(For the record and as a courtesy to the genius of Machiavelli, I must remind the reader that the concept of checks and balances originates with the great Florentine.)
So far we have discussed great philosophers whose political theories were unmistakably in the totalitarian vein. Democracy for them was a legitimate “totalitarian” concept, and, in this sense, Soviet totalitarianism, claiming to be a democracy (against strong protestations of the West), was indeed a totalitarian democracy, consistently with its solid philosophical definition, hallowed by the names of the world’s greatest thinkers, who saw nothing contradictory (and rightfully at that) in this otherwise patently oxymoronic to the modern ear interpretation.
This entry, however, is about two thinkers who had broken the totalitarian tradition in political philosophy. Their joint contribution to political thought, although intellectually not necessarily of the first magnitude, was huge in its practical implications and applicability, and, even though they came forth in two different historical epochs and represented two different national schools of thinking, they are often confused, as to who contributed what exactly to the greatest democratic traditions of modernity, and most spectacularly to the American Constitution.
Although thus virtually indistinguishable-- almost like identical twins-- in life and personal historical legacy they were worlds apart: one, despised and reviled by some, yet praised beyond merit by others, whereas the other, beloved and praised to excess, yet essentially marginalized in more recent times. It is time for us then to take a closer look at each of them: the Englishman Locke and the Frenchman Montesquieu.
Locke was a wishful thinker backwards. Rather than idealizing the future, he idealized “the past,” namely, the much-discussed state of nature. Those who recall Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a “war of every man against every man” may be shocked by the contrariness of Locke’s prehistoric utopia, where the state of nature is a happy state: “Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.”
Locke further expounds this point by a direct jab at Hobbes, (whom he, however, never mentions by name, even in such conspicuous cases where elementary decency demands one to give the man one borrows from some sort of attribution!):
“And here we have the plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which however some men have confounded are as far distant as a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction are from one another.”
Needless to say, this glaring contrariness is probably the result of a semantic confusion of sorts, in Locke’s mind, between what we call the ‘law of the jungle’ (incidentally doing a great injustice to Kipling by stealing his positively charged phrase and turning it on its head) and what he, Locke, apparently conceives to be the law of reason, in which case a much better distinction ought to have been made. In fact, the law of nature is ostensibly the Law of God to Locke, just as much, and along precisely the same lines of understanding, as in Plato and in Saint Thomas Aquinas, and clearly there is no originality here whatsoever, on Locke’s part.
What is peculiar to Locke, however, is his theory of natural rights of man, derived from his understanding of the law of nature. Thomas Jefferson would later call them inalienable Rights (corrected to ‘unalienable Rights’ in the Declaration of Independence, where he adds that we hold these truths to be self-evident). It is most instructive, though, that Jefferson’s “inalienable Rights” include “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” as if he were reluctant to include the strictly capitalistic Right of Private Property, which was the first and foremost natural right to Locke, placed by him even above life and physical personal safety!
According to Locke, “political power [is] the right of making laws with penalty of death and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury and all this only for the public good.”
While Locke’s theory of social contract is rather unoriginal, except to insist that, according to this contract, the responsibility of the government is to protect those natural rights, his idea of separation of powers is of particular interest. (Although he is limited in his understanding of this question by the conflict which he was witnessing in England, taking place between the Crown and the Parliament) Locke sees as the two powers in need of separation the legislative and the executive, and, not surprisingly, never raises the question of the third key power, the judiciary, which was of course left up to Montesquieu to include in the eventual classic triad.
Now, with regard to the exceptional posthumous animosity toward John Locke, here is one extremely mean 1827 attack on his memory by yet another Englishman, Thomas De Quincey: “Against Locke’s philosophy, I think it an unanswerable objection that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for a good seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.”
Schelling was far less vicious, but no less blunt: "Je méprise John Locke." (A German talking French about an Englishman, what an uncommon universality!)
And of course our friend Nietzsche has a very low opinion of Locke, but then, he is of a very low opinion of all English philosophers as a class: “They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke,--- a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of philosophy for more than a century.” (Jenseits #252) (Previously, in Jenseits #20, Nietzsche calls Locke “superficial,” with regard to his theory of the origin of ideas.)
I personally see the greatest flaw of Locke’s natural rights philosophy in his promotion of private property to their rank. This is inconsistent with the Christian attitude toward private property, and once you wish to promote something to the absolute status of Divine Law, you better take into consideration what Jesus and his Apostles had to say about it. His failure to reconcile his defense of property with Christianity (it would have been an impossible task anyway!) immediately deflates his theory of natural rights, and leaves it only with a symbolic general reservoir of value, from which Jefferson drew his inalienable rights, preferring to leave property alone(!).
Why was Locke so intensely disliked, at least by some? Perhaps, because he was virtually deified by others at the other end? His political philosophy was probably not of the highest magnitude, but its historical luck was of the top order… Well, so much for him, for right now, but I will surely revisit him extensively in the Magnificent Shadows section, where his other, non-political, contributions to philosophy will be discussed as well.
