Rousseau’s psychological response to the Enlightenment led him to articulate a certain argument. But what links Rousseau to Bernie Sanders or Occupy Wall Street isn’t primarily an intellectual lineage but a psychological tendency. How many members of Occupy Wall Street or MSNBC pundits have read Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality? Of the fraction who read it, probably in college, how many of them can attribute their opposition to tax cuts or the Koch brothers to that text? The answer must be very close to zero. Likewise, how many Tea Partiers or Fox News contributors consult John Locke for their positions? The answer is the same.
We tend to give too much credit to intellectuals for creating ideas. More often, they give voice to ideas or impulses that already exist as pre-rational commitments or attitudes. Other times they distill opinions, sentiments, aspirations, and passions that already exist on the ground, and the distilled spirit is fed back to the people and they become intoxicated by it. Revolutions die in the crib when the people are not inclined to be revolutionary.
So, just as the state is a myth agreed upon, most civilizational creation stories are just that: stories. That doesn’t mean they are untrue. But the truth’s significance is on a separate track from the significance of the story itself.
It would be fair to say that John Locke was a storyteller who, more than anyone, created the Miracle. But a more accurate way of saying it would be “the story we tell about Locke” helped create the Miracle.
Born in 1632 in the small English village of Wrington, Locke spent his childhood in the nearby market town of Pensford.6 His father (also John), a former soldier in the English Civil War, worked as a lawyer and clerk to a justice of the peace in a nearby village. The Lockes, devout Puritans, were prosperous but not particularly prominent. Thanks to his father’s former commander, who was a member of Parliament, John received a scholarship to the Westminster school in London, where he excelled, winning placement at Christ Church in Oxford. He studied scholastic philosophy there but was not particularly enamored with it. He spent more time studying medicine and science (then called “natural philosophy”). He stayed at Oxford for fifteen years, from 1652 to 1667, in various administrative and teaching positions. In 1667 he moved to London, where he worked as a tutor and physician in the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who would become the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Cooper was a member of the “Cabal” that largely governed in England at the time for King Charles II.* Through Shaftesbury, Locke procured several important administrative jobs in His Majesty’s government.
Shaftesbury, a leader of the Whigs, was one of the central political figures of his time, first siding with Royalists in the English Civil War but later switching to the Parliamentary side. Whigs were united by three ideas: Parliament was supreme, Protestant minorities should be respected, and Catholicism was a threat to English liberty and sovereignty. (The Whigs’ anti-Catholicism, while regrettable, should not be viewed through the prism of the present day. In the 1600s—and well after, in some quarters—Catholicism was deeply enmeshed with the power politics of the age.)
If Locke was a tutor to Shaftesbury’s son, Shaftesbury was a father-like tutor to Locke in the realm of politics. (It was during this time that Locke probably cowrote with Shaftesbury the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, the charter for colonial lands consisting of most of the territory between Virginia and Florida, of which Shaftesbury was one of the proprietors.)
In 1675, Locke moved to France for several years. When he returned, the politics of England were very different. Shaftesbury was now persona non grata with the crown, a leader in the effort to bar Catholics from the throne. This is relevant because Charles II, while not Catholic, was sympathetic to Catholicism. Indeed, Charles had once secretly promised the king of France to convert in exchange for support in his war against the Dutch. Worse, Charles’s brother, James, was Catholic, and because the king had no legitimate sons (though plenty of illegitimate ones), James was next in line to the throne. That fact, combined with rumors of his dealings with the French, aroused a fierce backlash in Parliament amidst something of a national anti-Catholic panic in England, prompting the Exclusion Crisis from 1679 to 1681. Lord Shaftesbury led the “Country Party” (later called the Whigs) in the fight to legally ban a Catholic from wearing the crown. Charles repeatedly dissolved Parliament to fend off the effort. In 1681, Charles dissolved Parliament permanently until his death four years later. While Charles was still alive, however, Shaftesbury had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for high treason. Shaftesbury was acquitted by a grand jury, thanks to a weak case by the government and a jury handpicked by a Whig sheriff. He tried, unsuccessfully, to organize an outright rebellion against the crown, but when that failed, he fled to exile in the Netherlands in the fall of 1682, lest he not be so lucky a second time. In January 1683, he died in Amsterdam.
