Locke
-Hobbes is important in outlining for us the concept of appetitive freedom, a new abstract equality, and the dynamics of insecurity and competition that emerge from this, and in illustrating how this is bound up both with the new scientific world view, and a new value system that rejects the elitism of the ancients and reifies ordinary life
However, he also comes up with political conclusions that are unacceptable, both in his own time and now.
Historically, Locke’s positive political thought is far more influential than Hobbes’s in the development of liberal democracies. How so?
1. His moral orientation towards hard work and accumulation continue to be decisive in North America and Britain, particularly in an era of neo-conservatism. Ie. The Protestant Work Ethic. Furthermore, the basis of this moral orientation is fundamentally religious in character, as we can show. This religious orientation continues to operate at the core of modern capitalism, yet without any consciousness of it, even though it has now become at least partially irrational and problematic.
2. His doctrine of private property and the ethics behind it are foundational to capitalist societies, and articulate the logic through which a formal doctrine of equality, which characterizes Hobbes and Locke and modern societies, turns in fact into a justification for a new kind of inequality based largely on economic class.
3. Relatedly, his thinking formed a significant part of the justification of the exclusion of the working class from political rights historically, and parts of this thinking had to be overcome in theorizing the extension of the franchise after the industrial revolution and the rise of the working class movement in the 19th century. Other forms of disenfranchisement of the working class, such as the lack of recognition of a justification for working class rights, like forming unions, are also present in his thought and have reemerged today in an era of neo-conservatism, along the same lines of logic.
4. His justification for private property logically entails the dispossession of the aboriginal peoples and the justification of African slavery. It was in line with actual arguments being made by settlers in the new world in order to argue for the absence of aboriginal title to the land so that the land would be free for white settlers—terre nullius. Furthermore, Locke’s argument itself was used historically in this way. His doctrine of property is essentially expansionist and racist, and thus deeply imbedded in the colonial history of North America.
5. His instrumental understanding of the nuclear family and the tacit subordination of the sphere of “reproduction” to the sphere of “production,” implicit in his value system, has had huge implications for the subordination of women, right up to and beyond the 2nd wave of the women’s movement, which was largely Lockean in character and which still has not come to grips with the work that traditional women did and which is now constituting the double day of labour in working families.
6. The instrumental relationship to nature central to his political philosophy continues to be bound up with contemporary capitalist societies even as it is increasingly being brought into question.
Thus Locke’s political philosophy, while not completely dominant, continues to remain fundamental to our current system, and marks our history dramatically.
The foundation of all of these features of Locke’s thought, which differentiate him from Hobbes, is his articulation of a new morality upon which to found the modern political community.
Locke is not writing 2nd Treatise explicitly against Hobbes, although it has historically been taken in terms of its relationship thereto, but against Filmer and an absolute, authoritarian govt.
-Locke’s connection to the Whigs
-difference between patriarchal conception of political authority and the fraternal conception of the social contract tradition
-includes Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and other modern thinkers
-medeival society patriarachal in sense of an absolute ruling authority divined by God—people born into that relationship to the authority as the son is to the father and it continues throughout their life
-Aristotle and Plato also writing in a patriarchal context in the sense that the laws and customs of the society are taken as given, the individual is born into them and is taught them by the elders. There is no questioning of that tradition or of customs. Even though Plato with Socrates is engaging in rational questioning it is still in order to find a rational basis to support the customary morality, not to create an altogether new political community.
The social contract thinkers are different in the sense that they begin from the idea of the individual as broken from community and as free. Political authority is thus not something given to which they must automatically submit, the way a son submits to a father, but is something to which we must give our consent. The idea of the contract symbolizes this notion that political authority now requires the consent of the individual in order to be legitimate. This puts all (male anyway) individuals on an equal footing, for all must find their own reasons to give their consent. And the political community is generated and reproduced through that ongoing process of consent.
Note: Freud symbolizes this shift from a patriarchal to a fraternal understanding of political authority in Totem and Taboo, when he portrays the sons in the primal horde as killing the father and then establishing their own community.
In Hobbes the consent is the consent to legitimize an absolute sovereign in order to get out of the horrible state of nature. Hence Hobbes has much in common with the absolutism of the feudal regimes. However it is different because of the way in which it conceives the legitimation of this regime, and thus he stands firmly in the social contract tradition.
Locke embarks on a new trajectory from Hobbes within the social contract tradition. Instead of saying that the state of nature is a state of war, he posits a natural morality, which implies a moral community that predates political society. The alternative is not between an absolute sovereign and a horrible anarchic state of nature. Rather the natural state is one of moral community, with a moral law to govern it that people rationally and naturally observe. It is only to correct the deficiencies in this community that govt. will be instituted. And it is only when “bad” people go against the moral law that there is war. The natural state is one of peace. It is a pre-political moral community where individuals have the capacity to live in harmony with one another.
