An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (review)

BOOK REVXEWS 345 James Tully. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Ideas in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 333- Cloth, $59.95. Paper , $18.95. There seem to be several reasons why James Tully has pluralized "context" in the title of his collection of essays on Locke (which is # 25 in the contextualizing series edited by Quentin Skinner). Aside from wanting to establish both historical settings and contemporary philosophical contexts for Locke's work, Tully wants to break up any simple, unified picture of the world Locke experienced and acted within that might be implied by putting Locke "in context." Further, even when Tully is engaged in providing a strictly historical context, he attempts, I believe, to travel somewhat beyond the bounds laid down in Skinner's methodological writings (which Tully has edited and declared his allegiance to), thus further expanding the Skinnerian meaning of "context" to include something more like a subcontext. In at least one;essay, he ventures past a recovery of what Locke clearly intended to do in his text (or what problems he meant to solve) toward uncovering what the language of the text may have done of its own accord, without any clear indication of intent from the author. The resulting book is not simply a pastiche of Locke studies in which contemporary concerns mingle with the indeterminate meanings of three-hundred-year-old texts, but rather a convincing and valuable illustration of Locke's shaping influence on a variety of structured "forms of life" whose long-term histories form part of our modern, Western identities (Tully seeks filiation at various points with Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Charles Taylor, while distancing himself from Rorty and Derrida). These can be divided into Locke's involvement in the following linked areas: 1) the constitution of the modern state, 2) the separation of church and state, 3) the construction of the mercantilist economy and the development of the discipline of political economy, 4) colonization and the displacement of Amerindian culture, and 5) the development of the penalized self. By laying out the problem in this fashion, Tully absolves himself of having to ask the anachronistic Whig questions (which, among others, David Wootton has recently belabored ): In what sense was Locke the father of liberalism, and when in his career was he really a liberal? On the other hand, he can accept the notion (which Chomsky and others have put forward) that the malleable self of empiricism served the disciplinary regime of the mercantilist state, without begrudging Locke a sympathetic appreciation of his work as a natural rights theorist--work which, according to Tully, is still useful (chapter 9). Though Tully does not attempt a systematic articulation of what might be called a mercantilist episteme, linking Locke's stances on all the various issues to his epistemology , the possibility comes through clearly enough to suggest (especially in "Governing Conduct") that we need no longer see Locke as a committed radical who at times caved in to conservative pressures from his employers (the view of Richard Ashcraft). The mature Locke that emerges in these pages was self-consistent as a demolisher of the old absolutist, theocratic order and an architect of the new order we still partially inhabit-one with freedoms we cherish, penalties we dread, and work we must all do. It is not as though Tully forgives Locke for opinions we find odious. In fact, in his "Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights," he charges Locke 346 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:~ APRIL 1995 with developing a theory which gave the green light to massive dispossession in the Americas. Since this is the chapter that goes most clearly beyond Locke's explicitly intended meaning, he may be less forgiving than is necessary. His argument is that Locke did not consider the Amerindian relationship with the land as industrious, making the land they lived on in effect "waste" which could therefore be rightfully taken over by industrious European agriculturalists. Tully quotes defenders of European setders who used Locke injust this way, so the issue is not whether the interpretation is anachronistic , but whether Locke meant his text to be used this...