrine. By putting a crown on William’s head on its own terms, Parliament had achieved effective constitutional sovereignty. Control of national finances and the armed forces lay with Parliament, and with those two things lay everything. The settlement also and crucially secured the independence of the judiciary and a right of petition, two bulwarks of a free society.
Locke described his aim, in his political writings, as justifying William’s possession of the throne ‘to make good his title in the consent of the people’ – by ‘people’ meaning Parliament, though the generalising ambiguity, in seeming to denote the whole nation, is doubtless intentional. Today his statement would be called ‘spin’. The spinning was necessary; not everyone in England was happy with the arrangements. Quite a few Tories were deeply uneasy about the legality of what had happened, and were inclined to uphold James II’s claim to be rightful king. Louis XIV helped Locke’s side of the argument – he could do no other than support ‘legitimacy’ and thus James II’s rightful possession of the throne, but his insistence on recognising James as the King of England kept not just Whigs but the English populace on the side of the new arrangements.
The text – it became an instant classic – in which Locke sets out the justification for the ‘Glorious Revolution’ is his Second Treatise of Government. The First Treatise consists in a fully worked-out refutation of Sir Robert Filmer’s defence of the doctrine of divine right in his Patriarchia. Monarchical absolutism is derived by Filmer (with commendable completeness and thoroughness, one has to say) from the authority given to Adam in the Garden of Eden. There the deity had conferred sovereignty over everything on Adam and his heirs for ever, Filmer pointed out, thus instituting absolute monarchy as the only correct political arrangement. With great patience Locke traced Filmer through the twists and turns of history to prove him wrong. If one asks why Locke devoted such attention to Filmer’s thesis, it is because a far bigger prey lurked behind the argument of the Patriarchia, namely, Hobbes.
Filmer’s book bears the subtitle ‘A defence of the Natural Power of Kings against the Unnatural Liberty of the People’. It had been written during the reign of Charles I, but it was published only in 1680, when it was being suggested that James should not be allowed to succeed Charles II because of his – James’ – Roman Catholicism. Like Bossuet, Filmer relied on the scriptures and the precedents provided by history, and he stated that he agreed with Hobbes on the question of ‘the Right of exercising government’ though not on how that right is acquired. For Filmer the right is endowed by God, transmitted through legitimate succession to the throne, while for Hobbes it is acquired from the consensual yielding up of each person’s liberty.
Locke did not write directly about Hobbes because Hobbes’ name was off limits – he was believed to be an atheist, and atheism was regarded with horror at that time. Moreover Hobbes’ views were equally applicable to monarchical and republican regimes. If anyone tried to defend William’s entitlement to the throne by citing Hobbes, William’s opponents could just as easily cite Hobbes on the other side of the case.
Hobbes regarded membership of political society as the only guarantee of individual safety. Without such insurance against the depredations of each on each in the unpredictable and violent conditions of a ‘state of nature’, life would be – as he memorably put it – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. In the absence of an authority capable of keeping everyone safe, there can be no security; not even self-defence pacts formed by individuals in combination with each other would be sufficient: ‘be there never so great a multitude; yet if their actions be directed according to their particular judgements, and particular appetites, they can expect thereby no defence, no protection, neither against a common enemy, nor against the injuries of another’.8
The only sure source of safety, Hobbes argued, is a ‘common power’, a central authority which Hobbes named ‘Leviathan’. The Leviathan’s authority is endowed on it by the agreement of each member of society to accept its unlimited sovereignty over them. The Leviathan could be an individual person, such as an absolute monarch, or a group or oligarchy, or indeed any other entity, so long as it possesses plenary powers:
For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth which is, to define it, one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenant one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence.9
The sovereign power, thus constituted by the agreement of those over whom it has complete sway, is under no obligation to the people once it is constituted, beyond ensuring their safety. Hobbes accords the sovereign two inalienable and unlimitable ‘rights’ which it must have in order to fulfil its function properly: it cannot have its power taken away or compromised by its subjects, and it can never be charged with treating any of its subjects unjustly. Hobbes’ justification for attributing these ‘rights’ to the sovereign is that it embodies the will of the people, having been created by the mutual contract they entered for their own safety. Therefore to seek to overthrow the sovereign or oppose its decisions would be self-contradictory, because the people would thus be challenging their own reason for constituting that sovereignty in the first place: ‘by this institution of a commonwealth, every particular man is author of all that the sovereign doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign, complaineth of that whereof he himself is author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself; no nor himself of injury; because to do injury to one’s self is impossible’.10
