Locke on Consent, Morals, and Education

Locke finished the first draft of the Essay in 1671. He is thought to have finished the Two Treatises on Government during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681. Both works were published in 1689. Hobbes had pursued a publication plan not entirely different. Hobbes’s De Corpore is a large and complex work. Hobbes’s doctrines of perception and body are in that work. One cannot truly understand De Cive without first studying De Corpore. One cannot truly understand Locke’s Second Treatise without dedicating considerable time to the study of the Essay.

For the purposes of political philosophy, doctrines of perception are of absolute importance. For that determines, a priori, the status that will be accorded to ordinary opinions. It also establishes, in the a priori, the degree to which a political philosopher is going to subscribe to common evidence, in the generation of his theories and in his conception of what language is. Plato was wise to conduct exhaustive investigations of those philosophers who sought to indict perception, who deny the obligation of language to common evidence. This is a tradition in philosophy, that is, examining the doctrines of perception, which is the special province of political philosophy now and forever. It is a tradition in need of revival.

In the Second Treatise Locke relies upon a vocabulary that is deeply wedded to customary opinions: liberty, equality, consent. However, the Essay establishes that these names are of the “mixed modes,” which kind Locke believes each individual has the most emphatic right to employ and define as he sees fit. There is no reason to look for hidden arguments, as a certain philosophic sect would suggest we do. All philosophers must finally make their argument in the lines, rather than in between them. One must be on guard, then, against one’s tendency to rely upon customary understandings when dealing with the vocabulary of one of these philosophers who have turned so severely against the evidence of ordinary perception. One must examine the definitions actually employed, as they are integrated into the philosopher’s argument.

More to the point, Locke’s Essay contains the depth-dimension of his philosophy of human personality, which an older political philosophy would refer to as soul. It is in the Essay where Locke unfolds the logic of human motivation and aspiration. It is also the place where Locke discusses the substance of his deepest moral philosophy. This does not mean that one should simply ignore what the Two Treatises have to say. Rather, one should rely upon the Essay to provide insights into Locke’s ethics and morality.

The Second Treatise has received much more attention by thinkers who are interested in Locke’s politics. It seems to be the case though that the Essay is at least as politically significant as the Second Treatise, and arguably more significant. The Essay provides a special definition of moral names called “mixed modes.” The Second Treatise is full of “mixed modes.” It is likely that we will need to consult the Essay in order to understand how to interpret the Second Treatise accordingly. Equality and liberty are those kinds of names that even scholars tend to be attached to in the popular signification. If Locke provides us with a special interpretive framework for the contemplation of moral names, we cannot rely upon the popular significations.

It is not a common point of view that every individual has a different interpretation of the signification of the names of “equality” and “liberty.” People generally suppose that these are principles that we all hold in common, and that we can appeal to a common signification when we make arguments about these names and what they indicate. This is precisely the point of view that Locke rejects in his definition of liberty. People grow accustomed to using certain names in a particular way, Locke argues, such that “they are apt to suppose a natural connection between them.” Not only is this delusory, in Locke’s view, but the opposite is the case: “they signify only men’s peculiar ideas, and that by a perfectly arbitrary imposition.”^[1]

It is clear that people generally do have differences of opinion as regards moral names. Plato’s Republic is the greatest investigation into the name of justice that Western civilization has produced. Plato’s Socrates deals with a great variety of conceptions of justice en route to his definition. Locke, however, is making a more extreme point than that. For most people, while they do differ in the signification that they find in particular moral names, are still usually in the same neighborhood. One person making an argument for equality may believe that each individual has the equal right to obtain as much property as he can; while another individual may believe that equality indicates that each person should be provided with enough resources to meet her needs. These are very different theories, with very different implications; but few would say that therefore the name of equality is beholden to “perfectly arbitrary” interpretations. Almost nobody except a philosopher would argue that it is simply up to the individual to decide how to use a moral name. Yet that is what Locke argues. Due to the large difference between the common and the philosophic uses of speech that Locke recognizes, one naturally wonders how that distinction plays into this definition of the use of names as arbitrary. Does Locke mean that philosophy is not obliged to use names after their common signification? That philosophy is even free to use moral names in a radically arbitrary manner?

The great theme of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is that all powers must be regulated. No human being can be trusted to employ unchecked power, or to subject the common interest to such unchecked power. This is the reason why it has been necessary to labor so long and hard on the issue of atomism in Locke. For atomism enacts such a distinction: it confers upon philosophers the power and the ability to separate themselves from countervailing authority in the political institutions that are subject to popular evaluation. The public has enough struggle with philosophers, without the formal disenfranchisement of perception as a way to obtain truth of fact. Atomism knocks that domino down. The atomist philosophy is furthermore so dense, and intricate, and coiled with powerful instruments of logic, as to be well nigh insuperable for a great many scholars to boot. Atomism in modern philosophy raises an entirely new specter of unaccountable power: and the location of that unaccountable power happens to be in the purview of the philosophies which are leading the choir in hymns to public liberty.

Robert Filmer, Locke charges, created a book that “was to provide chains for mankind.”^[2] “And the ground that he builds on is this: that no man is born free.”^[3] Things would be very different if Locke had argued that the human being is born with the right to seek his or her freedom, and to take measures to protect it once it is obtained. To make the argument that human beings are born free, however, is to link freedom to radical dependence, since that is the state into which we are all born. Moreover, the argument that human beings are all born free appeals to vanity. It appeals to our resentment, to our sense that we may simply assert our dignity, without necessarily learning what must be undertaken in order to make good on the claim. To proclaim natural freedom for those whom one consigns to darkness, is at least a bit hasty.

Locke’s role in British politics, the fact that he risked his life to defend the cause of Parliamentary freedom, certainly must be reckoned with. Should we evaluate Locke based upon his historical deeds? I concede that this must be allowed; and yet there is no reason to be excessively narrow in our construction of the notion of “historical deeds.” For philosophic arguments also take place in history; even philosophers who wield arguments that have been made over many centuries, such as atomism, lend their own particular agency and ability to such endeavors. Locke, as a philosopher, does not appear to be very sympathetic to the majority of the human race. Both dimensions of Locke must be entered into the historical record; and it seems that the potentially immense power of philosophy warrants special attention to Locke’s actions in that context.

John Rawls makes much of the fact that Locke put his life at risk in order to help Lord Shaftesbury’s men. Rawls throws down a powerful gauntlet. Locke acted for the sake of freedom with his actions, Rawls remarks.^[4] Rawls does not contemplate the Essay as an essential part of Locke’s political teaching. “Telling the truth and keeping faith are presumably part of the fundamental law of nature, and a further aspect included in it, as is the priority for the protection of the innocent.”^[5] When Rawls investigates the signification of Locke’s concept of equality in the Second Treatise, he observes that “clearly equal power means equal liberty and political authority over oneself. Power is not to be understood as strength, or control over resources, or much less as force, but as right and jurisdiction.”^[6] Rawls is presuming quite a lot. We are entitled to no such presumption as to the meaning of Locke’s Second Treatise.

Locke scholars are also obliged to answer to a number of hermeneutic theories in the historical sciences that would impose serious restrictions upon how such investigations are conducted. Quentin Skinner is a case in point. Skinner has pieced together a theory of historical scholarship that focuses with exeruciating narrowness upon language as a form of behavior. The theory that Skinner develops is laid upon the foundations of prior philosophies, such as Wittgenstein’s, and Russell’s, which advance the atomist thesis.

According to Skinner, every human being who reads a text, cannot help but to impose some meaning of his own in interpretation. Skinner’s point is that there is no such thing as a text, objective and common to all, from which point we can begin to make our arguments. While nobody disputes the fact that interpretations are going to differ considerably, it is by no means clear that we lack a common textual starting point. Skinner’s argument, in fact, traces back to that pesky atomistic postulate, shared by all of the founders of British linguistic philosophy.

In order to avoid minimizing Skinner’s point of view, a couple of additional passages can be introduced. “Even in the most primitive perceptual cases, even in the face of the clearest observational evidence, it will always be reckless to assert that there are any beliefs we are certain to form, any judgments we are bound to make, simply as a consequence of inspecting the allegedly brute facts.” Skinner is getting closer to the nitty gritty here. Theory always guides perception, in Skinner’s point of view. In this, Skinner is as one with the atomist faith. “It is only to insist that, whenever we report our beliefs, we inevitably employ some particular classificatory scheme; and that, as Thomas Kuhn has especially emphasized, the fact that different schemes divide up the world in different ways means that none of them can ever be uncontentiously employed to report indisputable facts.”^[8] That is precisely the issue. Locke’s atomism works overtime to snap this dependence of theory upon perceptual evidence. Atomism conquered philosophy so entirely during the Early Modern period, that it became less and less necessary, and perhaps less desirable, to so much as argue for it. Yet it is not the case that people depend upon different “schemes” to “divide up the world.” This is the liberty, not necessarily the fate, of philosophers in the Lockean or atomistic mode.

