Locke, like
Hobbes, was educated at Oxford. Though he became a lecturer there, he turned to
the study of medicine, and as the physician, friend, and advisor of Lord Ashley
(who later was the Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Chancellor of the Realm), Locke
became an influential man of state.
When Shaftesbury, who was involved in a plot to overthrow
King Charles II, was forced to leave England,
Locke found
himself suspected of disloyalty by the king and went into exile in Holland in
1683. Five years later, when Prince William and Princess Mary of Orange were
called to the throne in the Glorious Revolution, Locke returned to England as
part of the entourage of the future Queen Mary.
Locke’s two
most important works, Two Treatises of Government and An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, were published in 1690, by which
time Locke already was a famous philosopher and a respected political advisor.
In his last years, he withdrew from political affairs and devoted himself to
religious contemplation and study of the Epistles of St. Paul.
His contributions to epistemology and political theory were
of major and lasting significance, and he is recognized as an articulate
advocate of natural rights and religious freedom, as well as a strong opponent
of the divine right of kings.
Locke’s Two
Treatises of Government were published anonymously. During his life, rumors
correctly reported that Locke was the author of these works, but Locke always
denied this.
Hobbes lived
much of his life during a time of rather unpleasant turmoil, and he quite
reasonably thought that civil peace should be a primary objective for people. John
Locke (1632-1704), who was born some forty or so years later, responded in
his writing to a threat other than that of anarchy and chaos —namely, the
threat posed by a Roman Catholic monarch in Anglican England. To avoid getting
lost in the maze known as English history, let’s just say that this Catholic
monarch, James II, was a blunderer of the first rank who not only suspended
laws against fellow Catholics but also did his best to populate higher offices
with them. In response, English aristocrats invited the Dutch head of state,
the Protestant
William of Orange, to take the throne (which, of course, he
was happy to do). When William landed in England, James was forced to flee to
France, and in 1688 the throne was offered jointly to William and his wife,
Mary, who, incidentally, was James’s daughter.
This switch was known as the Glorious Revolution, and its
relationship to Locke’s writings was this: Locke wished to define a right to
resistance within a theoretical framework that would not at the same time
undermine the state’s power to govern effectively. Although Locke wrote his Two
Treatises of Government before the Glorious Revolution, he published them
in 1690, and they were regarded as the philosophical justification of the
Glorious Revolution.
Locke’s treatises, and especially the Second Treatise of
Government, are essentially an outline of the aims and purposes of the
state. They have affected democratic theory at least as much as anything else
that has ever been written. At the time of the American Revolution, Locke’s
political thought was well known to American political leaders and had become
considerably incorporated in American popular political thought as well. It had
a marked impact on the contents and wording of the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and has had a continued substantial
impact on American political thought and political institutions to this day.
All Americans are directly or indirectly influenced by John Locke.
Locke, unlike Hobbes, believed there is a natural moral law
that is more than a set of practical principles for survival. According to
Locke, we are all made by God and are his “property.” It logically follows that
we are obliged to preserve ourselves three sets of “Remarks” in support of
Bishop Stillingfleet’s criticism of Locke. Everyone ducked these broadsides,
even Locke. Nobody would say a word against the powerful Bishop of Wooster.
Then Catharine Trotter anonymously published A Defence of
Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding, Wherein Its Principles, with
Reference to Morality, Revealed Religion, and the Immortality of the Soul, Are
Considered and Justified: In Answer to Some Remarks on That Essay. She
published her defense of Locke anonymously because she was afraid that a
defense of Locke by a woman would further inflame Bishop Stillingfleet. (How
could a woman claim any religious or moral authority to give an opinion?)
However, within six months, Catharine Trotter was identified as the author of
the Defence, and her plays all closed, in an apparent blacklisting.
Locke sought her out and gave her some books and a large sum of money in
gratitude.
Leibniz (see Chapter 6) was working on his own critique of
Locke but put off finishing it until he could read Trotter’s Defence.
Several years after publishing Defence, Catharine Trotter married a
clergyman named Cockburn [KO-burn] and continued to publish philosophical
pamphlets defending Locke’s philosophy from his religious critics until shortly
before her death.
and, as far as
possible, the rest of humankind. Accordingly, except for the sake of just
punishment, no person may take away or impair another’s “life, liberty, health,
limbs or goods,” or anything on which these various items may depend.
That no person may destroy or impair another’s life, liberty,
or property requires, according to Locke, that each person has inalienable natural
rights and duties. They are inalienable and natural in that their existence
is entailed by the fact that we are God’s creations. This conception of natural
rights is more in accord with contemporary popular views than is the conception
of Hobbes, discussed earlier.
Locke was considerably less gloomy than Hobbes in his opinion
of people and was not nearly so pessimistic about what they might do to one
another in the absence of civil society (i.e., in a hypothetical “state of
nature”). Nevertheless, he thought it plainly advantageous to individuals to
contract among themselves to establish a state to govern them, because the
state, chiefly through its laws, offers the means to protect the right to
property and to ensure “the peace, safety, and public good of the people.”
