I'm going to talk this morning about John Locke, but before I do that, I want to say just one further thing about Hobbes.
I was thinking about how I presented a point about the way, according to Hobbes, people make the covenant to...
where they surrender their rights to act for themselves and give everything to the sovereign.
I think the way I presented it wasn't correct.
Now, you remember, as I had pictured it, there was a series of hypotheticals in which each person said,
I surrender my right to act according to the law of nature if everyone else does as well.
And then, as I mentioned, this raises a problem because if you have everybody saying that,
You don't actually have any real act of consent. You just have a series of hypotheticals.
Just like in the example I gave, you imagine the boy who says to his mother,
May I go to the movies? And the mother says, Yes, if your father says you can.
Then he goes to his father and the father says, Yes, you can, if your mother says you can.
So, he doesn't have permission to go, he just has two hypotheticals.
So, where I went wrong in what I was saying yesterday is that I said,
well, this requires, say, you need one person to start the whole thing off.
Now, in the example I gave with the little boy, this would work.
Say, if the mother then says, all right, you can go,
Then that commits the father to giving permission, also since he said you can go if your mother says you can.
Your mother did say that he can, so therefore the father's committed to say he can go as well.
But if you have more than one person, in the Hobbesian case we're having a whole lot of people,
then if one person goes ahead and makes a commitment,
I not only made all the hypothetical commitment that I'll surrender my right to act to the sovereign, if everyone else does as well, but I also say I do surrender my right to act to the sovereign.
Commission. That doesn't commit everybody else. All that would commit everybody else
would be everybody else making such a commitment except one person, and the last person would
also be committed. So I think to get around that, it's really better to see what Hobbes
is doing is not that the people would not be explicitly putting in the conditional part
in their commitment, they wouldn't be saying, I covenant to give my right to act to the
sovereign if everyone else does as well.
It would just be each one is making a commitment, a non-hypothetical commitment to the sovereign,
but he has in mind that the commitment won't come into effect unless a sufficient number
I think that seems to be a much better way of understanding and making sense of what Hobbes is saying than the wrong thing I was suggesting yesterday.
Now that said, we can now turn to John Locke, who lived from 1632 to 1704.
Locke came from a fairly wealthy family and he attended Winchester College and then went to Oxford.
He didn't think very highly of his Oxford education.
However, he became a fellow of one of the colleges, Christ Church College.
They call their fellows student.
So he was a student of Christ Church and he retained that position until 1684 when he was removed by the direct orders of King Charles II.
After he followed a fairly standard course in the humanities, but he was also very interested in medicine.
And he, although he didn't take his final degree as a doctor, I think he complained
that there were, that you had to attend too many dinners in the special places to qualify.
He was really qualified as a doctor and he's one of the few great philosophers who was
also a doctor.
Another one, incidentally, was William James, who was an M.D. After he taught at Oxford
for a while, he then met the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, and after he met the
Earl Shaftesbury. The Earl had to have a very serious operation and Locke supervised the
operation. He mentioned he had training as a doctor and the operation was very successful
and after that the Earl became very attached to Locke and Locke stayed in his household
for the remainder of his life. He was an advisor to the Duke and to the Earl on various matters.
In his early years, around 1660, Locke wrote two tracts on government essay and also essays
on the Law of Nature. In these essays, he took a very different position from the one
that's generally associated with him. In his early work, he said that government does not
rest on popular consent. He was an absolutist, and he opposed religious toleration. He said
The Supreme Magistrate has the right to decide on what the religion of the country should be.
So his position was quite similar to that of Thomas Hobbes.
The reason I mention this, I won't talk about his early work in the body of the lecture,
but the reason I mention this is that as usual there is the Straussian interpretation of Locke,
and the Stroussian interpretation, I should say this isn't the interpretation of all Stroussians, but some Stroussians such as Robert Kranak, who is written on this topic,
those Stroussians claim that Locke always remained a Hobbesian and that he really wasn't the defender of very limited government that most people take him to be.
Strauss himself takes this position in his most famous book, which is called
Natural Right and History. In the chapter on Locke, he argues that Locke was really
pretty much of a Hobbesian. I don't find this a plausible view, but that is the
Straussian view. Now, as I just said, Locke was an advisor to the Earl of
and Shaftesbury. Now, at that time in England, remember from Electron Hobbes, King Charles
II had come back to England after his father, King Charles I, had been executed in 1649,
but the monarchy was restored, King Charles had come back. But when he came back, there
There was still, there was a lot of conflict going on because there were some people who
were very attached to Protestant Christianity, they were very anti-Catholic, but on the other
hand the king himself, Charles II, was very sympathetic to Catholicism and in fact he
Secretly Converted to Catholicism
And so there was a big fight going on throughout Charles II's reign between these various religious factions.
The Earl of Shaftesbury was very much in the anti-Charles II camp.
He wasn't sympathetic to Charles's policy at all.
Locke had to go into exile. He went to France in 1675 because he was suspected of writing a pamphlet that was very critical of King Charles, that upset the royalists very much.
Locke always denied writing the pamphlet, something like a letter from a gentleman in the country.
He always denied writing the pamphlet, but you can't always take Locke's denials at face value,
because he tended to be very secretive about his activities.
It would have been, let's not say that he wrote it, but just that you can't always believe what Block said about what he wrote.
So, as I say, he was in France from 1675. He came back to England in 1679 when the things had died down. It was safe for him to come back.
However, things got even more troublesome for him a few years later.
The heir to the throne after Charles II was his brother James II.
James II had converted to Catholicism, so the people who didn't like the Catholics
didn't want James the Second to ascend to the throne and they tried to get a bill passed
in parliament that excluded him from the throne, it's called the exclusion crisis, but Charles
the Second was able to stop this bill from going through by just not dissolving parliament.
