GRANDFATHER OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

 

 (Technically speaking, Locke was the great-grandfather, but somehow grandfather sounds more elegant in this phrase, so let the title stand as is, with this little caveat.)

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This is the opening entry on John Locke (1632-1704) in this section. There are, of course, other entries and references in other places, which the reader can take time to look up. However, for the sake of convenience and also because of its importance to the overall picture of Locke, I have included here an excerpt from my entry Checks, Balances And Natural Rights, which I expect to contribute rather significantly to the flow of the present Lockean series. It is thus best to start with this excerpt, and then to move on from it.

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 (mistakenly, I must say, distorting Kipling, who coined this phrase) the law of the jungle and what he apparently conceives to be the law of reason, in which case a 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 exactly 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 “unalienable 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 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 a particular interest. (Although he is limited in his understanding of this question by the conflict that he was witnessing in England between the Crown and the Parliament.) Locke sees it 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.

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 unalienable 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 authority stood so high already in his own lifetime that his intellectual opponents clearly resented this and went out of their way to bring him down from his pedestal. His political philosophy was probably not of the highest magnitude, but its historical luck was of the top order.

Here is a concise and very valuable summary, to that effect, of Locke’s legacy, given by Bertrand Russell:

“Locke is the most fortunate of all philosophers. He completed his work in theoretical philosophy just at the moment when the government of his country fell into the hands of men who shared his political opinions. Both in practice and theory, the views which he advocated were held, for many years to come, by the most vigorous and influential politicians and philosophers. His political doctrines, with the developments due to Montesquieu, are embedded in the American Constitution, and are to be seen at work whenever there is a dispute between President and Congress. The British Constitution was based upon his doctrines till about fifty years ago (written around 1942), and so was that which the French adopted in 1871.”

In other words, if I may introduce my own summary, it has been because of the American experience, and its association with Locke’s name that a great deal of reverence bordering on deification has been attached to his name, and history, as they say, is always written by the winners. In the few remaining entries of this series we shall attempt to draw some general conclusions from the Lockean experience, which wouldn’t be dependent so much on his lucky stars and political windfalls.