Locke – Two Treatises of Government
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a deep dive exploring the works of John Locke. As you can observe from my last two blog posts, I began with Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and then I read his famous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But you can’t do a deep dive on Locke without reading his other most famous work: the second treatise in his Two Treatises of Government.
I didn’t know much about this work going into it except that it was supposed to be deeply influential both in the formation of modern liberalism and in the American constitution – even to the extent that Locke’s wording was possibly (though this is much debated) the source of the famous phrase in the Declaration, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Clearly Locke, writing about a hundred years before the founding of the United States, was a major source of political theory for the founders, and I already knew that many of his concepts supposedly outlined in the famous second treatise were seminal for the political realities of our country: the doctrine of natural rights, the notion of the state of nature leading to a social contract, the famous idea that government exists based on the consent of the governed.
In fact, in getting myself ready to read John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice a few months back, I read a scathing article from the 1970s (when the book came out) essentially arguing that Rawls was weakly sidestepping all the critical issues of government with which Enlightenment thinkers – especially Locke – had wrestled so well and so fruitfully.
I knew I had to read Locke on government, and the second treatise seemed like the critical one to read. Fortunately I had a copy of this book on my shelf – probably, given the distinct lack of scribbles, scrawls, and generally indecipherable margin-notes in the text, it’s my wife’s book from college. Unlike the Essay, I think it’s safe to say I hadn’t read this one in college.
So, with a humble sense of “I’m in Poly Sci 101,” I started in.
The State of Nature
The first thing that stood out to me immediately was Locke’s state of nature. I did read Thomas Hobbes in college (and I am going to reread his famous Leviathan shortly) and I remember well his conception of the state of nature as “the war of all against all” – in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short” until humans come together out of this hell to form a civil society presided over by a “leviathan” – an all powerful ruler who administers justice.
Locke’s conception of the state of nature is very different, and he takes several steps to prepare the reader for his argument. First, Locke differentiates between the state of nature and the state of war. The state of war is a lot like Hobbes’s state of nature: fighting, aggression, seizure of property, and no authority to appeal to. But this is not the state of nature. The state of nature for Locke does not necessarily imply conflict and violence. In many ways, it’s a decent place. Locke writes that it is “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions . . . within the bounds of the Law of Nature” (269). This Law of Nature is reason, which Locke says “obliges everyone” to obey it. Reason supposedly tells men that they were all created equal and therefore none has the right to “harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (271). It is important to note that throughout the second treatise, Locke’s reasoning is very much supported by theology. Men are equal because they are “all the servants of one sovereign master” and “the Workmanship of one Omnipotent” (271). So Locke derives two related principles: each person is “bound to preserve himself” and “to preserve the rest of Mankind” (271).
If these principles are violated, each man has the power to retaliate – not “according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own Will” but instead “so far as calm reason and conscience dictates” (272). To do so is to be the “executioner of the Law of Nature” (272) and has two stated values: preventing further offenses of the same kind by deterring future offenders, and providing “reparation” (273). Lesser crimes may also be punished by the aggrieved according to the correct degree, as dictated by sober reason.
Of course, there are some clear challenges to this – and Locke immediately addresses them. To the question of whether men can really be judges in their own case, Locke agrees that this is an issue, but he reminds readers that technically monarchies have this same issue – the supreme leader being able to be judge in his own case. Same goes for the issue of men getting carried away by thirst for revenge: monarchies have the same issue, again. That makes the state of nature better than an absolute monarchy, argues Locke cannily, because at least in the former a man who gets carried away in punishment is answerable to his fellows, while a monarch is not.
Locke doubles down on the notion that there have been clear historical examples of men in this state, and he closes by emphatically stating that all men are in this state of nature until they enter in a compact together to form a society with government.
Problems with Locke’s State of Nature: Natural Law and Tribalism
One wonders of course, at the extent to which Locke believes that this natural law is known to all participants. He is the same philosopher, after all, who argued passionately in his Essay that we are born with no innate ideas. How are we to know about this natural law? Locke seems to imply that we learn about this law through our reason – but that seems to me a big leap. Isn’t it just as reasonable to imagine that we might glean from our experience in the state of nature something more akin to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” mindset – or even Hobbes’s “war of all against all”? Certainly those scenarios are just as likely a conclusion as our understanding we’re not supposed to kill any other humans unprovoked.