In any case, even if it had passed, he could have simply vetoed the bill.
At that time, the king had the right, if it had an absolute veto over any legislation
passed by parliament, the last person, last monarch to use the royal veto was Queen Anne,
who was somewhat later.
So the anti-Catholics though weren't giving up, at least some of them weren't.
There was a plot by some people to kidnap the king and his brother who were tending
the horse races.
The plot was, this was in 1683, some people were going to seize them and possibly do away
Play with them, or at least do something to the brothers so that you wouldn't have a Catholic
king.
The royalists got word of this plot.
There was some indication, Richard Ashcraft has a book on Locke's Revolutionary Politics,
there was some indication, Locke was involved in this plot, so he had to go into exile again.
This time he went to the Dutch Republic where he remained for several years.
After the struggle between the Catholics and the Protestants in England intensified after
After the death of Charles II, when James II, his brother, became king, as the Protestant
superiority started putting into effect very pro-Catholic policies.
One reason besides the difference in religion that a lot of the English people didn't like
The Catholic policy was that the one who was the main sponsor of James II was the French
King Louis XIV.
A lot of the English people feared that James II was going to surrender his kingdom, the
The King of England to France, or at least completely subordinate English policy to the
French policy.
So, after things didn't get better, so there was a move, a popular move, to replace James
James II on the throne. William III was the Prince of Orange and his wife, Mary, were
invited to come to England and they defeated it. There was, after a couple battles, James
II fled to France where he remained at the court of Louis XIV. The reason, incidentally,
They invited William III and Queen Mary, even the fact that William was the leading Protestant
prince.
Mary was actually the next in line to the throne after James II.
She was his daughter.
James had had a son, but that son, the baby, was Catholic, and so the Protestants naturally
I didn't want him to succeed to the throne, so Mary was the next in line.
Also, her husband, William of Orange, was the son-in-law, I mean, not only the son-in-law
of King James, but he was the grandson of Charles I.
His mother, Princess Mary, was the daughter of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, so
they had quite good claim to the throne.
It wasn't just that the English were bringing in, the Protestants were bringing in some usurpers.
They had a pretty good claim once the Catholic ruler was excluded.
So Locke was an enthusiastic supporter of this change, it was called the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
And for a long time, historians thought that Locke's most famous book on government,
The Two Treatises on Government, was written around that time as a defense of the Glorious Revolution,
because Locke in the book refers to something like our great King William.
I think he dedicates the book to him, at least refers to him very favorably.
But it turns out that that isn't the case. The book was written quite a bit earlier.
Peter Laslett, who published a famous edition of Locke's Two Treatises, arguing that the
book was really written in 1679, and then other people, such as Ashcraft, say, no, it's
was somewhat later, 1682-83, but it was actually not written in defense of the Glorious Revolution.
So after Locke then came back to England and then he wrote other works such as The Reasonableness
of Christianity and of course his famous work on essay concerning human understanding, Letter
on Toleration, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Letter of Toleration, and the
two treatises all were published in 1689. Then he just lived out the remainder of his
life in England. He continued his philosophical work.
Now, in trying to understand Locke's political philosophy, I think we have to take account
of his point in his metaphysics. As usual, I tried to show, say, in discussion of Aristotle,
Aquinas and other people, there's very often a direct connection between the political
General Philosophy and Political Philosophy.
Now, Locke thought, didn't agree, remember Hobbes said, rejected entirely the appeal to natures or essences in the way Aristotle did.
Aristotle said every substance has a nature.
I'd say there's something about any substance, its essential properties, the properties without
which the substance wouldn't be what it is.
Every substance has such a nature, but Hobbes thought there weren't any natures.
Now Locke had the view there are natures to substances, but we, at least at the present
time with our state of scientific knowledge, we can't know what they are.
For example, is it part of the nature of the human mind that it has to be immaterial as
Descartes thought, Descartes said, thought that the mind can't be composed of matter.
Locke said we can't, we don't really know this, we can't know what the natures of things are.
This is not something we could find out.
Now this raises a problem for his political philosophy in this way.
Locke wants to say that all human beings have certain rights,
But how is he, if he doesn't know what the natures are, we can't find out what the natures are, how is he going to find out who the human beings are?
Now, one way, his way around this was he said we can take the property of rationality, just using reason, we say whatever has this property will count as a human being for the purposes of his political philosophy.
But then, if you say that, then you have a further problem. Why should we care about rationality so much?
Aristotle had an answer for this as he was saying that part of the human nature, the purpose of human nature is to exercise your reason fully.
But remember, Locke doesn't think we can know anything about human nature, so he has a problem with what is so good about rationality.
And here is where Locke's belief in God, his theistic view comes in.
There's big disputes, as I'll mention later, how central belief in God is to Locke's philosophy.
But I'm inclined to think it is very central.
There's a very good book I recommend on this topic by Jeremy Waldron called God, Locke, and Equality, and that's very much influenced the interpretation I'm giving here.
So, on this view, what Locke thought is that human beings, in their rationality, are in God's image.
What God's image, when we say human beings are, according to the Bible, created in God's image,
what this means is that human beings, by being rational, are really sharing in the divine mind.
and so this is why human beings are especially important. Now once given the
starting point we can identify the human beings then Lot argued there's a law of
nature that people ought to follow. What did he mean by a law of nature? Well he
He didn't mean sort of a scientific law, sort of saying how things happen, how various events
take place, such as it's the law of nature.
If you mix oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions, you'll come up with water.
Law of nature is an ethical law, something saying what ought to be the case, what human
beings should do.
Further, the law of nature is universal. It applies to everybody. It isn't just that there's a law of nature, one law of nature in England, another law of nature in California, so on.
