If history is, as Henry Ford inelegantly put it, one damn’ thing after another, was the history of thinking about politics merely one damn’ thinker or one damn’ idea after another? Was it even, as Macbeth more elegantly but more despairingly might have feared, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing, a chronicle of verbal fisticuffs at the end of which we were no wiser than at the beginning?

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The essence of a modern state is centralized authority, bureaucratic management, the efficient delivery of the public services that only a state can provide; Persia provided fewer services than a modern state and “outsourced” much of the work to officials in semiautonomous political dependencies, but the principle was there. As to the early modern states to which our own political systems are the heirs, Louis XIV may have said, “L’état, c’est moi,” but he knew what a state was: a legal person rather than a physical one. It was the state’s all-encompassing authority that he embodied in his own majestic person. It was on the state’s behalf that he was obsessed with the need to know whatever could be known about the resources of his kingdom and the lives of his subjects so that he could better manage their lives and resources for their own welfare.

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Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political equality as exhausted by “one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media, but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to use his or her resources to influence government—which is certainly one form of political equality—with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources undermines democracy.

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The discrepancy in political effectiveness in modern industrial societies is between the unorganized and the organized; money is the life blood of organization, but not money alone. Can democracies protect the public at large—unorganized individuals—against well-organized special interests? The question plagues all modern democracies. Neither intellectually nor institutionally have we advanced very far beyond Rousseau’s identification of the problem two and a half centuries ago in the Social Contract.

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given the right arrangements, the uncorrupted ordinary people could check the tendency of the rich to subvert republican institutions. That was a commonplace of antiaristocratic republican thinking in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; it is a standing theme of American populism. Many writers on the left have taken a simpler view of the need for popular participation. It is an old thought that unless the less well-off use their numerical strength to offset the advantages of the better-off, they will lose out in the distribution of the economic benefits that a modern industrial society can provide. It is the most obvious of the instrumental arguments for universal suffrage; unless the worse-off have an adequate say in the rules that regulate the economy in which they earn their living, they will find themselves exploited.

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Many writers, across the whole political spectrum, have thought that it is morally better to be an active citizen than a mere consumer of whatever benefits accrue in virtue of being an ordinary, economically productive member of one’s society.

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For the past two centuries, the argument has focused on the political roles of elites and masses. “The masses” is a relatively modern term, whether applied optimistically, in looking to the awakened proletarian masses to make the revolution that ushers in the socialist millennium, contemptuously in belittling the low tastes of the uncultivated masses, good-naturedly when we welcome the huddled masses yearning to be free, or merely descriptively, as meaning simply a lot of people. The term emerged during the industrial revolution at a time of rapid population growth and rapid urbanization; but the contrast between the elite and the rank and file is ancient.

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If we are persuaded that in all societies only a small number of people will actually play a role in governing the society, it makes all the difference just how the elite secures and retains the allegiance of the many. A totalitarian elite employs the secret police; a democratic elite employs pollsters and advertising agencies. Totalitarian elites, military juntas, and the like intend to hold power for life; democratic elites allow themselves to be thrown out by the electorate. They may do their very best to cajole, persuade, or even bamboozle the voter, but they do not corrupt the courts, politicize the army, or send the secret police to the polling booth. Unillusioned commentators on modern democracies describe democracy as rule by competing elites. The competition produces better government than elite rule without competition and better government than rule by mass meeting, or whatever direct democracy might involve. We are destined to be ruled by elites, but “the circulation of elites” will ensure that incompetent elites are replaced by more-competent elites.

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Nonetheless, just who gets to be a member of the political elite, or elites, and how that person gets there remains a contentious issue; even in Western liberal democracies there might be a fierce competition between politicians, but a restrictive system of recruitment to the ranks of the competitors. The American system of primary elections was established to counter just that problem; its success has been only partial.

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Modern freedom in contrast was essentially private; it was the ability to pursue our private economic, literary, or religious concerns without having to answer to anyone else. It was freedom from the political sphere rather than freedom in the political sphere.

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Skeptics about participation will insist that what matters is accountability rather than mass participation; voting for any particular party or candidate matters less than the ability to vote against them.

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otiose.

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To call this “social democracy” invites confusion, because the Marxist and post-Marxist socialist parties of western Europe called, and still call, themselves Social Democrats, and democracy in the sense described in this paragraph is very much at home with capitalism and free markets: if the claims of race, birth, and gender are rejected, what is left are the claims based on the contribution we make to the welfare of other individuals or society at large. Those contributions may range very widely, from simple manual labor to whatever it is that celebrities add to our lives, and the obvious way to discover what our contributions are worth is to see how they fare in the marketplace. Of course, all actual societies realize such values only very imperfectly, and markets are notoriously imperfect, too.

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That raises the question whether I am committed to the view that there is nothing new under the sun, or more guardedly to the view of Thucydides and Machiavelli, among many others, that since human nature is the same at all times and in all places, we can draw morals about what is likely to happen to us from what our predecessors have thought and done. The answer is “not exactly.” The last fifth of this book takes very seriously the thought that over the past two and a half centuries several revolutions dramatically changed the world that politics tries to master. In no particular order, and without assigning priority to one aspect of an interconnected process, the industrial revolution, the demographic revolution, the literacy and communications revolution, and the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century and more recently have created a world that is in innumerable ways quite unlike the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds. The most important of these ways reflect our greatly enhanced technological capacities. To put it brutally, we can keep vastly more people alive than ever before, and we can kill vastly more people than ever before.

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the tasks that modern governments must grapple with not only are more numerous and more complex than our predecessors could have imagined but threaten evils on a larger scale than they could have imagined. So I end with some anxious reflections on the politics of an interconnected and increasingly crowded planet. Demography may not be destiny, but managing the problems of a planet of more than seven billion people is a very different enterprise from ensuring that a city-state of two or three hundred thousand could feed itself, protect itself from its enemies, and cultivate the rich civic life that even now we contemplate with envy.

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There is no way to do this without running the risk of foisting our own views on the unresisting dead. It is the obvious danger of attempting to have a conversation with great, but absent, thinkers who cannot tell us we are talking nonsense. I am a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, whose essays in the history of ideas provide one model for what I do here; nonetheless, there are moments in his work that make the reader wonder whether it is Montesquieu speaking or Berlin, or whether Machiavelli would have recognized the causes for which Berlin recruited him. The early twentieth-century philosopher and historian R. G. Colling-wood claimed that historical explanation was a matter of rethinking past thoughts, and that thought was reflected in Berlin’s work as it is in what follows. As to not foisting my ideas on the unresisting dead, I can only say that I have tried to keep the critical voices of my colleagues in my head as I wrote. One further element that gives Berlin’s writings their extraordinary vividness is an almost uncanny ability to engage with the temperament of the thinkers he wrote about. The difficulties that beset the attempt to know just what someone thought equally beset the attempt to know just what it would have been like to meet him or her in the flesh, perhaps even more so. Nonetheless, if we are to see our predecessors in the round we must take the risk.

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the fact that a book such as Allan Bloom’s lugubrious essay called The Closing of the American Mind could become a best seller suggests that the American mind was much less closed than he thought, and although I did not greatly admire Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, its success demonstrated that there were public intellectuals in the marketplace, and a substantial audience for their ideas. History and biography have always had a wide popular appeal, and we are all richer for the work of Simon Schama or Gordon Wood, to name just two. But some accounts of the history of philosophy have secured an enviably wide audience. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which I read avidly at the age of fifteen, was one. Together with Mill’s On Liberty, it changed my life, but reading it again years later was a salutary experience; questions of inaccuracy aside, it was spectacularly prejudiced—though very funny. I have taken Russell’s lucidity as a benchmark, though the ability to write so transparently and easily, which rightly earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature, is a gift I can only envy. As to his prejudices, I share some of them, but have done my best to leave them out.

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On the other hand, it may be a mistake to operate new institutions under old labels, arousing impossible expectations and causing needless disappointment. It may have worse effects, perhaps enabling a plutocracy to exploit a political system for its own benefit, with “bread and circuses” pacifying the worse-off, who are flattered and cajoled but exploited nonetheless. We may be less deceived than self-deceived, knowing in our hearts that we are subjects, not citizens, that the world is divided between the givers of orders and the takers of orders, and that we are among the latter, but pretending to ourselves that we might make it all the way from the log cabin to the White House.

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Thomas Hobbes, with whom this volume begins, was a considerable producer of such flashes of illumination. The impact of these insights on our ways of thinking is obviously greater than on political practice, and we must be careful not to exaggerate the role of political thinkers in the rise of the modern state.

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The Latin description of the church as a corpus mysticum is misleading, insofar as it suggests to a modern reader something magical or supernatural about its identity; but a corpus mysticum is simply a corporation. In the crucial sense, the Ford Motor Company is a corpus mysticum, and so is every modern state. It is defined by a combination of a locus of authority, an account of the persons over whom that authority is exercised, and an account of what the purposes are of the combination of persons related to one another as members of the one corporate body.

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the modern state is not only a corporate entity; it is the corporate entity that uniquely claims a monopoly of coercive authority over everyone resident within its territory and commonly over its own citizens even when they are not physically present. Its territorial identity is essential to it. As long as there have been governments, one of their central tasks has been to maintain the territorial integrity of the state they ruled.

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We might think that “the modern world” was born in October 1492 when Columbus arrived at the islands off the American coast that he misidentified as part of the Indies; we might think that it was when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the cathedral door in Wittenberg in October 1517; we might think it was when Galileo said eppur si muove (nonetheless, it moves) when forced to recant his Copernican heresy in 1633; we might think modernity had begun much earlier, perhaps in 1439, when Gutenberg invented movable type and set in train a publishing explosion that in due course led to an explosion of new ideas in religion, science, literature, and politics. Among thought-provoking suggestions about the birth of modernity, one is that the invention of reliable clocks created a new sense of time, allowed more effective coordination of activity, and in a roundabout fashion paved the way for the industrial revolution and the economic disciplines of the modern world. In a work on the history of political thought, it would be out of place to embark on a long dispute over the merits of contending claims of this sort, however much entertainment such arguments can yield. Nonetheless, some sense of the importance of the contributions of a changed geographical consciousness, the rise of a new science, religious upheaval, increased literacy, economic growth, improved military technology, and a great deal more to what we call the rise of the modern world is necessary, not least as a corrective to the temptation to see the history of political thinking as an encounter between texts, propelled by logic rather than passion.

