Posted on 05/10/2003 10:58:47 AM PDT by traditionalist
From the January 2001 issue of Chronicles:
John Locke has been interpreted in various ways that appeal to conservatives—e.g., as a Christian, albeit a materialist and anti-Trinitarian, or as a qualified defender of private property—but there is a general drift to his thought that should offend traditionalists. His view of human beings as thinking matter without the capacity for innate ideas, his unmistakable faith in sexual egalitarianism, and his constructivist theory of civil society are all fundamentally anti-conservative. The point is not whether any of these positions is theoretically defensible but whether conservatives (or historically minded classical liberals) should want to identify themselves as Lockeans. The clear answer is no.
It is simply untrue that those loyal to the foundations of the American polity must be devotees of Locke. While some passages in the Declaration of Independence were adapted from Locke’s Second Treatise, George Carey, Forrest McDonald, and M.E. Bradford have all made two self-evident points: Most of the Declaration consists of a bill of grievances that came out of English parliamentary tradition but not necessarily Locke’s writings; and the founding political document of the American nation was the Constitution, not the Declaration. In any case, as shown exhaustively by McDonald, the Framers, in constructing the federal union, drew on such a multitude of ancient and modern authors that it would be difficult to award Locke pride of place among their sources.
One of the sources for the Constitution was Scottish philosopher David Hume, to whose achievements Donald Livingston has devoted two erudite books. According to Livingston, Hume’s conception of the social good as grounded in custom and tradition was partly a reaction to the fiction of Locke’s social contract. In the “Original Contract” and other essays, Hume expressed astonishment that a serious thinker could believe that individuals left a “state of nature” and entered civil society by way of a contract. Hume wondered how one could build a political theory on a situation that neither he nor his acquaintances had ever encountered. He was also amused by the notion of “natural right,” a concept of entitlement that was supposed to be natural and inborn but which most of the human race knew nothing of. If natural right should seem axiomatic, Hume asked, why did individuals throughout the world live “in subordination to each other” without a sense of being deprived of rights? Hume was not defending oppression but insisting that subjects of a limited monarchy should note their historical blessings and advantageous customs instead of inventing bogus rights and chimerical states of nature.
But Lockean contractualism has graver flaws than its bizarre anthropology. It is not coincidental that socialist John Rawls and mainstream welfare statists find it appealing. Although Locke treats property as a natural right that civil society might be required to defend, his defense of property per se was rather qualified. As the closing sections of the Second Treatise and the scholarship of Richard Ashcraft indicate, Locke was an embattled advocate of “the People” when it set out to overthrow tyranny and establish popular government. A tension, in fact, exists between Locke’s rights to life, liberty, and property and the majoritarian democracy that he evokes in his political pamphlets. As Ashcraft suggests, this tension can be resolved as easily in the direction of democratic collectivism, based on presumed individual consent, as it can by affirming the inviolability of property.
In the world of possessive individualism conceived by this late 17th-century Whig pamphleteer, the state comes into existence to ensure the individual’s right to material gratification. If the people see fit, the Lockean regime can achieve its purpose as plausibly by redistributing earnings and handing out entitlements as it can by protecting entrepreneurial profit. It can also enforce claims beyond the ones Locke fancied, if the majority comes to consider such claims as natural rights. Why limit rights to the short list Locke drew up when he was trying to dislodge the Stuart monarchs? It makes good Lockean sense to have the modern state guarantee claims that are more relevant today: e.g., a right to self-esteem or protection against insensitive white males, who don’t seem to mind being jerked around by the thought police. There is no Lockean requirement that rulers uphold natural rights in the form in which they existed before the rise of civil society. “Rights” mean what the majority takes to be a tolerable understanding of them on the part of those who rule. On this point, the late Willmoore Kendall, on the populist right, and John Rawls and Richard Ashcraft, on the socialist left, have interpreted Locke quite accurately.