Everyone has a common law of nature, and also the law of nature is what God wants us to do. God has commanded us to follow the law of nature.
Now, that's what the law of nature means, but what is the law of nature?
Well, Locke said there's a fundamental law of nature, and then there's derivative laws of nature that you deduce from the fundamental law.
And he says, this is a direct quotation,
The fundamental law of nature being that all, as may be, should be preserved.
When he talks about all, he means all human beings.
So the fundamental law of nature is that all human beings should be kept alive as much as possible,
Since they're the image of God, therefore they should be kept alive as much as possible.
What the purpose of ethics then is to promote human preservation as much as possible.
It's interesting, as you'll see in a later lecture, Herbert Spencer took a similar view,
Although not on the same theistic grounds as Locke, at least not in his later work,
Spencer also had the view that human preservation, the preservation of the human species, is
the fundamental rule of ethics.
So given that he had this view, he said that suicide is not morally all right, because
You can't quit your station on your own. God is our creator and wants us to be preserved, so we therefore have to stay alive as long as possible.
Now, as I say, Locke then said there were derivative laws that we can deduce from this maximum preservation.
and one of these is that each person is a self-owner as everyone has a property in
himself there since each person will be able to preserve himself that since
people tend to care about themselves more than about other than other people
do about them they'll have a better chance of preserving themselves if they
if they're regarded as their own, each one regards himself as his own property.
So now you might, it appears to be a problem here in that if Locke says each
person is a self-owner, how can he also say that really we're dependent on God,
that we have to do whatever God says we should do because that isn't, doesn't that
So how can you say both that really God is our creator and really has rights over us and that we also own ourselves?
So I think what Locke means here is that with respect to any other human being, we can't regard ourselves as subject to that person.
And everybody is the owner of himself or herself as regards other human beings.
It's true that ultimately God is over us, but no one has the right to claim that he's
God's representative and can tell us what to do on that basis.
So this incidentally is, well not so incidentally, is why when Locke holds, as I'll mention later, that churches are purely private associations, this isn't just an incidental part of his philosophy or just something he held for separate reasons in regards to religion.
integral to his key position because if say there's a church that has divine authority then it would be much harder to make the case that each person has the property himself and that other people can't tell them what to do because then you could say someone who's in the church says no, no, you have to do what God says and we're God's representative so you have to do what we say so
by saying that church is a purely private organization. Block stops that objection from arising.
Let me just make one digression here. It really isn't connected to the lecture, but that isn't going to stop me.
Sometimes, when we say people, we use the term, as mentioned, representative. We can't say somebody God's representative on Earth. We have a term for representative, vicegerent, God's vicegerent on Earth.
And the digression is, and I've seen this in book after book, I've seen this mistake,
people will have this word as vice regent. It is not vice regent, the word is vice gerent.
That's going to be on the final exam, so bear that in mind.
All right, so we have that each person is, in Locke's view, a self-owner. Each person
Now, Block also holds that the earth has been given to all human beings in common.
That's something that has been found in the Bible.
It was a very common view at that time.
So the earth has been given to everyone in common.
What does this mean as far as individual property rights are concerned?
Well, Locke says it can't be that this means that before you use any item in the earth,
you have to get consent from all the rest of mankind.
I might think that would be required because suppose I say something like this water pitcher
belongs to everyone in the room in common, then if there's some question on what to do
with the water pitcher, it might seem that everybody would have to agree on what to do
about it because each of you on this hypothesis has rights to it.
But if, when applied that policy to property, then it would turn out that you really couldn't
get everybody to agree on what to do, would be very cumbersome.
So people wouldn't be able to survive on that basis, and this would violate the fundamental
law of nature calling for human preservation.
So Locke says that can't be the way we have all things in common.
What he said on the contrary was, individuals can appropriate separate items of property.
You can take things from the common store by mixing your labor with them.
to do something to the, say, land or bring it into cultivation, and then this gives you
ownership rights to it.
This is, in the later philosophical discussion, is an extremely, as you probably know, extremely
controversial move on Locke's part.
A lot of people have objected to his argument, one objection which Robert Nozick mentions
in the Anarchy State Utopia book I'll be talking about later, is, I should say, Nozick mentions
this objection contrary to what many people thought. He isn't endorsing the objection,
he's just mentioning it as a point that Lockeans have to confront, but he isn't saying at all
Law that this refutes Locke's view. He says, why is it if you say, well, mixing my labor
with something means that I own it, why should you say that the argument is, I owe myself,
I owe my labor, I've mixed my labor with this other, with this commonly owned property,
Therefore it becomes mine. Why shouldn't you say instead you lose your labor? It's now still common property, but you don't own it anymore. You just put out some labor on the common property.
Nozick is characteristic of him, gives a very vivid example. He said, suppose I take a glass of tomato juice and just pour it into the ocean.
Would we say that I own the ocean since I mixed some labor with the ocean?
Would we say I've just lost my tomato juice?
So, this is one objection. They say, well, why does mixing your labor mean that you acquire the property?
Well, one thing Locke could say, I think, in reply to this, is just that this is one way,
if you want to have a system of individual ownership, because this is one way you will be able to preserve human beings by doing so.
by doing that. So this is one reason why you should take the mixing of labor as giving you ownership rights rather than saying you lose your labor by once you've done that. Otherwise, this first fundamental law of nature wouldn't be met.
Now, so far the way I've given Locke's theory is a bit oversimplified or quite a bit oversimplified in that Locke puts in, besides saying that you can acquire property by mixing your labor with the common, with the earth, he puts in some qualifications of this.
Now first he said, you have to leave as much and as good for others, supposing I appropriate some land on this, I can't appropriate land if as a result of doing so, other people won't be able to appropriate land.
