Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man

by Andrew Lynn

  Sixthly, that it is an inconvenience in monarchy that the sovereignty may descend upon an infant, or one that cannot discern between good and evil: and consisteth in this, that the use of his power must be in the hand of another man, or of some assembly of men, which are to govern by his right and in his name as curators and protectors of his person and authority. But to say there is inconvenience in putting the use of the sovereign power into the hand of a man, or an assembly of men, is to say that all government is more inconvenient than confusion and civil war. And therefore all the danger that can be pretended must arise from the contention of those that, for an office of so great honour and profit, may become competitors. To make it appear that this inconvenience proceedeth not from that form of government we call monarchy, we are to consider that the precedent monarch hath appointed who shall have the tuition of his infant successor, either expressly by testament, or tacitly by not controlling the custom in that case received: and then such inconvenience, if it happen, is to be attributed, not to the monarchy, but to the ambition and injustice of the subjects, which in all kinds of government, where the people are not well instructed in their duty and the rights of sovereignty, is the same. Or else the precedent monarch hath not at all taken order for such tuition; and then the law of nature hath provided this sufficient rule, that the tuition shall be in him that hath by nature most interest in the preservation of the authority of the infant, and to whom least benefit can accrue by his death or diminution. For seeing every man by nature seeketh his own benefit and promotion, to put an infant into the power of those that can promote themselves by his destruction or damage is not tuition, but treachery. So that sufficient provision being taken against all just quarrel about the government under a child, if any contention arise to the disturbance of the public peace, it is not to be attributed to the form of monarchy, but to the ambition of subjects and ignorance of their duty. On the other side, there is no great Commonwealth, the sovereignty whereof is in a great assembly, which is not, as to consultations of peace, and war, and making of laws, in the same condition as if the government were in a child. For as a child wants the judgment to dissent from counsel given him, and is thereby necessitated to take the advice of them, or him, to whom he is committed; so an assembly wanteth the liberty to dissent from the counsel of the major part, be it good or bad. And as a child has need of a tutor, or protector, to preserve his person and authority; so also in great Commonwealths the sovereign assembly, in all great dangers and troubles, have need of custodes libertatis; that is, of dictators, or protectors of their authority; which are as much as temporary monarchs to whom for a time they may commit the entire exercise of their power; and have, at the end of that time, been oftener deprived thereof than infant kings by their protectors, regents, or any other tutors.

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  J.C.A. Gaskin, ‘Introduction,' in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xv. ↵

  5

  John Locke, Second Treatise of Government & A Letter Concerning Toleration

  Introduction

  If anyone is considered to be the philosophical figurehead of early liberalism, it is John Locke (1632-1704). Locke’s work, and the work of those who followed in his footsteps, is for this reason of the first importance to the Western world even today, since we also march (or believe we march) under the banner of liberalism. To really understand Locke, then, is to understand something of ourselves. Likewise, it is through exploring what in Locke we find unacceptable, or simply unfathomable, that we can begin to learn how far the current era is from liberalism in its traditional forms, and how many of the political attitudes that we are taught to believe today come from quite different origins altogether.

  Locke was the son of a Puritan who fought for Parliament in the English Civil War. Going up to Oxford in the time of Cromwell, he studied medicine, which brought him into contact with Lord Shaftesbury, the radical peer, when Shaftesbury needed surgery for an abscess of the liver. Shaftesbury became Locke’s patron and converted him to liberalism. When Shaftesbury briefly occupied the role of Lord Chancellor, Locke followed him into government as secretary to the Board of Trade. Determined, however, to prevent King Charles II’s openly Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (later King James II), from ascending the throne, Shaftesbury promoted the ‘exclusion bill’ that, rejected by the House of Lords, led to him falling out of favour with Charles and fleeing to Holland, taking Locke with him. When James II came to power he proceeded to promote Roman Catholics to positions of authority in the kingdom, which gave rise to mounting opposition. On the invitation of a group of English nobles, William of Orange, a nephew of James who had married James’ daughter, Mary, arrived in England with an army, and James fled. The Parliament convened by William declared that James had abdicated, decided that Mary should be Queen and William rule alongside her, and passed a Declaration of Right (restated in statutory form in the Bill of Rights). This ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 allowed Locke to return to England and take up his post again at the Board of Trade. This was the period in which he published the works for which he is now best known, all of which appeared in quick succession: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689), and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). He died on 28 October 1704. But his ideas would live on—most notably in the achievements of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