The other alleged ‘twin’ of this rather improbable duo was the wonderful Frenchman Charles-Louis Baron de Montesquieu, about whom Voltaire in his inimitable wickedly-witty fashion said this, in a 1759 letter to an unknown correspondent:
“Montesquieu sometimes mistakes an epigram for a definition and an antithesis for a novel idea, but for all that he remains a profound and Heaven-sent genius who knows how to think himself and make his readers think.” (See much more on Montesquieu in the Heaven-Sent Genius entry of the Significant Others section.)
It is well-known among the knowledgeable, yet sadly unfamiliar to the general public, that the so proudly hallowed political-philosophical principle of the ‘separation of powers’ belongs to Montesquieu. Whereas Locke identified only two powers in need of separation, it was the Frenchman who added the crucial third component, the judiciary, to the legislative-executive combination.
In his great book L’Esprit des Lois, he also made history by producing his own and peculiar classification of governments. Instead of the traditional division into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, he named the republic, based on the animating principle of virtue, monarchy, based on honor, and despotism, based on fear. (A third principle in his classification was the effect of the climate on the intellectual disposition of the society, a very intriguing proposition, which I might consider looking more closely into in the future, if there is enough time for that.)
Fortunately for Montesquieu, he does not enter the debate about which rights of man are natural, and which are not. His intellectual discourse, therefore, is not only more refined and literate than Locke’s, but it is also more defensible than that of his predecessor.
There is a formal objection some express toward Montesquieu’s forceful drive toward the separation of the legislative and executive powers in particular, which in the England of his time already had the dividing line between them effaced, as the King was no longer the embodiment of the executive power, while the Prime Minister, emerging out of the Parliament and remaining there for all intents and purposes, thus combined them both in his person. To me, this objection kind of misses the point that England has other checks and balances against the abuse of power within its system, such as its political system’s flexibility in reacting to such abuses by, say, votes of non-confidence and a quick and easy way of driving any acting-up PM out of his Downing Street residence in no time at all. On the other hand, the American Constitution, which I do greatly admire, and which stipulates a very clear distinction between the three branches of government, is no less open to the abuse of power than the European political systems, through its use of party conspiracy, and due to the glaring lack of flexibility in the American four-year cycle. The American political system is however aware of its weakness and commendably compensates by adding an additional check and balance within the United States Congress itself, that is within the legislative branch of power, as evidenced by the counterchecking capacity of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
So far we have discussed great philosophers whose political theories were unmistakably in the totalitarian vein. Democracy for them was a legitimate “totalitarian” concept, and, in this sense, Soviet totalitarianism, claiming to be a democracy (against strong protestations of the West), was indeed a totalitarian democracy, consistently with its solid philosophical definition, hallowed by the names of the world’s greatest thinkers, who saw nothing contradictory (and rightfully at that) in this otherwise patently oxymoronic to the modern ear interpretation.
This entry, however, is about two thinkers who had broken the totalitarian tradition in political philosophy. Their joint contribution to political thought, although intellectually not necessarily of the first magnitude, was huge in its practical implications and applicability, and, even though they came forth in two different historical epochs and represented two different national schools of thinking, they are often confused, as to who contributed what exactly to the greatest democratic traditions of modernity, and most spectacularly to the American Constitution.
Although thus virtually indistinguishable-- almost like identical twins-- in life and personal historical legacy they were worlds apart: one, despised and reviled by some, yet praised beyond merit by others, whereas the other, beloved and praised to excess, yet essentially marginalized in more recent times. It is time for us then to take a closer look at each of them: the Englishman Locke and the Frenchman Montesquieu.
Locke was a wishful thinker backwards. Rather than idealizing the future, he idealized “the past,” namely, the much-discussed state of nature. Those who recall Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a “war of every man against every man” may be shocked by the contrariness of Locke’s prehistoric utopia, where the state of nature is a happy state: “Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.”
Locke further expounds this point by a direct jab at Hobbes, (whom he, however, never mentions by name, even in such conspicuous cases where elementary decency demands one to give the man one borrows from some sort of attribution!):
“And here we have the plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which however some men have confounded are as far distant as a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction are from one another.”
Needless to say, this glaring contrariness is probably the result of a semantic confusion of sorts, in Locke’s mind, between what we call the ‘law of the jungle’ (incidentally doing a great injustice to Kipling by stealing his positively charged phrase and turning it on its head) and what he, Locke, apparently conceives to be the law of reason, in which case a much better distinction ought to have been made. In fact, the law of nature is ostensibly the Law of God to Locke, just as much, and along precisely the same lines of understanding, as in Plato and in Saint Thomas Aquinas, and clearly there is no originality here whatsoever, on Locke’s part.