Exposing, say, all the, we imagine there's land people available for people to take and
various people start appropriating land and then say there's just one area left and I
take that and there won't be anything left for anybody else.
So if Locke means by as much and as good for others that I couldn't appropriate land, then
I couldn't take it.
But it's very implausible to take him as meaning the proviso in this quite strong sense.
Because if you take him this way, then you're going to get a big problem.
Can anyone see what the problem is?
Yeah.
Well, I would say that since the Atlanta, for example, is not all the same, any piece
I take, they can't have that piece.
So that piece, I have a monopoly on, so to speak.
And so of that particular portion, I haven't left anything behind.
I would say that since the land, for example, is not all the same, any piece I take, they can't have that piece, so that piece I have a monopoly on, so to speak, and so of that particular portion, I haven't left anything behind, so there couldn't be anything else there.
Land wouldn't be available anymore, so in that sense, it wouldn't be as much left for others.
Now, that's an interesting point, but I don't think that's quite what would be such a good objection,
because you certainly wouldn't have that plot, it wouldn't follow, you wouldn't have as much that is good for others,
I always just say is if we have lunch, if one person takes one of the box lunches, someone else can't take that one, but he has others as good that he could take.
The problem I had in mind, rather, is this. Supposing you have the last person says, I
can't take the land because then there won't be anything left for anybody else, so I'm
violating this proviso. Then we have, well, what happens to the second to the last person
If he were to take appropriate land, then there wouldn't be anything available for the
last person to take. You might think he could, because the second to last person, there's
one more lot available, namely the last one. But remember, we said the last person can't
take that, because doing so wouldn't leave anything for anybody else. So you have kind
of a backwards induction problem you can get from this that nobody could appropriate at
at all if you took the proviso this way.
So it seems much more plausible to take Locke as meaning by as much as good for others,
not that he means you have to have land parcels left over in this way, but rather that conditions
for other people won't be worse off in some more general way.
And in fact, he allows for cases where nobody has any, there's no further land to appropriate.
He said people then could work for others or earn money that way.
So I think it's implausible to take him, meaning this as much as good for others proviso in this very strong sense.
But that doesn't get him out, that doesn't end the complications.
He has another proviso, is you can't appropriate property, but you can't take so much that what you have would spoil.
Say, I'm going along and I see some grapes so I can take some and eat them, but I just can't keep piling up so many grapes that I can't eat them and just let them rot away.
That wouldn't be a right thing to do, and you can see why not, because
remember
the property is there so that
people are able to preserve themselves. We need to
use items in the earth in order to live.
The fundamental law of nature is that
we should preserve ourselves so
if people can take property and just
let it rot and then
let it spoil and prevent other people from using it.
This isn't at all conducive to human survival.
But this proviso doesn't limit people
once money comes into existence.
Because once you have money, Locke says,
then you can exchange items you can't use for something else.
So, once money comes in, then you can appropriate as much as you want.
So, the real, so Locke then, what we're left with is Locke has a very strong view,
sort of very classical liberal or libertarian view of property ownership,
that people can really appropriate property, you can take property for yourself
really without much limitation so long as other people are made better off by having such a system of property.
Of course, they will be since the system where people can just, they're just common use of goods,
but no property rights, no right to exclude anybody else from using property that you appropriate is an extremely inefficient one.
It won't promote human survival, so Locke wouldn't allow it.
Now I want to mention one objection to Locke's theory.
It was raised in a book called Locke on Governments, a quite good book by D.A. Lloyd Thomas, a
He says, well, supposing Locke thinks that mixing your labor with unowned land or commonly
owned land gives you ownership rights in it, then he can't hold that there are any provisos
to that.
Either the labor mixture gives you property rights or it doesn't.
How can it be that you have, you get labor rights, you get ownership rights of property
if you mix your labor with it, plus these various other, meeting these various provisos?
He thought that's somewhat, that's a contradiction.
Either Locke is saying, either labor mixing gives you the right or it doesn't.
But although, as I say, Lloyd Thomas' book is a very good one, this isn't a very good
argument at all, because what if the claim just is that you acquire things by mixing
your labor plus meeting these provisos?
I mean, I think, in fact, he's right that mixing your labor is enough to acquire property,
That isn't that if you hold otherwise there's some kind of logical flaw in the argument.
There's nothing at all wrong with saying that you need to meet several conditions to own
something. So there's no logical flaw he claims to find in the argument really isn't there.
Now, before I turn from Locke's view on property, there's another point is that Locke holds
that, supposing there are some people who are too aged or ill to work, to do any work,
they can't acquire any property for themselves or they can't work for other people and that
Lock thinks that those who are able to acquire property have a duty to aid them.
You can see why he holds that because of this fundamental law of nature.
Those people should be their human beings also and they have to be preserved.
However, it isn't clear that those people then can just take what they want or what
they need from the people who have property, because Locke refers to this as an obligation
of charity rather than justice.
So it isn't clear that one could support a welfare state on this basis.
Now, Locke's discussion of property, which is Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise, is somewhat
apart from the rest of the book.
In fact, one view is that it was written independently of the rest of the book.
What Locke is concerned to do in the rest of the Second Treatise is to give an account
very different from Hobbes of how legitimate government arises.
Remember, Hobbes had the view that everyone really surrenders everything, all their rights to the sovereign.
Locke favored a very different view. What he said is that we start off each person owns himself.
Now, in the state, we imagine a state of nature that's a sort of society without any government.
And Locke has thought that we can have property, as I've just explained, we can have property rights without government.
Property rights are things that people acquire just by appropriating land in the way I've explained.
