IN THE BEGINNING, all the English were Christian Aristotelians, more or less. Early seventeenth-century thought, whether royalist or parliamentary in orientation, betrays the formative marks of Aristotelian ways of thinking. By the time of the American Revolution, however, Aristotle was an almost discarded figure, among the Whig Opposition at least; the categories of political thinking resonated hardly at all with Aristotle’s Politics and much more with Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Thus I defend points of view considered outdated or simply mistaken in many if not most advanced scholarly circles today. I maintain, for example, that Locke was the inspiration for the natural rights philosophy that informed American political thought and, moreover, that Locke has things to say about such fundamental matters as natural rights that are still philosophically interesting and arguably true.
This book is thus about Locke’s coming to dominance within those traditions of Anglo-American thought that have come to be called Whig, and about the immense practical and theoretical significance of that event. Locke’s rise to dominance occurred within the context of the English seventeenth century—a tempest of a time, marked by great political instability and intellectual innovation. Locke came along only after a buffeting succession of transforming events had already subjected political thought in England to several significant shifts in perspective.
In the beginning, all the English were Christian Aristotelians, more or less. By the early seventeenth century, however, the Reformation and its aftermath subjected those inherited ways of thought to great and transforming pressure. Part of the pressure came from the practical conflicts unleashed by the Reformation, part from the struggle of thoughtful and pious men to find the political conclusion that flowed from Protestant premises. Under pressure from Protestantism, the old accommodations between Christianity and classical antiquity embodied in the various forms of Christian Aristotelianism gave way. But they gave way to a variety of remarkably different positions. At one extreme emerged a new divine right doctrine, profoundly challenging to the inherited ways of English politics. At the other extreme emerged a variety of parliamentarily oriented contractarian doctrines, most important among which was John Milton’s Christian republicanism. Although they were contractarians, neither Milton nor the other pro-parliamentary writers of the pre–Civil War era were adherents of anything like the Lockean contract doctrine. The various contractarianisms of the age, far from being more or less identical to each other, represented quite different responses to the Reformation. A Milton is not a Defoe is not a Locke.
The effort to find the proper political embodiment of the Protestant principle permeated the pre–Civil War era, but the variety and mutual hostility of the various embodiments promoted before and during the war showed this to be no easy task. The English Civil War, if not caused by these theoretical conflicts, nicely epitomized them. Warfare based largely on religious differences, of course, did not distinguish England very much from other European nations, for this was the era of religious warfare. However, instead of conflict between Protestant and Catholic, the English experienced mortal conflict among Protestants, each side claiming to present the correct solution to the theological-political conundrums unleashed by the Reformation.
The Reformation proved incapable of establishing a determinate politics. Thoughtful individuals during the Interregnum and in the early years after the restoration of the monarchy cast about for alternatives to the Protestant politics that had brought the country the disasters of civil strife and Cromwellian rule. Most important was the revival of politics grounded in natural law. Because of its associations with Catholicism on the one hand, and pagan rationalism on the other, the natural law philosophy had suffered an eclipse in the first half of the century. However, sola scriptura, or even scripture plus theology, had not only proved unable to settle politics but had contributed to the generally unsettled situation a virulence and fanaticism that led Englishmen to give new consideration to the virtues of political theories based on appeals to reason, which in principle was available to and binding on all human beings without regard to theologico-scriptural commitments.
During this period moderate natural law philosophers like Nathaniel Culverwell and Richard Cumberland wrote. It was also the moment when Richard Hooker’s books became the authority to which Locke testified when he appealed to “the judicious Hooker” as nearly conclusive support for any position he could attribute to his sixteenth-century predecessor. Most important, however, was the tremendous intellectual power that the Dutch political philosopher Hugo Grotius came to exercise over the English political mind in the latter half of the century. The Whig tendency in thought crystallized at this time, and almost all Whig thought from the Exclusion Crisis through the Glorious Revolution and beyond bears the unmistakable imprint of the Dutchman’s new version of natural law. Grotius developed his much reformed natural law in a Dutch context remarkably similar to that in which the English found themselves—in the wake of a period of intense and violent political and religious conflict between different varieties of Protestants. His conclusions, moreover, cohered nicely with tendencies long present in English parliamentary and anti-absolutist traditions. Grotius seems almost to have been conjured up for the occasion.
Contrary to what is sometimes said, the chief Whig writings in defense of the Glorious Revolution bore little resemblance to Locke or to the Americans’ Lockean Declaration of Independence, but instead played on themes from Grotius. Grotius was the philosopher of the Whigs—a philosopher of uncommon originality, depth, and subtlety. He was not, as is sometimes said, the founder of the modern natural law or natural rights philosophy, but he introduced major changes into the existing doctrines. He broke substantially free from the revived Thomism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as developed by Counter-Reformation thinkers like Francisco Suárez and Roberto Bellarmine. He went back to the well, to the original sources of natural law—the Roman law and the Stoics—in order to assemble an altogether new natural law doctrine. Ultimately, however, even more important than these sources for Grotius was Aristotle. His achievement could well be described as a synthesis of the philosophy of law implicit in Roman law and Aristotelian moral philosophy, in place of the Thomist synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity. The acceptance of Grotius among the Whigs thus signalled a partial restoration of the authority of Aristotle—an Aristotle much modified, it must be said, but Aristotle nonetheless.
By the late seventeenth century the fate of pre-Reformation Christian Aristotelianism was settled. Protestantism had served as a cyclotron, barraging the older synthesis with high-energy particles that split it into its constituent parts. Without being too schematic, we can identify four different patterns of successor doctrines. The Thomist synthesis did not come entirely apart; in the marvelous prose of Richard Hooker and the writings of many lesser lights who followed him, the main outlines of the Christian Aristotelianism developed before the Reformation remain discernible, although revised to meet the needs of the new context.
