The Cambridge political scientist John Dunn, who, in his
classic work The Political Thought of
John Locke (1969), sees his subject following his father’s footsteps as a
Puritan, has written that throughout history John Locke has “worn many faces …
so many masks.”[1] So in order to investigate such a pivotal
figure in the history of political thought let us be wary of too many intellectual
digests (internet or otherwise) and text-book interpretations because an active
imagination is best stimulated by direct contact with the original sources.[2] The ultimate purpose here is to present a
number of selected texts by Locke as they appeared in original form. Our other purpose is to consider briefly how
two different Canadians – C.B. Macpherson and Janet Ajzenstat – have
interpreted Locke.
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of Locke’s
misrepresentation is C.B. Macpherson’s, The
Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962), a very curious book, written
by one who was trained as a (Marxist) economist; and it is a work that is overly-focussed
on Locke’s notions of property.
Canadians seem fond of studying C.B. Macpherson, after all he is
Canadian (and was a Canadian icon), and even Jack Layton studied under him on
the recommendation of Charles Taylor.
Macpherson’s thinking on Hobbes is more interesting than he is on Locke,
but Macpherson is totally devoid of historical sensibilities. In his effort to
historicize Locke (and dismiss Macpherson), John Dunn succinctly explains that
“either Macpherson or Locke must have been confused about
seventeenth-century class structure.”[3]
In other words, the importance of property in Locke’s
thought is linked to the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 (following
the rule of Oliver Cromwell) and the problem of the Exclusion Crisis (1679-1681)
which attempted to alter the succession to the throne.[4] James II, the brother of Charles II, was a declared
Catholic, and hence was in conflict with the Church of England. James’ Catholicism was also believed to a
threat because of the absolutism of Louis XIV, the dominant power on the
continent. And the Sun King’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which famously
expelled Protestants from France, beginning in 1685, the same year that James
succeeded to the throne in England, was also considered a foreboding factor. John Dunn puts it this way: “The spectre which
haunted the English property-owner in 1680 or between 1685 and 1688 was the
threat of non-parliamentary taxation and the confiscation of freeholds to
consolidate executive authority.”[5]
Central to understanding Locke is that he began writing his Two Treatises of Government sometime
around 1681, in other words prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, and it
is an explicit rejection of Sir Robert Filmer’s divine-right paternalism in Patriarcha (1680) which finds hopeless intellectual
support for kingship (and all hierarchy) in Genesis.[6] Also of importance is that Locke’s (more
interesting) Second Treatise was written before the First Treatise, and in the
former Locke uses the term “state of nature” (which replaces the concept of
Genesis), articulating a right of resistance in certain situations, hence
harkening back to the Huguenot doctrines of resistance preceding him by about a
century. [7]
(See my blog) Important in his thinking
is the distinction he made between “law” and “force”, essentially antithetical terms,
in his view, making clear what would be his dismay (to say the least) with
police violence at Toronto’s G20 Summit (see below). Locke was no armchair philosopher; he was a
man of political commitment (and vision) who espoused a Newtonian equality (“For
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”), but he was not overly
swayed by democracy as we know it.
Locke sought limits to public power, which placed him in the
same league as eighteenth-century classical liberals, and he also developed the
notion of popular sovereignty (as a form of resistance to the abuse of power),
which made him something of a radical, or even a revolutionary (certainly when
we look to his American legacy). Clearly
aware of the tension between authority and revolution, Locke (perhaps inspired
by patronage from the Earl of Shaftesbury on whom he was financially dependent)
found solace in the idea of property, of man having “mixed his labour” with his
property, landed or otherwise, thus creating a process of ‘self-annexation’ and
thereby reducing Newtonian atomization and building an apparent mechanism
between extremes.[8]
Locke’s imprint on the United States is deep, but in her
effort to find him in Canada’s founding Janet Ajzenstat mimics J.G.A.
Pocock’s magisterial The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975). Unfortunately,
there was no “Lockean moment” in Canada.