Locke’s contributions to political theory can still be read with profit, particularly his strictures on the limits of political covenants. His critical observations concerning Robert Filmer’s defense of divine-right monarchy in the First Treatise on Civil Government make a brilliant polemic, even if Locke often misrepresents his opponent. But Locke’s contractualism is a slippery slope which leads to the political culture that dominates us; the connections between the two are too obvious to be missed. On balance, I agree with the thoughtful counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, who both admired and feared Locke’s imaginative energies: “Le dÈbut du discernement c’est le mÈfi de Jean Locke.”
Paul Gottfried is a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and the author, most recently, of After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton).
This statement isn't factually correct. Locke was such an ardent supporter of private property that he said that if a man steals your coat you have the right to kill him.
I would some what disagree with this statement
The Declaration is the premise that the Constitution flows from
I would some what disagree with the above statement
The Declaration is the premise that the Constitution flows from
That is precisely right. The compact concept is the basis of Government, not the basis of the rights that Government is supposed to secure.
The fact that the founding fathers accepted Locke's view that Government is a social compact, does not mean that they endorsed everything he wrote, or even considered much of what he wrote as relevant. The basic concept, not the author or his treatment of related topics, is the point. The concept in our Declaration of Independence has nothing to do with hero worship, or endorsement of any social view not discussed.
For the full text of what the Declaration actually says, see Declaration Of Independence.
William Flax
I was a little surprised to see that Adams favorably referenced him. Adams was was a cool head and after the war of independence even had some monarchist leanings, but I suppose earlier in his career he may have had some radical tendencies, of which he thankfully disposed before becoming president.
It seems rather unfair to reject Locke based on a position he did not hold. It also seems rather bizarre to accuse him of being a proto-marxist and to reject him on that account, as Voegelin did in post #20.
If the complaint is that Locke was not a conservative, in the traditionalist sense of the word, then fine. He would likely have agreed with you, as would most of the founding fathers. He was a classic liberal, perhaps he was "Mr." Classic Liberal himself, as were a preponderance of the founders who read him and based their revolution on him.
My impression has been that the average American "conservative" is in fact a liberal in the classic sense. The adherence to the concept of individual liberty, limited government, the crucial importance of private property as a guarantor of personal liberty, these are liberal concepts in the classic sense.
Of course, none of this is "either-or", there seems to me to be a huge overlap, most of the conservatives of renown that we care about here were whigs, and most whigs were also traditionalists to some degree.
What I am trying to gather in following this thread is simply the following. It is clear that Gottfried doesn't like Locke. Its clear that Voegelin doesn't either calling him "...one of the most repugnant, dirty, morally corrupt appearances in the history of humanity... " seems rather excessive to me, but clearly there is something here that I am missing.
If the men who wrote the founding documents were Lockeans, as is more or less established in post #16, if the central thrust of Locke's non-philosophy is limited government, "life, individual liberty, and private property", then where is our disagreement? It seems insufficient to simply call him "not a conservative", which is a given, or "repugnant". At least for my purposes here, what does he say that is wrong?
I get the impression that his attackers are trying to eliminate his influence from the discussion by means of an ad hominem attack, without yet revealing what their own case is.
I realize I may be a bit out of my league here, but I invite comment. And looking at the links in post #16, I clearly have some reading to do.
With that, the question arises, essentially for the whole Age of Reason, whether a ratio that, unlike the classical and Christian, does not derive its authority from its share in divine being is still in any sense a ratio? For Locke, it is clear on the strength of your excellent study that it is no longer that. In the concrete realization he must drop the swindle of ratio, and in the last instance refer to desire.
I'm not well-read enough in Locke to know if this is true, but I've long suspected that Locke's theories of consent are easily interpreted in such a manner that consent becomes a matter of will alone rather than a matter of reason. Thus we have legal positivism on an individual scale, a politics where "will makes right." And from there it's a short step to Humean emotivism.
