Minds Like Brooks

Of men, Locke calculates, “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education” (Education, §1).Footnote ⁹ Children are bubbling brooks, easily turned this way or that by the hand of an engineer:

Blank slates accept whatever characters are written upon them, and thus it is of no small importance what is inscribed by habit, by whom, and when. What is scribbled early and often dominates the script, and for Locke, the habits of youth are emblazoned in indelible ink. “When he has grown up, it is too late to begin to use him to it; it must be got early, and by degrees” (Education, §9). This echoes his discussion of custom, habit, and power in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “Custom,” Locke alleges there, “settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining the will” (Essay, 2.33.6). Young minds are clean paper awaiting the strokes of the parental pen, laughing streams whose course is easily shaped by the application of the parent's hand.

“I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself” (Education, §2). And though they initially require an engineer to shape the channels and plug the leaks, Locke's ultimate point is to co-opt an initially unruly, undisciplined subject and entangle him in a mechanism of power and discipline of which he becomes the bearer.Footnote ¹⁰ Were habits never to become second nature (and here, one might say first), were his subjects to continually require the constant supervision of an engineer, the liberty that is the hallmark of Lockean politics would be impossible.

Though it is obvious that Locke's immediate concern is for the behavior of children, he ultimately connects youthful indiscretion to mature delinquency:

When Locke writes of spoiled children, he adopts language his readers might expect to be reserved for tyrants. Children “would have their desires submitted to by others; they contend for a ready compliance from all about them, especially from those that stand near or beneath them in age or degree” (Education, §104). They desire property, a desire that easily turns from need to fancy and perhaps ultimately to the stuff of others, “pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give and the right that they thereby have to dispose of them as they please” (Education, §105). Locke's concern, it seems, is that rotten children will become rotten men, rotten citizens, and potential despots. We depend upon our children, the future generation of citizens, but “having made them ill children, we foolishly expect they should be good men” (Education, §36). Left to their own devices or spoiled by the excesses of their parents, children will not become the disciplined, orderly, productive subjects of the Second Treatise. Indeed, Locke's education offers a potent rejoinder to the idea of the natural subject, hewing closely to the skepticism expressed in the Essay. Locke demands a foolproof plan to prepare children to be good citizens and neighbors, a universal method for the production of disciplined subjects capable of liberty and careful of license, a disciplinary mechanism equipped to install practices, habits, and techniques for subjects who will self-govern. These self-disciplined subjects promise obedience to the moral law they internalize, governing themselves.

Locke repeatedly refers to the educator—the parent or tutor—as governor (Education, §§39, 40, 41, 66, 70, 87, 93, 94). The governor's task is character formation, the settling of habits of mind and body that yield a subject fit for the work of business or politics. “The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and the principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him little by little a view of mankind, and to work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy, and in the prosecution of it to give him vigor, activity, and industry” (Education, §94; italics original). Locke hopes this education will curb the license that endangers liberty, that inclines one to contention and quarrel, that makes one unfit for society, and in extreme cases, renders one immediately comparable to a wolf or lion, a dangerous beast possessing “no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence,” best “treated as Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and noxious Creatures” sure to destroy whoever “falls into their Power” (Second Treatise, §16).Footnote ¹¹ Were men tame merely in the presence of their governor, we would have little reason to expect civility in his absence, “for, as years increase, liberty must come with them, and in a great many things he must be trusted to his own conduct, since there cannot always be a guard upon him, except what you have put into his own mind by good principles and established habits” (Education, §10). “Every man must sometime or other be trusted to himself and his own conduct; and he that is a good virtuous and able man must be made so within” (Education, §42).

Lockean Panopticism

In furtherance of his goal of constructing a good citizen, Locke applies his training as a physician, translating vice into the medical logic of disease. The child must be kept “from the contagion of rudeness and vice. … Vice, if we may believe the general complaint, ripens so fast nowadays and runs up to seed so early in young people that it is impossible to keep a lad from the spreading contagion if you will venture him abroad in the herd and trust to chance or his own inclination for the choice of his company at school” (Education, §70). Delinquency is a communicable disease, therefore communication must be controlled. “[Children] are wholly, if possible, to be kept from such conversation for the contagion of these ill precedents, both in civility and virtue, horribly infects children as often as they come within reach of it. They frequently learn from unbred or debauched servants such language, untowardly tricks, and vices as otherwise they possibly would be ignorant of all their lives” (Education, §68; see also §59). “Beset on every side not only with temptations, but instructors to vice, and that perhaps in those they thought places of security” the child is at constant risk of infection, perpetually a case of emergency (Education, §37). Ever the good physician, Locke locates the vectors of contagion (unbred or debauched servants, the herd, schoolmates) and isolates the child by fixing him in space, denying lateral visibility. In this inverted quarantine, preserving the health of the child through isolation, the child is to be seen, not to see others infected by vice.Footnote ¹² “For you must take this for a certain truth, that let them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures of breeding daily inculcated into them, that which will most influence their carriage will be the company they converse with and the fashion of those about them” (Education, §67).

