Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke's Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction

In The Sociology of Culture, Raymond Williams traces the "modern" (or sociological) meaning of "culture" to Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose late eighteenth-century usage denotes the attitudes and customs—or "spirit"—of a people; but for Williams, the real watershed in the history of the term occurs somewhat later, in the nineteenth century, when comparative anthropologists begin to make enquiries into the "formative or determining elements" of various cultures.¹ The importance of this moment, Williams implies, lies in a clear shift toward an understanding of cultural practices as "constitutive," as integral to the reproduction of culture.² Williams's etymology, in effect, marks out the historical era during which the term "culture" emerges and develops to maturity as a critical concept. Prior to Herder and nineteenth-century anthropologists, he contends, "culture" designates one form or another of cultivation: tending to plants, breeding animals, or—by logical extension—educating human beings; that is, the word exists primarily as a general-usage "noun of process," not as a critically oriented "noun of configuration or generalization."³

Williams's famous genealogy of culture in Culture and Society notwithstanding, one might conclude from his etymological argument in The Sociology of Culture alone that, as a theoretical concept, culture has its strongest roots in the nineteenth century; and, arguably, it does. However, Williams goes on to observe that the critical impulse toward cultural science stretches as far back as Giambattista Vico, whose New Science urges the reflexive study of civil society during the early eighteenth century. Shifting from etymology to genealogy, Williams ventures to describe some of culture's conceptual precursors: Vico's inquiry into the "'principles'" of society he likens to the analysis of "cultural forms," Vico's interest in the social "'modifications of our own human mind'" to a concern with "social development" (or, in more recent critical parlance, with cultural reproduction).⁴ Williams recognizes a possible prehistory of the cultural sciences elsewhere than within the narrow confines of a word and briefly sketches out theoretical precedents in the study of what critics would ultimately call "culture." His line of reasoning here allows that cultural science, in some salient respects, predates the introduction of culture as its fundamental analytical distinction—that thinkers such as Vico may have sought after culture before it was found, so to speak.

Williams gestures toward early developments of culture within an indistinct but materializing critical tradition and, consistent with his overall approach to intellectual history, treats the evolution of the concept as part of a long revolution growing out of the Enlightenment and the advent of modernity.⁵ Needless to say, this richly suggestive moment in his work raises a host of questions of continuing interest to cultural critics. Foremost among them: did other Enlightenment thinkers besides Vico act as early proponents of cultural science? On what grounds could their intellectual work be said to stand in the lineage of the cultural sciences or even of cultural studies? What concepts or experimental methodologies did they advance? To what ends?

In this essay, I will take up these general questions about the prehistory of cultural science with regard to the theories of a specific thinker: John Locke. Not infrequently characterized as an early psychologist or as a rigidly atomistic individualist, Locke may seem improbable as a key figure in the history of the concept of culture.⁶ However, it is my contention that An Essay concerning Human Understanding—especially when considered in conjunction with such lesser-studied tracts as Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Conduct of the Understanding—advances an early, if not the earliest, theory of cultural reproduction in the Western tradition.⁷

Two epistemological gambits lay the foundation for Locke's cultural turn. First, he alters the philosophical conception of custom, or habitual knowledge and practice. Such forebears as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes tend to construct custom as anything from a hopeless to an abject category, aligning it with chance, superstition, and faulty common knowledge. They view systematic philosophy as its better, as a distinct or scientific register of intellectual activity defined by critical...