Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

[8] Cf. also Coleridge's apt remark. Table Talk, Jan. 3, 1834.

Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism, and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human rationalism. No one can read the Second Treatise without perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize. His very contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.

V

Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not, indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect. But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's Franco-Gallia should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the defence.

[9] Locke, Works (ed. of 1812), IX. 435.

More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the Spectator, on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a national glory. Defoe in his Original Power of the People of England made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his Original and Institution of Civil Government, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal the care with which the Second Treatise had also been pillaged. Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the field he considered his own to call him, in that Divine Legation which he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the Craftsman, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the Declaration of Independence had still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in his Treatise Concerning Civil Government and his Four Letters he declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness. Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England. Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined; and once Bentham's Fragment had begun to make its way, a new epoch opened in the history of political ideas.

Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned. For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification. Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.

With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element integral to the Two Treatises is absent from the Social Contract. Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke—what limits shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only emphasized the urgency of the debate.

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers. The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his generation.