“He is the object of information, never a subject in communication,” at least, never a subject in lateral communication.Footnote ¹³ Within this controlled space, the child is educated under the watchful eyes of his parents and tutors in careful, controlled, hierarchical communication with only the best examples.Footnote ¹⁴ The home functions as a hospital, a therapeutic operator, and the child is only allowed visitation from the most skilled physicians. He remains isolated from peers of his own choosing, those contagious lateral influences threatening corruption. Through the techniques of discipline Foucault describes, “the hospital building was gradually organized as an instrument of medical action: it was to allow better observation of patients, and therefore a better calibration of their treatment; the form of the buildings, by the careful separation of patients, was to prevent contagions. … The hospital … was no longer simply the roof under which penury and imminent death took shelter; it was, in its very materiality, a therapeutic operator.”Footnote ¹⁵ Lockean discipline does not include overt reference to brick and mortar architecture, but the ordering of space by parental power assumes and depends upon the ordering of space by stone.

The child is to inhabit a space carefully controlled and partitioned, fixed as much as possible before the parental gaze.Footnote ¹⁶ Isolated and confined, he must be kept from the rude habits that threaten to ruin him: the fashion of the herd, the unbred manner of servants, the license of vagabonds and drunkards. He must remain laterally invisible, laterally incommunicado, just as he must be kept axially visible, hierarchically visible, in constant communication with his parents and his parents' chosen examples. “The less reason they have of their own, the more are they to be under the absolute power and restraint of those in whose hands they are. From which, I confess, it will follow that none but discreet people should be about them” (Education, §39; see also §71). Under these watchful eyes, Locke insists that boys be “used … as the honest farmers and substantial yeomen do theirs” (Education, §4). His concern is that these sons of privilege not retire into lives of comfortable sloth. They are to be inured to discomfort, fortified against craving, and taught trades unfit for gentlemen but necessary to implant industry and thrift (Education, §§9, 3, 22, 115; 33, 38, 45; 201–11). They must learn to exhaust their superabundant energy in productive industry and to view relaxation as restorative that they might return to work refreshed (Education, §§201–2; 206–7). In short, young gentlemen are to be prepared for a life of pious virtue expressed in diligent labor by inculcating industry, thrift, honesty, and piety as habits of mind and body learned from the careful attention of the parents and constant contact with models of just these behaviors (Education, §18). To arrive at this end, Locke's advice is to create a community bounded by the household, an “empire of habit” ruled by the parents and made possible by this inverted quarantine and reverse oubliette, a community proffering the fashion and opinion of the parents enforced by constant and total visibility and therapeutic isolation. Most men “govern themselves chiefly, if not solely by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God, or the magistrate” (Essay, 2.28.12). If the child's company is carefully chosen, his club and thus his fashion can be determined for him, and he can be habituated to those attitudes and behaviors his parents find becoming. “The great thing to be minded in education is what habits you settle … do not begin to make anything customary the practice whereof you would not have continue and increase” (Education, §18). Vice and virtue are contagious; children kept “as much as may be in the company of their parents and those to whose care they are committed” can be expected to imitate what they see (Education, 69). He will not feel the imposition of this discipline; it will be in practice, but not in effect, invisible.

