IAN SHAPIRO
Old books are read for many reasons. Intrinsic enjoyment is one. Coming to grips with the past is another. Understanding the origins of the world we live in is a third. Additional purposes become relevant when old books are part of a received canon. Canonized texts may be heralded as repositories of important truths. They might codify ideologies, whether dominant or subversive. They might be objects of controversy as to their true meaning. When canonized texts are works of political theory, it is usually because they are thought to illuminate enduring fundamentals of political association. Sometimes they gain additional notoriety when they move people, individually or collectively, to political action.
John Locke’s mature writings about politics, collected here, are worth reading for all these reasons at least. They have stood the test of time as captivating works, in print more or less continuously for well over three centuries and translated into all of the world’s major languages. They are remarkable historical documents addressed to the turbulent political conflicts of Locke’s day, yet at the same time they transcend that and many another particular context to which they have been deemed relevant. In them Locke develops arguments about freedom of conscience and belief, the relations between religion and politics, the nature of property, the family, consent, majority rule, resistance, and the foundations of political legitimacy that have become perennials of political argument in the modern West. Locke’s views on all these subjects are taken up in the interpretive essays that follow the texts in this volume. Here I will limit myself to some general remarks about his life and political writings.
As is frequently true with canonized texts—indeed this often facilitates canonization—Locke’s central arguments are sufficiently complex that they invite disputations about their true meaning. Similar controversy attends the question whether Locke’s political writings stand independently of, are derived from, or live in tension with, his voluminous writings on philosophy and theology, and the degree to which his views evolved over the course of his lifetime. He was born in 1632 and died in 1704, so that his life spanned one of the most tumultuous periods of English history. He was ten years old when England became divided by civil war and still at Westminster School when Charles I was executed nearby in 1649. He lived through the subsequent interregnum when various governments of the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate were in power, the subsequent Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the radicalization of English politics in which he was sufficiently implicated so that he was forced into exile for most of the 1680s—returning only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
For a long time it was believed that the Two Treatises, first published in 1690, had been written as a justification for the Revolution. Locke had sympathized with Parliament’s actions in forcing James II from the throne in response to his attempts to Catholicize the army, pack Parliament with his supporters, and suspend restrictions on his fellow Catholics. Following these and other provocations, the birth of James’s son in 1688 made the possibility of a Catholic dynasty in England real, leading Parliament to act by replacing James with William and Mary and instituting significant constitutional constraints on the monarchy. The supremacy of Parliament, thus established, fit hand in glove with the concluding arguments of the Second Treatise, and seemed to be validated by the right to resist that lay at the heart of Locke’s argument.
The received view of Locke as the philosopher of the Revolution and the Two Treatises as his manifesto has been conclusively debunked by Peter Laslett and Richard Ashcraft who established that the bulk of it had in fact been written almost a decade earlier, so that, whatever its purposes, justifying the Glorious Revolution was not among them.1 The debate on dating the Two Treatises has not been resolved definitively, and quite possibly it never will be.2 However, it now seems clear that most of it was written some time between 1679 and 1681 in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis during which Protestant nobles led by the Earl of Shaftesbury sought to exclude Charles II’s Catholic brother James from the succession. It seems likely that initially much of it was written as an Exclusion tract, though Locke may well have revised and added extensively to it in the early 1680s when various plots were afoot to rid England of its monarch because of his pro-Catholic policies—plots in which certainly Shaftesbury, and probably Locke, were deeply implicated. It also seems clear that much of the material in the First Treatise—the entire document, if Laslett is to be believed—was written after the Second Treatise had been completed in response to the growing influence of Sir Robert Filmer’s absolutist views after 1680.
Given this history, it is not surprising that the meaning and significance of Locke’s political texts are continuing sources of scholarly controversy, as are the political implications people draw from them. In our own generation Locke’s texts have been seen as repositories of the core ideas of bourgeois individualism, but also as providing the intellectual resources and ideological ballast for a radical critique of capitalism and a democratic assault on the liberal constitutionalism.3 We are not special in this regard. Every generation has bred its Locke controversies, often—as is the case with ours— in ways that reflect and embody the great ideological contests of the day. Locke’s standing in the ideological lexicon is sufficient to ensure that fighting over his corpse is one of the forms political argument takes.
