Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration

How well human lives go still turns largely on the relations between our dependence, our intelligence, and our capacities and opportunities to choose for ourselves how to make those lives together.¹ John Locke was one of the great reshapers of how we conceive and interpret those relations. “Measuring Locke’s Shadow” considers how we can best judge today what he contributed to that reshaping, within the context of the history of political thinking in the West, and increasingly in the world as a whole.

The Problem of Perspective: The View from Without or the View from Within?

As with any human life, Locke’s can be viewed, at least in intention, both from the inside and from without. We can attempt to see it as it must have seemed or been for Locke himself, but we can also try to see it as it really was for others, then or (sometimes very much) later. We can view it as a more or less confused and dispersed sequence of battles, adventures, enjoyments, and sufferings, or as a practical pressure, potent or all but nugatory, on the lives of an endless series of other human beings. Except in the stern light of the Last Judgment,² it is at best a heroic assumption, and probably nothing more than a literary conceit, that any human life could truly be from any angle or at any point in time a unified whole.³ But it would be merely quixotic to suppose that the most integrated such life, however grand and consequential, should also prove a unified whole as seen from the outside, whether by or on behalf of all the other human beings who in the end turn out to have had some stake in it. Locke’s was a very grand and consequential life indeed, and in the nearly three centuries which have passed since his death, huge numbers of human beings across time and space have had (or thought they had) some real stake in what it was or meant for them in particular. Because they have seen so much as riding on that life,⁴ and because they have differed so widely in their beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, and have disagreed so drastically on what that life itself meant, they have also disagreed very extensively on what it consisted in: on what in fact took place within it.

As time goes by and human beings continue to proliferate, the task of seeing Locke’s life steadily and as a whole from the outside becomes ever more elaborate, and perhaps ever more evidently forlorn. It fans out wider and wider, and is ever further from being adequately discharged. This is certainly not because we now, between us, know less about Locke than our counterparts did fifty years ago. Here, if anything, the position is clearly the opposite. There has been a massive accumulation of knowledge about Locke in the years since the outbreak of the Second World War. It is a safe bet that more is now known, and known reliably, about the dead Locke than has ever been known before. Living human beings, all but inevitably, are known about in a very different way, and those who live long, and who touch many other lives quite emphatically whilst doing so, as Locke certainly did, are known directly, if with varying intimacy, to numerous others (Shaftesbury, James Tyrrell, Damaris Masham, Edward Clarke, Philipp van Limborch, Sylvester Brounower). The best of scholars, however imaginative, clear-headed, and patient they may be, can never hope to know an archive the way in which most of us know a few other human beings. We may reach for Locke’s life, as it appeared from within, and do so as bravely and imaginatively as we can, but there is much about that life which we can never hope to recapture—much which is now lost for ever, gone with the companions who once lived and breathed and quarreled and cared beside him, and with the bearer who alone ever had the opportunity to know it from within.

The external, objectifying, eye of scholarship (or modern thought more generally) has limited concern with that irretrievably lost life, and is in any case apt to suspect the pathos of loss of being either confused or bogus. It volunteers to identify and convey relatively determinate aspects of the view from without and assess their significance to the highest current intellectual standards, anticipating neither comprehensive conversion to its own point of view, nor utter futility in the attempt to edify the stubborn and largely involuntary prejudices of everyone else. It settles for critical accountability, evidence, and the reasonably frank acknowledgment of its own agendas, modes of inquiry, and criteria of validation. For many purposes, the view from without is not merely all we now have open to us, and quite adequately interpretable from documents which Locke himself chose to make public, whether anonymously or under his own name; it is also all we need in order to interpret what that life has come to mean for very many others over the centuries which followed. In this optic, the historical Locke just happened to be the author of a set of immensely consequential texts, and what we need to take in is the history of the consequences of those texts, and the causal and rational basis of the scale and distribution of those consequences. It no longer matters what Locke was up to in writing them in the first place, or what he supposed himself to be doing at any point along his way. (Or, if it does matter to anyone, it does and can do so only to the purest of historians—those who prescind radically from all interest in consequences, for fear that any trace of such interest must sully the integrity of the past the way it simply was, those who fear that the least hint of affinity with Whig subject matter must be incompatible with the flatly Tory requirements of historical truth.⁵)

The Persisting Imaginative Pressure of the Supposed View from Within

There is some force to each of these lines of thought. But it is instructive how hard modern interpreters of Locke’s political thinking have found it to stand by the conclusions of either. For almost half a century, since Wolfgang Von Leyden’s meticulous and impressively thoughtful edition of the relatively juvenile Essays on the Law of Nature,⁶ scholars have found themselves endlessly dragged back from the well-formed and controlled technical exercises of modern philosophy to less comfortable or elegant grapplings with the epistemological treacheries of the struggle to recover at least the main intellectual (or even emotional) dynamics of Locke’s life as he once viewed it from within. This is a matter of some interest in itself, and it is far from clear quite why it should have been so. But it seems unlikely that the answer turns merely on the relative confusion or stupidity of the scholars in question. Part of that answer, probably, is as much a matter of supply as one of demand, in the striking contingency of the survival of a huge mass of personal documentation, the fate of the Lovelace papers, the individual curiosity, taste and munificence of Paul Mellon, and the good fortune and sense of occasion of the Bodleian Library. Any serious Locke scholar today is heir to a remarkable treasury of well-explored and endlessly fascinating resources. But a larger part of the answer, surely, must rest firmly with effective demand.

The historical Locke lived some time ago, but the refusal to leave him unmolested in his grave plainly comes from very much more recently. In many ways it has grown in insistence as the decades have gone by since Von Leyden’s edition. The impulse behind that refusal derives above all from the United States. It is primarily as an ideologue that we cannot let Locke rest even now in the massive peace of historical indifference. Today, over two thirds of a century since Merle Curti’s famous article,⁷ Locke is still intractably America’s philosopher, and still very much America’s philosopher for what still seems ever more peremptorily America’s globe. He is the sign on the banner of America’s imperious external reach, her cultural, imaginative, ideological, economic, and even political Griff nach der Welt-macht. The image on that banner, unsurprisingly, is very distant from its historical archetype, and quite hazily delineated as time goes by. But its stunning prominence ceaselessly raises the price of the apparently ingenuous question of just what was or was not true of that far off historical incarnation. (Contrast the relaxation of Michael Oakeshott’s incomparable assessment two thirds of a century ago: “It is at least remarkable that at the present time the gospel of Locke is less able to secure adherents than any other whatever … he was meek, and until recently he inherited the earth.”)⁸

The first impulse of the historian, naturally enough, has been to shield the historical Locke from these intrusions: to insist on his own idiosyncratic preoccupations, and emphasize the unbridgeable gap between those preoccupations and the high stakes of global ideological struggle three centuries later.⁹ But this impulse is less clear in its ultimate purposes, and hence far less convincingly self-vindicating, than it initially appeared to some. It still has no obvious insecurities as a claim of justice: an insistence on the dead Locke’s right to immunity from primitive errors of identification, or, more generously, to his continuing entitlement, like any other human being alive or dead, to at least the effort at sympathetic understanding on the part of any other human being who claims to disclose the truth about them.¹⁰ But it is less prepossessing (and wholly devoid of authority) as an effort at appropriation: an attempt to exclude others (everyone but true historians) from the great Common of the past. Here a disparity in interests is badly miscast as a commitment to, or a flouting of, the epistemic decencies, or an index of personal intellectual coherence or confusion.¹¹

The Historical and Political Sources of That Continuing Pressure

In the second half of the twentieth century two main groups of scholars proved especially reluctant to leave Locke unmolested to history. One was made up of the socialist critics of global capitalism, still drawing their core political convictions from the tradition of Karl Marx. The second formed the educational heritage of Leo Strauss. History since 1954 has been kinder to the latter than to the former, but not necessarily in ways which do much to clarify either the character of Locke’s life viewed from within, or the aspects of his thinking which will in the end prove to cast the longest shadows of all. Locke’s own most explicit (if disingenuous) assessment of his achievements as a theorist of politics¹² drew attention to the unique felicity of his treatment of property in the (still determinedly anonymous) Two Treatises of Government.¹³ Modern scholars who have studied this aspect of his thinking at all attentively have seldom endorsed this evaluation, but, between them, they have greatly clarified both the arguments which he advanced and the scale of the continuing challenge to identify a normative basis for capitalist appropriation which does not, under critical reflection, effectively denounce itself.¹⁴ The dispute as to whether capitalist appropriation can and must in the end be understood as a process of augmenting the stock of natural goods, rather than depleting it by subtracting resources from the common, is as deep and arduous as it has ever been before.¹⁵ No one could sanely believe that its resolution turns on interpreting Locke’s own thought processes or polemical strategies. But, even three centuries after he added his key argument to the final edition of chapter V of the Second Treatise,¹⁶ it remains hard to get to the heart of the issue faster or more incisively than through Locke’s thinking. Those few lines are still the most spectacular point of intersection between that life viewed from the inside and the same life viewed from without. If we see the history of capitalism, as we emphatically should, as an endless collision between forms of life,¹⁷ institutional constructions, normative rhetorics, and ways of focusing and deepening human powers, with no preguaranteed outcomes for better or worse, and the bleakest indifference to the vulnerable human animals who enact it, this elaborately contextualized episode in Locke’s thinking is still one of the great imaginative moments within that history; and the argument as to how best to represent that episode when seen from within is still a significant prize in the struggle to characterize authoritatively from the outside not merely Locke’s own life, but the human significance of most recent history. The Marxists may have lost all residual political credibility. But they still seem to have had a better grasp of the key issues at stake here than virtually any of the antagonists who have swept them so humiliatingly from the field.¹⁸ After a promising phase in the 1970s and 1980s,¹⁹ it is still unclear how much this sustained scholarly attention has done to establish exactly what questions Locke himself was attempting to answer, or quite what conclusions he sought to vindicate and just why, in his reflections on property. They have been considerably more successful, however, in spelling out conclusions which his works certainly do not establish (whether or not he meant them to do so). Because of the continuing ideological resonance of the claim to connect economic entitlements under capitalism with clear personal merits (to ground entitlement, at least in enough salient instances, in desert), the relations between the limited cogency of some of these arguments and their continued imaginative attractions is still of great moment, irrespective of Locke’s own historical concerns, ambitions, or endeavors.

The idea of grasping the content of an intellectual life seen from within necessarily privileges the temporal coordinates of the life itself, and rapidly loses coherence as it moves away from these. But the idea of grasping its contents from the outside has no such temporal moorings. It demands that we look backward as well as forward, and that we register what has happened in and through that life by contrasting its intellectual outcomes at least with what its own bearer came self-consciously to reject, and perhaps, too, with what she or he contrived inadvertently to lose sight of or betray. The relation between Locke’s grandest work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the cultural dynamics of the Enlightenment, and the powerfully inimical relation between the mode of analysis which that work set out and the imaginative stability and theoretical coherence of Christian Natural Jurisprudence, both guaranteed that no adequate account of what happened in that life could rest solely on what Locke himself contrived to notice in the course of living it (let alone on what he cared to acknowledge openly whilst doing so). Nor could it rest solely on a conjunction of those recognitions and acknowledgments with what happened later. It demands, too, a clear vision of what slipped away, or was squandered inadvertently, in the same passage of thought and feeling, and hence a contrast, conceptually at least, with a vast, if indeterminate, miscellany of what had gone before. To take the measure of Locke’s achievements, for better and for worse, we would first need to be able to take the measure of the main movements of modern western thought, and do so, not compulsively in its own pre-established terms, but somehow freely on ones for which we could assume full responsibility ourselves. The dream of such an assessment, scandalous, insanely arrogant, but undeniably thrilling, has tantalized European intellectuals since at least the days of Nietzsche; most flamboyantly, in recent years, in the strange odyssey of Michel Foucault.²⁰ No modern Locke scholar of any quality has had the effrontery to attempt anything of the kind. But in relation to the deepest issues with which Locke struggled, and also in relation to the most drastic challenges which his work poses to our own continuing efforts to apprehend politics, it is far from clear that anything less grandiose can possibly suffice.