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The concept of the state of nature is one base. It was a novelty to suppose that the way to become clear about what a state is—what its legitimacy rests on, what the scope of its authority is, and what the rights and duties of its subjects are—is to imagine a world without a state. Or more exactly, perhaps, it was a novelty to employ the idea as a thought experiment, not as a fantasy about a lost golden age of innocence and spontaneous sociability. Not everyone thought that it was a fruitful innovation, and not everyone who appealed to the idea of a “natural” prepolitical condition agreed on what that condition was like; the most famous of such thinkers, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, notoriously did not agree among themselves. Nonetheless, the thought that the state is importantly and interestingly artificial rather than natural takes the discussion of its purposes and its powers and their limits in new directions. Many reasons have been suggested to explain why the contrast between natural and artificial forms of organization should have become salient in this way; most are suggestive rather than compelling.

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The importance of European interactions with societies at a much lower level of technical, political, and military development as a result of the voyages of discovery that took explorers and merchants down the African coast and into the Indian Ocean to India and modern Indonesia and then across the Atlantic to the West Indies and America itself is equally obvious. The impact of a modern, well-armed, and technically increasingly competent civilization with peoples whose technology was that of the European stone age did appalling damage to populations who were enslaved, dispossessed of their lands, dispossessed of their culture, and subjected to the ravages of unfamiliar diseases against which they had no protection; it also gave some, if rather limited, empirical support to conjectures about the natural condition of mankind. The prepolitical condition was not a golden age of innocence, but at best one of hand-to-mouth existence, short lives, and ignorance. Viewed with our modern sensibilities, none of this entitled Europeans to behave toward simple societies as they did; nor did every writer from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth think that less technologically advanced societies were morally inferior to their more sophisticated oppressors.

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Aristotle’s universe was hierarchical through and through. Galileo’s universe was in important ways “flat.” God might have created the universe on rational lines, and man might be at the summit of creation because man shared in God’s rationality. Nonetheless, social hierarchy was not built into the nature of the universe as it had been for Aristotle, say. The universality of the laws of physics was of a wholly different order from the near-universality of many social conventions. From none of this did it follow that nobody could give credence to, for instance, the divine right of kings.

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Man was perhaps homo faber, a generally creative being whose creativity extended far beyond politics in any ordinary sense of the term. Less happily, he might be simply a productive animal, whose essence was the reproduction of the species. What one might term the rise of the social had other implications. Aristotle took it for granted that men, or at any rate the Greeks whom he knew, would be eager to take part in whatever activities citizenship in a polis implied. The rise of what one might term bourgeois comfort made that assumption less plausible. If private values, not selfish values, but family life, cultural activities of all sorts, activities that we can engage in without the assistance of the state and its agents, become unequivocally the most important aspects of our lives, and if our lives as workers and consumers come to seem obviously more central to existence than our lives as citizens and subjects, the way is open to imagine the eventual withering away of the state.

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The thought that modernity begins with Hobbes is this. Machiavelli was essentially a backward-looking figure. His ideal of a successful political regime was the Roman Republic. His ideas about what made Rome the success it was were much the same as Polybius’s and would not have surprised Pericles. Rome was stable, law-abiding, the military superior of any power on earth; its citizens were loyal, public-spirited, courageous, and self-disciplined. Machiavelli says nothing about the intellectual, literary, artistic, or architectural glories of Rome, other than to complain that his contemporaries copied statues but did not copy great men. Although his Discourses is a commentary on Livy’s History of Rome, Machiavelli does not have the modern sense of history as an irreversible process in which our forebears become increasingly remote from us and decreasingly intelligible to us. History is a storehouse of exempla, and the underlying thought is that what has worked in one time and place will work everywhere.

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The first is to see Machiavelli as announcing the autonomy of politics as a human activity with its own rules and its own standards of success, standards not drawn from natural law or from an overarching Christian cosmology. On this view, what the classical and the medieval worlds have in common, at least in the works of political philosophers, is a moral and metaphysical framework, within which politics is to be judged by transcendental standards, not by worldly success alone. What Machiavelli insists on is that the political realm is all about acquiring, holding, and using power. Success is a matter of technique, and political analysis is the analysis of these techniques.

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He was born prematurely on Good Friday, 1588; his mother was frightened by the rumor—unfounded then but true in September—that the Spanish Armada had been sighted in the Channel, and went into labor. “And hereupon my Mother dear, did bring forth twins, both me and fear” was Hobbes’s later comment on this beginning, and “feare is the motive to rely on” the watchword of his masterpiece, Leviathan, published in 1651.1

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Later relations with Oxford were bad. He engaged in unedifying debates with Robert Boyle over the possibility of a vacuum, and with John Wallis over the possibility of squaring the circle. The chancellor of the university, the earl of Clarendon, wrote a large volume attacking Leviathan, and after Hobbes’s death the university condemned his writings and burned them in the quadrangle of the Bodleian Library.4

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He also spent an unconscionable time borrowing money on his master’s behalf during their tour of Europe in the 1630s; the downside was waiting in the rain for his money, the upside, spending long hours in other men’s libraries, in one of which he read Euclid and fell in love with geometry.5 Hobbes’s first political work was a gift to his employer: a translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. He thought it highly relevant to his own times. Thucydides was an effective critic of Athenian democracy, and Hobbes never shed his antipathy to popular government.

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Thucydides taught the lessons of history. Hobbes now sought an ahistorical science that would demonstrate from first principles the essence of political authority and what rulers and subjects…

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The fortunes of the royal and parliamentarian sides ebbed and flowed during the war, and the parliamentarians emerged victorious in 1647. After Charles escaped captivity and tried to recover his throne, he was definitively defeated, tried for treason, and executed on January 30, 1650. To many royalists, this was martyrdom, the blasphemous murder of the Lord’s anointed. Hobbes concluded that the royalist game was up and that sensible people must make their peace with the government of Oliver Cromwell. It was then that Hobbes wrote Leviathan, which many readers today read as a defense of absolute monarchy, but which was a defense not of monarchy but of absolute authority in whatever person or persons it was vested. Hobbes certainly thought that monarchy was the best form of government, but he did not think that it was possible to demonstrate it. What he thought he had demonstrated was that political authority must be absolute. The…

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after a few years, Hobbes fell afoul of the church; he was a sharp critic of the pretensions of the clergy, while they thought he corrupted the morals of the court and its hangers-on. His unorthodox opinions made him an easy target, and there was a move to have him tried for heresy. It was an open question whether the medieval statute De heretico comburendo—“Of the burning of heretics”—was valid law, but Hobbes, who prided himself on his timidity, did not want to test it. He retired to the country, where he was sheltered by the Devonshires at Chatsworth; he died there in 1679, at the age of ninety. It was unkind of the University of Oxford to burn his works as a second best to burning their author, because Hobbes ends Leviathan with the hope that his doctrines would be ordered to be taught in the universities “from whence the Preachers, and the Gentry, drawing such…

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Hobbes claimed that the science of politics was no older than himself. Before him, historians and rhetoricians—Cicero, Machiavelli, or Erasmus—gave advice based on historical evidence, engaged in simple moral exhortation, or showed off their rhetorical skills. Hobbes claimed to be the first to put the understanding of politics on a scientific basis. He thought that the chief obstacle to the creation of a genuine science of politics was the self-interest of Scholastic philosophers, priests and professors, rhetoricians, and obscurantists. His particular bugbears were those who wanted to revive the ancient republics and Roman libertas and those who wanted to…

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As a young man he hoped to make his name as a man of letters; his translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and his numerous later Latin poems, including a Latin Autobiography, are accomplished and vigorous. After his famous encounter with geometry, and his discovery of the new physical science, he became passionate about optics, but also got into academic scrapes and quarrels in which he came out badly, particularly in controversy with Wallis over the squaring of the circle and with Boyle over the possibility of the vacuum.8 For our purposes, Hobbes’s literary achievements and the deficiencies of his understanding of the new physics matter only insofar as they suggest that Hobbes was pitched into becoming a political theorist by events, and that he was telling the truth when he said that he would rather have lived in quiet times and studied optics.

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Hobbes’s ambivalent reactions to historical writing for political purposes had a simple basis. He thought that Thucydides was “the most politic historiographer that ever writ,” and agreed with him that democracy was an intrinsically unsound form of government, not least because democracies got into self-destructive wars and were prone to faction and dissension. But history was put to dangerous uses in seventeenth-century England. Republican writers were moved by their reading of history to advocate tyrannicide; others claimed that the lesson of history was that political freedom existed only in popular republics. Most writers other than himself, he thought, were not thinkers; they decorated their political prejudices with historical allusions to show how well-read they were. They allowed rhetoric to substitute for thought. The attack seems paradoxical: Leviathan is itself a masterpiece of well-turned rhetoric. That was no accident; rhetoric was acceptable as the servant of reason. If his discovery of the principles of political science was as original as he thought, rhetoric would make his new science more digestible. What made it science, however, was logical cogency, not literary attractiveness.

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His assault on the idea that a state aims at “liberty” for its citizens implied that subjection to law, like all other forms of subjection, including slavery, is simply inconsistent with liberty.

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Whatever Hobbes’s motives, it remains astonishing. Every page contains philosophical insights—or assertions—that repay scrutiny 350 years afterward. Philosophically, the contentious and difficult view that human beings are no more than complicated mechanical systems is argued with a mixture of deftness and clumsiness that remains engaging when computer analogies have been commonplace for decades. Hobbes’s insistence that sovereignty must be absolute, omnicompetent, indivisible, and ultimate is still fiercely debated, though rarely with reference to Hobbes. His views on the nature of law, the connections of church and state, religious toleration, and much else repay any amount of analysis.