The parent or tutor is to observe his charge and study the character of his student. “A good disposition should be talked into [him]. … This I think no hard matter for a discreet tutor to do, who has studied his pupil's temper” (Education, §74). The child has been frozen in place, located and made present to the educative gaze by the brick and mortar architecture of the house and the command of the parent. He must now be scrutinized, his words and deeds made to speak the truth of the mind within. The home is to become “a microscope of conduct,” a system of visibility capable of analyzing the child as a case.Footnote ¹⁷ Locke is aware that the child might dissemble, might affect an outward appearance of propriety while remaining inwardly ill, asymptomatic to the casual observer. Such affectation is the result of poor discipline: “It is of that sort of weeds which grow not in the wild uncultivated waste, but in garden plots under the negligent hand or unskillful care of a gardener.” Affectation is a failure of the educator. To combat this semblance of virtue, Locke recommends not rules or a strict code of conduct, but slow progress made possible if “the same action [be] done over and over again under the eye and direction of the tutor.” Gentle correction, not harsh rebuke, should attend errors. Repetition builds habit, and habit gives not the veneer, but the solid substance of the conditioned subject, a second nature where there was no first (Education, §66).

Disciplinary Psychology

Locke's principal concern is desire. Liberty is, for him, “the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind” (Essay, 2.21.8). The will, properly speaking, cannot be free, for volition “is an act of the mind knowingly exerting that dominion it takes itself to have over any part of the man, by employing it in, or withholding it from any particular action” (Essay, 2.21.15). For Locke, it is the man—the agent—who is free and not the will, the will being but an act of the man. “That which has the power, or not the power to operate, is that alone, which is, or is not free, and not the power itself” (Essay, 2.21.19). The agent determines the will, and it is the agent who is free to act or not, in this particular manner, another, or not at all. Thus it is the agent, and not the will, at which Lockean education aims.

Locke writes of a “great many uneasinesses always soliciting, and ready to determine the will,” pressing the agent and pleading their cases (Essay, 2.21.47). “It is natural, as I have said, that the greatest and most pressing should determine the will to the next action; and so it does for the most part” (Essay, 2.21.47). But the agent, the mind that is prior to the will, “in most cases” has “a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after another,” and thus “is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty man has; and from not using it right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, and faults which we run into, in the conduct of our lives” (Essay, 2.21.47). To be at liberty is to deliberate, to assess and to hold the will hostage until the mind gives its assent, acting only in the manner and at the time the agent decides. Locke, then, is certainly concerned to implant and cultivate the relish for rational reflection, though this reflection springs from the ground of the habits of virtue nurtured by the parents.

Locke's educative goal is the formation of a free mind, a mind that suspends the execution and satisfaction of desires that lead to pain and unhappiness, a mind that wills in conformity with the virtue that supports the pleasures of industry, thrift, and community, faith, charity, and vocation. The ability to question and restrain desires dissonant with these virtues is the hallmark of a free mind. The capacity and relish to submit one's desires to scrutiny is liberty as Locke defines it (Essay 2.21.8–12). “This seems to me,” he writes, “the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is (as I think improperly) called free will” (Essay, 2.21.47). For Locke, desire does not determine the will—the mind does, though it moves because of desire. “A great many uneasinesses” provoke the mind, all grounded in a basic psychological hedonism: Locke's subjects naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain (Essay, 1.1.3). This inborn affection for pleasure and aversion to pain is at the very center of Lockean education, determining both the levers by which the child can be brought to self-discipline and the final shape of the child's understanding of appropriate pleasures and pains. And this self is “sticky,” attached to the models of virtue inculcated in youth, entangled in a system of power from which it does not wish to extricate itself. Thus, the capacity to distance oneself from the immediacy of desire and to actively determine the will, to bind the will to what the mind thinks morally right, must be cultivated in the child; he must see himself as a “center” empowered to shape the periphery that is everything else he is and thinks.Footnote ¹⁸ But this center must be a virtuous character, itself largely beneath and beyond question.

Recall that for Locke our pleasures and pains are individualized by experience, by the activities, objects, and ideas with which we learn to attach pleasure and pain (Essay, 2.20.1; 2.20.3). “Hence naturally flows the great variety of opinions, concerning moral rules, which are to be found amongst men, according to the different sorts of happiness, they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves” (Essay, 1.3.3; see also 1.3.6). And though we are necessarily motivated by hedonistic calculation, Locke in no way commits himself to a gross version of its logic.Footnote ¹⁹ Locke's subjects may pursue loftier goals than mere pleasure, interpreting their self-interest with forethought in the sense that they forgo immediate pleasure or tolerate immediate pains for the sake of greater pleasure in the future, and in any case, these pleasures and pains need not be physical.

