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Ruth W. Grant John Locke’s Liberalism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1987. Pp. ix + 220. US$24.95.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
There are no intimate connections between Locke's political thought and his general philosophical position — that, at least, is the longestablished view, the accepted orthodoxy. Locke's Second Treatise of Government, so it is held, presents doctrines which are unrelated to, or perhaps even in conflict with, those of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.For contemporary students and scholars this view is firmly established through Peter Laslett's influential ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government.At the moment it receives powerful support from a magisterial work by an author well known both as political theorist and as commentator on Locke: Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986). Ashcraft's reductive contextualism and his concomitant intentional neglect of certain philosophical (particularly methodological and epistemological) dimensions of Locke's position would lead us to read the 2T more as a piece of parochial political propaganda than as a treatise of political theory.
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References
1 Whenever possible I shall refer to Two Treatises of Government as TT, and to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as Essay (or E). To conform to Grant's practice, I shall refer to the Second Treatise as 2T.
2 Peter Laslett, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (New York: Cambridge University Press 1960)
3 See my Critical Notice of Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Two Treatises of Government, infra 101-16.
4 See note 10 to the first chapter. In the last paragraph of this note, Grant is too generous when she states that she agrees with Ashcraft ‘that there is a unity and coherence to Locke's epistemological and political writings.’ This makes it sound as if Ashcraft does not explicitly and consistently reject an approach to political thought through epistemological and methodological considerations (see Ashcraft, 33ff., 204, 576, 578) and so tends to detract from the contrast between their two approaches.
5 John Dunn reports that there is such a work in Italian: Francesco Fagiani's Nel Crepuscola della probabilità: Regione ed esperienza nella filosofia sociale di john Locke (Naples: Bibliopilas 1983). According to Dunn, Fagiani argues that Locke developed his ideas in political theory ‘self-consciously’ through placing them in a ‘systematic epistemological setting.’ See Dunn's review of the book in The Locke Newsletter 16 (1985), 96-9. In The Imposition of Method, a Study of Descartes and Locke (New York: Oxford University Press 1980) I have, in a single chapter (VII), attempted to draw these two sides of Locke together in what was more a preliminary attempt than anything like a complete account.
6 For Locke, the words ‘order’ and ‘method’ are often interchangeable, and if something is a ‘demonstration’ then it must be ‘methodical’ or ‘orderly’ and ‘cohere’; and ‘unmethodical’ or ‘incoherent’ ‘demonstration’ would be a contradiction in terms.
7 Grant's uncritical use of the word ‘analysis’ (e.g. p. 76) as well as the absence from her index of words like ‘analysis,’ ‘decomposition,’ ‘definition,’ and ‘reduction’ (this in contrast to the inclusion of ‘demonstration’) would by themselves make one suspect that there is a blind spot.
8 For an account of how, for Locke, a statement of reason's procedure in its pursuit of general knowledge is a functional definition of reason and at the same time an articulation of method, see The Imposition of Method, chapter VI.
9 I shall not comment on Grant's convincing but somewhat belabored exposition in her first chapter of the doctrines that mixed modes are products of the mind, and that the mind's creation of these archetypes does not lead Locke into relativism.
10 That she is not always consistent in her statement of the second ‘premise’ (sometimes - as on pp. 6, 11, 52 — it mentions only freedom, sometimes — as on pp. 65 and 97 — it mentions both freedom and equality) and that she regularly reduces the two ‘premises’ to a single one in whose formulation we sometimes find both the concepts ‘equality’ and ‘preservation’ but in which that of ‘freedom’ is replaced by ‘right’ (as on pp. 22 and 77), and sometimes both ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ but not ‘preservation’ (as on p. 5), are matters on which I shall comment later.
11 Peter Laslett, 99
12 Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatise of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1986) 3
13 For my account of this aspect of Locke's position, see The Imposition of Method, Ch. VI, part 2.
14 See The Imposition of Method, Ch. VI, part 1.
15 Most of this sentence is borrowed from The Imposition of Method, 196.
16 For Locke, this concept can be derived from analysis of political practice and of the pamphlet literature which accompanies it, or from the more academic statements concerning politics as found in words like those of Aristotle and Grotius. In his Revolutionary Politics, Ashcraft focuses almost exclusively on the first of these. In view of the influence still exerted in Locke's days by Aristotle and of the popularity of a writer like Grotius, and in view of Locke's conscious struggle with both old and new ‘academic’ ‘experiences,’ Ashcraft's emphasis in onesided.
17 I have provided such a reconstruction in Chapter VII, part 2, of The Imposition of Method. The following paragraphs draw upon this account.