It was against this backdrop that Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. But he would not dare publish them for nearly a decade, lest he be put to death. In 1683, Locke also fled to the Netherlands. He did not return until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Recounting the story of the Glorious Revolution in detail would take us too far afield for our purposes. But a very brief summary is necessary.7 When Charles II died, his Catholic brother James inherited the throne. Again, English Protestants were convinced that Catholicism was a tyrannical creed that put the interests of foreign powers ahead of the interests of the English people. James set out to lift all of the legal prohibitions on Catholics in government. Worse, he attempted to transform Parliament—the seat of popular sovereignty—into a body of lackeys, lickspittles, and yes-men, reversing the progress of liberty in England and seeming to confirm the worst fears about Catholic absolutism. After all, France’s king, Louis XIV, had spent much of the 1680s persecuting French Protestants, dismantling popular assemblies, and attempting to expand Catholic hegemony on the Continent. There’s a rough parallel between the 1680s and the 1930s in that during both periods it seemed tyranny (by whatever label you want to put on it) was the wave of the future, not just in France but in the Hapsburg Empire and throughout much of Europe.8
Things came to a boil when James had a son with his second, Catholic wife. This meant that the heir to throne was no longer James’s Protestant older daughter, Mary, but another Catholic. Mary’s husband William of Orange, the stadtholder (or chief magistrate) of the Netherlands—and James’s nephew—organized an invasion for the purpose of regime change. He orchestrated an invitation from seven English Lords to come to England. William put together an army of 25,000 men and an armada of five hundred ships. His agents disseminated some 50,000 copies of a pamphlet vowing to seek a “free Parliament”—i.e., one properly elected, and not a tool of the king, the Catholics, or the French. After a daunting November channel crossing, William’s forces landed in Torbay, in southwest England.
There were two minor skirmishes, but James was inadequate to the task of rallying popular support, particularly at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in England was so high. His foremost general, John Churchill—an ancestor of the twentieth-century prime minister—switched sides, at enormous risk. Isolated and inept, James ordered his troops not to fight the invading army. He fled to France instead. But first he did something remarkable and hugely significant. He took a sheaf of writs establishing a new Parliament and burnt them. He then took the king’s seal and hurled it into the Thames. This was not simply an act of spite. James believed, with some good reason, that if the official documents authorizing a Parliament, and the seal which legitimized that authority, were disposed of, then no new government could be formed.
“We may think of official documents as readily fungible; if there is an original somewhere, of an act of Congress or a Supreme Court decision, it is readily replicable, and its validity is not expunged if, by some unhappy accident, the original is consumed by fire or vermin. But in the seventeenth century the document was the law,
” writes Michael Barone in Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers.9 To the modern mind, this may seem almost comical. One can imagine the plot of some action movie in which the dastardly villains endeavor to find and destroy all the original copies of the U.S. Constitution, thus in one fell swoop eliminating the Bill of Rights and our system of government. But that’s not how it works. That wasn’t clear to James at the time.
William marched into and occupied London. But he did not declare himself king. Rather, he called for new parliamentary elections and theatrically made no effort to sway them. The new Parliament debated whether James was still king, decided that he was not, and named William and Mary the king and queen. The immediate political significance was obvious. There would never again be a Catholic on the throne. French influence on England was thwarted. A new Anglo-Dutch alliance was formed.
But the lasting significance was far greater. Parliament—not God—had made William king. Moreover, it had established that Parliament was the ultimate authority in England and that the king was not above the law. This was a watershed moment. The idea of parliamentary supremacy—and hence the ultimate sovereignty of the people—had been around in some form since at least the days of the Magna Carta. Now the idea was manifested in the real world. The new Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights, which cemented for all time the rights of Parliament (never to be permanently dissolved again), the English people, and the limits on royal authority. No longer could the king (or queen) suspend laws, levy taxes, raise standing armies, and the like without the consent of Parliament. The right to free speech in Parliament was now beyond the power of the king to abrogate as well.
It’s crucial to understand how ideas and culture were intertwined in the Glorious Revolution. The new order was understood and ratified not as a radical departure from tradition and custom but as a reassertion of it. In the text of the Bill of Rights itself, Parliament insisted that it was merely asserting and vindicating the “ancient rights and liberties” of the English people. In William’s “Declaration of Reasons” for the invasion, he hammered the point that he was merely trying to restore the English tradition of liberty and defeat the forces of tyranny and absolutism. He claimed to be unable to “excuse ourself from espousing their interest in a matter of so high consequence, and from contributing all that lies in us for the maintaining both the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of these Kingdoms, and for the securing to them the continual employment of all their right” and to come “for no other design, but to have a free and lawful parliament assembled as soon as possible.” He was “appearing upon this occasion in arms” to rescue the Church of England and the “ancient constitution.”10 In other words, the English culled from their past a story of themselves and ratified it in a legal principle. The story, not the principle, was what mattered most. But, once committed to the story, new principles—or ideas—emerged that would eventually drive the story in new directions.