Just as the exact role of Locke’s ideas in English politics of the 1680s continues to be debated by historians, so does the nature and extent of his influence in subsequent political conflicts, most notably on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English radicalism and on the architects of the American Revolution.4 But it is beyond debate that what people have taken to be Locke’s arguments have often been sources of political inspiration and activism to a greater degree than the historical Locke could ever have imagined. Although his influence on English high politics grew substantially in the last decade and a half of his life following 1688, he was an unlikely political champion. He lived most of his life before this in the shadows—first in a successful though not especially distinguished academic career at Oxford focused on medicine and philosophy that he began as a student in 1652; then, increasingly, in Shaftesbury’s household as a physician, confidant, and tutor of children; and finally in exile in Holland and France after Shaftesbury’s death in 1683.
Locke’s long association with Shaftesbury, which had begun in the late 1660s when Locke deployed his skill as a physician (most likely supplemented by amazing luck) to plan and direct lifesaving surgery for Shaftes-bury, lasted for the rest of Shaftesbury’s life.5 This relationship was the source of Locke’s political influence, and, indeed, arguably of his intellectual maturity as well. But even in his last years, when Locke had become a figure of considerable eminence partly due to his changed political fortunes after the Revolution and partly due to the publication of his major philosophical work the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in his own name in 1689, he continued to keep his political writings anonymous. This was perhaps out of fear of the possibility that James II, who had fled to France in 1688, might reclaim the throne that Parliament had given William and Mary, or perhaps for other reasons. In any event, it was not until his very last years that he began to allow the political writings to be attributed to him, and then only among a small group of close acquaintances. The Tw o Treatises were unambiguously acknowledged as his only in his will.
Locke’s political views evolved considerably over the course of his lifetime. Indeed, what is most remarkable about the young Locke given the tenor of his mature political writings is how little interested he seems to have been in politics or political theory. In the 1650s his principal interest was in medicine, partly as a result of his interactions with Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and others at the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club. His early work with Boyle was on the human blood, then a revolutionary field following Harvey’s discovery of the heart’s circulatory function some decades earlier. Locke’s medical researches with Boyle and later with the major physician of his age, Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), seem first to have brought him to prominence—leading to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1668. In philosophy the major formative influence on him seems to have been Descartes, though from the beginning Locke’s philosophical reflections took a more empirical bent. In his Essays on the Law of Nature, probably prepared as lectures in his capacity as Censor of Moral Philosophy at Christ Church in 1663 or 1664, we find Locke struggling— less than altogether successfully—to render arguments from nature, reason, and Scripture mutually compatible. This concern would preoccupy him for the rest of his life, with decisive implications for his moral and political philosophy.6
To the extent that the young Locke had political views, they were conservative, or at any rate apolitical. His embrace of authoritarian arrangements seems largely to have been unreflective, and his early writing on toleration gave no clue of the radical tolerationist stand in the Letter Concerning Toleration that was first published anonymously in Latin in 1689 (though probably written while he was in exile in 1685) and translated into English more or less immediately by William Popple. Some scholars have argued for greater continuity between his earlier and later writings, some for less; this is not a controversy we will attempt to settle here.7 It does seem clear that despite some underlying conceptual continuities, he was radicalized politically during and after his association with Shaftesbury—even if historians continue to debate the extent to which the radicalization of Shaftesbury’s circle reflected tactical maneuvering against the possibility of a Catholic monarchy as distinct from genuine radical conviction. How much the changes in Locke’s views were accounted for by the association between the two men and how much by other factors, such as the drift of political events, no one can say. In any event, the Letter is an intensely political document, geared to expanding toleration for Protestant nonconformists while denying it to Catholics—scarcely a surprising move in light of not only the English political situation but also developments in France. In 1685 Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes that had ensured some toleration for Protestants for almost half a century. His brutal repression of the Huguenots must surely have concentrated minds about what would likely ensue across the Channel were Catholicism to become entrenched in the English monarchy.
