THE REFUTATION OF DIVINE RIGHT AND ADVOCACY OF GOVERNMENT BY POPULAR CONSENT
John Locke had more influence upon the world than any other British philosopher. Not only did he provide the Glorious Revolution with its philosophical legitimacy, but his thinking was central to the development of liberalism, influencing the arguments against absolutism in Europe and, more directly, inspiring the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Locke was born in 1632 into a minor Somerset gentry family. His father fought for the Parliamentarians during the Civil War. Locke was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, during the period of the republican Commonwealth. Awarded a college studentship, he demonstrated wide academic curiosity in subjects ranging from theology and philosophy to Greek, medicine, meteorology and chemistry. His breadth of interests brought him into contact with such eminent scientists as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.
It was his friendship with Anthony Ashley Cooper, later earl of Shaftesbury, the emerging leader of the Country – or ‘Whig’ – faction in Parliament, that ensured he was also at the forefront of political controversy. Doubling as the earl’s secretary and physician, Locke lodged at his mentor’s London mansion, Exeter House. Like Shaftesbury, he suffered recurring ill health and it was partly to escape London’s polluted air, as well as to extract himself from an increasingly precarious political situation, that he spent the years between 1675 and 1679 in France. There he made the acquaintance of many of Europe’s leading Enlightenment thinkers.
He returned to England but his stay there was soon interrupted. Shaftesbury’s attempts to exclude the future James II from the throne collapsed and, fearing incarceration, the earl fled in 1682 to Amsterdam, dying there the following year. Locke departed hurriedly, first to Rotterdam and then to Amsterdam. There, he dodged English warrants sent to the Dutch to have him arrested by living under the assumed identity of ‘Dr Van der Linden’. It was 1688’s Glorious Revolution that gave him his chance to go home once more. During his exile he met William of Orange and in February 1689 sailed for England on the ship carrying the future Queen Mary II.
Locke maintained that his Two Treatises of Government, finished later that year (but post-dated to 1690 as its year of publication), was his means of defending philosophically the British revolution to the world. In fact, he had begun writing it around 1680–2 and had left the manuscript behind when fleeing to the Dutch Republic. The elapse of time between conception and publication made Locke less the prophet and more the legitimizer of events.
The first treatise kicked away the main prop of the House of Stuart’s claim to autocratic power – the divine right of kings. Locke demolished the justification put forward by the political writer Sir Robert Filmer that subjects were to sovereigns as children were to parents because sovereigns, like fathers, were descended from Adam. Giving short shrift to such notions was the easier part of Locke’s task. In the second treatise, his implicit target was the view expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work Leviathan, that in order to curb the anarchic rule of Nature that would otherwise make their lives unendurable, the people entered into a contract with the sovereign power. By it, they surrendered their rights in return for being provided with security. In this way the sovereign (whether a monarch or some other form of government) was entitled to exercise absolute power for the greater good of law and order, without which human existence would be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.
Hobbes had done his thinking (in exile) at a time when England had descended into the near anarchy of civil war. His philosophy did not necessarily advocate the despotic wielding of power, but by imagining that the state and society were one and the same he nonetheless provided absolutist regimes with a justification for expecting their subjects’ unequivocal submission.
Locke rejected the notion that mankind was faced only with the stark options of anarchy or capitulation to absolute power. On the contrary, he suggested that certain God-given and inalienable rights existed beyond the give or take of the state, among them freedom of action and the ownership of private property. Since these rights were natural, not a retractable gift from government, the latter could remove them only with the consent of those to whom they belonged.
This was the nature of the ‘social contract’ that Locke believed defined the relationship between government and the governed. The loyalty that the people owed to the state existed on the presumption that the state sought to pursue their best interest. If it wilfully failed to do so, then the people had the right to remove that government.
From the Second Treatise, Chapter 18: ‘Of Tyranny’
Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another’s harm; and whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command, to compass that upon the subject, which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another. This is acknowledged in subordinate magistrates. He that hath authority to seize my person in the street, may be opposed as a thief and a robber, if he endeavours to break into my house to execute a writ, notwithstanding that I know he has such a warrant, and such a legal authority, as will impower him to arrest me abroad. And why this should not hold in the highest, as well as in the most inferior magistrate, I would gladly be informed. Is it reasonable, that the eldest brother, because he has the greatest part of his father’s estate, should thereby have a right to take away any of his younger brothers portions? or that a rich man, who possessed a whole country, should from thence have a right to seize, when he pleased, the cottage and garden of his poor neighbour? The being rightfully possessed of great power and riches, exceedingly beyond the greatest part of the sons of Adam, is so far from being an excuse, much less a reason, for rapine and oppression, which the endamaging another without authority is, that it is a great aggravation of it: for the exceeding the bounds of authority is no more a right in a great, than in a petty officer; no more justifiable in a king than a constable; but is so much the worse in him, in that he has more trust put in him, has already a much greater share than the rest of his brethren, and is supposed, from the advantages of his education, employment, and counsellors, to be more knowing in the measures of right and wrong.
Ultimate sovereignty thus lay with the people. This was, in effect, an argument for representative democracy. Believing that constitutional restraint made for better government, Locke suggested that government was less likely to tend towards oppression if there was a separation of powers between the legislature and the executive: the former elected, the latter residing in the person of a head of state.
Nor was this the only separation he advocated. Theologically, Locke was a moderate Anglican who set out his attitude in his Letter on Toleration. He believed that the state and religion were fundamentally different, the latter being a voluntary matter unrelated to civil promotion or disabilities so long as a Church did not promulgate doctrine at odds with the principles of civil society or force allegiance to a foreign overlord. He also wrote on education and monetary policy (some of his arguments preshadowing the free-trade advocacy of Adam Smith) and, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he contradicted Descartes’ view that ideas were innate and that universal truths could therefore be deduced by purely rational deduction alone. Rather than such philosophical abstractions, he believed in empirical research, garnered through experience and reflection.
Although the Two Treatises of Government was originally published anonymously, it burnished Locke’s reputation as an exponent of freedom in the decades after his death in 1704. Locke, the defender of the Glorious Revolution, had created an intelligible theory of limited government as the servant of the people. His thinking infused Whig arguments during the eighteenth century and influenced nineteenth-century liberalism, in particular that of John Stuart Mill. Outside Britain, his legacy was perhaps even more apparent. In 1669 he had helped draft the constitution of the colony of Carolina, and the first American printed edition of his Two Treatises was published in Boston in 1773. Its timing was perfect, providing arguments that American colonists would use against what they considered the overweening and unrepresentative authority of George III. No document better conveys Locke’s arguments for the separation of powers than the constitution of the United States of America.
