I

‘[A]ll communities tell stories about themselves, about the distinctive nature of their formation and achievements. These stories can have a powerful role in constituting our identities, and so in defining and sustaining our common life.’Footnote ¹ These words are Quentin Skinner's, and I take them as my point of departure in this article. A well-told story has the ability to transform the way we understand ourselves and the world in which we live, shaping it into significance after its own fashion and interpreting it to us authoritatively. We take our bearings from it. It explains, for good or ill, how we came to live and think as we do.

Typically, this means building upon a conventional repertoire of stories with which a particular age, a particular civilization, a particular community, is already conversant. But as Skinner notes, this suggests a difficulty, because these stories are

This article is intended in that spirit.

II

Liberalism, like many other ‘isms’, implies a story to validate it and to ratify its values, a story which shows that the past was conducted into the present according to its tune. The story may, of course, be told in various ways,Footnote ³ but I will be concerned in this article with the strange and remarkable convergence between the story told by modern liberals and a story told by people of a very different hue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result of that convergence is an unsustainable but always widely accepted version of the past – widely accepted because, for different reasons, it suits liberals and their enemies alike.

The story tells of the birth of liberalism somewhere in England in the seventeenth century. Depending upon who tells the story, the father was either Thomas HobbesFootnote ⁴ or John Locke.Footnote ⁵ Reports differ. There are even dark mutterings that, in fact, they are one and the same person.Footnote ⁶ Either way, the offspring laid the intellectual foundations for a new way of understanding the world, and one which continues to shape our collective political imagination. With the advent of liberalism, so the story goes, human beings became modern men and women, recognizable as such by their equal capacity to choose for themselves how they ought to live, and by their matching opposition to the imposition by authority – whether civil or ecclesiastical – of forms of life and modes of thought that they have not chosen. Thus religion, for one, retired, or was pushed, into private life, and a new epoch of liberal self-government began.

This is the story I have called in the title of this article ‘the fable of liberalism’.Footnote ⁷ My concern here is with the roles played by John Locke in that story, rather than with the rival stories, groups, and ideals over which it may have trampled in the course of its triumphal march.Footnote ⁸ In writing of the ‘fable of liberalism’, I do not mean to disparage liberalism or to suggest that it is simply a trick of the light. Rather, I mean to convey that what I have in view is not quite, or not just, the ideology, or history, or histories, or genealogies, of liberalism, but the conventional stories to which it implicitly appeals, its persuasive ambitions, and its artfulness. I shall be speaking, that is to say, about fabulae: about great men and great deeds, and what is told of them, about what is inevitable, about what is the subject of common talk and idle talk, about what is fabricated or false.Footnote ⁹

The next section of the article discusses the conventional stories upon which the fable of liberalism builds. The fourth section discusses the emergence of the fable itself. The fifth section draws attention to an historical irony in the way that Locke figures in many versions of that fable today. The sixth section of the article suggests a different way of thinking about Locke, and one which puts question marks against most modern treatments of Locke and most versions of the fable of liberalism in which he figures centrally. I turn first, then, to the stories upon which that fable draws.

III

The fable of liberalism is a successor story to at least two older stories, which for present purposes may be distinguished, rather roughly and readily, as, respectively, the ‘individualism’ story and the ‘democratic intellect’ story. Both stories begin, in their most primitive forms, in the seventeenth century, as reflections, or ruminations, on the thought and experience of the previous two centuries, and both attempt to make sense of the world in which people now find themselves. Both were developed more fully over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the first by Hegel, and then Marx and his followers,Footnote ¹⁰ the second by Hume, Smith, and Constant among others, reaching an apotheosis in Tocqueville.Footnote ¹¹ By the twentieth century, they were firmly entrenched among the repertoire of stories defining recognizable, and perhaps acceptable, accounts of the transition from the medieval or early modern to the modern world.

