What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?

Review of Politics

Volumn 68, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 232-258

  Forde, Steven ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249174098     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670506000106     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; originally published in 1690), § 124; cf. § 12; Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, trans. Robert Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; originally written in 1663?), 103, 211, 219. Henceforth, the former work will be cited as “Second Treatise,” by section number, and the latter as Questions, by the page numbers of the edition cited.
2. James W. Ceasar, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 19–25, 40.
3. John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the ‘Essay’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970), 172;
4. Michael S. Rabieh, “The Reasonableness of Locke, or the Questionableness of Christianity,” Journal of Politics 53, no. 4 (November 1991): 933–957, 941; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14-15; cf. “Second Treatise,” § 12.
5. See also Peter Myers, Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 49.
6. See Locke, Correspondence 4:110-13, 729, 786 -87. This point is relied upon by Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 202 – 3, 206, 207; Dunn, Locke, 30, 84-85; Grant, John Locke's Liberalism, 25-26; Pangle, Spirit of Modern Republicanism, 197-98; Horwitz, introduction to Questions, 25-26; Marshall, Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, 384-87; and Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94–95.
7. Reasonableness, 148. James Tully believes that Locke has a complete proof: A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 35–43, but in the correspondence cited above, Locke appears to deny it.
8. See Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 96–97.
9. Thomas Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Ch. 2.
10. Cf. Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 187; Grant, John Locke's Liberalism, 25. This is not to suggest that Locke denied the possibility of revelation. He allows that revelation may be accepted on points “above reason,” or where reason can form only conjectures (Essay, 4.18.7-9). However, revelation can never contradict certainties of sense or reason (4.18.5-6); reason must always certify the genuineness of revelation, even for one who seems to hear the direct voice of God (4.16.14). The determinative principle is that “reason is natural revelation,” and “revelation must be judged by reason” (Essay, 4.19.4, 14).
11. Cf. J. Budziszewski, The Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 24–25, 43-44;
12. Karl Olivecrona, “Appropriation in the State of Nature: Locke on the Origin of Property,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 2 (1974): 211 – 30; reprinted in John Dunn and Ian Harris, eds., Locke, vol. 1 of the Great Political Thinkers (Lyme, CT: Edward Elgar, 1997), 314–332, 219
13. Tully, “Editor's Introduction,” xvii.
14. This is striking, especially in light of the remarks on charity in the “First Treatise,” § 42. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 248; Pangle, Spirit of Modern Republicanism, 144; John Dunn, “Justice and the Interpretation of Locke's Political Theory,” Political Studies 16, no. 1 (February 1966): 68–87. Some earlier doctrines of property had a charitable principle built into them, making Locke's silence even more striking. See Aquinas Summa Theologica II-II Q 66, A7; Grotius, Law of War and Peace, 193.
15. The foremost champion of this position is Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Her argument has been challenged by William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 11
16. Ruderman and Godwin, “Liberalism and Parental Control of Education,” Review of Politics 62 (Summer 2000): 503–529, among others.
17. cf. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 243–244.
18. cf. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 243; Myers, Our Only Star and Compass, 41; Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 47.
19. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), chap. 1 et passim; Myers, Our Only Star and Compass, 138; Zuckert, “Big Government and Rights: Locke, Rawls, and Liberalism,” in Zuckert, Launching Liberalism, 311-30.