Locke and the Dynamics of the Enlightenment

For Locke’s life seen from within, the key question of ethical and political judgment posed by its centrality to the dynamics of the Enlightenment is how far Locke himself came in later life to recognize and embrace the destructive implications for Christian Natural Law of the analyses of language and knowledge which he eventually worked out in the Essay. That question may have been posed fairly crudely three or four decades ago, but it has attracted since, and especially since the mid 1980s, an exceptionally impressive array of scholarship from the most empathetic to the most analytically astringent. Predictably, the scholars in question remain divided in their conclusions principally by discrepancies in intellectual interests or attention, and by contrasts in ideological taste. Those most appreciative of the continuities in language and rhetoric between elements in Locke’s texts and the public ideology of the United States have often been the most confident of the clarity of his recognition and endorsement of the destructively secularizing implications of his epistemology and psychology.²¹ In face of an indisputably protracted and dogged reluctance on their author’s part to acknowledge these implications for himself in public, they have buffered their interpretation of his purposes by attributing to him a corresponding agility and zest for obfuscation, following the hermeneutic lead long ago offered by Leo Strauss himself. Naturally enough, the result is seldom as convincing in its depiction of the historical Locke as the best work of those who confine their interests mainly to the latter.²² It is, for one thing, consistently far more restrictive in the range of pertinent archival material which it elects to consider at all, or to analyze with any care.²³ But its relative historical insouciance has not necessarily impeded it from delineating the internal tensions within Locke’s developing thinking in a powerfully illuminating way.²⁴ Setting aside the contributions of factional animosity (a topic on which Locke himself dwelt at some length), this disparity is in the end best seen as one of contrast in purposes. A synoptic interest in large-scale change over long periods of time is not readily combined with a keen concern for the intricacies of individual experience, even if the causal basis of all such change must always be an immense accumulation of individual intricacies of exactly that kind. Reconciling a synoptic interest in drastic intellectual transformations over long time spans with a zest for particular intellectual heroes or heroines favors a highly stylized representation of those selected.

The carefully stylized Straussian Locke reappears at varying distances and for a miscellany of purposes. Some of its most interesting and illuminating exemplars have been presented less in order to recharacterize, with greater or less patience and authority, the philosopher himself, than to clarify and consolidate an older picture of the significance of the American Founding in face of the republican lineage so masterfully disclosed by John Pocock,²⁵ and embraced more than a third of a century ago in Bernard Bailyn’s classic Introduction to his Belknap Press edition of the Pamphlets of the American Revolution, ²⁶ trenchantly reissued two years later as The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.²⁷ This protracted historiographical mělée has often been more than a little confused and, even cumulatively, has done less to enhance the understanding of Locke himself than more narrowly focused textual studies of similar provenance like those of Nathan Tarcov²⁸ or Ruth Grant²⁹ have contrived to do. The historical question of just how much American political perception or sentiment were at any point clearly attributable to the more or less attentive reading of passages from Locke’s writings is extremely complicated and very hard to answer at all convincingly.³⁰ Little dependable headway has been made with it since the days of Merle Curti’s article (or, more tersely, perhaps ever). It is easier to establish where, when, and to whom, copies of the relevant Locke texts were definitely available in eighteenth-century America, or when, and to some degree why, particular passages from his writings were cited, with greater or less precision and with or without acknowledgment,³¹ in books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, or public pro-nouncements³² in the colonies or early republic.³³ But most of the more important instances of the latter have been well known for a very long time, and continue to underline the very special significance of the construal of the relation between legitimate taxation and consent in the Second Treatise of Government in the context of the struggles which preceded and led up to American independence.

The anglophone reactions to Locke’s political texts have recently been charted with exemplary patience by Mark Goldie,³⁴ with results which largely confirm the dislocation between preoccupation with the continuing presence of the texts themselves, and concern predominantly with the issue of what exactly Locke’s own intellectual experiences and innovations have proved in due course to mean for human beings alive considerably later. The continuing presence of the texts, both in public life and in the comparative seclusion of academic inquiry and disputation, is comparatively tractable historiographically, however patchy the evidence eventually proves to be. But the long-term implications of Locke’s own intellectual experience, invention, and indiscretion for his human successors are not an essentially historiographical matter, and except in detail and within the carefully restrictive focus of particular disciplinary culs-de-sac, they are unlikely to prove tractable to any reasonably determinate mode of inquiry. This yields an unenviable dilemma: more than a suspicion that the sole available options are for triviality or charlatanism. To opt for pure history was to eschew charlatanism like the plague, but since its purity was its sole specific against the risk of triviality, it is easy to see why it was likely, sooner or later, to seem gravely insufficient, and especially so for those whose principal concern was with understanding politics.³⁵ In the theory of politics, trade-offs between precision of method and the claims of the subject matter, even in the more Alexandrian phases of the development of modern academic disciplines,³⁶ could never for long firmly favor the precision of method. Hence the continuing importance for those who share neither the political convictions of Karl Marx nor many of the methodological judgments of Leo Strauss, of the bodies of scholarship which have issued from each of these.

The Ideological Prizes at Stake

Besides the key issue of the relations between the normative standing of rights to private property and the justice or otherwise of social arrangements in their entirety, the main axis of ideological contestation across the globe for most of the time since Locke’s death, there are a number of other key domains of normative conflict in modern politics, where the bearing of Locke’s personal intellectual experience still carries profound significance. Amongst the more important are the integrity and coherence of a normative political vision grounded on assigning rights to individual human beings as a distinctive type of natural creature, the realism and normative cogency of grounding political authority on a process of personal authorization and consent, and the clarity and conclusiveness of the claim that human thought and speech must be seen and treated as free, and that each individual is therefore entitled, however bizarre or irksome the judgments or pronouncements in which they issue, to a toleration from their fellows, limited only by the unmistakable threat of physical harm. Other plausible, if in the end less compelling, instances are the law-focused approach to the design and enactment of constitutions which entrench all three of these commitments, if with varying degrees of security and priority, and the sociological presumption that, except in pathological or perhaps non-occidental cases, societies can, do, and should, subsist in some degree of causal independence from the inherently arbitrary dispositions of state power or the vagaries of operating markets, and that such societies therefore deserve, and may even be able to exact a measure of direct control over the former, and at least a limited immunity to the latter.³⁷ In the case of the United States all five of these complexes of normative and practical interpretation in some measure fit together and disclose an apparent elective affinity. Each complex can be associated, with varying degrees of selective inattention, with at least some aspects of Locke’s writings, and Locke can therefore, less defensibly, be identified as the leading historical protagonist of all five. Even if all five did fit together perfectly in the case of the United States itself, this state of affairs would offer no guarantee that their affinity was anything more than a contingency of history and geography. Since it requires little effort to notice loosenesses in the fit even in the American case (between, for example, the natural universality of human rights and the institution of chattel slavery), any presumption that the linkages will prove robust across time and space (that they will turn out over time transhistorically and globally self-evident) is fairly heroic. America’s Griff nach der Weltmacht is the most overwhelming, the furthest extended, and in many ways the most integral grasp for world power there has yet been, but it was always inherently unlikely to vindicate this presumption.

Locke and the Theorization of Rights

In the meantime, in any case, it is intellectually more prudent to try to assess the bearing of Locke’s reflections in these five cases, one by one. The most strategically illuminating of the five is the theorization of individual rights, recently analyzed with the greatest care by A. John Simmons.³⁸ The grounds and implications of Locke’s theory in this case have long been at the center of scholarly contestation to define the terms on which Locke himself is best understood. C. B. Macpherson,³⁹ and other interpreters who drew their main insights into Locke from a broadly Marxist orientation,⁴⁰ read his theorization of rights decisively through the prism of Chapter V of the Second Treatise, following the cue proffered in the Essay’s comparatively casual observation that where there is no property there is no in-justice.⁴¹ Macpherson himself presumed, without obvious warrant, that property in this sense was to be taken in its restricted meaning of private ownership, rather than in the wider usage glossed by Locke himself as “lives, liberties and estates,”⁴² in which it was always more reasonable to interpret the term as virtually a synonym for rights, and the casual equation of the scope of property and justice, instead of being a striking act of moral and political effrontery, becomes an unexhilarating tautology. It would be attractive to settle the matter once and for all by isolating the way in which Locke himself understood the category of justice over time, and demonstrating the constraints which that understanding must have imposed in the ways in which he conceived many other connected issues⁴³—an approach rendered still more enticing at present by the dominant concerns of contemporary liberal political philosophy with the criterion for justice in social arrangements. But rich though the materials which Locke left behind certainly are, and fascinating though the scholarly materials extracted from them over the half century or so since Von Leyden’s edition have proved, nothing in these materials confirms that justice had for Locke himself a theoretical centrality analogous to that which it plainly carries for John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, or Tim Scanlon.

If it is still as implausible as ever to see Locke’s intellectual life on the model of John Rawls’s (as a protracted struggle to pin down the scope of justice in human social and political relations, and the requirements which it places upon human agents), it is altogether more compelling to see that same life as a sustained inquiry into the nature of the rights which human beings as such hold against one another, and a somewhat more intermittent investigation, differentially focused over time but sometimes pursued with the utmost urgency, into just how these rights articulate with each other in relation to particular issues: the true original, extent and end of civil government, the grounds and scope of the duty to tolerate the religious convictions and practices of others, how far and why private ownership, more especially of land,⁴⁴ can be a genuine entitlement. The nature of the rights which human beings hold against one another is the core intellectual problem of Natural Law. For many centuries it lay at the center of European thought about ethics, epistemology, and theology. The balance between these domains, notoriously, shifted over the course of Locke’s life, and has continued to shift, more or less erratically, over the centuries since his death.⁴⁵ A scholar with the fastidiousness and patience of Von Leyden was every bit as attuned to the scale and significance of these shifts as more flamboyant and macroscopic interpreters of the dynamics and implications of European intellectual history, from Leo Strauss himself,⁴⁶ to Charles Taylor,⁴⁷ Al-asdair MacIntyre,⁴⁸ Michel Foucault, or Richard Rorty. He may have focused on different aspects of them and analyzed them with a considerably finer grain, but it would be simply an error to suppose that he was either obtuse to them, or foolishly blithe over their significance. Just the same is true of the more careful and reflective of the scholars, whether philosophers, historians, or political theorists by profession or intellectual formation, who have followed in his footsteps.⁴⁹

The most conspicuous single shift in the structuring of western thought between Locke’s birth and the present day has been the erasure of the all-structuring role of a single omnipotent and omniscient Deity (if not necessarily as a contingent focus for personal belief, at least as a publicly avowable premise of cognitive strategy). Uncontentiously, in Locke’s early intellectual life that role was still firmly in place. Arguably, by his death, and to no small degree as a consequence of his own analytical reflections and conceptual innovations, it was not merely clearly less secure, but conclusively displaced. What remains acutely contentious is quite how clearly he himself was aware of the more disturbing implications of some of his own main lines of thought, and how clearly and calmly he embraced the most disruptive of these. (Plainly, insofar as he was unaware of them, he cannot plausibly be thought to have embraced them.) Since Strauss himself, the most confident and determined exponents of the view that Locke understood and welcomed all of these implications, and the most disruptive, the most warmly and whole-heartedly, have come from the ranks of the scholars whom Strauss inspired and did so much to shape. Although the initial diagnosis reaches back before Von Leyden’s edition was even published, and was grounded quite independently of any of Locke’s early texts, this group of scholars has labored purposefully to push the moment of recognition and endorsement of the shift by Locke himself as far back as possible within their author’s life. Despite the ingenuity and incidental insight of some of the resultant readings, this exercise has not proved historiographically convincing. But the most grudging verdict on it could hardly deny that it has by now done much to sharpen a modern reader’s awareness of the scale of what is at stake. What is less clear is whether, in doing so, it has advanced significantly on Locke’s own apprehension of these stakes, which was in many ways both acute and extremely explicit.⁵⁰

Nowhere in Locke’s thinking does the conceptual presence or absence of an omnipotent and omniscient Deity bear more directly and conclusively than on his view of the character and practical import of the presumptively equal rights of all human beings as natural creatures.⁵¹ In his view these rights are an articulation of an authoritative Law, and that Law itself expresses the will, the presumptively perfect judgment, and the overwhelming powers of enforcement of its supreme Law-Maker. The distribution of rights assigned under this Law can, of course, be reconceived less hectically, as Simmons suggests,⁵² in terms of a metaphysically less ambitious moral realism, without necessarily undergoing drastic disturbance, at least in their conceptual architecture. But the sanctions of an explicitly concerned and overwhelmingly effective enforcer must then be replaced in their entirety by whatever other materials can be elicited from culture, history, deliberative rationality, and interactive prudence or imprudence. All of these resources, none of which can be said to be ignored by Locke himself, have been explored extensively since his death. Surprisingly many of the main outlines which he left behind, recapitulated, self-consciously or inadvertently, in the polemical strategies of the American revolutionaries and the constitutional expedients adopted by the founders of the new republic, have kept their shape and impetus, and greatly extended their territorial impact, in the centuries since his death.

