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John Locke on Custom's Power and Reason's Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2012

Ruth W. Grant
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Abstract

Locke stresses the power of custom in shaping opinion and behavior, though this aspect of his thought has been underappreciated. Recognizing its importance raises critical issues, particularly the relation between custom and reason and the role of authoritative custom in supporting political and social power. Locke explains in detail the various psychological and sociological mechanisms by which the power of custom is manifested; but he nonetheless consistently and emphatically rejects its authority. Instead, Locke is a champion of the authority of reason. Because custom is powerful, but reason is authoritative, Locke attempts to enlist the power of custom in the service of reason and of reasonable politics, and because custom is powerful and its impact unavoidable, individual intellectual independence cannot mean being without cultural prejudices. At best, it means the ability to gain some critical distance from them. These observations place Locke's relation to the Enlightenment in a new perspective.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , Fall 2012, pp. 607 - 629
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

Introduction

My subject is Locke's analysis of the formative power of custom, what we would call “socialization” today. To many readers, it will certainly be surprising that Locke has anything to say on this subject at all. There is a widespread view of John Locke's thought captured in the phrase “Lockean individualism.” The phrase has many meanings, but usually includes the idea that social relations are irrelevant for Lockean political analysis. “Lockean individualism” is “atomistic” individualism: Locke imagines dissociated individuals in the state of nature who create society, rather than being created by it; Lockean individuals act on the basis of objective, rational consideration of their private interests, and so on. Cultural forces hardly come into the picture. It is not uncommon to find statements like this one in the literature: “Moral psychology cannot be said to be Locke's strongest point as a philosopher. He simply lacks interest in the psychological underpinnings of intolerance.”Footnote 1

But nothing could be further from the truth; the “individualist” Locke is a “straw man,” and one that has been remarkably persistent, despite the fact that few Locke scholars today characterize Locke in this way.Footnote 2 Locke emphasizes the crucial power of custom in forming individuals and dictating their behavior. Although we would be unlikely to turn to Locke for an explanation of practices like female genital mutilation or for an explanation of parents who support their child's ambition to become a suicide bomber, one can find explanations of similar phenomena in his writings. There is no presocial individual in Locke's thought, and he was fascinated by the incredible range of cultural practices that lead people to behave so differently in different societies.Footnote 3 Locke's analysis of cultural formation is rarely emphasized, and there has been very little detailed examination of the kind that I will offer here of his description of the mechanisms that make it effective.Footnote 4

One consequence of clinging to the view of Locke as a “Lockean individualist” is that the psychological and sociological dimensions of his thought are lost to view. And the consequence of that, in turn, is that certain important issues in his thought simply fail to surface. The most important of these are the relation between custom and reason and the ways in which authoritative customs support political and social power. I begin here by describing in some detail Locke's analysis of the role that custom plays in shaping behavior. Only then is it possible to explore these issues.

In particular, the failure to appreciate Locke's emphasis on the power of custom makes it easy to misunderstand his claims regarding reason. While all human beings have sufficient capacity for rationality, to be reasonable in one's thinking and behavior is extremely difficult, according to Locke. It requires challenging the effects of custom. If custom were not so powerful, there would have been no need for Locke to write The Conduct of the Understanding to give people techniques to combat its power. Beliefs govern behavior and customs govern beliefs, usually leading people to cling to opinions that are not true. Locke's analysis even explains the persistence of the “straw man” version of his thought. As you will see, he understands why misconceptions and false associations that have become habitual or customary and are linked to partisan positions are so hard to correct. Frustrated disputants in political controversies often respond to their opponent's apparent stubbornness with the rhetorical question: “Why can't they just be reasonable?” Locke has an answer to that question.

My aim here is to establish that Locke stresses the power of custom in shaping opinion and behavior; that he explains various mechanisms by which its power is manifested; that he stresses its role in supporting the powerful; and that he nonetheless consistently and emphatically rejects its authority. I then go on to explore how Locke's insistence on the authority of reason should be understood. Because custom is powerful but reason is authoritative, Locke attempts to enlist the forces of custom in the service of reason and of reasonable politics. And because custom is powerful and its impact unavoidable, intellectual independence cannot mean being without cultural prejudices. It can only mean being able to gain some critical distance from them.

The Power of Custom

“Custom, a greater power than Nature.”Footnote 5

Most people govern their conduct according to the beliefs they acquired in childhood and the common opinions of those they live among. It is custom, “fashion,” and tradition that shape behavior. And there are very few people who manage to gain independence from these influences. These are views that Locke held throughout his life. They can be found in the Essays on the Law of Nature as well as in the Essay concerning Human Understanding and other late works, often even expressed using the same metaphors.Footnote 6 People who “are carried off by inveterate habit and traditional examples” and “follow the herd,” rather than using their own reason, act like the man who will not open his eyes and so is as liable to error “as he who is born blind.”Footnote 7 “Knowing is seeing, and, if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves that we do so by another man's eyes.”Footnote 8 Yet most people “are guided not so much by reason as either by the example of others, or by traditional customs and the fashion of the country, or finally by the authority of those whom they consider good and wise.”Footnote 9 The greatest part of mankind “govern themselves, chiefly, if not solely, by this Law of Fashion,” which is stronger even than either God's law or the civil law.Footnote 10 Reputation and disgrace are the forces that govern men:

Where riches is in credit, knavery and injustice that produce them is not out of countenance. … Where power, and not the good exercise of it, gives reputation, all the injustice, falsehood, violence and oppression that attains that [i.e., power] goes for wisdom and ability. Where love of one's country is the thing in credit, there we shall see a race of brave Romans; and when being a favourite at court was the only thing in fashion, one may observe the same race of Romans all turned flatterers and informers. He, therefore, that would govern the world well, had need consider rather what fashions he makes than what laws; and to bring anything into use he need only give it reputation.Footnote 11

The power of custom is an undeniable sociological and psychological fact. Time and again, Locke introduces evidence of the wide variety of cultural practices found in different societies to make his point. He emphasizes particularly that there is no violation of natural law, not even infanticide or suicide, that has not been sanctioned somewhere as a religious ritual or traditional practice.Footnote 12 Custom is the primary determinant of human behavior. But why? How does Locke explain this? “Custom” in Locke's account actually comprises several different, but closely related, phenomena: among them are (1) “received opinion” handed down from generation to generation; (2) habitual behavior, or what we are accustomed to doing and thinking; (3) socially approved behavior; and (4) orthodox belief.Footnote 13