It is also striking the extent to which Locke sees the state of nature as both individualist and universal. Human beings in the state of nature appear to act as nearly independent agents, while the law of reason is supposed to remind them of the universality of their condition. Meanwhile, Locke does not appear to think much about the effect of groups in the state of nature. Although he does write about familial bonds now and then in the treatise, Locke is not explicit about how these exist in the state of nature, and he says nothing about any tribal affiliations before our entry into a social contract. That seems to me something of an oversight.
Not the Garden of Eden
Another point that I think is important about Locke’s state of nature is that, while it’s not all bad, it’s still not an idyllic Garden of Eden. It is not viewed by Locke with particular nostalgia or fondness – the way that Rousseau seemed to idealize the state of nature as a far more natural arena for the fulfillment of man’s true nature. Locke is pretty emotionless about this original state; he doesn’t see man as having fallen from it through Original Sin (as in Christianity), or having been pulled away from it by a corrupting society (as in Rousseau). For Locke, humans do not aspire to return to the state of nature, but nor do they particularly fear it. It’s all very rational – as we’ll see shortly: If things become too intolerable in the state of nature, man joins a society; if things become intolerable there, he can change this set of circumstances, again, as we shall see later.
The State of War
The main point here is that Locke argues that the state of nature and the state of war are different. That is an interesting division, and it’s possible to see that as hair-splitting: after all, if the state of war is common, doesn’t that define the state of nature? If the state of nature, with its peace and harmony and natural law is rarely respected, how can it be really said to exist?
Beyond that there is not much to say about the state of war, except that it involves someone in the state of nature breaking natural law and fighting with another participant in an unjust fashion. There is no higher authority to appeal to, so even though the aggrieved has the (natural) right to preservation – and therefore to confront force with force – it’s possible that the aggrieved is not strong enough to do so, and justice will go unserved, or that the conflict with continue. Both scenarios provide the reason why humans often escape the state of war by forming a society.
It’s also important to note again, that by “war” Locke doesn’t mean nations or even large groups fighting with each other, but individuals.
Human Nature and A New Concept: Rights
Locke’s view of human nature is what I would consider “Shakespearean”: we are capable of very, very base instincts – warring, fighting with each other, stealing, murdering – all the characteristics of seeking “dominion” over others that Locke saw forming naturally in children, back in Some Thoughts. But at the same time, Locke sees us as capable of self-regulation through reason to a considerable degree. When we do finally enter civil society, as I will describe below, it is as rational agents aging in our own enlightened self interest according to reason.
Meanwhile, he sees inherent “natural rights” (although he does not use this term) in all human beings. Because we are all created by God as equals, only God has the power to end our lives, not our equals. And because there is such sanctity in each individual life, it is our personal freedom that is most sacred and in need of safeguarding. This is surely a drastic reversal from the common view of monarchists (such as Robert Filmer, whose arguments the first treatise largely aimed to refute) who held that humans owed fealty to a ruler with divinely appointed authority.
Yet Locke’s natural rights doctrine is just as fundamentally “mythical” as Filmer’s. Both views, really, are just interpreting our duty based on a kind of narrative or imagined story. In one, God appointed our ruler and then created us to follow that ruler; in the other, God created all of us to be equals, except by consent. Ultimately neither one has any more empirical grounding – one of Locke’s key tenents for grounding any sort of principle.
That’s strange when you think about it, isn’t it? Because in a sense, natural rights is perhaps the most fundamental doctrine underlying our political framing as a country. But it comes, in largely part, from Locke, in this essay – which in the end rests on little more than a myth or at least a heavily interpreted understanding.
But I want to underscore what a profound idea is the concept of “rights” in the history of political philosophy. I am no expert in this field, but even from my limited historical knowledge, I know that – particularly in the hundreds of years before Locke was writing – the medieval and feudal political traditions were at best deeply equivocal, if not openly hostile, to the notion that people even had a right to their own autonomy – let alone to their own property. Same goes for the notion that human beings were all created by God as equals, and therefore no one person (such as a ruler) has any right to control another’s autonomy (a point Locke is clearly responding to repeatedly). The fact that political association is built on “rights” (rather than, for example, “duties”) changes the game considerably – and is a concept that influenced the United States to a profound degree.
Think of all the times we hear about or use the concept of “my rights.” A lot of that comes from this radical formulation by John Locke.
***
Property
Here we arrive at maybe the core of the second treatise: Locke’s discussion of property. This is not a subject that I tend to think much about – natural rights are one thing, but I tend to think of them in the terms familiar to most Americans from the Declaration: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But remember, Locke’s actual line (quoted up above) includes “possessions.” So clearly property was important.