Both tell of two distinct epochs, one lost forever or remorselessly receding from view, the second definitive of the present and the future. Here is the individualism story in outline. Once upon a time there was a fixed, and natural, order of things into which human beings fitted, which was governed by the form provided by institutions. The individual as such counted for nothing except as a member of his guild, his church, his monastic order, his feudal hierarchy. Within these institutions he found a place where he was wanted and work was found for him. He could devote himself to fulfilling the duties assigned to him by his station in this great organism, within which he found himself lodged; these duties occupied his whole energy and his whole life, and thus the institution acted as the safeguard of the individual's utility and happiness.Footnote ¹²

Now we live in the epoch of the individual. The conduct of this individual is no longer accommodated to an ideal order of social life embodied in institutions. Instead, he strives to sustain a coherence of desires and preferences within a framework of obligations undertaken voluntarily. Self-determination, especially in religious and commercial activities, is his disposition. Individual will generates the institutions through which he chooses to express this disposition. Contracting is the characteristic activity of such an individual. Freedom is his most cherished value.Footnote ¹³

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in its earliest versions – the version one finds, for example, in the writings of Sir Robert Filmer – the story is told as one of wilful individuals breaking out of the prevailing order. The diagnosis is one of breakdown. The new epoch is represented as the hideous parturition of unnatural desires and values which are at once deplorable and dangerously seductive. The problem with freedom, as Filmer remarks testily, is that people like it.Footnote ¹⁴

An influential variant of this story is formulated about the idiom of natural law. It goes as follows.

Once upon a time there was a fixed, and natural, order of things into which human beings fitted, which was governed by an eternal law emanating from God. All creation participated in this law, which directed everything to its final end. Human beings, as rational beings, participated in this law in a distinctive way. Rational reflection on their own natural inclinations and situation generated precepts which directed them to their proper end and their common good.Footnote ¹⁵

This epoch is succeeded by the epoch of the modern theory of natural law. This theory is said to originate with Hugo GrotiusFootnote ¹⁶ or, in some renderings, Francisco Suárez.Footnote ¹⁷ Grotius derives natural law not from an eternal law which expresses God's nature but rather from what suits a being that is both rational and sociable, and without reference to any final end or common good. A rational being desires above all to preserve its own existence. It would therefore live according to rules or laws which enable it to satisfy that desire. A rational being that is also sociable would live according to rules or laws which make living together possible. These rules or laws may be commanded by God but they are binding by reason alone. They would hold even if God did not exist.Footnote ¹⁸ Self-preservation and living socially are thus the basic prescriptions of natural law.Footnote ¹⁹ Correspondingly, the individual is the bearer of the powers or freedoms or rights necessary to preserve itself and a secure life in society.

The individualism story, in both versions, sometimes shadows, sometimes intersects with, and is sometimes contradicted by, the story of the democratic intellect. Here is that story in outline. Once upon a time there was a fixed, and natural, order of things into which human beings fitted, which was governed by the idea of hierarchy. This hierarchy reflected the distinction of ranks of nobility in the souls of men. Greatness of soul was the privilege of an aristocratic few. This few were as the gods. Their deeds evinced a grandeur and excellence at which the many could only marvel. Loyalty, honour, and manliness were their most cherished values. Glory was their highest goal.Footnote ²⁰

In this epoch, freedom was experienced as independence from the pettiness, destitution, and squalor that was the lot of the many and defined in antithesis to slavery. It endowed its possessor with a sense of liberation from the hierarchical obedience in which the social order consisted and yielded an energy which derived from an affirmation of the self as superior. In exceptional circumstances, that energy could be cultivated by a whole people, such as that of Republican Rome, which judged itself superior to all other peoples and felt that it alone had the right to be independent. Its energy was expended through the incessant aggressive warfare that made Rome glorious.Footnote ²¹

But nowadays, we live in an epoch in which there is no distinction of ranks in the souls of men to which the multiple social ranks correspond. Each individual is independent of an inherited order and free by nature. The equal freedom of all is founded in reason. Reason is a faculty possessed by every human being but, because neither God nor nature discloses definitively to reason how people ought to live, it has no authoritative external referent: people are thrown back upon their own resources and their own reasoning.Footnote ²²

The self-reference of reason produces two complementary lines of development: first, of individual judgement, private conscience, and personal responsibility, and, second, of generalized methods of inquiry – sciences – which are turned to the purpose of understanding and transforming the natural world so that its riches may be made available to further human interests, secure human wants, and meet human needs.Footnote ²³ The energies of freedom are expended differently. The aristocratic longing for glory is replaced by the profit motive and warfare by commerce: ‘among the bulk of the people military courage diminishes [writes Adam Smith disapprovingly]. By having their minds constantly employed on the arts of luxury, they grow effeminate and dastardly.’Footnote ²⁴ The modern individual prefers security to glory and desires merely to live a commodious life. Trucking and bartering is his characteristic activity. Equality is his most cherished value.Footnote ²⁵

Subsequent versions of this story, which emphasize the one or the other line of development, fill out this narrative structure in their own way while drawing in varying proportions upon the individualism story, but they tell more or less the same story.