Nevertheless, his hedonistic psychology inclines his subjects to avoid pain more avidly than they pursue pleasure: we act not to procure “the greater good in view” but to rectify an uneasiness, a desire, a want of the removal of some present pain or the grasp of some absent good (Essay, 2.21.31; 2.20.1–3). And though uneasiness can be provoked by either absent pleasure or present pain, the latter hurts immediately, compelling us to act. One may want to be rich and thus may desire to be industrious, but one will remove one's hand from a fire. Though the absent good would be pleasurable, its absence is not always painful and never quite as immediate as the presence of something agonizing: the “absence of good is not always a pain, as the presence of pain is. And therefore absent good may be looked on, and considered without desire” (Essay, 2.21.31). Locke turns this psychological principle to clever use by analyzing the child's inborn desires and subtly pulling these levers to shape the subject, crafting a moral agent who knows certain things to be right and others wrong. “This manipulation of the child's desire and will is Locke's new ‘method’ of education, replacing corporal punishment. … This new method makes the exercise of power ‘invisible,’ or unnoticed, and it is precisely this characteristic that gives paternal power its perpetual effect.”Footnote ²⁰

Locke eschews corporal punishment except in the most severe of cases (Education, §78). “He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry and is in danger never to be good for anything” (Education, §45). Locke's goal is to fashion the mind as its own guardian, installing principles and techniques reflective of virtue as the father defines it. The rod spoils the child, either teaching him merely to avoid vice for fear of physical pain or crushing him to the point of dejection (Education, §§45–46). The pupil must come to self-regulate, and that by learning to resist the inclination to abnormality, or delinquency. Indeed, since the point of moral education for Locke is the formation of character capable of self-denial, corporal punishment is precisely what must be avoided. “The pains and pleasures of the body are, I think, of ill consequence when made the rewards and punishments whereby men would prevail on their children. … They serve but to increase and strengthen those inclinations which it is our business to subdue and master” (Education, §55). Physical pain merely teaches the student to avoid the master, to fear punishment if he is caught. He learns to behave when his warden is present, not to guard himself.

Pain remains a more useful educative tool than pleasure, though it must be used in a most cunning way to avoid the pitfalls mentioned above. “The rewards and punishments then, whereby we should keep children in order, are quite another kind and of that force, that when we can get them once to work, the business, I think, is done and the difficulty is over” (Education, §56). “Shame of doing amiss and deserving chastisement is the only true restraint belonging to virtue. The smart of the rod, if shame accompanies it not, soon ceases and is forgotten, and will quickly by use lose its terror” (Education, §78).

Children, Locke assures his readers, “(earlier perhaps than we think) are very sensible of praise and commendation,” taking pleasure in “being esteemed and valued,” especially in the presence of others (Education, §57; see also §62). Rewards and punishments of this kind attend not particular behaviors but “states” of “disgrace or commendation.” The goal is that

This is the invisible and gentle discipline of Locke's education. Inhabiting an inverted quarantine, the child's access to others is strictly controlled by the parents, whose constant thought is the example the child sees and the company he keeps. From earliest childhood, he hears only what the parents want spoken, sees only those behaviors the parents wish imitated. Surrounded on all sides by models of the parents' image of virtue, publicly applauded for obedience to this standard, the child comes to favor the fashion of his company, choosing to be the kind of subject the parents intend. He does not see that his world is carefully circumscribed, though he does recognize that he is not physically coerced, not brought to bow to the yoke through the sting of the rod. Indeed, Locke's method functions by winning the willing consent of the child as an agent who can choose to disobey at any point, though not “one of ten thousand … is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his club” (Essay, 2.28.12).

This application of power is invisible, cloaked in the mist of early memory and the desire of the child to conform to the only fashion he knows. As Locke observes in the Essay:

Center and Periphery

It may seem strange for Locke to emphasize the positive power of habit, but consider the use to which he turns this “early insinuation,” namely, producing a virtuous character his subjects will “not suffer … to be profaned, touched, or questioned.” This is the core capable of assessing the periphery, the moral compass constructed by the parents to point firmly north, to guide true wherever the gales of passion might blow.Footnote ²¹

Thus, though the divine standard is “the true touchstone of moral rectitude,” and though one would think that faith itself the best guard on behavior, Locke denies just this. Of the three disciplinary regimes Locke offers in the Essay—the divine, the civil, and the fashionable or reputable—only the last is truly effective.

