America Unlocked - A Review of “America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life”

I will not – or maybe, cannot - read this book in its entirety, because the author’s research of the relevant literature is seriously lacking.  I got about as far as page 51.  Then I started skipping through the pages until settling on the last two chapters, which were of greater interest, even informative, but also flawed.

Historian Claire Rydall Arcenas, formerly a doctoral student at Stanford University, begins her argument as follows: “… the Declaration’s ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ cannot even be a relatively loose translation, with the substitution of Locke’s ‘property’ for Jefferson’s carefully chosen words ‘the pursuit of Happiness’.”[1]  This is gravely mistaken. 

It appears that a great number of Americans – not just the present author in question here – look to Locke’s “Second Treatise” in the Two Treatises of Government as the source of that famous trinity, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  In an effort to substantiate this claim, they rely on a particular text – Arcenas apparently among them - and on Locke’s words: “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”[2]  

In so doing, Arcenas clearly misses the fact that Locke is the actual originator of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” It can be found, as I have indicated elsewhere in an earlier blog post, in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature, lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.  The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always  follow, the more we are free from any unnecessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined, whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with our real happiness: and therefore till we are as much informed upon this inquiry, as to the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands, we are by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desire in particular cases.[3]

I, therefore, put it to my readers that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is an amalgam of Locke’s sentence as extracted from the “Second Treatise” and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  The “pursuit of happiness” is not Jefferson’s own phraseology.  It is clearly Locke’s wording.

Arcenas’s argument that the Two Treatises of Government was hardly cited after the American Revolution is irrelevant.[4]  In effect, Arcenas unwittingly supports my own case when she goes on to assert that Locke’s prevailing influence derived not from the Two Treatises but An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “In the nineteenth century [it] remained the primary basis for Locke’s nationwide authority.”[5]    She remarks (but does not wonder why) that when President Millard Fillmore was choosing books for the first White House Library in 1850: “he included the Essay but no other works by Locke.”[6]  She adds (again, without the irony) that when President Lincoln arrived at the White House just over a decade later: “he would have been pleased to find the Essay in the White House Library.”[7]  In other words, that Locke was sufficiently understood in the nineteenth century (and prior) to be the originator of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” was reason enough for American presidents to keep a copy of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the exclusion of any of Locke’s other works. Arcenas dwells on the Essay at some length, but appears not to have read it with care. 

In attempting to undermine the influence of Locke on Jefferson, Arcenas is also minimizing the importance of Enlightenment ideas, which were so profoundly shaped by Locke’s very own thinking via Voltaire, as well as other philosophes, and their readers.  Locke was also aided by Newton, certainly an Enlightenment figurehead: the two belonged to many of the same social circles, knew each other, wrote to the other, and probably read each other (or at least, Locke read the less complicated aspects of Newton).[8]  If I were to hazard a guess, when Locke began Chapter Two “Of the State of Nature” in the “Second Treatise” he was really channeling his inner Newton.  Locke’s words “A State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than the other” bear some resemblance to Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  It could also be argued that the aforementioned Newtonian principle served as a model for Lockean political resistance to James II prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89.  I find it fascinating that Newton published his most famous book, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (which contained the three laws of motion) in 1687.  Note, as well, Newton’s allusion to a trinity in the laws of motion, a theme I have explored in these blog pages many times before.

Locke died in 1704, and the Declaration of Independence occurred in 1776. Arcenas likens the period in between these two dates to some sort of dead, or inert history.  She asserts: “… the Locke Jefferson and his contemporaries knew was an eighteenth-century Locke, one who has been forgotten, brushed aside by weighty historiographical debates, calculated political maneuvers, and the simple passage of time.”[9]  She continues this same vein in her conclusion, where Locke was taken “as a guide and a model – albeit for purposes that were often more personal and mundane than the development of political philosophies.”[10]  

What then are ideas?  Are they just ephemeral ‘schools of thought’ that die when a philosopher passes on? Are they, in an historiographic sense, simply rejigged or reinvented at certain moments of history, to suit curriculum needs of burgeoning universities in the aftermath of the Second World War, as Arcenas describes.  Is there no element of truth to an intellectual tradition?  Is there no consideration for Locke who considered himself a man of Truth?  Are we guided only by social myth?

Arcenas’s chapter, “John Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition,” is by far one of the more interesting, but it lacks imagination.  She points to a Life editorial of 1949, where the following was put: “We [Americans] have only the dimmest idea of where we came from.”[11]  I would put it to my readers that Arcenas also has a poor idea of American origins; so, the problem continues. Could it not be that the post Second World War generation actually had a clearer notion of the intellectual connection between “the pursuit of happiness” and John Locke?  Look, for example, at Bertrand Russell’s famous tome History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1946, regarded (according to the jacket cover) as “the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century.”  Bertrand Russell discusses therein Locke’s politics, and his theory of knowledge, and he identifies the “pursuit of happiness” as a quotation from Locke’s Essay (but lacks some precision with the citation).[12] Given this fact, I would argue that Locke was better remembered – and more accurately so - in the 1950’s than Arcenas is prepared to admit.

In the end - and, again, perhaps unwittingly, what we get from Arcenas’s work is some sort of apologia that mistakenly supports a right-wing agenda, in other words, the Trumpian Maga crowd that today seeks a “patriarch”.  Arcenas undermines the legacy of Locke and what lies behind his work - the theoretical origins of political resistance against tyranny.  Locke was no apologist.  Neither was Jefferson. Give me fresh air!

---

[1] Claire Rydell Arcenas, America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), p. 51.

[2] John Locke, “Second Treatise” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge\: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 269 (Section 6).

[3] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 244,245. (See Book II, Chapter 21, Section 51).

[4] Arcenas, America’s Philosopher, p. 52.

[5] Ibid., p. 60.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 61.

[8] Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of a Genius (London: Picador, 2002), p. 18.

[9] Arcenas, America’s Philosopher, p. 51.

[10] Ibid., p. 162.

[11] Ibid., p. 128.

[12] Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 559.  Russell’s source is correct, but his chapter reference in the footnote is not accurate.  See my footnote no. 3.