To understand the force of “received opinion,” we must begin with the fact of childhood. All human beings start life dependent and prerational. We first acquire opinions from trusted adults, who are the authorities in our lives, when we are very young and long before we might be able to subject them to examination. (Adults who take opinions on trust are thus deemed “childish.”)Footnote 14 Locke describes the process in some detail. At first, we are too young even to notice “how they [opinions] insinuate themselves, stream into our unguarded minds.”Footnote 15 These opinions are then reinforced in us, because they are respected and revered by others around us. And so

it may come to pass, that Doctrines, that have been derived from no better original, than the Superstition of a Nurse, or the Authority of an Old Woman; may, by length of time, and consent of Neighbours, grow up to the dignity of Principles in Religion or Morality. For such, who are careful … to principle children well … instil into the unwary, and, as yet, unprejudiced Understanding (for white Paper receives any Characters) those Doctrines they would have them retain and profess.Footnote 16

Later, because we no longer remember either a time when we did not hold these doctrines or that we acquired them from our nursemaids or our parents, many mistakenly conclude that they are natural or innate.Footnote 17 Moreover, Locke views early childhood experiences as formative and children as highly impressionable and malleable, “for white Paper receives any Characters.”Footnote 18 There is nothing in the child's natural dispositions that would resist any particular cultural transmission. It is clear that, whatever we do, given the fact of childhood, received opinions will establish themselves in each generation. By the time we are adults with the capacity for critical rationality, we are no longer starting with “blank slates,”Footnote 19 but instead must make the considerable effort required to reconsider a host of acquired prejudices and to overcome lifelong mental habits.

To contest “the empire of habit” is no easy business, in Locke's view, and the force of habit is the second factor that explains the formative power of custom. The constant repetition that makes something a habit is one of the mechanisms by which customary practices are acquired.Footnote 20 In explaining how habit operates, Locke again stresses human malleability. The legs of a dancing master, the fingers of a musician, the balance of a tightrope walker all have been acquired and transformed through repeated practice. Mental practice, or lack thereof, much more than differences in natural talent, similarly explains the variety of intellectual abilities found among men.Footnote 21 The repetition involved in habitual behavior gives it a sense of automaticity; it seems like “second nature”; we hardly notice it.

The facility which we get of doing things, by a custom of doing, makes them often pass in us without our notice. Habits, especially such as are begun very early come, at last, to produce actions in us which often escape our observation.Footnote 22

Just as with opinions absorbed in childhood, habits can lead us to believe that ideas and behaviors are natural when they are merely customary.

This is as true of intellectual habits as of any other kind, and Locke stresses that the habitual association of ideas can be a great source of error. The mind works by associating ideas that are found together in experience. But sometimes these ideas have merely a chance connection and not a necessary one. “Such unnatural connections become as natural to the mind as sun and light.”Footnote 23 These errors are not innocuous: for example, the association of the idea of infallibility with a particular person has had enormous repercussions. According to Locke, it is the erroneous association of ideas that is at the bottom of irreconcilable conflicts between religious sects. Ideas that have no real relation to one another are constantly joined in men's minds “by Education, Custom and the constant din of their Party,” blinding them so that they cling to falsehoods unknowingly. Interest alone could never explain religious sectarian conflict. Such conflict always involves many who sincerely believe false doctrines, and this results from habitual mental errors.Footnote 24

In an entirely different context, Locke again stresses the power of habit as compared to interest and even reason, arguing that the best guard against dishonesty in children is a habitual detestation of it (“habits working more constantly and with greater facility than reason, which when we have most need of it is seldom fairly consulted, and more rarely obeyed”).Footnote 25 Habits can form what we might call “gut reactions,” like a sense of shame or disgust at the thought of dishonesty. And habits can shape pleasures as well. The “palates of Men” have been corrupted by “Fashion and the common Opinion,” but good habits can retrain us so that we enjoy the right things. People enjoy those things they are accustomed to.Footnote 26 And since pleasures and pains are the primary motivating forces in Lockean psychology, the power of habit goes deep indeed.

The third factor, and the one that Locke stresses most in explaining the power of custom, is the natural psychological propensity to find pleasure in good reputation and great discomfort in shame or disgrace. The concern for reputation is the motivation for action; social approval provides the rules that guide our conduct, and a good reputation is the purpose to which our actions are directed.Footnote 27 Locke recommends that parents rely on esteem and disgrace, rather than rewards and corporal punishment, in their government of children. He calls this “the great secret of education” and “the true principle which will constantly work and incline them to the right.”Footnote 28 Nonetheless, adults must somehow develop the ability to resist, when necessary, this need for social approval which provides the foundational support for the dominion of custom or “fashion.” Bravery is required to challenge prevailing views. Locke addresses his educational treatise to parents “so irregularly bold that they dare venture to consult their own reason in the education of their children rather than wholly to rely upon old custom.”Footnote 29 Boldness is necessary “especially when one of their Principles is, That Principles ought not to be questioned.”Footnote 30

And that opinion—that there are orthodox beliefs and practices beyond question, beliefs that must be accepted on trust as authoritative—is one that is always useful to dominant elites in any society, particularly religious leaders. The final factor in explaining the strength of custom is that vested interests support customary practices and beliefs that support their own power. Sometimes, those advantaged by a customary practice simply keep it going when the initial reason for it no longer applies.Footnote 31 More often, established interests employ orthodoxy to support their power.Footnote 32 Political and religious elites are threatened by intellectual freedom, and thus people are prevented from examining their own opinions,

a freedom which few men have the notion of in themselves, and fewer are allowed the practice of by others; it being the great art and business of the teachers and guides in most sects to suppress, as much as they can, this fundamental duty which every man owes himself, and [which] is the first steady step towards right and truth in the whole train of his actions and opinions. This would give one reason to suspect that such teachers are conscious to themselves of the falsehood or weakness of the tenets they profess, since they will not suffer the grounds whereon they are built to be examinedFootnote 33

Locke repeatedly taunts the upholders of orthodoxy for their lack of confidence in the truth of their doctrines, challenging them to put their doctrines to the test of reason.Footnote 34 The arbiters of orthodoxy, with their claim that certain opinions and practices are authoritative, are dangerous, in Locke's view: they make custom revered and give it the status of the sacred, turning people into “zealous bigots.”Footnote 35

All of the factors identified here work together in establishing custom's power. For example, in describing how custom comes to have sway over the mind of an individual, Locke writes, “And what can hinder him from thinking them [his principles] sacred, when he finds them the earliest of his own Thoughts, and the most reverenced by others”?Footnote 36 And in describing how societies come to adopt unnatural practices, he writes, “And when Fashion has once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness to contradict or question it.”Footnote 37 Evidence of the power of custom comes not only from its influence on our conduct, but also from the difficulty of resisting that influence. And here, too, all of the factors are in play. To challenge our lifelong commitments, to change our habits, to risk social ostracism, and to risk punishment for heresy,Footnote 38 are all extremely difficult.

