The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (review)

For the past three decades, with the ascendancy of the republican synthesis in historical and literary studies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, John Locke's contributions and influence over this crucial era in American cultural and political history have been downplayed by most scholars of early America. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims and, more recently, Steven Dworetz's The Unvarnished Doctrine both offer important challenges to this view of Locke's influence. Gillian Brown's new book, The Consent of the Governed, represents a stunning new addition to the study of Locke's American influence and clearly establishes Locke's centrality to the formation of the nation and its incipient cultural production. Rather than seeking to overturn the place of republicanism in early America, Brown shows how Locke's philosophy and particularly his pedagogical theories played an integral role in the development of new ideas, most significantly a particular sense of the individual, in Europe and America that would make the American Revolution possible. She deconstructs the binarism between liberalism and republicanism that has profoundly marked the study of early America in recent years, and offers a more nuanced and compelling understanding of the philosophical foundations of late eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Instead of competing with republicanism, in fact, in Brown's analysis Lockean ideas serve as a critical foundation for "the civic sense registered by republicanism" (9). With claims such as this one in her introduction, Brown makes it clear that her book will yield a significantly different understanding of Locke's influence on the eighteenth century and the literature produced as a consequence of the dissemination of his thought.

Principally focused on Locke's complex theories of consent, The Consent of the Governed deftly traces the development of this influential concept, which informed theories of education, politics, and family relations in the eighteenth century. The first major task of Brown's book is to recover Locke's ideas as they appeared and were circulated in the eighteenth century. As Brown points out early in her text, for the last half-century or so we have received a version of Locke that has served the political and ideological needs of twentieth-century liberals, that is distinctly different from the Locke that eighteenth-century Americans would have encountered. The center of her book is ameticulous close reading of Locke's theories of consent and education and the various versions of them that circulated in early America. Brown's readings of Locke are not only fascinating and insightful but also original. In perhaps the most startling and provocative insight of the book, Brown points out the extent to which Locke's notions of consent are located specifically in the person of the child. For this reason, Locke's educational theories supersede his political arguments in their breadth of influence on eighteenth-century culture. In the first half of the study, then, Brown analyzes a number of key texts where children or childhood figure prominently, beginning with the New England Primer. Her reading of the ways the various woodcuts illustrating the text supplement, complement, and complicate the written messages of the Primer is nothing less than a tour de force of literary and visual analysis. Repeatedly, the woodcuts, rather than simply confirming the message of text, generate their own potential meanings and invite readers to meditate on the meaning of the words attached to them. The meanings generated by the woodcuts often compete (even if only slightly) with the meanings offered by the verses. By offering the child a choice, this supplementary relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer asks the child to decide for him- or herself what is the ultimate meaning embedded in the text. Thus, the relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer enacts the process of consent that is so central to the pedagogical mission of...