If Locke’s Letter speaks directly to these concerns by arguing against toleration for Catholics (along with atheists and “Mahometans “) at the same time as it presses for unusually broad toleration of Protestant nonconformists, his stance is not an unprincipled one. His reasons are political, not religious: atheists cannot be trusted to keep their promises, and Catholics and Mahometans are suspect because they owe allegiance to an alien earthly power.8 Moreover, commingling earthly religious authority with political absolutism creates the danger that civil authority will try to tyrannize over the soul, which can never be justified or even, ultimately, successful because authentic religious belief requires “inward persuasion of the mind.” Herein lies the link between the Letter and Locke’s broader political theory developed in the Tw o Treatises: his doctrine that all legitimate political authority is rooted in the consent of the governed.
It has been clear since John Dunn’s seminal study of the religious foundations of Lockean political theory that Locke was not embracing atomistic individualism by taking this stand. Rather he was committed to a particular view of the nature of religious belief and the relationship between the individual and his creator that had to be rooted in authentic individual commitment.9 This led to his view that religious convictions of all sorts should be tolerated so long as they do not threaten the integrity of the state, but this was a view he affirmed, ultimately, for religious reasons. The goal was to protect religion by freeing it as much as possible from state interference. In this pursuit, his impulse was comparable to that of the American founders who would argue a century later for disestablishment of the church in order to strengthen religion, not, as critics of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution often seem to assume, to weaken it.
One cannot help but be struck by the affinities between Locke’s argument in the Letter and John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty, even if Mill’s principle is more capacious in extending the realm of what must be tolerated beyond religion and including all types of belief—even atheism —within it. But there are important underlying differences.10 Both writers define the limits to toleration in political terms by reference to when beliefs or actions become threatening to others, not by reference to any claim about the validity of the beliefs themselves. And, even though Locke was profoundly religious while Mill could scarcely conceal his hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular, both saw freedom of conscience and belief as the surest path to discovery of the truth in human affairs. But at the end of the day, Mill’s commitment to freedom was for its own sake—in this he was a true child of the Enlightenment. He saw individual freedom as the greatest good. For Locke, by contrast, freedom of conscience was valuable for the more Lutheran reason that he thought it essential to spiritual salvation. In this reasoning, as in many other matters taken up in our interpretive essays, Locke is something of a hybrid figure. He makes arguments that endure as defining features of political argument in the modern West, yet he does so in ways that reflect and embody premodern concerns. Reading Locke reveals that we have more complex links to our past than we might otherwise perceive.
1. See the introduction to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 61, 123–26, and Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).
2. For the current state of the debate, see the introduction to Locke, Political Writings of John Locke, David Wootton, ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 49–94.
3. Different variants of the bourgeois individualism charge were leveled by C. B. Macpherson, in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 194–257, and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1953]), pp. 202–51. The case for Locke’s political radicalism has been most trenchantly made by Richard Ashcraft in Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
4. On the use of Locke’s arguments by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments over poor relief, see Richard Ashcraft, “Lockean Ideas, Poverty, and the Development of Liberal Political Theory,” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 43–61. On the much debated subject of the relative influence of Lockean versus civic republican and other influences on the American Revolution, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).
5. See Peter Laslett’s introduction in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 25–37.
6. On the relations among Locke’s arguments from nature, reason, and Scripture as they affected his political philosophy, see Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 80–148.
7. See J. W. Gough, “The Development of Locke’s Belief in Toleration,” and Paul J. Kelly, “John Locke: Authority, Conscience, and Religious Toleration,” in Susan Mendus and John Horton, eds., A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 57–77 and pp. 125– 146, for the argument that his later views are reconcilable with his earlier writings. For the contrary view that there is a disjunction between his early authoritarian phase and his later radical one, see Maurice Cranston, “John Locke and the Case for Toleration,” ibid., pp. 78–97.
8. This subject is explored at some length in my contribution to the present volume.
9. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). The religious foundations of Lockean political theory were further explored by James Tully in A Discourse Concerning Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Perhaps the definitive treatment of Locke’s religious views, particularly as they shape his attitude toward toleration, is John Marshall’s John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
10. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978 [1859]).