But there is one additional element in the resistance to examining received opinion, and this one gives grounds for some hope. People who challenge their own received opinions must risk having to acknowledge that they have been living according to falsehoods, which they view as a shameful thing. This inhibits self-examination. But, at the same time, that people take pride in their reasonableness is a potential weapon in the fight against dominant customs.Footnote 39

The question now becomes, “Why does Locke believe that dominant customs must be challenged?” A brief mention of Edmund Burke should be sufficient to suggest that one might take a less critical attitude toward custom and tradition. In Burke's account, tradition represents the collective wisdom of the ages, far greater than the wisdom available to any single individual. And Burke extols the inherited political and religious prejudices of the English as “just prejudices,” which cement and sustain communal bonds.Footnote 40 In stark contrast to Burke, Locke sharply criticizes trust in tradition or received opinion. That Locke recognizes and explains the power of custom is clear. Now we must consider why he is so suspicious of it.

The Critique of Custom

“By these means it comes to pass, that Men … stamp the Characters of Divinity, upon Absurdities and Errors, become zealous Votaries to Bulls and Monkeys; and contend too, fight, and die in defence of their Opinions.”Footnote 41

Much of Locke's critique of custom has been intimated in the foregoing discussion, but it is worthwhile to consider each of its aspects separately. In Locke's account, custom—particularly when unquestioned in its authority—can be a source of error, a source of evil, and a source of servitude. It is a source of error in at least two different ways. First, customary opinions often involve the habitual, but mistaken, association of ideas with one another, as was discussed above. Second, people regulate their judgment, accept or reject ideas, based on the opinions of others (“giving up our Assent to the common received Opinions, either of our Friends, or Party; Neighbourhood, or Country”).Footnote 42 But the fact that an opinion is widely held by people we respect has no bearing on the probability that it is true.

In fact, it is these sorts of errors that lead to evils of various kinds. Partisanship and sectarian conflict follow directly from false associations of ideas as well as from blind acceptance of the opinions of our associates. Moreover, whole societies have been led to accept the most horrible evils—cannibalism, infanticide, patricide, ritual suicide, and so forth—because they were established as customary practices and people do not question accepted customs. Custom leads people away from reason and nature:

He that will impartially survey the Nations of the World, will find so much of their Governments, Religions, and Manners brought in and continued amongst them by these means, that he will have but little Reverence for the Practices which are in use and credit amongst Men, and will have Reason to think, that the Woods and Forests, where the irrational untaught Inhabitants keep right by following Nature, are fitter to give us Rules, than Cities and Palaces, where those that call themselves Civil and Rational, go out of their way, by the Authority of Example.Footnote 43

“Civilized” societies engage in all kinds of wicked and irrational practices for no better reason than that things have always been done that way.

Custom is the culprit again when considering how individuals become cruel. Children are not inherently wicked: Locke rejects an Augustinian view of childhood and of original sin. Universal sinfulness is not the consequence of the Fall.Footnote 44 Instead, when children display “unnatural cruelty,” it is a “habit borrowed from custom and conversation”; not least from the honor bestowed on conquerors throughout history, who are nothing more than “butchers of mankind.” Thus, “what humanity abhors custom recommends to us,” and “by fashion and opinion, that comes to be a pleasure which in itself neither is nor can be any.”Footnote 45

Finally, custom, particularly in the form of trust in orthodox opinion, is a source of servitude both politically and intellectually. The “implicit faith” of the populace “submits them … to others,” and allows them to be manipulated by “aspiring and turbulent men.”Footnote 46 To adhere to orthodoxy blindly is to submit to the arbiters of orthodoxy. But perhaps more importantly, to accept the opinions of others as authoritative is to put shackles on yourself.

This was rightly called imposition, and is of all others the worst and most dangerous sort of it. For we impose upon ourselves, which is the strongest imposition of all others; and we impose upon ourselves in that part which ought with the greatest care to be kept free from all imposition.Footnote 47

Even if the opinions taken on trust are true, they are “second hand rules of conduct.”Footnote 48 People must “see with their own eyes.”Footnote 49 And even if a judgment is correct, one has not behaved rightly without examining both sides of the argument.Footnote 50 Independent judgment is guided by consideration of all of the evidence, and not by deference to authority. The importance of this point for Locke's critique of custom emerges clearly from his discussion of the freedom of the will in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. There he concludes that human freedom is the ability to suspend our desires, to examine, and to reach a considered judgment before determining the will to action.Footnote 51 Thus, to have our actions follow thoughtlessly from opinions taken on trust from others is to reject not only reason but freedom as well. One could even say that it is to deny our own humanity.