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They understood that Leviathan justified Hobbes’s submission to the protectorate established by Cromwell. In 1651 Cromwell required subjects who wished to keep their property to “engage” with the new regime, that is, swear allegiance. Only the better-off and politically active had to decide whether or not to swear allegiance, but for them it was a controversial question. Many felt that since they had pledged their allegiance to Charles I they could not go back on their word. Charles was dead and could neither hold them to their allegiance nor release them, but many felt bound to him and his heirs. The question when a man was free to take on new allegiances if not explicitly released by the person to whom he had sworn allegiance before was not easy, but Hobbes provided a clear answer. Once we have pledged allegiance to a government, be it monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, we are obliged to obey it and help sustain its authority.11 A sovereign political entity exists to secure the safety of its subjects, and it can do so only if everyone upholds its authority. If in spite of our efforts, the sovereign disintegrates—if the regime is defeated in war or dissolves in civil strife—we may submit to a new sovereign. No sovereign is truly a sovereign who cannot preserve the lives of his subjects. Everyone understood the implication: once Charles I had been defeated in the civil war and could not protect his subjects, they were free to pledge allegiance to whoever could protect them. Others said something similar; Hobbes was unusual in embedding the thought in a complex and comprehensive account of all our political rights and obligations. Many contemporaries fell back on Saint Paul’s injunction to “obey the powers that be, for the powers that be are ordained of God,” or on the thought that Oliver Cromwell’s forces had been victors in a just war,…

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What Hobbes thought science, and therefore political science, was is surprisingly hard to say. What it is not, is easy. It is not Aristotelian. It is not teleological; and it looks behind appearances for the mechanisms that explain appearances. It is decisively post-Galilean. Hobbes draws an analogy with understanding a watch; someone who knows how a watch works can take it to pieces and put it together again. We are to take the state apart in thought. The last thing he wanted was that anyone should take the state apart in fact. One might complain that the mere ability to take a watch to pieces and reassemble it is no proof of understanding: a good memory might suffice. But Hobbes was interested in the fact that a watchmaker must understand what he dismantles if he is to see what is broken and repair it; a knowledgeable but clumsy horologist might be a poor watch repairer but able to instruct a deft assistant. When Hobbes talks of the “art” by which God creates nature and we create the state, the presumption is that just as…

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Leviathan seems to lay down principles for constructing a commonwealth, but these principles are not advice for founders of republics, or for statesmen or insurgents, such as Machiavelli offered in The Prince or the Discourses. Hobbes rejects Aristotle’s claim that politics is the realm of rules of thumb, and we must be content with only as much certainty as the subject matter allows; but Hobbes has also changed the subject. If he were giving practical advice, he would have to be content with “usually,” but he rarely offers advice. Perhaps the most overt practical advice is that Leviathan should be taught in the universities.18 True science is founded, says Hobbes, on “definitions,” or “the imposition of names” and the reckoning of the consequences of names. Hobbes makes life harder for himself and the reader by insisting that naming is in one sense arbitrary, but that in a more important sense it is far from arbitrary. Blau, bleu, and azzurro are synonyms of “blue,” and as names of a color none is better or worse than the others, if it names the same visual experience. The definitions of “law,” “justice,” “authority,” and so on can be in Latin, Greek, or English, but if well-chosen, certainty will be achieved, and if ill-chosen, confusion and contradiction will result. His purpose is to get us to understand the nature of sovereign authority, and the nature of law, and the nature of justice, and he says firmly, “The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules as doth Arithmetic and Geometry; not as in Tennis-play on practice only.”19 And this appears to be what he has in mind when he says in the afterword to Leviathan that “the matters in question, are not of fact, but of right.”20 If we talk about the state as Hobbes thinks reason requires, we may not manage everyday life much better, but we shall not plunge into war because we are talking nonsense. If Leviathan has an ancestor, it is Plato’s search in Republic and elsewhere for definitions of justice, knowledge, piety, or courage. Its intellectual successor is modern economics. Like geometry, economics works from definitions to conclusions, and abstracts away from most of human life to illuminate what perfectly rational agents will do in their market interactions; it is not a merely empirical account of what most people happen to do but an account of what we rationally must do, supposing our ends to be as the theory supposes and ourselves to be fully informed and rational. In the same way, Hobbes offers a theory of what human beings must do if they are the rational, well-informed, and fearful creatures he draws for us.

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Hobbes paints a picture of the capacities that human beings possess in virtue of being self-maintaining physical systems that perceive both things outside them and their own bodily states, that feel desires and aversions, and, above all, that think; then he provides an account of the basic emotions that drive such creatures and the more complex emotions that experience and reason create out of these basic ingredients; by imagining many such creatures placed in an environment with no rules, no laws, nobody in authority who is able to make them act in one way rather than another—the so-called state of nature—he gives a striking account of the problem to which government possessing absolute authority is the solution. It is still known to political theorists and sociologists as “the Hobbesian problem of order.” Hobbes begins from the premise that human beings are complex physical systems—natural automata—endowed with sense, reason, and passions. Much of his account of our intellectual capacities is an exasperated commentary on the nonsense of the Schoolmen, the Scholastic philosophers of his own and the previous two centuries. These are old battles, but Hobbes’s uncompromising materialism and nominalism is still exciting. Reason is not a divinely implanted source of illumination; it is the capacity to calculate consequences. Its task is to calculate the consequences of names or, in modern terms, to draw logical inferences. Words get their meaning because human beings impose “names” upon experiences they wish to record. The term “red,” for instance, gets its meaning by being imposed upon the experience of seeing a red thing to remind us that the experience was like seeing another red thing. This is not a persuasive theory of meaning in general—it is particularly bad on the meaning of words such as “if” or “and”—but it yields results that Hobbes needs. If everything is body, the world contains only particular entities; but late medieval philosophy invented all manner of terms referring to properties of a more or less occult sort. Where names refer to a suspect entity, Hobbes sometimes declares them “unmeaning”; frequently, he makes the very modern move of analyzing them as the name of something else—the name of a name, for instance.22

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Everything in the world is particular, and everything universal is verbal; Hobbes is firmly on the materialist, nominalist, and anti-Platonist side in matters of logic. Traditional philosophy must reduce its ambitions; it cannot see into the essences of things, as Plato hoped. There are no essences. For reason to operate effectively, it must not be dazzled by verbal confusion, whence the need for meticulous definitions, and an end to the unmeaning speech of the Schoolmen. But reasoning is social as well as individual; our opinions can be corrected by other people, and the use of reason implies a willingness to defer to other people. If everyone tries to impose his own ideas on others or to define words as he wants, reasoning is as impossible as playing cards would be if everyone “declared that suit to be trumps of which he had most in his hand.” Hobbes is not Humpty Dumpty; words do not mean whatever we want them to mean.24

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Hobbes despised Aristotle’s ethics and politics. He also despised his physics but conceded some merit to his biology. Leviathan was intended to drive Aristotle from the terrain of political debate, but Hobbes silently appropriates his views on many occasions, and our motives for reasoning about the world and ourselves may be one.

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If Aristotle’s observations are acceptable, the system in which he places them is not. It is absurd and the fount of absurdity. Hobbes’s system operates on a mechanical, not a teleological, conception of desire and aversion: something within us drives us to, or away from, what we want or wish to avoid. Our desires are explained by how we are constructed, not by ends inscribed in nature to which we are naturally drawn; the final end of action is set by our desires, not by natural impulsion toward the good. Aristotle’s teleological conception of human nature is rejected, and with it any suggestion that we have “proper” or “natural” ends. Aristotle saw values inscribed in nature; Hobbes saw values inscribed on nature by ourselves in the light of our desires and aversions.25

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We do not naturally converge on any particular goal: there is nothing that pleases everyone, and nothing satisfies any individual forever. Once a desire is satisfied, another takes its place, and we begin the search to satisfy it. This is not to be deplored; nobody thinks it gluttony to eat lunch as well as breakfast. The felicity of the angels makes no sense to us, though we may hanker after whatever we suppose it to be.

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The changeability of our desires means that the standard of how well we are doing comes from within us; but it cannot answer the question whether we get what we should. What we habitually do is look at how other people are doing. If they do better than we, we envy them; and they envy us if we do better than they. We come to desire their envy, their admiration, and their acknowledgment that we are doing better than they. We move from wanting things “naturally,” in the familiar sense of that term, to wanting them because other people want them. We want a bicycle, move on to wanting a car, and end by wanting a car to make the neighbors jealous. “Vainglory” is the most important emotion in Hobbes’s political theory;

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Pride must yield to its opposite; men must consider their most important, long-term interests and concerns. They must understand that they are fragile creatures for whom self-preservation is the overriding imperative, and think about what behavior promotes self-preservation, not what would impress others. Among consequences disagreeable to traditionally minded aristocrats, two are striking. The first is an insistence on the natural equality of all mankind. There are no natural aristocrats; Aristotle thought exactly the opposite—just as there are slaves by nature, so the “best men” are best by nature. Hobbes insists that what it means to be an aristocrat is a matter of what the sovereign authority determines. The crown is the “fount of honor” in the conventional sense, and in a logically more stringent sense: “honor” is what the sovereign confers. Once the two thoughts are put together, we can see that there is no room in Hobbes’s theory for any social group to claim to have a natural right to rule in virtue of birth and upbringing.

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The second powerful thought is Hobbes’s inversion of Aristotle’s search for the summum bonum. There can be no consensus on the highest good for mankind, but there is a worst evil, and that is death. Everyone has good reason to avoid “sudden and violent death” at all costs; in the absence of a summum bonum we can agree on the existence of a summum malum.27 That death is the worst of all evils is almost a physical truth for Hobbes; as self-maintaining automata, we are “hard-wired” to reject anything that will bring us to a halt. Hobbes says over and over that we may rationally agree to anything except to get killed. A promise or covenant to kill myself or to let myself be killed is void. This has the curious consequence that the coroner’s verdict of suicide while of unsound mind is a pleonasm. To kill oneself appears to be insane by definition. It also has some interestingly liberal results; one is that we cannot say to our rulers, “If I do thus and such, kill me.” The most we can say is “If I do thus and such, you may try to kill me,” with the implication that we do no wrong if we try to ensure they do not. Having established sudden and violent death as the ultimate evil, Hobbes inverts much else of Aristotle’s view of politics. We come together to establish a political community not out of a sociable impulse to pursue the good life in common but out of an unsociable fear of one another, and for the sake of avoiding the greatest of all evils, death. Without

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whereas Aristotle thought man was a political animal intended by nature to live in a polis, Hobbes was a thoroughly modern thinker who repudiated the idea that nature had any purposes for us whatever, and emphasized that we were driven into political society. The consequence is that for Hobbes it is no loss if we live wholly private lives and take no interest in politics, while for Aristotle it would be a truncated existence suited to women and slaves but not to citizens.

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On these premises Hobbes erects a wholly secular and arm’s-length account of religion. The natural basis of religion, as distinct from revelation, is that men come to a belief in God through anxiety about causes. We constantly try to discover the cause of events that concern us—the preceding events on which they follow; knowing causes allows us to control events. Following the chain of causes backward, we reach the thought of a cause from which all later events follow, the first cause. This first cause we call God. Belief in God so defined is almost devoid of content, save that it is impossible that we should think any being is capable of creating the universe without also thinking that it is exceedingly—“infinitely”—powerful and has our fate in its hand.