To say that Canada was founded by “John Locke’s disciples” is a vast overstatement.[9] Locke wrote in 1681, and this fact was not
generally known until well after the Enlightenment – and quite possibly not
until the definitive work of Cambridge political scientist and historian Peter
Laslett (1915-2001). Canada was founded
almost two centuries after Locke wrote, and, again it is likely that any number
of readers would have thought (mistakenly) that he wrote the Two Treatises after the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, thereby diminishing his
potential significance. Locke’s trinity of
“Peace, Safety, and publick good of the people” does come close to Canada’s
“Peace, order and good government” but the textual resemblance here is not
developed by Ajzenstat. [10]
Again, like C.B. Macpherson, Ajzensta’s work lacks some broad
historical context, and we might benefit from looking at nineteenth century
Britain and Europe. The British North America Act was established when Benjamin
Disraeli was Tory Prime Minister of Britain. He was born a Jew but, once
baptized while young, he came into the Church of England to become Britain’s
first and only Prime Minister with a “Hebrew countenance. “ [11]
Under his rule, the working classes had only
just received the right to vote; and, in a related development, the right to
assemble and speak at Hyde Park was granted in 1866 as defended by John Stuart
Mill.[12] It is not inconceivable, then, that Canada
was granted a parliament because it took little
stretch of the imagination: the average British citizen, too, was granted voice
at Hyde Park.
Idealistic and Romantic liberalism had very much faded by the
second half of the nineteenth-century.
Byron had lost his life for the early cause of Greek independence, and
after the failed liberal uprisings of 1848, which spread like wildfire across
Europe, and even Britain, a new intellectual mood set in: conservatism combined
with science and biological determinism and realism. In fact, mid-nineteenth century Europe seems
to prove that conservative movements were better at nation-building than liberal
ones, certainly if we look to Bismarck in Germany and Garibaldi in Italy, developments
contemporaneous with Canada’s founding. Conservatism
also helps to explain: peace, order
and good government. Why presume that
Canada was immune to Europe’s new-found conservatism?
Instead of looking exclusively at Locke we should also
consider the twin impact of two nineteenth-century figures: Arthur de Gobineau, the father of racism, and Charles
Darwin, who had many antecedents.
Gobineau’s work, An Essay on the
Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) held to an exclusive biological
determinism, claiming that Aryan decadence followed from white miscegenation
with other races. Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in
1859 (the same year as John Stuart Mill’s classic On Liberty), and it was Herbert Spencer who popularized the phrase “the
survival of the fittest”, coining it in 1864. Neither Darwin nor Gobineau can
be excluded from Canada’s nineteenth century matrix, or have we forgotten the First Nations peoples, the Chinese “coolies”,
and the Eugenics movement?
Moreover, the emphasis on so-called “science” leant itself
to a form of determinism which made nation-building turn on notions of social discipline.
If we borrow from France at the turn of the last century, we learn that Maurice
Barrès articulated nationalism as “the acceptance of a determinism”, and this
dutiful tone goes some way in explaining the mood of 1867, certainly the notion
of “order” straddling our own trinitarian motto.[13]
Again, later in the century Kipling
considered it “white man’s burden” for Britain to rule over India; similarly, it
may have been the ‘responsibility’ of Canadians to join forces and partake in
the British North America Act. In other
words, Canada’s founding may have been instigated by non-individualistic and
non-thinking habits of mind, which helps to explain why Canadians have had, at
least until recently, such difficulty explaining their country to themselves.
So there was competition for Locke’s “influence” on Canada’s
founding. Similarly, there were
influences on Locke’s thinking that are not discussed by Ajzenstat. Cicero and the New Testament were the two
most important moral authorities for Locke, and Cicero’s influence can be found
in Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and the early Huguenot Resistance theories (again,
see my blog).[14] Significantly we find mention of Cicero in
Canada in the Senate’s Speaking Chambers (reconstructed after the fire of 1916),
where two Latin inscriptions (of six) bear reference to the Roman Senator. The two inscriptions with Cicero’s authorship
read: “It is the duty of the nobles to oppose the fickleness of the multitude”
and “Let reason prevail with me [us] more than popular opinion.” [15]
There is another inscription by Horace who is famous for his notion of “the
golden mean”. So the Latin inscriptions
offer insight into the classical - or more particularly Ciceronian - tradition
of the “middle” and “balance” which we find expressed in the role of the
Canadian Senate, originally conceived.