In one version, which tends to privilege the first line of development over the second, the first epoch was one of religious homogeneity. A hierocratic institution, the Roman Catholic church, headed by a great man, the pope (who, by virtue of his role, was the divinely authorized representative on earth of Christ), interpreted God's word infallibly to all human beings. All were subject to its universal and final authority. The church was the locus for salvation. Conscience was a shared, unifying force.Footnote ²⁶

In the second epoch the person, not the church, is the locus for salvation. There is no interpreter to come between any individual and the scriptures, no ecclesiastical mediation between the individual and God, because, in the final analysis, no one can be certain enough of the truth of any interpretation to give it the sanction of incontestable authority. All are equally capable in principle of forming their own beliefs about it for themselves using their own reason and they can reasonably differ in conscience from one another in their judgements about it.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, there is religious pluralism.

Being saved depends upon believing sincerely – being ‘in conscience persuaded’Footnote ²⁸ –rather than believing truly. Sincere belief is always unforced. Since religion is entirely a matter of such beliefs it is, first of all, an entirely private affair (since people form beliefs for themselves) and, secondly, beyond the scope of political authority (because it is private and because belief cannot be forced). Thus, there is freedom of religion.

In another version, which tends to privilege the second line of development, the discoveries of the natural sciences, and the technological advances which they make possible, corrode the certainties of religious belief even as they enable the amelioration of the conditions of destitution and squalor to which the many had once been condemned, and in which they sought consolation in religion and the promise of a better world to come. An epoch in which almost the whole of life was organized around religion as a means to eternal happiness is succeeded by a ‘secular age’ in which religion is considered, if it is considered, with reference to its consequences in the present life.Footnote ²⁹ The preoccupation with salvation is replaced with action which is directed at getting ahead in the world and interest is substituted for conscience.Footnote ³⁰ There is freedom from want, at least prospectively, and a progressively generalized freedom of thought and action.

Here, then, are two stories, which recount the rise of the modern individual and the replacement of a regime of privilege with a regime of equality in which privilege, if it exists at all, has been universalized. In the next section of the article I turn to the sequel to these stories, the fable of liberalism.

IV

The fable of liberalism tells a new and different story. It is a fusion and effusion of the two stories I have been describing, which first began to crystallize as late as the 1930s. The intellectual, institutional, and geo-political forces which converged then to produce it are too many, too various, and too complex to be itemized here, but a small constellation only of intellectual currents may be usefully picked out:Footnote ³¹ first, a sense that liberalism as handed down from Mill and from the idealists had become indistinguishable from socialism;Footnote ³² second, a felt need to distinguish it from socialism, and from other social and political doctrines then gaining credence and traction across Europe, captivating whole communities, and appealing to the same conventional repertoire of stories – for as Michael Oakeshott pointed out in 1939, even National Socialism asserted ‘complete liberty of creed and conscience’;Footnote ³³ third, the contributions to that process of émigré scholars fleeing those communities to Britain and the United States;Footnote ³⁴ and, fourth, the attractions of an account of liberalism which located its intellectual origins and development there, and which had as its hero an Englishman who was at the same time ‘America's philosopher’, namely John Locke.Footnote ³⁵ These forces resulted in a story in which liberalism became an Anglophone achievement and the constitutive political ideal of modernity.