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animadversions

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Mankind in the state of nature has the intellectual capacities of civilized men and is deprived only of government. The state of nature is not a primitive or historical condition; it is a theoretical construct. Among the qualities of natural man, the most important is the desire for power. This is not specifically political power. Power in Hobbes’s understanding is a label for the capacity to control future events. Our present resources for controlling the future constitute our power. Anxious creatures like ourselves must want power; once we have eaten, we wonder where the next meal will come from; we need “power” over the food we shall need in future. I may gather food from the bushes, but only if I can be sure of coming back and not finding them stripped by others can I be sure of my next meal. I need to control the bushes’ fate. Hobbes thinks that we move swiftly from power over inanimate things to power over people; what happens depends on what other people do, so controlling them is the key to all control. Control over other people is the core of any account of power.

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power hungry,

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It was essential that Hobbes could argue that most individuals were ready to live modestly and have moderate aims in life, and yet that under the wrong conditions they would have to behave as if they were power hungry, aggressive, and immoderate. If everyone was power hungry by nature, there would be no hope of establishing government; if nobody cared about his own safety, politics would be unintelligible. Secure people will not seek to dominate others, but insecure people will be forced to try for the sake of survival. And power is essentially comparative; if we both want to exercise control over some part of nature, the one who can make the other yield has the real power. So we are forced to try to acquire more power than others; they are forced to try to acquire more power than us. We are in an arms race, even though we may all wish to escape it. The implications for modern…

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“the miseries of life without government,” in which he spells out the effect of living in an environment where there are no rules, and no means of enforcement. The problem is not only that there is no authority that can make us behave in one way rather than another; there is also no common judge of right and wrong. Under government we know who owns what, and who can dictate what happens to this money or these goods or this field. Absent that, none of us has any reason to think that he has less right to anything than anyone else has. As Hobbes bleakly says, in these conditions we all have a right to everything, even to the use of one another’s bodies. It is a right that nobody can make use of. What we lack is a mechanism for allocating determinate rights that we can make use of. Recall that Hobbes said, “Whatsoever each man desires, that for his part he calleth good.” My own survival is a good to me, but perhaps not to you; your paying your debt to me is a good to me, but not to you. We can all understand that if there were a common judge who…

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there are three causes of quarrel—causes of the war of all against all. They are competition,…

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“Mutual assured destruction,” the alarming name given to the policy of acquiring enough weapons and protecting enough from attack to maintain “second-strike capacity,” made both sides safe. Once each side could retaliate, neither had an incentive to launch a first strike. Since each knew that about the other, the motives tending to peace were reinforced. What makes the story relevant is that individuals cannot develop a “private” second-strike capacity. To put it another way, a state with second-strike capacity is not “killed” if it is attacked, because it can retaliate. The individual who is killed cannot retaliate. We need the state to provide us with a second-strike capacity. States do not need a supranational state in the same way, though small states may well form alliances with more powerful states to provide it.

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The final reason for conflict is not on all fours with competition and diffidence. Competition can be assuaged by prosperity when we can earn a living by hard work and intelligence. And our willingness to seek our living that way rather than by violence is much increased by the existence of law and its enforcement. Fear may be reduced almost to nothing when we all know that everyone else has every reason not to assault us. Pride is different. We have seen how pride results from the combination of the instability of our desires with the ability to compare our successes with those of others; it is the source of an unremitting urge to “come top,” no matter what the competition is about. In any competition there is only one top place, and competition for it cannot be diluted by prosperity. Pride makes men overestimate their capacities and take foolish risks; it leads men to be obstinate when they would preserve the peace by being willing to give in gracefully. It leads them to seek occasions to increase the resentment felt by their competitors, when peace suggests we should soothe their feelings. The cures for pride are twofold. The first is that the sovereign is understood to be the fount of honor, and that all understand their social status to be in the sovereign’s gift. The other is simply to repress its expression as far as possible. Leviathan is king over the children of pride.

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Unlike Machiavelli, who says bleakly that men are evil and will do all the evil they can, Hobbes thinks they are essentially innocent. They are frightened of sudden and violent death and must do whatever they can to avoid it. In the wrong conditions, that makes things worse rather than better. The sense in which Hobbes is an Augustinian about politics does not extend to sharing Augustine’s obsession with original sin. The same emotions and intelligence that lead to the war of all against all can secure peace and prosperity under stable and orderly government.

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The laws of nature are “theorems” about what “conduces to the safety of them all.” As theorems, they are not rules but conclusions about rules within a piece of hypothetical reasoning—“if we all followed the injunction to keep our covenants, peace and prosperity would ensue,” and so on. A command is an imperative: “keep faith, practice justice, eschew cruelty,” and the like. Hobbes thinks of the rules of morality, which is what the laws of nature are, as imperatives we address to ourselves. We may choose to think of them as the laws of God, in which case they are properly laws, divine laws. They are always binding on the conscience, which is to say we should always wish to act on them and be willing to do so when it is safe, but we are not bound to act on them unless it is safe to do so. Hobbes marks the distinction as between being obliged in foro interno and in foro externo.

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He begins by saying they are precepts found out by reason whereby a man is forbidden to do what is destructive of his life. This is plausible in the sense that if everyone else obeys the rules, we shall do well to obey them. But if others do not follow the rules, following them is dangerous since others will take advantage of us. The rules are good for us collectively if we all obey them; for an individual thinking selfishly, what matters is whether others obey them. Selfishly, I need others to keep the peace, keep promises, and behave decently. Purely selfishly, I do best if they keep the rules and I do what I choose. The literary expression of that thought goes back to Callicles and Thrasymachus, and more credibly to Glaucon. Hobbes never raises this anxiety, what is today known as the free-rider problem.

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Earthly sovereigns are created by the consents of their subjects. What distinguishes Hobbes from his predecessors is his obsessive attention to the individual subject. Where Justinian claimed that “the people” conferred absolute authority on him, Hobbes is concerned with our obligation to obey the sovereign’s commands, and he finds that obligation in our individual consent.32 The question is one not of the pedigree of an existing sovereign but of the moral obligation of each individual. The politically central laws of nature are the second and third. The second tells one to be willing to lay down the right to all things “and to be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.” The means of laying down our rights is to contract or covenant with others for the purpose; the third law of nature therefore dictates “that men perform their covenants made.” Justice consists in fulfilling our obligations; obligations are imposed by us on ourselves when we make a contract or covenant.

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The contradiction between what I say and what I know I shall do is, as with lying, the essence of deceit but not a defect of logic. It certainly undermines the possibility of good order; pacta servanda sunt—“promises must be kept”—is as important as everyone from Cicero onward has maintained. And it is certainly true that just as communication would be impossible unless most of us most of the time said what we thought to be true, so the institution of promising would simply not exist unless most of us most of the time took the obligations we assumed as seriously as we should.

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The first law of nature obliges always; it demands only that we seek peace, and no matter what the difficulties, we can always do that. The second law of nature, which requires us to be willing to give up our rights on condition that others give up theirs on equal terms, is equally easy to obey. It is not difficult to be willing to consent on equal terms to the creation of government; the difficulty lies in actually laying down my right if that exposes me to attack by others.

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laws of nature, then, oblige always in intention; they bind us to promote peace. They are not conditional; they do not invite us to observe them if we wish, or when we think they are to our advantage. We need not observe them in foro externo if it is too dangerous; but we are not at liberty to ignore them as we choose. This is essential for the next step of the escape from the state of war. The escape depends on our contracting with one another; Hobbes’s account of contract or covenant is the key to everything that follows. Hobbes claimed that although we are obliged to obey the laws of nature as laws if they are thought of as the laws of God, the obligation to obey human law rests on our prior agreement to obey a human lawgiver. Nobody is under an earthly obligation that he has not placed himself under; injustice consists of a breach

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Two powerful consequences are that nothing the sovereign does can be unjust, in Hobbes’s sense; and that our obligations to the governments we live under have been freely undertaken by ourselves.33 It is worth recalling yet again that this is not a historical story about the genesis of government; Hobbes says that was a matter of families becoming clans and clans becoming kingdoms. Leviathan is an account of right, not fact.

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The covenant that takes us out of the state of nature is a covenant of every man with every man to transfer all their rights to “this man or this body of men,” and to take his or their word as law. This institutes a sovereign. The sovereign is an artificial body—recall the frontispiece of Leviathan—and as an artificial person it represents us all, and we are the authors of its acts.

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a point Hobbes reinforces by insisting that it should be unlawful to talk about tyranny at all, no doubt thinking that from discussing the nature of tyranny it would be a short step to advocating tyrannicide.

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Although almost all sovereigns in fact acquire authority over their subjects by acquisition, institution underlies the existence of all sovereigns.

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The details of Hobbes’s

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Critics have wondered why Hobbes said that covenants without the sword are but words and of no power to hold a man at all, and yet relied on a covenant without the sword to create the sovereign who was to wield the sword. Once the covenant establishing the sovereign has been entered into, it is maintained by the sword of the sovereign; the difficulty is reaching that point.

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Hobbes regarded theories of divided sovereignty as disastrous, and this was a popular refrain among defenders of absolute monarchy. The thought that we might settle on a person or group as the focus of obedience and obey them because everyone else obeys them is not implausible,

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The thought that underlying our “vertical” allegiance to this or that ruler—Charles I or Cromwell—there must be a horizontal allegiance to our fellow citizens is a decidedly modern and egalitarian thought. Perhaps it is true in fact that creating a state depends on finding a charismatic founder; but what is true in logic is that unless we have some one source of authority entitled to lay down the law and enforce it, we have no state at all, only anarchy.

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The sovereign by institution is the sovereign authority created out of the state of nature, while the sovereign by acquisition is an existent sovereign acquiring new subjects. The second case covers the silent, continuous acquisition of new subjects that takes place as young people become old enough for their allegiance to concern an existing government. It also covers—more importantly for Hobbes—the case where persons defeated in war are spared on condition of subjecting themselves to a new ruler.

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It is essential to Hobbes’s theory that we give up all the rights we can transfer to the sovereign. We cannot give up the right to save our own lives in extremis, so there is no point in trying. All other rights are transferred. The sovereign by institution is not bound by this covenant, because we covenant with one another and not with the sovereign. The sovereign by acquisition is not under an obligation to us, because he fulfilled his side of the bargain when he spared our lives, and has no further obligation to us. Hobbes took a strikingly individualistic view about obligation. We are under an obligation to obey our rulers because we have put ourselves under that obligation. Unlike traditionalists and conservatives, Hobbes did not think we are born into obedience. Most people assent silently to the government in power in the society into which they are born, but in logic the sovereign might legitimately treat them as “enemies” until they explicitly engage to obey him. The sovereign’s forbearance is to be understood as the terms for obedience.