The two unlimitable and inalienable ‘rights’ in question are what make the sovereign’s power absolute. Only the sovereign can decide on matters of war and peace, on relations with other states, on what can be published or practised in the commonwealth, on property, punishments, official appointments, the distribution of honours, and all final matters at law. Hobbes says that these powers are the ‘essence of sovereignty’; they are ‘the marks whereby a man may discern in what man, or assembly of men, the sovereign power is placed and resideth’.11
Although by its nature the sovereign is above the law and in almost every respect unchallengeable, there is after all one great constraint on it. This constraint arises from the very reason for its existence, which is to ensure the safety of its subjects. Its ‘office consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people; to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and to none but him’.12 If the sovereign fails in this duty, the overriding concern of the subjects for their own self-preservation gives them the right to disobey the sovereign and even to rebel against him. Self-preservation is a need and a duty that is not cancelled when all other freedoms are yielded to the absolute control of the sovereign. At first blush this concession seems to lodge a contradiction at the very centre of Hobbes’ thesis: for if the people possess an ultimate right to overthrow the sovereign should the latter fail to protect their safety, then they indeed have the ultimate say in the commonwealth.13
In the passage just cited we see Hobbes invoke the idea of a ‘law of nature’ which binds the sovereign to his duty of guaranteeing the people’s safety. The concept of a ‘law of nature’ is ill defined, and as what provides the place for a regress to end – the regress to what ultimate authority is the ground for the authority of the sovereign itself – it is ad hoc. If there are natural laws providing an ultimate justification for claiming that the safety of individuals is paramount, why can they not be operative in the state of nature, perhaps by the light of something else equally supposed to be natural, viz. ‘the light of reason’? Why can each individual not be ‘obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of that law, and to none but him’, to ensure the safety of others as well as himself?
A compelling criticism of Hobbes is offered by Quentin Skinner.14 The charge laid by Skinner is that Hobbes’ account of the nature of liberty undermined the better notion of ‘republican liberty’ (sometimes called by Skinner ‘Roman liberty’) which sees liberty as the absence of dependence. Free people are those who do not live under any form of arbitrary power, whether or not it is exercised. The view that liberty is lack of interference or restraint – or in Hobbes’ even more reductive view, that liberty is absence of impediment to motion – is insufficient to render people free; however benign the existence of power, its mere presence changes free people into slaves. And free people can only exist in a free state.
Skinner traces the history of the idea of republican liberty from ancient Rome to the Renaissance, and argues that it was at work during the Civil War in England in the 1640s, as the Parliamentary side fought against the Crown’s claim to hold discretionary prerogative rights – which means, arbitrary rights – superior to those of Parliament or individuals. As examples of defenders of the republican view of liberty Skinner cites James Harrington, Algernon Sydney and John Milton.
It is in the earliest of his works, The Elements of Law, that Hobbes argued that the authority residing in an absolute sovereign is derived from the voluntary surrender to it of the power that individuals otherwise hold over themselves, and that they do this in the interests of their own welfare. In his next book De Cive Hobbes countered the idea that the mere fact of government, by its very existence, makes people slaves – this being the republican view – by arguing that liberty is ‘absence of impediments to motion’ and that this is consistent with there being an absolute sovereign. In Leviathan this definition of liberty was finally further refined to say ‘absence of external constraints’ – and this is what Skinner focuses upon as a signal moment in the history of political thought, because it introduces a distinction between liberty and power. Skinner says that this makes Hobbes ‘the first to answer the republican theorists by proffering an alternative definition in which the presence of freedom is construed entirely as absence of impediments rather than absence of dependence’. From this has stemmed all subsequent thinking about liberty, which as a result misses the point about the many ways in which true liberty is rendered unattainable.
Liberty as ‘absence of restraint’ is described as ‘negative liberty’, following Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty.15 It is the idea of liberty which – whether or not as a result of Hobbes’ influence – most people would now understand as the basic kind. Skinner’s ‘republican liberty’ is a concept less easy to find compelling, if only because the sheer facts of history and geography, of society and human relationships, make the idea of a wholly independent individual a very implausible one; and it is not much helped by the idea that a free individual is one who is a citizen of a free state. It is true that the idea of a free state is one of the deepest sources of thinking about freedom itself, as exemplified (for a salient historical example) by the Greek city states in their opposition to the Persian invasion, as Herodotus tells us. But a city state might be free of dependence on or control by another city state or neighbouring empire, yet the inhabitants of it might not themselves be free of the internal constraints imposed by the manner of government of the city state itself. This was certainly true of the Greek city states in which most of the population were in any case disenfranchised: women, slaves, ‘foreigners’ and those who had lost citizenship rights in punishment for a wrongdoing of some kind.
