Distrusting John Locke (Why Locke was no conservative)

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).

I have been delaying any further contribution to this thread until I have finished reading all of the references offered in the various posts, specifically I am working my way through the links in post #35.

I love stuff like this, Locke is a particular interest of mine, and there are some folks posting here who are worth reading.

Still, going back to the original article that started this thread, the Gottfried article seems to be nothing more than a hit piece. He accuses Locke of not being a conservative, which is a given, and accuses him of favoring "life, liberty, and property" and democracy. Dang.

While there is certainly always going to be tension between democracy and liberty, since one is a means and one is an end, even granting that liberty as an end can be a means to a yet more profound end, still my question remains. While attacking Locke, Gottfried has not stated what his case is. If he attacks Locke's belief in individual liberty, what does he propose? Or if he is attacking his belief in the sanctity of property, what would be better? Or if Locke's support of property is not unqualified enough, what would resolve this weakness in his argument?

If Locke's proposal of Democracy as a means of promoting the greatest good is ill-founded, what would be better? Gottfried does not reveal himself, preferring to attack Locke for things he did not believe, laying Orwell's thought police at his feet.

Curious, also, is the reference to Hume, and limited Monarchy. Is Gottfried proposing such a thing? If so, then why not simply say so, so we can get on with it? He quotes Hume thus: "Hume asked, why did individuals throughout the world live “in subordination to each other” without a sense of being deprived of rights? " without challenging Hume's assertion. Who says individuals living throughout the world are not conscious of living in oppression? Perhaps Hume, from his perspective could say such a thing, but I can't imagine any serious commentator saying such a thing today. But if that is Gottfried's case, then why not simply say so?

My suspicion is that he knows that if he openly declares his support for such a thing, most of his audience would simply tune him out. It seems Locke, and the Lockeans, are much more durable than the monarchists. But if we are going back to limited monarchy, I want to get my application in early. I'm there. When I'm the boss, there are going to be some changes around here.

Meanwhile, you guys just carry on, I still have a lot of reading to do, thanks guys.

One can argue that Locke represents a wrong turn, but one can't put the spilt milk back in the bottle (sorry about the mixed metaphor). It's quite possible to criticize Locke on the basis of older ideas of legitimacy, but hard to restore those older ideas to the power they once had. It's also certainly possible to speculate about whether Locke's ideas were necessary to dethrone absolutism or whether older conceptions of natural law would have served the same function and perhaps have done so better than Locke's ideas.

Locke looks a bit like a mutation of conservative anti-absolutist ideas into a form that could eventually demand and justify individualist democracy. Perhaps an unmutated form of legitimist, anti-absolutist thought could have served us better. But the Rubicon has been crossed. One certainly can't uproot Locke from the American or modern Western mind or undo the distrust of governments, rulers and hierarchies and the resistance to them.

What "the governed" wanted was not so much a sophisticated theory of rights and mutual obligations, but a source of slogans and claims that could be pitted against the power of their governors. That yesterday's governed become today's governing elite to be cast aside by others is one of the inevitable, though unforseen results of the theory.

Gottfried himself shares the truculent, "don't tread on me" spirit of today's average American, so perhaps he doesn't recognize his own character or ancestry. Maybe this is the paleo dilemma: they rely on pre-Lockean ideas to defend some unruly and tradition-based Celtic community against centralized states, unaware that those pre-Lockean ideas were as apt to be used against the intransigent Celts as against their oppressors.

Traditional monarchy may look good in comparison to contemporary democracy, but monarchs and royalists didn't lack the ability and willingness to oppress and exploit. England may have needed a restoration of older concepts of natural law, but what they got was Locke. France, Spain and Germany, which had no Locke, probaby ended up worse off than England.

You can also check out the original thread on this article or the Chronicles symposium that the was originally published in. While the question of Locke is of extreme importance in its own right, I can't resist a sneaking suspicion that for Donald Livingston Locke=Lincoln and Hume=Calhoun.

One of the reasons I enjoy your posts is insightful paragraphs such as these. The desire for "slogans" and neat little logical systems to enter the public rhealm with on a daily basis never leaves some people today as well.

General distrust of philosophers' systems for practical matters is one of the halmarks of many conservatives, despite an appreciation for a life-of-the-mind. I must confess myself amongst that former category despite my interest in those topics and many posters that are obviously in those later ranks.

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Distrusting John Lockeby Paul Gottfried

Distrusting John Locke
by Paul Gottfried