Historians debate how sincere William was. To be sure, William had his own ambitions in mind, as did all of those Whigs and other members of Parliament piously invoking the ancient customs of liberty as validation for a coup. Similarly, there was no end of realpolitik motivating the Dutch to pull off one of the greatest regime changes in human history.
But what stuck was the story. Just as the Magna Carta became something more than a fairly mercenary, even grubby truce between the king and the nobles, the relatively bloodless Glorious Revolution reinforced the story the English told themselves about themselves. As Edmund Burke would put it a century later, “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”11 The Glorious Revolution simultaneously severed England from its feudal past while at the same time grounding its new embryonic democratic society, not in grand abstractions, but in a nationalistic, essentially tribal story of Englishness. The abstractions came later. And that is where John Locke came in.
John Locke’s Second Treatise, published in 1689, provided a philosophical binding for the pages of the story of English liberty. But it also contained within it a radical departure from English particularism. In tone and ambition, it spoke to the English heart and mind, but within it lay a universal worldview. I will offer a brief and somewhat selective summary, even though—spoiler alert—I will go on to argue that the precise details do not matter as much as some like to think.
The Second Treatise on Government contains its own creation myth: “Thus in the beginning,” Locke declared, “all the world was America…” What Locke meant is that in our original tribal state everyone lived like the Indians across the Atlantic. Why? Because “no such thing as money was any where known.”12
What Locke means by money here is property. And Locke’s understanding of property is the key to his entire political worldview. Locke argues that, in the state of nature, men exist in “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending Upon the Will of any other man…”13 Locke’s state of nature is remarkably similar to Rousseau’s in many respects. Locke says in the state of nature is “a State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to Dominion and Sovereignty.”14
For Locke, the problem with the state of nature is that it is unstable. It invites a “state of war” in which one man—or group of men—may use force to impose their will on another. Because the state of nature lacks “a common judge with authority”15 to settle disputes, disputes are therefore settled by force. The loser of such contests, if he survives but remains involuntarily under the control of the “conqueror,” is now in “the perfect condition of slavery.”16 This is an illegitimate, or arbitrary, use of force, for no man has the right to exert his will against another’s will.
That is because the first property right is the right to own yourself—and all other rights derive from this one. Thus, government is a necessary tool, created collectively to protect property, which is another way of saying protecting life. Men, according to Locke, voluntarily combine to create government to do limited and specific things, because our rights are prior to government. As we’ve seen, Locke was wrong about this in terms of history or anthropology. But Locke recognized what Mancur Olson meant when he said that order is “the first blessing of the invisible hand.”17
Long before Marx, Locke offered his own labor theory of value—or, in Locke’s case, a labor theory of property. For every man, Locke writes, “the Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”18 God gives us trees, but when a person chops down a tree and turns it into a table, it becomes property.
Locke believed that property was the route to improvement; it was literally the vehicle of progress. The tribes of America might be exotic and fascinating but it was nonetheless the case that a “King of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.”19 In other words, Locke understood that human ingenuity creates wealth.
For Locke, our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and property. The Declaration of Independence changed this to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, but there is no insurmountable c
ontradiction here, because Locke believed that property was the route to happiness. When the first man put a fence around a piece of land to cultivate it, he was beginning the process of human advancement, of culture. As we will see, this is the exact opposite of Rousseau’s vision.
Locke was interested not in material equality but in equality in the eyes of God, and therefore in the eyes of government. People may have different perspectives and opinions, but that is because they have different experiences. And therefore tolerance for differences should be maximized.
This is where Locke’s doctrine of the “blank slate” (or in his case blank paper) proved so useful:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.20
This idea, which comes from Locke’s work as one of the founders of empiricism, arguably did more to transform the world than anything he wrote on government and politics. As a matter of science, Locke was wrong. Obviously, experience informs and shapes how we see and understand the world, but we also come preloaded with all manner of genetic software that processes the data in various ways. But as a matter of politics and philosophy, Locke’s rejection of original sin, innate ideas, and the natural—i.e., divine—authority of kings moved politics from a God-centered universe to a man-centered universe. God was the only master of mankind, according to Locke, and no man could appropriate God’s power. This meant that, in this world, each man was the master of himself and just power had to be rooted in his consent.