America's Liberal Education

Gillian Brown. The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 237pp. Illustrations, notes and index. $49.95.

John Locke is back. After being buried under an imposing mass of historiography, which asserted the primacy of civic republicanism in American life, the seventeenth-century philosopher has risen again. But he returns not as he departed. His recent scholarly incarnations suggest that his individualism was not as possessive, nor his Reason as instrumental, as they were once thought to be. John Locke has returned as an advocate for consensual relationships, a champion of virtue, and a redeemer of innocent children. Some may still recall his swashbuckling libertarian days with a faint nostalgia, but for an increasing number of historians, Locke has indeed been reborn as a godly, pragmatic liberal.

The rehabilitated John Locke plays a central role in Gillian Brown's The Consent of the Governed, which traces the career of consent in early America. Brown's book offers imaginative readings of the eighteenth-century texts that educated young minds for a lifetime of consensual relationships. As Brown sees it, Locke's formidable influence in American culture owed much to the fact that he treated norms and institutions as conventions, as things people had agreed to create. Colonial Americans rehearsed this notion as children and acted upon it as adults. Since the eighteenth century, the consent of the governed has remained the one indisputable source of authority in American life. But the nation's Lockean legacy has always been plagued by contradiction. Indeed, long before the Constitution was drafted and long after it was ratified, the ambiguities of consent occupied a prominent place in the American imagination. Brown points out that the United States was formed upon the astonishing pretense that its institutions had received the consent of the American "People." If the objections were not always explicitly raised, they could hardly be avoided: Who were the "People" and how could they all consent? Did every social group--including women, Indians, children, the unpropertied--have the right to consent? And what about slavery? When had African-American slaves relinquished the right to direct their work? These were not trivial issues for a newly formed, slaveowning, representative democracy. Those questions that were suppressed or ignored--slavery and women's suffrage are only just two such examples--haunted American politics from the early nineteenth century onward. Brown's book investigates the "aesthetic labors" that taught Americans how to reevaluate even their most deeply entrenched social arrangements (p. 13).

Brown is much less interested in the direct influence of Locke's books than she is in the indirect impact of the paradigms he shaped. ¹ This approach to the "Lockean legacy" possesses a venerable genealogy. Nearly half a century ago, Louis Hartz contended that America was Lockean before any American had read John Locke. For Hartz, Locke's thought was so intricately woven into American culture that it hardly required demonstration. ² In 1990, Steven Dworetz argued that Revolutionary era writing was "distinctively Lockean." Dworetz claimed that Locke's influence could be established even in the absence of direct references to his work (though he found plenty of them). ³ More recently, Mary Beth Norton concluded that colonial Americans had begun to embrace the Lockean notion of divided power before Locke wrote his most influential tracts. ⁴ Like Hartz, Dworetz, and Norton, Brown is not particularly interested in locating the countless eighteenth-century citations to "the celebrated Mr. Locke." ⁵ Instead, she scrutinizes the Lockean reading strategies through which eighteenth-century individuals learned to consent.

Locke's influence on educational practices was certainly immense. His Thoughts Concerning Education became "probably the most widely read and instituted pedagogical theory in eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture" (p. 36). Together with his well-known Two Treatises of Government, Locke's Thoughts molded eighteenth-century understandings of household authority. Brown argues that Locke found absolute patriarchy no more appropriate to household rule than civil government. The...