Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke (review)

168 English translation of De officio hominis et civis (1673) was, after all, published in 1991 and is still widely available. But Messrs. Hunter and Saunders’s volume should be welcomed as the first modern republication of the fifth and final edition of the original English translation(1735). Initiallypublishedin1691,Tooke’stranslation provides a unique insight into how Pufendorf’s political ideas were wrested for an English audience. This remarkably unfaithful text diverges in many significantrespectsfromtheoriginal :Tookeand his later (anonymous) English editors substitute ‘‘community’’for ‘‘state’’(civitas ), they avoid Pufendorf’s use of the term ‘‘sovereignty,’’ and there are many notes from Jean Barbeyrac’s 1707 French translation, a work that attempts to mitigate Pufendorf’s secularization of civil ethics. With these revisions,thetranslator and editors tried to make Pufendorf’s ideas palatable to Whig sensibilities and a parliamentary legislative power. Unlike their biased eighteenth-century forebears, Messrs. Hunter and Saunders are careful and meticulous. In their many detailed footnotes, they point to the disparitiesbetweentheoriginalLatinandthe English translation. Their Introduction provides a short but beautifully clear account of Pufendorf’s natural law theory, of Barbeyrac’s reception and modification of that theory, and the context of Tooke’s translation. I would like to have heard more about the influence and significance of the English translation for London Whigsofthetime.WhileMessrs. Hunter and Saunders imply that the volume had relevance for party political debate —andespeciallyfortheWhigassault on High Church Anglicanism in the 1690s—they do not offer details. One of the benefits of making this translation available, however, is that scholarship on Pufendorf’s reception in Englandwillundoubtedly increase. Research on Barbeyrac ’s defenses of Pufendorf will also be aided by Mr. Saunders’s fine translation of Barbeyrac’s essays. Overall, these two volumesformanadmirable part of Liberty Fund’s handsome Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series. Jacqueline Broad Monash University JOHN LOCKE. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration , ed. Ian Shapiro with essays by John Dunn, Ruth Grant, and Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale, 2003. Pp xvi ⫹ 358. $30; $14 (paper). This odd volume contains Locke’sTwo Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, along with an Introduction by Mr. Shapiro and essays by each of the editors. While this is an impressive collection of raw material, the product is less than the sum of its parts. The overall problem is audience. The volume is part of Yale’s series ‘‘Rethinking the Western Tradition,’’ but it is not clear who is supposed to be doing the rethinking . Most undergraduates and nonacademic readers, who may not have ‘‘thought the Western Tradition’’ in the first place, will be baffled because the Introduction gives almost no information concerning the context of Locke’s works, and the volume contains not a single explanatory note for any passage in either of the books, not even for Locke’s most obscure Biblical references. As for professional scholars, the book offers little. The versions of Locke’s writings in this volume cannot replace or even compare to the standard scholarly editionsbecause they contain no apparatus with alternate readings. The interpretive essays are a mixed bag. Ms. Grant’s is a delight, but the others are less impressive. Mr. Dunn’s 169 ‘‘Measuring Locke’s Shadow’’ surveys Locke’s historical influence, and is one of the strangest things I have ever read. The author of one of the most influential books on Locke, Mr. Dunn is usually a fine philosophical stylist. But this essay is unintelligible. For brevity I will give one sentence that can stand for the whole. ‘‘The relation between Locke’s grandest work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , and the cultural dynamicsof theEnlightenment,andthepowerfullyinimical relation between the mode of analysis which that work set out and theimaginative stability and theoreticalcoherence of Christian Natural Jurisprudence, both guaranteed that no adequate account. . . .’’ That is half the sentence; it gets worse from there. If one generously assumes that things like ‘‘culture dynamics’’ and ‘‘imaginative stability’’ exist, one will still be unable to see what the essay is about. Ms. Grant’s essay, conversely, is clear, informative, and exceptionally interesting . She uses her deep understanding of Locke’s political philosophy to speculate about what he might have thought concerning modern liberal...