Well, it's not that you get your property because the government assigns it to you, property is a natural right, and also, property is a natural right, and also money, this is where Locke anticipated Carl Menger and von Mises, money can develop without the government.
It doesn't have to be that the government says something like people must accept these pieces of paper as money because we say so.
Locke envisions money developing in the state, or money is present in the state of nature.
We know this because he says that once money comes into being, then the spoilage proviso doesn't apply anymore.
So he's saying, money, you don't need the government to have money. Now what do you need the government for? One would like him to answer nothing, but that isn't the way he does it.
What he says is that in the state of nature, each person has the right, such as the right to life and property rights,
but each person has the right to enforce other people's respecting his rights, not just respecting his rights, but respecting rights in general.
Supposing, say, someone tries to assault me, I have the right to stop them from doing it.
Not only that, if I see, say, one person assaulting someone else, I have the right to stop that.
I have the right to enforce the law of nature.
So everyone in the state of nature has the right to enforce the law of nature.
And this in locks you, this involves not only that each person can stop the other person
from aggressing and sort of restore the previous, the correctly existing state of affairs, but
he has the right to punish violations of the law of nature.
It means to impose some additional penalty on the person besides restoring what he wrongly
taken.
It's up to each individual to decide what the appropriate punishment is.
So Locke suggests, well, supposing we have a system of state affairs like that where
Each person is on his own trying to enforce the law of nature.
Then we'll get a very chaotic, undesirable result,
because people will differ on what, on disputes,
on has someone violated the law of nature, not both.
You can imagine people having a dispute.
Are you taking something from my property,
is it really your property? We would have differences of opinion on which people appropriated
which property, what the appropriate penalties would be, what's the appropriate punishments
if somebody has done something wrong, or we could have disputes not only on the, on the
punishment, but people, according to Locke, would tend to make mistakes in their own fare
and supposing I'm in a dispute with someone, well, obviously I'm in the right, I'm in
the right, the other person's wrong because that's the way people tend to act.
So how can we remedy this state of affairs?
Well, like, I should mention, when Locke pictures what would happen in the state of nature this
way, it sounds, as I mentioned, it's a quite bad situation.
So this gives the Straussians, one of their openings, they say, well, look, even though
Locke starts off by saying his state of nature is very different from Hobbes, because he's
postulating people have all these rights. In fact, what he comes up with is pretty close
to Hobbes because people are at war with each other. I think this seems to me very much
exaggerated, but that is one of the contentions that Strauss has in natural writing history
and his followers have echoed him on this point. So, Locke not having had the benefit
of Studying Strauss had a different view of how we get out of the state of what we do
about being in the state of nature.
What he said was we can imagine people getting together and they don't, as with Hobbes, they
don't give up all their rights to a particular person.
On the contrary, what they do is each person surrenders his right to enforce the law of
nature, not any of his other rights, just his right to enforce the law of nature, not
to any particular person or group of persons, but to the whole community.
So everyone surrenders his right to the whole community to enforce the law of nature.
Then once the whole community has the right, has this right to enforce the law of nature,
then the whole community decides by majority rule what the government is, what the government
is going to be.
They, they don't have to, even though it's the whole community that decides, they don't
have to establish a democracy.
They can establish a monarchy or an aristocracy or a democracy, a mixed type of government.
They can really do anything they want.
They can't, though, establish an absolute monarchy.
Although Locke certainly does allow monarchy, he says, if it turns out that the majority
of the community decide to have, say, you have a legislative body, an executive, and
The executive has some of the legislative power also, as was the case in England, the
king of England is not only the chief executive he has, at least at that time he had quite
a good deal of legislative power.
He then is in a sense supreme, Locke says, but still he's not an absolute monarch.
Now we have the question, well, why is it that it's the majority of the community that
gets to decide what the government should be?
Why don't you have, let's say, the whole, we can see why wouldn't it be the whole community
has to decide?
Because then it's very unlikely people would arrive at any decision, people, there's always
people who have different views on matters, and then we wouldn't be really getting out
Part of the situation in the state of nature, we would be probably even in the worst position
because we've all surrendered our rights to enforce the law of nature, then there's no
one left to enforce to the whole community, but the whole community hasn't agreed on
anyone who can enforce the law of nature, so we're all in a very sad state of affairs.
So what Locke says is that if you have a body, the community, it really has to go in one
direction or other, and so the greater force prevails, but it's kind of a physical metaphor.
You imagine every body, say, some people are pushing one way, some people are pushing the
And the majority have a bigger push, so things go their way.
But this, as I say, is just a metaphor.
And I think what Locke has in mind is something like this.
Each person is taken to be free and equal to everybody else.
So if you have to decide one way or the other on a thing,
If you go with the majority, you're respecting human beings' rights more than if you impose a minority view on the rest of people.
If you had a minority verdict was put in, then you would be saying those people were in a sense superior to the majority.
Majority, but a one-person, one-vote rule really is more in line with the basic equality
of people.
That's been a very influential argument in subsequent justifications for a democratic
rule.
Now, you may have noticed I was rather careful, I didn't say one man one vote, I said one
One person, one vote. I wanted to leave open the question, did Locke mean to include women
in this initial contract? It isn't clear what, he doesn't really say anything about this.
He does have somewhat traditional views of marriage, although not, he says normally,
In a marriage, the husband can tell the wife, makes the decisions and tells the wife what
to do.
However, he says that this is really a default arrangement, an arrangement that people in
a marriage have the right to contract otherwise, so you could marry someone and say, you could
decide that the wife would be in charge rather than the husband.
That, for the time, was a quite radical view.
One Tory critic of Locke, George Hicks, said that on Locke's view, he'd have to say that
women were included in this initial contract, and he thought that was an obviously absurd
view, so he thought this was really refuted Locke, but it isn't clear what Locke would
What he would have said about that, as I say, he certainly, he was very careful not to get
in trouble, not to say anything that would be considered too radical for his time, but
not really clear from the evidence what he would have said about that.
