Market Society and Meaning in Locke's Political Philosophy

Market Society and Meaning in Locke's Political Philosophy* E. J. HUNDERT LOCKE HAS TENDED TO LEAD separate, if not completely distinct lives in the history of political philosophy. According to one set of accounts, 1he expounded the liberal doctrine of constitutional guarantees for the maintenance of individual liberties , and defined the role of "government by consent" in contriving a legitimate polity. This was the view of Locke's adherents in the English-speaking world after the American Revolution, of some of the French philosophes and their continental associates after about 1750 and, in part, of his most subtle early opponents, Viscount Bolingbroke and Charles Leslie? Another set of accounts maintains that liberalism's most distinctive feature is its assertion of individual, pre-political property rights, and views this claim as part of a comprehensive social philosophy of the individual's place in society. Nineteenth-century radicals and reactionaries both often shared these opinions. They saw Locke providing in The Second Treatise philosophical foundations for the bourgeois, and hence liberal theory of society. Marx said that it was "the classical expression of bourgeois society's ideas of right against Feudal society, ''3 while George Fitzhugh, the most articulate defender of American slavery, thought that virtually all "modern social reformers.., proceding upon the theory of Locke... propose to dissolve and disintegrate society. TM Each of these readings has ample textual support, but the "constitutionalist" interpretation seems the least convincing historically. Its narrow focus of concern almost precludes a way to comprehend how Locke, the defender of natural liberties against intrusions by government, the man who claimed that all men were born free, in "a State of Equality," could at the same time argue for strict governmental regulation of economic life, and propose a policy of hard labor, whipping and even torture for that large segment of the population which he thought led an animal existence and were *A slightlydifferent version of this paper was presented to The Society For the Study of the History of Philosophy at Northwestern University,Evanston, Illinois,on April 26, 1975.I wishto thank members of The Society, and particularly Paul J. Johnson, California State College, San Bernardino, for their comments and criticisms. For example, J. W. Gough,John Locke's Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1956);and M. Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1968). 2See LouisHartz, The Liberal Tradition inAmerica (NewYork, 1955);Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (London, 1970),passim; Viscount Bolingbroke, The Philosophical Essays, Fragment XIII, in Works (Philadelphia, 1841),vol. IV; and Charles Leslie, The Finishing Stroke (1711), the first systematic criticism of The Second Treatise. 3Karl Marx, Theories of SurlHus Value (Moscow, n.d.), p. 356; see also, pp. 354-355. 4 Cannibals All, ed. C. Van Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 71, cited in John Dunn, "The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century," in John Yolton, ed.,John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1969),pp. 78-79,n. 5, [331 34 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY prone to idleness, irrational outburst and riot s Moreover, Locke's views about the poor were, if anything, conventional at the time he expressed them. No one, to my knowledge, thought these ideas contradicted his politics until the very end of the eighteenth century when the terms "liberal," "liberalism," and "liberalist" acquired their modern meanings6and Locke was appropriated as the philosophical instructor of the "school" to which Mill, for example, said he belonged in the essay on "Coleridge" (1840). Before about 1790, English government publicists, and even Burke, gave Locke's name the official stamp of the distinctly illiberal Whig oligarchy ,7while Opposition ideologues wrote in the political language of Cicero, Machiavelli , Harrington and Montesquieu rather than Locke's? In America this same constellation of "republican" ideas which championed "virtue" over and against "acquisitiveness" and "commerce" had an even greater force. It set the terms of political debate well into the Revolutionary period. Madison's argument in Federalist Paper no. 10 then took on the status of official doctrine, enlarged into the nineteenthcentury mythology of a liberal American political tradition whose sources were almost completely Lockean. Government, in this view, could not control acquisitiveness -the source of faction--but was obliged...