J. G. A. Pocock is a scholar who is impatient with any attempt to trace a history of ideas in western civilization. According to Pocock, the philosopher who writes does so in a multitude of contexts. The notion of a history of ideas in political philosophy strikes Pocock as a bit silly. The historian of thought is more capable, Pocock believes, of really ascertaining even what a political theorist is doing when she utters arguments in writing. “A “history of political theory” would clearly move beyond the scrutiny of particular acts in the construction of such a theory, and would suppose “political theory” to be and have been an ongoing activity, about which generalizations may be made and which can be said to have undergone changes in its general character over the course of time; changes which could be recounted in the form of a narrated history.”^[9] There is nothing controversial about the idea that a political philosopher such as Locke writes in a number of different contexts. Locke is, in the struggle against Royal Prerogative, very much an historical actor. The Second Treatise clearly has signification in the context of that political struggle. Yet I do not see how one can deny that Locke is a philosopher first of all. For in the domain of politics, philosophy is capable of being the most potent force. Locke’s Second Treatise can indeed be read as a work on the Exclusion Controversy, as Rawls has stated. “He wants to defend the cause of the first Whigs in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681. His problem is to formulate the right of resistance to the Crown under a mixed constitution, as the English Constitution was then regarded.”^[10] Yet the Essay supplies a meta-context for the understanding of the Second Treatise. The Essay contemplates a form of political authority that is not part of any historical conversation taking place in the politics of seventeenth century England. It envisions a new court of truth, and it is to that court that all historical players must turn, in proportion as it is established.

For Aristotle, the category of the voluntary is much broader than the category of free rational choice and deliberation. The individual in a sinking boat may toss overboard precious cargo in order to avoid sinking, Aristotle observes.^[11] This behavior is assuredly voluntary; and yet it is prompted by circumstances which make a mockery of free rational choice. If the boat had not been sinking, the individual had not decided to toss the cargo overboard. For Aristotle, free rational choice indicates individual deliberation as the moving principle of decision, as the very cause of action. A leaky boat is not a substitute for free rational deliberation, however voluntary such an action might be. For Aristotle, free rational choice is the basis of actual freedom. When circumstances impede that possibility of choice, and in proportion as this is the case, actions may still be voluntary, but hardly free. This distinction is one that Locke labors mightily to obscure.

Locke ignores this distinction in his discussion of will and freedom. We have good reason then to pay special attention to Locke’s doctrine of consent, which is not to my knowledge directly investigated in the Essay. We may not be on Locke’s level, or even be capable of attaining to the degree of sophistication that he has achieved in the use of language. Yet we have learned that we are not to assume any connection between Locke’s use of a very familiar common name, such as “consent,” and what it is ordinarily taken to indicate.

Locke is very artful in segregating deliberation from freedom. Freedom, for Locke, can only involve external impediments to one’s physical motion. Where some motion is possible, to that degree freedom is possible, even for the prisoner, or the man prepared to forsake his life. If the doctrine of “consent” upon which Locke’s entire scheme in the Second Treatise is predicated, is not interpreted from a vantage point that closely examines Locke’s discussion in the Essay of the matters of “will” and “freedom,” it will only abet our ignorance.

Truth matters a great deal to human beings. It is perhaps the chief reason why human beings pursue opinions. They need to discover things about their world, and they can only do so in proportion as they are able to employ language to feel themselves against the walls of the common objects as it were. A man cannot begin to feel himself, to know himself, unless and except as he is able to have his speech heard, by authorities in society, on the terms that he intends it; and the human being can only begin to feel and understand himself, his place in the world, his options, his vulnerabilities, in proportion as he is able to comprehend what the authorities mean, when they utter common and public names. Based on the model of society that Locke is attempting to lay the groundwork for in the Essay, that authority is expressly philosophic.

Locke is a shrewd person. He possesses some keen insights into human nature and behavior. Locke knows that the least intelligent individual among us will feel burning anger, if he is called out for his ignorance. Adults, like children, buck up against direct authority. They do not experience it as a pleasant condition. It is not clear, however, that the attempt to flatter and seduce human beings by appealing to their vanity is a more charitable instrument for the management of public opinion. Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education are revealing in this particular; and the parallel between the Thoughts and the essential rhetorical structure of the Second Treatise is certainly of interest. This will be investigated a little below.

Rawls does not draw any parallels between this equality that Locke professes to find among the human race in his state of nature (“every man a king”), and his propensity to flatter human beings. “If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom?”^[12] These are strong words. “An absolute lord”; “equal to the greatest.” It is certain that the Second Treatise had a much greater readership than the dense and complicated Essay, despite their simultaneous publication. Yet in the Essay, the individual who lacks deep philosophical training, who believes that he perceives the actual apple directly, is far from “equal to the greatest.” He is so far from being equal to the greatest, that his capacities for truth are likened to those of the lower animals over whom such men and women are accustomed to govern.

The people, compared to the philosophic court of speech, are utterly bereft of true bearings in life. The things in which they believe, such as substances, are tossed out of the ranks of the actually knowable things by philosophic authority. Yes, “an absolute lord,” each person may be, within the confines of his own impotence. Just as he cannot take his goods to market if he lacks access to the public highways, so his access to the domain of reality is forfeited if he lacks the possession of the philosophic knowledge which stands as trump to every last crumb of perceptual knowledge that he is eligible to obtain in his life. Or, more accurately, the average individual will not have access to the public highways of opinion and thought truly, if philosophy does not produce out of itself, a sufficient number of thinkers to keep those highways clear of doctrines that attempt to denigrate or otherwise trivialize the evidence that is ordinarily obtainable through sense perception.

It is perhaps the worst situation for a human being, to be in total ignorance. I do not think it is true that nature has been stingy of gift to humankind, in our ability to make a place for ourselves in the world. Language is our great gift. Yet it is possible for philosophy to make of that gift a form of bondage. Just because these sufferings will be inarticulate; just because the testimony of those who suffer will be interpreted by those who inflict the damage, in accordance with their own tenets of hermeneutics, does not reduce the injuries, or alleviate the humiliating subordination.

When science employs common names in such a way as to cause the ordinary opinion to believe that science is making binding statements about common objects, ordinary opinion is fated to take these statements as a foundation for its own attempt to pilot itself through the tall grass of life. Yet if science, in its own self-understanding, is but entertaining itself with its use of words; if it has excused itself from that inevitable public expectation that when people use the common names, they are referring to the common objects, this causes people to predicate their own understandings of the world, and indirectly of themselves, upon mere stories.

A people that is not eligible to participate as an aware audience, in the public search for truth, will find time and again that it has put its beliefs where no reality exists. For those things that the established philosophic authority is saying, are husbanded closely by the men and women who lack philosophy, when they make their utterances. Where a person cannot rely upon her own understanding of speech to act upon the world in such a way as to discover the true contours of what is external to her, and more powerful than her; such a person is fated to frustration; and in this frustration she is led to dependence on her passions by default. In her passions she is perfect fodder for that Machiavellian anthropology, which seeks to make of crisis the origin of all order.

Pocock, for all his insight, has been known to thunder at those who would dare to suggest that Machiavelli is a philosopher. Machiavelli however is much more than a mere philosopher: he is the creator of a political model that has guided philosophic thought over several centuries. In Machiavelli’s political ontology, the origin of society is crisis. It is the suspension of discourse, the handing over of authority to those strongest individuals who are at the ready, and possessed of means, to supply order. Crisis dissolves the debate as to what sort of means are appropriate to settle political controversies. In that degree of crisis, the question as to “why do I live?” cannot be asked. The question as to “what do I live for” can in no way be asked. These questions, however, are as natural to the human condition, as is the desire to know that Aristotle observes in the first sentence of his Metaphysics. Human beings devolve upon these questions, because that is their nature. Yet in the regimes which are founded upon an ontology of emergency, these questions are perpetually kept at bay.

Man has a right to his opinions: to know what his utterances signify, especially for the authority in his society. Man has a right to freedom of opinion, which means that he has a right to really know what the scientific authority in his society intends to signify, in its self-understanding, when it speaks in the vernacular. It is not possible for man to have freedom of opinion if he does not understand the manner in which his utterances are not merely received by philosophic authority, but the terms upon which they are judged and interpreted. We will have to make our way through the Second Treatise to see what it actually holds.

