Eighteenth-Century Thought Volume 3 ed. by Earle Havens and James G. Buickerood (review)

60 guenot scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society, was a close associate of the Duke, who appointed him rector at St. Lawrence, Whitchurch, so that he could continue his experiments on the extensive waterworks in the gardens at Cannons . Susan Jenkins Eighteenth-Century Thought Volume 3, ed. Earle Havens and James G. Buickerood . New York: AMS, 2007. Pp. 446. $121.50. Why should we still read Locke, and what do we owe him? ‘‘Assessing the Legacy of Reasonableness,’’ the running title of one of many excellent essays in this collection, shapes the difficulty. Arguably the most important philosopher since Aristotle, hungered after by undergraduates longing for the Enlightenment ’s philosophical origins, Locke has been damned by such praise as Bertrand Russell’s, chatting with Gilbert Ryle: the first philosopher ever to have had common sense—and only Englishmen have had it since. As Johnson said of Dryden, Locke’s contemporary, his discoveries have become such commonplaces that he has lost all credit for them. They have passed invisibly into the way we conduct our thinking. Scholars live to tease commonplaces alive again. Originating in a tercentenary commemoration of Locke’s death at Yale’s Beinecke Library, this superb collection ranges from medals celebrating Locke (images reproduced) through most of his major works (Reasonableness of Christianity, Two Treatises, Essay Concerning Human Understanding) to the excluded categories, women, slaves, and idiots. The contributors are distinguished , and they deploy their meticulous scholarship to raise new questions rather than to pot answers. In ‘‘John Locke and the Intellectual Legacy of the Early Enlightenment,’’ Jonathan I. Israel situates Locke as the poster child of moderate establishment enlightenment, a most-quoted author in Johnson’s Dictionary (until 1773), an object of contempt to more radical thinkers such as Bayle and Diderot, a useful cover for other radicals, including Voltaire and d’Alembert (and English Dissenters), and a bulwark against Spinozism and materialism in Italy and Greece. Justin Champion’s ‘‘‘A Law of Continuity in the Progress of Theology’: Assessing the Legacy of John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695– 2004’’ speaks of ‘‘the Lockean imprimatur ’’ of Reasonableness as inciting equally to appropriation and refutation. Yet this icon of moderate reasonableness kept hidden a radical past still known principally from a few facts and traces—his expulsion from his Oxford college in 1684 at the behest of Charles II’s secretary of state, his flight into exile with his patron Shaftesbury in 1683. In ‘‘The Early Lives of John Locke,’’ Mark Goldie argues that Le Clerc’s much-reproduced and plundered Life has obscured its more valuable sources, Shaftesbury’s letter (published in 1851) and Damaris Masham’s even more important memoir (not published in extenso until 1955) and her correspondence with Locke. Preliminary to a forthcoming edition of Locke’s early lives, Mr. Goldie’s essay shows would-be biographers where to find early materials, while J. R. Milton in ‘‘John Locke: The Modern Biographical Tradition’’ recounts the faults of all existing biographies , along with the history and uncertain dating of Locke’s papers. Maurice 61 Cranston, he argues, is ‘‘irritatingly vague’’ on Locke’s politics of the 1680s, while Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics, where we had looked to make up that fault, is riddled with elementary errors. In ‘‘Pierre Des Maizeaux, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, and the Foundation of the Locke Canon,’’ Philip Milton treats Des Maizeaux ’s additions to the Locke canon and cautions against non-Lockean works that have long added to Locke’s canon. James G. Buickerwood and Earl Havens’s ‘‘Lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity: Charting Locke’s Legacy’’ cries out against the ‘‘false economy’’ of cheap editions and the reissue of Fraser’s Essay: ‘‘Now perhaps officially classifiable as undead.’’ In ‘‘Citizens, Wives, Latent Citizens and Non-Citizens in the Two Treatises: A Legacy of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Assimilation,’’ Barbara Arneil comes down hard on Locke for excluding women and idiots from citizenship, subsuming the former in the private sphere as wives. Ian Harris’s ‘‘The Legacy of Two Treatises of Government’’ ripostes that Locke did not distinguish between public and private sphere, but between government and society, that he contributed...