http://ptx.sagepub.com/Political Theory

http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/40/2/229.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/0090591711432842

2012 40: 229Political TheoryTimothy StantonReply to Tate

  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Political TheoryAdditional services and information for    

  http://ptx.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://ptx.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Feb 29, 2012Version of Record >>

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Political Theory40(2) 229 –236

© 2012 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permission: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0090591711432842http://ptx.sagepub.com

432842 PTX40210.1177/0090591711432842StantonPolitical Theory© 2012 SAGE Publications

Reprints and permission: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

1University of York, Heslington York, UK

Corresponding Author:Timothy Stanton, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington York, YO10 5DD, UK Email: tim.stanton@york.ac.uk

On (Mis)interpreting Locke: A Reply to Tate

Timothy Stanton1

I am extremely grateful for Dr. Tate’s response to my article,1 for it has cap-tured, more concertedly and with far greater clarity than I evidently managed to muster in the article, exactly the way of thinking about Locke that I wished to expose to closer scrutiny and reflection. It has also shown, as I will dem-onstrate, why that way of thinking is so very inadequate to dealing with its subject matter.

Dr. Tate suggests that my ‘interpretation’ of Locke is inaccurate because, so far from ‘inscribing the presence (and the authority) of God at the center of [his] political philosophy’, Locke ‘sought to remove God and His “purposes” from the center of his political philosophy, and adopted three strategies to achieve this’. Yet Dr. Tate makes two concessions which, properly understood, are obviously fatal to his position: that God is our creator2 and that He gives us natural law.3 These concessions are fatal because it is natural law that generates two natural rights which, in their turn, generate the authority to produce government and identify its scope; and these, surely, are at the ‘center of . . . political philosophy’.

To be specific, the duties under natural law to preserve oneself and to preserve others4 generate rights to punish and restrain those who endanger oneself and others, rights to preserve oneself and to execute natural law.5 So people make a commonwealth the better to protect their rights and therefore be able to perform their duties in natural law: ‘Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the Rights and privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

230 Political Theory 40(2)

man, . . . hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty, and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others, as he is perswaded the Offence deserves, even with Death itself. . . . [T]here only is Political Society, where every one of the Members hath quitted this natural Power, resigned it up into the hands of the Community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it’.6

Civil government, then, is a device to secure the ends for which we enter civil society, and those ends are well known to include the protection of our own lives and the lives of others. These are certainly requirements of natu-ral law, and as such God’s requirements. No doubt natural or ‘material’ interests7—‘comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties’8—are advanced in the process, but it is entirely misleading to represent Locke’s argument as one conducted in terms of interest: when one actually consults the apparently impressive cat-ena of citations which Dr. Tate adduces in support of this notion,9 one finds that the word ‘interest’ appears only twice in the twelve sections cited, and then, in both cases, when used to refer to that which biases men and leads them to misapply natural law in their own cases.10 Perhaps this is an example of the ‘rigorous substantiation’ which Dr. Tate finds wanting in my article.11 In any event, he has made a major error in overlooking the content of natural law and the two rights which are derived from it, for both are necessary to explaining why, as opposed to stating that, civil government is a secular body, being confined in its scope to the relations of one human to another: the rights which authorise it, and which people resign up to government, relate to con-cerns which are specific to the present life.

Dr. Tate appears to believe that God is concerned only with a future life and notices no distinction between theology, whether natural or revealed, and reli-gion, whether natural or revealed.12 Thus he expresses the view that the divine purposes which underlie civil society, namely the preservation of each and all and the perfection of the conveniences of life, embraced together in what Locke called ‘the great Design of God’,13 are ‘theological matters upon which individuals, and religious congregations [which are quite beside the point in this place], were likely to disagree’.14 But Locke is perfectly plain that the existence and attributes of God may be known by the human understanding without the assistance of revelation.15 They are therefore indubitable facts, and facts to be taken very seriously indeed, because as there is a being with these attributes, He is the one who gives us directions.16 Thus reason shows that we are under authoritative guidance by God, as a matter of certainty because as a matter of knowledge.17 And reason is infallible.18