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The existence of the United States of America suggests other possibilities: one of which is that a sovereign is not what Hobbes says—since the United States possesses a multiplicity of legal systems and no single final arbiter of conflict; or, that the possession of an identifiable sovereign is not a necessary condition of being a single state—since the United States is a single political system, but different bodies have the last word on different issues.

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commentators have described Hobbes as a “protoliberal,” if not a liberal. The awkwardness is that most liberals think citizens have rights against their governments; such as a right to free speech, to the free practice of whatever religion seems compelling to them, to the immunities against arbitrary arrest and ill-treatment we see enshrined in bills of rights. Hobbes, however, insisted that subjects have no such rights.

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But he believed very firmly that government exists first to keep the peace and then to promote all the arts of civilization, commercial and intellectual.

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There is no difficulty in Hobbes’s suggestion that we should provide for the poor, the old, and the sick; we are not so selfish that benevolence toward them is impossible. John Aubrey tells a nice story to make the point that the fact that our feelings of sympathy must be ours does not mean they are not feelings of sympathy.

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They were used to religious zealots arguing that the classical doctrine of tyrannicide justified the assassination of a heretical monarch, and to other enthusiasts advocating the institution of the kingdom of God on earth at the first opportunity. The argumentative Hobbes also felt honor bound to fight off many current theological views and to defend some unorthodox views of his own. He was, for instance, a “mortalist,” which is to say that he believed that at death we perish entirely, without continuing to exist as an immortal soul;

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We therefore find Hobbes arguing consistently for a state whose authority is unlimited, but which exercises that authority discreetly. Since religion was the great source of contention in the seventeenth century, it was the authority of the state over the church that he was particularly anxious to defend, but in the hope that it will be exercised with a light touch. Arguing against Bishop Bramhall over free will and necessity, Hobbes insisted that religion is a question of law, not truth, which is what he consistently argues in Leviathan. Philosophical speculation is one thing, the expressive and moral functions of religion another. How far this was religious skepticism is impossible to say.

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The rational sovereign will read Leviathan and understand that a temperate government that secures the livelihoods of the citizenry, does not encroach upon their privacy, and encourages initiative, imagination, art, and science will create a loyal, intelligent, and adventurous population. The difficulty comes with a less intelligent or less competent sovereign, whether this is one man carried away by whim, pride, or ambition or an assembly riven by discord. What can we do? Hobbes had no answer. So much did he fear that his fellow subjects were looking for every least excuse to avoid their duty that he weighted the scales against self-help to an absurd degree. He agrees that we may resist the sovereign on our own behalf alone if we are directly threatened; since self-protection is hard-wired into the human organism, nothing we do can commit us to allowing the sovereign to kill us without resisting.

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But Hobbes’s difficulty is that by insisting that we may resist only to save our own lives and only on our own behalf, he contradicts his own account of human nature and renders resistance too difficult. Anxious creatures gathering evidence about what danger they may be in can hardly help taking the way the sovereign treats others as evidence about how he might treat us. If we see that the sovereign seems bent on folly or misrule, we can scarcely avoid thinking it might be better to hang together than to hang separately, and form an alliance to resist the irrational sovereign while we can. Luther had in essence faced the issue and evaded it by acknowledging that a ruler who behaved badly enough would find that his subjects ignored the Pauline injunction to obey the powers that be and overthrew him, rightly or wrongly. The subjects of a Hobbesian sovereign cannot help asking whether the sovereign may turn from protecting them to attacking them. If the latter, the sovereign and they are back in the state of nature, and they may use all the helps and advantages of war. Hobbes’s only recourse is to urge us to give the sovereign the benefit of the doubt, and to urge the sovereign to recall that his or their glory rests on the prosperity and happiness of their subjects.

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His achievement was to draw a more compelling picture of the political predicament than anyone before him, and one that has never been bettered. The considerations that tell for and against confiding more or less authority to government, and drawing the bands of obedience tighter or looser about the subject, have never been better set out. That his readers, and we ourselves, must make up their own minds about where the balance should finally be struck is a fact of political life, not a failure in Hobbes.

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College fellowships required their holders to take holy orders or to study for an advanced degree in law or medicine; Locke decided on medicine. This had important consequences. At an intellectual level, it gave him a respect for careful observation and the application of past experience to new cases that was lacking in Thomas Hobbes. This outlook permeates the Essay concerning Human Understanding, on which his philosophical fame rests. It is an “antirationalist” view. Human understanding is bounded by experience; there is no possibility of understanding the world from first principles detached from experience. Human reason is described as “the candle of the Lord,” the instrument that enables us to know as much about the workings of the world as we need to live sensibly and virtuously, with a proper regard to our duties to God and man.

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Shaftesbury converted Locke into the liberal figure we know. Locke initially subscribed to the view that political power was by nature absolute and that a ruler was entitled to make whatever religious dispositions he chose in “things indifferent,” that is, outside the essentials of the Christian faith. This was cuius regio, eius religio and Hobbes’s view. Shaftesbury was a confirmed believer in toleration in the familiar sense of the recognition of a right to religious liberty, and he rejected the suggestion that toleration was a matter of royal concession. He believed what Hobbes denied.

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Locke became Shaftesbury’s confidential secretary and followed him into government when Shaftesbury briefly became lord chancellor, and Locke became secretary to the Board of Trade. He followed him into opposition; and as the conflict between Charles and his opponents became fiercer during the 1670s and early 1680s, Shaftesbury drew on Locke for advice on political strategy. The chief object of Charles II’s opponents was to prevent him from cementing an alliance with Louis XIV and Catholic France. They rightly suspected that Charles was trying to betray his kingdom to a foreign power. The Treaty of Dover of 1672—a desperately secret treaty—provided that when the time was ripe, Charles would return his country to the Catholic faith; Louis’s armies would enter the country to reestablish Catholicism. Shaftesbury and his allies were determined that Charles’s brother and heir, the duke of York, a declared and practicing Catholic, should not succeed him. They promoted an exclusion bill in 1679, and a full-scale crisis ensued. For the last five years of his reign, Charles governed without calling a parliament. Locke was under surveillance from royalist spies in Oxford. He was given to extreme suspicion of other people’s motives; but he had every reason to fear for his safety. Charles might hesitate to strike at Shaftesbury; but he would have no qualms about the judicial murder of an adviser to teach Shaftesbury a lesson. Oxford was a royalist city where a jury could be paid to bring in a verdict of treason against anyone the crown wished to be rid of; one unfortunate opponent of the government, Stephen College, was acquitted by a London jury, taken to Oxford, tried, and hanged.

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During his reign of only three years, James II tried to establish the conditions for a French invasion of his country;

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Locke could now return, and did. He led a quiet, but useful existence until his death in 1704. He was again made secretary of the Board of Trade, in recognition of his abilities as an economist; his greater fame was as a philosopher, the interpreter of Newton to the wider world, and the defender of a view of religious toleration that no British government adopted until the abolition of the Test Acts in 1872 removed the last legal disabilities of Catholics and Dissenters. It was left to the drafters of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to establish Locke’s principles as the guiding principles of a legal and political system and especially of the relations of church and state. In Locke’s own day, the American colonies by no means accepted his ideas about toleration. Puritan New England pleased Charles II by executing more Dissenters than he ever tried to do. Nor did Locke campaign for wider toleration in Britain; his writings said all that intelligent readers needed. For much of the past two centuries, John Locke epitomized the virtues on which English liberals prided themselves. He was thought to be cautious, commonsensical, matter-of-fact, given neither to the overpassionate enthusiasm for freedom that might lead to upheaval and civil war, nor to the overwillingness to accept authority that might allow dictatorship and despotism to flourish unchecked. This picture has recently been replaced with a more interesting and ambiguous one. Locke has been characterized as a supporter of a capitalist revolution, as a covert disciple of Hobbes, and as a conspirator against Charles II who thought that assassination was the only way to rid the country of a tyrant and whose decision to take refuge in Holland in the last days of Charles II and the short reign of James II was entirely justified.

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The first is a long drawn-out, blow-by-blow demolition of the political views of Sir Robert Filmer, the author of Patriarcha. Filmer’s is not a name to conjure with today, and even in Locke’s time, he was an oddity. He was a country knight, who wrote Patriarcha some time before his death in 1647; it languished in obscurity and unpublished until the defenders of Charles II exhumed it as a propaganda weapon during the exclusion crisis and published it in 1680. Patriarcha argued that the authority of kings is the authority of fathers, handed down from Adam, the father of us all. Where it is not restricted by positive law, itself the will of a monarch, it is absolute, arbitrary, and bequeathable. It may seem odd that Locke spent several hundred pages assaulting such a rebarbative view, but Algernon Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government did exactly that, at the same time, and the book’s relevance to the politics of the day got its author killed.

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The Second Treatise is so disarmingly written that it seems to need no commentary, which may be why commentators have strained to find something more surprising to say than that the Second Treatise means what it says. Nonetheless, it is hard to see why commentators have felt the urge to represent Locke as a friend to untrammeled capitalism or a friend to dictatorship or…

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Locke was evasive about his authorship of the Treatises; as late as 1703, the year before his death, and many years after James II’s abdication, he wrote to a correspondent to praise the account of property offered in the Second Treatise, as if he had no idea who had written it.2 This was not true of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, where he was very happy to be known as its author. Locke may have thought that his work would not be wholly to the liking of his new employers after the Glorious Revolution and the installation of William III. Locke published the work in 1690 and said that the point of publishing it—not, as commentators have noted, the point of writing it in the first place—was to establish the throne of the nation’s protector William III in the consent of the people.3 This seems beyond criticism. The new monarch was not regarded as legitimate by a majority of his subjects, but Locke maintained that he was the most legitimate ruler in Christendom. It was an uphill argument. Many who did not care for James II nonetheless believed that the House of Stuart was the legitimate line and the House of Orange not, which was one reason why William reigned jointly with his queen, James II’s daughter Mary, and why her sister, Anne, became heir to the throne ahead of any sons the then childless William might have from a later marriage. For Locke to publish something whose purpose was to establish William’s throne more firmly was surely acceptable.