It is helpful analytically to think of the new story as emerging in and through three overlapping phases of reflection. In the first phase, liberalism is re-examined from the left by liberal Marxists who wish to understand whether, and in what form, it can survive the failure of the capitalist way of life with which it has been associated since the seventeenth century. A classic instance is provided by Harold Laski's The rise of European liberalism: an essay in interpretation (1936), suggestively re-titled The rise of liberalism: the philosophy of a business civilization by its American publishers.Footnote ³⁶ Laski stated that ‘liberalism has been, in the last four centuries, the outstanding doctrine of Western civilization’ and gave Locke a starring role in his story as the ‘most representative prophet’ of the modern age.Footnote ³⁷ Hobbes appeared briefly as a sort of John the Baptist to Locke, but it was Locke who gave lapidary expression to the political creed of the new capitalist faith: that men of property are the proper rulers of society, that natural rights means the idea that property can be controlled only as it consents to be controlled, that liberty is the obligation of government to refrain from interfering with property rights, and so that the authority of government is a function of consent.Footnote ³⁸

In the second phase, the rise of liberalism is recast as a version of the story of the democratic intellect in which Hobbes, not Locke, is the decisive figure. The writer who did most to craft this version of the story was Leo Strauss.

Strauss made this statement in 1953, but had laid the groundwork in his text of 1936, The political philosophy of Hobbes, which represented Hobbes's philosophy as the organized rejection of aristocratic virtue in favour of a new moral attitude (what Strauss called ‘bourgeois virtue’) in which the recognition of the natural equality of all men is the only just self-estimation.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was an equality of natural right, by which was meant the justified (that is, equal) claims of the individual to a secure and commodious life.Footnote ⁴¹ In the 1936 text, Hobbes was described as both ‘the father’ and ‘the founder of modern political philosophy’.Footnote ⁴² By 1953, ‘modern political philosophy’ had become synonymous with ‘liberalism’.

In the third phase, the two versions of the story are combined through the assertion of an identity between their leading protagonists. In his highly influential history of political theory of 1937, George H. Sabine informed the first of many echelons of American students and scholars that

Sabine suggested that the influence of Locke, ‘precisely because it was less aware of its principles, was…more insidious’ than that of Hobbes.Footnote ⁴⁴ The insinuation was that Locke was responsible in some way for vast swathes of modern liberal thought.

Reflection has continued in these terms down to the present day. Strauss gave Sabine's suggestion his own distinctive twist by arguing that Locke was a disingenuous follower of Hobbes, whose ostensible concern with God and natural law was a screen behind which he advanced Hobbes's radically modern and individualistic doctrine of natural right.Footnote ⁴⁵ Strauss's argument has been elaborated in turn with greater nuance by Michael Zuckert, who declared Locke to be the man who ‘launched’ liberalism,Footnote ⁴⁶ and with greater boldness by Pierre Manent in his Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme.Footnote ⁴⁷

Laski's story was given fresh impetus by his pupil, C. B. Macpherson,Footnote ⁴⁸ who identified Locke's hidden agenda as the unlimited acquisition of property by the capitalist class and his remarks about God and religion as ideological instruments designed to secure the compliance of the irrational masses.Footnote ⁴⁹

Sabine's observations about the egoistic and radically individualist character of Lockean and liberal political theory have spread into generalized criticisms of liberalism by the disappointed and censorious. Thus, Michael Walzer complains that the liberal individual ‘exists wholly outside institutions and relationships and enters into them only when he or she chooses or as he or she chooses’,Footnote ⁵⁰ while Amy Gutmann imagines a liberal society in which ‘no one does more or less than respect everyone else's liberal rights. People do not form ties of love and friendship…This might be a perfectly liberal…society [she observes] but it is certainly not the best society to which we can aspire.’Footnote ⁵¹

Each of these phases of reflection was instigated by thinkers and writers who were not obviously admirers of Locke and who were not overly friendly to liberalism. There is therefore a certain irony in the fact that it was they who did most to shape the paradigm in which not only critics but the modern admirers of Locke and the friends of liberalism have tended to discuss both. In any event, if the fable of liberalism was in the first instance a creation of the opponents of liberalism, it is nevertheless a fable which the proponents of liberalism have eagerly embraced. The consequences of that embrace may be observed in the accumulated mass of writings about liberalism and Locke since the 1950s, in which, taken as a whole, the individual and his rights have tended to dominate the scene and the notion of consent has assumed a supreme importance.