It is this morality that stands at the basis of his possibility to make an argument for a natural right to private property, and it is this difference that stands at the root of his argument for limited govt.. These arguments for a right to property and for limited government are his two most famous political doctrines. And this is fundamentally significant because it paints the logic for any theory of democracy, however limited, in the modern tradition. In order to escape Hobbes’s conclusions, that modern individual freedom requires an authoritarian sovereign, one must be able to make the argument that individuals are moral in a substantial sense, that they have the capacity to be self-governing, and that the return to a state of nature is thus not the worst possible thing imaginable. It is conceivable to overthrow a dictatorial regime and institute a form of government that is more expressive of and responsive to a community of moral citizens.
Hence Locke, in his own time, was progressive, in the sense that he went against the argument of absolute monarchy and of patriarchal law, in constructing his argument against Filmer in the Second Treatise. From our historical vantage point, of course, he was extraordinarly limited in many of his ideas and it is because of the extremely narrow and ascetic nature of his moral conception that this was the case. Subsequent thinkers like Rousseau, Kant and Hegel reconstituted and broadened his idea of morality and hence escape some of the fundamental problems that we find in Locke, and offer a much more substantial basis for the modern democratic community. Yet Locke constitutes the historical marking point for the idea that a modern political community must be founded on a new moral constellation.
Hence let us look in more detail at the particular idea of morality in Locke’s Second Treatise, from which the rest of his arguments and the character of his political community follow.
Locke portrays the natural law that is the basis of this moral community in ch. 2 of 2nd Treatise. Depicts the state of nature with the 2 premises of equality and freedom that Hobbes begins from. Differs dramatically when he goes on to state that (p.6)—para. 6. “though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of` licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself……see rest.
-4 main articles:
1. do not harm others
2. preserve oneself
3. do what you can to preserve mankind when your own preservation “comes not in competition”
4. do not destroy any creature in one’s possession “but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it” (i.e. human use and consumption). An argument against wanton destructiveness and waste.
On what does Locke base this natural morality? It is unclear. Locke works from within the same ontology as Hobbes (appetitive). Hobbes found only prudence. Locke wants to say that the laws of nature are not mere prudential advice about how to survive, but are actually moral obligations that come from God and that we are obliged to obey. If we do not, then we are bad or evil, not merely unwise. Yet how does he accomplish this?
What is clear from this statement is that this is a religious conception, which differentiates it fundamentally from Hobbes’s conception of our natural state. We understand ourselves fundamentally as in a relationship to God and as bound to follow out his purposes for us. It is not a question of mere Instinct, but of obligation. It is a genuinely moral conception in this sense. But not only that, it is Christian. Dunn describes Locke’s state of nature as “saturated with Christian assumptions,” right down to the very assertion that we are all born free and equal.
What is particularly peculiar about Locke’s assertion of a religious law governing us at our most fundamental level is that it is paired with an empirical ontology. Locke’s most important philosophical essay, An Essay on Human Understanding, is famous today for it’s statement that the human mind if originally a tabula rasa, a blank slate which acquires knowledge only through experience (just like Hobbes). Yet at the same time he is positing a natural law doctrine.
For Locke, it is “reason” which “is that law” and “teaches all mankind, who will but consult it”. But Hobbes had reached a different conclusion.
(According to Dunn, Locke was never able to work out this inconsistency in his own thought. His attempts to do so in the Essay and in the essay “the Reasonableness of the Christian Religion” are both failures. He seemed to think that most people could understand natural law through reason, although many would need coercive force to obey it. This has been used by many commentators like Macpherson and Strauss to argue that Locke is really Hobbes in disguise, and that he’s not serious about his own morality. But I take Dunn’s stance that it is simply a conviction that Locke could not logically work out from within the framework of an empiricist psychology. Hence it is highly significant that Rousseau and the others later seek to ground morality in a deductive manner, by showing the limits of empirical knowledge and locating morality on the other side of that limit).
At any rate, we can safely say that this is a Christian idea of the moral community that Locke’s political philosophy is grounded upon. Furthermore, as we analyze the meaning of the natural law in practice, as it is logically developed in the next chapters, we can see that is in fact a Puritan Christian orientation that he is espousing.
But then why should we care about it at all, from our vantage point today, since most of us would not accept this? Because it is this moral orientation that is central in the historical development of the kind of society we live in today, and which, I would argue, is still operative at an unconscious level in this society.
What we can see notably at the beginning in this moral community is that there is a truncation of the Greek idea of a higher life. Rather the end of life becomes merely self-preservation.
-theoretically allows for the infinite expansion of this category of self-preservation to mean limitless accumulation. No natural limit on self-preservation—can be interpreted to mean the more and more you have the better you are preserving yourself. (vs. the Greeks you just meet your needs in order to go forth into the public sphere). In Locke’s thought this is of course borne out as we shall see in the analysis of chap. 5.
