John Locke

"L etat, c'est moi"—"I am the State." Was this, the utterance of Louis XIV to a bewildered French parliament in 1651, the height of arrogance or simply astute observation? Like the great astronomers of his time, Louis was keenly aware of what was central and what was periphery when he styled himself the "sun king". But even if the most absolute of monarchs, he was not strictly an aberration: the 16th and 17th centuries witnessed growing power in the hands of many European sovereigns. And of course the more power and money that were divvied for the wars and the whims of ruling royals left all the less, skinny slivers of pie for the rest—peasants, merchants, and gentry the same.

John Locke changed all that. He set forth a vision of limited government based on individual rights and the consent of the people. Without John Locke, we might still be chasing squatters off our manor estates and calling each other Sire.

To begin to understand Locke's perspective, it is useful to know his predecessor, as it were, the first of the modern political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes. An Englishman, Hobbes wrote during the time of the English Civil War, a time when King and Parliament had the same love for each other as dog and cat, or Arab and Jew. He ran off to France, which was convenient since neither King nor Parliament was quite happy with what he put to paper. There, under the sky of the sun king and the stimulation of raw brandy, Hobbes published Leviathan (1651), the first cohesive 'social contract' theory. It suggested that men in the state of nature (without civil institutions) would inevitably find themselves in a lawless state of war (in which every man is against every man) and would surely cede political authority to a sovereign power in a desperate effort to find peace in society. There was a little lump of proverbial coal for everybody: for his own recently beheaded King Charles, he rejected the divine right of kings, placing their legitimacy in more earthly terms; for the likes of Parliament, he wrote that as citizens we pass unto our sovereign monarch a free gift, the gift of sovereign authority. In return, the sovereign is to honor the notion that "the safety of the people is the supreme law." The kicker is that whatever the sovereign does with this gift, whatever the attention paid to the supreme law, all laws from the sovereign are just. Since the intent of giving political power to the sovereign is peace, there is no justification for disturbing the peace, by civil war or some such tantrums, when one disagrees with the nuts and bolts.

Another forty years, and a protectorate, restoration, and Glorious Revolution later, John Locke produced his own social contract theory, and the essence of his political philosophy, in Two Treatises of Government (1690). Heavily influenced by Hobbes, Locke borrows the social contract approach, but pays back very different conclusions. Like Hobbes, Locke's ideas were written at a time of upheaval for England, in this instance the turmoil that resulted in the Glorious Revolution; unlike Hobbes, his prescriptions were all against the monarchy. Like Hobbes, Locke envisions life without civil authority as a state of nature sometimes reverting to a state of war; unlike Hobbes, he assures that the state of nature does not inevitably result in an all-against-all state of war. Further, Locke quibbles that man's foremost goal is self-preservation, not self-defense, and that man's purpose in forking over political power to a civil authority is more to save his barrow of apples than to head off axe-wielding lunatics. Like Hobbes, Locke sees civil government as a logical and proper remedy for the difficulties of the state of nature; unlike Hobbes, he does not see the price in political power for such remedy as nearly as expensive. Government is man's creation, not God's, and government must rule by the consent of the governed.

This leads to the heart of Locke's social contract, the definition of rights. Individuals, ceding authority to civil government cautiously, insist that such is a loan, not a gift; and that the sole purpose of this is to acquire protection of one's life, liberty, and property from the machinations of his fellow man. Much emphasis is placed on the right of property, especially, which it is clear he believes to be the main impetus for forming political society: "Government has no other end but the preservation of Property." From someone considered to be the architect of modern democracy, this statement shows how far from the nest our path has strayed.

Locke was drawn into philosophy initially by religious persecution. As a Unitarian Protestant, he found himself afoul of Britain's Catholic regime under the restored Stuart monarch James II. During his time of self-exile in the Holland, he wrote his first major philosophical treatise entitled A Letter Concerning Toleration. In this, along with a general theme of religious pluralism, he grounds his thinking in the notion that government is nothing more nor less than the application of legitimate force. "It is one thing to persuade, another to command." And that a man's conscience, being beyond the persuasions of both sword and musket, was unconquerable by the cajoling legions of Stuart monarchs. Herein lies the first lesson of early liberalism: force and authority do neither a pliant heart nor a reasonable argument make. This lesson has been taught since Aesop gave us the tale of the North Wind and the Sun. And it is a lesson that both paternalist liberals and moralist conservatives of today have yet to learn.

Locke also had much influence in other philosophical and social disciplines. He remains one of the most important contributors to epistemology (the study of knowledge acquisition), and he also wrote widely on many other subjects, including economics, theology, and medicine. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), his attention turns to education and some useful hints for raising children, one notable passage urging that while "it being the usual method of servants to awe children, and keep them in subjection, by telling them of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones," these scare tactics must be "carefully prevented," lest the children grow up afraid of hobgoblins and dark shadows in their adult lives. Surely Locke must have imagined Hobbes as just such an affrighted tyke, since it is edgy Thomas who warns that grownups in the state of nature would face life of a kind which is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Ultimately, Hobbes entrusts in the Leviathan beast, monarchy with arbitrary power, to defend us from such a ghastly fate. In disagreement, Locke would just as well not create a real horror to avoid imagined ones.

Locke has no equal as a modern political philosopher, and his influence can not be underestimated. It is well known that our Founding Fathers were well read of Locke, that they found him agreeable by the persuasions of Tory abuses, and that Jefferson was especially smitten. Certainly the purpose and even the methods of our Constitution—checks and balances, separation of powers—are owed to Locke. And either directly or by extension do his concepts of natural rights and limited government influence today the constitutions of republican governments from Warsaw to Baghdad.

With such impressive credentials, it is little surprise that American left-wingers have no choice but to yield Locke the same superficial praise that they afford the United States Constitution. He is the "father of democracy", an archetypal liberal who delivered us from the lowbrow, medieval prerogatives of hereditary rule. But beyond these broad strokes, it is fantasy to think that the details of Lockean political philosophy aren't haunting concepts for modern-day leftists. To escape these, their lesson-plan is easy: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. Hundreds and hundreds of plain-spoken words, all concerted in their intent, all to achieve the glaringly obvious goal of limited government; these can be summarily brushed aside and superceded by a gratuitous phrase or two taken in bad context. Such are the abuses of John Locke in civics textbooks; and such are the abuses of the U.S. Constitution in our high courts.