Practically none can bear up under the condemnation of his fellows, and thus in practice the law of private censure governs while the other two do not (Essay, 2.28.12). When Locke considers this social fact in the light of his rejection of probabilistic assent, he is left with a startling realization: men judge their actions by the censure they receive from their peers, not a transcendent ground of moral truth (just as they grant assent because of custom, power, and habit rather than by weighing evidence). Habits are formed under the pressure of the private censure and the watchful eye of our peers, for we pursue commendation just as we avoid condemnation (Education, §§211, 224–25).

This squares perfectly with Locke's observations of moral skepticism: men acquire the mores of the communities they inhabit (Essay, 1.3.9). We acquire a mental relish much as we do our tastes for food: by habit and custom. These mental relishes are but habits of thought, made appealing by early inculcation and repetition.Footnote ²² Since, as Tully notes, “moral error [for Locke] is not so much misjudging relative one's habitual relish but acquiring a relish that does not lead to the greatest or true happiness,” Locke needs to fashion the proper relishes with careful efficiency.Footnote ²³ And though this disciplinary mechanism can allow the prejudices of nursemaids to become “truths,” it is as intimate as her presence by the crib and as powerful as her voice in the mind of a child. The power of habit to govern conduct demands Locke's pragmatic turn to the gentle way of correction: habit and custom can be reformed and turned to good use by having the right people implant the disposition to judge well and behave virtuously (Essay 2.28.7–10; 1.3.22).

Why habit rather than right reason? Consider that for Locke, the threat of punishment at the hands of god or the state, or the hope of a felicitous life, are not enough to promise obedience to the law of reason. For these very real hopes and fears to turn the wheels of the will, at every temptation we must calculate the odds of discovery and prosecution, weigh the absent pains of hell against the present pains of denying ourselves sinful pleasures, and assess the prospects of felicity were we to succeed in virtue. Even were we to add to this the condemnation of our peers should our vice be detected, we merely add another layer of calculation. If this were indeed how liberal subjects functioned, disorder would multiply as these calculations were either ignored or poorly made; few if any would consistently choose well in the face of temptation, uncertain detection, or, in the case of divine penalties, the distant prospect of perdition. Passion's pull is simply too strong. Indeed, calculative prudence leaves Thomas Hobbes an infamously poor response to the fool who says in his heart there is no justice, who must calculate the costs and benefits of keeping his covenants, and who will defect when this calculation promises gain from oath breaking.Footnote ²⁴ Hobbes cannot explain why one should keep a covenant when doing so is disadvantageous, and as Locke laments, even the panoptic system of omniscient observation by god fails to correct our behavior. Were god's omniscience effective, all Christians would in fact be good men. What is necessary, Locke understands, is a subject who is more than a reasoning machine, a subject whose obedience to the norms of liberal society originates in something more compelling than logic or fear, a subject who can transcend the temptations of passion.

Instead of populating society with human calculators bound by the chains of reason or punishment, Locke imagines a subject educated to see defection as immoral and blameworthy. The content of this education is not facts and figures, though these are certainly not ignored in the quest to fashion productive citizens, but rather habits of mind and body that make liberal society possible. Through the strikingly panoptic method analyzed above, Locke co-opts his subjects, engaging their capacity for self-regulation; like Bentham who will further refine these tools for different ends, he employs the control of space, surveillance, and gentle correction to tug the levers of the mind into place. His goal is to construct industrious, pious citizens from the raw material of children, to cultivate people capable of self-government. As temptations arise, these disciplined subjects habitually choose the right thing, or—what is more to Locke's point—they transcend temptation, much as my present readers do not find themselves tempted to steal a car they pass on the street, to keep a wallet they see drop from an unsuspecting person's pocket, or to skip out on an expensive bar tab. They—you—are not the kinds of people who do these things, and so the question of costs and benefits, coercive interference, and eternal damnation is rarely raised in their day-to-day lives. They keep their contracts, pay their taxes, work their jobs, and live their lives within a system of power, habit, and custom that naturalizes these moral commitments, making the idea of gross misdemeanor nearly impossible (for most people, most of the time). These deep commitments enable liberal systems of power—what might be called the illusion of laissez-faire—by shaping the self-governing behavior of citizens such that constant coercive interference is not necessary.Footnote ²⁵ Discipline reduces the need for political violence to maintain order, and thus stands at the center of liberal subjectivity and liberal politics. But this is not to suggest that Locke's subjects are nothing more than creatures of habit, automata denied the capacity or relish to reason.