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Stanton 231

It follows that where Scripture agrees with reason, it too has a content which certainly comes from God.19 The great Design falls into this category. So many civil interests, including the ones upon which Dr. Tate dwells, such as the acquisition and protection of private property, and others upon which he does not, such as marriage and the continuation of the species,20 are fea-tures of God’s purposes and ceteris paribus to be pursued. On this basis it is hard to share Dr. Tate’s confidence that Locke in ‘no way sought to subordi-nate the ends of individuals, civil society, or government to divine pur-poses’.21 It might be added that since Locke stated explicitly in his first treatise that ‘God the Maker of Heaven and Earth’ was the ‘sole Lord and Proprietor of the whole World’, and that ‘Mans Propriety in [His] creatures is nothing but that Liberty to use them, which God has permitted’, something which He might alter, and indeed had altered, and enlarged,22 to better suit His purposes, Dr. Tate’s claims about the liberation of human beings from those purposes are as distantly related to the textual evidence as his claims about ‘the limits on liberty’ to which individuals might or might not consent. That he cites Locke via Richard Hooker and St. Peter to support the view that Locke wished to expunge divine purposes from politics should, or so one would have thought, have given him at least some pause for thought.

Dr. Tate is correct to insist that one such purpose is absent from politics, namely the salvation of souls. But once more his way of thinking about Locke quite fails to make sense of Locke’s arguments for its exclusion from the proper scope of politics. Dr. Tate asserts that Locke pursues a strategy of ‘privatization’, which reduces faith in its various aspects to a private matter, that is, a matter of individual belief, conscience, and choice.23 This is a little hard to square with Tate’s stated view that God has given natural law to peo-ple, for natural law includes a duty to worship God, to be performed by all, in public: as Locke puts it in his Epistola de tolerantia, Deum publice colendum et sciunt et agnoscunt omnes, all men know and acknowledge that God ought to be worshipped publicly.24 There is nothing optional or private about it. For why else, Locke asks, must they come together in public assemblies, quor-sum alias ad coetus publicos cogimur?25 That is to say, religious societies are requirements of natural law, being integral to the performance of the natural duty to worship publicly: there is a choice of ecclesia, but not a choice of whether to worship. These societies have as their end the public worship of God, and by that means, the gaining of eternal life, Finis societatis religio-sae... est cultus Dei publicus et per eum vitae aeternae acquisitio,26 an end which is contrasted immediately with that of civil society: in religious societ-ies, Locke continues, nothing is or can be done that relates to civil or earthly

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

232 Political Theory 40(2)

goods, Nihil in hac societate agitur nec agi potest de bonorum civilium vel terrenorum possessione.27

It is in these terms, of natural law and natural reason, that problems con-nected with revealed religion are addressed by Locke, for his Epistola is con-cerned with the relations between societies which are, in their different ways, vehicles of natural law, both of which come into existence through the con-sent of people to incorporate into societies, but for very different ends: for mutual protection against terrestrial hazard in the one case, to worship God in the manner they believe will be acceptable to Him in the other. As Ian Harris has established, Locke’s explanation of the differences between the two soci-eties has little, if anything, to do with a perceived contrast between a ‘public’ realm of law and government and a ‘private’, interior realm of personal belief and preference. In the Epistola, Locke ‘used the word privatus and connected terms in drawing a contrast between those who did not and those who did have a special duty in [a commonwealth], and therefore between what did or did not relate to the status and authority of the latter. So privatus was under-stood in contrast with an office-holder, or with civil authority’.28 Locke’s point, in other words, was that salvation was not part of the magistrate’s con-cern, not that it was a private matter in the sense that Dr. Tate insinuates. Locke used English, rather than Latin, to make the point in his ‘Essay con-cerning Toleration’ of 1667, when he contrasted ‘my private interest in an other world’ with the magistrate’s ‘authority’.29

Again Dr. Tate is correct when he says that that ‘authority extended only to civil affairs and not to “men’s souls”’.30 Unfortunately his subsequent invocation of ‘Locke’s proscription of Catholics and atheists’ when elaborat-ing upon this assertion saws off the branch on which he is sitting, since it is not obvious why, if God’s purposes are indeed absent from politics, atheists in particular are such a menace in Locke’s view. Are they not bearers of mate-rial interests centered on their lives, liberties, and estates? One might think that that is more or less all that they could be on Dr. Tate’s view. Dr. Tate further fails to consider why Locke thinks that belief in God is “the founda-tion of all morality”.31 It is so with Locke because in denying God the atheist denies natural law and so also morality. If atheism is inconsistent with moral-ity, and the practice of morality (or parts of it) upholds civil society, then atheism undermines society and the magistrate must act against it.32 Roman Catholic loyalty to the Pope, meanwhile, is not simply a threat, real or imag-ined, to ‘public security’,33 but a repudiation of the integrity of the common-wealth, its independence of religious society, and of the character proper to each, which Locke had demonstrated by natural law arguments. Locke’s positions cannot be explained without reference to natural law; and, once it is

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Stanton 233

admitted, the first two ‘strategies’ to which Dr. Tate commits Locke melt into air.

