James Stoner locates my work on Locke as part of a somewhat broader current we might call “Straussian revisionism.” A group of us who were students of, or influenced by Leo Strauss seek “to return to the early moderns” like Locke “for adequate guidance.” He notes that this “return” has something to do with America, for all of us, in one way or another, look to Locke in the old-fashioned way, as “America's philosopher.” I will not presume to speak here for the others he identifies as part of this current, but I believe he speaks correctly for the most part of my own work. My one reservation concerns his attribution of motive: I came to differ with Strauss on the meaning of Locke not because I sought to find “adequate guidance” in Locke, but because over time parts of Strauss's reading of Locke did not seem adequate to me. A consequence of understanding Locke differently is that he has come to look capable of supplying more “adequate guidance” than Strauss thought he could.

I believe there are three main matters on which Stoner disagrees with my “Straussian revisionism.” First, is Locke rather than Hobbes the founder of liberalism? Second, am I correct to argue that Locke grounds natural right differently than Hobbes? And third, can Locke, as I read him, supply us “guidance”? Does he respond to certain deficiencies Stoner identifies?