John  Locke :  Why Do We Read Him and What Can We Learn From His Work?

Reading assignment:  Second Treatise of Government, chapter 1

We’ve now worked a bit on Locke’s prose style.  This is worth mastering, as you’ll have to disentangle similarly complex documents for the rest of your lives.  Always try to find the subject of a sentence, then the verb that indicates what the subject is doing.  Never be shy about asking me or someone else about passages that don’t seem to work.

In this and the following lectures, I’m going to try to extract as much as I can from a relatively short set of readings in the Second Treatise. I’m asking you to read only chapters 1-5 and 18-19.  We may refer back to other chapters in the coming week, when we look at the hugely important influence of natural rights theory in England and America—Frederick Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucretia Mott and others.  But for right now, we’re going to try to master these readings in Locke himself.

Chapter 1

Here, we have to keep in mind a few basic facts.  (Scholars actually have trouble with these facts, since we’re not exactly sure when Locke wrote this document—it probably lay around for a while before publication.)  Locke is associate with a political group—the Whigs--who were unhappy with what it considered the oppressive reign of King James II in England.  Eventually this group helped to bring about the fall of James in what is called the "Glorious Revolution," and brought in a monarch they preferred, William I.  We don’t need a lot of detail here: the main item is that Locke is opposing a king he dislikes.

But as a theorist, Locke thought in more general ways.  He devotes part of this Treatise to discussing the justification for kingship.  Today, kings figure mostly in bad movies and we don’t take them seriously. But things were obviously far different when Locke wrote, and he probably did risk death for his work (he was in fact imprisoned: William Penn is said to have helped get him released).  So Locke begins by responding to a massive defense of the divine right of kings by Sir Robert Filmer.  In fact, this "second" treatise is only the second part of that attack.  You can figure out Filmer’s position from the long paragraph, chapter 1 section 1.  He says the king’s reign is justified by the Bible, which gave Adam absolute authority and that this authority extended to his heirs.  Locke accepts none of this.

Let’s pause here for a moment.  You might want to reflect on Locke’s references to the Bible.  If we turn on the TV on Sunday morning, we find lots of people talking about the Bible, in different ways.  I’m not sure any of them will speak quite like Locke.

The second point I would like to make about Chapter 1 is that it develops a definition of political power.  Have you thought much about this?  As I reflect on movies and TV shows I’ve seen, I’m not sure they all capture the distinction he wants to make.  In section 2 of chapter 1 Locke distinguishes political from other kinds of power, and in section 3 he offers a "definition."  As always, Locke is working deliberately through a problem.  We often toss around the term "definition," but it’s important to recognize that definitions are serious things: they are not just descriptions.    From Plato onward, people have used definitions to make distinctions that have serious meaning in the world: we’re still doing this.

Briefly, a definition puts boundaries (the root word is finis, end; compare "infinite") around something.  It does so by taking two steps:

--stating the "family" (genus) to which a topic belongs, in this case "power"
--stating the things that differentiated this topic from others in the "family":  Locke does this in section 3 (the differentia).

For instance:  the great French chef Escoffier defined an omelette as "scrambled eggs, glazed on the outside."  That is a very elegant and memorable definition, clearly stating the family something belongs to and distinguishing it from other members of the family (the glazing—usually tossing around in butter or oil).  You may want to keep your ears open when you hear folks "define" things: they often are simply describing them.  Try making up your own definition of items in your daily life: it can be an interesting challenge.

The point here is that definition-making is a way of getting authority and control over a subject. The person who makes the definitions has the high ground.  Locke is seizing that high ground right here, first of all by saying that political power is special, then by giving it his own particular emphasis.

Now, notice what he emphasizes as the goal of political power:

--the regulating and preserving of property
--the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury

That’s it.  My question to you is, are these the goals you yourselves would suggest for "political power"?

Some other questions:

How often does Locke speak of "right" in this chapter?  What do you think he means by "right"?  Is he "right" to use it this often?

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