Little space remains to respond in detail to Dr. Tate’s comments about Locke’s ‘third strategy’, in which claims about the intellectual consequences of Locke’s extended skirmish with Jonas Proast are supported by a reference to the work of John Rawls.34 I have written about this episode elsewhere, and explained what I take those consequences to be.35 That Dr. Tate and I would probably disagree about these is as unimportant in the wider scheme of things as the various ways in which, I think unfairly,36 he fillets and refries my article in representing it as lacking in insight, rigour, or substantiation.

I have shown why, as opposed to stating that, it is Dr. Tate’s claims that are unfounded in relation to the relevant textual evidence. He seems unable to recognise that evidence, so committed is he to pursuing a particular course in the interpretation of Locke, which admits of no deviation, and which cannot contemplate the possibility that Locke thought in anything but the secular liberal terms of a Rawls. He thus perpetuates a way of thinking about Locke which prejudicates the evidence, knowing, without troubling over the actual content of his texts, what he said and what he meant.

Dr. Tate is trapped inside a framework of thought which cannot explain much that is relevant and of vital interest, not only to the study of Locke, but to the possibilities and privations of liberalism. The ambition of my original article was to exhort Locke scholars to challenge that framework of thought wherever they found it, whether in themselves or in others, in order to escape its unhappier results. I prefaced that article with a remark of Wittgenstein’s; let me end my response to Dr. Tate with another: ‘a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push’.37

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this article.

Notes

1. J. Tate, ‘Locke, God, and Civil Society: Response to Stanton’, Political Theory 40, 2, 2012, 222-28. Subsequent references to Dr. Tate’s reply are by page number only.

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

234 Political Theory 40(2)

2. 223. 3. 223. 4. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1960), II.ii.6, 311. 5. Locke, Two Treatises, II.ii.7, 311. 6. Locke, Two Treatises, II.vii.87, 366-67. 7. 224. 8. Locke, Two Treatises, II.viii.95, 375. 9. 224, which cites Locke, Two Treatises, II.iii.21, 323; II.vii.87, 366-67; II.vii.94,

372-74, II.ix.123-27, 395-97, II.ix.131, 398-99; II.xi.134, 401-2; II.xi.136, 404-5, II.xv.171, 428-29; II.xix.222, 460-62.

10. Unsurprisingly, the eighth of Locke’s disputations on the law of nature answered the question ‘Is every man’s interest the basis of the law of nature’ in the nega-tive. See J. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 204-14.

11. 227 (n. 9).12. See e.g. 223, 224, 225, 227, for confusion between theology and religion, the

assumption that the first always is revealed and that the second is always a synonym for Christianity.

13. Locke, Two Treatises, I.iv.41, 205.14. 223.15. J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1975), IV.x.3-6, 620-21. Compare Bodleian MS. Locke c. 28, fols. 119-20, at 120, for a train of reasoning beginning with ‘internall perception self consiousnesse or intuition from whence therefore may be drawn by a traine of Ideas the Surest and most incontestible proof of the Existence of a God’.

16. See Stanton, ‘Authority and freedom’, 18-20 and, more fully, I. Harris, ‘Locke’s Political Theory’, in S. Brown, ed., British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1996), 96-122, at 97-99.

17. Locke, An Essay, IV.vi.3, 579-80.18. Locke, An Essay, IV.iv.4-8, 563-66.19. See e.g. Locke, Two Treatises, I.ix.86, 243, II.v.25, 327; II.vi.52, 345.20. Locke, Two Treatises, II.vii.79, 362, cast expressly in terms of the ‘Rule, which

the infinite wise Maker hath set to the Works of his hands’.21. 223.22. Locke, Two Treatises, I.iv.39, 202-4.23. 225.24. J. Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia/A Letter on Toleration, ed. R. Klibansky, trans.