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Nor was his army merely decorative; it fought several skirmishes with the royalist forces on the way to London. On the other hand, he had little appetite for war; when the leaders of Parliament dithered about exactly what should happen, William threatened to go back to Holland and leave them to shift as best they could. The outcome owed much to the good sense of James II’s daughters, Princesses Anne and Mary. Locke’s position was more radical than that of Parliament, and it issued in the views of the American revolutionaries and the radical dissenters that Edmund Burke so hated a century later. If the English people chose their rulers, they might decide on reflection that their rulers were inept or wicked, and assert their right to “cashier them for misconduct,” as Richard Price put it a century later, and choose others in their place.4 Burke argued that the correct view prevailed: the English had reluctantly engaged in a defensive revolutionary restoration of the ancient constitution; it required a monarch, and after James II’s de facto abdication, the country was fortunate that his (Protestant) heir was at hand.5

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Locke begins from the premise that men are born free and equal, neither possessing authority over anyone else nor owing allegiance to anyone else. We are so used to this claim that we rarely notice that taken as a statement about how we come into the world, it is glaringly false. We are born helpless and dependent, and most people believe that they acquire their political identity and allegiances in virtue of their birth, along with a host of obligations to parents and other relatives.

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As God pointed out to Job, he made the world, and it is permeated with the qualities with which he endowed it. As part of God’s creation, we are under his absolute power, endowed with the abilities he has given us, and “sent into the world by his order and about his business.”6 An insight into the hatred with which Locke viewed the claim of absolute authority made by Charles II and other monarchs of his day is provided by imagining the contrast in Locke’s mind between the rightful authority of God and that of these other claimants. To claim absolute authority for an earthly government, monarchical or other, was blasphemy. It is easy to think that with monarchs and their propagandists on their behalf, claiming to rule jure divino, their opponents must have been deeply secular in their thinking, and that we should discount their religious views; in fact, we may have religious reasons for taking a fiercely secularist and antiabsolutist line about politics. Locke did.

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Since Locke is giving an account of what political arrangements rational and morally serious persons would agree to, he begins by giving an account of the purpose and nature of the political society that can legitimately be established. “Political power then I take to be a Right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the Commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good.”7 It exists, he says, to secure men’s “property,” by which he means their “lives, liberties and estates.” While “property” today has a much narrower meaning than “lives, liberties and estates,” Locke habitually uses the term in both the modern, narrow sense and in an older, wider sense embracing all the “external goods” that governments exist to protect. Governments exist to protect and secure the rights of their subjects; a person with rights has something of his own for the government to secure, and in that sense has “a property” to protect. A person without rights has nothing of his own and is a slave, not a member of political society; this thought has a long lineage and is at least as old as Cicero. It follows, as Locke is at pains to say, that absolute and arbitrary authority is not the essence of political authority, as Hobbes and Filmer said, but inconsistent with it. Like Aristotle confronting Plato, Locke carefully distinguishes the authority of parents over children, masters over slaves, and lawful governments over their subjects.

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Locke’s purpose there, and very plausibly in the Second Treatise, too, is to deny that government has any concern with spiritual matters; “property” is the shorthand term for our “external” goods—security against attack, the ability to make a living, freedom of movement, and the like—and sharply distinguished from a concern with our immortal souls. The latter is more important than the former, but Locke wants to protect our inner lives and our spiritual allegiances from the coercive interference of the state just because they are the most important parts of our lives. Positively, we can be free to lead our spiritual lives as we ought, only if our external liberty is secure. Certainly, this extends to protecting the property rights of a congregation that builds a church, for instance; but the protection owes nothing to whatever doctrine the congregation professes, only to its ownership. Locke thought that we required the state’s protection of our right to form voluntary associations with…

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limited, constitutional government. Since Locke was contending against those who thought there were no limits to monarchical rule, he needed an argument to show that there were limits, and what they were. He sets them by framing political authority within natural law. We are, he claims, born into a world already under law; this law is natural law. Locke does not go into detail about what makes natural law law, but he does tell us briefly how we know what its dictates are; reason tell us that we are made by one almighty creator, sent into…

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He may also have come to hold the liberal belief that political cooperation is possible between people with different convictions about many moral, religious, and metaphysical issues. It is in the intimate areas of life, especially sexuality, that the greatest diversity of moral views is visible, while the need for honesty, keeping agreements, the duty to care for children, and similar principles are universally accepted. Honeste vivere, neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere—honesty, nonaggression, and giving everyone his due—are, as Cicero said, the basis of social and political life. But one thing that emphasizes how thoroughly his own religious convictions permeated Locke’s work was that Locke did not distinguish, as Hobbes had done, between “theorems” about what will conduce to our safety that can be worked out by pure reason and laws strictly speaking that require a lawgiver to promulgate them as laws. Locke invokes God as creator and legislator from the outset.

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Natural theology grounded natural law. To the usual conundrums about how we know what God’s purposes are, and why we should imagine that he wishes us to thrive, given the seventeenth century’s mortality rates, and the horrors of the wars of religion earlier in the century, Locke offers no answer. If God has made us, it is absurd to suppose that he endowed us with a desire to stay alive, appetites for food and drink, pressing needs for shelter and human companionship, and an urge to beget and rear children, only to frustrate the use of these endowments. Constructed as we are, we are evidently intended to use our gifts and satisfy our lawful appetites and flourish. We are sent into the world to secure our own long-term good, and because God has created all of us on the same terms, he must intend that all of us promote the good of everyone to the extent that we do not excessively undermine our own. This hangs on a teleological understanding of human nature more akin to Aristotle’s than Hobbes’s.

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For Locke, morality implies a lawgiver who lays down rules to bind the conduct of his subjects; this implies that a man who does not believe in God cannot regard himself as morally obliged to behave in any particular way. He might behave decently because he felt impelled to do so, but on this view he could not see himself as obliged or bound to behave decently. This sets the limits of toleration; atheists could not be trusted to follow the dictates of morality and had no claim to the toleration extended to all deists.10 Locke did not confront the problem that besets many secular moralities; in many systems of ethics, morality is construed as a set of rules for promoting the common good or the general welfare. Some of them, such as utilitarianism, start from the premise that each of us by nature wants to promote his or her own well-being, and imply a permanent tension between the demands of morality and the promptings of self-interest. In Locke’s universe, there is no such tension; we are the handiwork of an almighty and benevolent maker, and pursue our well-being on his terms. He has made us sociable, moral, and reasonable, and our long-term welfare includes doing our duty according to the rules by which God governs us. We are entitled to prefer our own safety to that of others where they come into such severe competition that we would suffer greatly by not doing so; but anyone who is tempted to exploit other people for his own benefit is wicked and selfish.

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He had an Aristotelian rather than an Augustinian view of the way morality and self-interest are conjoined. We are social creatures, designed to flourish in open and friendly relations with others; generally we flourish when other people’s well-being is an important part of our own. The differences between Locke and Aristotle are not negligible. Locke was a moral individualist with a strong sense that we all have…

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Locke took work infinitely more seriously than Aristotle. For Aristotle, the mark of a gentleman was his knowledge of how to employ his leisure; work was for slaves and the lower classes. Locke subscribed to the work ethic. God has equipped us with skills and talents and given us a world of resources on which to employ them, in gratitude to God and for the improvement of the human condition. A person who…

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question raised by this account of natural law is how far it loses credibility with “the death of God.” Nobody knows. Many writers have feared that modern liberal democracies are living on the borrowed capital of a Lockean religious ethic, and that as it erodes, the foundations of liberal democracy will be eroded, too.11 Optimists think that Locke’s conclusions are persuasive where his premises are not, and that that will suffice. If human beings are happiest when they live in nonviolent, law-abiding societies where work is encouraged and rewarded, liberal democracy will flourish. The latter part of the twentieth century saw the rise of an international consensus that we all possess so-called human rights, which closely resemble the rights that a Lockean system of…

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It also provided rules of conduct by which mankind could under favorable conditions live at peace in the absence of political authority. This is where Locke was at odds with Hobbes. For Hobbes the misery of the state of nature stemmed from the fact that although we knew what rules it would be good to follow, we could not follow them safely. Locke thought that we could employ them to regulate our conduct with others until life became either too complicated for them to regulate our conduct in the absence of conventional written law, or misbehavior was so rife that we could no longer trust one another. Locke summed up the requirements of the law of nature in the requirement that we should not harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions unless our very existence depended on it; this is not very different from Hobbes, but Locke did not think that our lives depend on it very often. It is vital to Locke that this should be so; if the choice was “despotism or chaos,” we might well hesitate to evict our tyrannical rulers. If the choice is “despotism or behaving according to unofficial but universally accepted rules while we find a new government,” we would not. The American colonists drew the right inference in 1776.

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Since the law of nature gives nobody an absolute and arbitrary power over his own life and liberty, let alone anyone else’s, no government possesses absolute and arbitrary power over its subjects. Whatever Charles II or Sir Robert Filmer might think, absolute monarchy is a moral impossibility. This claim might have got Locke executed in the last days of Charles II, but it was often made in the Middle Ages and is persuasive.

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Locke took the right to inflict the death penalty “and consequently all lesser penalties” as the central right of all governments.12 If men in the state of nature had no right to punish others, governments could not have acquired the right; so Locke duly insisted that we had a right to punish breaches of the law of nature. Hobbes had vacillated; sometimes he said that the right to punish was part of the “right to all things” that we possess by nature, and that the sovereign had simply retained this natural right when the rest of us had given up our rights; sometimes he said that it was a new right, because punishment according to law was very different from the right of self-defense we all possess in the state of nature. Locke refused to see a problem, even though he admitted that some readers would think his view “strange.”13 The state of nature is a juridical state, and each person has a judicial authority, which is both instituted and bounded by law.

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We distinguish between rights of ownership and other rights. Most legal systems allow us to transfer our property (in the narrow sense of objects we own) to other persons who then acquire the rights we once had. By contrast, none allow us to transfer such things as our religious liberty or our immunity to physical abuse. If I tell you that you may require me to pray when and where you choose, and then I do not do so, no court will assist you. If I tell you that you may have my “property” in my life and may kill me when you choose, you had better not take me up on the offer, because any court will convict you of murder. But if I sell you my bicycle and then try to take it back, I will be convicted of theft. Locke bundled together all those rights that attach to what one might call our legal and political personality as constituting our “propriety,” that which gives us a stake in the world and in the political and legal system.

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One might think that once a monarch had granted his subjects their property on terms, his successors should not interfere with settled expectations; but the idea that men could own property in the absence of government seemed absurd. Ownership implies agreed rules whose existence postdates government.

