Locke

Bio:

• b. 1632 at Wrington, Somerset, to John Locke (attorney) and his wife, Agnes. He was the elder of two. Marginal gentry.

• Family had puritan sympathies: Locke Sr. served as captain in one of the parliamentary armies.

• Locke went to Westminster School, along with Dryden, Robert Hooke (scientist), and Christopher Wren (architect – designed St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire). He found it extremely severe – frequent floggings.

• In 1652, Locke was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. He took his BA in 1656, his MA in 1658. This is during the Interregnum, recall. Oxford had been a royalist stronghold, but was purged of serious royalists in the 1640s after the war.

• Developed an enduring dislike of the scholastic method of disputation and its emphasis on chopping logic – he thought it was counterproductive and came to favour an empirical methodology that had less to do with logical propositions and more to do with the evidence of the senses. We call this empiricism: Locke is considered to have invented this philosophic methodology.

• Spent rather a lot of time reading plays, romances, novels and letters.

• Unsure about career choice – admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1656 (lawyers’ chambers); took large numbers of notes on medical texts in the late 1650s. Nothing came of either option. In 1663, he was considering ordination, but was persuaded out of it by a friend, John Strachey. He was elected instead to a series of teaching posts at Christ Church in Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy.

• Met Robert Boyle in 1660 (founder of the Royal Society); started reading him, natural philosophy in general, and Descartes.

• At Oxford, Anthony Wood described him as ‘a man of turbulent spirit, clamorous and never contented … while every man besides, of the club, was writing, he would be prating and troblesome’ (Life and Times, 1.472). Pierre Coste, however, testified to his ‘obliging and benevolent manners which, supported by an easy and polite expression, a great knowledge of the world, and a vast extent of capacity, made his conversation so agreeable to all sorts of people’ (Works, 10.168).

• He never married, though maintained several sentimental correspondences with women in Oxford. He kept his own council on this topic, though one letter from a friend records the friend’s conjecture that he had a mistress.

• In 1665 he went to Cleves for 3 months as secretary to an ambassador; very much enjoyed it. Saw members of different churches live peacefully together – may have changed his mind about toleration, of which he was a great proponent.

• In 1666, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1^st earl of Shaftesbury. They developed a lasting friendship and Locke spent the next 8 years living in Shaftesbury’s London residence on the Strand: Exeter house.

• Locke was probably tutor to the second earl, also Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was a bit of a dullard and rather an ineffectual individual, by all accounts. His son, the future 3^rd earl of Shaftesbury, was also tutored by Locke, to much better effect. His grandfather raised him and took control of his schooling. Locke also oversaw the operation for an abcess on the 1^st earl’s liver.

• He was a fellow of the Royal Society, but doesn’t seem to have been much interested in their day-to-day doings.

• He was involved in the founding of a new colony, Carolina: wrote, or co-wrote the ‘fundamental constitutions of Carolina.’ Includes discussion of slavery.

• Origins of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding dated to early 1670s – two drafts in 1671, work not resumed until 1676.

• In 1673, made secretary and subsequently treasurer to the council for trade and plantations.

• In 1675, Shaftesbury was out of favour with the government and Locke’s post at the university depended on royal dispensation, so he returned to take his medical degree, which secured his position at Christ Church with one of the medical studentships.

• Went to France for 3 years, 1675-79. Engaged in thinking about Cartesian ideas.

• Arrived back in England in the middle of the Exclusion Crisis in 1679. Shaftesbury’s involved – in 1682, the Rye House Plot causes Shaftesbury to go into hiding and eventually to flee to Holland. Locke wasn’t involved in the plot, but he was associated with the people who were. He also fled to Holland in 1683.

• He’s likely writing the Two Treatises in the early 1680s, but it was too dangerous to publish them at this time – published in 1689, with a 1690 imprint on the title-page. He was also writing his Letter Concerning Toleration, which advocated a complete separation between church and state.

• In 1684, while he was in the Netherlands, he was expelled from his studentship at Christ Church for consorting with rebels – supporters of Monmouth. He went into hiding until 1686.

• He returned to England in 1689, after the accession of William and Mary. It was now safe for him to be in England, but Oxford wouldn’t give him back his studentship.

• Most of his major works, the Two Treatises (which he never signed or acknowleged as his in his lifetime), the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the Letters Concerning Toleration, were all published in 1689.

• Also wrote Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which was compiled and published in 1693 from a series of letters Locke wrote to a friend with young children.

• He had always suffered from an unidentified disease of the lungs – possibly asthma – and his health began to deteriorate in the spring of 1704; he died at the end of October.

Second Treatise (1689)

Key: If bolded, look carefully at the passage indicated.

Why Locke in a lit course? [Sets the stage for discussions about property, power, individual rights and freedoms, all of which issues will come up repeatedly in the texts in this course.]