Skinner means to focus principally on the idea of independence from the domination of a ruler or master, in this sense asserting a broader conception than a purely political one: but if one were constrained even in the most usual ways by the circumstances of one’s life (the historical, geographical, societal webs in which one is enmeshed) the idea of there being no authority on whose say-so one’s rights and actions are dependent, makes of liberty something all but notional. And in any case, it can be argued that the idea of ‘having no master’ – no arbitrary power over one, even if unexercised – is no different in effect from being free of restraints on choices and actions. The distinction between ‘non-domination’ and ‘non-interference’ is a real distinction, this argument says, but an abstract one, a distinction without a functional difference. Still, Skinner’s point is a sharp and interesting one, and the conception of ‘republican liberty’ as an ideal is especially attractive.
The notions of natural law and natural rights figure centrally also in Locke’s views, but for him they led to quite different conclusions from those reached by Filmer and Hobbes. He also employs the idea of a ‘state of nature’ as existing before the creation of civil society, but for Locke it was not an arena of dire and unending strife between people, but instead a place where individuals enjoyed freedom. Most of that freedom had to be yielded up to get the benefits of living in society, but Locke held that certain of those rights, chief among them rights to life, liberty and property, cannot be given up in a social contract. This fact by itself makes it impossible that there should be such a thing as absolute sovereignty; by its very nature absolutism is inconsistent with the natural rights that people bring into society when they engage in the mutual contract that brings that society into existence.
The ideas of natural law and natural rights are closely connected. In Locke’s view, natural rights rest on the fact that in the state of nature individuals can freely use whatever nature offers in the way of shelter, comfort and sustenance. Natural law is what says what is allowed and forbidden to people given how things stand in nature: ‘all men are naturally in . . . a state of perfect Freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any Man’. (Locke’s alternative way of describing this state of affairs is to say ‘In the beginning all the World was America.’)16 This is because everyone is equal in the state of nature; no one has greater status or more right than anyone else, and no one is in a position to dictate to others how they should live. Because all men, Locke says, are ‘furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are made for ours’.17 In this way Locke rejects Filmer’s claim that a hierarchy of higher and lower among men was introduced in Eden by God’s grant of lordship to Adam, first over his companion Eve and then his sons, and thence to all humankind.
The importance of Locke’s argument on this point is that it asserts that each person has a right to self-preservation, and therefore a correlative obligation to each other person to respect his or her right to self-preservation – and indeed to be actively concerned for the welfare of others in this respect. The obligation thus entailed goes beyond refraining from doing harm to others, but requires acting to protect them from harm and punishing those who do harm.
Locke points out that in the state of nature it is difficult to ensure the proper protection of these rights and the exercise of these correlative obligations; he calls this the ‘inconvenience’ of the state of nature. But to set up a Hobbesian sovereign to enforce both would, he says, be worse than this inconvenience, because nothing could stop an all-powerful sovereign from preying on its subjects and even going to war against them. It is therefore wrong in principle for people to yield their rights to an absolute ruler; to do so not only forfeits the right to self-preservation but makes them unable to carry out their associated duties to others.
Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary power is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what he forfeits his Preservation and Life together. For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. No body can give more Power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own Life, cannot give another power over it.18
In answering Hobbes in this way, and in the process offering an argument against any form of absolutism, Locke is working with an assumption that might be independently questionable. In the quoted passage he is implying that the reason people cannot give up their right to self-preservation is that they are not owners of themselves – suggesting rather that they are owned by God; so they are not entitled to give away their freedom. This prompts the independently interesting question whether one can enslave oneself to another; could anyone be said to have the right to do that voluntarily? Locke says No. Hobbes’ view is that the very foundation of society is that people have not only the right but the positive need to alienate their freedom.