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Locke’s First Treatise is overkill, but its target was not wholly negligible, and the arguments employed against Filmer do the work of demolition that allows Locke to build constructively in the Second Treatise. To us, the proposition that Charles II is not the heir of Adam is blindingly obvious and therefore uninteresting. Locke’s claim that Adam received from God only limited powers of stewardship looks plausible on the evidence of the text of Genesis, but hardly something we would go to the stake for. The two claims together give Locke what he needed: English kings did not inherit from Adam the powers they claimed, both because they did not inherit from Adam at all and because the powers they claimed were powers he had not had. Adam’s authority over his children was limited, as is all authority by the purpose for which it was granted, namely, to allow him to bring them up to maturity. Adam’s ownership of the world was limited, as all property rights are, by his using the world for the benefit of life.

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The state of nature is defined relationally: men are in the state of nature with respect to one another when they have no common government, so sovereign states are always in a state of nature with respect to one another, and individuals are so if they encounter one another where there is no common government. A Swiss and an Indian bartering for trade in “the woods of America” are in the state of nature, says Locke. Not all of America was a pregovernmental state of nature (there were established governments in the early colonies by the time that Locke wrote), but in “inland America” no government has jurisdiction over the parties.

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Locke’s thought is only that we can imagine most human relationships working well enough in the absence of government, and it is hard to deny that. Second, the state of nature is a condition governed by its own laws, the laws of nature. In less theocentric terms, these two claims amount to the claim that human beings could in principle live together under generally accepted and morally binding rules without a government to enforce them.…

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The third thing Locke argues is that in the state of nature it would have been possible to acquire legitimate property rights over external objects useful to the life of man, property in the ordinary modern sense. God gave the world to mankind in common for the sustenance and enhancement of human life. If the good things thus given to us are to be used for the purpose they are given for, individuals must have some legitimate way of taking their share from the common stock. This is Locke’s reworking of the Scholastic deduction of the lawfulness of ownership, and may well have been inspired by Aquinas or later Thomist writers. If we have property in what we take, then once we have taken it, it is ours, and not only de facto no longer part of the common stock, but de jure too. The objection to this line of thought was always that a claim to ownership requires recognition by other people; in the absence of government, would we not have to ask the whole world…

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Locke’s conception of what our labor consists in is elastic, embracing any activity by which we make a productive difference to the world, from picking an acorn from a tree at one end of the spectrum to setting up a limited liability company to take settlers to the American colonies at the other. It must be a productive or useful difference, because spoiling or wrecking the world is making a difference to it that is forbidden ab initio. The argument is compelling. God grants humanity an abundant world to use and enjoy. It cannot be used and enjoyed unless individuals consume its fruits; since they must be able to do so lawfully, there must be a moment at which things pass from the common stock and into private hands and after which it would be wrong for others to deprive the new possessor. I put a gourd into the stream and carry the dipper of water to my child; is this “my” water? The answer is yes, at any rate prima facie. Where we hesitate, it is because of two further considerations that Locke put into place. The first is whether I have left “as much and as good” for others; if there is a shortage of water, taking a dipper of it may exceed my share, and I may have “a property” in somewhat less. The second is whether I am going to use it for a legitimate purpose; in the case of a dipper of water for my child, that also is taken care of. The three tests for legitimate ownership are that it is acquired by labor, that “enough and as good” is left for everyone else, and that what we take is used and not wasted. “Acquired by labor” is, however, essential only for first appropriation; my child does not have to labor to receive the water from me.18

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property is what we cannot be deprived of without our own consent. Arbitrary taxation, as the American colonists complained seventy years later, is a paradigm case of being deprived of our property without our consent. What I get is the right not to have that water taken from me.

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In the First Treatise Locke discusses the question of the rights over other people’s property conferred by sheer necessity. He takes Aquinas’s view that if we have the resources to secure some persons from starving and we do not use them, our superfluity is really theirs. That is, we cannot stand fast on our property rights and say that although it would be a kindly act for us to help them, it is our bread or grain or whatever, so they have no right to it; Locke’s view is that if their need is urgent enough, they have such a right, and that it is theirs.19 It is impossible to guess what Locke would have said under the circumstances of a twenty-first-century industrial economy, but on the face of it, any wealthy person who complains about his or her taxes going to the poor has made a mistake about the ownership of their income above the level at which his welfare would be severely under threat. Conversely, nobody who can labor but is unwilling to do so has any claim to assistance from anyone else. Locke’s views on property make the sort of socialism that regards all private property as illicit illegitimate from the outset, but they do not exclude the creation of a welfare state.

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why we should wish to leave the state of nature. It is less like a Hobbesian war of all against all than the philosophers’ golden age. If we could manage all our relations with one another by simple moral rules—as we manage the great bulk of our relations in any society—there seems no need of government. Locke painted a skeletal picture of a natural growth of complication, including an account of the development of inequality and the invention of money that suggests that the needs of a developed economy, on the one hand, and the unsatisfactoriness of a system of regulation so vulnerable to uncertainty and insecurity, on the other, make government necessary.

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The difficulty comes when all the readily cultivated land has been acquired and there are landless persons without access to uncultivated land. Locke’s answer is that landowners must employ them as laborers on decent terms. His theory of acquisition now faces the awkward fact that the persons thus employed do not become owners of the fields on which they labor, even though they are on any reckoning mixing much more labor with the earth than the owners of it. The landowners’ acquisition does not leave “enough and as good” land for others, and it seems that the landlord owns without working while his laborers work without owning. This simple thought formed the basis of agrarian radicalism for the next three centuries, and Locke’s resistance to it has led critics to claim that Locke was the advocate of an agrarian capitalist revolution, and an enemy to the just claims of the landless laboring class. The radical view was that the landless laborer had been deprived of his right to the land. Only periodic redistribution could spread the enjoyment of that right more widely, or a supersession of private rights by common ownership was required. Rousseau says something very like it; the executed French revolutionary radical Gracchus Babeuf demanded it; innumerable early nineteenth-century agrarian reformers said it. Locke disagreed. What we have a right to acquire by labor is not material things, in this case land, but “a living.” God wishes us to flourish, not to be attached to a piece of ground; our rights are rights to employ our abilities on the world’s resources in order to yield a good living. Nonexploited laborers get what they have a right to. One might, as Locke did, put the matter another way. The best-off member of a hunter-gatherer society lives less well than a laborer in a developed society; he lives less comfortably and eats less well: “A King of a large and fruitful territory there [‘inland America’] feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.”22 Since the person who benefits least from the transformation benefits so much, the transformation is legitimate. The argument resolves one anxiety, but fails entirely to meet another; it answers the question whether the private ownership of land is justified, by pointing out that even the least benefited is benefited by the change. It does nothing to explain why the particular people who are the least well-off occupy the positions in society that they do. As radicals have always insisted, the worst-off do most of the work;

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Locke defines money functionally; anything will serve as money if it is a store of value and a means of circulation of commodities. The ultimate step is to use as money things that have a “fancy value,” do not perish, and are valuable only because they will exchange for what is useful. “Fancy” is an odd word in the context, but necessary to Locke’s purposes. Locke thought that some people had simply liked shiny metals such as gold or bright shells like cowrie shells; someone who acquired them would find that others would exchange genuinely useful things for them, and a price system would emerge. Locke also uses the word “fancy” to indicate that money is accepted by convention, not instituted by nature, and he sometimes suggests that money really isn’t valuable at all. With money a developed economy is possible; people can buy land, hire laborers, invest in new projects, and accumulate more money. Readers of Locke wonder whether he really believed that a market economy could have existed in the state of nature; the best guess is that he thought it impossible in fact and possible conceptually. If all accepted the rules that allowed them to know who owned what, who owed what to whom, and what anything was worth in cash terms, they could run a market economy without government; in practice, the complexities would defeat them.

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So we come to the creation of government. Its role is obvious: to provide a known and settled law, administered by impartial judges. The brevity of the list is deliberate. It is no part of government’s tasks to save our souls, to establish a church, or to take sides in moral controversy. Its authority is limited by the needs of its subjects; they are the protection of their rights and the clarification of their duties to each other. The argument is overdetermined. God grants us only the powers we need to fulfill his purposes; if he requires government to attend only to our earthly needs, no government has absolute and arbitrary authority. It is a contradiction of the very idea of government. Contra Filmer, who had derived absolute monarchy from the rights of fathers, Locke argued that parents’ rights over children were neither absolute nor arbitrary, but bounded by the needs of the children; they were parental, not patriarchal, held by both parents, not fathers alone, and naturally dropped away as children reached the age of reason. Even where authority must be absolute to be effective, it is not arbitrary, because it is always bounded by the purpose it served.

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As to how government is created, Locke offers an account that critics have cut their teeth on for three centuries. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke imagines the institution of government as a two-stage process. The first is the step by which a people constituted itself a people, which was the prelude to instituting a political society; this was genuinely a contract of all with all. Medieval lawyers described it as the pactum communis; the second was traditionally known as the pactum subjectionis, or the step by which the people put themselves under a government of a specified form. What makes Locke’s view modern is what he does with the imagined mechanism. The old vision, as it descended from the Roman lawyers, imagined the people generating political authority in becoming a political society and then giving that authority to their rulers. This is Justinian again, and in republican guise it is Bartolus. Locke’s account suggests something closer to the relationship of employer and employee; the people never wholly relinquishes its authority. We the people employ our rulers on whatever terms we rationally choose; if they fail to do their job, we can dismiss them. We do not contract with our rulers; we “trust” them with the powers they need to serve the functions they are to serve. Government must rest on consent. Conventions operate only because people agree to operate them, and governments are a skein of conventions. It hardly needs saying that our dealings with governments are not paradigms of consent-based relationships, though critics seem to delight in saying it over and over. Our duties to the governments we live under are not voluntarily undertaken; I did not choose to live under the government I find myself obeying, and I cannot revise the terms on which I live under it. Its laws bind me whether or not I consent to what they demand; the government of the day may or may not be one I voted for or would have voted for, but it is there regardless. The consent involved in the authority that government has over me is not the sort of consent involved in commerce or marriage. It really does require my consent for me to be married or be bound by a commercial contract; it really does not require my consent for me be a subject of the government of the United Kingdom. This may not be decisive against Locke. Just as it requires my consent if I am to become the naturalized citizen of another country, Locke may well have thought that because we are all born free and equal, which is to say citizens or subjects of nowhere, giving our allegiance to any particular government required our consent in the same way. In terms familiar to Americans, we might think that we are by nature resident aliens until the question arises of whether we are fully members of the political community in which we happen to be living.

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Like Hobbes, he wanted to found our obligation to obey our rulers on our having consented to do so. Unlike Hobbes, he wanted that consent to be given on terms, and to constrain what governments, including the legislative branch of government, could rightfully do. For ordinary purposes, that consent could be given by our representatives, but our lives and liberties, and our property in the usual sense, are our own and not to be touched or taxed, except with the consent of ourselves or our representatives, and if our representatives violate their trust, then not by them.