All right, so we now have, the majority of people have decided on what kind of government
they want. Now, when they decide on the government, this is a very important point to bear in mind
understanding law, they don't, the majority or the whole community, don't make a contract
with the government. There isn't a second contract. We have the first contract where
everybody surrenders his right to enforce the law of nature to the community. There isn't
In a separate contract where the community, having voted for someone, now has a contract
with them, it's rather that the community has entrusted the government with certain
functions.
So the reason this is important is if the government doesn't follow the policies that
they're supposed to, say if the government starts violating people's rights, then the
The Committee can withdraw its obedience to the government and put in something else.
You see, if we had a contract, then, well, if there's a claim a contract has been violated,
then normally there would have to be some kind of discussion between both sides to see
who, to see what would happen.
Say, if you have a contract with someone, you can't usually unilaterally say, all right,
You violated your contract, therefore I don't have to keep the contract either.
You would usually have to be settled by some agency or some person.
What would happen in such a case?
But in this case, it isn't a contract.
The government is the servant of the community, has to do what the community wants.
Locke is very clear also that, as he said, people have the right to, if the government doesn't do what they want, they have the right to get rid of it and replace it with a new government.
He's very clear that they shouldn't do it just very readily.
This is where you remember in the Declaration of Independence, which was very influenced by Locke.
This is a reference that people shouldn't change the government for light and transient causes.
That's a direct Lockean view. It has to be something very serious.
However, the community does have the right to decide on what to do.
And among the things that the government can do that entitle the people to reject it is
that supposing the government decides that it's going to surrender the country to a different
The Theory of Money and Credit
The U.S.S.R. would be able to stop them from doing that.
The government can't transfer its powers to something else.
And this was a quite topical concern because, as I've said, people were afraid that James
The second was going to transfer the government to Louis XIV in France, or at least subordinate
the English government to the French king if he were to remain in power.
So that was one reason for getting rid of him.
Now as I mentioned, Locke doesn't say, he makes quite a distinction between saying the
The community as a whole has the power to enforce the law of nature, and requiring a
particular system of government doesn't require people, say, democracy, doesn't say we have
to have a system where everyone votes.
So one reason perhaps he said that, one motive he had in saying that is that he, as usual,
The Whig Party that he favored, there were various factions of it, there were radical Whigs who thought everybody really should have the right to vote.
The vote shouldn't be restricted, as it was in England at that time, to an extremely small percentage of the people.
On the other hand, there were more conservative wigs, including Locke's patron, the Earl of Shaspry, who didn't have that view at all, who favored a very restricted franchise.
So, Locke really has it both ways, because he said people do have the right, everyone has an equal right to be part of the community to which they decide what the government is going to be.
but it doesn't fall that everyone has the same franchise. Now, once we have a government in being, I think one of the, it's very important to see, one of the key parts is that this is, I think, one of the most libertarian sides of Locke, is that the government is very limited in what it can do.
It's, remember, all that people have surrendered to it is the right to enforce the law of nature.
It doesn't have any other power, so it can then enforce people's previously existing property rights,
but it's not clear it can do much else. It can have the right of defense and respect and justice,
of Justice, but what else could it do, because all the power it's gotten is to enforce the
law of nature. That's the explicit grant, so it's very much more, it's a very limited
government indeed. Now there are some people, for example, as one I mentioned, D.A. Lloyd
Thomas, he thinks that according to Locke, the government can rearrange property rights,
I don't see any real, it seemed to me that if you said that, that would be going against
the whole structure of Locke's argument, because again, what people have surrendered to the
government, to the community that establishes the government, is only the right to enforce
the law of nature. They've retained all their other rights. There's another argument that's
sometimes given for, that says that the government can do more than this. And this is that Locke
talks sometimes about what he calls the prerogative power. What he means by that is that sometimes
condition will happen which calls for emergency action. Locke gives this example, supposing
someone's house is burning down and there's other houses burning down also and to stop
the fire you have to demolish some house that isn't burning. Locke thinks in an emergency
The executive and the government can sometimes act with prerogative power, but I think this is a quite limited idea.
It doesn't mean that because of prerogative power, the executive can do anything it wants.
It seems like Locke has in mind here some very limited situations where there's some immediate danger to people that requires action that would otherwise not be allowed.
The reason I mention this is that, as often happens, there's this Straussian view.
And this one is that the prerogative power really gives the executive the right to do
anything it wants.
It sort of makes him into an effect of Hobbesian sovereign, and this has some contemporary
relevance because Harvey Mansfield, who's one of the, he's a professor of government
at Harvard, he's one of the top Straussian political thinkers.
He contends that the U.S. Constitution was really founded on Lockean principles.
I think he's right about that, Lockean principles, influence, both declaration and constitution.
But he takes Locke in this Hobbesian way, so he says that on the Lockean view that he
The President, because of his prerogative power, can do whatever he likes, really, in foreign policy.
He says, well, people shouldn't say there's anything unconstitutional about the Iraq War,
because the President is exercising his prerogative power to cope with emergencies.
You see, this is a very live issue in where it shows how Lockean theory has some very
direct relevance there.