The Authority of Reason

“An argument from what has been to what should of right be has no great force.”Footnote 52

For all of these reasons, custom has no authority: it can never confer legitimacy on beliefs, practices, or institutions. And it is a poor guide for conduct. Locke writes that a person never acts without a reason for what he does. The important thing, then, is that the reason be a good reason: a well-informed judgment, a true principle, or both.Footnote 53 People should examine their principles to their foundations, at least once in their lifetimes. Where certain knowledge cannot be had, they should regulate their assent according to judgments of probability grounded in what can be known.Footnote 54 Sound reasoning, good judgment and the evidence of sense experience are the elements of reasonableness, and reasonableness should guide our conduct.Footnote 55

But why should we make the considerable effort that it takes to cast off prejudice and consult reason? Because God is “the God of Truth.” In Locke's account, the authority of reason ultimately derives from divine authority.Footnote 56 To hold to tenets “upon no other evidence than respect and custom” is “to do the work of the devil.”Footnote 57 These are strong words. Reason is a faculty given to each of us by God—a light within—which is not sufficient to know all things, but sufficient to guide us to knowledge of our duties.Footnote 58 And one of those duties is to cultivate and develop our rational faculty:

He that believes, without having any Reason for Believing … neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and Errour. He that does not this to the best of his Power … must be accountable for whatever Mistakes he runs into: whereas he that makes use of the Light and Faculties GOD has given him, and seeks sincerely to discover Truth … may have this satisfaction in doing his Duty as a rational Creature, that though he should miss Truth, he will not miss the reward of it. … He that does otherwise, transgresses against his own Light, and misuses those Faculties.Footnote 59

There is a moral duty to try as best we can to be reasonable, and reason is the authoritative guide for belief and conduct.

The question of the role of reason in providing access to knowledge of God's will was one of the matters in dispute between Locke and the critics of his religious writings. Jonathan Edwards, for example, a Calvinist, attacked Locke's writings over the question of how to read scripture. Edwards attacked Locke for rejecting scriptural teachings (the Trinity in particular) that could not be easily understood by everyone. In Edwards's view, Locke makes the “Capacity of the Vulgar” the test of articles of faith.Footnote 60 Locke, of course, insisted that scripture cannot be incompatible with reason. He argued that each person must judge the meaning of scripture for himself.Footnote 61 He certainly did not believe that human reason was thoroughly corrupted and unreliable as a result of the Fall. Though our rational capacities are limited, they are sufficient for us to discern our duties.Footnote 62 Reason is a God-given faculty that gives us access to His law through reflection on experience. According to Locke, natural reason and revelation are both avenues through which God teaches man what his duties are.Footnote 63 And they always lead to the same place.

In other words, in opposing the authority of reason to the authority of custom and tradition, Locke is not opposing reason (let alone secular science) to faith. Rather, he is arguing for a certain conception of reason as the proper Christian conception of it.Footnote 64 “Faith is nothing but a firm Assent of the Mind: which if it be regulated, as is our Duty, cannot be afforded to anything, but upon good Reason; and so cannot be opposite to it.”Footnote 65 To employ our God-given rational faculties is itself a moral obligation and only by employing them can we reach a proper understanding of both duty and faith.Footnote 66

Yet people abandon their reason, so much so that many really have no opinions at all. They are thoughtless partisans motivated by personal interests of one kind or another.

They are resolved to stick to a Party, that Education or Interest has engaged them in; and there, like the common Soldiers of an Army, shew their Courage and Warmth as their Leaders direct, without ever examining, or so much as knowing the Cause they contend for … 'Tis enough for him to obey his Leaders, to have his Hand and his Tongue ready for the support of the common Cause, and thereby approve himself to those, who can give him Credit, Preferment, or Protection in that Society. Thus Men become Professors of, and Combatants for those Opinions, they were never convinced of, nor Proselytes to; no, nor ever had so much as floating in their Heads.Footnote 67

Locke's tone is extraordinary. He is in a battle of his own; a battle against authoritative orthodoxies, partisanship, vested interests, and bigotry. Given the power of custom in all of its manifestations, it is an uphill battle. But Locke has nature and God on his side. One final quotation will illustrate the point:

The desire of Esteem, Riches, or Power, makes Men espouse the well endowed Opinions in Fashion, and then seek Arguments, either to make good their Beauty, or varnish over, and cover their Deformity. Nothing being so beautiful to the Eye, as Truth is to the Mind; nothing so deformed and irreconcilable to the Understanding as a Lye. For though many a Man can with satisfaction enough own a no very handsome Wife in his Bosom; yet who is bold enough openly to avow, that he has espoused a Falsehood, and received into his Breast so ugly a thing as a Lye? Whilst the Parties of Men, cram their Tenets down all Men's Throats, whom they can get into their Power, without permitting them to examine their Truth or Falsehood; and will not let Truth have fair play in the World, nor Men the Liberty to search after it; … What greater Light can be hoped for in the moral Sciences? The Subject part of Mankind, in most Places, might, instead thereof, with Ægyptian Bondage, expect Ægyptian Darkness, were not the Candle of the Lord set up by himself in Men's minds, which it is impossible for the breath or Power of Man wholly to extinguish.Footnote 68

Reasonable Customs

“All the world is born to orthodoxy.”Footnote 69

“Learners must at first be believers.”Footnote 70

Custom is powerful, but not authoritative. Reason is authoritative, but largely ineffectual. Thus, we live in a world that is not what it should be. Is there anything that can be done to improve this situation? It should be clear by now that there is no escape from custom's power. Every child must be socialized; every individual is formed within a culture with certain received opinions, accepted norms, and habitual practices. The only possibility for improvement is to enlist custom's power in the service of reason's authority. This is the clear implication of Locke's analysis. One must create a culture where customs are reasonable, which is to say both that they support the authority of reason and that there are good reasons for them. Locke engages in just such a project of cultural reform alongside his more generally appreciated political project.Footnote 71

Locke was a serious and radical cultural critic, as well as a political revolutionary: “Fashion and the common Opinion having settled wrong Notions, and education and custom ill habits, the just values of things are misplaced, and the palates of Men corrupted.”Footnote 72 He criticized the idleness of the rich and their disdain for “honest labour and useful and mechanical arts.”Footnote 73 He criticized the parochialism of both scholars and country gentlemen, offering a particularly sarcastic portrait of the pretensions of the latter.Footnote 74 In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he has nothing good to say about the typical education of English gentlemen, which encourages affectation and useless learning while corrupting character. He criticized the culture of intolerance in the churches. All in all, he portrays a society divided into parties and sects, each blindly clinging to its own orthodoxies. And he explains how this situation is likely to perpetuate itself both through the process of cultural transmission from one generation to the next and because adhering to the status quo is the surest path to wealth, power, and particularly esteem. People are unwilling to question received opinion or to rely upon their own reason. And there is no public discourse that can bring together members of competing sects to rationally explore their doctrinal differences. God has given man reason “to be the rule betwixt man and man, and the common bond whereby human kind is united into one fellowship and society.”Footnote 75 But reason has been silenced by custom, and society is riven by partisanship.

