Locke’s Political Liberty: Readings and Misreadings (review)

As the title of this volume of SVEC indicates, many of the ten articles it contains address the historically varying levels of John Locke’s influence not only though the ways in which he was widely read and interpreted, but also through the various ways in which his complex works have been misinterpreted. As John Dunn puts it in his Postface (which could additionally function as a more extensive review of this book), Locke’s intellectual legacy, while clearly durable and widespread, has also come to ‘embody large elements of myth’ (p. 210), which cast the seventeenth-century author alternately as the inventor of the values of toleration and of political liberty that would shape the Enlightenment or as a racist apologist for slavery and for an expanding colonial empire. Several of the authors provide accounts of how successive myths or misreadings of the Lockean corpus developed, and offer more nuanced interpretations through recontextualization or through contrasting investigations of Locke’s texts and of those who later praised or criticized him. Jean Terrel’s analysis of the Two Treatises of Government highlights the context of the 1688–89 Revolution, ‘which was absolutely decisive when the book was finally published’ (p. 27), and finds serious flaws in Locke’s attempts to conceptualize a foundation for constituent power, flaws that limited his degree of influence on later thinkers. Unsurprisingly, some of the articles are devoted to re-evaluations of how Locke’s work was appropriated and adapted for new polemical uses by eighteenth-century French authors (Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sieyès). Less predictably, Jørn Schøsler provides a historical overview of the reception of Locke’s political philosophy in Denmark, concluding with the recent revival of interest in his writings, partly due to the context of conflicts over religious sensitivities and freedom of speech (the 2005–06 ‘crisis of the caricatures’ of the prophet Mohammed): ‘This famous crisis in Denmark — which saw the two Lockean principles, tolerance and freedom of expression, collide with each other — continued to enliven the polemic between the adherents of those principles’ (p. 162). James Farr’s article on natural law addresses the twin issues of how Locke provided limited justification for slavery (the ‘just-war’ theory) and of his recently reassessed role within the administration of British colonialism. By examining how some Southern apologists for slavery reacted to Locke’s theories, Farr provides a generally unflattering portrait of an author enmeshed in contradictory ways of thinking, an author still often regarded not only as an innovative theoretician of liberalism but also as a champion of liberty, even though he was, through his professional activities, unmistakeably linked to slavery in the New World: ‘he was strangely indifferent to contradiction on so grave a matter and, worse, to the lives and liberties of the persons made slaves in the New World’ (p. 188). While most of the articles in Locke’s Political Liberty will tend to appeal more exclusively to historians and political scientists, some (such as those by Schøsler and by Farr) will be of interest to broader groups of scholars, including practitioners of cultural studies.