Turns out, for Locke’s conception of natural rights, it’s really important.
Locke argues that from the perspective of reason and revelation, the earth belongs to all humans, who have a right to their own preservation. First, a man has the sole right to his own body; as Locke described earlier, no sovereign or leader can exercise control over another’s body without this being a state of war (which Locke explicitly states in a short chapter about slavery). Given this natural right, one also has a natural right to preserve his body; this includes their ability to get food from the earth. A man has a right to an apple that has fallen from the ground – he does not have to ask permission from all other human beings; he possesses an inherent right to the fruits of the earth. Again, Locke’s argument is very religious – he argues that God has given the earth to humans for this purpose. Locke derives his understanding of “property” from a sense that a man must often do work (which he calls “labor”) to attain food. If a man takes the time to collect many apples to feed himself, he has done labor, and these apples rightly belong to him (provided he has not stolen them). They began by being common property but became private property when the man undertook labor to get them: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property” (288).
This notion of private property extends to land, too. Any land that a man mixes his own labor into in order to cultivate it thereby is a product of his labor, and thereby belongs to him alone. Locke writes, “As much Land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common” (290-291). Once again, Locke’s view is very individualist – a sharply different understanding of the function of common land that, for example, that of Karl Marx. Where Marx would advocate for the sharing of land in common for the goal of equitable distribution of both labor and resources – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” – Locke’s view is again sharply focused on individual rights, and specifically on individual industriousness. Locke sharply dismisses any criticisms of individual property rights along commonistic lines as little more than the enviousness of lazy men:
“[God] gave [the land] to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious. He that had as good left for his Improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another’s Labour: If he did, ’tis plain he desired the benefit of another’s Pains, which he had no right to . . .” (291).
He “out not to meddle” – this is very much Locke’s individualism, summed up in a phrase. It is hard, on the one hand, not to hear some Ayn Rand in the passage above. And yet, there does seem some similarity with Marx – who after all would certainly agree that a worker’s labor should be his own. The problem that communism seeks to address however is the gross inequality that results from capitalism. What happens, in other words, when one person subdues a whole huge swath of land, and others have none at all?
In response to this argument, Locke maintains that even as full as the world is, there would still be enough room for all humans to have as much land as they (again, in individualistic, or perhaps familial situations) could reasonably till and tend without upsetting or depriving others, and without – most importantly – wasting anything. The moment a man collects so many apples that he cannot eat them all and some go to waste, he is violating natural law and implicitly depriving others of their share. Yet if a man wishes to stockpile durable goods, says Locke, there’s nothing wrong with that – particularly if he wishes to trade the apples he collects for durable pieces of pleasing-looking, non-perishable metals (such as gold or silver). “The exceeding of the bounds of [a man’s] just property,” writes Locke, does not lie “in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it” (300).
“And thus,” says Locke, “came in the use of money” (300).
Over time, Locke allows, resources became more scare, and humans began to realize that tilled, processed land actually created a surplus value: as families working the land grew larger, and presumably as farming techniques became more effective and reliable, people began to produce well more food than they themselves needed, creating a value for other people. Consequently, humans began to trade perishable goods, such as crops, for non-perishable ones, such as precious metals – money – which in turn allowed more industrious men to accrue more wealth and, presumably, more private property than non-industrious men without violating the law of nature by wasting perishable fruits of the earth. Locke seems to implicitly justify inequality on the grounds that 1) it doesn’t waste anything, 2) The use of money is done voluntarily, by a compact among people – even in a pre-societal state of nature, 3) because, he seems to say, it is justified by the “industriousness” of men being different, and 4) because it produces surplus goods for the rest of humankind.
I am reminded of a quote I once read – I think it was the political philosopher Leo Strauss – that said, the moderns (such as Locke) built their philosophy on low but solid ground. By this I think he meant that instead of trying to appeal strictly to the “higher” faculties of man – reason, virtue – as the ancient Greeks often did, men like Locke built their conception of a good society on man’s more base instincts and needs. Locke’s conception of property is set on this sort of “low ground” – man has a natural right to feed himself, which leads to a right to whatever he can collect on the ground, which leads to a right to till the earth to feed himself, which leads to a right to his own property. In essence, Locke’s notion of property is really just an extent of the right one has to one’s own physical body, and to the furtherance of its existence – certainly very “low ground” and not at all anything higher or more glamorous.