If we see this complex apparatus of individual rights, constitutionally mediated state power, practically institutionalized representative consent, and increasingly confident capitalist property relations as embodying a somewhat inexplicit historical pragmatism, whether or not we also attribute its extension to the expanding power of the United States of America,⁵³ it is reasonable to see the theorization of rights not merely as a contingency of American cultural history, but also as a practical institutional expedient which has gained steadily in political plausibility as time has gone by. Here, plainly, nothing turns on the intimacy and precision of the causal connections, if any, between the apparatus thus extended and the historical inquiries, arguments, or conclusions of Locke himself. It is only if we press the question of whether this apparatus does reflect a coherent and compelling rationale that there is any strong reason for viewing it over against Locke’s own intellectual experiences or creations. A self-defending and self-commending set of pragmatic expedients stands in no need of a coherent rationale,⁵⁴ and it would be unwise to desert it merely because no such rationale readily suggests itself. But the view that this apparatus plainly is both self-defending and self-commending is very much a view from within, and, even from within, is some way from exhausting the visual space. From without, it has always faced severe criticism, as well as acute animosity. In face of that criticism, the judgment that Nature carries no authoritative Law, and that any vision of the distribution of rights within it merely reflects the normative intuitions of particular individuals, groups, or cultures, depletes the language of rights of most of its power,⁵⁵ and undermines the presumption that there is anything determinate for it to answer to. Under a Law which holds authority over nature as a whole, rights might indeed be trumps.⁵⁶ They might dominate a normative space through a power which they carried in themselves, and do so without specious rhetorical amplification. But in the cacophony of cultures, and amidst the often murderous exigencies of political conflict, it is hard to see them as more than whimsically invoked pseudo-trumps, claims to an authority which in the end is wholly bogus, and which also has nothing left to fall back on, as soon as its targets choose actively to repudiate it.⁵⁷

As far as we know, Locke himself never doubted that the prescriptive content of the Law of Nature (what it commanded and forbade) lay within the epistemic reach of every adult human being. But he certainly did not believe that most human beings in fact grasped that content at all fully and accurately, let alone recognized how overwhelming were their grounds for complying with it.⁵⁸ In his judgment, on sustained reflection, these grounds were less and less convincingly accessible from the interaction between human beings and the natural world alone. What was missing decisively from the epistemic resources yielded by that interaction was a knowledge of the sanctions required to enforce that law conclusively and in its entirety: more specifically the sanctions disclosed in the Christian Revelation.⁵⁹ Within Locke’s own vision, this assignment of rights and duties issued from a Law which held full normative authority, and which was also backed to the hilt by overwhelming power. Shorn of that backing, the claim to normative authority lay at the mercy of the sensibilities of its individual human targets, and lost the air of externality, objectivity, and solidity, which it drew from its presumptive standing as the normative logic of a created universe.⁶⁰ Along with that air, it also lost any intelligible claim to a foundation independent of, and over against, the fluidities of cultural change or the quicksands of inter-group animosities. Instead of offering a normative matrix with the power to distinguish permissible from impermissible human actions in any possible space of interaction, it subsided into an altogether more Hobbesian version of the State of Nature, in which right extended no further than power, and every normative intuition was open to challenge by anyone with the confidence or obduracy to feel and judge differently. At the level of power, this has done little to impede the diffusion of the rights schemata of modern representative democratic states and the capitalist property orders which accompany them.⁶¹ A vulgar pragmatism must confine itself to recording this historical movement. To explain it, and still more to vindicate it, demands an altogether more alert and critical pragmatism; and such a pragmatism (in intention, most of the more influential and impressive contemporary political philosophy) has had minimal success in explaining this movement, and has sought largely to vindicate a variety of economic, social, political, and legal arrangements which, for all their pronounced lack of utopian allure, are unmistakably at odds with those which at present prevail.⁶² Within this body of disciplined critical appraisal pragmatic commitment and normative intuition have parted company ever more decisively.

The Intellectual Upshot of That Theorization

Studying the thought of Locke is no direct aid in mapping this process of disintegration: the cracking up of the juridical ice-fields once fused together in the model of Nature’s unified Law. What Locke’s vision still can offer is an immensely revealing vantage point from which to view that process of disintegration over time. It in no way precludes sympathy with (or even at points allegiance to) the enterprises of constructivist theoretical re-imagining, or systematically cooperative design and implementation of legal institutions, which are needed to establish a regime of human rights within and between all existing states. But it does compel us, if we are to think clearly and accurately about the matter, to view each of these exercises quite largely (and the latter all but exclusively) as hazardous, extreme, and necessarily improvisatory, political adventures, not as simple acts of recognition of the decencies implied by our standing as one particular kind of animal in a world where we already are, or could ever hope to become, fully at home.⁶³ In the world as Locke imagined it, theology was still the master science. God’s Law ruled that world without restriction, both by right and by power, and all rights of human beings in the end issued from a single integrated framework of meaning and authority. In the world as we severally imagine it today, the ideas of a master science of the normative, of an all-encompassing and authoritative Law, or a unified framework of meaning, make no residual sense. The scope of human rights must be defined by whatever practices we prove to approve, and the authority of human rights is as flimsy, and their definition as fitful and centrifugal, as the vagaries of our approvals and disapprovals.

We still, therefore, have every reason to distinguish as sharply as we can the critical question of just what Locke’s arguments rationally imply, in both their force and their failures, from the historical question of the continuity, extent, and depth of the ideological shadow cast by his great texts. The first question is one of philosophy or political theory; the second, an assortment of questions about the historical transmission of formulae, complexes of belief, or structures of argument, and the dynamics of contemporary change, economic, social, cultural, and political, across the globe. Studying Locke will be little, if any, help in addressing any of the latter. But it remains the sole minimally prudent method for focusing on the former, and thus an indispensable moment in judging how best to answer it. Because Locke considered so many different topics in ethics, politics, theology, and philosophy with some care in the course of his life, and because he did so with such intellectual energy and ability, it would be absurd to attempt a complete listing of the range of such arguments which he advanced which might still repay the closest analysis. Any selection on grounds of urgency or relative depth must principally reflect the tastes and preoccupations of the selector. Over and above the key issue of property, the leading contenders for the most pressing and significant of these arguments in the last decade and a half have come from his analyses of the rationale for and limits to toleration, his treatments, explicit or implicit, of the significance of gender,⁶⁴ and his relatively relaxed conceptualization of political authorization. It is simply a mistake to see Locke as a champion, or even an especially careful analyst, of the merits of constitutionalism.⁶⁵ But he plainly did intend the Second Treatise, with its crisp account of the true original, extent, and end of civil government, as a compelling picture of how political power can be to some degree validly authorized. Over issues of gender the degree to which his attention really was engaged is often harder to judge. Only over the claims of toleration does the scale and continuity of his concerns, the vigor with which he pursued his arguments, and the imaginative and analytical force of his treatment establish for itself the continuing centrality of his analysis for many connected matters now and far into the future.

Locke and Toleration

For all the energy, and in some cases the distinction, of scholarly accounts of Locke’s views on toleration since the 1980s, there is still room for a full and balanced analysis of the changing ways in which he saw the issue of toleration over time, and the range of experiences which led him to modify his judgments about it so substantially. Some of the most stimulating historical studies of his changing views have lacked balance,⁶⁶ and failed particularly to register the degree to which he came to see it less as one of the key stakes in English domestic politics, and more as the fulcrum of the fate of European Christendom as a whole.⁶⁷ This distortion was principally occasioned by one of the most protracted public wrangles of Locke’s declining years, his defense of the argument of the original Epistola de Tolerantia against the assault launched on William Popple’s English translation by the Anglican clergyman Jonas Proast,⁶⁸ the final installment of which was still unpublished at Locke’s death. Since no comparably sustained attacks were leveled at the initial Latin edition which emerged from Locke’s continental exile, he never had occasion to try to defend this against the wider range of continental antagonists which its arguments certainly called for, and in particular never faced the intellectual challenge of vindicating what was at best an extreme Protestant view against the intellectual defenders of a still militarily dynamic Catholicism.

By 1667, as is well known, Locke had already come to deplore the use of coercion in the attempt to alter the religious convictions of others. Over the final two decades of his life, Locke in his Letters on Toleration sharpened and deepened this judgment, leaving, alongside the works of Pierre Bayle, a magisterial verdict on the wars of religion unleashed by the Reformation, and a classic repertoire of grounds for favoring toleration, to their Enlightenment successors.⁶⁹ Contemporary liberals have quarried these texts principally for components of a potentially decisive secular defense of freedom of speech, thought, and worship. The most distinguished liberal political philosopher of at least the last half century, John Rawls, has quite explicitly adopted this defense as model for how to ground a coherent conception of social justice on a full recognition of the equal right to see, value, and live differently of all adult human beings.⁷⁰ Three decades after the publication of A Theory of Justice, however, it is still unclear how far this conclusion can be stabilized rationally rather than rhetorically. Locke himself was not merely addressing rather obviously different issues (which in some sense may no longer be relevant); he also reached, in his own judgment, very different conclusions.

What those conclusions were can be seen best if we start out by considering the issues which he did wish to address. The central question for him, as it was likely to be for any Protestant thinker facing a militarily and ideologically (perhaps even in part a spiritually) renascent Catholicism, was whether human holders of political authority did or did not have a clear duty to try to impose their own best assessment of the requirements of Christianity on those whom they ruled. This issue had pressed on Christian thinkers ever since they inherited the coercive facilities of the Roman empire. To any Christian ruler who saw themselves as legitimate, and had already presumptively done their best to ascertain, with due sacerdotal assistance, what those requirements were, it was hard to explain how they could escape having a duty to act on this judgment: hard, indeed, to see how they could be fit to hold the authority in the first place if they shrank from exercising it on behalf of the most important and weighty of all their subjects’ interests, the fate which awaited them at the Last Judgment. Contemporary liberals have parted company too decisively with this problem to be able still to see it as a problem. They see it instead as an index of archaic superstition. Accordingly, they are slow to recognize the value which Locke very reasonably placed on the special advantages of his arguments from his own point of view, and quick to resent the very limited provision which those arguments offered for their own quite distinct requirements. For Locke what was essential was to refute the view that persecution was a Christian duty. For contemporary liberals the most intellectually reassuring result (and for some the only acceptable conclusion) must be that any form of molestation of adult belief or thought is both an impertinence and an absurdity, and any encroachment on freedom of speech therefore a ground for acute suspicion, entertainable at all only where the speech in question collides immediately with some at least equally peremptory right on the part of those whom it threatens.