Popular as Hooker was, however, the more powerful currents of the day reveal the disruptive effect of the Reformation onslaught. The pre–Civil War era was dominated by modes of political thought that retained allegiance to one side of the synthesis, Christianity as understood in the Reformation, but more or less jettisoned the other side, Aristotle. The post-Restoration era was dominated by the obverse phenomenon. In Whig Grotianism we see the development of a new purified Aristotelianism, more or less freed from, although not hostile to, Protestant Christianity in its main forms.
Finally, to complete the set, there emerged new forms of political philosophy—Hobbes is the clearest case—that rejected both sides of the old Christian Aristotelianism. Hobbes’ work was not the only form of this new or modernist thought, however. Pufendorf, in part, and Locke, altogether, shared with Hobbes the aspiration for a political philosophy neither Christian nor Aristotelian in character, although both also broke with Hobbes in many and important ways. In Locke’s case this meant the development of a new liberal theory of political society that was constitutionalist, like the English Grotian Whigs’, but differed importantly from Hobbes in its foundational theory of natural right. That difference is captured in Locke’s most central teaching: all right is understood by him as property, and property is understood as natural. In both respects he diverged from Hobbes, and the differences allowed Locke’s thought to become the basis for the new republicanism.
Locke differed not only from Hobbes, but from Grotius as well; although the Whigs of the late seventeenth century were mostly Grotian, and although Locke was also a Whig, Locke was not a Grotian. Indeed, his political philosophy emerges largely as a critique of Grotius, not least of Grotius’s Aristotelianism. From Locke’s early unpublished writings on natural law to his mature Essay and Two Treatises, Locke polemicized against the most characteristic features of Grotian natural law doctrine: the Grotian ontology that found a genuine natural law independent of all divine grounding, and the Grotian epistemology that found in the consensus gentium a source of knowledge of the natural law.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Grotius had been displaced by John Locke as the master of Whig thought. Nonetheless, Grotius remains an important figure, not only because he developed a philosophy of inherent interest and strength that shaped Whig thinking in the later seventeenth century but because, albeit unwittingly, he proved to be the vehicle for the further transformation of the Whig tradition by Locke. Despite the great differences between them, there were thematic similarities that made the transition from Grotius to Locke plausible if not inevitable. The greatest similarity—and the greatest difference—concerned the issue of rights. Grotius’s new natural law had as one of its chief features the narrowing of natural law to the sphere of rights, and in this Locke followed him. Nonetheless, their respective understandings of rights are almost altogether different, and result in great practical differences. Paradoxically, Grotius is a rights-thinker because he attempts to adapt Aristotle to the seventeenth century situation; Locke is a rights-thinker because he breaks with Aristotle in order to respond to the seventeenth century situation.
Locke’s new rights theory laid the foundation for the new republicanism, which in turn became one vehicle by which Lockean political phlosophy was disseminated. Locke did not develop the new republicanism himself, nor was it developed from materials supplied exclusively by him. He provided some of the valuable “raw materials,” but others came from the pre-Lockean Whig tradition.
The seventeenth-century Whigs largely followed Grotius on the issues of political philosophy proper—natural law and natural right, political obligation, and the like. Their contractarianism was also Grotian in character. In addition to the Grotian political philosophy, however, a distinctive mode of Whig political analysis emerged. The Whigs discovered, in effect, the informal constitution, and the political dynamics that could subvert the constitution even as it was being formally honored. In this Whig political science one finds many of the themes the advocates of the civic republican thesis emphasize in their construing of the political thought of the era. They rightly emphasize these themes, because the new republicanism does partly form around them. The writers who, more than any others, put together the new synthesis that is the new republicanism were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, writing in the early eighteenth century as “Cato.” The sponsors of the classical republican approach single out Cato for much of their attention, but mistakenly present him as an anti-Lockean. This is the opposite of the truth: Cato was a source from whom both the English and the Americans of the eighteenth century learned Lockean politics. Cato’s creators are important because they built the new republicanism on the foundation supplied by Locke but incorporated in their work the older Whig political science. Trenchard and Gordon thus fused into a coherent whole two lines of thought which had proceeded in partial independence of each other previously—Whig political science and Lockean political philosophy.
The two lines of thought Cato fused together to make up the new republicanism correspond roughly to the “competing” traditions (liberal-contractarian and republican) on which recent scholars have focused in their debates over American origins. These were not so much competing traditions, even in their pre-Cato manifestations, as modes of political analysis proceeding at different levels and addressing different questions. Cato’s successful synthesis proves that our contemporary scholars are quite mistaken in seeing the “America problem” in terms of an either/or. It was not.
As the American origins begin to come into focus, so does something of the modernity problem as well. America was not “founded in the dread of modernity,” as one of the civic-republican historians puts it, but founded in the embrace of modernity. This modernity was neither classical nor Christian, but, as developed by Locke and Cato, it was able to make peace at some level with those elements of both traditions that had been taken almost for granted before being dislodged by the Reformation. Setting the new republicanism into the context of the seventeenth century from which it emerged helps make more intelligible not only the inner character of political modernity but also the process by which it came to power.
This book, in other words, is meant not only to elucidate something of the character and value of modernity through the analysis of Locke’s political philosophy in relation to his predecessors’, but also to contribute to the woefully underexplained story of how such a major reorientation of thought might have come about. In this story, Grotius, as the link between Locke and the past, and Cato, as the link between Locke and the future, play especially important parts.