Locke’s point is the more persuasive. Civil society offers protection to individuals’ lives, liberty and property. It is based on laws that everyone can know, with independent judges to apply them, and agreed structures to enforce them. An arrangement of this kind resolves difficulties about how such rights and obligations are to be exercised properly. ‘Having in the State of Nature no Arbitrary Power over the Life, Liberty, or Possession of another,’ Locke wrote, ‘but only so much as the Law of Nature gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of Mankind; this is all he doth, or can give up to the Common-wealth, and by it to the Legislative Power, so that the Legislative can have no more than this. Their Power in the utmost Bounds of it, is limited to the publick good of the Society.’19 If a government behaves in ways that run contrary to the ‘publick good’ of society it thereby ‘dissolves’ itself – Locke’s term – because it makes itself illegitimate. This is what happened in the case of James II; his legitimacy ‘dissolved’ itself when he acted in ways contrary to the interests of his subjects. Locke’s point is stronger yet: if an illegitimate government tries to stay in power, the people have not merely the right but the duty to overthrow it, and to put a better in its place.
Locke set out these points in the final chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, aiming by their means to justify what the English Parliament had done in deposing James II and putting William and Mary on the throne. They profoundly influenced the thinking of the eighteenth century, and as noted above are quoted verbatim and in extenso in the documents of the American and French revolutions. One major reason for their influence is that Locke introduced the idea that power is a trusteeship, and is held by the consent of those on whose behalf it is exercised. ‘Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or the Legislative act contrary to their trust?’ Locke asked, and he answered, in a passage which has been key to the subsequent development of democratic ideas, ‘The people shall be Judge; for who shall be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well, and according to the Trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him have still a Power to discard him, when he fails in his Trust?’20
Which view of the state of nature is more plausible, Locke’s or Hobbes’? The dangerous anarchy envisioned by the latter retains a trace in Locke’s concession that without civil society and government the rights and obligations of natural law are more difficult to exercise. There is agreement that, therefore, civil society confers advantages once individuals have agreed to constitute it. But these are the only respects in which there is a measure of overlap. In all other respects their premises and views are toto caelo different. Set aside the fact that the same state of affairs – life without civil society or government – is given a malign cast by one thinker, a benign cast by the other. The key difference lies in their respective views about what individuals give up in order to enter the social contract. Hobbes says they give up everything apart from the right to self-preservation; Locke says they retain their naturally conferred rights not just to self-preservation but to liberty and property also. For Hobbes the state of nature is a lawless one, for Locke it is a realm of natural law. For Hobbes civil society introduces law – the sovereign’s law – for Locke civil society makes the pre-existing natural law effective.
There is a very significant difference in the respective views of human nature at work in these conceptions. For Hobbes people are by nature violent, greedy, exploitative and adversarial. For Locke they are reasonable, interested in others, essentially social. For Hobbes civil society is an artificial restraint on the horrors that the natural state involves. For Locke civil society is the natural outcome of what human nature and the natural law jointly aspire to make of human life.
It was natural for Locke to focus on life, liberty and property as the fundamental rights to be protected by civil society, given that these were the demands made by the Independents in England’s Civil War. Each notion had a clear sense for him as for them. ‘Liberty’ meant the right of an individual to make his or her own choices and to live by them, the only constraint being that they should be consistent with the requirements of natural law. Liberty and natural law are consistent because the latter exist to protect and enhance the former: they are – to take a prosaic example – like traffic regulations, compliance with which makes it possible for everyone to benefit.
The right to property is a less obvious choice as a fundamental in Locke’s scheme. Locke derives this right from the assumption that although land and all that it provides is commonly owned in the state of nature, when individuals mix their labour with parts of it those parts thereby come to be privately owned by them.
In Locke’s view the contract that creates civil society includes provisions that specify, and thereby limit, the power vested in the sovereign. Where Hobbes had it that the contract places all power in the hands of the sovereign, in Locke power remains with the contracting parties, and they delegate it to the governing authority, and can recall it if they are not satisfied with the exercise of it. For Locke, what the contract creates is the state; he never anywhere uses the term ‘sovereign’. ‘State’ and ‘government’ are not the same thing; the state is the community created by the contract, the government is the entity deputed by the community to carry out the range of functions required for protecting the rights and interests of individuals in the community.
It was essential, in Locke’s view, that the functions of legislature and executive should be separate. A legislature might convene in order to pass laws, and having done so, dissolve again. But the laws thus passed need to be applied and if necessary enforced. This is the task of the executive. Locke held that it was desirable not merely that the two arms of the state should be separate, but the people involved should be distinct also. Failure in this respect could have untoward consequences: if legislators and executives were not different people, they ‘may exempt themselves from the obedience to the Laws they make, and suit the Law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private Wish, and thereby come to have a distinct Interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government’.21 This is a further argument against the absolute sovereign, who of course is legislature and executive rolled into one all-powerful entity.