But as I say, I think if you keep in mind that in Locke's view, all that people have
surrendered is the right to enforce the law of nature, this really shows that you can't
take the prerogative power in this very expansive sense because the emergencies that you're
coping with would have to be ones just that are enabling the executive to enforce people's
previously existing rights. It can't be that he just goes off on flights of fancy of his
is owned, as Mansfield implies. Now, there's a big problem with the theory I've presented
so far, is that according to the theory, everybody's gotten together and surrendered his power,
his right to force, the law of nature, the community, the community then establishes
of Government. But the big problem is, of course, none of this has ever happened. People
didn't all get together and establish, surrender their rights in this sense. So the question
then is, well, how can Locke claim that we're bound to any actually existing government
if people haven't expressly consented to it? Locke sometimes seems to say that express
Less consent is necessary. Other times he talks about tacit consent. It is not clear
what the conditions for that are. Sometimes it seems like people, just by accepting the
jurisdiction of the government living in the territory of tacitly consented to it, otherwise
sometimes he said, if someone accepts property from someone else, he's accepting all the
He's accepting all the conditions that go with the property, including that the property is under a certain legal system.
I don't find any of this plausible. I think probably the best
rational reconstruction we can give of Locke's argument is that it's a
hypothetical consent argument. He's saying
if we were to imagine ourselves doing this, it would be rational to do so.
That's why we should consider ourselves under an obligation to the government, because it would be rational to think that if we were to get together and do this, then we would surrender our rights and enforce the law of nature of the community, and then have the community establish a government, so it's a hypothetical argument.
I want to mention one objection to such arguments that's been raised by a very good philosopher,
libertarian philosopher at University of Arizona, David Schmitz.
He objects in principle to hypothetical arguments, consent arguments of this kind because he said,
In these arguments, it isn't that when people disagree in the hypothetical situation, their agreement isn't arbitrary.
They've made the agreement for various reasons.
In the Lockean case, people have made the agreement because they don't want the situation where each person is trying to enforce the law of nature for himself.
They think it would be better to have some common erasions to do it.
So you don't want a situation where there's all these disputes.
So he says, well, if there's a reason, if there are reasons for what they agree on,
then doesn't the consent drop out?
The real justification for the policy, for whatever the policy is,
is just the reasons that people are agreeing on.
What do we need to bring in the hypothetical contract for?
I think this is an interesting argument.
I don't think it works because the reasons, what you would get in the contract, there
are reasons that people have in the situation for agreeing on something.
But according to the moral theory being propounded, these aren't, those aren't, those reasons
don't tell us what the obligatory force of the result is.
We'll make this a bit more concrete.
Supposing people in the hypothetical situation
agree to surrender their power to the community.
So the reason we should regard ourselves as having done that
is not that those people find it rational to do so, but that what we think we ought to do is whatever people in such a situation decide to do.
I'm sure I haven't explained that in a way that's at all comprehensible, but that's the best I can do now.
You see, the basic point is that Schmitz hasn't come up with, he's just denied the type of argument that's being offered. He hasn't really given an objection to it.
The argument isn't that, it is that what we ought to do is what people in such a situation should do.
There isn't anything, I mean, maybe that we won't want to accept that argument, there isn't anything in principle wrong with that kind of argument.
So the fact that people in the situation have reasons to do what they do doesn't entitle us to drop out the hypothetical agreement from the argument because that's the basis of the moral obligation.
At the time remaining, I want to then respond to a Straussian challenge that if it were correct
would knock out a large part of the basis of what I was claiming in this lecture.
I argue that there was a strong theistic basis to Locke's philosophy, namely that since he
He doesn't believe we can know what the natures of things are, including the nature of human
being.
Then he lies just on rationality, wherever the property of rationality is present, and
we know that a human being is present.
Then he has the further problem, why is this important?
That's where he brings in, because we're created in God's image.
So, if you take God out, then that destroys the whole structure.
If you want a philosophy that doesn't, not on a theistic basis, probably the best bet
is to reject Locke's view that we can't know nature's, if they can go back to an Aristotelian
view that we can, but suppose you do take Locke's basis, then if you, theistic views
Now, the Straussians say, well, no, this is all wrong because Locke, like everyone else,
was a secret atheist.
It's funny, in the Straussian view, whatever the philosopher they're talking about is,
he always turns out to be a secret atheist.
It's a bit like, say, deconstructionist readings of poems where, say, the poem always turns
Turns out to be about the process of writing poetry and the difficulties of communicating
meaning.
Whatever the poem is, it's always the same message.
So it's like that with the Straussians, everybody's a secret atheist.
So what I want to address in the last topic, there was a very strong defense of the Straussian
composition, in a book by Michael Zuckert called Launching Liberalism.
Michael Zuckert's wife, Christine Zuckert, is also a Straussian philosopher, so it's
not the only husband and wife team who are Straussian philosophers, William and Miriam
Goldstein and also, well, Straussian philosophers, which runs in the family. So he has arguments,
various arguments, trying to show that Locke is really an atheist. I just want to, in conclusion,
go through some of these and so we can see whether they're strong or not. Well, he has
As a first, one of his arguments is to justify the whole, so responding to an objection people
might raise in this child's case, is that how can you say Locke is an atheist if he keeps
talking about belief in God, he wrote a book called Reasonableness of Christianity, he
wrote commentaries on St. Paul, how can you say this?
So he has an argument that we should think that Locke is engaged in deceptive writing.
The argument is this, in the essay on human nature, Locke criticizes certain philosophers
and he says, these philosophers write in a very obscure way, they could contend that
that black is white and white is black and Locke says that they destroy the possibility
of human communication. So this seems like very much going the opposite of what Zucker
wants because Locke is saying people should write clearly, they shouldn't engage in deceptive
writing like people trying to argue that black is white and white black. Of course when Locke
Locke is saying that that was a standard way of criticizing the Jesuits who were alleged
to train people so that they would be so obedient, they would say, black is white and white black.
So you see, Zuckert's argument, how does Zuckert say that this really supports the view that
Locke is deceptive?
Well, he said, let's look at Locke's view of color.