J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 100. See also Locke, Essays, 156, for the natural duty to render this worship, and Bodleian MS. Locke c. 34, 76-77:

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Stanton 235

‘Men finding it their duty to honour, & worship the God they served were to doe it by publick acts of devotion owneing to the world thereby that Deity by solemne acts of worship to whom they payed the internal acts of veneration in their hearts. And ’twas for this that men were obliged to enter into societyes for Religion, with those who were of the same beleif & way of worship with them-selves’. Belief, then, is part of religion, but it is not ‘private’ but is to be exercised publicly through worship.

25. Locke, Epistola, 100.26. Locke, Epistola, 76.27. Locke, Epistola, 76.28. I. Harris, ‘John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration’, in Natu-

ral Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment ed. J. Parkin and T. Stanton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See Locke, Epistola, 78, 80, 86, 126, for the contrast between privatus and an office holder. Compare Cicero, In Catilinam, I. 3, where Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio (consul 138 BC) is described as acting ‘privatus’, that is, not in the capacity of public office, in putting Tiberius Gracchus to death: P. Scipio, pontifex maximus, Ti. Gracchum mediocriter labefactantem statum rei publicae privatus interfecit.

29. See J. Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration and other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667-1683 ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford, 2006), 272-73.

30. 225.31. 225.32. On this point see J. Dunn, Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 58-59

and I. Harris, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intel-lectual Setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 190.

33. 225.34. 225-26. Dr. Tate forgets his own point when citing Rawls, for he has already admit-

ted (225) that Locke presupposed that theism was a key basis of ‘social-coopera-tion’, since it underwrites the keeping of contracts. The other side of this story is that atheists could have no place in Rawlsian-style deliberations about the creation of an overlapping consensus, being irrational, indeed criminal and mad, in Locke’s view, and so belonging to the class of unreasonable citizens who present to their fellow citizens ‘the practical task of containing them—like war and disease—so that they do not overturn political justice’. See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 48-65, esp. 64, n. 19. For atheism ‘being a crime, which, for its madness as well as guilt, ought to shut a man out of all sober and civil society’, see J. Locke, A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), vol. 7, p. 161.

35. T. Stanton, ‘Letters concerning Toleration’, in S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, J. Walmsley, and P. Schuurman (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Locke (London: Continuum,

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

236 Political Theory 40(2)

2010), 257-65. Suffice it to say that ‘true religion’ in Locke’s exchanges with Proast almost invariably refers to the truth claims made on behalf of specific branches of the Christian church, rather than Christian doctrine in general or natural theology. So Dr. Tate’s citation of it does not touch Locke’s point that natural law requires people to worship God, whether inside or outside a commonwealth. See e.g. J. Locke, A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1690), 4: ‘you build all you say upon this lurking Supposition, that the National Religion now in England, back’d by the Publick Authority of the Law, is the only True Religion’; J. Locke, A Third Letter for Toleration, to the Author of the Third Letter concerning Toleration (London: 1692), 152: ‘your bringing Men to the True Religion, being to bring them to Conformity to the National’.

36. Consider e.g. footnote 6, which claims that I simply take it for granted that indi-viduals will know when resistance to government is justified, when I say explic-itly that only God is in the position to know and to judge this, or footnote 8, which turns a claim about the individual into a claim about consent. See also fn. 13, which claims that I suggest that there is a duty to inaugurate government. I do not suggest any such thing, since Locke mentions none, emphasising (as I therefore do) only the instrumental usefulness of doing so. There is, however, a duty to inaugurate religious societies, in virtue of the duty to worship under natural law. Or see fn. 17, on duties to God, where, pace Dr. Tate’s misleading paraphrase, I obviously mean that government is not concerned with the duty to worship, ‘only’ with matters relevant to the duties to self-preservation and the preservation of others.

37. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. P. Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42.

About the Author

Timothy Stanton is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. In 2011-12 he is Balzan-Skinner Fellow in Modern Intellectual History since c.1500 at the University of Cambridge, where he will deliver the third Balzan-Skinner Lecture, ‘John Locke and the fable of liberalism’.

at University of York on December 2, 2014ptx.sagepub.comDownloaded from