Sticky Subjects

Locke is certainly concerned to free the mind of the child by teaching him to measure his assent by probability and to remain skeptical of received opinion (Essay, 4.15.4; Of the Conduct of the Understanding, §§3–7, 41). Moreover, it is easy to recognize how this subject is prepared to resist the encroachment of government: having come to see certain rights as the very voice of god and reason, he will jealously guard these gifts of nature and feel himself vigorously obliged to respect these rules. Furthermore, Locke's plan for the education of the elite develops in them the relish to reason, the desire to question that makes them “capable of public reason and public judgment.”Footnote ²⁶ As Button notes, these disciplined agents “will not simply possess an essentially Christian moral code (which Locke admits the rule of custom and opinion more or less provide), but will have become the kind of subject who might more properly govern his assent,” making them better citizens.Footnote ²⁷ But as I have argued, this delectation for reflection and reasoned argument is only partially adequate as a description of his proposed education and certainly not the lion's share of Locke's “transformative” pedagogy.

Locke's educative goal is the construction of a “sticky subject” who will govern desire with a virtuous character inculcated by his parents and tutors.Footnote ²⁸ Undisciplined subjects would not do so, and as I have argued, Locke's response to his fear of the natural, and thus bestial, self “is an elaborate regime of individual and social discipline, a specification and encouragement of conformity with norms through early habituation and a promotion of predictability through enforced and encouraged regularity.”Footnote ²⁹ The character Locke proposes enables the resistance to arbitrary power for which he is rightly famous, but the “Reason” so pronounced in the Second Treatise is an artifact of this education, the rules of the game well-bred men observe. Locke's subjects have internalized a worldview and morality that arms them against tyranny precisely by preparing them to govern themselves and demanding that they do so.

These disciplined subjects will govern themselves by joining habit and reason in the service of virtue, but this complicates the reading of Locke as a theorist of negative liberty.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, Carrig goes so far as to suggest that the degree of indoctrination implied by Locke's education erodes the foundations of liberal society. He confesses, “It becomes difficult … to understand what it means to speak of liberal education, an education that frees the understanding from public constraint.”Footnote ³¹ The normalized subject Locke hopes to produce cannot meaningfully be described as autonomous, nor can this subject be said to learn the “intrinsic value or ‘truth’ of the ‘liberal’ notions of consent, individual rights, the rule of law, toleration, or any other terms familiar in liberal discourse.”Footnote ³² Carrig is obviously not alone in his concern. Locke's emphasis on habit “places [his] thinking in tension with some dimensions of the liberal tradition that he is often thought to have spawned.”Footnote ³³ “Children should not be made to do things, but rather should have cultivated within them the desire to do those things the parent wants them to do,” Hirschmann cautions; “thus Locke's emphasis on freedom of choice sits uncomfortably with rather narrow constraints on what we should be free to choose, and which choices count as ‘freely made.’”Footnote ³⁴ If I have been persuasive, the goal of Lockean education is the “reasonable” citizen who does in fact enact these civil practices but who does so at least in part unreflectively, captured by habit in a sense he cannot see, affirming these worries.Footnote ³⁵ If we remain wedded to the autonomous subject as the gold standard of liberalism, we are ineluctably disappointed by what we find when we scrutinize Locke's subjects.

But we need not laud this elusive and illusive “autonomy”; we can instead appreciate the agency these subjects enact. I want to suggest that the choices of the Lockean subject are “free” in the sense that as an agent, he chooses to follow the model of virtue propounded by the parent. This model was not chosen by him in one sense—it was his parents'—but Locke's method co-opted the choice of the child, resulting in his choice to conform. Though the virtuous ideal was his parents', it is his now: he wants to be who he has become. His model of virtue is a “branded contingency” as Connolly calls it.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, though his choice of character was not autonomous, though it was as much an accident as the family into which he was born, as an adult, this accidental character is who he is, and he has chosen to conform to the standard of virtue that has become himself. I suppose that we might add the adverb “freely” to modify this choice, at least as far as Locke would use the term. Thus the Lockean subject, as a disciplined adult, is free while constrained, self-reflective while governed by habit, jealous of his individual rights and thoroughly normalized by a system of power of which he has become the bearer. There are no “Teflon” subjects here, detached from the background of discipline, autonomously choosing as they slide effortlessly past their entanglements.Footnote ³⁷ They are agents, but they are not autonomous, nor could they be and exist within the largely negative constraints of liberal society.