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Double yellow lines on the road “mean” that we must not park there; to say that they exist by consent is an awkward way of expressing the important point that they mark out a no-parking area by a convention that exists because we accept it. The oddity of talking about consent in such cases is partly that we rarely wonder how such conventions are kept alive, and partly that no single individual can do much to bring about the downfall of the institution. Consider money, which Locke also says exists by consent; nobody is in a position to destroy the pound sterling or the U.S. dollar by refusing to agree to its existence. But if all of us became convinced that a currency will lose its value through hyperinflation, we might all refuse to use it, and it would cease to be a currency.

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To distinguish between different degrees of obligation that someone living under a government owed to it, Locke drew a distinction between “express” and “tacit” consent that is less famous than notorious. The distinction is useful in everyday life—if you send me a note to say that you presume you will meet me at seven o’-clock unless I say I shan’t be there, and I say nothing but do not show up, you will feel that I had tacitly agreed to be there and should have shown up. Locke suggests that if we are never asked to swear allegiance to the current government but accept its benefits without demur, we give tacit consent. Enjoying the benefits of government, including the protection of our lives and liberties, and inheriting property from our parents, permits the presumption that we agree to obey the present government on the terms they did. Express consent is better in the sense that if we are asked for our consent and give it in proper form, we will be thought to have put ourselves under the obligation to do what we have consented to. That is why Cromwell’s government required the more important members of English society to “engage.” The view that tacit consent is inferior to express consent is reflected in the American habit of having children recite the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. Children thereby give express consent to their government, though they do so at an age when their consents cannot be binding on an installment plan purchase, let alone in the matter of choosing a system of government. Curiously enough, most school districts abandon the practice when children attain the age of reason and might be thought to be bound by what they say.

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All critics make the simple but devastating objection that “consent” is binding only when the person giving it has a fair choice of alternatives; nobody has been impressed by Hobbes’s insistence that the man who swears obedience when the conqueror’s sword is at his throat has a choice of alternatives. Even with Locke’s milder version of the argument, the objection is the same; the choice we have about what government to live under varies, but few of us have the luxury of being able to migrate elsewhere entirely painlessly and whenever we wish. Those who “engaged” with Cromwell could, perhaps, have remained in exile without undue difficulty; few modern citizens could simply pick up and live elsewhere. The complaint against “tacit” consent, on the other hand, is that it is no consent at all. What can we do but accept the benefits of orderly…

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Locke was strangely casual about forms of government and their virtues; he endorsed the views of “the judicious Hooker” about constitutionality, but unlike Thomas Hooker he did not meticulously lay out the case for mixed and balanced government. He was equally casual about just how a political society, once formed, is to create the constitution under which its members will live. He takes majority decision making for granted, with the bare observation that it is necessary that a body moves whichever way the greater force directs it, which hardly justifies majority rule or explains its legitimacy and problems. The point, perhaps, is that what he was doing was resurrecting in a modern form the view of a writer such as Marsilius that “the people” possessed all the legitimate authority that can exist, and that it is up to them to delegate its employment as they choose. Any number of institutionalizations of the process might be imagined. Locke certainly thought that the legislative function of government was overwhelmingly the most important, which suggested an acceptance in general terms of the sovereignty of Parliament, but thought a variety of systems of representation and a variety of legislative bodies were acceptable. He distinguished between the legislative, executive, and “federative” powers of government, rather than what became traditional, and he did not explore the problems posed by theories of the separation of powers and checks and balances. Constitutional details are a matter of prudence.

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Under any constitution, a written constitution, if we have one, must rely on the unwritten understandings that we employ to interpret it. The best we can do is write down our understandings as we go, so that we are guided by precedent. When precedent runs out, we must act as best we can in the light of natural law.

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Locke was far from the first writer to discuss revolution. Aristotle considered it in the context of the breakdown of politics; Machiavelli considered it in the context of the renovation of a polity and the revival of its citizens’ virtue. Locke’s position was not, as theirs was, sociological but moral. It was squarely in the tradition of Augustine, though framed in terms very different from the Pauline tradition, and designed to repudiate it. So far from being “ordained by God,” the powers that be are instituted by a social contract; they hold their power as a trust from the people. Locke’s understanding…

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Locke’s question was whether a citizen had the right to revolt against his government. Like Luther and Calvin, Hobbes firmly said no; like them, he recognized that as a matter of fact we will fight in self-defense if we have to, and that men who fear they may be forced to fight in self-defense may do it sooner rather than later. But Hobbes insisted that each should look to his own welfare; he denied that we have a right, let alone a duty, to attack our sovereign on behalf of others or in the name of principle. Locke’s view was exactly the reverse. Government possesses authority only within constitutional bounds. If it exceeds those bounds, it has declared war on its citizens, and they may resist. Not only may they resist; they have every right to reconstitute the government as they choose to secure constitutional government in future. That is surely an expression of Locke’s belief that the Parliament that met after the abandonment of his duties by James II was a constitutional convention,…

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His contemporaries were fearful of disorder and hated anything that smacked of an incitement to rebellion. Locke thought his countrymen were too willing to sit quietly under injustice and that they should be urged to stand up for their rights. He thought that only…

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to what we can say when the supporters of the crown and the supporters of the revolutionaries both claim that right is on their side, Locke replies that we can only appeal to heaven with swords in our hands. The shockingness of all this can only be appreciated in the light of the horror that swept over Europe at the trial and execution of Charles I. To kill a king was to stretch out one’s hand against the Lord’s anointed, and here was Locke insisting that whatever ceremonies…

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Locke’s point is simple. If resistance is permissible under any circumstances, those who resist must be ready to use force, because force will certainly be used against them.

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Locke’s radicalism was not complete; unlike Jefferson, who thought that a revolution every thirty years would stir a sluggish nation to recover its sense of purpose, Locke believed in stability and thought that revisiting the system of representation as infrequently as once a century would be enough. He wished to see settled law established in place of arbitrary royal whim, not the permanent revolution of later Marxist imaginings. Nonetheless, in an age when many theorists thought that kings were literally appointed by God, and that absolute authority on the one side must meet absolute obedience on the other, Locke imagined revolution as a measured, controlled but nevertheless violent act that disposed of a tyrannical government yet left intact the bonds of everyday life. The idea that we can evict our rulers without undermining the common understandings that not only make us one people but make us governable was one of the most important ingredients of American radicalism.

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His Essay on Toleration of 1667 marked the change to the view that governments exist only to perform the tasks set out in the Second Treatise. The doctrine is nicely stated in an essay entitled Civil and Ecclesiastical Power (1674); “There is a twofold society, of which almost all men in the world are members, and that from the twofold concernment they have to attain a twofold happiness; viz. that of this world and that of the other.”28 He also came to think that the royal prerogative was less extensive than he had believed and sided with the Dissenters who refused to accept toleration as a royal concession rather than the acknowledgment of a right. Locke became a confirmed believer in the widest possible toleration, but it was toleration as an acknowledgment of the subject’s right to practice his religion as he conscientiously believed he should, not a good-natured concession.

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Separation of church and state does not mean that the state will not protect the earthly interests of a church as a corporate body. A person who burns down a church is guilty of arson just as if he burned down a house or a shop; the physical plant of a church is earthly property like any earthly property and receives the same protection. Conversely, there are restrictions on what we can do in our worship; if the law forbids cruelty to animals, I may not flay a cat on the altar as part of my religious practices. A fortiori I cannot claim the right to commit infant sacrifice or ritual mutilation. Locke might have had his doubts about the circumcision of Jewish baby boys; so-called female circumcision would have been prevented as simple assault. Locke’s argument is that if there is a good secular reason to prevent something, there can be no good religious reason to permit it. American Indians wishing to use peyote in their ceremonies would not have got far in courts that adopted Locke’s principles. They could not have claimed that their religion rightly required what the secular law rightly forbade. Locke’s view would have been that they must find a way of worshipping within the law. However, a law that prevented anyone from consuming peyote might be hard to sustain. Given the intoxicants that are not forbidden, there must be a suspicion that the law forbids the consumption of peyote because it is part of Indian religious ritual, and that is a breach of the principle of toleration. Locke’s own example is clear enough; if cows may be slaughtered at all, they may be slaughtered ceremonially; if there is a famine and we are forbidden to slaughter cattle, they may not be slaughtered as part of a ceremony.

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Locke thought that atheists had no reason to keep their promises, or accept the other principles of morality on which society depends, and were therefore not to be trusted. This is at all levels nonsense, however, since the nontoleration of atheists simply gives people Locke deems untrustworthy an added incentive to dissimulate. As to the premises of the argument, Locke’s knowledge of the history of philosophy would have shown him innumerable examples of writers and thinkers who were atheists but entirely honest.

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Locke thought men rightly wanted exactly what Hobbes was not ready to give them—the right to worship in public. To give them that would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of the organization, not merely to accept the harmlessness of a personal religious taste. It is because Locke took religion as religion more seriously than Hobbes that he was less willing to make any concessions at all.

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his arguments for limited and constitutional government, economic freedom, and religious liberty can be read as if they were made yesterday. However, this very transparency may paradoxically blind us to the vitality of other ways of writing about politics in which an older tradition of statecraft was remodeled for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To neglect these would be to neglect a strand of political thinking that has been at least as influential in determining the institutions we live under as the Lockean concern that government should respect our natural rights and the requirements of natural law. To put the issue much too briskly, one strand of thinking focuses on the rights of individuals and the constraints they do (or do not) impose on government, while the other focuses on the capacity of a people collectively to act as citizens rather than subjects. Liberals from the time of Rousseau on have complained that the second tradition has had too little concern for the rights of individuals against their governments. The French Revolution gave added force to their fears. The attempt to turn modern Frenchmen into ancient Romans reproduced the entire history of the Roman Republic in fifteen years—from monarchy to republic to tyranny by way of mass murder and warfare on all borders.

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We might think, living as we do in modern, constitutional, liberal democratic republics that we have pulled off the trick of achieving both kinds of freedom, the liberty of citizens and the liberty of subjects. Skeptics may respond that we are deceiving ourselves, that real citizens were once upon a time directly engaged in the affairs of their republics in ways we are not; given the scale of modern states, they may say, we simply cannot be. The American founders as well as the French revolutionaries hoped to prove the skeptics wrong. Before we see how they set about doing it, we should see what the republican writers on whom they drew thought about republican liberty.

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