Looking to Ajzenstat, she sees Canada’s founding as a
watered-down expression of “popular sovereignty” supposedly derived from
Locke. But if we look to Locke, we see
popular sovereignty more truly as a means of checking the abuse of power and as
a right of resistance. And if we look to Cicero in Canada’s Senate, the idea of
popular sovereignty is itself prone to tyranny, not unlike a dictatorship, and
in Cicero’s case his opponent was Julius Caesar himself. In other words, Canada’s founding was not
primarily an act of “popular sovereignty” but an act that recreated the idea of
the “middle” and of “mixed government”. There was nothing truly “popular” about
“peace, order and good government”, and this trinitarianism clearly belongs to
a “middling” tradition begun by St. Augustine, aided by Cicero. Locke’s influence, in other words, may not have
been as strong as our religious traditions, and the nineteenth-century
educational system was still dominated by the classics. And we ought not to discount, as I have
suggested, the contemporaneous nineteenth-century impact of Gobineau and
Darwin.
So, likely, it is Canada that has failed Locke, and we have
two instances of apparent mistaken identities in the examples of Macpherson and
Ajzenstat. If Canadians were true
Lockeans, much more would have been said about the G20 police violence in
Toronto, and we would not have been prone to two prorogation crises under the
“Harper Government” whose predisposition for abuse of authority knows few
parallels in Canada.
Here are some selected samples of Locke to peruse and
consider:
On Police Violence at
Toronto’s G20 Summit, etc.
… Force without
Right, upon a Man’s Person, makes a State of War, both where there
is, and is not, a common Judge.[16]
But when the
actual force is over, the State of War ceases between those that are in
Society, and are equally on both sides Subjected to the fair determination of
the Law; because then there lies open the remedy of appeal for past injury, and
to prevent future harm: but where no such appeal is, as in the State of Nature,
for want of positive Laws, and Judges with Authority to appeal to, the State of War once begun, continues,
with a right to the innocent Party, to destroy the other whenever he can, until
the aggressor offers Peace, and desires reconciliation on such Terms, as
may repair any wrongs he has already done, and secure the innocent for the
future: nay where an appeal to the Law, and constituted Judges lies open,
but where the remedy is deny’d by a manifest perverting of Justice, and a
barefaced wrestling of the Laws, to protect or indemnifie the violence or
injuries of some Men, or Party of Men, there
it is hard to imagine any thing but a State of War. For wherever violence is used, and injury
done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and
injury, however colour’d with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end
whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiased application
of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made
upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left
to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven. [17]
To avoid this
State of War (wherein there is no appeal but to Heaven, and wherein every the
least difference is apt to end, where there is no Authority to decide between
the Contenders) is one great reason of
Mens putting themselves into Society …[18]
… where there is no
Law, there is no Freedom. For
Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be,
where there is no Law: But Freedom is not, as we are told, A liberty for every Man to do what he lists: (For who could be
free, when every other Man’s Humour might domineer over him?) But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he
lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, with the
Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the
arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own.[19]
On Toronto’s “G20
Secret Law”
… whatever form the Common-wealth is under, the Ruling Power
ought to govern by declared and received Laws, and not by extemporary Dictates
and undetermined Resolutions. [20]
~
… I say using Force upon a people without Authority, and
contrary to the Trust put in him, that does so, is a state of War with the
People, who have a right to reinstate
their Legislative in the Exercise of
their Power. For having erected a
Legislative, with an intent they should exercise the Power of making Laws,
either at certain set times, or when there is need of it; when they are hindr’d
by any force from, what is so necessary to the Society, and wherein the Safety
and preservation of the People consists, the people have a right to remove it
by force. In all States and Conditions the true remedy of Force without Authority, is to oppose Force to it. The use of force without Authority, always puts him
that uses it into a state of War, as
the Aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly.[21]
On Prorogued
Parliaments …
… When the Prince hinders the Legislative from assembling in
its due time, or from acting freely, pursuant to those ends, for which it was
Constituted, the Legislative is altered.