  Locke’s political philosophy, like that of Hobbes, rests on his concept of the ‘state of nature’. Locke’s ‘state of nature’, however, has very little in common with Hobbes’ perpetual war of all against all. In his Second Treatise of Government he defines the ‘state of nature’ as the ‘state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.’ Such ‘perfect freedom’ to act without obtaining anyone else’s consent is a state of liberty, but it is not a state of licence. The state of nature is constituted by men living together without a common superior on earth and with no authority to judge between them, but living nevertheless ‘according to reason’; while man in the state of nature is free to act independently of other men, he nevertheless remains subject to the ‘law of nature’.

  In fact, it is precisely through the exercise of reason that we are able to identify the natural law and its precepts. ‘The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,’ says Locke, ‘and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.’ Locke’s reasoning process and the outlines of his law of nature are, broadly speaking, as follows. The starting point is that we are born free to dispose of our persons and possessions as we see fit, independently of other men. We are also, Locke added, born in a state of equality, where we all have the same faculties and advantages of nature and where all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal. Since we are, however, created beings, and therefore the property of our creator, the law of nature requires us to preserve ourselves; moreover, except when our own preservation is at stake, we ought as far as we can to preserve the rest of mankind, and ‘may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.’

  The state of nature nevertheless gives rise to inconveniences. The principal difficulty, of course, is that in the state of nature each man is judge in his own cause. As a result, men come together to form governments to administer settled law and provide judges to adjudicate impartially upon it. They do this by way of a ‘social contract’, through which the people constitute themselves as a people and put themselves under a government. Crucially—and this is where Locke’s account differs fundamentally from that of Hobbes—the governme
nt is a party to the contract: it is bound by its terms and can justly be resisted if it fails to abide by them.

  It is no surprise that Locke is widely considered to be the founding father of political liberalism and, indeed, there is much in Locke that remains widely accepted today. We share with him the view that government’s legitimacy originates in the people. We share with him the view that there are natural laws which underpin the best of our man-made laws and serve as inspiration for making those man-made laws better. And we generally agree that men are equal, at least in their political rights, and that we should not impair the lives, liberties, and property of others, except in effecting punishment according to the law.

  What is less often acknowledged is just how far we have come from Lockean first principles. In some respects this is palpable to anyone who applies their mind not only to what is said but also to what is presumed: Locke’s support for democracy and majority rule, for example, was premised upon the assumption—one that was widely held until the nineteenth century—that women and men without property would be excluded from the franchise, for reasons that Locke would have thought obvious but which appear for the most part unfathomable to us today. In other respects, however, the differences are subtle and manifold, albeit no less profound. Where Locke had argued that the government is not entitled to take from any man any part of his property without his consent, and indeed that the very point of government is the preservation of men’s property, we must remember that in his era there was no income tax, no inheritance tax, and no purchase or value-added tax. Locke would, no doubt, have looked askance on the onerous tax burden borne by working men and women in modern Western democracies—levied in order to advance a whole range of social projects that have little or nothing to do with protecting life, liberty, or property. Locke would have been equally perturbed, one would imagine, by the restrictions imposed on our liberties by new and invasive forms of social control, from surveillance and censorship to secret courts and speech crimes. We are discomfited by certain of Locke’s blind spots; he would have been equally discomfited by many of ours.

