The title, God, Locke, and Equality, as well as its controversial thesis about the necessity of a theological foundation for equality are designed to startle and provoke. Yet those who have kept up with Locke scholarship (not an easy job since there are 5–10 new books on Locke each year, and over 9000 articles have been published about his work) will recognize that in recent years, its topic, the relation of Locke's religious beliefs to his politics, has become an important theme in the interpretation of Locke's political philosophy. This article will attempt to place the book in the context of this literature and evaluate its contribution to the growing number of studies.

In the early years of what John Pocock once called “the Locke industry,” Locke's religious beliefs did not get much attention. The two most influential interpretations of his political thought portrayed him either as a crypto-Hobbesian hedonist, or an apologist for capitalist exploitation, ignoring or explaining away his commitment to Christianity. It is true that John Dunn in his book on Locke's political theory made much (perhaps too much) of Locke's Calvinist upbringing, only to dismiss his political thought as so dominated by a religious worldview that it is irrelevant today.

Jeremy Waldron's much noted book, God, Locke, and Equality, has put the topic of “God and Equality in Locke” at the center of many perhaps most, discussions of Locke these days. I am going to raise some critical objections to Waldron's interpretations, but all the more reason to begin by noting the very many things about this book that I admire.

First, he rejects the insistence by many of the most outspoken Locke scholars that a proper understanding of Locke—or any philosopher of the past—must be purely historical—that it must have nothing to do with us or our concerns, questions, or problems. Professor Waldron cuts through this claim as mere arbitrary assertion.

Second, many Locke scholars, often some of the same ones, insist that Locke's political writings must be understood in isolation from his philosophic writings, especially from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke's editor, Peter Laslett, set the tone long ago when he pronounced judgment: “Locke did not write as a philosopher, applying to politics the implications of his views of reality as a whole.” Rather, according to Laslett, Locke appealed to or drew off of preexisting “modes of discourse.” This approach makes it very difficult to understand Locke as an integral personality, much less as a coherent author or as a thinker to be taken seriously. Waldron thus reopens the lines of communication between Locke's political and his philosophical writings and makes Locke a significant thinker, not just a corpse for the historians.

It is no easy matter to do justice to Locke or any other capable seventeenth century thinker: to judge them in terms which are wholly appropriate to them, but which also give due weight to our own necessarily very different needs and preoccupations. Yet if equality is a normative relation which holds in time as well as space (and not a purely pragmatic relation which characteristically fails to hold anywhere at all), there must be a justice which sets a limit to the permissible inroads of all subsequent concerns on the part of other human beings: a personal entitlement to consideration in their own terms and on their own terms before we decide how far to set those terms aside to implement our own purposes in ways which may put their reflections to uses in which they could have held no conceivable stake. So seen the duty is a side constraint on interpretive licence, not an arbitrary restriction of subject matter, or a taboo on cognitive interest. It is fully discharged once we have done our best to grasp what it is they were talking about, and what led them to affirm and deny what they did. After that point, it holds no guarantee whatever (though it may, of course, hold some potential) of contributing further, even heuristically, to our capacity to judge what to make for ourselves of what they affirmed or denied.

A modern constitution is a man-made fundamental law, and it sets up a supreme government as agent of the people. What, however, of the commandments of the supreme God? How in face of Him can a man-made law and government be fundamental and supreme?

This is the political-theological problem, we will argue, at the deepest level of John Locke's First Treatise of Government. At that level the First Treatise chiefly undermines, although it also revises. It undermines the primacy of the biblical God, of both his providence and his law, and it also revises biblical fundamentals so as to permit a more rational and civil faith. These are the two leading contentions of this study. If they prove to be true, the First Treatise is much more important to Locke's liberalism than is commonly believed. It is the precondition for his works on toleration and Christianity, the writings setting forth the liberal religion that can abide the primacy of civil government and of “civil interests” generally. It is also, then, the precondition for the Second Treatise of Civil Government. The famous Second Treatise may be the seminal articulation of modern representative government, but the neglected First Treatise proves to be its necessary preface. So we will contend.

In God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke's defense of human moral equality is inextricably tied to a theological doctrine: “Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them.” Moreover, Waldron suspects that this points to a more general truth, namely, that an adequate secular defense of human equality is not possible. He writes, “I actually don't think it is clear that we—now—can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation” (GLE, p. 13). If Waldron's claim of the inseparability of equality and theology in Locke's theory is taken as a claim about what Locke himself thought he was doing, I shall not dispute it, though, as I shall argue below, I do not think that Waldron's argument for this claim is satisfactory. If Waldron's claim is rather about the theory that Locke created, which I take to be a system of propositions whose implications and significance are not necessarily fully known to its author, then I disagree. I think that there is, in Locke's theory, a separable secular defense of moral equality intertwined with the theological defense, but I shall not try to prove that Locke intended this to be a separate defense or even thought (as I do) that it could stand on its own.

I am grateful to all the participants in this symposium for the attention they have paid to my arguments in God, Locke, and Equality (GLE) and for the kind things they say about the book. I am grateful, too, to the editors of this Review for offering me the opportunity to respond. In this brief note, I want to answer some of the criticisms that have been made of my interpretation, particularly in regard to Locke's account of the underpinnings of basic equality. I shall not say much about the suggestion which I advanced at the beginning and the end of GLE to the effect that we—even now, in the twenty-first century—ought to take seriously the view that the principle of basic equality requires for its elaboration and support something along the lines of Locke's religious views and that, just as basic equality was not conceived or nurtured on purely secular premises, so it cannot be sustained on purely secular premises. A full elaboration and defense of this suggestion would require much more space than I allotted it in GLE or than I can allot it here. I hope eventually to provide this in a book, which will deal with basic equality directly rather than through the lens of John Locke's work. Here I will discuss this aspect only by way of brief response to the efforts by Professors Zuckert and Reiman to show (not just to say) that basic equality can be supported on purely secular foundations.

Rousseau's relationship to the phenomenon of modern nationalism is a consistent theme of political theory and the history of ideas. This article argues that Rousseau's thought can be seen as providing the foundation for nationalism even if he would not have endorsed it. That Rousseau's thought bears this relationship to nationalism can be seen by reexamining his argument through the lens of Benedict Anderson's concept of nations as imagined communities. Rousseau's account of political psychology, sovereignty, and the proper limits of the nation provide the core of the analysis of this question.