Is it accurate to say that the Right is prior to the Good for Locke? It seems to me that the liberty of his state of nature is indifferent to any vision of the good life.
Maybe one steeped in classical or medieval or possibly German philosophy approaches Locke as a shocking new departure. For those in the Anglo-American empirical or positivist or analytical traditions, he's a distant ancestor, old fashioned but not frightening. And over the past few decades the traditions have grown closer together, as Anglo-American social views have found acceptance in Europe (and to some degree vice versa as well).
Voegelin has a point in finding the Lockean revolution ugly and godless. But on the whole the consequences of Continental theorists have probably been worse. Locke may represent not so much a political philosophy as the Anglo-American resistance to theory or totalizing philosophies. Or perhaps that resistance has saved us from the true consequences of his philosophy.
Perhaps having a frontier meant that secular revolutionary ideas didn't have the consequences they did in crowded Europe (though some blame Locke for the sufferings of indigenous peoples -- I suspect some of his ideas on property ownership more an effect than a cause of the settlement of new lands). Or perhaps the apparent Christian husk of Locke's thought was taken for the kernel itself by his contemporaries and decendants and seen as something essential rather than superficial or superfluous.
But if conservatives are to reject Locke as a radical, it's hard to see how they can hold tightly onto Hume as Gottfried and Livingston do. Arguably Hume shook the foundations of Western thought more than Locke could ever dream of doing.
Still, it is good to know that Voegelin was so uninhibited in expression. It's hard to know what Strauss thought. He clearly disliked Locke very much, but the other ambiguities in his thinking make him hard to figure out, so some of his followers (the "West Coast" Straussians) apparently accept and celebrate Locke.
Here are two articles for anyone interested: Was Leo Strauss Wrong about John Locke? and Locke's Doctrine of Human Action.
Thanks for the letter, Corney...it's amazing the stuff you dig up.
The John Locke as John Lennon analogy again comes to mind. A bit too much credit, even if for a very highly influential figure. Each John seems to have taken in various streams of creative "opera" and dished it out from an advantageous platform.
I tend to favor Paul McCartney -- and Algernon Sidney from the perspective, admitedly, of my very limited education.
Barry Shain's recent book has also criticized the assumption that Locke was behind the revolution.
My guess is that there are three things that make American conservatives cling to Locke.
First, the feeling that making religion paramount will smother individual liberty. That perception may be wrong, but once you get down to the difficult question of which religions is to be adopted and how much toleration or deference there will be for dissenters, it's easy to understand how the assumption arose.
Second, the desire to keep the unruly, populist, individualist strain of American politics to prevent our becoming more docile and timid, like Canadians or Scandinavians. Something in the American character resonates to Locke and generates resistance to political power. Take Locke away and we might be a very different people, with less backbone, less character, and less ability to resist tyranny or conformity.
Third, the fear that a rejection of Locke will bring racialist or collectivist or sociobiological ideas to the fore. There may not be any inevitable connection between the two, but Thomas Fleming's resurrection of Filmer in sociobiological terms indicates that concern on this score is not wholly misplaced. The sense that we shouldn't all be individual islands isolated from each other is an understandable and laudable one, but the alternative of collectivism or social solidarity also has its disadvantages and ugly side.
The conflict between Locke's natural right and earlier natural law may be quite pronounced, but in practice, conflicts between liberty and tyranny or the person and bureaucracy tend to be even sharper, bitterer and more violent. While Locke may be insufficient or wrong philosophically, proponents of liberty find it easy to fall back on a Lockean individualist, property-rights view, because it is so sharply differentiated from the collectivisms of the day.
You can see this at FR every day. Lockean slogans may not always be deep or intellectually fruitful, but they are inspiring and easy to understand and remember when conflicts are less refined and more visceral. Lockean individualism does go to extremes, but when the concern is with backsliding that can look like, or be, a great virtue.
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