It’s also interesting that Locke has a very positive view of capitalism, and a very astute understanding of it – well before Adam Smith came along. He makes what feels like a very Smith-ian point – that one acre of cultivated land is worth far more to men than ten acres’ worth of uncultivated land; and he seems to at least imply a kind of Smith-ian justification for economic inequality on somewhat utilitarian grounds (that it produces more surplus goods that can assist everyone). It is also open to interpretation as to what he thinks about the gross economic equality that can result from the unequal “industriousness” of individual participants. Locke surely has a clear-eyed view about human nature, and so doesn’t he realize the danger inherent in a monetary system? There is some evidence that he thinks the system of proto-capitalism in the state of nature is acceptable, so long as there is still enough land left for everyone to have some. What is clear though is that he believes that property will be fought over.
And that’s where the social contract comes in.
The Social Contract
So, how and why would man leave the state of nature? Locke’s most basic point here is that the only way an individual (and again, the focus is on individuals) leaves the state of nature – or gives over anything of his own person or estate to another – is through his consent. This is an important word in Locke – as we shall see. Locke writes:
“The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it” (330-331).
The key points here are that 1) this is a rational, uncoerced decision made by individuals, 2) it requires their consent (which he also calls a “compact,” and 3) one agrees in joining society to give up some of his natural rights in favor of being governed by the majority.
This, for Locke is the only “lawful” form of government (333).
Here is where Locke writes what I take to be the famous line that might or might not (it’s highly debated) have formed the basis for the famous line in the Declaration – “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Locke writes that men join society for: “the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name property” (350).
Locke is offering this model as not only a blueprint for future governments, but also as a real explanation for how societies in the real world begin. Just as Locke went to great pains to cite historical examples of his state of nature – to prove that it really exists, now he cites historical examples of nations that really did begin through rational action and consent of the governed. Locke’s argument is a stretch at times (at one point he claims that citizens sometimes give “tacit consent” [348]). Yet he does make some very insightful points about why men often – rationally, through consent – end up choosing fairly “top-down” forms of government, such as monarchies; he suggests that often material conditions make these forms of government attractive (even though they ostensibly allow common people less voice). Locke really stretches his argument again when he tries to claim that every child born into a society must voluntarily accept the society for himself once he comes of age as a way of proving his point that even long-standing civilizations are watered fresh by the consent of the governed in generation after generation.
Anything else outside of this consent, Locke implies, represents not a lawful government, but a state of war.
Okay, so government requires consent, but why leave the state of nature? Locke is admirably clear: men want to protect their property. He writes, “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property” (351), which in the state of nature “is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasions of others” (350).
Next Locke introduces the three components that men want in society in order to protect their property: first, an “established, known, and settled Law”; second, “a known and indifferent Judge”; and third the power to back and support the judge’s ruling. This then forms the basis of Locke’s concrete, tangible ideas for the three branches of government that he outlines: the legislative, the executive, and the federative. The first two branches are familiar, but I was surprised by the last one – that it was not the “judicial,” as I expected, but a separate power more focused on international relations.
Still, the broader point is an important one – that power should be separated. I realize that the “separation of powers” is an idea – like that of “rights” so deeply ingrained in our culture as to be nearly invisible; yet it’s fascinating to go back and read some of the very early arguments for such ideas. Locke writes a great deal in the treatise about both the reasons for the separation of powers specifically, and the reasons for limitations on the government more broadly. He often mentions the danger of legislators taking too much power for themselves, or becoming distanced from the normal citizens and thereby making laws that benefit themselves and not the society as a whole. He writes about there being “too great a temptation to humane frailty apt to grasp at Power” (364) for individual legislators. So this belief in the separation of powers and of a limited government all follows quite naturally from Locke’s stated beliefs about human nature – that humans are self-interested, prone to warring and taking what’s not theirs, and not necessarily charitable. Locke believes, roughly, that men are good and bad – but we need to plan for the bad ones. He cites the example of a good prince who gains the people’s trust and therefore they don’t require many explicit rules to govern his conduct; yet this becomes an issue when a more corrupt prince succeeds him. “The reigns of good princes have always been the most dangerous to the liberties of their people,” writes Locke (378).