What sort of cultural reform might support, rather than undermine, reasonable politics? First, Locke seeks a transformation of reputation. For example, religious “enthusiasm” is discredited as irrational.Footnote 76 Implicit faith becomes “childish, shameful, senseless credulity.”Footnote 77 Those who might be seen as loyal and dedicated partisans always appear as blind and servile followers in Locke's account. As we have seen, Locke taunts the orthodox with the charge that they lack confidence in the truth of their opinions, since they will not examine them at the bar of reason. He enlists the natural pride in reasonableness and embarrassment at embracing falsehood in the service of his cause. Social approval of intellectual independence would go a long way toward encouraging reasonableness, since “to bring anything into use he need only give it reputation.”Footnote 78

Second, he recommends a transformation of mental habits. Of the Conduct of the Understanding is a guide to mental habits that allow a person to gain some intellectual independence.Footnote 79 It outlines the discipline required to examine one's own prejudices, consider a variety of perspectives on any given question, and regulate one's assent to a proposition only so far as the evidence warrants, for example.Footnote 80 These must become habitual dispositions. They are not only statements of correct principles of reasoning; that would be entirely ineffective. “Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules … practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule.”Footnote 81 Habits are more effective than reason—recall, for example, that a habitual distaste for dishonesty is the best way to secure honesty in children.Footnote 82 Locke makes clear that reasonableness requires disciplined practice and habituation. He makes an analogy between physical health and the habits it requires, and mental “health” and the habits it requires. Good mental habits must replace the bad habits that people inevitably acquire growing up.

Next, we might consider Locke's attacks on orthodoxy as part of his efforts to reform the culture. Unlike reputation and habit, whose powers can be enlisted in support of reasonableness, the very idea of orthodoxy is inimical to reasonableness. Locke critiques the idea of authoritative opinion in favor of individual judgment. This is evident in his political writings, for example, where he replaces the idea that subjects owe blind obedience to their king as a religious duty with the idea that political legitimacy rests on the consent of the people, and ultimately on each individual's judgment. To convince people that customs and traditions are not authoritative and that there are no institutions, of the state or the church, whose representatives can put certain beliefs and opinions beyond question is to take a large step toward establishing a culture of reasonableness. But this is not to say that vested interests, ministers for example, will not retain their powerful voices. Locke teaches people to question what the authorities teach, but he also tries to alter their teachings. Ministers ought to preach from the pulpit that toleration is the correct doctrine for a true Christian, for example.Footnote 83

Finally, he uses the powerful effects of custom in childhood to support the authority of reason. An education to reasonableness begins with the same mechanisms that promote any cultural formation in childhood.

Teach him to get a mastery over his inclinations and submit his appetite to reason. This being obtained, and by constant practice settled into habit, the hardest part of the task is over. To bring a young man to this, I know nothing which so much contributes as the love of praise and commendation, which should therefore be instilled in him by all arts imaginable. Make his mind as sensible of credit and shame as may be; and when you have done that, you have put a principle into him which will influence his actions when you are not by, to which the fear of a little smart of the rod is not comparable, and which will be the proper stock whereon afterwards to graft the true principles of morality and religion.Footnote 84

There are many other ways in which parents might encourage reasonableness in their children as well. Locke recommends that young men be taught to yield to “the conviction of clear arguments,” rather than be taught formal disputation. Parents should treat children as rational creatures and reason with them in a manner appropriate to their age, and so forth.Footnote 85 This education to reasonableness is, at the same time, an education to virtue. The core of virtue is self-mastery—the ability to resist desires and to follow where reason leads instead, or more accurately, to follow desires only where reason authorizes them.

The authority of reason cannot prevail without the support of the social forces we have been discussing. The question now becomes whether these “reasonable customs” are vulnerable to the same criticisms that Locke leveled against custom generally, namely, that customs produce errors, evil, and servitude. Are there customs that pass muster when judged at the bar of reason—customs that are harmless at worst and beneficial at best?

Locke would surely argue that the customary practices he recommends would not be conducive to error in the same way as those he criticizes. These customs incline people to rational inquiry and instill mental habits such as considering each question from multiple perspectives. If the dominant opinion is that opinions must be grounded in clear evidence and strong argument, errors become corrigible.

And where customs do not regularly produce errors that powerful elites then make sacred, they will not produce the evils that follow from such errors either. It becomes more difficult for priests, for example, to institutionalize evil practices as traditional rituals. Where customs support the authority of reason, powerful elites can always be called to account for the beliefs they espouse and the practices they support. Moreover, if blind obedience is no longer valorized as a duty, the oppressive power of elites is severely undermined.

But it is not so clear that “reasonable customs” can escape the charge that custom is a source of servitude in other respects. The power of reputation remains unchanged: social disapproval is a powerful force in suppressing belief and behavior even when its target is irrational belief and behavior.Footnote 86 Or consider the problematic transition from childhood to adulthood. Children begin by submitting to the authority of their parents, but they must later become adults who can govern themselves according to reason.Footnote 87 As children, we develop habits of submission. We acquire opinions and beliefs initially through implicit faith in our parents and often unselfconsciously. Praise and blame is the best means of governing children, according to Locke, and children should be sensitized to social approval. How do such docile children gain the independence necessary to question their parents' beliefs or to challenge prevailing fashions when they become adults? How do they move from accepting certain ideas and practices because they are customary to accepting only ideas and practices that are rationally defensible? The child raised to reasonableness might be said to acquire at an early age a prejudice against prejudices; or to be dogmatically opposed to dogmatism; or to trust blindly in independent thinking. After all, anything accepted on trust, true or not, is still accepted “second hand.” And a habit is a habit regardless of the particular behavior that has become automatic on account of the discipline involved in habituation. It is difficult to reconcile the unthinking automaticity of “second nature” acquired through habituation and childhood experiences with the vision of the independent adult as the self-conscious master of his own thoughts.

Several authors have recognized the problem of reconciling Locke's discussion of acculturation with his claims on behalf of autonomy. James Tully and Uday Mehta emphasize the oppressive character of Lockean socialization and education.Footnote 88 Tully refers to the Lockean self as “the penalized self.” In their view, Lockean independence or autonomy is simply not genuine independence. In contrast, Alex Neill argues that habituation is the necessary precondition for epistemic autonomy.Footnote 89 A child who was not subjected to the external influences of education would not become a free and rational being.