What is peculiar to Locke, however, is his theory of natural rights of man, derived from his understanding of the law of nature. Thomas Jefferson would later call them inalienable Rights (corrected to ‘unalienable Rights’ in the Declaration of Independence, where he adds that we hold these truths to be self-evident). It is most instructive, though, that Jefferson’s “inalienable Rights” include “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” as if he were reluctant to include the strictly capitalistic Right of Private Property, which was the first and foremost natural right to Locke, placed by him even above life and physical personal safety!
According to Locke, “political power [is] the right of making laws with penalty of death and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury and all this only for the public good.”
While Locke’s theory of social contract is rather unoriginal, except to insist that, according to this contract, the responsibility of the government is to protect those natural rights, his idea of separation of powers is of particular interest. (Although he is limited in his understanding of this question by the conflict which he was witnessing in England, taking place between the Crown and the Parliament) Locke sees as the two powers in need of separation the legislative and the executive, and, not surprisingly, never raises the question of the third key power, the judiciary, which was of course left up to Montesquieu to include in the eventual classic triad.
Now, with regard to the exceptional posthumous animosity toward John Locke, here is one extremely mean 1827 attack on his memory by yet another Englishman, Thomas De Quincey: “Against Locke’s philosophy, I think it an unanswerable objection that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for a good seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.”
Schelling was far less vicious, but no less blunt: "Je méprise John Locke." (A German talking French about an Englishman, what an uncommon universality!)
And of course our friend Nietzsche has a very low opinion of Locke, but then, he is of a very low opinion of all English philosophers as a class: “They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke,--- a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of philosophy for more than a century.” (Jenseits #252) (Previously, in Jenseits #20, Nietzsche calls Locke “superficial,” with regard to his theory of the origin of ideas.)
I personally see the greatest flaw of Locke’s natural rights philosophy in his promotion of private property to their rank. This is inconsistent with the Christian attitude toward private property, and once you wish to promote something to the absolute status of Divine Law, you better take into consideration what Jesus and his Apostles had to say about it. His failure to reconcile his defense of property with Christianity (it would have been an impossible task anyway!) immediately deflates his theory of natural rights, and leaves it only with a symbolic general reservoir of value, from which Jefferson drew his inalienable rights, preferring to leave property alone(!).
Why was Locke so intensely disliked, at least by some? Perhaps, because he was virtually deified by others at the other end? His political philosophy was probably not of the highest magnitude, but its historical luck was of the top order… Well, so much for him, for right now, but I will surely revisit him extensively in the Magnificent Shadows section, where his other, non-political, contributions to philosophy will be discussed as well.
The other alleged ‘twin’ of this rather improbable duo was the wonderful Frenchman Charles-Louis Baron de Montesquieu, about whom Voltaire in his inimitable wickedly-witty fashion said this, in a 1759 letter to an unknown correspondent:
“Montesquieu sometimes mistakes an epigram for a definition and an antithesis for a novel idea, but for all that he remains a profound and Heaven-sent genius who knows how to think himself and make his readers think.” (See much more on Montesquieu in the Heaven-Sent Genius entry of the Significant Others section.)
It is well-known among the knowledgeable, yet sadly unfamiliar to the general public, that the so proudly hallowed political-philosophical principle of the ‘separation of powers’ belongs to Montesquieu. Whereas Locke identified only two powers in need of separation, it was the Frenchman who added the crucial third component, the judiciary, to the legislative-executive combination.
In his great book L’Esprit des Lois, he also made history by producing his own and peculiar classification of governments. Instead of the traditional division into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, he named the republic, based on the animating principle of virtue, monarchy, based on honor, and despotism, based on fear. (A third principle in his classification was the effect of the climate on the intellectual disposition of the society, a very intriguing proposition, which I might consider looking more closely into in the future, if there is enough time for that.)
Fortunately for Montesquieu, he does not enter the debate about which rights of man are natural, and which are not. His intellectual discourse, therefore, is not only more refined and literate than Locke’s, but it is also more defensible than that of his predecessor.
There is a formal objection some express toward Montesquieu’s forceful drive toward the separation of the legislative and executive powers in particular, which in the England of his time already had the dividing line between them effaced, as the King was no longer the embodiment of the executive power, while the Prime Minister, emerging out of the Parliament and remaining there for all intents and purposes, thus combined them both in his person. To me, this objection kind of misses the point that England has other checks and balances against the abuse of power within its system, such as its political system’s flexibility in reacting to such abuses by, say, votes of non-confidence and a quick and easy way of driving any acting-up PM out of his Downing Street residence in no time at all. On the other hand, the American Constitution, which I do greatly admire, and which stipulates a very clear distinction between the three branches of government, is no less open to the abuse of power than the European political systems, through its use of party conspiracy, and due to the glaring lack of flexibility in the American four-year cycle. The American political system is however aware of its weakness and commendably compensates by adding an additional check and balance within the United States Congress itself, that is within the legislative branch of power, as evidenced by the counterchecking capacity of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
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