Yet they are rational – or capable of being rational – and as a result, Locke is admirably charitable in his view that humans can govern their own society – keep watch on those in charge, take down pieces of the structure that don’t work, and change them. He writes memorably toward the end of the treatise about why and when the people are justified in changing the form of government. In one memorable passage toward the end, Locke imagines an objection to his arguments: If the people are allowed to just dissolve the government whenever they want, won’t they do this often, jeopardizing the stability or effectiveness of the state? “To this I answer: Quite the contrary,” says Locke (414). People are usually slow to change their known forms of government; they are usually well-meaning, and not given to violent action unless conditions get really bad – which Locke reminds us can and does happen in any form of government, even those with supposedly strong centralized power structures: “The people generally ill treated, and contrary to right, will be ready upon any occasion to east themselves of a burden that sits heavy upon them.” Come on, says Locke: “He must have lived but a little while in the World, who has not seen examples of this in his time” (415).
There will always be troublemakers, rabble-rousers, and malcontents, says Locke, but the majority of people are fairly good judges of these types of people, and are unwilling to follow them. Toward the last chapter of the treatise, Locke writes one of my favorite passages, just a pure, beautiful expression of Thomas Sowell’s “constrained” vision of human nature:
“Tis true, such Men [who wish the “alteration of the Government”] may stir whenever they please, but it will be only to their own just ruine [sic] and perdition. For till the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of the rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the greater part, the people, who are more disposed to suffer, than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. The examples of particular injustice, or oppression of here and there an unfortunate man, moves them not” (417-418).
Yet the people will rebel when things pass a certain point, and the blame for that cannot rest with them, argues Locke: “Ar the people to be blamed if they have the sense of rational creatures and can think of things no otherwise than as they find and feel them?”
You can see that Locke’s conception of man is so – I would say positive – because he believes that individual men can be relied on to act in rational self-interest, and can be (he seems to imply) relied upon to cooperate with each other to at least a reasonable degree – and because Locke has such a strong sense of what is naturally due to individual humans (his strong, fundamental sense of natural rights). As a result, what emerges from Locke’s picture of political structure is a very limited government. So many of the “rights” he seems to enumerate are rights designed to protect the individual from the power of the government. They are “negative” freedoms: freedom from having one’s property unjustly taken, freedom from having arbitrary power wielded against them, freedom from being judged by another man in his own case, and so on. He writes, “The community perpetually retains a Supream [sic] Power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of any Body, even of their Legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish, or so wicked, as to lay and carry on designs against the Liberties and Properties of the Subject” (367).
Locke’s emphasis here on the people’s right to both set up a government and then to protect themselves from their own government if necessary is, again, a fascinating idea that as best I can tell has had tremendous ramifications in the hundreds of years since Locke wrote these ideas down. Once again, it seems useful to me to consider the differences here with a Marxist notion of a socialist or communist government – one that has the power to do certain things: to feed the hungry, care for the sick, promote equality of material conditions. It is hard to forget Locke’s implications throughout his descriptions of the state of nature that imply his belief in there being plenty of green earth to go around – that there is plenty of “property” for everyone. But what about if there is not? What if one does not have any property? Wouldn’t that send rational beings toward a social contract designed to provide them with sustenance? There is, after all, a big difference between a government designed to protect natural rights, and a government designed to provide natural rights – and I can imagine that which one you choose depends on your material starting conditions.
I often have the sense of certain thinkers as being very “early” thinkers: they were revolutionary fo their time, and they vaulted our conception of humanity forward to a great degree. And yet, there were of course further problems ahead that they could not anticipate. I think of Locke this way, in a sense. Even though his state of nature is not a utopian garden of Eden, it is a place of plenty: a place where there’s still land and food for everyone – an equality of opportunity. Therefore the reason for leaving this state is to protect that which one already has. Yet it’s just as rational, one could argue, to imagine that the state of nature is a state of starvation, a state of competition for scarce resources. In this light, rational man would escape the state of nature in order to attain that which he does not have. There one could certainly see the justification for a government that seeks to provide basic services.
Conclusion
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These are the famous words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. I am not a political scholar, so I cannot tell if John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was the direct sources for these words. But I can tell that Locke’s ideas are all contained in that famous phrase: his focus on happiness as a main goal, which is found in all his writings, even his Some Thoughts on Education. Then his focus on natural rights – his reasoning deriving from a surprisingly religious understanding of the fundamental equality of all of God’s creatures. Then there is the capacious sense of liberty that Locke derives from those rights – the liberty to do as one sees fit, so long as it doesn’t encroach on his neighbor. Absent of course, in Jefferson’s famous phrase is an explicit mention of Locke’s most pivotal concept in the securing of governing consent: property. Yet anyone with any understanding of American government can tell just how deeply property rights run in our system laws.