A partial solution to this problem in Locke's writings, compatible with Neil's approach, lies in the idea that freedom is obedience to reason's authority. For example, Locke is well aware that the transition must be made from childhood dependence to adult independence.Footnote 90 But in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he does not seem to see this transition as particularly problematic. Instead, he characterizes submission to parental authority and conformity to prevailing views as a form of obedience to the reason of others that prepares the child to obey his own reason one day.Footnote 91 (Apparently, the success of Locke's educational program depends very heavily on the reasonableness and sensitivity of the child's parents and tutor and on the reasonableness of the prevailing norms in the household and the society at large).Footnote 92

Similarly, the mental discipline acquired by the habits recommended in the Conduct of the Understanding does not constrain intellectual freedom—quite the contrary. The ability to suspend pressing desires, pause, evaluate, and only then make a judgment is “so far from being a restraint or diminution of Freedom, that it is the very improvement and benefit of it.”Footnote 93 Without this moment of judgment, our actions are determined by the strongest desire, and hence unfree. Individual autonomy requires self-mastery, and self-mastery requires habituation. “Habituation, the central business of education, is thus not in conflict with epistemic autonomy.”Footnote 94 In Locke's thought, liberty is always distinguished from license and compatible with lawfulness.Footnote 95 And just as the rule of law makes each person free from subjection to the will of any other person, to accept an opinion or belief only on the basis of reason makes a person free from any personal subjection to members of his family, community, party, or sect.

Nonetheless, Tully and Mehta have a point, and there is cause for continued uneasiness. How exactly does a child radically question parental dogmas when the primary dogma is that dogmas should be questioned? And surely the independent spirit who challenges reigning orthodoxies, like Locke himself, differs importantly from the person who remains concerned primarily about reputation. Does Locke's understanding of the power of custom require us to re-evaluate what he really means by independence and rationality? These and similar questions remain. Precisely because Locke does offer a psychologically and sociologically sophisticated analysis of the unavoidable power of custom, we are led to confront questions that would not arise had he actually defended what we like to call “Lockean individualism.”

Conclusions

What sort of independence, then, is available to the Lockean individual? Although babies are born “blank slates,” without prejudices, they do not stay that way for long. Everyone is formed by his or her early experiences and continues to be influenced by important relationships with others. Everyone will have strong and immediate “gut” reactions in situations that have political or moral or emotional importance to us, and these “gut” reactions will be largely the result of socialization. There is no independent individual in the sense of a person who has not been decisively shaped by interactions with others or in the sense of a person whose judgment could be said to be thoroughly rational and objective. “Lockean individualism” is not “atomistic” individualism.

Instead, human independence is a bit more modest. “That freedom of the understanding which is necessary to a rational creature and without which it is not truly an understanding” consists in two things: the willingness to consider our own received opinions impartially and the willingness to examine our own principles.Footnote 96 If we wish to “see with our own eyes,” we must begin by recognizing that our vision has been blurred and limited by the forces of custom. To see clearly is possible, but it requires considerable effort because we cannot be without prejudice and partiality; it requires habits of self-examination. The independence of Lockean individuals consists in their ability to recognize their inevitable intellectual limitations, to gain some critical distance from their own prejudices, and to interrogate their “gut” reactions.Footnote 97 And it should be recognized that this is no small thing.

Yet it is by no means the same thing as imagining an individual who is sufficiently reasonable to be without prejudice or to overcome prejudice entirely. This is not Locke's vision. Scholars who treat Locke as a progenitor or teacher of the Enlightenment sometimes make this mistake. Peter Schouls, for example, speaks of a Lockean education as shielding the child from prejudice and of rational self-mastery as vanquishing, destroying, or annihilating it. Charles Taylor writes of the “radical disengagement” of the Lockean self.Footnote 98 But I think Jad Smith appreciates the importance of Locke's analysis of custom when he writes: “While one familiar view of the Enlightenment places reason and custom in opposition, Locke shows an interest in harnessing custom's potent yet subtle educative power.”Footnote 99 In Locke's view, the problem posed for the possibility of a rational society by the power of custom is not a problem that can be “solved” in the sense that the problem could disappear. Prerational, nonrational, and irrational social forces will affect opinions and behavior always. The trick is to harness those forces to support positive cultural reform. If Gadamer is right that the Enlightenment demands the “overcoming of all prejudices,” then Locke is not an Enlightenment figure.Footnote 100 And to the extent that the belief in the inevitable progress of reason through history is identified with the Enlightenment, the label also fits Locke poorly; Locke is no Condorcet.

Locke is considerably less optimistic than that. There will never be a convergence of opinion on the basis of universal rationality; there will always be a diversity of religious opinions;Footnote 101 there will always be conflict between rival political parties. For these reasons, there will always be the need for a liberal political culture to support liberal politics (to put it in contemporary terms). The best we can hope for is that people will examine their opinions when challenged or at least examine them once in their lifetime; that people will adopt a doctrine of toleration; that political conflict will be managed through open debate, rather than the despotism of religious orthodoxy or blind partisanship; and that leaders will be called to account at the bar of reason. At any point in history, these must be seen, not as inevitable developments, but as hard-won achievements requiring the support of all of the mechanisms that make customs powerful, save one: habituation, received opinion, and social approval, but not orthodoxy. Even the Lockean principle that reason is authoritative, but custom is not, should be subjected to critical examination.

Locke seeks to vanquish the idea that custom is authoritative—that there is any idea or practice that is beyond question. But he cannot dismiss custom's power. Instead, he seeks to enlist custom in the service of the authority of reason. If he succeeds, some people will be truly independent thinkers who examine the foundations of their beliefs and question commonly accepted norms. But most people most of the time will support independent thinking and rational argument primarily because they have grown up with a prejudice in their favor.Footnote 102 For the same reason, they will also resist any claims to power or influence on the part of political, social, and religious “authorities” that rest on custom or tradition.Footnote 103 This is an essential component of the new political culture Locke seeks to establish. And politically, it may be quite sufficient. But it leaves us with a perpetual concern: custom and reason cannot be entirely reconciled, and a “culture of reasonableness” can become a new orthodoxy. This can only happen where people make the common fundamental error that Locke so often attacks. Whether considering kings, conquerors, or customs, one must never mistake power for authority.