Not only does Locke say, goes further than saying black is white, white is black, Locke
thinks there aren't any phenomenal colors at all.
He says something like, when I see that there's, I'm looking at a red object, there isn't
any real sensation of red, there isn't any real red color that's in the object.
All that's present, all that is the case is that the object has the power to produce in
me certain red sensations. So he's saying, look, Locke is condemning these people for
obscure writing, but he has an even crazier theory, therefore a theory even more at variance
with common sense, so therefore he really, in attacking convoluted or esoteric writings,
The Theory of Money and Credit
is exactly the same in the Lockean view as it is in views that phenomenal colors are really present in the object.
So, Zuckert's argument, I think, doesn't work.
Then, addressing the theological point more directly, Zuckert points out that Locke says, as one of his arguments that God exists,
We can't think that human beings created themselves because if a human being created himself he wouldn't have brought it about that human beings die because every being wants to keep itself in being.
So how could a human being, if he created himself, brought it about that human beings die?
So, if, if God, so Sakhi says, well, if God then created us according to Locke, since God does have, we do die, then this indicates that God is hostile to us.
So, and if God is hostile to us, then we can't be obligated to do what he says.
But, again, this argument really doesn't work because the principle Sucker's appealing to is that each being tries to conserve itself in existence, but it doesn't follow from that that any being will try to conserve whatever it produces in existence.
So wouldn't it all indicate that God is hostile to us if God has brought it about that we die or hasn't made us immortal?
Now this leads, though it's perhaps a central Straussian argument, both that Block is an atheist and we can't take his moral theory seriously.
And that is, that block holds that in order for the law of nature to be true,
in order to hold that we have objective moral judgments,
it must be the case that a human being survived death.
We have immortal souls who are subject to punishment and reward in the afterlife because otherwise we wouldn't have a motive based on self-interest for being moral.
Locke is assuming that morality and self-interest have to dictate, at least ultimately, the same thing.
So the argument is, well, if Locke says we can't, so Locke thinks first that we have to have, we have to be, have immortal souls, if reality is to make any sense.
But then Strauss and Zuckert following point out, Locke doesn't produce any proof that we have immortal souls.
So, isn't then Locke really undermining the basis of his own contention, because he's saying morality depends on our having a mortal soul subject to punishment and reward, but he doesn't give any proof that we have them.
So, isn't he really then leading the careful reader to see that he doesn't believe any of this stuff?
So what I think he's overlooked there is just that is the whole thing. That is the argument, namely that morality wouldn't make any sense without postulating immortal souls. Morality does make sense, therefore we have good reason to think we do have immortal souls.
This is, Kant gave a somewhat similar argument to that later on, so I think that Zucker and Strauss have just overlooked the nature of Block's argument.
I could go through some other arguments, but I think I want to allot some time for questions, so I think I'll end at that point.
Any questions?
Roderick?
Block says that when you institute nature to contract, there are two things you give up.
One is you give up entirely our right to be a judge in our own case.
And then the other thing you give up non-partly is you give up however much of our liberty is necessary to protect the rest.
So I imagine the people who think that Locke is authorizing the government to do a lot more in terms of redistributing entropy and so forth, are probably going to have a federal certification of that necessary proper flow.
They're trying to admit that all sorts of extra things are necessary in order for us to protect the rest.
The question was, Locke says that we give up, when we leave the state of nature, the right to be the judge in our own cause,
and also we give up whatever is necessary of our liberty to protect the rest,
and so perhaps that would be a way that those who support a more expansive view of what Locke and the state can do could get a foothold.
I think that's right, but as you suggest, I don't think it would be clear just how, why it would be necessary, say, to interfere with people's property rights to protect their liberties.
I mean, we would have to see how they would make the argument in a particular case, but I think you're right. That would be one way they would try to get around the argument.
Dan.
and Tax. I'm wondering, therefore, whether this would be a broader kind of intellectual commission that misinterprets law and takes his labor mixing idea and turns that into a kind of labor theory analogy.
The second question is, what couldn't we see Henry George as a dissident Lockean in that
he says we own our own labor, but we don't own the land that we don't own land, so we
You can't claim that we own land by mixing our labor with it. Therefore, the government
has the right to tax land. Couldn't we see a dissident Lockean tradition coming into
a labor theory of value on that basis? Well, I think that you certainly could. For example,
Herbert Spencer in the first edition of Social Statics does give a view where, just like
the one you're suggesting, that was one that I think Henry George was influenced by, so
I think you can certainly see some connection there.
Now, I do think though it's important, although as usual there's a complication, it's important
to distinguish between the claim that you own something because you mixed your labor
and the claim that the value of something is dependent on how much labor has been put into it.
That would be two different claims. However, the complication is that one of the arguments
Locke gives for the labor mixture view is that most of the value of something is not
not just from the property, the land that you start with, but your labor adds most of the
value with it.
So that's one of the reasons you should get the whole thing.
So I think you're quite right, there is some connection there.
Anyone else?
Rodney?
I think one thing you can say about that last argument is that although Locke does say that most of the value of things comes from labor rather than from the raw materials,
he never says as far as I know that the value is proportional to the amount of labor he did.
He just says that raw materials by themselves without labor aren't good for money, aren't good for money in both cases.
Yeah, the point was that Locke, although he sometimes says that the value of the land we acquire
are mostly come from labor. He doesn't have a view that the value is proportional to the labor that you put into it.
I think this is, of course, entirely right. I mean, he doesn't try to establish a labor theory of value on that basis.
He doesn't have the claim that your ownership rights vary in proportion to the value of the labor that you put into it.
Your point, I think, holds both on the economic theory, on the value of the good, on determining the value of the good, and also for ownership.
Well, I think we're out of time now, so thanks very much.