V

In one way or another, consent plays a central role in most versions of liberalism. Consent is understood to be a necessary condition for political legitimacy, even social legitimacy, because people are said to be naturally free and equal and so cannot rightly become subject to the authority of another except with their own agreement. Government based on consent is the proper mode of government everywhere. The theoretical foundations of this view have been set out explicitly by Jeremy Waldron:

The capacities which demand respect are capacities for morality rooted in autonomy and rationality, or our capacity for choice.

This is clearly a reworking of Locke's idea of consent as Waldron or indeed Rawls understands it: ‘A legitimate regime [declared Rawls] is such that its political and social institutions are justifiable to all citizens – to each and every one – by addressing their reason…government can be founded only on the consent of free and equal, and reasonable and rational persons.’Footnote ⁵³ On this view, no revealed religion can justify a public presence: that is why religion is, and must be, a private affair of the individual. Locke's reputation as the canonical philosopher of liberalism rests on the belief that, in two classic texts, Two treatises of government and A letter concerning toleration,Footnote ⁵⁴ he showed that these positions, like two little sisters, must always go hand-in-hand.

In Two treatises, so the story runs, he supplied an account of the state as arising from the consent of all its members individually.Footnote ⁵⁵ In A letter concerning toleration, he is said to have given an account of religion as ‘essentially a private matter’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The accounts are bound together by the claim that it would be ‘irrational to consent to a government that claimed a right to enforce a particular path to heaven, since that path might prove abhorrent to our conscience’,Footnote ⁵⁷ and we have a ‘nonforfeitable right of conscience’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Every individual follows his or her own conscience as he or she sees fit.

Both accounts, we are duly told, are ‘deeply individualistic’,Footnote ⁵⁹ but the account of religion ‘reflects [even] more radical individualist principles’ than that of the state.Footnote ⁶⁰ That account is individualistic enough: taken literally, the view that all aspects of a political and social order must be made acceptable to every individual invites a doubt that any political or social order could emerge as legitimate by its lights. A. John Simmons presses this point in an interpretation of Locke's views on rights, political obligation, and consent which shows that contemporary governments lack legitimacy and are in principle unworthy objects of allegianceFootnote ⁶¹ – a suggestion, one might add, with which no Straussian would be likely to quibble, except publicly.

I have said that there is an irony in the fact that the fable of liberalism is a creation of the opponents of liberalism. There is a further irony, which I wish to explore briefly in the next section of this article. That irony is a historical one. It is that the Locke described and celebrated in the fable of liberalism is almost indistinguishable from the figure extracted in horror from Locke's writings almost immediately after his death by the nonjuror Charles Leslie and the third earl of Shaftesbury, and dismissed a little later by David Hume. Leslie was so very important in shaping the subsequent reception of Locke in the eighteenth century that I begin with him.

VI

Leslie was a polemicist of malicious genius who made it his mission to show to the world why Locke's assumptions and the explanations that followed upon them were a self-deconstructing individualist nightmare – and a blasphemous one to boot. Locke and his successors had (Leslie wrote) ‘Disolv'd all Government in Heaven, or on Earth’ and so were ‘Guilty of the Very Sin of Lucifer’, of rebelling against God and what God had laid down.Footnote ⁶² In a sustained attack conducted in the pages of his periodical The Rehearsal, Leslie discussed, with mounting incredulity, a social order organized on Lockean lines, in which the ties which bound children to fathers, wives to husbands, servants to masters, subjects to rulers, and worshippers to ecclesiastical authority were products of contract or consent. The idea that these institutions depended on the consent of every constituent member, and had no authority otherwise, was so preposterous that Leslie found it difficult to believe that Locke could really have meant what he wrote.Footnote ⁶³ For if he meant what he wrote, it would be man, not God, who was the true creator of the world in which people lived and moved and had their being.

Leslie thought that Locke's views would prove fatal to the religion and government of England. In defence of both, Leslie presented a revivified version of divine right patriarchalism, and was drawn into a sustained and bitter controversy with Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, an avid proselyte for Locke's views.Footnote ⁶⁴ In response to one of Hoadly's attacks, Leslie revealed just how far the danger posed by Locke's ideas extended in his eyes. ‘The Sum of the Matter’, Leslie wrote,

As Leslie saw it, the Lockean style of explanation eviscerated all that it touched, for it suggested that everything should not only be understood as beginning with the individual, but as being constituted by individual will and agreement, by individual choice, and so constituted by individuals themselves, even unto God himself: ‘Who Makes can Unmake! The Inherent and Radical POWER is still in ME!’Footnote ⁶⁶ All that was solid melted into air.