This is a very complicated subject matter, not to be compressed into a brisk formula. But for all its inherent complexity it is far from clear that any consistently pragmatic and skeptical assessment of it could possibly vindicate the conclusions which contemporary liberals favor. In practice, as the history of American public law endlessly attests, claims to freedom of expression regularly collide with the rights of others, through immediate threats to public order, direct incitements to violence, and perhaps, more ecologically and elusively, in the economic dynamics of entire industries (pornography, drugs). Adjudicating the collisions (and hence confining freedom of expression in practice) is a coherent and readily defensible legal and political exercise, which in itself does nothing to impugn the value of free expression. But what it does do is to make clear why freedom of expression cannot be a self-defining and self-subsistent political and social good, let alone a wholly untrammeled individual right, independently of the consequences of the ways in which it comes to be exercised. Modern liberal readers of Locke are quite right in seeing him as rejecting religious persecution as cruel, futile, and unjust. They see that the charge of cruelty, while cogent enough in itself, will hardly do the necessary work. (Prisons, for example, are scarcely a consistently successful orchestration of kindness to the greatest number.) They see that the charge of injustice, whilst more conclusive in their own eyes, is bound to seem question-begging in this context to anyone who seriously opposes them, and they have turned accordingly with particular gratitude to the charge of futility, as this figures in the thought of Locke (or, perhaps more encouragingly, in that of Bayle).⁷¹ The attempt to coerce belief is inherently futile since coercion acts upon the will, and belief is not a voluntary matter. Very few human beings can change their beliefs simply by choosing to do so, and, it is reasonable to assume, none at all can do so instantaneously. It may be relatively easy to modify how others choose to express themselves through a judicious blend of menaces and bribes, but you cannot sensibly hope to make them believe what you want by even the most lurid extremes of intimidation. (There are few more compelling sites for this insight than the practice of child-rearing.)⁷² The main insecurity in this argument lies in the timespan over which it is to be applied. What you can do at once to modify the belief of another by direct assault is pretty modest. But over far longer spans of time (for instance, over several generations), the room for rational hope is far wider, and the room for entrepreneurial fantasy all but limitless. Well over a millennium of interpreting the thorny Christian path to personal salvation had registered this distinctly less hectic tempo of credal manipulation quite deeply, and reasonably concluded that decisive proof of the long-term futility of determined, relentless, and lucky persecution was out of the question. To win his argument, accordingly, Locke needed to argue much more narrowly, and with much greater contextual care.

Read with due care within this context, his conclusions differ notably from those of contemporary liberals.⁷³ At the core of his argument were the distinctions between theoretical and practical beliefs and between civil and religious associations. The purpose of civil associations was to provide for the needs of living human beings within this world. The purpose of religious associations was, in the Christian case, to provide for the salvation of their souls, and, in all cases which Locke himself recognized as genuinely religious, for the requirements of their relation with a divine authority whose powers and concerns reached decisively beyond this life. What made religious persecution potentially mandatory for its exponents was the clear priority of the second schedule of interests. Locke fully accepted this priority, and assumed it without hesitation. What he disputed was that the priority itself could ever extend to the services provided by those who hold authority within a civil association. His arguments were always far from convincing, if seen from a religion like Islam.⁷⁴ Their force for a Christian audience depended on the clear duty of each individual Christian to do their best to save their own soul, and on their manifest interest in succeeding in that endeavor. To save their soul every individual Christian must live, as best they could, as God required, a task likely always to prove beyond them. More manageably, at least in the luckier cases, they must also worship Him as they believed He required them to do. Only the sincere expression of devotion through these forms could discharge the central responsibility of a Christian and close the alarming gap between God’s requirements and their own relatively feeble capabilities. In that delicate and awesome relation the intrusion of human power was not merely certain to contaminate motivation and worsen the prospects of the individual believer. It was also categorically quite irrelevant—as impertinent as it was prospectively harmful. Locke’s defense of toleration assumed a distinctively Protestant vision of the relation between human beings and their God. It refused, notoriously, to extend a comparable degree of immunity to Catholic members of his own society. More strikingly still, it showed no trace of tolerance toward those who rejected theism in its entirety.⁷⁵

To see this combination of commitments as integrated and rational (and not as shamelessly and ludicrously incoherent), it is necessary to view it in its own terms. In his analysis the salvationary requirements of individual religions are matters in themselves of theoretical belief (indeed paradigm cases of theoretical belief). They depend upon how human beings conceive and imagine something which does not lie clearly or steadily within human view. It is only as theoretical beliefs, beliefs with no determinate implications for how their bearers have reason to behave in this world, and more specifically none which threaten the interests of their human fellows, that they are immune to civil coercion. As soon as, or insofar as, they merge with practical beliefs, beliefs which clearly do prompt or even require their bearers to act very differently, and act in ways which do threaten the vital interests of others, that immunity lapses. Any form of political allegiance is a practical belief, and Catholicism, as Locke construed it, was incipiently a form of political allegiance. The decision on whether or not to tolerate it was therefore a classic issue of political judgment, a matter of assessing the balance of threats and advantages, and acting for the net benefit of the subjects for whom a sovereign holds public responsibility. With atheists the issue for Locke was simpler and even more decisive. Since they disbelieved in either Gods or an afterlife, they could scarcely stand in need of religious toleration: the entitlement to worship as they believed themselves obliged to do. But on Locke’s account, they also had no right to avow their disbelief in public (or, more bewilderingly, perhaps even to believe it), since that belief itself was in his eyes all too devastatingly practical: a menace to the entire structure of motivation which rendered human beings minimally fitted to live with one another. It was thus a paradigm case of a practical belief of the most threatening kind, and the duty to suppress it as thoroughly as they could fell clearly on every civil ruler (Christian or otherwise).

Three centuries later this assessment has come to look very odd (especially when set beside the judgments of Locke’s contemporary Pierre Bayle).⁷⁶ But what is odd about it is not the judgment that some beliefs can and do carry practical menaces (or indeed practical blessings) for other human beings. To distinguish menacing from benign practical beliefs requires an extraordinarily delicate assessment of social, economic, and political causality. No government can hope to carry out such assessments with consistent success. But it is not easy to see how any government can hope to avoid the permanent duty to monitor with the utmost vigilance the balance of menace and promise within the practical beliefs held by its fellow citizens, and to intervene to limit the menace before it is too late. Murderous sects and hideous purposes are no prerogative of the late seventeenth century. It is intrinsic to human belief that the relations between the theoretical and the practical should always be intensely precarious. In many settings since Locke’s day we have made impressive headway in the practice of toleration (religious and secular). But we have yet to think our way commandingly beyond his fragile synthesis. Atheism may seem to most Europeans and Americans today (not least the atheists amongst them) an unlikely source of practical hazard. But it has plenty of less implausible competitors.

Locke’s Vision of the Place of Politics in Human Life

Many other aspects of Locke’s political thinking have been analyzed illuminatingly in recent decades, not least the subtle and fascinating issue of his sensitivity or obtuseness to the normative bearing and practical presence of gender throughout the lives of human beings.⁷⁷ It would be reckless to predict which aspects, whether from these and older themes or wholly novel, will loom as large in the decades to come. What can be confidently expected to carry continuing force is the synoptic vision of the human political predicament offered by his work as a whole—its imaginative arc from the process of psychic individuation, and linguistic and cultural construction, across the theorization of value and the practical bonds between individual human beings in cooperation and conflict, to the legal and political structures of organized communities, and the emerging economic logic of what is now a globalized system of production and exchange. At the center of this vision are the precariousness and onerousness, but also the endless revitalization, of human judgment⁷⁸—its incessant collisions and aberrations, but also its enduring capacity for creative recovery. This is overwhelmingly less brash or encouraging than the ideological materials which have made such remarkable global headway in the last half of the twentieth century.⁷⁹ But is also deeper and wiser. It is hard to see how it could ever simply cease to apply.

Chasing the Shadow

If we view it from today, the shadow which Locke casts has lengthened every day since the afternoon that he died.⁸⁰ It is natural to assume that it must also have grown ever fainter and more notional as time has gone by. By the same token, too, it is also natural to assume that we, in our turn, must have become ever worse placed to see quite what it was that could have cast a shadow of this intimidating length. In response to this combination of prominence and elusiveness, three centuries and more of division of intellectual labor have offered in exchange a variety of techniques of more or less disciplined inquiry, which volunteer to show us how to distinguish our questions ever more precisely, in order to answer them with ever greater security. You can see the relation between these two processes as a race, and wonder which of the two has been gaining on the other, and whether the gain, where gain there has been, has been steady and deeply grounded, or altogether more fitful, and based upon the most arbitrary of contingencies. I doubt myself whether the gain has ever been for any length of time at all steady or dependable, and doubt even more acutely whether the history of the human sciences as a whole has ever been one of reliable headway in specifying how to answer such questions with real security. Whether we see Locke as an incompetent modern,⁸¹ a heroic Masterbuilder of Modernity,⁸² or, still more recklessly, as someone marooned on the far side of an ever widening chasm,⁸³ we must take most of the weight of such judgments on our own shoulders. As we do so, the most prudent conclusion to draw from the last half century of Locke scholarship is that we should shoulder it as humbly as we can. The motive for making the judgment in this spirit might be epistemic or moral—a respect, however uneasy or reluctant, for distant greatness or alien power. Perhaps by now, though, to strike a more defiantly incorrect note, we might just recognize instead how ill-placed those whose puny shadows can barely hope to stretch across their own lifetimes will always be to take in fully the source of shadows cast from so very far away.

NOTES

1. Compare Locke’s own analysis of the relation between human beings and the Law under which they find themselves: “A dependent intelligent being is under the power and direction and dominion of him on whom he depends and must be for the ends appointed him by that superior being. If man were independent he could have no law but his own will no end but himself. He would be a god to himself.” Ethica B (Bodleian Ms. Locke C28, 141: John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969]), Epigraph.

2. “Person is a Forensick Term, appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery.”(John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], Bk. II, xxvii, 26, ll 26– 28; cf. John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], chapter 1, 13–33). And cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

3. For a contemporary assessment see David Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Parfit, Reasons and Persons.

4. See, generally, John Dunn, Political Obligation in Its Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 4. Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 volumes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). For North America, D. S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, 78 (1984), 189–97; Stephen Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism and the American Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); J. Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Fathers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); Laura J. Scalia, “The Many Faces of Locke in America’s Early Nineteenth Century Democratic Philosophy,” Political Research Quarterly, 49 (1996), 807–35; J. F. Dienstag, “Between History and Nature: Social Contract Theory in Locke and the Founders,” Journal of Politics, 58 (1997), 985–1009; T. H. Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship: The Context of James Otis’s Radical Critique of John Locke,” New England Quarterly, 71 (1998), 378–403. For France, see Ross Hutchison, Locke in France 1688–1734 (Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Volatire Foundation, 1991); John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Jorn Schosler, John Locke et les philosophes franÇais: La critique des idées en France au dixhuitième siècle (Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997).

5. For a succession of assessments of the trade-offs along the way, see Dunn, Political Obligation, chapter 2; James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); Richard Tuck, “The Contribution of History,” Philip Pettit and Robert Goodin, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 72–89; John Dunn, The History of Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Runciman, “History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3 (2001), 84–104.

6. John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, W. Von Leyden, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).

7. Merle Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke, America’s Philosopher, 1783– 1861,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 107–51; and cf. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

8. Michael Oakeshott, “John Locke: Born 28 August 1632,” Cambridge Review, 54 (4/11/1932), 27 (reprinted in J. Dunn and Ian Harris, eds.), Locke, vol. 1, 26–27 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997).