Second Treatise was published most frequently as part of the many editions of Locke’s collected works, but had a separate printing in 1773 in Boston, and has always had an enormous impact on American political thought. It was imported almost wholesale into the Declaration of Independence, and “Founder’s Intent” (a legal category in American constitutional law) makes it still relevant.

The State of Nature

1) “Nature” has a different significance for the 18C: Doesn’t describe the natural landscape, rather, the original state of the individual & of human society. Can refer to Edenic nature (Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha) or to a secular original nature (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan).

2) Why are people interested in it?

a) an old history of humanist investigations – interest in secular, human origins for institutions, etc. – what sets the Renaissance apart from medieval understandings of the world.

b) fascination with the origins of power following on the Civil Wars in England. Kings had usurped power before (Bolingbroke), but not the same. (Humanism; neoclassicism)

c) potentially the most significant: colonialism. Describing original peoples as in the state of nature provided a tidy excuse for conquest – we’ll see how this plays out in Locke.

3) What does Locke say about it?

a) p. 8 (Ch. II, Sect. 4): State of Nature is “a State of perfect Freedom,” and “a State of Equality.” – opposed to Filmer & patriarchal theory.

b) p. 9 (Ch. II, Sect. 6): the “law of nature” and “reason, which is that law.” Attributing reason to the state of nature declared Locke’s opposition to Hobbesian individualism, which saw the state of nature as an unreasonable life: “nasty, brutish, and short.”

The State of War

1) Locke’s major refutation of Hobbes: p. 14 (Ch. III, Sect. 17): Locke’s definition of the State of War is essentially that it is an assertion of absolutism.

a) What does this mean for Kingship? [king is in a state of war with his people]

b) What for slavery? [must be wrong]

Contract theory

1) This is what Locke proposes against Hobbes and Filmer: p. 52 (Ch. VIII, Sect. 95): “noone can be put out of this estate . . . without his own consent”

Majority rule instead of monarchy. [Dryden’s response: the majority is often wrong]

2) marriage also a contract (“a voluntary compact”) that may be ended in a case of tyrannical rule: p. 44: “But this reaching but to the things of their common interest...” [Milton argued the same in the Divorce Tracts]

Slavery

A contradictory chapter because Locke is really talking about two different forms of slavery:

1) This is really a discussion of absolute monarchy: p. 17 (Ch. IV, Sect. 23): “This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power...”

2) Now Locke is talking about African slavery: p. 17 (Ch. IV, Sect. 24): “This is the perfect condition of slavery...”

Property

1) Equitable beginnings are varied by the use of reason: we all have reason, but the more reason we have, the better use we’ll make of the land. Locke doesn’t talk about variations in rational capacity except by implicaton (when he discusses land-use). Seventeenth-century culture, however, ascribes less rational capacity to various groups, including: children, women, Africans, Native Americans, working people: p. 18 (Ch. V, Sect. 26): “the world to men in common...”

2) “inclosure”: p.19 (Ch. V, Sect. 26): Locke is making a comparison here between the American situation and Native American land-use and a seventeenth-century institution called “common land” and “inclosure.” Common land was land on which the people of a community in England could graze their animals, gather birds-eggs, mushrooms, berries, etc. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this land was increasingly beginning to be “inclosed,” i.e. fenced in and cultivated by neighboring land-owners who claimed a title to it and whatever it produced. This comparison enables Locke to make a point that goes something like: “Look, we think this is a good thing in England, wouldn’t it be great for America too?”

3) From “property in his own person” [this phrase has a huge impact] to labour. If property is created by labour, then anyone who labours (merchants, tradespeople, etc.) can have property: p. 19 (Ch. V, Sect. 28): “We see in commons...”

4) Problems with this definition: Locke includes the labour of his servant in a discussion of how to create property by your own labour: p. 19-20 (Ch. V, Sect. 28): “the turfs my servant has cut...”

5) If cultivation is your title to land, “uncultivated” land is free to be claimed, in this system: p. 21 (Ch. V, Sect. 34): “He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational...” – who’s this? [the middle class; merchants; the English]

6) law invented to care for property: p. 51 (Ch. VII, Sect. 94): “whereas government has no other end but the preservation of property.”

America

Contrary to the picture Locke paints of America in the late seventeenth century (big, empty, virtually uninhabited spaces), the Europeans who landed there found farming operations, stable villages, cleared and ploughed land, crops, and permanent buildings.

1) Americans don’t labour, in Locke’s view – they aren’t cultivating their land (implication: the English have a right to take it from them): p. 25-26 (Ch. V, Sect. 40-41): “Nor is it so strange...”; “There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing...”

2) Improvement is generosity – not only do the English have a right to American land, they’re in fact doing the American First Nations a favour by “improving” it: p. 23-24 (Ch. V, Sect. 37): “And therefore he that incloses land...”

Tutorial:

• Locke says: p. 29 (Ch. V, Sect. 48-49): “In the beginning, all the World was America.” What are some of the implications of this statement both for England and for America?

Conquest: p. 91: Under these rules, why isn’t America classified as conquest? [property]