Footnotes

1 Nussbaum, Martha, “Radical Evil in the Lockean State: The Neglect of the Political Emotions,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2006): 162.

2 MacPherson, Nozick, and Strauss contributed to this view, though in different ways. See Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possesive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). As long ago as 1988, I wrote, “the opinion persists, despite general agreement among contemporary Locke scholars to the contrary, that Locke's individualism is ‘atomistic’ individualism” (Grant, Ruth, “Locke's Political Anthropology and Lockean Individualism,” Journal of Politics 50, no. 1 [1988]: 43). Surprisingly, the same can be said today. The persistence of this view can be attributed in part to influential works, which are not studies of Locke per se, that associate Locke with liberal individualism, Enlightenment individualism, or modern individualism. For example, see MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 33, 259–61; Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187–90, 291–93; Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 159–76.

3 For Locke's engagement with an extensive travel literature see Batz, William G., “The Historical Anthropology of John Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 4 (1974): 663–70; Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, The Library of John Locke, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Laslett, Peter, introduction to Two Treatises of Government, 3rd ed., ed. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Paxman, David B., Voyage into Language: Space and the Linguistic Encounter, 1500–1800 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2003).

4 Exceptions include Smith, Jad, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke's Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction,” English Literary History 73 (Winter 2006): 831–53, and Tully, James, “Governing Conduct: Locke on the Reform of Thought and Behavior,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, ed. Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also Neill, Alex, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989): 225–45, and Schouls, Peter, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), on prejudice. One reason for the neglect among political scientists may be that most tend to read and teach the Second Treatise and the Letter concerning Toleration, some read the Essay concerning Human Understanding, and very few read the educational writings. The Conduct of the Understanding particularly is understudied, but see Ward, Lee, John Locke and Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

5 Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), I.iii.25.

6 Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. von Leyden, W. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954).

7 Footnote Ibid., 135.

8 Locke, John, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Grant, R. W. and Tarcov, N. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), par. 24; see also pars. 3, 33.

9 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, 135.

10 Locke, Essay, II.xxviii.12 (my emphasis). See also Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, par. 146.

11 Locke, “Credit, Disgrace,” in Political Writings, ed. Wootton, D. (New York: Mentor, 1993), 237.

12 Locke, First Treatise, §58, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett; Essay, I.iii.9–12; Essays on the Law of Nature, 167–77.

13 Alternatively, we might think of these as aspects of culture: tradition, custom properly speaking, what Locke calls “fashion,” and orthodoxy. By “orthodoxy,” I mean the unquestioning acceptance of established beliefs.

14 Locke, Conduct, par.12.

15 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, 142.

16 Locke, Essay, I.iii.22.

17 Footnote Ibid., I.iii.22–26; Essays on the Law of Nature, 141–43.

18 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, par. 1.

19 Locke employs this idea in the context of a particular dispute over whether or not there are innate ideas imprinted on the mind from birth. It has been taken to mean that Locke is a thoroughgoing empiricist or a devotee of the “nurture” side of the nature/nurture debate. See Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 5–6; and see Vogt, Philip, “Seascape with Fog: Metaphor in Locke's Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 1 (1993): 1–18, for one challenge to this view. Vogt argues that Locke's use of the metaphor of a ship captures his ideas better than the blank slate metaphor and that Locke's epistemology contains both empiricist and rationalist elements. I tend to agree with his view.

20 Locke, Conduct, par. 41.

21 Footnote Ibid., par. 4; see also Waldron, Jeremy, “The Democratic Intellect,” chap. 4 in God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83–107.

22 Locke, Essay, II.ix.10.

23 Locke, Conduct, par. 41.

24 Locke, Essay, II.xxxiii.17–18; see also II.xxxiii.6–9; Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode,” 836.

25 Locke, Thoughts, par. 110.

26 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.69.

27 Locke, “Credit, Disgrace,” 236.

28 Locke, Thoughts, par. 56; see also pars. 48, 53, 57–63.

29 Footnote Ibid., par. 216. How a child raised with great sensitivity to social approval becomes an adult capable of challenging prevailing views and practices is one of the puzzles of Locke's position taken up briefly later in this article.

30 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

31 One of Locke's examples is “rotten borroughs.” See Locke, Second Treatise, §§157–58.

32 Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, in Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke, ed. Higgins-Biddle, J. C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pars. 238, 241, 243; Second Treatise, §§92, 94 line 20; Essay, I.iv.24.

33 Locke, Conduct, pars. 10, 12, 14, 34 (my emphasis).

34 Footnote Ibid., pars. 10, 12, 14, 34.

35 Footnote Ibid., par. 34.

36 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

37 Locke, First Treatise, §58.

38 John Marshall argues that bold public expression of Locke's own religious views could have brought imprisonment even at the end of his life. See Marshall, John, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 454.

39 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, 143; Conduct, par. 6; Essay, I.iii.25; IV.iii.20; Thoughts, par. 81; see text accompanying note 68.

40 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mahoney, Thomas H. D. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 38, 99; see also Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), I-II, Q. 97, art. 3, where Thomas argues that custom sometimes embodies reason: “when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgment of reason.”

41 Locke, Essay, I.iii.25.

42 Footnote Ibid., IV.xx.17; IV.xv.6.

43 Locke, First Treatise, §158.

44 Locke, Reasonableness, pars. 1–9.

45 Locke, Thoughts, par. 116. But the love of dominion in children is “the origin of most vicious habits that are ordinary and natural” (pars. 103–5).

46 Locke, “Labour,” in Political Writings, 442.

47 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

48 Locke, Essays Concerning the Law of Nature, 129.

49 Locke, Conduct, par. 24.

50 Footnote Ibid., par. 10.

51 Locke, Essay, II. 21. 48.

52 Locke, Second Treatise, §103; see First Treatise, §157.

53 Locke, Conduct, par. 1.

54 For the importance of a new conception of probability in seventeenth-century thought, see Shapiro, Barbara, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). For a discussion of how the new language of probability offered an alternative to both skepticism and rationalism and made it possible for Locke to forge a public reason in politics and religion, see Casson, Douglas, Liberating Judgment: Fanatics, Skeptics, and John Locke's Politics of Probability (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 3.