12. “Propriety, the subject matter about which Laws are made. I have nowhere found more clearly explain’d than in a Book intitled Two Treatises of Government.”(E. S. de Beer [ed.], The Correspondence of John Locke, [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–], letter 3328, 25 August 1703: VIII, 58.)

14. James Tully, A Discourse of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); G. A. Cohen, “Marx and Locke on Land and Labour,” Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXI, (1985), 357–88; M. H. Kramer, John Locke and the Origins of Private Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); G. Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Dunn, History of Political Theory, chapter 7.

15. Cohen, “Marx and Locke on Land and Labour”; Istvan Hont, “Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,” John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 41–120; Dunn, “The Emergence into Politics of Global Environmental Change,” Ted Munn, ed., Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change (London: John Wiley, 2002), vol. 5, 124–36.

17. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 5.

18. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

19. James Tully, A Discourse of Property and An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Waldron, The Right to Private Property.

21. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); S. Zinaich, “Locke’s Moral Revolution: From Natural Law to Moral Relativism,” Locke Newsletter, 31 (2000), 79–114.

22. John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and “John Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism,” in M. A. Stewart, ed., English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111–82; Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and “Locke on Justice,” M. A. Stewart, ed., English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, 49–85.

23. Harris, The Mind of John Locke; Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, and “John Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism”; Victor Nuovo, “Locke’s Theology 1694–1704,” M. A. Stewart, ed., English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, 183–215; and the volumes of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–).

24. There is, of course, substantial variation between these writers in this respect. Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism; Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism.

25. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

26. Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750– 1776, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1965).

27. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

30. Cf., still, Dunn, Political Obligation, chapter 4; and compare Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics.

31. Except in the case of the grandest and most formal of public pronouncements (cf. Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas [New York: Vintage, 1959] ), where citing a partisan intellectual champion would hardly be appropriate and might well prove prejudicial, most evident American citations from Locke’s own texts in this period were quite explicit, and the attempt to invoke his intellectual authority was clearly part of the point of citing them.

35. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; Dunn, History of Political Theory; Runciman, “History of Political Thought: The State of the Discipline.”

36. John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London: HarperCollins and New York: Basic Books, 2000).

37. Dunn, Cunning of Unreason, and “The Contemporary Political Significance of John Locke’s Conception of Civil Society,” Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani eds., Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39–57.

38. A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

40. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Shapiro, Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory; Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

41. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I V, iii, 18: p. 549, ll. 28–29.

42. Compare Locke, Second Treatise, §§ 123, ll. 16–17, and Peter Las-lett’s gloss at p. 101.

43. Cf. Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke, and “Locke on Justice”; and, more perfunctorily, John Dunn, “Justice and the Interpretation of Locke’s Political Theory,” Political Studies, 16 (1968), 68–87.

44. Tully, A Discourse of Property and An Approach to Political Philosophy, chapter 5; Cohen, “Marx and Locke on Land and Labour”; Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism.

45. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Foucault, Power.

47. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

49. Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1991); John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), etc.; Harris, Mind of John Locke; Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility, and the editors of the Clarendon edition of Locke’s Works.

50. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, and Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and “Bright Enough for All Our Purposes,” “John Locke’s Conception of a Civilised Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 43 (1989), 133–53; cf. Harris, Mind of John Locke; Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility; and, more analytically, Ayers, Locke: Epistemology, and Ontology.

51. Tully, A Discourse of Property; Shapiro, Evolution of Rights; Harris, Mind of John Locke.

53. Or, for that matter, attribute the expanding power of the United States of America to it.

55. John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 44–60.

56. Compare Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977).

57. Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

58. Dunn, Locke: A Very Short Introduction, and“Bright Enough for All Our Purposes.”

60. Tully, A Discourse of Property, and Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke.

61. John Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), conclusion; and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).

62. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

64. This is an extraordinarily rich topic, which has been explored with great interest since the 1980s and will clearly continue to hold its fascination for some time to come. In view of Ruth Grant’s contribution to this volume I shall confine myself here to drawing attention to the judicious treatment of a central issue in Ruth Sample, “Locke on Political Authority and Conjugal Authority,” Locke Newsletter, 31 (2000), 115–56.

65. Cf. Martyn P. Thompson, “Significant Silences in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,” The Historical Journal, 31 (1987), 275–94; Julian Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke.

67. For the English context see especially Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics; Mark Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” O. P. Grell, J. Israel, and N. Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 331–68, and “Locke, Proast and Religious Toleration,” J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor, eds., The Church of England c1689–c1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143–71; Richard Vernon, The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997); and Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility. For broader treatments of the argument and its context see Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” Mary Dietz, ed., Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 153–71; Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy; Jeremy Waldron, “Locke: Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution,” Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61–86; Harris, The Mind of John Locke; and for the significance of the wider European context see especially Dunn, History of Political Theory, chapter 6, and the forthcoming study by John Marshall. For an illuminating recent analytical placing see Alex Tuckness, “Rethinking the Intolerant Locke,” American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 288–98.

68. Goldie, “Locke, Proast and Religious Toleration”; and Vernon, The Career of Toleration.

70. Rawls, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

71. Pierre Bayle, Political Writings, Sally L. Jenkinson, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); S. L. Jenkinson, “Two Concepts of Tolerance: Why Bayle Is Not Locke,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 4 (1996), 302–22; Dunn, History of Political Theory, chapter 6.

72. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty.

74. Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

78. Cf., a trifle ponderously, Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lock-ean Politics and the Limits of Consent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

79. Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, or, on very different premises, Michael Zuckert, “Big Government and Rights,” Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Politics at the Turn of the Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 123–39.

83. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, and Locke: A Very Short Introduction.

John Locke on Women and the Family

RUTH W. GRANT

Was John Locke a feminist? Certainly not. But just as certainly, this cannot be the right question. For John Locke, the status of women in society was not a central concern. He paid far less attention to the matter than thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Stuart Mill, for example. Locke’s central political concern was to challenge contemporary authoritarian doctrines of Divine Right and patriarchalism that legitimized subjection to absolute monarchical power. To be sure, in launching that challenge, he was led to distinguish between political authority and authority within the family. His reflections on authority within the family, on relations between husbands and wives as well as parents and children, are part of his broader argument about the justification of authority and obligation altogether. It is an argument meant to establish the limits of political subjection and to justify revolutionary resistance to government. What can we learn by revisiting his discussion, penned over three hundred years ago, about the issues that most concern us? I think we can learn a great deal, but only by beginning with the awareness that we are bringing our question to his texts.

What, then, is our question? Contemporary interest in Locke’s writings on women and the family is driven by the question of the status of women and the place of the nuclear family in modern liberal societies. The problem looks like this: we find ourselves living in societies where the dominant liberal ideology teaches equality of rights and individual freedom, yet women continue to be subordinated, not least through the constraints imposed by the role they have been expected to play in family life. How are we to understand this disjunction between liberal theory and modern practice? One possibility is to credit liberalism with providing the principles with which to transform traditional oppressive practices. Struggles for women’s suffrage, for example, appealed to accepted liberal conceptions of equality, consent and rights.¹ The very real gains of the recent past also can be understood as an extension of liberal ideals. From this point of view, if we are concerned to secure equality and freedom for women around the world, what we need is more liberalism, not less.

Alternatively, liberal theory itself can be criticized in a variety of ways. In the light of liberal theory, the family appears to be a miniature liberal polity: nothing more than a group of individuals held together by mutual benefits and contractual agreements. Individual family members believe that they can choose the extent of their ties with their kin, negotiating and renegotiating their obligations to one another, rather than viewing themselves as bound together as members of a transgenerational, natural whole which is bigger than the sum of its parts and within which certain obligations are simply given. With its emphasis on the priority of the individual and particularly of individual rights, liberalism seems unable to recognize the importance of such crucial dimensions of human life as affective ties of kinship and concomitant intergenerational responsibilities. Yet, the family remains a vital social institution as the locus of the cultivation of these very aspects of our humanity and of values like loyalty and sympathy that curb egotism and sustain public life. Paradoxically, liberal political theory seems unable to provide the theoretical justification for those social institutions, like the family, which it needs most for its own support.

Liberal theory has been criticized from a very different vantage point as well. The liberal propensity to conceptualize oppression solely in legal and political terms leaves us without the intellectual tools to understand crucial cultural and psychological aspects of gender inequality. Equality of rights under the law seems an insufficient instrument to reach the subtleties of sexual harassment or the processes of socialization that shape identities and conceptions of gender difference, for example. Lastly, liberalism is said to be blind to its own role in providing the conceptual ground for the subordination of women and for oppressive family structures. To take just one example, liberalism’s sharp division of public and private spheres, which has been a crucial protection of individual rights, has contributed at the same time to serious deprivations of the rights it purports to protect. While the dictum that “a man’s home is his castle” has provided protection from illegitimate government interference in citizens’ private affairs, it often has left women and children vulnerable to abuses by husbands and fathers. Moreover, the public/private distinction leads us to depoliticize the domestic realm, which has been the primary locus of women’s work, and thus to view women as unsuited for public life. From this perspective, emancipation requires nothing less than a radical critique of liberal principles.²

To begin to address these issues, some turn to the writings of John Locke as one of the most articulate progenitors of liberal ideas. But this inevitably involves adopting assumptions about the role of ideas in history and the relation of theory and practice—and a cautionary note is in order. There are a number of common, but fallacious, assumptions to be avoided. Among them is the notion that contemporary American liberalism is a continuation of, or further development from, its Lockean roots and that for all practical purposes, the two are indistinguishable. It is well to remember that the term, “liberal,” did not even exist until long after Locke was dead, and that Lockeanism might represent a distinct alternative to contemporary liberalism in important respects rather than simply an early articulation of it.³

Moreover, errors can emerge both from taking ideas too seriously and from not taking them seriously enough. In the latter category is the presupposition that historical writings are simply circumscribed by the dominant practices of their time and place—Aristotle could not have criticized slavery⁴; Locke must be an apologist for the seventeenth century status quo with respect to gender relations, and so on—but there is no period without contested ideas and a range of available opinions, and there is no reason to assume that in earlier times people were less capable of social criticism than we are. On the other side of the balance lies the variety of ways in which ideas are assumed to be weightier than perhaps they actually are. To what extent is liberalism to be credited with advances in the status of women and to what extent ought other sorts of forces to be considered: changes in demographics, economics, and medicine for example?⁵ And, alternatively, when injustices persist, to what extent can we conclude that it is liberal ideology that is at fault? Has there ever been an ideology, or a religious doctrine for that matter, that has not been perverted to rationalize injustice? There may well be permanent sources of human evils that getting the ideas “right” will never entirely remove. This is a sobering thought, and one not usually confronted by a people who take the liberal idea of progress for granted, but it is a serious possibility nonetheless. The bearing of the investigation of Locke’s thought on our judgments of our contemporary situation will depend a great deal on the positions we adopt with respect to the impact of political thought more generally on our common life.

But the investigation of Locke’s thought itself can be conducted independently of these issues, and that is my primary task here. We need to know what Locke said and its meaning in the context of his own concerns before determining what it means for us. Locke framed his political theory in the Two Treatises of Government as a reply to Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Filmer’s basic position can be characterized as follows: all authority is paternal authority. Just as the Lord governs the world as the Heavenly Father of us all, the king governs his subjects, and the earthly father governs his household. Since all authority is paternal authority and women cannot be fathers, the status of women as subjects hardly requires argument. The authority of kings, who are not literally fathers of their subjects, does require some justification. In Filmer’s account, God’s grant of dominion to Adam, told in Genesis, is inherited through the eldest son of Adam’s line to the monarchs of his own day.