  Locke’s work remains, nevertheless, of the greatest significance today, not least by virtue of his having identified where the parameters of liberty must lie. What is crucial is the distinction he draws between liberty and licence. Liberty is the right to dispose of oneself and one’s possessions without interference; licence, on the other hand, means stepping outside the laws of nature by engaging in activities that ‘take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another’ beyond what may be strictly necessary in the pursuit of justice or self-preservation. In this view, we are entitled to our lives and property, but we are not entitled to impair (or engage in activities that tend to impair) the lives, health, or property of others. It can readily be seen that this in practice grants the most valuable of rights—the right to live free from interference—while at the same time imposing the most stringent of responsibilities in our treatment of others.

  Relatedly, while a state ought to practise tolerance, it ought not to do so naively or recklessly. The state is not obliged to tolerate opinions contrary to human society or contrary to the rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society: this would rule out anarchism and revolutionary socialism. The state is not obliged to tolerate those who arrogate to themselves or their group, albeit secretly, some peculiar power or privilege, by holding that they do not need to keep promises to heretics or that dominion of all things belongs only to themselves; nor is the state obliged to tolerate those who challenge civil and political authority on the basis or pretence of religion. The state is not obliged to tolerate those who are themselves intolerant. It is not obliged to tolerate those who owe loyalty to a foreign sovereign. And it is not obliged to tolerate atheists.

  Locke’s greatest value, for the modern man, is that he reminds us, as citizens, of our native authority—that governments are entitled to rule by virtue of the consent on the people and in accordance with the terms of the social contract under which they take office. When a ruling cabal violates that contract it declares war on its people which entitles that people to take steps reconstitute the government. This takes the form of a revolution that is also a renovation: the purpose is to return government to its proper position so that it may exercise its powers within the proper bounds; it is not intended that revolution be instigated merely to advance particular social and political agendas. But it is revolution all the same, and there may come a time when it is not only justified, but also necessary.

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  Second Treatise of Government

  Chapter II

  Of the State of Nature

  Sect. 4. To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

  A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

  Sect. 5. This equality of men by nature, the judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in itself, and beyond all question, that he makes it the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men on which he builds the duties they owe one another, and from whence he derives the great maxims of justice and charity. His words are:

  The like natural inducement hath brought men to know that it is no less their duty, to love others than themselves; for seeing those things which are equal, must needs all have one measure; if I cannot but wish to receive good, even as much at every man’s hands, as any man can wish unto his own soul, how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other men, being of one and the same nature? To have any thing offered them repugnant to this desire, must needs in all respects grieve them as much as me; so that if I do harm, I must look to suffer, there being no reason that others should shew greater measure of love to me, than they have by me shewed unto them: my desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to them-ward fully the like affection; from which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn, for direction of life, no man is ignorant, Eccl. Pol. Lib. 1.

  Sect. 6. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure; and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s. Everyone,
as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another. …

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  A Letter Concerning Toleration

  …But some may ask: ‘What if the magistrate should enjoin anything by his authority that appears unlawful to the conscience of a private person?’ I answer that, if government be faithfully administered and the counsels of the magistrates be indeed directed to the public good, this will seldom happen. But if, perhaps, it do so fall out, I say, that such a private person is to abstain from the action that he judges unlawful, and he is to undergo the punishment which it is not unlawful for him to bear. For the private judgment of any person concerning a law enacted in political matters, for the public good, does not take away the obligation of that law, nor deserve a dispensation. But if the law, indeed, be concerning things that lie not within the verge of the magistrate’s authority (as, for example, that the people, or any party amongst them, should be compelled to embrace a strange religion, and join in the worship and ceremonies of another church), men are not in these cases obliged by that law, against their consciences. For the political society is instituted for no other end, but only to secure every man’s possession of the things of this life. The care of each man’s soul and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self. Thus the safeguard of men’s lives and of the things that belong unto this life is the business of the commonwealth; and the preserving of those things unto their owners is the duty of the magistrate. And therefore the magistrate cannot take away these worldly things from this man or party and give them to that; nor change propriety amongst fellow subjects (no not even by a law), for a cause that has no relation to the end of civil government, I mean for their religion, which whether it be true or false does no prejudice to the worldly concerns of their fellow subjects, which are the things that only belong unto the care of the commonwealth.