Authority

Locke, in the severe way that he analyzes political institutions, appears for all the world to regard man as naturally free; but when one investigates his doctrine of philosophy, and the influence that it would wield over the ordinary opinions, and the nature of that control—then one might begin to think that Locke’s hostility to political institutions and deliberation per se is just not aimed at the protection of human freedom. For political institutions are the natural incubators of public opinion.

Locke does appear to reduce the scope and breadth of political authority over human beings. This appearance may be ascribed to different causes. In the first place, the new version of authority actually may be slight and modest. Clearly there have been societies in which this was so. In the second case, the authority might be so strong and subtle, as to disguise itself very well. I think that this is the case in regimes which operate along the lines of Machiavelli’s model. Machiavelli’s republic, as illustrated in the Discourses, still attracts a bevy of contemporary admirers, despite the fact that the nuts and bolts of that city in speech are every bit as oppressive as the regime set forth in his Prince. Locke, in my view, belongs to the second category. Authority in Locke’s regime is very great, immense in truth: yet it is so complicated and subtle, that there is not much chance of human beings understanding it. To be unable to identify the nature of one’s oppressor, unfortunately, does not cancel oppression: for oppression is a real thing out in the world, which operates to force us against our own natures, into modes of life which we do not wish, and in which we cannot pursue our fulfillment and happiness.

Speech is how we orient ourselves in the world. Names are the signs and marks that we assign to the various objects in our world, for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, names are used to indicate that which has existence or reality. We learn names through experience of diverse kinds of objects. In all this Locke speaks correctly. Yet the objects that Locke is willing to countenance, as able to so much as pass into our minds from sensory faculties, don’t exist. In nature, there is no object “red.” There is no object “circular.” There is no object “cold.” There is no object “sweet.” These qualities exist in nature as belonging to diverse sorts of objects. An individual can, in his mind, decide to single out a quality, perhaps one that he has seen in a great number of external objects, and speak about it. Some objects are more interesting to human beings than others. Yet these simple ideas that Locke insists upon, as the sole objects that can enter into our minds from sensory perception, are neither the objects that truly do enter into our minds, nor are by any stretch of the imagination capable of combining to form the vast diversity of objects that we experience.

There are as many forms of oppression as there are modes of existence. A man can be oppressed in his ability to locomote; he can be oppressed in his ability to speak his mind freely; he can be hindered in his capacity to understand the philosophic authority that would plumb his depths, and pluck his chords, without his noticing; as he may be injured in his relationships, attachments, beliefs, and above all trusts. I know that this name of trust has been driven into a dark corner by the tide of realist political philosophy over the last several centuries; but I feel obliged to comment on it, because as stated above, I do not think it is an area in which the human being is capable of exercising choice.

Even the new princes of Machiavelli’s sire come into the world through the many agencies of trust which enable their existences. There are no human beings, including Machiavelli himself, who are free not to trust, at decisive stages of life, but especially in one’s coming to be a full-fledged member of society. That is the great tragedy in modern political philosophy, to the extent that it actually prefigures the life that individuals in society will be able to lead: for the places which have been cleared for the new human beings to stand in, require that their shoulders be so stooped, and their knees so bent, and their head and chest thrust backward, from the cradle to the grave. Locke’s authority of philosophy is honey tongued and prolix enough to set the most well trained minds upon sleep. Yet it is a deadly serious enterprise.

Locke and Epicureanism

Locke, in moral terminology, belongs to the Epicurean tradition. There we go again: even in morals, there are doctrines which traverse the centuries, under a variety of names, but almost identical in substance. This is to say, that Locke is a person who believes in pleasure and pain as the ultimate poles of human experience. Locke states that it is the purpose of the sensory faculties to enable the human being to know which objects are pleasant for its body, and which objects are painful for its body, rather than to know objects for what they are.

The Epicurean philosopher is so obsessed with being able to make his own pain and pleasure the sole motives of his conduct; the Epicurean philosopher is so determined never to forsake a pleasure for the sake of something called duty; so determined to never endure a pain for the sake of something called community—that he leans on his philosophy of atoms to enable him to deny the existence of any other kinds of experience.^[13] The original Epicureans posed much less of a political problem than the ones brought into being by Machiavelli’s rhetorical torch. They were content to keep to themselves, and as such posed no serious threat to the commonweal. Locke belongs to the Machiavellian wing of Epicureanism: he seeks to establish moral norms for the entire state.

Locke does not say that this is merely his preference as to what human beings should or should not incline toward. Locke alleges that this is the true reality, the very inmost disposition of the human mind, and he knows. According to Locke, things are good or evil only insofar as they are products of pleasure or pain. Ordinary human beings recognize quite a bit of difference between pains and pleasure of the body, and pains and pleasures of the mind. Bondage, political oppression, doubtless affects the body; but it affects the mind in a more pernicious way. The insult to dignity, the suppression of opinion, all of these things suggest sufferings that may border on agonies. The language of good and evil, in ordinary speech, goes much more toward intentions and motives. Character, in other words, is involved in happiness as ordinarily understood; and while Locke ultimately does provide us with a theory of character, he never quite makes a real distinction between the good and pleasure.^[14]

In common life, we have very many names, and very many words, to indicate pain. Sorrow, unhappiness, misery, inconvenience, disturbance, aversion, dislike, irritation, mortification, betrayal, transgression, object of contempt, disinterest, and so on. We have many names to indicate pains, because they are of different natures. We don’t discuss the experience of serious betrayal in a relationship, in the same way that we discuss a disappointment with the flavor of an ice cream cone. Nobody in ordinary experience needs to be alerted to this fact. Just as nobody in ordinary experience needs to be alerted to the fact that there is a certain kind of pain that is generally something destructive and therefore to be avoided. To hold out the prospect that all pain is therefore bad, or evil, does not conceivably follow.

It is not that Lockean science discovers to us the absence of meaning in the world: it is that the Lockean meta-morality is opposed to, out of sympathy with, those meanings that people actually live for. It is true that in common speech, people use the names “love” and “like” very casually at times. People may say that they “love” vanilla ice cream. Yet this does not indicate that people truly confuse appetite with the feelings of love that they hold more properly considered. Most people will say that they recognize a major difference between the names of “love” and “like.” As a moral philosopher, Locke is not speaking in a trivial way. Locke actually does not believe that there is a qualitative difference between love of grapes, and love of a person for another person.^[15]

On the level of objects, they are entirely relative to Locke. “Hence it was,” Locke observes, “that the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue or contemplation.”^[16] “But it suffices to note, that our ideas of love and hatred, are but the dispositions of the mind in respect of pleasure and pain in general, however caused in us.”^[17]

Uneasiness

Locke has a meta-morality, a metaphysics of the soul. Defenders of Lockean virtue have a basis for their appeals. For Locke indicates that there is indeed something superior to momentary pleasures and the avoidance of pains. Locke doesn’t provide us with a tremendous amount of information as to how this other faculty can exist in a soul, such as the one he describes; but this other faculty involves the ability to resist immediate gratification. In other words, one definition of liberty that Locke describes involves the ability to defer immediate gratification, and to undertake this resistance in order to pursue a greater good, than the immediate pleasure or avoidance of pain.

Locke chooses to characterize the human soul as principally beset with unmet needs. I don’t think this is an inevitable characterization. The language that Locke uses to characterize human desire is original. He refers to it as a condition of “uneasiness.” In Locke’s view, the human mind is always beset with various and sundry uneasinesses: in other words, each soul is freighted with a number of unmet desires. At any particular time, only one need can gain the priority, and determine us to behavior. I do think it should be pointed out here, that Locke’s philosophers do not fit into this moral portrait. It seems to me that Locke’s philosophers are able to rise above all uneasiness. This will be taken up below. The issue immediately before us concerns the nature of human character. Locke does have a theory. Locke has a theory of character that exceeds the mere pursuit of the pleasure of the moment, or the attempt to flee the onset of some sudden pain.

In Locke’s moral philosophy, the soul has the power to step back from the teeming desires and aversions that continually beset it. In fact, Locke argues, a human being’s very chances for happiness in life depend upon this aspect of her character. Those who do not develop this capacity to “suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires,” are fated to misery. Our interest therefore lies with those who develop the power to stand back from their desires and aversions, with some measure of detachment. For Plato and Aristotle, of course, the soul commands the passions: the good and the worthy do not consist in the choice of desires or aversions, for the Socratic Greeks. For Locke, however, the desires and aversions remain the central focus: the individual’s success in life is said to depend on which desires she pursues, and in which aversions she enacts.^[18]

Human beings have this power to resist the momentary importuning of pains and pleasures. The question before us is what Locke wishes to teach us in this context. In Locke’s view, one remains focused on the objects brought forth by pain and pleasure. The task is to decide which one of the pleasures to pursue, which one of the pains to avoid. “In this lies the liberty man has.” To employ this liberty incorrectly, is to spoil one’s life. The question still remains before us: based upon what logic shall the human being choose the right pleasures to pursue, the right pains to avoid?

