Limited government, resistance and Locke

The reading this week is Locke's second treatise, chapters 6-19 (though the earlier parts of the book are still of course relevant). Locke is often seen as a conservative thinker, keen to defend rights of property, and to champion the individual against state intervention. He is sometimes contrasted with radical thinkers like the Levellers (who argued for universal adult male suffrage in the England of the later 1640s) and the Diggers (who wanted private property to be abolished). But the Two treatises were written to encourage and defend violent resistance to the King of England - unquestionably quite a radical measure. Richard Ashcraft in his book Revolutionary politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1986) argued that Locke was a radical, whose ideas were close to those of the Levellers.

In the early modern period, the idea that people could take up arms against their rulers was voiced by persecuted religious groups including both Protestants and Catholics. On 24 August 1572, Protestants were massacred in Paris and then elsewhere in France. Some Protestant thinkers reacted by claiming that an ungodly monarch may be resisted and even deposed. The most famous book to put forward this kind of claim was the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, published in 1579. In the same year a similar theory was expressed in a book published in Scotland and written by George Buchanan. The title of this book was De jure regni apud Scotos (on the law of the kingdom amongst the Scots). Buchanan justified the deposition of the heretical and tyrannical Mary Queen of Scots. He was tutor to her son and successor James - who reacted violently against Buchanan's ideas. In 1585 a Protestant (Henry of Navarre; later Henry IV) became heir to the throne of France. He was opposed by the French Catholic League which now adopted ideas of legitimate resistance that Protestants had earlier voiced. Similar ideas also featured in the propaganda of the Dutch rebels who took up arms against Spain in the 1560s; Spain finally acknowledged the independence of the seven Northern provinces of the Netherlands in 1648. Some theorists (including the Jesuit Mariana) justified not only armed resistance but also assassination. In 1610, Henry IV of France was assassinated.

A number of arguments were used to justify resistance. One claim was that just as kings were appointed by God, so too were other magistrates; if the king failed to do his duty, these other magistrates could call him to account. This theory that public officials subordinate to the king ("inferior magistrates") could discipline a wicked monarch was expressed most commonly by Calvinists. Catholics often argued that the pope was empowered to authorize resistance to a tyrant. Both groups sometimes claimed that the king derives his power from the people and that if he infringes the conditions upon which they transferred power to him, they recover their original authority and may resist him. Ideas of limited monarchy and legitimate resistance were frequently expressed by parliamentarians in the English Civil War. After that War, the victorious English parliament acted not only as the legislature but also as the executive, and it even claimed judicial powers. Many people protested against the increasing corruption of this parliament, and the army eventually purged and finally dissolved it. During discussions on the role of parliament held in England in the 1640s and 50s the idea of the separation of powers gained currency, and people came to argue that the legislature should not have executive powers.

Locke develops the ideas of the earlier resistance theorists: government must be based on consent, there should be a separation of powers, and rulers who govern tyrannically may be disciplined and even deposed by the people. He rejected absolute government altogether, claiming that it was never justifiable. Like Hobbes and others he talked about a state of nature existing in pre-political times. How did he differ from Hobbes on the state of nature? What consequences did these differences have for his wider theory? More generally, how did he attempt to undermine Hobbes' political arguments? Or did he simply ignore them? How new and convincing are his arguments? Locke portrayed as a new and strange doctrine his idea that we get into society by giving up to the public the executive power of the law of nature; what was the point of this doctrine? How much of an individualist and a radical was Locke? How, if at all, does his theory of resistance connect up with his views on property? What did he think were the principles of the law of nature? Did his views on the law of nature differ from those of Pufendorf? Locke was not only a political theorist but also an important philosopher, who made a major contribution to epistemology in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). There, he adopted an empiricist view of knowledge, arguing that the mind is at first a tabula rasa or blank slate, and that there are no innate ideas; we gain knowledge by experience, and through our senses. Is this attitude to knowledge compatible with what Locke said about the law of nature?

Further reading: same as last week.
For background, try Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought esp. vol. 2, and Burns, ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700.