Of course, Filmer’s particular version of patriarchalism was not universally shared among Englishmen at the time, but patriarchalism in some form was common.⁶ The official Prayer Book catechism included “to honour and obey the King” along with “to love, honour and succour my father, and mother” in the text of the fifth commandment.⁷ The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings meant, not only that the authority of the king had a divine source, but that the subject’s obligation to obey regal authority was inseparable from his obligation to God. Moreover, in Filmer’s view, it meant that the extent of sovereign authority was identical whether wielded by God, king or father. Sovereign power included the power of life and death; it was exercised at the will of the sovereign; it could not be limited by law. Sovereignty was absolute and the obligation of the subject was equally so. Locke, aiming to justify revolution, sets out to attack this position in the First Treatise.

And because Filmer’s position rests on the notion that sovereignty is founded in paternity and that political authority relationships can be understood in the same terms as familial ones, Locke begins his constructive argument in the Second Treatise by declaring that he will distinguish between “the power of a magistrate over a subject … a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave.”⁸ Failing to make these distinctions, Filmer is unable to tell the difference between legitimate monarchy and tyranny, or between a “subject” and a “slave,” which is the distinction of greatest importance to Locke. And since Filmer relies on scriptural argument to a large extent, scriptural interpretation is one of Locke’s weapons as well.

In Locke’s view, Scripture provides no evidence of a divine grant either for Adam’s rule as the first father over the rest of mankind, or for the exclusive rule of fathers over their children, or for the rule of husbands over their wives. God granted mankind dominion over the nonhuman creatures, rather than granting Adam dominion over all other human beings, which is evidenced in part by the fact that Eve was included in the grant on Locke’s reading of the biblical passage.⁹ Further, Locke never tires of reminding the reader that the fifth commandment includes mothers as well as fathers and that properly we ought to speak of parental, rather than paternal, authority.¹⁰ And on Eve’s subjection to Adam (“and he shall rule over thee,” Genesis 3:16), Locke’s scriptural reading is remarkable:

[B]ut there is here no more law to oblige a woman to such subjection, if the circumstances either of her condition, or contract with her husband, should exempt her from it, than there is, that she should bring forth her children in sorrow and pain, if there could be found a remedy for it, which is also a part of the same curse upon her.

Locke emphatically denies any biblical support for the claim that husbands have the right to rule their wives. It cannot be a sin for a wife to disobey her husband because there is no divine command requiring obedience. According to Locke, the biblical text grants no authority, not even to Adam over Eve, much less to husbands in general over their wives. The passage only foretells what a woman’s lot in life will be: she will bring forth children in pain and she will be subordinated to her husband by the customary practices of nations, both of which conditions could change.¹¹

What, then, of the authority of custom or tradition? English political traditions pose a problem for the patriarchalist who would identify paternal and monarchical power, since English monarchs have traditionally been Queens as well as Kings, and this is an argument that Locke does not hesitate to employ.¹² But his deeper argument is that customs, traditions, and historically established practices simply are without authority. We can find examples of horrible cruelties, including infanticide and cannibalism, that became established practice and even sacred custom within a given society, but the fact that such practices exist has no bearing on their justification.¹³ In one of his most radical statements, Locke remarks, “an argument from what has been, to what should of right be, has no great force.”¹⁴ Irrational and oppressive customs and rituals often survive because it serves the interests of the powerful, priests in particular, to maintain them.¹⁵ That they have withstood the test of time is meaningless as a standard for moral judgment. Customary practices and established prejudices must be judged at the bar of reason.¹⁶ This is a major thrust of all of Locke’s work.¹⁷

Having eliminated both scripture and custom as the ground for the justification of political and paternal authority, only nature remains as a possibility. Locke’s position with respect to political authority is clear; there is no natural political power. Rather, the natural condition of men is a condition

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 upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species … should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.¹⁸

This is the fundamental premise from which the entire argument of the Second Treatise proceeds. In the absence of any indication that God has set one man above the rest, nobody can claim a natural superiority that would justify subordinating others to his will. Legitimate political rule can come about only by human artifice, when people with equal natural rights to self-government agree to establish a government amongst themselves.¹⁹ There can be no doubt that women are included in the generic term “man” in this passage and that they enjoy the same natural rights as men as “creatures of the same species.”²⁰

Nonetheless, there is legitimate power within the family, and, while it cannot be understood to be political power, much less monarchical sovereignty as Filmer would have it, there are genuine obligations between parents and children, husbands and wives. What is their source and what is their extent? The power of parents over their children follows from their duty to care for them and to educate them until they are capable of caring for themselves. Not only are these powers and duties shared by fathers and mothers, they can be forfeited by negligent natural fathers and acquired by caring foster fathers. They are by no means tied exclusively to natural paternity. Moreover, a father’s authority does not include powers governing the child’s life, liberty or property, for these are political powers belonging only to the magistrate. And while the obligation of children to honor parents who cared for them is lifelong, parental authority ceases when it no longer serves the purpose which justifies it; that is, when children reach maturity.²¹ This is a general principle in Locke’s thought: the power of one person over another is legitimate only to the extent that it serves the purposes of their association.

Association between a man and a woman in marriage, which Locke calls “conjugal society,” is formed by voluntary contract for the purpose of producing and rearing children.²² Once that purpose is served, there is no reason that the association must continue; thus, divorce under certain circumstances is reasonable. And because the purposes of the association can be served by a variety of arrangements, the terms of marriage contracts might vary considerably.²³ But in every conjugal society, according to Locke, there must be a power to govern whatever has been designated as common to husband and wife. Since unanimity of judgment cannot always be expected, the final determination must be lodged in one or the other of them in cases of conflict. This conjugal power is “naturally” lodged in the husband as “the abler and the stronger,”²⁴ and Locke remarks, “there is, I grant, a foundation in nature for it,”²⁵ though it is a customary or conventional arrangement.

There are striking parallels between Locke’s argument for placing conjugal power in the husband and his argument later in the work for locating political authority initially in the majority of the community, though the comparison is not exact in every particular.²⁶ In both cases, the society itself is created by the unanimous, voluntary consent of equal individuals. For the society to be ongoing, whether civil or conjugal, there must be a dominant power within it. In the case of political society, Locke observes that it is “necessary for one body to move one way;”²⁷ in the case of marriage, it is “necessary that the last determination … should be placed somewhere.”²⁸ Since there will be differences of opinion, unanimity is impracticable as the ruling principle in either case. In civil society, the dominant power is the majority; in conjugal society, it is the husband. It is by agreeing to the original contract to form a society that one agrees to obey the power within it. But in both cases, that power could be placed differently and still be legitimate. In conjugal society, it could be placed in the wife; the dominance of husbands within marriage is a matter of convention, as we have seen.²⁹ And in civil societies, the people can agree to place it in a number greater than the majority.³⁰ But it is worth noting that they cannot place it in a number less than a majority; “the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest” because “that which acts any community [is] only the consent of the individuals of it.”³¹ The argument justifying the authority of the majority is stronger than that justifying the authority of husbands. In the latter case, the justification follows from the greater likelihood of effective rule, rather than from the principled ground of the association.³²

The customary dominance of husbands seems reasonable enough, according to Locke, as it recognizes the usual natural superiority of strength and ability in men, but this by no means implies a general inequality of rights between men and women.³³ The argument is not a defense of a natural right for husbands to rule their wives and does not even approach a claim of a right for men in general to rule women. Women are by nature “at their own disposal.”³⁴ Only by voluntarily joining in marriage does a woman accept subordination to her husband’s judgment, and then only with respect to their limited common concerns. Immediately after asserting that the final determination in a marriage rests with the husband, Locke writes: “But … this leaves the wife in the full and free possession of what by contract is her peculiar right, and gives the husband no more power over her life than she has over his.”³⁵ Moreover, with respect to governing others in the family unit, including servants, the power may belong to the mistress as well as to the master.³⁶ And finally, within a political community, the civil magistrate is the ultimate arbiter: deciding “any controversy that may arise between man and wife” about their common concerns.³⁷

The overall effect of Locke’s argument with respect to husbands and fathers is to significantly circumscribe their authority, both in duration and extent. Moreover, what authority they have is not theirs to use as they will, but only so long as they use it for the ends for which it was given. This is a crucial component of Locke’s argument: power can always be subjected to judgment in this way, and those who hold power do so only conditionally. When a father “quits his care” of his children, “he loses his power over them,”³⁸ and “The power of the husband being so far from that of an absolute monarch, that the wife has in many cases a liberty to separate from him.”³⁹ As compared to Filmer’s claims for the absolute and arbitrary rights of sovereignty in the fathers with respect to their wives as well as their children, Locke’s understanding of authority within the family represents a vastly liberalizing alternative. Locke accepts and defends the dominance of husbands over wives in some form, but alters its status significantly by altering its justification. One crucial consequence of this approach is that the superiority of husbands over wives, whatever its extent, does not prejudice the rights of women in other relationships within the household or without. In Locke’s view, subjection to conjugal authority, or to parental authority for that matter,⁴⁰ does not imply political subjection of any kind.

The purpose of Locke’s discussions of paternal power and conjugal society is to demonstrate that a family unit, no matter how large and complex, is not a political society.⁴¹ In very important respects, for Locke, the whole point is that a man’s home is not his castle.⁴² It is a grave error to believe that a father is king of his household and that the King is father of his subjects, an error with significant consequences. To offer just one example, in Locke’s time, “high treason” was a crime committed against the political sovereign. But since the head of a household was considered lord and sovereign there, crimes against him were also a form of treason. “Petty treason” was the crime committed by a wife in killing her husband, or a servant his lord or master, or a clergyman his prelate. The penalties for petty treason were harsher than they were for ordinary murder (and the killing of a wife by her husband was only murder, since the wife could not be lord over her husband).⁴³ Against the patriarchalists, Locke argues that there is no sovereignty within the family. If patriarchalists, like Filmer, truly understood the very limited powers of fathers over their wives or their children, they would find fatherhood a slim reed indeed to support the claims of absolute sovereignty in the monarch. And if they truly understood political power, they would find that it too is grounded in the voluntary consent of naturally equal individuals and limited by the purposes it is meant to serve.

We turn now to consider the status of women with respect to political authority, and here the interpretive task becomes more difficult. Since Locke never directly addressed the question apart from his general discussion, we will have to proceed by inference on some points and remain satisfied with uncertainty as to others. According to Locke, the only source of political subjection is the voluntary agreement of each individual to become a member of the political community. This proposition follows directly from the premise of natural freedom and equality. If political authority is not natural, it must be artificially created through some sort of voluntary human action. All legitimate government is founded in consent of some kind. Let us suppose that a consent theorist, like Locke, wanted to justify the political subjection of women to men; he would have three alternative approaches available to him. First, he could argue that women consent to government, and thus become subject to the laws, through the consent of their husbands. Some political writers of the time took this approach, but Locke was not one of them.⁴⁴ Wives are not bound by the consent of their husbands any more than children can be bound by the consent of their fathers once they come of age. The political independence of each member of the family is made clear in Locke’s discussion of conquest where the power a just conqueror acquires over defeated combatants yields no power over their wives or children.⁴⁵ For Locke, a political community is a group of individuals, not a group of families or households.

The second alternative is to argue that women as such, in contrast to men, cannot become members of the political community because they do not possess natural rights equally with men. (Note that it would be contradictory to embrace both this second alternative and the first one: if women are not naturally free, then they must be naturally subjects and there is no need to explain their consent, either through their husbands or otherwise.) That women are simply excluded from the political community seems an implausible interpretation of Locke’s account on the face of it. According to Locke, people belong to the same political unit when they have a common law and established judge between them. And in Locke’s account, controversies between husband and wife are judged by the civil magistrate; women owe obedience to the laws; they can own property independently of men and make enforceable contracts; there is such a thing as an “English woman,”⁴⁶ and it would be odd indeed for a woman to rule as monarch over a political community of which she could not be a part.

