Within Catholic-blog-land, you may have noticed some sudden interest in Lockean political theory and its relation to Catholic social teaching. Having spent several years now studying Locke’s philosophy, I thought I would try my hand at sustaining that interest by way of a multi-part series on Locke’s political theory, devoting concerted attention to its fundamental principles before looking at how it stands in a conflicting relation to the fundamental principles of Catholic moral and social thought. The recent posts on Locke and Catholic social doctrine to which I refer above fail to do the heavy lifting of coming to understand Locke first and foremost. Instead, they trade on certain ambiguities in Lockean texts, prematurely mapping these ambiguities to tenets of Catholic social teaching and mistakenly taking superficial similarities between the two to be genuine agreements. My hope in this on-going series on Locke is to disabuse the authors of these posts, as well as the handful of readers who may buy them, of these misinterpretations.
Why is there confusion over Locke’s political philosophy in the first place? The answer is: John Locke is a more difficult read than one might initially think. Difficult, though not obscure. Of his major, extended writings, only one, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is written in a straightforward way. One can just pick it up and start reading: what you get from start to finish is pure Locke (though this is not to say that Locke could have benefited greatly from an editor!). But such is not the case with works like the Two Treatises on Government and his Oxford lectures on natural law, later organized and published as Questions Concerning the Law of Nature (hereafter cited as LN). The Two Treatises are notoriously difficult to interpret not on account of any shortcomings on Locke’s part, but because of his particular strategy for winning acceptance of basic tenets of liberalism among a 17th century population divided over questions of political legitimacy, divine right, and toleration. For instance, if one were to pick up, say, the First Treatise without a grasp of both its background history and Locke’s intentions in composing it, one might indeed mistake Locke for an powerful advocate of a distinctively Christian theory of political consensus. Of course, such a reading would be a bad misreading. The careful and attentive reader of Locke will spot that the First Treatise and the Second Treatise respectively forward mutually exclusive political theses. Indeed, Locke contradicts in the Second Treatise many points he makes in the First Treatise. But Locke’s inconsistency is only apparent; the First Treatise is not Locke’s political philosophy but instead a refutation of Robert Filmer’s divine right politics by means of Filmer’s own sources (the Christian scriptures and certain assumptions about royal succession). Once Locke exposes the inconsistencies of Filmer’s theory, he advances his own positive political philosophy in the Second Treatise, which flows from his own philosophical empiricism and natural (not biblical or Christian) theology. Similar difficulties arise from reading LN, which employs a dialectical method, forwarding certain theses at the onset before dashing them in later chapters.
The reader of Locke is rewarded only when he/she puts in the legwork of not only reading Locke’s political texts, but also turning them on all sides, so to speak, peering at what’s underneath and around them. By that I mean grasping Locke’s sly and subtle maneuvers in the texts, the historical events and controversies that motivated their penning, and the content of the Essay, which establishes the very methodology Locke employs in his positive political writings. From what I can tell, the recent blog posts on Locke to which I refer above exhibit none of this effort.
Now, I am not suggesting that other seminal texts in the history of British political philosophy are as difficult to understanding as those of the Lockean varietal. Filmer’s Patriarcha, Book III of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Mill’s On Liberty are among many of such texts that are relatively straightforward. Locke is a unique case, and we should be cautious about making sweeping claims about his political thought before we have really spent quality time wrestling with his political theory. The upshot of such effort is seeing the incompatibility that runs all the way down between Locke’s political philosophy and Catholic social teaching.
So what do I hope to be the pay-off for my posts? Well, I hope to show the following:
1) Locke’s political philosophy is not in the Christian tradition, nor is it an entirely secular account of politics. Rather, his thought draws from the ground between the two , so to speak. That is to say, Locke relies a bit on natural theology–a view devoid of any tenets of Christianity. This is a major departure from the method of his medieval and early modern predecessors.
2) Locke rejects the Catholic ideas of absolute moral value and objective standards of good and bad action. For Locke, nothing is intrinsically good or evil. Rather, moral values are constructed by human reason following the patterns of external regularities in nature. This is unsurprising since Locke’s position flows straight from his philosophical empiricism and nominalism. This is why I claim that one cannot understand Locke’s moral and political philosophy without having read the Essay.