For ‘tis not a certain number of men, no, nor their meeting, unless they have
Freedom of debating, and Leisure of perfecting, what is for the good of the
Society wherein the Legislative consists: when these are taken away or altered,
so as to deprive the Society of the due exercise of their Power, the Legislative is truly altered.
For it is not Names, that Constitute Governments, but the use and
exercise of those Powers that were intended to accompany them; so that he who
takes away the Freedom, or hinders the acting of the Legislative in its due
seasons, in effect takes away the
Legislative, and puts an end to the Government.[22]
After “a long train of abuses” (see also the
American Declaration of Independence)
… Revolutions happen not upon every little
mismanagement in publick affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many
wrong and inconvenient Laws, and all the slips
of humane frailty will be borne by the
People, without mutiny or murmur.
But if a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all
tending the same way, make the design visible to the People, and they cannot
but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; ‘tis not to be
wonder’d, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule
into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at
first erected; and without which, ancient Names, and specious Forms, are so far
from being better, that they are much worse, than the state of Nature, or pure
Anarchy; the inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther
off and more difficult.[23]
“The People shall be Judge”
Here, ‘tis like, the common Question will be made, Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or
Legislative act contrary to their Trust? This, perhaps, ill affected and
factious Men may spread amongst the People, when the Prince only makes use of
his due Prerogative. To this I reply, The People shall be judge: for who shall
be Judge whether his Trustee or Deputy acts well, and according to the Trust
reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him have
still a Power to discard him, when he fails in his Trust? If this be reasonable in particular Cases of Private
Men, why should it be otherwise in that of the greatest moment; where the
Welfare of Millions is concerned, and also where the evil, if not prevented, is
greater, and the Redress very difficult, dear and dangerous? [24]
[1] John
Dunn, The Political Thought of John
Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of
Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), p. 5.
[2]
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 62,63.
[3]
Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke,
p. 235.
[4] For
some good historical context see David Wootton, Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche,
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), pp. 303-309.
[5]
Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke,
p. 216.
[6]
Dunn, Ibid., p. 48, pp. 152,3.
[7]
Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke,
p. 50.
[8] John
Locke, Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political
Thought, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
p. 288.
[9] Janet
Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament
(Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), p. xvi.
[10] Locke,
Two Treatises, p. 353. See also Locke’s “Peace, Quiet, and Property”
in Two Treatises, p. 359.
[11] E.
Royston Pike, Britain’s Prime Ministers:
From Walpole to Wilson (Feltham, Middlesex: Odhams Books, 1968), p. 263.
[12] Raymond
Williams, Culture and Materialism:
Selected Essays (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 5.
[13] Maurice
Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du
nationalisme, Vol I, (Paris: Plon, 1902), p. 10.
[14]
John Locke, Political Essays. Cambridge
Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 351.
[15]“Words
of Wisdom in the Senate Speaker’s Chambers,”
http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Senate/WordsOfWisdom/WordsOfWisdom-e.htm
[16]Locke,
Two Treatises of Government, p. 281. The Second Treatise, paragraph 19.
Emphasis added.
[17] Ibid., pp. 281,282. Second Treatise, paragraph 20. Emphasis added.
[18]Ibid., p. 282. Second Treatise, paragraph 21.
[19]Ibid., p. 306. Second Treatise, paragraph 57.
[20]Ibid., p. 360. Second Treatise, paragraph 137.
[21] Ibid., pp. 370,371. Second Treatise, paragraph 155.
[22] Ibid., p. 409. Second Treatise, paragraph 215.
[23] Ibid., p., 415. Second Treatise, paragraph 225.
[24] Ibid., p. 426,427. Second Treatise, paragraph 240.
