God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought by Jeremy Waldron (review)

334 more, and Wills provided the decoration for the room where the governors met, and established the hospital as a center of art and a public attraction. The public came to its chapel each Sunday for baptisms , and Handel offered the first of many concerts there in 1749. Coram continued to visit the hospital to which he had given so much. Never wealthy (contrary to popular belief), he slipped into poverty. Ironically, friends set up a subscription to provide him with a pension. Coram died in 1751 and was interred in the hospital’s chapel. Ms. Wagner does not attempt to whitewash his faults; he was hot tempered and irascible , but the major efforts of his life served the public good. Anita Guerrini University of California, Santa Barbara JEREMY WALDRON. God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. xii ⫹ 263. $65; $22 (paper). In the 1999 Carlyle Lectures, Mr. Waldron argued that ‘‘we are not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke’s commitment to equality.’’In Mr. Waldron’s considered judgment, we should not even try. Thus God, Locke, and Equality represents a breakthrough in the understanding of Locke’s philosophy in general, and his Two Treatises of Government in particular. Mr. Waldron excels at spelling out just how his view of Locke as an ‘‘equalityradical ’’ advances scholarly conversation . Whereas John Dunne assumes Locke’s hierarchical faith in A. O. Lovejoy ’s ‘‘Great Chain of Being,’’Mr. Waldron reveals Locke’s near egalitarian belief in ‘‘Species . . . linked together, and differ[ing] but in almost insensible degrees ’’ (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). ‘‘The members of the laboring class,’’ C. B. Macpherson’s reading of Locke asserts, ‘‘do not and cannot live a fully rational life,’’ but, in Mr. Waldron’s words, Locke insists on ‘‘the fundamental adequacy of even the meanest intellect.’’ Mr. Waldron, correspondingly , refutes Macpherson’s narrow understanding of Lockean ‘‘property ’’ as tangible possessions: Locke’s concept, in Mr. Waldron’s highlighting of it, features life, liberty, and labor. The upshot of Locke’s forceful argument against Sir Robert Filmer, according to Mr. Waldron’s startling, yet persuasive , interpretation of the Two Treatises, is that ‘‘neither the rich nor civil society on their behalf is entitled to resist the poor when the poor attempt to seize their surplus goods for themselves .’’ Because Locke regards charity as more a right than a duty, Mr. Waldron continues, ‘‘Lockean government may have to be continually interfering to redistribute surplus goods from the rich to the most needy.’’ Thus, though scarcely separated from the state, on the one hand, and though obviously far from the state-affiliated brand of conservative Christianity now dominant in the United States, on the other, Locke’s Christianity feels spiritually communitarian (as distinct from temporally socialist). Mr. Waldron’s paraphrase of Locke’s notes on Romans 13:1–5, on obeying ‘‘the powers that be,’’ rings true. His summary of Locke’s notes on I Corinthians 7:20–23, about slaves obeying their masters, proves telling. Locke, in Mr. Waldron’s estimation, slips ‘‘some distinctly Lockean ideas’’ into The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)—for instance, freedom of worship for the slave population there. Mr. Waldron contests Lorenne Clark’s verdict that Locke’s theory displays ‘‘un- 335 equivocally sexist assumptions.’’ For more than six pages in the First Treatise, after all, Locke elaborates on the fifth commandment’s inclusion of mothers. Mr. Waldron’s ear for Locke’s ‘‘logic of contractarianism’’ hears Locke acknowledging women’s parental authority, their property, and even their marital partnership . As Mr. Waldron points out, Locke praised a 1696 sermon by Rebecca Collier and observed that ‘‘women had the honour first to publish the resurrection of the Lord of Love.’’ ‘‘The scriptural character of Locke’s writing,’’ Mr. Waldron admits, ‘‘might suggest that he is doing something different from philosophical argumentation .’’ ‘‘In fact,’’ however, ‘‘Locke is trying to give the world a lesson in the difference between arguing from scriptural revelation and simply assembling [as Filmer does] various verses and catch-phrases in an opportunistic political tract.’’ Against John Rawls’s conclusion that ‘‘citizens may not appeal to their religious convictions in...