Overall, I found Locke’s whole argument and his whole understanding of politics to be both clear and easy to understand, as well as informed by a clear sense of human nature. I was surprised at the extent to which I could easily understand his writing, and I was struck, as I noted above, at the almost myth-like derivation of his concept of natural rights. It’s very holistic, humane. It’s not complex and arcane. Locke’s understandings are simple and easy to understand – but they have great ramifications. His arguments are also straightforward and honest, and he’s quite adept at anticipating counterarguments, and attempting to disprove them directly. He’s quite persuasive, and above all, common sensical – in the sense of being good at seeing what is right in front of us, and of point that out. In the Treatise I did not see the same tone of defiance, the individual against the authorities, that I saw in the Essay. But perhaps that is because his message here is even more radical.
What I will take away from the Second Treatise is above all, Locke’s concept of natural rights: the foundation of equality of all human beings, and the foundation of our modern concept of “rights.” For such a rationalist, Locke’s account of why we are due our natural rights is a curious mix of Lockean empiricism (the basic facts that we are all born the same way, as human beings) with religious myth (that God has created all of us, so therefore we are under no one else’s dominion). I will also remember the importance that Locke places on property – his fascinating insight that what one needs in the state of nature is not so much protection of his life from his neighbors, but protection of his food from his neighbors. And then I will also remember the fascinating turn that Locke’s thought takes here – from the bare, basic protection of one’s basketful of apples from the raids of one’s neighbors to the acceptability and even social benefit of the accumulation of goods and wealth. Here one can see a fascinating interconnectedness of early modern liberalism and proto-capitalism, with property rights knit into the very fabric of liberal society; the state of nature being a place of plenty, rather than a place of starvation.
I will also take away from this treatise Locke’s twofold, “Shakespearean” view of human nature: on the one hand men are not to be trusted (too much) with power; individual actors are often given to the temptation of self-interest, greed, covetousness, and all the human failings. Hope for the best leaders, but plan for the worst, Locke often seems to say. Yet on the other hand, men are capable of conducting their lives in accordance with reason, with rational self-interest. Locke places an uncommon amount of faith in the individual member of the society to choose what is best for him (the social contract, often) and to keep an eye on political leaders, in order to ensure they don’t become corrupt. Finally, I will remember Locke’s relentless focus on the individual as the unit of society and political endeavor. For the most part, Locke seems like a remarkably clear-eyed thinker, a building “on low but solid ground” in Leo Strauss’s words – yet the one place where I see an oversight in his realism is his failure to take human groups or tribes into account on his conception of our social and political lives. Yes to his individualism, and yes to his universalism, I’d say – but don’t forget that we humans like to bond together – sometimes into warring factions, and sometimes into noble formations of brotherhood and unity – it’s an important part of human activity and human nature, and one I don’t see particularly recognized in Locke.
Still, I appreciate Locke’s grounding of his philosophy in a deeply viable conception of human nature. This is more and more becoming a key starting point for me, and something that I think differentiates thinkers whose systems are more plausible from thinkers whose systems are less plausible. I recall in my lengthy blog posts about both Paolo Freire and Karl Marx that I felt both thinkers shied away from outlining a coherent theory of human nature; in fact, it seemed to me that they, especially Freire, sort of hid it within their work. But at heart, when you look closely, both thinkers, in my view, are basing their systems and understandings on very small slivers of human nature, rather than all of it, the good with the bad — and both thinkers are trying say that society should help make humans more “human” by fostering these aspects of human nature that the authors think are important. In Marx’s case, I felt his conception of human nature was a kind of abstraction — just one aspect of human as creator and tool-maker (or worker) that he felt a good society should actively cultivate. In Freire’s case, he talks a lot about this goal: humanization, which he sees as a kind of overcoming of human nature to achieve a higher state. In the end, both thinkers seem to me to be making subjective moral claims about what human nature “ought” to be, rather than starting from a place of describing what it really *is* and building their political and social systems from there. Locke, on the other hand, definitely starts from a pretty clear-eyed perspective about human nature. It’s certainly not lofty, but in starting low, it makes it possible, I believe, to build up to great heights.
Either way, I’m glad I’ve read this treatise and tried to come to terms with it. I may attempt one more – the “Letter Concerning Toleration” but I’ve written more than 10,000 words on Locke in the last two weeks, so first I may need to step back from Locke for a while and read something else first.