Leslie's Locke was a liberal in the sense of the word emphasized by John Henry Newman, that is to say, someone who made ‘the mistake of subjecting to human judgment’ matters which ‘are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rested for their reception simply on’ an external and higher authority.Footnote ⁶⁷ Leslie discovered the source of Locke's mistake in what he represented as Locke's root assumption: that there was no authority higher than the individual himself, because ‘I alone am king of ME’.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was this assumption that made Locke a supremely dangerous thinker.

The phrase ‘I alone am king of ME’ has the sense, if not the inflection, of John Stuart Mill's definition of individual sovereignty: ‘over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The belief that Locke subscribed to such a view – often termed self-ownership – is widely held today,Footnote ⁷⁰ which no doubt helps to account both for the hypothesized existence of a tradition of what has been called ‘Johannine liberalism’ which runs from Locke through Mill into Rawls, and for the power attributed to consent in this tradition.Footnote ⁷¹

Leslie borrowed the phrase ‘I alone am king of me’ from a scene in the play Almanzor and Almahide, or the conquest of Granada, by Locke's schoolfellow John Dryden. ‘I alone am King of me’, the character Almanzor is made to say. (He has just finished murdering somebody):

His interlocutor Boabdelin replies

Almanzor immediately ripostes,

The allusions to Hobbes's philosophy in these lines are unmistakable, and the unspoken insinuation is clear enough: Locke is the heir of the monster of Malmesbury.Footnote ⁷³

Where Leslie was merely insinuating, Shaftesbury was explicit. Shaftesbury had been Locke's pupil almost from infancy, but in Several letters written by a noble Lord to a young man at the university (1716), written in 1709, he penned a well-known passage which charged Locke with completing the work of Hobbes: ‘’TWAS Mr. LOCKE, that struck the home Blow: for Mr. HOBBES'S Character and base slavish Principles in Government took off the Poyson of his Philosophy. ’TWAS Mr. LOCKE that struck at all the fundamentals, threw all Order and Virtue out of the World, and made the very Ideas of these…unnatural, and without Foundation in our Minds.’Footnote ⁷⁴ As the Characteristicks went on to demonstrate, the fundamentals in question related to a view of man as inherently sociable rather than solitary and selfish. At issue was whether civil society was the product merely of self-interested agreement and self-incurred obligations, outside of which there was no obligation on anyone to behave honestly or sociably – a position Shaftesbury thought ‘ridiculous’ – or whether it was a product primarily of sentiment and instinct.Footnote ⁷⁵

A more sophisticated version of this line of inquiry was explored by David Hume. Hume placed Locke with Hobbes ‘among the moderns…who maintained the selfish system of morals’,Footnote ⁷⁶ and he read Locke as carrying this system into his political theory. Thus, on Locke's account, as Hume paraphrases it,

Famously, Hume went on to propose an alternative account of the grounds of allegiance to government and reserved some of his most withering scorn for the idea that consent was either a necessary or a sufficient condition of legitimate government.Footnote ⁷⁸ If it were, Hume points out, there would be no legitimate government in the history of the world.Footnote ⁷⁹

My purpose in drawing attention to this irony is not to claim that these three eighteenth-century critics of Locke suggested the outline for all modern reflections, but rather to make what must surely seem an equally obvious point: that there is more than one sense in which the fable of liberalism tells us what we already know. Leslie discovered in Locke what he already knew, that the whigs were dangerous fanatics, just as Shaftesbury discovered what he already knew, just as Strauss and Waldron in their way discovered what they already knew. They all knew, as we know, that Locke was a proponent of a politics of consent, of rights wielded against government, of a radical moral individualism, because they and we are the inheritors of stories which captivate because they tell us what we already know, stories which made it natural for them to talk about him as they did and to locate him in relation to others as they did and which make it seem natural for us to follow their lead. My aim in the final sections of this article is to sketch the outlines of a different story and to propose an alternative paradigm through which to think about Locke. The difference with my story is, first, that it is mine,Footnote ⁸⁰ and, second, that it is true.Footnote ⁸¹

VII

At the heart of my story is the claim that, for Locke, humanity is defined not by the freedom to choose, but by the freedom to love. The capacities which demand respect are not those of autonomy, but capacities to follow a law which commands us both to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Because reason and choice are so central to what Locke has in mind in writing along these lines, it has proved almost irresistible to assimilate him to a paradigm of consent, but choice means something quite different in this setting, and so too does freedom. In the space that remains I will indicate how and why it does so.

