A review of John Locke: Two Tracts on Government, ed. with an introduction by Philip Abrams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 264 pages.
This volume consists of two parts: an annotated edition of what seems to be Locke’s earliest “tracts on government” (112–241), and the editor’s extensive Introduction (1–111). One of the two tracts was composed in English, the other in Latin; the editor has supplied his edition of the Latin tract with an English translation. Both tracts were written shortly after the Restoration, and neither tract was ever published by Locke. The differences between the two tracts are not important (113).
The “two tracts on government,” as the editor calls them, are in fact disputations on the question as to “whether the civil magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to religious worship.” Locke answers this question in the affirmative. He takes the side of law and order against “the popular assertors of public liberty” who would only bring on “the tyranny of a religious rage” (120) if the civil magistrate did not have or exercise the disputed right. Locke is all in favor of gently dealing with “the sincere and tender hearted Christians” but against allowing them “a toleration . . . as their right” (160; cf. 185–86). He regards the people as an “untamed beast” (158).
Indifferent things are things not determined by God’s law. The indifferent things with which the disputations are concerned are those related to divine worship as distinguished from indifferent civil things such as taxes, which are on both sides admitted to be subject to determination by the civil magistrate. According to the view rejected by Locke, the civil magistrate may not determine indifferent things that concern divine worship because such determination would not be compatible with Christian liberty. Hence the most important argument adduced by the men whom Locke opposes is that “imposing things indifferent is directly contrary to Gospel precepts”(130, 142, 155, 190, 202–204). One may therefore say that the disputations belong to the province of political theology rather than to that of political philosophy.
Yet while this istrue of the primary theme of the disputations, it is not unqualifiedly true of all of its implications. It suffices here to mention two of these implications or presuppositions: God’s law and the origin and extent of the power of the civil magistrate.
Locke does not say much on God’s law. The divine or moral law becomes known to man “either by the discoveries of reason, usually called the law of nature, or the revelation of his word” (124). The question as to whether the content of the law of nature is identical with the content of the revealed law is answered negatively in the English tract, where Locke occasionally speaks of “the positive moral law of God” (151), and affirmatively in the Latin tract (194). This observation is not contradicted by the fact that in the English tract he occasionally speaks of “the law of God or nature” (138), for he list’s this expression when stating the view of his opponents. He apparently did not think it necessary to clear up the obscurity indicated.
As for the extent of the power of the civil magistrate, Locke ascribes to him “absolute, arbitrary power over all the indifferent actions of his people” (123). To say the least, this sounds very different from the teaching of Two Treatises (IISect. 135–37). The magistrate may “establish or alter all indifferent things as he shall judge them conducing to the good of the public,” “but he alone is judge what is so and what not” (150; cf. 126). Although the magistrate acts unjustly by commanding things forbidden by God’s law, his subjects are bound to a passive obedience, i.e. may not resist his laws by force of arms (192). Since “the same arbitrary power” resides in the governing assembly of a republic as in any monarch, subjects enjoy no greater freedom in a republic than under an absolute monarch (125, 201). This is quite at variance with the teaching of the Two Treatise’s, according to which “absolute monarchy . . . is indeed inconsistent with civil society” (II Sect. 90ff.). In accordance with all this, Locke’s argument in the two tracts does not depend on how one decides the question as to the origin of the civil magistrate’s power, viz. whether one holds that that power derives immediately from God or from the subjects (122, 128–29, 200–01)—in other words, whether the king is held to rule by divine right pure and simple or by virtue of a contract.
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The two tracts would not be of interest to anyone except historians specializing in mid-seventeenth-century English theologico-political debates but for the fact that they are the work of Locke, if of the young Locke who had not yet found his own word. As the editor puts it, the author of the two tracts is an “authoritarian” rather than, as he is frequently thought to be, “the presiding genius of liberal democracy;” he surely is not “liberal” or in favor of “any . . . form of permissive government” (7–9, 84). Yet “authoritarian” has many meanings: most, not to say all, political philosophers who wrote prior to 1660 were “authoritarian.” Hooker was “authoritarian” in one sense, Hobbes in a very different sense. In the two tracts, Locke quotes approvingly Hooker’s general definition of law (193) but, as the editor correctly states, he divorces that definition from its teleological context (69–70). One is not surprised to observe that Hobbes is never mentioned in the tracts. This would not by any means exclude the possibility that the tracts were influenced or inspired by Hobbes, for silence on Hobbes might have been part of the “strategy” of the young Locke as it was part of the “strategy” of the mature Locke (cf. 68). According to the editor, “it is essentially a Hobbesian argument that Locke deploys” (24, 69). Yet, to say nothing of his far-reaching qualifications (57, 71, 75–80), both his notion of what constitutes Hobbianism and Locke’s relevant statements are too vague to enable Abrams to prove the dependence of the tracts on Hobbes.
The question regarding the Hobbianism of the young Locke may be said to be of sonic importance with a view to the fundamental question regarding the political philosophy of the mature or old Locke, to the question which would have to be stated as follows: is the natural law teaching of the mature Locke fundamentally traditional (say, Hookerian) or is it a modified version of Hobbes’s natural law teaching?* Abrams admits that Locke has broken with the traditional natural law teaching but denies that he builds on the foundation laid by Hobbes (77–78). As he suggests, Locke has moved away, more or less hesitatingly, from the view according to which the law of nature is the law of reason and that it is obligatory because it is dictated by reason, in the direction of “fideism.” More precisely, while Locke never abandoned the notion that the law of nature is the law of reason or, which for him seems to be the same thing, that ethics can be made a demonstrative science, he never elaborated that ethics but asserted that the complete law of nature is available in the New Testament and only in the New Testament, i.e. only by revelation (86–90). In a word, Locke is “inconsistent” regarding the foundations of politics; “in the end he remained intellectually entangled in the tradition in which he had been educated” (91). Abrams arrives at this result partly by relying on Locke’s “relativistic” statements regarding “true religion,” i.e., by tacitly identifying “objective moral truths” (and therefore in particular that set of moral truths which underlies the political teaching of the Second Treatise) with “true religion,” and partly by disregarding the difference (which for Locke is crucial) between men in general and the “studiers” of the law of nature (94–95, 102, 107). Abrams could not have remained satisfied with his thesis if he had paid any attention to the fact of which he has heard and which he does not deny that “face value is something one cannot safely attribute to any work by Locke” or that the study of Locke’s writings must be enlightened by understanding of the character as well as the reason of his “persistent strategy” (68).
*cf. Willmoore Kendall, “John Locke Revisited,” The Intercollegiate Review, II (January–February, 1966), 217– 34.