But some have argued that women can be subjects of political authority without being consenting members of the body politic.⁴⁷ The argument turns on the notion that Locke did not consider women sufficiently rational to govern themselves according to the law of nature, which is the law of reason or the moral law. If women are not capable of self-government, their voluntary consent to be governed by others would not be required. But if this were so, Locke would have to argue also that women are incapable of obligation to God, who is the source of the law, or of moral obligation altogether. It would be as unreasonable to expect a woman to be a Christian or to consider her guilty of a crime as it would be to expect moral responsibility of a dog or a cat. Subjection to the law of nature is what distinguishes human beings from the other animals. Locke is explicit that the sort of rationality that is required for subjection to the law of nature is available to all mankind.⁴⁸

Moreover, if women do not become members of the political community through their own consent, what are the grounds of their subjection to the laws of the polity? It would be incumbent upon Locke to explain this to the reader, but he does not say.⁴⁹ Locke does not argue anywhere for a different grounds for political authority over women than over men, yet he had ample opportunity to do so in the process of sorting through the various types of authority within the family and the polity, and it is unlikely that it would have been particularly controversial if he had. Instead, particularly in responding to Filmer, Locke undermines all claims for scriptural, natural, or traditional foundations of political authority. Again, Locke argues emphatically throughout the work that political authority can be grounded only in individual consent. That women can become political subjects and members of the political community in the same manner as men is tolerably clear.

The third possibility is to argue that, while women have fundamental natural rights and cannot be obliged to the laws without their own consent, they are not capable of effective participation in government, and, since such participation is a matter of convention rather than right, they can and ought to be excluded from it. Again, this is not a subject that Locke ever addresses explicitly, and it is even more difficult in this case to follow out the implications of his general argument because that argument is ambiguous on two important issues. First, it is not clear what membership in the political community implies about participation in the processes of governance for men or women, and, second, Locke makes apparently contradictory statements concerning the criteria for determining what sort of action counts as consent to membership and the process by which consent is given.

With respect to political participation, it appears at first blush that membership in the body politic implies nothing at all with respect to a role in its governance or a right to be represented in its councils. Once the community is formed, the majority can entrust the community’s power in any manner it chooses. It can constitute a monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, or any form or combination of these.⁵⁰ By inference, it would be perfectly legitimate to constitute a representative government where women and a goodly portion of men were disenfranchised. Women might have the rights of conscience, of property, and even of revolution, but not the right to vote. So long as the subjects are protected in their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property and have established the government on the basis of consent, the government is a legitimate one. Locke is a liberal, but not a democrat. But a problem arises because there are passages which do imply greater pressures toward democratic and representative forms of government in the Second Treatise. For example, Locke argues that there can be no taxation without representation;⁵¹ that a conquered people can accept the government of a conqueror only by consenting to the laws either directly or through their representatives;⁵² and that “well ordered commonwealths” have carefully structured legislatures as well as other institutional limitations on their powers.⁵³ It is difficult to determine with certainty what sorts of political rights, if any, follow necessarily from equality of natural rights in Locke’s view.

It is equally difficult to determine the precise meaning of the requirement of consent to establish political authority. At one point, Locke states quite strongly that nothing can make a man a member of society except “positive engagement, and express promise and compact.”⁵⁴ Yet elsewhere, Locke writes that tacit consent, often “little taken notice of,” is sufficient to establish political obligation.⁵⁵ And of course historically, if women and men have consented to membership in political society at all, it has certainly been a tacit consent most everywhere and always. That consent is the only legitimate basis for a political community is clear; how that community is constituted on the basis of consent is quite obscure.

These two problems, of consent to membership and of participation in political society, represent major areas of tension in Locke’s political thought, and I believe the difficulties flow from the same source. Locke is attempting to specify criteria of legitimacy that will justify a right of revolution in certain circumstances. But he must accomplish this without at the same time unsettling most governments in the world. In particular, he must be careful to ensure that his criteria support a distinction between abusive monarchies and monarchy per se. In fact, part of Locke’s rhetorical strategy is to turn the tables on the usual claim and argue that his consent theory, which implies a right of revolution, is actually more likely to lead to peaceful politics than is Filmer’s doctrine of absolute subjection to Divine Right monarchy.⁵⁶ It is important for Locke to be convincing on this point, given England’s recent history of regicide and bloody civil war.

Locke proceeds by establishing minimal criteria for legitimacy; that is, consent and protection of natural rights. In the early ages of human history, even tacit consent to monarchical power in the father of a family could transform that family into a legitimate commonwealth by these criteria. Such consent would be reasonable since the father had the power to effectively execute his judgments and his judgment could be trusted.⁵⁷ But this “Golden Age” was temporary:

when ambition and luxury, in future ages would retain and increase the power without doing the business, for which it was given, and, aided by flattery, taught princes to have distinct and separate interests from their people, men found it necessary to examine more carefully the original and rights of government; and to find out ways to restrain the exorbitances, and prevent the abuses of that power which they having intrusted in another’s hands only for their own good, they found was made use of to hurt them.⁵⁸

As historical conditions changed, more stringent requirements (such as the creation of a legislature, the limitation of executive prerogative by known and standing laws, and explicit oaths of allegiance indicating consent to membership) might have to be met in order to satisfy the same general criteria of legitimacy in practice. In a large and complex society with weaker ties amongst the people and greater conflicts of interest, it is a more difficult task to construct a government grounded in consent and devoted to the pursuit of the public good. Some institutional protections, unnecessary in simpler times, become essential to the task.⁵⁹ Moreover, Locke sometimes describes maximum standards for the best governments, rather than minimal requirements of legitimacy. Violations of the latter justify revolution; violations of the former do not. Locke needs to assure his readers that revolutions are justified only rarely and not in response to every government that falls short of perfect justice.

This rhetorical situation makes it difficult to discern Locke’s final position on those questions which are peripheral to his main task, which was to establish the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy and the right to oppose the rule of any king who is likely to become a tyrant, James II in particular. Locke only took up the question of women and the family in order to counter Filmer’s patriarchalism and further his own claims regarding the limitations of political obedience. He had no need to take up the question of the political and social inequality of women on its own terms (or the similar inequalities among men), and arguably, it would have been counterproductive to do so. Government by a select group of men could meet the minimal standards of legitimacy in principle. Locke does not argue against the political inequality of men or women; this issue is not a casus belli. But it should be noted that he doesn’t argue for it either, though he certainly could have done so.⁶⁰ He undermines the standard arguments that were used to support the subordination of women politically—scriptural, traditional, and natural—and does nothing expressly to provide an alternative support. It is an open question what Locke’s “maximalist” view on the matter might have been.

My best guess would be that Locke would approve of systems of government that acknowledge both equality of right and inequality of ability to rule.⁶¹ Considerable social and political inequality could be justified in a system that protected rights and promoted the public good. Full social and political equality is not a necessary component of the public good in and of itself. In Locke’s view, unequal social arrangements ought to be judged by their effects. In a particular historical situation, political equality would be required if the rights of community members proved insecure in its absence. Thus far, the argument applies to inequalities among men as well as to inequalities between men as a group and women as a group.

We do not have direct evidence to determine whether Locke would have argued that women as such are less politically capable than men. There is evidence that he did not share the prejudices of his day regarding women’s weak spiritual and intellectual capabilities,⁶² though, in all likelihood, he would be astonished at the contemporary experiment aimed at abolishing gender differences as the basis for the division of labor in society in every significant respect. What we can say with some certainty is that, in Locke’s view, the justification for barring any group of people, male or female, from participation in politics requires a showing that that group, for whatever reason, is incapable of exercising sound political judgment.⁶³ If there is an implied argument for the social and political inferiority of women, it is an argument made on meritocratic, not patriarchal, grounds. And this means that it can be challenged on the basis of experiential evidence. After Locke, the terms of the argument over the status of women have to change.

With respect to women, Locke demolishes the idea, prevalent in his own time, that women are born subject to male authority in the form of paternal authority of one kind or another and are destined to remain so throughout their lives. He establishes instead the natural freedom and equality of each individual and makes the individual, not the family, the basic unit of political society. These are now propositions that are generally taken for granted. What Locke does not do is provide an explicit justification for the equal participation of women with men in politics. Locke’s argument regarding women and the family is embedded in his general attack on Filmer’s patriarchalism. In the process of challenging Filmer, Locke argues that paternal power is quite different from political power, and that paternal power is so limited in duration and extent that it cannot be the basis for claims of political authority.

Locke teaches his readers to think about power and obligation in a new way. Power comes in a variety of forms, each determined in extent by its origins and its ends.⁶⁴ Power of any kind must be justified by its purposes and, to the extent that we create our own obligations, the exercise of power can always be judged by those subject to it. The duty of obedience has its limits. Nobody owns his or her authority; rather, power must be “authorized” in order to be legitimate. Practically speaking, this is the real significance of the argument from consent; that it justifies a right of revolution or a right to alter government in response to abuses. And this is the crucial difference between Filmer’s understanding of patriarchal monarchy and Locke’s.⁶⁵ The ambiguities surrounding how consent is given are less important than the demonstration that it can be rightfully withdrawn. Locke changes the terms of the discussion: when considering power relations of any kind, the question becomes how to recognize where the limits of authority and obedience lie. Power always requires justification and is always subject to scrutiny. Again, these are propositions that we now take for granted entirely. And they are the propositions that emerge from Locke’s consideration of the issues that most concerned him.

What, then, can we learn from reading Locke about issues of contemporary concern, particularly the concern for social and political equality for women? There is an indeterminacy in the implications of Locke’s argument on this issue that set the stage for future controversies. On the one hand, his argument provides a large opening wedge for claims for increasing equality for women. Under modern conditions, equality of rights cannot coexist with political and social inequality since to ensure equality of rights necessarily requires full participation in public life. If women do not have both equal participation and equal fundamental rights, then they will have neither.⁶⁶ On the other hand, though Locke doesn’t himself make the case, his argument also permits the claim that women ought to remain unequal in political participation on account of their inferior capabilities.⁶⁷ This claim is far more tenable on Lockean grounds in a world where most people, men as well as women, share second-class status and the rule of the few is justified on the grounds of their superior fitness for public service. It loses a good deal of its force once men are universally included in public life. Once it is established that the rights of men cannot be secured without direct equal participation in political life, and that even the least educated male is capable of such participation, it is much more difficult to maintain consistently any grounds for the exclusion of women as a group.

The indeterminacy of the Lockean position on the question of social and political equality for women is sufficient to make clear that Locke was not a liberal democrat in any contemporary sense, though this should come as no surprise. Nonetheless, within the terms of a Lockean sort of liberalism, contemporary liberals confront some of the same theoretical tensions that Locke confronted. At the outset, I portrayed the focus of contemporary concerns about the status of women as the disjunction between egalitarian principles of liberal theory and modern practices of subjection. But it now appears that one dimension of the problem is located within liberal theory itself. Liberal theory must confront the question: What is the relation between the basic liberal claim of equality of fundamental natural rights and the democratic requirements of equality of participation in governing arrangements? It seems incoherent to us for Locke to be a liberal and not a democrat, since we assume that liberalism entails a substantial degree of democracy in principle everywhere and always. We do not tend to view the relation between the two historically, as Locke did. But while we tend to speak of “liberal democracy” as if the two terms were synonymous and, while we certainly see the right to vote as essential, even we do not require complete equality in the distribution of political power. No one today recommends assigning political office randomly by lot, as the ancient Greeks did. Powerful courts with appointed judges serving life terms, undemocratic institutions to be sure, are construed as an important instrument for the protection of rights. There is always some combination of institutional provisions that recognize the principle of equality and other elements that attempt to ensure effectiveness in achieving the ends of government as liberalism defines them, namely preservation of rights and pursuit of the public good. To the extent that we see any particular system of government, not as one among a variety of means to achieve these ends, but as essential to these goals, we will find that we have condemned all other possibilities.