Locke labors to get it across to us that there is a way to overcome the travail of uneasiness. When Locke looks at the pleasures that beckon human beings onward, and the pains that they would flee, Locke does not evaluate these two categories as equivalent. The category of desire is guilty, for Locke, of ruining human lives. Locke argues that the good that we do not at present possess, is not essential to our happiness, regardless of what it is. In truth, Locke argues, there is a boundless sea of desire, that would doom us to a career of misery if we were open to it. The proper way to dispose of one’s liberty, in Locke’s view, is to turn a harsh eye upon desire. Yet we must hasten to add, that Locke has forced us to cast all good things into the narrow category of “pleasure.” Locke has refused to allow us to distinguish, say, honor from gluttony; justice from dyspepsia. When Locke recognizes the category of desire as the guilty category, it is a stern rebuke to man’s hopes in the world, for a happy life. This is truly Epicureanism. For Epicurus, reducing pain, precisely is the definition of the good. For Locke, “all absent good does not at any time make a necessary part of our happiness, nor the absence of it make a part of our misery.”^[19]

We should get rid of the category of “uneasiness” altogether if we can, Locke argues. Yet this moral attitude is far more complex than it appears at first blush. Machiavelli’s entire moral philosophy, after all, begins with the dismissal of all of the range of good things that ordinary opinion pursues. Machiavelli dismisses these things, including justice, as a mere waste of time, as a bargaining for trouble; “for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.”^[20]

The reader needs to pause here. When Machiavelli advises his pupils to forsake the “high road,” so to speak, he is asking human beings to give up on what they most deeply wish for and cherish: love, honor, dignity. However, when Machiavelli asks us to turn away from these things—or when he asks a few to turn away from these things—he does not thereupon instruct these individuals to enjoy a modest life. He appeals to their resentment, which will be immense, if they follow his recommendations. Once they have surrendered all of the truly difficult aspirations of human life, what have they got to lose? They are now ripe to be coached by Machiavelli, in how to seize a state. From the vantage point of resentment, a tremendous well of power can be summoned. Machiavelli is seeking to teach his charges a mode of psychological advantage here: for he has disengaged from the pursuit of the truly worthwhile things. Thus he no longer has reason to tame his baser impulses either. He feels entitled to dominate. He has paid the ultimate price. This devastating moral attitude recurs in Hobbes, and I believe it is the secret to Locke’s definition of liberty as well.

When Locke argues that the mind must banish uneasiness from its purview, the question is what this finally consists in for his pupils. To cease to strive, for Locke, in a certain manner, is the absolute condition of our happiness: “the will can be at leisure for nothing else till every uneasiness be perfectly removed.”^[21] This must be kept before the mind along with certain other pieces of evidence. It would certainly be easier, if Locke allowed a full distinction between the good and the pleasant. He decides to conflate them. It would certainly make for a clearer argument, if Locke allowed that the ancients were right in advocating the pursuit of virtue, as opposed to indulging appetites. Locke refuses to dignify that opinion.

Gideon Yaffe is one of the scholars who believe that Locke wants us to raise ourselves up to a God-like self-restraint. In Yaffe’s view, Locke believes that the human being who obeys God’s natural law will reap a form of pleasure that is without defect. “Locke held that where the right action is that action which accords with natural law—the law given by God—God also makes it the case that the right action is that action which maximizes the pleasure and minimizes the pain of the agent undertaking it.” Yaffe refers to the object of Locke’s theory of liberty as that “elusive something”: “The elusive something, then, is a perfection in the causal determination of volition: an agent has it when her volitions are causally determined by (non-accidentally) correct judgments as to what is good, judgments the content of which depends on what is, in fact, good.”^[22]

Yet we have seen, that Locke elsewhere rebuffs our efforts to make a distinction between the pleasant and the good. What he has made a case for is getting rid of uneasiness, or anxiety. I think again that we must consider the larger context of Locke’s Essay and its politics. The non-philosophic public is never satisfied in its quest for justice, and Locke can easily be interpreted as seeking to muffle those noises with his new theory of the human mind and its supposed limitations. The non-philosophic public strives for goods. It is not satisfied with the amount of justice that the world has produced. Locke does not speak admiringly of political actors in the Essay. Locke has little patience for “wrangling.” Perhaps the new philosophic authority is going to redefine names like justice, and liberty, so that they don’t involve those hopes; so that when philosophic interpretation has had its say, things are just as they ought to be, forever and always. Whatever answer we finally settle on is going to have to account for Locke’s economic theory in the Second Treatise, especially that second state in the state of nature when the labor theory of property is superseded as money is introduced.

Locke has defined liberty, as we have noted above, as the alleviation of uneasiness. It is possible to drive it out of the mind, by making one’s current condition a sufficient parameter for one’s happiness. And yet, this is not quite Locke’s last word on the subject. For Locke does not want an indolent human race. Quite the contrary. Uneasiness, while it is man’s major torment in one context, is said to be his salvation in another. For who would labor at all if he did not suffer want? Who would procreate if he did not burn? God the wise creator therefore puts uneasiness into the human race, for Locke, “to move and determine the will, for the Preservation of themselves and the continuation of their species.”^[23]

How do we reconcile these competing arguments as regards the condition of uneasiness? In one breath Locke has argued that it is the absolute nemesis of the human race. On the other hand, Locke has argued that it is the salvation of the human race. It must be the case that there is a way to properly overcome uneasiness, and a way to improperly overcome uneasiness. Locke obviously, in his tome-like Essay, is no enemy of laboring. It seems clear that the people, in Locke’s view, need to be reconciled to uneasiness. Locke does not, in his economic writings, go out of his way to alleviate the condition of the poor, or the working majority. Perhaps the overcoming of uneasiness is something reserved for Locke’s philosophers?

Machiavelli was the first to set down the acquisitive gospel of hedonism in modern political philosophy.

Machiavelli does not lack for perspective on the futility of desires. Yet Machiavelli is all about practical achievements. Some say that he is all about the achievement of greatness even. That would be hard to do if one surrendered all of one’s hopes in life, as Locke suggests that the wise use of liberty recommends. Unless of course it is as we have speculated above: and it is only the perennial urge to better justice, to the right and good that Locke means for some to surrender. Machiavelli’s Discourses themselves are about a founding, and that founding is to take place in crisis. Machiavelli it was who authored that new moral destination for the generality of human beings: the continual struggle for survival that never ends. Locke’s state of nature also finally leads into crisis: it also leads into the conviction that most people are lawless hoodlums. Yet for Locke, the right to acquire as much property as one wants is held aloof from the authority of the founding, as we shall see. It is from a prior “consent” that men have allegedly obtained this right.

Hobbes gives to Machiavelli’s diction the appearance of a democratic twist. What is noteworthy about Hobbes, once again, is the extraordinary torque that he lends to human right. In Hobbes’s story of the human race, nature has betrayed man. She has left him defenseless, so that he is not at leisure to care about justice. He is forced, as it were, to use all the means at his disposal to look after his own interest. Hobbes’s ideal person does not become modest. He is unchained like Machiavelli’s new prince. He operates from a vantage point of maximum, even irredeemable resentment. No one can tell him differently, but he will obtain his way to the goods he seeks, so long as he has the power. “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man’s desire, is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire.”^[25]

Yaffe interprets Locke to indicate a sort of union with God, through the right exercise of liberty. “The full-fledged free agent has both freedom of action—she expresses herself in her conduct—and freedom of will—she transcends and escapes herself and thereby becomes like God.”^[26] Is it really like God to turn away from ultimate happiness? Or even from the more difficult, but clearly the more worthy, possible goods in human life? This is Locke’s prescription. It is hope that is the culprit. That version of the deity is even stranger than Epicurus’s.

Philosophic Liberty in Locke

The above discussion of the metaphysics of liberty in Locke does not even take into account Locke’s long discourse on moral names, or mixed modes. Locke actually must revive the atomist argument in order to make his case that moral names are even more arbitrary than any other attempt to designate natural kinds of objects. It seems a bit odd why Locke would even need to go to the trouble to make an argument for “mixed modes” as the special basis for moral language. Given the exhaustive investigation of the human inability, or alleged inability, to know substances, given Locke’s reduction of substances to bundles of qualities or simple ideas, that work would seem to be repetitive. Yet Locke undertakes it.

