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Was Leo Strauss Wrong about John Locke?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

James R. Stone Jr
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Extract

Was Leo Strauss wrong about John Locke? Surely that he was has been the consensus among historians of political thought, though their reasons are sometimes at variance. The Cambridge school, influenced by the work of John Dunn, interprets Locke's work in the light of the Calvinism in his family background. Though attacked by spokesmen for the Church of England, Locke quickly gained admirers among dissenting clergy, for his psychology, his politics, and of course his program for religious toleration, and the proponents of the Calvinist interpreta tion explain why: His discourse closely tracks the theological language of his Calvinist contemporaries. Richard Ashcraft, meanwhile, sought to restore Locke's reputation as a revolutionary by investigating his role in English politics under the Restoration, albeit at the price of reducing the Two Treatises to a tract for the moment. James Tully would likewise save him from the charge of being a capitalist apologist, insisting Locke merely offered a defense of Whig landholding, with the responsibilities as well as the privileges embedded in the English law of estate. All these interpretations dismiss or disregard Strauss's account of Locke as an atheist in the mold of Hobbes and Spinoza who succeeded by his mastery of the art of esoteric writing in concealing his unbelief; as the most successful, because most prudent, proponent of the modern doctrine of natural rights, which revolutionized politics around the world; and as the theorist who prepared the way for modern capitalism by his vigorous defense of unlimited acquisition.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , Fall 2004 , pp. 553 - 563
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2004

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References

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Earhart Foundation, which made possible the preparation of this article and of the response.

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2. Ashcraft, Richard, The Revolutionary Politics of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

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4. Strauss's principal essay on Locke appears as the second part of chap. 5 (“Modern Natural Right”) of his Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 202–51Google Scholar, the first part of which treated Hobbes. Another essay, in the form of an extended review of Leyden's, W. von edition of Locke's Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954)Google Scholar, appeared under the title “Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law” in Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959), chap. 8, pp. 197–220Google Scholar. Locke, is also discussed in some depth in the title essay, pp. 49–50Google Scholar.

5. Pangle, Thomas L., The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; West, Thomas G., Vindicating the Founders (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 1997)Google Scholar. Cf. Pangle, , “The Significance of the Locke Chapter in Strauss's Natural Right and History” (unpublished paper, presented at Michigan State University, 2001)Google Scholar, and West, , “Nature and Happiness in Locke: A review of Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy, by Michael Zuckert,” in Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2004)Google Scholar.

6. Zuckert, Michael P., Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002)Google Scholar, which includes essays written over the past thirty years, including new material. I will concentrate on this recent book in this brief essay, but for a more complete account of Zuckert's views on Locke, see also his Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and on the American Founding, The Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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9. Ibid., p. 3.

10. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, pp. 231–35Google Scholar; on Locke's, superior prudence, pp. 165–66Google Scholar; cf. What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 49Google Scholar, where the latter consideration alone is stressed.

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14. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II, chap. 5, sect. 27; cf. II, chap. 2, sect. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16. Two Treatises of Government, II, chap. 4, sect. 19Google Scholar.

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18. Ibid., p. 9.

19. See Strauss's, remarks on Hobbes's reputation in What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 171Google Scholar.

20. Published in English translation in Schmitt, Carl, The Concept of the Political, ed. and trans. Schwab, George (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976) (orig. 1932)Google Scholar.

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23. Ibid., p. 5.

24. Ibid., p. 18. In his last major statement on Hobbes, which partly repeats in its title the title of the early book, Strauss reiterates this insight in a footnote that he later pointed to as addressing “the nerve of Hobbes′ argument.” See “On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy?, chap. 7, p. 176nGoogle Scholar, referred to in the “Preface to the 7th Impression (1971)” of Natural Right and History, p. viiGoogle Scholar.

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27. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, pp. 165–66Google Scholar; cf. Pangle, “The Significance of the Locke Chapter in Strauss's Natural Right and History,” and West, “Nature and Happiness in Locke.”

28. Zuckert, , Launching Liberalism, p. 20Google Scholar.

29. Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 55Google Scholar; cf. Natural Right and History, p. 12Google Scholar. It is worth noting that in Natural Right and History Strauss links classical natural right with the classical metaphysics, pp. 19, 29Google Scholar; though he writes at the outset that “an adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem [being “forced to accept a fundamental, typically modern dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man”] has been solved,” p. 8, he does not let “the victory of modern science” dissuade him from his study, in a philosophic more than a historical spirit, of natural right.