3) Locke’s version of “natural law” is nothing like the Thomistic and Scholastic notions of “natural law.” Locke rejects a notion of natural law that is “written on the heart,” a clear repudiation of the Catholic understanding of natural law upon which all Catholic moral and social teaching rests. Consequently, the individual rights championed by Catholic social teaching and Locke, and which are derived from their respective accounts of natural law, are not the same. This includes everything from their rights to life to their views on the right to property.
4) Locke’s political philosophy and Catholic social teaching have, at best, a few superficial similarities (as do Catholic social teaching and Marxist socialism). Superficial, not fundamental. A Catholic who thinks that there is continuity or foundational overlap between the two, I suggest, is confused.
I plan to leave some chronological distance between my successive posts on Locke to allow time for reading the posts, conversation threads, and studying the texts in question. I am not claiming that my reading of Locke is the correct (though it coheres with an emerging consensus within the best of Locke scholarship). I am most interested in critical comments that reflect an acquaintance with Locke’s writings, so by all means let’s have them. Comments of this sort will help all of us learn. As a disinterested reader of Locke, I am perfectly willing to have my mind changed.
The American Catholic 
A lot of consider in such a topic. I look forward to the series.
In the broadest context, I think it is vital to recognize what Strauss did (he was a thinker determined to rescue liberalism from the unforseen forces unleashed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau): that a General Will, primed for manipulation, is what replaces the project of Machiavelli and Hobbes, which was to seperate the conduct of public affairs from the conduct of religious life.
And so, to Locke…what a mess of a writer and thinker. If he were only a century or two later, meaning after the gigantic earthquake of the French Revolution, I expect we would have a much more “true” picture of what he was trying to convey. “Democracy,” the project of a late liberalism (liberalism meaning, generally, “equal freedom”) taken to its most evolved position, is what Locke has given us, regardless of intent. By this I mean the demise of community grounded in the traditionalist family in the face of a centralized state…as the will of the people is to be expressed by the power of the majority. So whenever men live in community, their relations are a term of agreement which assigns more or less unlimited power to a majority the “right” (!) to make decisions. This will devolve into tyranny.
OK, while time is here….Filmer and Locke were heated opposites, particularly on these political premises: should all government be limited in its power (even as Locke doesn’t recognize explicitly his own openings of tyranny), and should it exist by the consent of the governed (ditto).
My big issue with Locke is the lack of contextualization for the themes of human freedom (and Pope Benedict has been really outstanding in those reminders). His various writings cover aspects of freedom (religious, political, economic) – great. However, as Locke addresses the nature of political power, especially in Book I of the Two T., his answers (the right of making law, an understanding of the state men naturally exist in) assume a rather “un-Catholic” premise – a state of liberty in which only a “law of nature” is his rule. And as the reader contextualizes Locke further, the sinister bubbles, especially the connection between a law of nature and the desire for self-preservation under an umbrella of advocacy for majoritarianism. What a mad, sad, bad box for the ideological to open…..
Jonathan,
For many of the reasons you mention, it continues to amaze that some Catholics think Locke was influenced by or has positively influenced Catholic social thought. Perhaps the problem is that these Catholics see Locke mention “God” and “natural law” and “rights” and they automatically think that he means the same thing as Catholic doctrine does by those terms. And, as you point out, Locke’s starting point is Hobbesian with a few adjustments, and, like Hobbes, he does not think humans have any freedom in the positive sense. Locke’s soft determinism compels him to speak of liberty only as an absence of constraint rather than as something positive about human nature as CST does. This all suggests to me that Catholics who argue that there’s any real connection or continuity between Locke and CST are falling prey to ulterior motives (e.g., a desire to see their libertarianism confirmed somehow by CST).
I think it because its a historical fact that the people who drafted Rerum Novarum deliberately inserted Locke into the encyclical, and that Leo XIII approved of it. Unless Manfred Spieker is a liar or mistaken. I cite the article in the link below.