Whether we are talking about trees or murders, for Locke, there is no such thing as a natural kind. This needs to be pointed out before we take up the essence of moral names. It is not the case that they are especially complicated, in the Lockean scheme of things. For human beings, not nature, make kinds for Locke. This is true for Locke in general. This is to say that in Locke’s view, the kinds do not exist already made in nature. Human beings rather make them up, based on loose similarities between objects, for the sake of convenience. Philosophy alone is final arbiter of what any name signifies; but the philosophers too are makers of categories, not discoverers of them. “Tis men, who, taking occasion from the qualities they find united in them, and wherein, they observe several individuals to agree, range them into sorts, in order to their naming, for the convenience of comprehensive signs. . . . And in this, I think, consists the whole business of genus and species.”^[27]

One thinks of Locke’s discussion of uneasiness. How does Locke’s indictment of human perceptual faculties fit into the larger philosophical framework? It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to, to take issue with the general consent of the human race that there are indeed natural kinds. Locke is certainly not engaged in this laborious business in search of some distant pleasure: it must be that he is mobilizing himself against that aspect of public opinion which exposes all people to those demands for justice, for improvement. These would indeed disturb Locke’s serenity: he wants to block out these noises. As custodian of the language, in a radical way, he can undertake to shield himself from the uneasiness that the public discourse would otherwise lead unto.

Consider how complicated Locke makes it, to so much as enumerate what is a “lie.” Generally, in non-philosophical opinion, this is one of the first things that a child is taught. The child knows soon enough what a “lie” is. Advanced mathematics does not seem to be necessary to the lesson. Yet when Locke undertakes to perform a philosophical autopsy on the name, it is all incredibly intricate. “Having treated of simple modes in the foregoing chapters, . . . we are next in the place to consider those we call mixed modes, such are the complex ideas, we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, which consisting of several combinations of simple ideas of different kinds, I have called mixed modes, to distinguish them from the more simple modes, which consist only of simple ideas of the same kind.”^[28] “Every mixed mode consisting of many simple ideas, it seems reasonable to inquire, whence it has its unity . . . to which I answer it is plain, it has its unity from an act of the mind combining those several simple ideas together.”^[29]

The distinction between active and passive liberty that Locke introduced in the later editions of the Essay picks up the thread of distinction between the non-philosophic, who are dependent upon (passive) perception for their information, and the philosophic, who are not so dependent. An entirely new vista opens up to view when Locke begins to talk about the distinction between active and passive liberty. Locke does not spend much time on the distinction, but it recalls to mind our earlier discussion of uneasiness. We have noted above that Locke gives us more than one account of uneasiness. On the one hand, it must absolutely be removed by the person who correctly uses his liberty. This alone will make for a contented life. On the other hand, most people need uneasiness in order to have motivation to live at all. How to reconcile these competing arguments? The answer may reside in the distinction between active and passive liberty. Locke is not the first one in the Early Modern movement of philosophy to essay this distinction. Spinoza preceded him. For Spinoza, the entire category of the passive, which includes perception, is utterly worthless in moral terms. The active, on the other hand, is not dependent upon perception, upon what is, for its formulation of imperatives. When Locke unfolds his category of active liberty, he actually dismisses the “passive” exercise of liberty, as not even deserving of the name. It may now become possible to resolve the puzzle.

This distinction between active and passive experience is similar to the one that we find in Spinoza.^[30] “Our mind is in some instances active and in other instances passive,” Spinoza writes; “Insofar as it has adequate ideas, it is necessarily active; and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, it is necessarily passive.”^[31] It is truly Spinoza’s variation on Descartes’ philosophy, which is quite substantial, that has great impact on Locke. For Spinoza, who speaks much more boldly than Locke is willing to, the great dichotomy is between “active desire” (which Spinoza, but not Locke, calls “virtue”) and passive emotional experience which both Spinoza and Locke refer to as some form of bondage. Almost all of ordinary human experience, in the state of nature and in actual states of society, is passive experience, in the sense that Locke and Spinoza condemn and indict it.

The generality of the human race is bound by its perception to know objects, and indeed to form opinions about one’s place in society and the world. Locke’s entire atomist philosophy in the Essay is taken up with the indictment of the ordinary perceptions as pretentious, as presumptuous, as claiming to know much more than man is capable of actually knowing. This relationship between philosophy and ordinary opinion is to the detriment of the latter: that is, it complicates the life of the latter. Philosophy to some degree interferes with public discourse. This is certainly going to raise the general quotient of uneasiness in society. In this context, however, the people are objects of administration: they are passive. To this degree, to this degree that they are passive even by necessity, they cannot properly lay claim to the mantle of true liberty in Locke’s view.

The “active” mind, in Locke’s analysis, does not submit to the authority of ordinary perception. The active mind does not accept the authority of the ordinary use of names. The active mind asserts its liberty, by virtue of its capacity to indict those ordinary perceptions; and it makes that indictment based upon the corpuscularian hypothesis. “Passive” mind, for Locke, indicates those who believe that their actual perceptions give them direct and accurate information about the objects external to them. Passive minds are shaped by the emotions evoked by situations that are merely passively experienced.

What has become, the reader would like to know, of that modest condition of the mental estate, which the new critique of the capacities of the sensory faculties was intended to apply? What has happened to the image of the philosophic observer that Locke presented to us in earlier passages of the Essay, who carefully weighs and calculates each experiment, each simple idea? For now what appears to us, is the philosopher as the individual who is without opposition or hindrance, in his determination as to how to use names. This philosopher is free to bring into play “ideas out of sight,” or “at one’s own choice,” “as one thinks fit.” This alone for Locke deserves the name of liberty, which suggests agency. Those who are dependent upon their sensory faculties for perception, are to this degree by contrast passive: for they do not make up their own objects, but are given to taking the objects as perception has given them to us. The philosophic authority that has ordained itself to preside on all matters of truth, has fused its truth-seeking function, with a radical liberty to define the objects that it would talk about.^[33]

Locke’s philosophers can therefore overcome uneasiness with active liberty. In this most precise of definitions of liberty, Locke draws a very firm line in between the philosophers and the non-philosophers. Only the philosophers can experience this power, and one wonders how it squares with those beliefs scholars have as to Locke’s religious orientation. All of a sudden, the philosophers display a virtually super-human power, one that lifts them above the rest of the human race, and one which is furthermore based upon the philosophy of atomism rather than of the New Testament. Can we square Locke’s presentation of the theory of active liberty with the traditional conception of natural law that Rawls, for example, still finds in Locke?

Mixed Modes in the Second Treatise

In Locke’s state of nature situation, every person stands flattered. We have seen that according to Locke, there is no species, there is no moral name, which is not an artifice of individual human beings. The vast majority of people, pace Locke, have not the time to investigate the precise meaning of names, which even itself is still finally cast on the side of the ledger of human arbitrariness, when it comes to framing words. Locke makes some loose pronouncements upon the law of nature in the Second Treatise: are we supposed to believe that Locke, who has labored endlessly in the effort to pry loose human beings first from the evidence of their perception, and correlatively from their assignment of name to object, is assuming that we are all on the same page when it comes to the mixed mode of the “law of nature”?

In the Essays on the Law of Nature, Locke lashes out at the “general consent of men.” In the Essays on the Law of Nature Locke steers us to sense perception. Yet we have spent enough time investigating what sense perception indicates for Locke. “But since, as has been shown elsewhere, this light of nature is neither tradition nor some inward moral principle written in our minds by nature, there remains nothing by which it can be defined but reason and sense perception.”^[34]

This distinction between active and passive liberty would appear to be very important for understanding the Second Treatise. For one example, we could turn to the people’s characterization in Locke’s state of nature. Locke has certainly rolled out the red carpet. Everybody is “absolute lord” in the state of nature; possessed of an “empire” no less; “all being Kings as much as he.”^[35] Is Locke employing his active liberty in the formulation of these definitions? For they flatter, and disarm, and make all readers feel secure in the dignity and the respect which they are being accorded.

These “Kings,” as Locke defines them, have other characteristics which the reader might not be paying much attention to. Most of the “Kings,” Locke indicates, are swine. For most people are rather like how Machiavelli describes human beings, who make it self-destructive for a man to follow justice or virtue. In Locke’s view, so far as human beings are concerned, the greater part are “no strict observers of equity or justice.” Due to which defects, the Kings are all liable to be fearful of one another. “This makes him willing to quit this condition, which however free, is full of fears and continual dangers.” In other words, the “Kings” are driven by passive causes, out of the state of nature, and into the new social contract. Yet according to the distinction established by the Essay, those driven by passive liberty, cannot be confused with agents at all. In truth, they are not able to rely upon liberty for the purposes of consent; because liberty involves action, that is, being an agent. This must make us think long and hard about the nature of this consent that is obtained at the gateway to the social contract in Locke. For it is not even properly said to be constituted out of liberty.