According to Locke people are naturally free and equal, but emphatically not because they are each sovereign over themselves. God, who is sovereign over all of them, has ‘given [to each of them]…an Understanding to direct his Actions’ and ‘a freedom of Will, and liberty of Acting, as properly belonging thereunto, within the bounds of that Law he is under’.Footnote ⁸² As Locke goes on to emphasize,

With Locke, law, and especially divine law, not reason as such, and not sentiment at all, is the ruling normative force. Reason is a capability of knowing those ‘those Laws whereby he is then bound to guide his Actions’.Footnote ⁸⁴ What makes all men naturally free and equal is that they are all of them subject to natural law and that they are all possessed of the capabilities needed to grasp and follow it. Should a creature which in every other particular looks like monkey evince those capabilities, it is a man by Locke's definition.Footnote ⁸⁵

Natural law makes mankind all members of one community, community implying union by virtue of common subordination to a law that applies to all members without exception.Footnote ⁸⁶ What does this law require? In his disputations on natural law, Locke identified, amongst others, duties for all human beings to love and preserve themselves, to love their neighbours and to console them in their distress, to preserve and relieve the needy, and to love and revere God and worship Him publicly.Footnote ⁸⁷ Our sentiments towards our fellow men may vary, but the duty of love towards them does not. It appears in Two treatises as a natural duty, and Locke uses it to generate from a duty of self-preservation a duty to preserve all.Footnote ⁸⁸ We can add that it becomes clear why Locke would speak in the first treatise of charity giving a title to ‘so much out of another's Plenty, as will keep [anyone] from extream want’,Footnote ⁸⁹ for charity means love, and civil society is an expression and product of love.Footnote ⁹⁰

Religious society was, likewise, a requirement of love. As Locke pointed out in his ‘Defence of nonconformity’, the ‘great businesse of Religion is to glorifye God’.Footnote ⁹¹ This went beyond private devotion to public worship ‘in Communion with some society’ for (he continued) ‘the actions of a private solitary life cannot reach to all the instances & purposes of religion’, and these included ‘the publick worship of God’. The ‘solitary recesses of a retired man’ were insufficient, Locke went on, because people recognized that ‘their duty to honour, & worship the God they served’ implied ‘publick acts of devotion’, ‘owneing to ye world thereby that Diety by solemne acts of worship to whom they payed the internal acts of veneration in their hearts’.Footnote ⁹² Religious societies are thus requirements of natural law, being integral to the performance of the natural duty to worship publicly. There is a choice involved in joining one church rather than another by assenting to the claims around which it is constituted, but not a choice of whether to worship. Each religious society is tied together by bonds of love and demands reciprocal acknowledgement from every other as the organized expression of the love of God, our neighbours, and ourselves, freely given.Footnote ⁹³ That is what Locke means by toleration, so that toleration, too, implies love.Footnote ⁹⁴

But what is love? In a journal note of 1676, Locke describes it as ‘the principal and first of all passions’, to be distinguished from desire because, properly speaking, it ‘never embraces any object as serviceable to some other purpose’. That is to say, love truly takes as its object only what is desirable and valuable in itself and is expressed in our affinity with what is loved rather than in any extrinsic relationship to it. Correspondingly, Locke construes it as a ‘sympathy of the soul’ and the ‘union of a mind’ with what ought to delight it.Footnote ⁹⁵ Human beings, to his mind, were distinguished by the capacity, or more precisely the duty, to choose the appropriate objects of their love. Let Locke speak for himself:

For Locke, this meant loving God, one another, and ourselves as we ourselves were loved, the ideal expressed in the golden rule which epitomized in its turn the duties of natural law.Footnote ⁹⁷

