John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (review)

Mr. Forster’s ending, “Locke and Us,” is his beginning; he has turned to Locke not for historical or philosophic study, but because his “ultimate purpose has obviously been political.” John Rawls’s efforts in Political Liberalism are both most akin and most different from Mr. Forster’s. Like Rawls, he wants a liberal political theory, a theory of limited government, which can achieve consensus and establish authority while uniting rather than exacerbating the various lines of cleavage already present in modern societies. Rawls and many contemporary liberal theorists seek such consensus and authority along a path of neutralism by developing “political theories” in Mr. Rawls’s special sense, which avoid any commitment on the fundamental or comprehensive moral, religious, or metaphysical doctrines that divide the populace. Mr. Forster, by contrast, eschews neutralism, and in particular the attempt to ground a theory of liberal politics in thoroughly secular commitments. Instead, he looks to Locke for a comprehensive doctrine, one that attempts to articulate deep truths about morality and politics, grounded in the divine. Mr. Forster’s book, in other words, garbed in the history of political philosophy, ambitiously speaks to our politics.

As a study in the history of philosophy, Mr. Forster’s book is remarkably comprehensive. Drawing on nearly all of Locke’s important works, including the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Reasonableness of Christianity, the Two Treatises of Government, and the Letter Concerning Toleration, he treats Locke as epistemologist, theologian, and political philosopher. In his hands, these are not separate or fragmented Lockes, but different elements in a single moral and political doctrine of integrity and wholeness.

Mr. Forster also fully examines the very large body of literature on Locke, closely examining the approach pioneered by Leo Strauss, as well as the literature by the so-called Cambridge school. The large issue that divides these two schools of interpretation is the role of religion in Locke’s thinking. The Straussians present Locke as an anti-religious thinker, despite Locke’s many more or less orthodox religious statements. The Cambridge writers, led by John Dunn, anchor Locke’s philosophy unshakably in his religious views and commitments. For Mr. Forster, Locke is a religious thinker, but he rejects the conclusion drawn by many who see Locke that way; in the words of Dunn’s 1969 pioneering study of Locke, “I simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters.” Dunn later stepped back from that sweeping claim, but for Mr. Forster, Locke is relevant to us precisely because of his religious grounding.

In Mr. Forster’s view, Dunn’s insight puts us on the track to understanding correctly the historical Locke and at the same time to see that this historical Locke has the theory of political authority that is both true and speaks to our present political needs. Mr. Forster’s purpose is “to show, with guidance from Locke, how liberalism can be built on a moral foundation that includes an account of the divine without becoming illiberal, irrational, or exclusionary.”

He expresses his chief insight into Locke and his chief hoped-for reorientation of our politics in his idea of a “politics of moral consensus.” The idea of such a politics points to another dimension of the book’s comprehensiveness. Unlike many who see in Locke a tension or even contradiction between reason and revelation or faith, he finds a “partnership between reason and faith to build a political theory based on the potential for moral consensus.”

The way in which that partnership builds to the politics of moral consensus provides Mr. Forster’s chief theme. Moral consensus is in turn the vehicle for resolving “the all-important problem for politics,” authority. Authority is “all-important,” for it endows rulers with the right to govern, or, otherwise put, authority implies the moral obligation to obey. Because authority is definitive for political life, political theory is inescapably moral...