Given that, the overlap between Leo and Locke’s political thought is even more obvious. There’s no ulterior motive at all – “libertarianism”, if that’s what you want to call it, is confirmed by Leo’s writings.
http://www.insidecatholic.com/feature/how-john-locke-influenced-catholic-social-teaching.html
I’m not going to say much more on it. I think your motive is to make more of an issue out of the differences between them than is really there, so you can keep any hint of libertarianism out of CST. It’s obvious to me that the same basic concepts are at work, and it’s obvious to Locke scholars such as Jeremy Waldron that simply because the First and Second treatises are written for different purposes doesn’t mean that Locke was duplicitous putting forward two radically different accounts of things to meet his immediate objectives.
Frankly Locke’s contradictions don’t bother me. Lots of great thinkers have contradictions. What matters is that his account of natural law & right, the purpose of government, the legitimate acquisition of private property, and charity are all present in Leo’s social encyclicals, by conscious design.
And so it seems to me that your main line of attack ought to be on Leo XIII and those who worked with him on these encyclicals, rather than attempting to give a definitive interpretation of Locke that by your own admission has always been an elusive and difficult task.
I think it because its a historical fact that the people who drafted Rerum Novarum deliberately inserted Locke into the encyclical, and that Leo XIII approved of it. Unless Manfred Spieker is a liar or mistaken. I cite the article in the link below.
Spieker is mistaken, yes. You will not find someone publishing this mistake in an academic journal. Moreover, you appear to be mistaken, too, given that you think Spieker says Locke was “deliberately inserted” into the encyclical.
Given that, the overlap between Leo and Locke’s political thought is even more obvious.
Joe, you have a habit of reading what you want to see into texts and then claiming that your reading is the “obvious” one. You’ll see from my posts that you are misreading Locke and Leo XIII in profound ways.
Given that you cite neither the Essay nor the Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, two works that are crucial to understanding Locke, I suspect that you have not given Locke a complete read.
I think your motive is to make more of an issue out of the differences between them than is really there, so you can keep any hint of libertarianism out of CST.
My motive is to understand Locke. I have nothing riding on whether or not libertarianism is in or out of CST. That’s why my series will focus on understanding Locke rather than prematurely linking him to CST. On the other hand, your paleo-libertarianism does have a bit at stake in the debate.
Frankly Locke’s contradictions don’t bother me. Lots of great thinkers have contradictions.
I didn’t say Locke contradicted himself. Instead, I said Locke contradicts what he thinks are the implications of Filmer’s positions. That’s his intention with the First Treatise.
’s obvious to me that the same basic concepts are at work, and it’s obvious to Locke scholars such as Jeremy Waldron that simply because the First and Second treatises are written for different purposes doesn’t mean that Locke was duplicitous putting forward two radically different accounts of things to meet his immediate objectives.
No one suggested Locke was duplicitous in writing the First Treatise. Like your reading of Locke and Leo XIII, you are inserting something into my post that is not there. As for Waldron, he does not support your view in the least, and I invite you to read his book to see this.
What matters is that his account of natural law & right, the purpose of government, the legitimate acquisition of private property,
Exactly, which is why my posts are directed to understanding these points.
are all present in Leo’s social encyclicals, by conscious design.
You’ll see that this is an untenable claim. But just wait for the rest of the series. I trust that you will give them careful consideration as they directly counter most of what you have written on Locke. As I put the posts up and cite liberally from Locke (no pun intended), you are welcome to challenge my reading of specific passages.
rather than attempting to give a definitive interpretation of Locke that by your own admission has always been an elusive and difficult task.
Difficult, yes. Elusive, no. At least not to those willing to labor over the texts in questions. Ironically, it seems that you are the one who is clinging to what he thinks is the “definitive interpretation” of Locke, given your insistence that Locke and Leo are in lockstep on fundamental points of social thought. But we’ll get to Leo down the road. For now, let’s just do Locke.
Well, good luck with all that. I’ve said what I wanted to say.
I’ve said what I wanted to say.
I hope not. If I am wrong, I hope to be helped.