What about those who design the social contract? What about the philosophers who create, out of their own imaginations, seizing upon “ideas out of sight,” embarked upon the expenditure of rare and unhindered true liberty for Locke, the state of nature itself. They cannot be said to be lacking in liberty. They cannot be said to be passive. They are unlike the others, therefore, who would be passive, as a mule rather than a king might be, led by the halter through the archway of the new social order.

Locke on Property

The doctrine of active versus passive liberty that we have examined above can be traced in the Second Treatise and its discussion of economic liberty. It has been noted that “property” is a general idea in Locke’s lexicon: that it serves as an umbrella term that contains one’s right to life and liberties. There is a teaching in the Second Treatise on property as a limited economic good that is of particular interest.

There are two stages of doctrine in Locke’s theory of property in the Second Treatise. It is the first stage that attracts our special attention. For in the original laws of property, we are in the state of nature. This is the state wherein Locke has undertaken to flatter the generality of human beings. This has been discussed above. In that original state of equality, Locke argues, human beings have a right to take such property from the common stock as may serve to enable them to preserve their lives. We should suppose, Locke argues, that God bestowed the world upon human beings in common.

According to Locke, God gave the world to human beings in common. One would presume that this would be due to their common need to appropriate from nature. Yet even here in the beginning, Locke is making distinctions between human beings in the state of nature. Exactly who are the “quarrelsome and contentious” in the early state of nature, when nobody presumably possesses anything but a sprout and a stream to drink out of? How are they different from the “industrious and rational”? Locke suggests that at the very beginning, there are those who seek to work, and those who seek to prey upon the labor of others. This is somewhat at loggerheads with the general mood of the labor theory of value; for it is generally considered to be a valid principle, and if this is so, the general opinion would be harshly disposed towards any truly free riders.^[36]

This discussion by Locke is so fair minded, that there really could be very few who would dispute it. It is indeed the belief of the vast majority of people that each human being should earn his own bread by the price of his own labor. In the portrait that Locke provides to us, there is a bountiful world, and a limited number of people. This discussion suggests that Locke is talking squarely about the “law of nature” which he has pointed out, though leaving it vague in other particulars. The reader will feel the sentiment that each man will be able to retain his independence; and that is the signal commendation of Locke’s advertisements in the Second Treatise for his social compact and the consent to follow. The reader will feel that Locke intends for the human being to take only so much as he has personal need for. By this the reader will construe Locke to mean that the law of nature will not allow gross disparities in economic power.

Locke makes it sound for all the world as if the labor theory of property will prevent injustices among human beings; that since nobody can possibly accumulate more than a very little bit of property through their labor, that their accumulations could never possibly disturb the independence of people, which Locke has made the hallmark of the original state of nature and its many kings.^[37]

Locke now proceeds to tell us, that at a later date in the state of nature, that is, before a civil government has been established, human beings agree to waive these labor and need-based restrictions. In my view, confusion arises between the labor aspect and the need aspect. Locke has sounded both trumpets. There is the appeal to justice in the sense of one having a right to that which he has labored upon; and there is the appeal to justice in the sense of limiting each human being’s right to amass more than a small measure of property, in accordance with one’s needs. Locke had first made it appear that labor defined this scope of need: a man cannot claim to have a need for more than his labor can actually provide. This is the suggestion in the passages quoted above.

When Locke turns to this second stage in the state of nature, he is only focused upon one aspect of the justice provisions of the law of nature. With the introduction of money, man can now conceivably amass more property than he could use. Locke is being subtle here, so we must examine the argument carefully. During the first stage of the state of nature, man’s right to enclose some portion of land from the common, is based upon his need to do so. This need is regulated by his ability to consume what he produces. It is only as an auxiliary condition that Locke advises the reader that a man is not at liberty to allow any property to go to waste.

The prohibition on spoiling property, really does constitute a significant alteration in Locke’s argument. It goes to economic motive. The emphasis on labor and need suggests natural limits to property accumulation: what a man has actual need to consume, he may procure. The argument for the possession of property based on one’s ability to profitably employ it summons forth an entirely different theory of motivation. Locke ascribes both of them to the law of nature, but he makes the labor theory of property subordinate to the profitable use theory of property.^[38]

There is a great difference between this “use” provision, and the earlier discussion of need. It may seem that the two are linked: that “use” is bound by one’s need. This is the way that Locke has made it appear to the reader. When Locke now introduces the caveat, that a man can lay claim to as much property as he can hold without wasting it, this is a very different position. There is a miniature revolution being wrought here in Locke’s discussion of property. For human beings to take from nature only so much as they have need for, sets a limit on their property, which is not liable to change much. This in turn safeguards the independence of the others, allowing to each sufficient common land and resources to make his own claim. However, to interpret this “need” through the lens of “take as much as you want so long as you don’t let it go to waste,” is very different. For this can accommodate the individual who seeks to go far beyond his needs, and to obtain boundless amounts of property, so long as he can make use of it in a way that does not condemn it to spoilage. In this second scenario, the common is going to be quickly used up; and with it, the independence of men will quickly vanish. For once there is no longer any common to take from, the individual must seek to obtain his needs through making contracts with those who possess land and seek to make advantage from it. Thereby one is conveyed into a dependence upon other men, all in the state of nature.

The thing to be taken notice of is the way Locke has disguised his economic doctrine. For he has attempted to make the individual feel secure in the fairness of the property allotments. When an individual is limited in the property he can acquire, in accordance with what he may personally use (and that of his family is certainly included), this forsakes the motivation of dominion over others. Yet when Locke conveys this right to property into whatever a man can profitably make use of, he opens the door to the impulse to obtain dominion over others. Locke ascribes this too to “consent.” As soon as human beings have recognized that money shall serve as a means of trade and economic contract, Locke argues, men have certified that it is legitimate for any human being to seek to accumulate as much property as he can possibly profitably discharge. This is so far from the original portrait that Locke sketched, as to be its opposite. Locke makes it appear that there is continuity between the two stages in the state of nature, when there is a qualitative rupture with the original condition. This is hardly something that individuals would consent to. It should be noticed that Locke does not ask us to consent to this interpretation of the employment of money: he simply enacts it.

Why should the introduction of money open the floodgates to the right of men to make as large an economic accumulation of property and land as they can? Surely, this is not the reason why money is introduced. Money is introduced because people cannot always exchange goods and services in the barter mode. An individual may possess ten shirts that he has woven, and need a pair of shoes. But the shoemaker already has shirts. He does not need them. What then shall the shirt maker do? For he cannot effect a trade with the shoemaker. Money solves the problem. The shirt maker can purchase the shoes with money. Money represents units of value which are equivalent. This is not the time to go into a detailed examination of the original principles of political economy; but sure it is that money was originally introduced in order to facilitate exchange, rather than to make it possible for some to lay claim to as much property as they can profitably discharge. The civility of Locke’s state of nature goes out the window even before the civil society is framed; and Locke ascribes this arrangement, the new moral arrangement, to the generality of human beings. The generality of human beings do not think that it is a justified economic motive to try to enrich oneself to the best of one’s ability. People regard this as greed, but also as anti-social, in that it seeks to obtain power over others.

It is the morality of property acquisition that has undergone a radical change between the two stories. One can observe that the distinction between passive liberty and active liberty can be traced out in these two accounts of property. For human need is passive. Every man has the need to feed and clothe himself, to provide himself and his with shelter and the other necessities of life. Like perception itself, the individual is not truly an agent here, in Locke’s terms. For in Locke’s terms, active liberty is reserved for those who are not beholden to any external conditions, including one’s need for survival. Active liberty is reserved to those who “bring into view ideas out of sight, at one’s choice. And to compare which of them one thinks fit.” Those dependent on the needs of their bodies to drive their labor, such as characterizes the first account of economic property in Locke’s Second Treatise, are passive in the terms of Locke’s Essay. Yet the entrepreneur is active, possesses the potential of this active liberty. For he can suspend his present enjoyment, in order to amass greater amounts of property.