So much of love – what of freedom? If not in freedom of choice, then in what does Locke understand freedom to consist? The answer to this question is best taken in three parts. First, and perhaps paradoxically, freedom is dependency on God. In a note on law from 1693, Locke writes that ‘[t]he originall and foundation of all Law is dependence. A dependent intelligent being is under the power & direction & dominion of him on whom he depends.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Human beings can never escape from a state of dependency. The question for Locke is simply whether it is a dependency which binds us to what decays and dies or dependency on a higher power that makes it possible for us to be what we were made to be and which, little by little, guides us towards what we were made to be, the image of God:

In the proper use of their faculties, and by obedience to God's commands, people form themselves in His image.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

It is, secondly, freedom as the acknowledged weakness of human beings, a weakness that does not think to stand on the basis of each his own resources alone but rather also on those from God. It is a weakness that is free from the self in its self-regarding manifestations, the self-gratification, and self-assertion which Locke calls ‘license’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ License means acting as if one is independent and subject to no law but one's own will. It is the mode of conduct characteristic of wild beasts. And Stuart monarchs.Footnote ¹⁰²

It is, thirdly, the freedom of a decisive commitment made – the distinguishing feature of Christian liberty as Locke understood it – of having made the great choice which relativizes and determines all other choices, of receiving Christ for our king and ruler and professing ourselves his subjects.

Both reason and the Gospel, in Locke's view, disclosed the same requirements of mutual love.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

VIII

My aim in this article has been to explain how a particular story about Locke and his relation to liberalism rose to prominence and came to enjoy a hegemonic position, and then to tell a different story about Locke. All stories, I have suggested, have meaning for us in proportion to what we already know and this story is no different: it has meaning for me because of what I already know.

More than fifty years ago, in a classic article published in this journal, John Dunn suggested that an improper paradigm was responsible for a great deal of misunderstanding when it came to Locke's political theory, and he showed how that paradigm had misled scholars to mistaken conclusions about the argument and structuring assumptions of Two treatises of government.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In an essay published as recently as 2013 in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and destined to become a classic, Ian Harris shows the same process in operation with respect to Locke's A letter concerning toleration.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ I have tried in this article to show how that paradigm arose, how it could have so captivated the minds of so many modern commentators, and to propose an alternative to it.

My story has some of the makings of a fable. There are animals, after all – little dogs, monkeys, bees, and beetles – and so perhaps there should also be a moral. The moral of this story is not that Locke is not a liberal (though I see little ground to think that he was)Footnote ¹⁰⁷ or that his ‘liberalism is…not the same as modern secular liberalism’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ or that modern secular liberalism requires Christianity to brace its foundational principles.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ My moral is a broader one, if scarcely an original one, yet it is nevertheless an appropriate one in context, for it brings me back to my original point of departure, to the idea that to bear witness well we must ensure that the stories which define and sustain us are as little as possible imposed upon us.

Some stories are so omnipresently pervasive that, even when proposing alternatives, we do so in terms which are set by them and so we remain captive to them, even as we imagine ourselves free from their thrall. Like the poor, they are always with us.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The moral of my story is that it is altogether more difficult than is sometimes asserted to divest ourselves of the ‘easy assumptions’ (as one writer puts it) that predetermine ‘what we think an argument of a certain sort must be like’.Footnote ¹¹¹ It is necessary to add that the same writer assumes with some ease that ‘moral individualism’ is ‘crucial to Locke's moral and political theory generally’ and is duly flummoxed by the absence of the ‘explicit Christian argument’ he was expecting ‘for the specifically individualist way in which [Locke] understood man's relation to God's commission and God's purposes’.Footnote ¹¹² Yet Locke, so far from thinking principally in terms of the individual, mentions him hardly at all in either Two treatises or A letter. Those texts are concerned, in their different ways, with the origins, extent, and ends of societies to which, as Locke saw it, human beings must belong if they are to perform the duties, including duties to love, which, while incumbent upon them all – each and every one – bind all of them together and reflect their dependence upon each other and upon the God who, in His wisdom and love, created them.Footnote ¹¹³

To see things as the proponents of arguments saw them: that really is the challenge.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is the challenge which, however inadequately, I have endeavoured to meet in this article.