Thus Locke, like Hobbes, held that the state is created and
acquires its legitimacy by an agreement or social compact on the part of its
citizens and subjects. For both philosophers the purpose of the social compact
is to ensure the “public good,” but for Locke the purpose is also to protect
natural rights. For Hobbes, each subject gives up his rights to the
Leviathan in exchange for, or rather in hopes of obtaining, peace and security.
For Locke, the subject entrusts his rights to the state for
safeguarding.
For Locke, then, the legitimacy of the state and its
governing of its citizens rests on their prior consent to the state’s
existence, authority, and power. Without that prior consent, it is a violation
of a person’s natural rights for the state to exercise political power over
him. Because men are “by nature all free, equal and independent,” he wrote, “no
one can be . . . subjected to the political power of another without his
consent.”
It is plain, however, that most people in most states have
never explicitly given their consent to be governed by the state. Do you recall
ever having given such consent? Therefore, can it not be argued that existing
states, by having laws and punishing lawbreakers, in effect violate the natural
rights of their citizens?
Locke resolves this problem by maintaining that, if we accept
any of the advantages of citizenship—if, for instance, we own property or rely
on the police or travel on a public highway—then we have given tacit consent
to the state to make and enforce laws, and we are obliged to obey these
laws. In this way, Locke can maintain that states do not violate the natural
rights of citizens (and others subject to their authority) by exercise of
governmental authority over them, even though these individuals have never
explicitly expressed their consent to that authority.
Locke and
the Right to Property That people have a natural right to property, Locke regarded
as evident. Because all people are created by God and thus (as explained earlier)
have a right to their body (their “limbs”), it follows, Locke
reasoned, that
they have a right to their body’s labor and thus to whatever things they “mix
their labor with.” That is, they have a right to those things, provided that
the things do not already belong to or are not needed to sustain someone else,
and provided that they do not exceed in amount what can be used before
spoiling. Because money is durable, a person may “heap up as much of it” as he
can, said Locke.
Locke’s theory of property implies that although all
people equally have a right to property, they do not all have a right to equal
property, because how much property a person lawfully has will depend on
his ingenuity and industriousness. This distinction is important because it can
go some way toward justifying an unequal distribution of wealth.
Separation
of Power
When people agree to unite themselves in a state, Locke said, they consent to
entrust to it the power to make and enforce laws and punish transgressors, and
they consent to submit to the will of the majority. The majority must decide
for itself what form of government is best—that is, whether it (the majority)
will run the government itself or will delegate its ruling power to a select
few, or even to one, or will adopt yet some other arrangement. The body to
which the power is delegated (or the majority itself, if the power is not
delegated to anyone) is the legislative, or lawmaking, branch of the
government.
Lawmaking is the central function of government, in Locke’s
opinion, for it is only through law that people are assured of equal, fair, and
impartial treatment and are protected from the arbitrary exercise of power by
the government.
But, Locke thought, the persons who make the laws should not
themselves execute them, and so, he said, the government should have an executive
branch as well. Further, in addition to the legislative and executive branches
of government, there must be, he believed, a federative branch with the
power to make war and peace. Though Locke believed it essential that there be a
judiciary to settle disputes and fix the degree of punishment for lawbreakers,
the idea that the judiciary should be a separate branch of government was not
Locke’s but that of the influential French jurist Montesquieu [MAHN-tes-kyu]
(1689-1755).
Locke’s political theory also contrasts sharply with Hobbes’s
in that, for Hobbes, political power is surrendered to an executive
authority, whereas for Locke, political power is delegated to the legislature.
Also, as we have seen, Locke, unlike Hobbes, called for a division of
governmental authority.
Because, according to Locke, the power of the government is
entrusted to it by the people of the state, the government is the servant
of the people. Whenever, in the view of the people, the government acts
contrarily to that trust, the people may dismiss their servant. In other words,
when this violation of trust is perceived to have happened, rebellion is
justified.
It is plain, then, that several basic concepts of the
American democratic form of government are found in the political theory of
John Locke. These include the ideas that people have natural rights that the
government cannot infringe on, that the government is the servant of the people
and its power is entrusted to it by them, that law rather than force is the
basis of the government, that the will of the people is determined by majority
vote, and that the government should be divided into separate branches.
Catharine
Trotter Cockburn and John Locke
Catharine
Trotter Cockburn (16791749) was an Englishwoman who, with no apparent formal
education, learned French, Latin, and Greek and read philosophy. Until very
recently, her philosophical writings went unexamined by scholars. We mention
her here in connection with Locke.
Trotter was an immensely successful playwright before she
turned to writing philosophy. London’s Drury Lane is the predecessor of New
York’s Broadway. When Trotter was a teenager, her first play, Agnes de
Castro, was produced at Drury Lane. It was so popular that she was
immediately able to get hundreds of subscribers to pay money in advance to
support the writing of her next play. (The list of her subscribers reads like a
Who’s Who of England.) When she was twenty-one, she had three
blockbuster plays on Drury Lane at the same time.
Edward Stillingfleet, the Bishop of Wooster, was a subscriber
to Trotter’s plays. He was, in addition, a major critic of Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, especially of its consequences for morality
and religion. He thought that Locke’s views challenged the authority of divine
revelations on the nature of morality, and he wrote several highly publicized
(and unbelievably long) letters condemning Locke. An individual named Thomas
Burnet of the Charterhouse anonymously published
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