John Rawls reads Locke differently. In Rawls’s view, there is no moral transformation in between the two accounts of property. Rawls believes that the original account of economic property in Locke, that is, that one should not take more than one needs, is sustained to control the economic situation when money is introduced. In other words, Rawls believes that property becomes “conventional” or subject to social regulation when money is introduced; so that individuals may not accumulate money and property in such a way as to become a threat to their peers politically. Rawls suggests, therefore, that in Locke’s view, government will have the moral right to reassign property, so that the accumulation made possible by money does not subvert the goal of equality politically. “A crucial point here is that the introduction of money in effect suspends the spoilage proviso, which says that we can take no more from the bounty of nature than we can use before it spoils.” “In the second stage, it is the age of government by social compact that Locke is mainly concerned with. In this stage property is conventional: that is, it is specified and regulated by the positive laws of society. I assume these laws respect all the constraints on the fundamental laws of nature we have discussed.”^[40]

The very reason why Locke introduces the new morality of property acquisition in the state of nature, as if it were a concomitant of the introduction of money inescapably, is precisely to deny to the social compact government the authority to interfere with the individual liberty to property established in the acquisitive ethos. Government in Locke is sworn to uphold the property provisos from the state of nature, with the sole exception concerning the “defects” of the state of nature. The major defect of the state of nature is that most men are no “strict observers of equity and justice.” Thus the individuals surrender their “executive authority” to punish transgressors. Government absorbs these powers. Yet government does not obtain the authority, as Rawls indicates, to remove one iota of property from any individual who has accumulated in accordance with the no-spoilage provision. In fact, this robust economics of acquisition will go on after the social compact, just as it had been left to occur before the formal founding.^[41]

The Shaping of Young Souls

Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education (STCE) in 1693, a mere five years after the publication of the Second Treatise and the Essay. Locke’s Thoughts on Education prefigure the later work of Rousseau in his Emile. In both cases, what is being illustrated is the relationship between a philosophical instructor and a young pupil. The tutor to which Locke commends his Thoughts Concerning Education need not himself be a philosopher; but the Thoughts themselves are steeped in philosophy; and the tutor who obeys them, will to this degree be enacting Locke’s philosophical strictures. Some of the observations that Locke makes in his Thoughts are quite revealing about his theories of human nature, but also about his theory as to how best to govern human beings. This discussion is included to help us get a better grasp on Locke’s education for liberty as it is to be practiced in the model of government loosely sketched out in the Second Treatise.

STCE was written for a friend of Locke, toward the education of that man’s son.^[42] This work does not contain deep philosophical meditations like the ECHU does. It contains instructions for an educator who need not himself possess any serious philosophical education. Yet the instructions themselves are philosophical. This is to say that the instructions convey a philosophical relationship between educator and pupil. Nor is this work prepared for just any sort of educator. It is prepared for a tutor, such as a family of means could afford to employ in-house for the education of their child.

Readers of the Essay, the Second Treatise, or the Essays on the Law of Nature are used to a Locke who is rather distant and remote emotionally. Yet in STCE, we are introduced to a very different Locke. For in STCE, Locke insists that the educator possess a remarkably intense and emotional relationship with the student. For the part of the student’s mind that Locke is most determined to operate upon is not abstract thought, or even logic. What Locke intends to focus upon, in his STCE, is the student’s most vulnerable psychological territory: the need for love, and the dread of disgrace. Locke’s educator at last is guided to make these most delicate and ultimate of psychological coordinates, rather than intellect, the very object of the educational endeavor. One could almost observe that for Locke’s educator, psychology is all.

The discussion of “simple ideas” and the distant nature of substances, or their illusory character, is nowhere to be found in the Thoughts. The educator, for certain, has no doubts as to the existence of his pupils, or the constitution of their souls. When he talks about the human need for approval, and the human dread of disgrace or ostracism, even in the Essay, Locke seems to be speaking to us ex parte: for Locke addresses these serious and almost omnipotent emotions as quite real, as not being implicated in any inventions of the philosopher, nor as any part of “mixed modes.”

Coercion is painful for human beings, and Locke’s is a coercive educational model. It must be sold to individuals therefore in a more attractive packaging. It must be introduced to individuals, not as coercion, but in the guise of something that they freely choose.^[43] In STCE, Locke instructs the educator in how to do precisely this: to confer a voluntary appearance on habits and actions that the educator is determined to instill, and which in actuality run quite counter to the free rational choice of the individual.

Locke has a keen understanding of certain aspects of human nature. Locke understands very well that human beings do not like to be coerced; that they do not like to be rebuked, and that people do not like to be bossed around. A major part of the tutor’s project, then, will involve arranging the educational process, so that the goals that the tutor wants the pupil to pursue will appear to the pupil as her own free choices, even though they are not so.^[45]

Plato, in his Republic, spends a considerable amount of time talking about the different kinds of souls that people have, which is evident from a very young age. Plato recommends looking for evidence of these distinct natures through the administration of games. It is admitted that in these games, Plato is demonstrating his own manipulation of the children. The children think that they are playing games, but what they are doing in actuality is revealing themselves and their natures.^[46] Unlike Locke, Plato does not believe in overpowering the nature of a child. Locke’s educational regimen is nothing like Plato’s. Yet both works are interested, more loosely in Locke’s case, in appraising potential governors. The difference between the convictions of these educators is mighty instruction as to the reason why Early Modernity turned so harshly upon the Socratic Greeks.

For Plato, there are different kinds of souls by nature. It is not within human power to create these natures. Plato is interested in one nature in particular. This nature is as likely to occur in a female as in a male, Plato argues, and this is the reason why his Guardian class recognizes no barriers of gender. There is a kind of soul, Plato argues, which will cleave to truth at any cost.^[47] The games that Plato designs are intended to coax out this nature and to reveal it. Some of the games offer seductions and rewards to tease out the submissive and those whose souls are easily bought. Still other of the games employ intimidation, or the threat of pain, or even disgrace, to reveal the individual who refuses to cheat under any circumstances. That there is such a type of soul is Plato’s understanding, and readers will need to consult their own experience in order to judge it. Yet the point is that this is the sort of soul that Plato seeks for his governing class. That class must finally be persuaded to govern based on the knowledge that government is a kind of service to others, first of all; and that it is a painful service, filled with many unpleasantries, and not that many delights.

Locke’s educational model could not be more different. Locke’s educational model is predicated upon the solicitation of the pupil’s complicity in dissembling. Locke instructs the tutor to make the child feel as if everything he does is under his own control and voluntary auspices. It is the pupil who successfully navigates this program who is Locke’s ideal student.^[48] To Plato, this sort of soul is slavish. Truth is the last thing that this sort of soul is interested in knowing. To search for truth, one cannot be subject to the rewards and punishments of other men and the controls that they seek to instill. Locke, and we can certainly say that this is within the province of his active liberty—this construction of an educational model for human beings—has absolutely no use for the truth seeker. In fact, Locke is resolved not to tolerate this sort of soul at all. This soul Locke marks for breaking.

Locke has the tutor approach the pupil in the following ways. Flattery comes first. The tutor undertakes to make all of the pupil’s activities and decisions seem free and voluntary, when in truth almost none of them are.^[49] Locke, that is, appeals to human vanity in order to educate. Yet the tutor also undertakes to create an appearance for his pupil. The pupil is drilled into displaying certain habits and attitudes of generosity and open-handedness with his friends.^[50] Yet he is drilled in these demonstrations in order to obtain a good reputation with his peers. He is not praised for actually harboring these wishes. He is rewarded for pleasing his tutor. “Virtue” for Locke is part of the pursuit of individual advantage.

Locke’s educational anthropology is penetrating. We must include a discussion of the experience of fear. Fear, it is true, has its use. It instructs us as to dangers. The child is warned not to touch the hot stove. The child is warned not to go outside without a coat. These are some of the dangers that rate significance for a child. Yet obviously adult life has its dangers as well. Human beings fear things such as disgrace, impoverishment, disease, failure. These things are very painful for a human being to bear, and therefore they ought to be feared. For the human being, insofar as it is within his control to avert such dangers, it is obligatory to do so.

Here we tread a very fine line however, especially when we are talking about the educational process. Fear is easily a crippling thing. Ignorance is something that human beings are not sufficiently afraid of, because it takes some serious learning to acquire this awareness. Intellect, mind, by nature seeks the truth, in order that it may replace fearful ignorance with knowledge. To employ fear as an instrument in the educational setting, is a dubious proposition. Fear is not itself a good thing. Fear is the antithesis of free rational choosing, which should be the model of character education. Locke, however, views fear as an elementary part of the educational process.

What is needful for the educator to remember is that fear is quite easily the instrument of tyranny. Fear can be such a poison to souls, as to destroy character, especially in its early development. Submission is not desirable for its own sake. I realize that this is easy to say to a teacher in a sixth grade classroom, and harder to accomplish. I do not mean to suggest that a teacher ought to surrender the class in hostage to students who would disable the educational environment with their insolence. Yet, discipline of insolence is not likely to give rise to irrational fears on behalf of the other students.