And this is the locus of the second area of tension shared by Locke and contemporary liberals. In today’s world, we concern ourselves a great deal with the problem of how to uphold a universal standard of human rights without imposing the views of one culture on all others. This is a central area of concern in the international community with respect to the status of women globally. The shared dilemma is this: either we specify the one essential way of achieving a regime that recognizes fundamental natural equality (the maximum requirements), in which case we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of advocating one uniform standard to impose everywhere, or we specify minimum conditions that allow room for variety, in which case we are forced to accept practices that do not meet ideal standards of justice.⁶⁸

Locke takes the second approach but in a way that offers an alternative to contemporary perspectives. Locke’s liberalism differs from many forms of contemporary liberalism in important respects. One of these has been mentioned already, his view that what is essential for legitimate rule varies as historical conditions change. Another is that Locke’s liberalism has nothing to do with cultural relativism, which is the view that cultural practices can be judged in relation only to the standards of the particular culture in which they are found and not by the light of a universal standard. Locke is crystal clear that custom itself provides no justification. Nonetheless, a variety of practices can be respected, not because culture as such is respectable, but because there are a variety of ways that societies can achieve legitimate human purposes. Locke mentions the form of polygamy in which a woman takes more than one husband and arrangements in which marriage is quite temporary, for example, as practices adequate for rearing children (rather than denouncing either as a heathen practice).⁶⁹ This is the minimal requirement, and many sorts of marital institutions can accomplish that goal.

[C]ommunity of goods, and the power over them, mutual assistance, and maintenance, and other things belonging to conjugal society, might be varied and regulated by that contract which unites man and wife in that society, as far as may consist with procreation and the bringing up of children till they could shift for themselves; nothing being necessary to any society, that is not necessary for the ends for which it is made.⁷⁰

At the same time, those minimal requirements are firm and universal standards for judgment, and, just as Locke clearly condemned cannibalism and infanticide, he would surely condemn practices such as killing women upon the death of their husbands. Some rights are inviolable; Locke would say inalienable—the right to life, the right to own what you earn, the right to be a party to a marriage contract, the right to choose your own religion, the right to remain free from subjection to the arbitrary will of another. These rights provide a standard which applies to every human society. But they do not dictate a monolithic approach to political and social arrangements. In other words, Lockean liberalism allows both moral and political judgment and acceptance of diversity by focusing on defining minimal criteria for legitimacy rather than articulating a model of the ideal form of political society.

The tensions we have been discussing, between liberalism and democracy and between universalism and particularism, are tensions that arise from within the terms of “Lockean liberalism,” and while these are the dominant terms of discourse in the West today, they are certainly not the only possible terms. There may be important problems for which they simply are inadequate as tools for understanding. To take just one illustration, Locke’s perspective allows him to demonstrate the limits on any one person’s power to stand in the way of what another person wants to do. But reading Locke will not help if the question is why some groups of people tend to want certain things. To understand the subtle psychological forces of subordination and identity formation involved in a question such as this, you have to look elsewhere. Locke has little to say about the political psychology of inequality, though this should not surprise us particularly either.⁷¹

In every place and time, new questions will come to prominence, or old questions will arise in a new way. For this reason, we should not expect to be able to return to texts from an earlier time for answers to our questions. We cannot ask authors for the answers to questions that they never asked. The conceptual fabric of historical discourses was woven within a context of argumentation that we do not share, and it is unlikely simply to suit contemporary circumstances. But by knowing the historical antecedents and the historical alternatives to our own efforts to comprehend our situation, we can gain clarity on our conceptual vocabulary and perspective on the dilemmas associated with it. Without that knowledge, we will be blind to the dangers of weakening the principles we now take for granted and blind also to the dangers of forgetting their limits.

NOTES

I would like to thank Susan Liebell for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1. See “The Declaration of Sentiments,” Seneca Falls Conference, 1848, reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, A History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y.: Fowler and Wells, 1889), pp. 70–71.

2. For a discussion that incorporates the range of criticisms mentioned here see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981), chapter 3.

3. “Liberal” as a political designation came into the language in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Oxford English Dictionary.

4. Aristotle actually mentions contemporary critiques of slavery. Politics I.6, 1255a.

5. Such forces sometimes bring advancements and sometimes not. On the greater economic independence of women in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century see Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, “ ‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism,” Political Studies, vol. XXVII, no. 2, 1979 (183–200), pp. 186, 196.

6. See Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapter 1.

7. Filmer excluded mothers from his version of the fifth commandment. Locke, First Treatise, §60. See Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 452–60, esp. p. 455.

10. See e.g., Locke, First Treatise, §6, 11–12, 60–61, Second Treatise, §§52–53.

11. Locke, First Treatise, §47. See the discussion of this passage in Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty, pp. 64–65. Locke rejects here as elsewhere the notion that the customary practices of nations, or the “common consent” of mankind, is any indication of a divine providence that would make those practices authoritative.

13. Locke, First Treatise, §§57–59. See also John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I.3.9–12. Hereafter cited as Essay.

15. See, for example, Locke, Second Treatise, §§92, 94, line 20, and John Locke, On the Reasonableness of Christianity (Stanford University Press, 1958), §238. Hereafter cited as Reasonableness.

16. Locke did not thematically challenge the prejudices of his day with regard to the status of women in his public writings. There is evidence, however, that he did not share those prejudices. After listening to a female preacher, Locke wrote her a letter of encouragement indicating that he saw no reason to exclude women from the ministry. Quoted in Melissa A. Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 72, no. 1, 1978 (135– 50), p.150. Believing the author of a tract he admired to be a woman, Locke wrote “I am of the opinion she deserves one of the best places in the university.” Quoted in David Wootton, ed. Political Writings of John Locke (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 126. Wootton comments, “It would be difficult to find a more straightforwardly feminist sentiment written by a seventeenth-century male.” In a letter to Mrs. Clarke concerning the education of her daughters dated January 7, 1684, Locke wrote that, since he saw “no difference of sex in your mind relating to truth, virtue and obedience,” his educational advice concerning her son could be applied to her daughters as well. Quoted in Nathan Tarcov and Ruth W. Grant, eds., John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. xi. Locke certainly took seriously the intellectual capabilities of the only woman who was important in his life, Damaris Cudworth (Lady Masham), the daughter of a Cambridge philosopher and an extremely intelligent and philosophically sophisticated person.

17. For just a few examples see John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, §§10–12; Essay II.33.18; IV.20.17–18; for a discussion of the issue see Ruth W. Grant, “Locke’s Political Anthropology and Lockean Individualism,” The Journal of Politics, vol. 50, 1988 (42–63), section III.

19. The “state of nature” is simply the phrase referring to the condition between any two or more people who have not entered such an agreement. The concept of the state of nature is inseparable from the premise of natural equality. Since there is no natural political power, such power must be created by human beings, and unless and until it is, they remain in the state of nature (i.e., their natural condition) with respect to one another.

20. To deny this would lead to endless absurdities, including that Locke would have excluded from the “species” half of those necessary for reproduction; denied that women could be held morally responsible for their actions; and essentially read women out of God’s creation of mankind. See also Second Treatise, §6. The generic understanding of the terms “man” and “mankind” was even stronger in Locke’s day than in ours. See The Oxford English Dictionary entry for “man,” which includes the following examples: “The Lord had but one pair of men in Paradise. (1597)” and “There is in all men, both male and female, a desire and power of generation. (1752).” We return to this subject below; see n. 48 and accompanying text.

21. Locke, Second Treatise, §§58, 65–67. See Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 59– 64, for a fuller treatment of these subjects including Locke’s critique of Filmer’s argument that paternal power can be inherited and Locke’s defense of the rights of children, regardless of birth order or gender, to inherit their parents’ estate.

22. The legitimacy of arranged marriages would seem to be ruled out by the combination of the limitation of parental authority and the requirement that the marriage contract be voluntary.

32. For a discussion of the status of majority rule in Locke’s account see Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, pp. 115–19.

34. John Locke, “Virtus” (1681; from the 1661 Commonplace Book), reprinted in Wootton, Political Writings, p. 241.

40. See Locke, Second Treatise, §§116–118. Locke makes clear that adult children are not bound to any political society by their parents’ consent. Each person must consent individually to membership in political society.

42. Locke was the first to effectively challenge the analogy between the family and the state. This was a critical move in undermining the claims for permanent, extensive, and hierarchical authority in husbands over wives. The analogy had structured debates between Royalists and Parliamentarians over the right of the subjects to challenge the King’s authority for quite some time. Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 32, 1979 (79–91).

43. Bryan A. Garner, ed. Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th edition (St. Paul, Minn.: West Group, 1999), p.1506.

44. See the discussion of the different ways in which Edward Gee, James Tyrrell, and Algernon Sidney combine patriarchal notions with consent theory in Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism,” pp. 139–42. On Tyrrell, see also Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract,” pp. 85– 86.

47. See Brennan and Pateman, “ ‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth,’ ” for one example.

48. Lunatics, idiots, and madmen alone are excepted as “defects” … “out of the ordinary course of nature” (Locke, Second Treatise, §60). Members of the species are characterized by “the use of the same faculties;” “every one” is “furnished with like Faculties” (Locke, Second Treatise, §§4, 6). For the connection between the natural law, reason, and the human species in contrast to animals see, for example, Second Treatise, §§8–11, 62. See also n. 20, and Essay III.11.16.

49. Locke does explain that foreigners must obey the laws of the country in which they reside and are thus subjects without being members. But even this he explains as an example of tacit consent, the necessity of which presumes a natural equality of rights. Moreover, I see no reason to assume that Locke treats English women as if they were temporary foreign residents.

62. See note 16. Outside of the Two Treatises, I have found only one disparaging remark about women, or perhaps about women of the laboring classes. Locke comments that laboring men “(to say nothing of the other sex)” need to have access to religious truths in simple form because they have neither the leisure nor the capacity to follow lengthy theological arguments. Reasonableness, §252.

63. In America, excluding women and propertyless men from the franchise often was defended on the grounds that their economic dependence would compromise the independence of their political judgment, particularly before the institution of the secret ballot. This claim is unrelated to the claim of natural incapacity.

64. The full title of the work is The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government.

65. Locke acknowledges that, historically, governments often began when families were transformed into small polities ruled by a single man, usually the father. But he is at pains to argue that even these were governments based on consent, and for that reason, the people were always free to establish and reestablish political authority to protect themselves from abuses and to best serve their common purposes. Second Treatise, §§105– 112.

66. A strict Lockean might make this claim, not as a timeless principle, but as necessarily true under modern conditions. Locke took the position that the necessary requirements for legitimate rule may vary as conditions change over time and as people progress in their understanding of political power. Locke, Second Treatise, §§94, 107, 110–111.

67. Again, a strict Lockean could only make this claim conditionally. Political subordination could only be sustained on Lockean grounds so long as women themselves could consent to that position reasonably. It would have to be demonstrably clear that they benefitted from the arrangement, since people never can be thought to voluntarily change their position for the worse. Locke, Second Treatise, §131.

68. This is the dilemma that arises over whether to classify “new rights” as basic human rights, e.g., a right to health care.

69. Locke, Second Treatise, §65. In unpublished notes, Locke also wrote that a man may have two wives simultaneously. Cited in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 1988), p. 321n.

71. Though he is not entirely silent on the subject. See Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §§31–62, and Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty, chapter 2.

Essays

Measuring Locke’s Shadow

JOHN DUNN

The Problem of Perspective: The View from Without or the View from Within?

The Persisting Imaginative Pressure of the Supposed View from Within

The Historical and Political Sources of That Continuing Pressure

Locke and the Dynamics of the Enlightenment

The Ideological Prizes at Stake

Locke and the Theorization of Rights

The Intellectual Upshot of That Theorization

Locke and Toleration

Locke’s Vision of the Place of Politics in Human Life

Chasing the Shadow

NOTES

John Locke on Women and the Family

RUTH W. GRANT

NOTES