The question that immediately arises is: when can it be said that the government has overreached its authority? It is necessary to allow that a government might err or make unfortunate choices occasionally, so there can be no question of recalling a government just because of minor misjudgments. It would be wrong if there were rebellions on inadequate or unjustified grounds. Locke distinguished the case of James II: there it had been right to deprive him of the throne because he had bypassed Parliament, made arbitrary laws, sought to reintroduce Roman Catholicism, and made secret treaties with foreign governments, all in the interests of extending the reach of his powers. This constituted a breach of faith with the people, whose only remedy was to rise in insurrection against him.22
Because of his views Locke is regarded as the starting point for liberalism as we understand it in the English (not American) sense.23 He articulates a view – a mind-set – which is distinctively modern. It would not have been possible to write at the end of the sixteenth century as he wrote at the end of the seventeenth. This does not mean that he was the first to formulate such ideas; the debate about constitutional matters during the Civil War in England had advanced and canvassed similar ideas, sometimes considerably more radical. Indeed his views incorporate much older traces, such as the Renaissance view that things were vastly better in olden times, and history has been a long declension from more perfect arrangements in antiquity. The very idea of a ‘state of nature’ in which people had lived in ‘perfect freedom’ (Locke’s own words) is a residue of this attitude. But the manner in which he articulates his views has given them their enduring status in political theory since, and explains why they are quoted in the documents of the Enlightenment’s revolutions.
Of course, Locke did not vanquish absolutism. Louis XIV, Frederick the Great in Prussia, Catherine the Great in Russia and her successors right up to the Menshevik and Bolshevik revolutions of 1917, Stalin, the Nazis, the Maoists in China, Pol Pot, Pinochet, the absolute rulers of today’s Middle Eastern states, any number of pocket tyrants in various corners of the world, all testify that absolutism has flourished and continues to flourish. Theocracy by its very nature is a form of Hobbesian absolutism.
Moreover, simulacra of democracies as implied (not envisaged: he was not for universal adult suffrage) by Locke did not begin to appear until well after his own day. The United States and France are the two polities which first gave real momentum to his ideas in application. In Europe for much of the nineteenth century there was still a conflation of the idea of democracy with ochlocracy – rule by the mob – and Plato’s disdain for the latter under the name of democracy was what kept ruling elites, educated by their reading of his Republic, leery about extending the vote too far too fast. Hobbes was particularly scathing about the Long Parliament in England in his own day; his description of it as ‘democratical’ was anything but a compliment, for he saw it as threatening a return to the raw and bloody conditions of the state of nature as he envisioned it. For him as so many before and since, democracy meant anarchy at the hands of ignorant, greedy and violent people.24
Britain in the nineteenth century is a prime example of the eking out of the suffrage in successive reforms separated by decades, as the pressure from larger sections of the community made it necessary, to avoid revolution, to hand out more in the way of a sop. Universal adult suffrage arrived in Britain only in 1929, two and a quarter centuries after an English philosopher set out the principles of liberal democracy. That is quite an achievement on behalf of the ruling elites who kept their hands on the levers of power so long.
In the seventeenth century and for a long while afterwards the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was regarded with suspicion because, in his unfinished masterpiece the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he championed the ideas of democracy and equality and defended freedom of expression. This latter was of particular interest to him; he said it was a high duty of any form of government to secure it. Indeed he said he would support any type of government that would ensure freedom of expression, though he was persuaded that a democratic and egalitarian dispensation would be most likely to do so. He also – not therefore putting himself into quite the same camp as Locke – held that all forms of government are in fact democratic because all forms ultimately rest on the consent of the people, which is the case even in the Hobbesian dispensation because the initial consent of the people was required in setting up absolute sovereignty. Spinoza accordingly held that democracy in this somewhat attenuated sense is the most fundamental and most natural basis of political authority.25
The reputations of both Spinoza and Hobbes were occluded for the next two centuries by the fact that they were both recognised as atheists. The influence of these thinkers on the formation of the modern mind is significant, for their arguments did not rest on biblical doctrine, revelation, religious tradition or authority – in short, their views are secular. But the phrase ‘these thinkers’ also in fact includes Locke, for although he was not himself an atheist, neither did he – pace some formulaic references – rely on doctrine, revelation, tradition and the rest; indeed, in explicitly rejecting the concept of the divine right of kings, he was disconnecting questions of the source of political authority from that of religious authority, and this is par excellence the point of secularism. As in so many other respects, therefore, the making of the modern mind is a function of the transition from theocentric attitudes to the reasonings of the secular intellect.