The educator must not view fear as an important ally. When Locke talks about the employment of fear in the educational setting, he is talking about the relationship between a tutor and an isolated child. The flattery of the child is in and of itself an aggressive maneuver; for the child will certainly know that he is being manipulated, or being praised in a way that has yet to be earned. This flattery itself can beget fear. What Locke’s educational model seeks to do is transform the occasion of disagreement between a student and a teacher into a psychologically earth-shaking event: the student is to learn that this state of affairs bodes utter peril, and the silent message is submission.^[51]

The child must be approached in such a way that his chores seem to him voluntary. The coercion must be artfully concealed. Authority must deceive him therefore, at the start. But if there are any natures, any wills that express defiance, here Locke throws down the gauntlet. Physical beatings must break the child’s will, envenomed by shame.

I don’t see how we can approach this text in radical isolation from the model of political education that is set forth in the Second Treatise. Courage is not going to be of much use in that model. Locke is banking upon fear as the essential tutor, the one that human beings are meant to commit themselves to for a lifetime. Stubbornness is not insanity. Disobedience in a child, as noted, may careen toward insolence. Disapproval will seem harsh enough to the child in response to this sort of behavior. Locke’s educator is here revealing something more about himself than about the soul of a pupil. The child cannot yet be instructed about some distant court of science, which is the sole tribunal of truths. The child will indeed believe that which Hobbes would blame him for most ferociously: that he knows what the true facts of a situation are, and that he can calibrate his own actions accordingly.

When one takes into account Locke’s strategy to leave unreflective public opinion at the mercy of a science which converts the most easily discovered facts into mental adventures of futile destination; one must evaluate Locke’s diagnosis of fear, and his disdain for courage, as aspects of his larger political philosophy. The truth of the matter is that the people reared in the psychological coordinates of Lockean civil society, will find it very hard to come by trustworthy authorities, since the new philosophy criticizes all of them. The flattery with which Locke begins the educational enterprise is evidence of the low profile that Locke prefers for his source of authority in society; yet the threat of violence is the naked truth behind the flattery.

Locke does indeed link will to motive. Thus, Locke’s tedious denial in the ECHU that it is inappropriate to speak of the will as “free” or unfree, is disingenuous. The pupil who refuses to abide by the levers of esteem and disgrace as administered by the tutor is revealed to be following his own will: that is, he is not willing to submit. Behind the administered levers of esteem and disgrace is the Lockean educator. Submission to this administrator is the archway of Locke’s educational model. It does not matter what the cause of the resistance from the student might be about, in Locke’s view. The individual’s will must be crushed. Now it becomes possible to understand the difficulty Locke has in simply explaining the signification of “free will” in the ECHU. Deliberation is severed from will in Locke’s model. The individual’s capacity to think for himself is in the very category of deliberation, which seems simply to fade out of Locke’s presentation. He who would consult truth rather than pleasure and pain for a master, is doomed in Locke’s educational environment.

We have not even begun to talk about the cynicism that will be the fate of the most well-educated in Locke’s model. Respect for truth is the last thing that has been impressed upon them. Their experience will have taught them that all of the language of virtue is but a pose, a prize to be won through behavior that is frankly less than admirable. The most successful students, the students who receive the highest regard, will not be those with the greatest respect for truth; but rather those with the most contempt for it.

Notes

Essay Concerning Human Understanding III.ii.8, 408.

First Treatise of Government 1.141. In Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

First Treatise of Government 2.142.

“Locke: His Doctrine of Natural Law.” Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 108.

Ibid., 120.

Ibid., 115.

“Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” Visions of Politics, volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 58.

“Interpretation, Rationality and Truth” In Regarding Method, 45.

“Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative,” 167. In the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Edited by John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

10.

“Locke: His Account of a Legitimate Regime,” 122. In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

11.

Nichomachean Ethics 1110a8.

12.

Second Treatise IX.123, 350. In The Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

13.

I have written on Epicurus and his doctrines in Machiavelli and Epicureanism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014, chapters 2–3.

14.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xx.2, 229.

15.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xx.4, 230.

16.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xi.55, 269.

17.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xx.5, 230.

18.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.47, 263.

19.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.47, 260.

20.

Prince XV. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

21.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.46, 263.

22.

Liberty Worth the Name. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, 33, 38.

23.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxi.34, 252.

24.

Discourses On Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, II 1.

25.

Leviathan. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chapter 11, article 1, 65–66.

26.

Liberty Worth the Name. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 74.

27.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding III.iv.36, 462.

28.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxii.1, 288.

29.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxii.1, 288.

30.

In Machiavelli, the political philosopher who rises up against the authority of the political world, its institutions, its moral beliefs and customs, himself constitutes a new artificial form. The customary society against which the new prince exerts himself is viewed as mere “matter.” For Machiavelli, virtu consists in the exertion of great will: to become the creator of political community, on terms obliged to the power of the individual philosopher. This is the distinction of “active” and “passive” that is at the heart of Spinoza’s Ethics. This is the essence of the political science outlined in the Prince, just as it is the essence of the founder of republics in the Discourses on Livy.

31.

Ethics III, proposition 1. Spinoza acknowledges but three “primary emotions”: “pleasure, pain and desire” (Proposition 11, scholium). Pain and pleasure are both passive to Spinoza. “Desire” for Spinoza indicates much the same thing that philosophically precise senses of “liberty” mean for Locke. “Pleasure and pain and consequently the emotions that are compounded of these or derived from them are passive emotions” (III, proposition 11, sch). “All the activities which follow from our emotions that are related to the mind insofar as it exercises an understanding I refer to as strength of the mind (fortitudo), which I subdivide into courage (animositas) and nobility (generositas). By courage I understand desire whereby every individual endeavors to preserve his own being according to the dictates of reason alone.” Ethics III proposition 59 scholium. From Spinoza: The Complete Works. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Edited by Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002. The references should be read as follows: Ethics III Proposition 1, indicates book III, proposition 1. The distinction between the active and the passive hinges, in Spinoza as in Locke, on the issue of perception. Active thinking is not bound by perception; passive thinking is. All of what is ordinarily thought of as liberty belongs in the passive category, by these lights; and in these thinkers, the passive is untrue, and useless.

32.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxi.72.

33.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxii.3.

34.

Essay IV. Essays on the Law of Nature. Edited by W. von Leyden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 47.

35.

Second Treatise IX.123, 350.

36.

Second Treatise 34.291.

37.

Second Treatise 36.292.

38.

Second Treatise 37,294–95.

39.

Second Treatise 47–48.300–301.

40.

“Locke: Property and the Class State.” In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 149. The italics are Rawls's.

41.

Second Treatise 138.360–361.

42.

Edward Clarke of Chipley.

43.

Nathan Tarcov has an interesting take on Locke’s STCE. It is the purpose of STCE, Tarcov argues, to manage two natural dispositions in man: a will to be free or at liberty, and a will to dominate. According to Tarcov, Locke seeks to undermine the will to dominate, and to grant freedom as a sweetener to this enterprise. Tarcov’s theory of liberty indeed seems worthy: to be free without dominating others. “What makes it necessary or politic to grant liberty is the human desire for liberty. That desire seems to have the same basis in pride as the dangerous desire for mastery, yet it can be safely and separately satisfied or accommodated. Perhaps it is even because this desire is accommodated that the other can be subjugated” (114). Locke’s Education for Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984. This is a very important discussion that Tarcov has raised, the struggle between impulses for liberty and impulses for domination. How does this relate to the relationship between the non-philosophers and the philosophers in Locke’s philosophy; or to the distinction Locke makes between active liberty and passive liberty, with the latter turning out not to be liberty at all? We need to recall the twin positions on the principle of uneasiness: how Locke believes that the generality of the human race are blessed to have this characteristic, while there is another sector of society, those able to practice “true” liberty, who can totally overcome this uneasiness. If we turn to the economic discussion, it is hard to agree with Tarcov that the impulse for domination is the one subdued by Locke. Those who would argue for justice seem more like the “quarrelsome and contentious” whom Locke has chastised even in the early state of nature; whereas the “industrious and rational” are property maximizers. One cannot say that the liberty of the philosophers, who are put in charge of determining the precise signification of names, is equivalent to the passive position that the majority are thrust into, those who must rely upon their perceptual faculties, and to that extent be ineligible for any inquiries into truth. It seems to be the case in Locke that true liberty, active liberty, is rather conducive to domination. Just like the teacher conquers the pupil, through flattery and threats, the people is managed.

44.

Ibid., paragraph 73, 134.

Ibid.

Republic 413.

Ibid.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education, paragraph 115, 174.

49.

Ibid., paragraph 83, 144.