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The First Liberal Democrat: Locke's Popular Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert Faulkner
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This article discusses the democratic side of Locke's political thought, which is generally not appreciated. How is it that Lockean constitutionalism is also “popular government,” institutions, that is, but institutions considerably informed by a democratic spirit? The answer involves Locke's three characteristic innovations in institution-planning: “civil” government, a supreme “legislative” power coupled with a responsible executive, and, inter alia, a vigilant “majority”—a party or movement of the people with authority to elect to government and to rebel against any non-popular government. While Locke does raise up a powerful executive, he also makes it dependent as a rule on a rather democratic legislative. What Locke wishes to induce over time is something like parliamentary government, with the executive vested in a cabinet and the whole more or less responsible to the people in his sense, especially to a majority.

To what extent are liberal democracies democratic? That question guides this reconsideration of the first and fundamental plan for liberal government, that of John Locke. I shall argue that Locke's plans are more democratic, and more radical too, than is generally believed. True, important parts of Locke's teaching correspond to undemocratic features with which we are now quite familiar. Liberal democracies have more or less capitalist economies in which wealth and big corporations are protected, they are moved not only by public opinion but also by liberal opinion-leaders of one stripe or another, they are governed not by the people in assembly but by constitutional governments.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 5 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2001

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References

For help in clarifying the argument, I am grateful to Christopher Bruell, Robert Eden, Peter Josephson, Sanford Kessler, Sanford Lakoff, Thomas Schneider, and Robert Scigliano. I thank the Earhart Foundation and Boston College for supporting this and others of my recent studies.

1. This historical blurring goes back at least to Fraser's, Alexander CampbellLocke (1890: reprint ed. Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1970), p. 100; cfGoogle Scholar. Pollock, Frederick, An Introduction to The History of the Science of Politics (1911; reprint ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 79Google Scholar.

2. Macpherson, C. B., Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) p. 196Cf.Google Scholar. Plamenatz, John: “Locke of course was no democrat,” and if his argument had democratic implications, “neither he nor his contemporaries drew them.” “Liberalism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Weiner, Philip P. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), vol. 4, p. 40Google Scholar. I owe these references to Sanford Lakoff.

3. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)Google Scholar. All citations to Two Treatises are from this edition by section number.

4. Laslett, Peter, “Introduction,” Two Treatises of Government, pp. 116–19Google Scholar. On Locke as majoritarian, see Kendall, Willmoore, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965)), pp. 132–36Google Scholar. Ashcraft, Richard has shown Locke's involvements with a leveling movement (Revolutionary Politics & Locke's “Two Treatises of Government” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986])Google Scholar.

5. This is a summary of the mutilated books 7 and 8 of Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; see the author's Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), chaps. 10, 11Google Scholar.

6. Gwyn, W. B., The Meaning of the Separation of Powers (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1965), pp. 28–67Google Scholar.

7. Mansfield, Harvey C. JrTaming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: The Free Press, 1989), pp. 161–64Google Scholar.

8. The comparison is elaborated in the author's Francis Bacon and the Politics of Progress (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993), pp. 146–49Google Scholar, chaps. 9 and 10, esp. 184–86, 202–202, 209–224. Locke, praised the “great Lord Verulam” for imagining how “learning” might be advanced. Of the Conduct of the Understanding, in The Works of John Locke (London: C. and J. Rivington, etc., 1824), II: 324–25Google Scholar. Wood, Neal has investigated “Locke's Commitment to Baconian Science,” in The Politics of Locke's Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 5Google Scholar.

9. Mansfield, , Taming the Prince, pp. 181–211Google Scholar

10. “Message to Congress in Special Session,” 4 07 1861; CfGoogle Scholar. Alexander Hamilton's remark that it is by an improved “political science” that the American republic might escape “the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage” that overwhelmed “the petty republics of Greece and Italy” (The Federalist, No. 9).

11. Gierke, Otto, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, trans, and intro. Barker, Ernest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), p. 357Google Scholar. See also Vile, M. J. C., Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 60–64Google Scholar.

12. Emphasis added.

13. Noted by Laslett, , Two Treatises, p. 154Google Scholar

14. A (doctored) quotation from Livy, on the title page; included by Laslett in Two Treatises, p. 154Google Scholar.

15. Quoted by Kendall, , John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule, p. 97;Google ScholarLocke's, was “a much more democratic rule of government than whigs have ever been inclined to adopt” (Bourne, Henry Richard Fox, The Life of John Locke [1876; reprint ed. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1969], 2:178)Google Scholar.

16. See Tarcov, Nathan, “Locke's Second Treatise and ‘The Best Fence Against Rebellion,’” Review of Politics 43 (1981): 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. See Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, “The Modern Doctrine of Executive Power,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 17 (1987): 237–52Google Scholar.

18. Consider Strauss's, Leo discussion of “natural public law” in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 190–96Google Scholar.

19. Fraser, , Locke, pp. 98–99Google Scholar.

20. Barker, , commenting on Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, p. 358Google Scholar.

21. Stoner, James R. Jr, Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), p. 150Google Scholar.

22. Clark, G. N., The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 13;Google ScholarWilliams, Basil, The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 15–18, 21–22, 30–38Google Scholar.

23. As to England's “powerful governing class” after the Restoration and the Settlement of 1688, see Clark, , The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714, pp. 10–17Google Scholar, and Williams, , Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760, pp. 22–27Google Scholar. Richard Ashcraft noted Locke's tendency to define membership in the commonwealth (and thus representation in the legislative) without reference to “differential class membership” (Locke's Two Treatises of Government [London: Unwin Hyman, 1989], pp. 164–82)Google Scholar.

24. Mansfield, , Taming the Prince, pp. 181–211Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., pp. 1–20.

26. Ibid., p. 200.

27. Quoted by Scigliano, Robert, “The War Powers Resolution and the War Powers,” in The Presidency in the Constitutional Order, ed. Bessette, Joseph W. and Tulis, Jeffrey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 136Google Scholar.

28. Mansfield, , Taming the Prince, pp. 202–203Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., pp. 190–92.

30. Compare Pangle, Thomas L., “Executive Energy and Popular Spirit in Lockean Constitutionalism,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 7 (1987): 259;Google ScholarMansfield, , “The Modern Doctrine of Executive Power,” p. 245Google Scholar. But see Bourne, Fox, Life of Locke, 2: 177:Google Scholar the legislature may delegate the executive power to some “person or persons,” and any so-called king “can never be more than the agent of the legislature.”