55 Locke, Essay, IV.xvi.

56 Joshua Mitchell argues for the importance of Christ's first coming, in Locke's account, for clarifying reason's authority. But Christ's first coming does not establish reason's authority. Men are always and everywhere subject to the Law of Reason as God's law, including before Christ and in places where Christ is not known. See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

57 Locke, Conduct, pars. 11, 14.

58 Locke, Essay, I.i.5, IV.xii.11; Conduct, 8.

59 Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.24; see Conduct, par. 41.

60 Locke, Reasonableness, par. 252. Edwards's attacks focused primarily on charges of Socinianism. Locke wrote both a first and a second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in response to Edwards's attacks. See Parker, Kim Ian, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, ON: Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 2004), 32–33. Despite this dispute, Edwards was indebted to Locke in some respects, quoting Locke's Essay in some of his writings.

61 To take another's interpretation as authoritative is to put that person in Christ's place. See Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (London: C. Baldwin, 1824), xii.

62 In taking this position, Locke is entering a theological dispute that goes back at least as far as the famous exchange between Erasmus's On the Free Will: A Diatribe or Discussion and Luther's The Bondage of the Will. According to Luther, faith and grace, not doubt and reason, are the only ways that fallen man can have access to the word of God as revealed in scripture. As a result of the Fall, human beings are entirely unworthy. Our capacity for reason itself is corrupted, such that reason cannot give us access to knowledge of God's will, according to which we could guide our actions. See Gillespie, Michael, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151ff., and Skinner, Quentin, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 3ff.

63 Locke, Essay, II.xxiii.8; IV.xix.4; Reasonableness, pars. 241, 252; see also Forde, Steven, “What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?,” Review of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 242.

64 His position in this follows Richard Hooker's closely. Hooker is cited in the Second Treatise very heavily.

65 Locke, Essay, IV.xvii.24.

66 There is a vast literature on the question whether Locke was sincere in his claims about God and the Law of Reason or the Law of Nature. The argument that he was not can be found in Strauss, Natural Right and History, 202–51, and What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), chap. 7. For a recent alternative view that Locke's thought is grounded in religious ideas see Waldron, God, Locke and Equality. I do not need to engage this debate here. For my purposes, it is enough to show that Locke portrayed reason as the enemy, not of the Christian religion in particular or of religion in general, but only of sectarianism and bigotry, i.e., the effects of blindly following custom.

67 Locke, Essay, IV.xx.18.

68 Footnote Ibid., IV.iii.20 (last emphasis mine).

69 Locke, Conduct, par. 34.

70 Footnote Ibid., par. 28.

71 I am not alone in recognizing Locke's project of cultural reform. Casson (Liberating Judgment, 18–20) describes Locke's political project as a kind of pedagogical project, shaping the sorts of citizens who can sustain legitimate institutions and shaping a new conception of what constitutes reasonableness. Smith (“Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode”) argues that Locke alters the concept of culture and “attempts to recuperate custom by identifying it as a possible site of social reform.” Ward takes in the entire scope of Locke's efforts to reform family, polity, church, and education around the idea that the autonomous individual is the only determinant of truth. He even argues that Locke anticipated public education. See Ward, John Locke and Modern Life, 832.

72 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.69.

73 Locke, “Labour,” 440.

74 Locke, Conduct, par. 3

75 Locke, Second Treatise, §172; see also Laslett, introduction to Two Treatises, 96.

76 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119.

77 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

78 Locke, “Credit, Disgrace,” 237.

79 Here I disagree with Ward (John Locke and Modern Life, 192) who sees the Conduct, in contrast to the Thoughts, as unconcerned with habit formation.

80 To regulate assent according to the evidence is the core of reasonableness for Locke.

81 Locke, Conduct, par. 4 (my emphasis).

82 See text accompanying note 25 above.

83 Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in Political Writings, 404, 427.

84 Locke, Thoughts, par. 200.

85 Footnote Ibid., pars. 54, 189.

86 Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, 119.

87 See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone, 86ff., for the theoretical importance of this transition for Locke's attack on patriarchal government.

88 Tully, “Governing Conduct”; Mehta, Uday, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

89 Neill, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education.”

90 See Thoughts, par. 200, quoted above.

91 Footnote Ibid., pars. 36, 61.

92 Some Thoughts Concerning Education was written as a series of letters to Locke's friend, Sir Edward Clarke, who presumably could be characterized as both reasonable and sensitive. As I already mentioned, the work is addressed to parents bold enough to challenge custom.

93 Locke, Essay, II.xxi.48; Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 173.

94 Neill, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education,” 244.

95 Locke, Second Treatise, §§6, 22, 63.

96 Locke, Conduct, par. 12.

97 Much current psychological research is finding that people's moral decisions are powerfully affected by emotions or “gut” reactions as opposed to rational judgments. For a summary of recent findings see Lehrer, Jonah, How We Decide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), chap. 6. But to argue for the importance of rational moral judgment is not to deny that emotional “gut” reactions govern most people most of the time. The crucial thing is the possibility of resisting those initial impulses.

98 Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 94; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 171, 173ff.

99 Smith, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode,” 833.

100 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 277. I am indebted to Matthew Cole for this reference. Cole writes: “while Locke acknowledges the intransigence of prejudice in human understanding, he vindicates the capacity and the right to challenge any specific prejudice, and denies that tradition or authority ought to enjoy any presumptive validity when confronted on evidentiary grounds. Locke stops short of a theory of epistemic autonomy, but he is an unambiguous champion of intellectual freedom” (Cole, “Was John Locke Prejudiced against Prejudice? Should He Have Been?” [unpublished manuscript, 2010]).

101 Locke, “Letter,” p. 431: “It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of toleration to those who are of different opinions (which might have been granted), that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world on account of religion.” Locke does not see a diversity of heterodox opinions as a problem in itself. See Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone, 78.

102 Forde, “What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?,” 233, 255–56.

103 See McCann, Edwin, “John Locke” in A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Nadler, Steven (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 373. McCann characterizes Locke's Two Treatises and the Essay this way: “both evince a decisive rejection of any claim to authority, whether epistemological, moral, political, or religious, licensed merely by tradition or by the social position of the claimant.”

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