Jeremy Waldron's God, Locke and Equality is an odd book. It attacks the historicism of the Cambridge school of political thought, while it depends upon their arguments. The basic premise of Waldron's book—that humans are equal by their shared species-membership—is derived from John Dunn (12), not John Locke, who, as Waldron acknowledges (chap. 3), repudiated the idea of real species in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, questioned whether Negroes belong to the human species or whether they might be the offspring of mandrills and humans, and asserted that “there are some brutes, that seem to have as much Knowledge and Reason, as some that are called Men” (55). Waldron acknowledges that Locke, as distinct from Hobbes, thought men naturally superior to women (chap. 2), bestialized criminals against the law of nature (chap. 5), and justified enslaving those who infringed property right (chap. 7). Waldron cheerfully admits that “it would make my life easier as an exponent of [Locke’s] theory of basic equality” (32) if he had not written what he did about women, criminals, slaves, and the idle poor.

I am sympathetic to Waldron's distaste with Quentin Skinner's dictum that political philosophy is either history or ideology. Theorists are spectators; they are not so immersed in the practical policies of their time and place that their ideas about human nature cannot endure beyond their time. Waldron may be constructing a straw man when he says that the Cambridge historicists hold that “moral and political claims are utterly inseparable from the historical context in which they are propounded” and hence “cannot be considered and explored in abstraction from that context” (10). Political philosophy is an amphibious beast, with one foot in the current of history and the other foot on the enduring land of human nature. If Waldron has unduly generalized the historical school's reduction of ideas to historical context, or political philosophy to history, he aims to rectify the balance by bracketing out Locke's historical context. Waldron's immediate target is John Dunn's “What is Living and What is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke?” or the claim that the Protestant foundations of Locke's thought are insufficient to ground a theory of human equality today (12–13). Waldron rightly observes that contemporary moral philosophers are more apt to assume human equality than to ground it in argument or to indicate in what respects human beings are equal. Perhaps echoing Nathan Tarcov's and David Wootton's claim that Locke is “our political philosopher” (the former meaning America's philosopher and the latter, the world's philosopher), Waldron asks, “With our own peculiar concerns [as modern theorists of equality], in what sense is this work by John Locke ‘ours’?” (8).

Waldron accepts, contrary to the followers of Leo Strauss, that Locke's political thought is grounded in Protestant theology. Locke's alleged egalitarianism was “an axiom of theology,” not, as Hobbes's theory was, based on reason (6). Waldron does not indicate the inadequacy of secular arguments for human equality, such as Hobbes's view that humans are equal with respect to what matters most—we have the wit and strength to kill others (a view insufficiently weighed in our reliance on missile defense shields and the militarization of space), or Rousseau's view that we are equal in our moral choices, or Smith's view that human inequalities were the effect, not cause, of the social division of labor and our vocational education, or Helvétius's view that we are equally the product of our environment and education. Rather, he supports his interpretation of Locke that our common humanity is based on our ability to form an abstract idea of God and to know our duties to this abstraction (75–79). Waldron acknowledges his road to Damascus; two decades ago he attempted to ground political theory independently of Christian theology (44), but he has come to see that commitment to equality can have no other basis than Christian theology. Waldron's conversion accords with the desire of America's heartland to have a more godly liberalism, one free of historical relativism and corrosive reason, always subject to debate and reinterpretation. One might have expected Waldron to indicate why Locke's Christian egalitarianism is more compelling than Saint Paul’s, Saint Augustine’s, Richard Hooker’s, Pierre Bayle’s, or Blaise Pascal’s. Indeed, since Waldron ignores Locke's Christology, we might ask why Locke's egalitarianism is better grounded than that of Jewish or Islamic thinkers, but we are given no such indication. Readers are left uncertain of the moral purchase or specific content of Locke's egalitarianism, but they are told that it is the basis of contemporary liberal democratic worldviews.

Waldron argues that Locke confronted widespread notions of a generalized human inequality but cites no one other than Robert Filmer (whom Waldron recognizes advocated a particularist inequality—the authority of the Crown—not a generalized inequality, or class superiority of masters or landowners). Somehow, in opposition to Filmer's particularist inegalitarian claims, Locke advanced a general argument for human equality (in spite of his writings on women, criminals, slaves, and the propertyless), just as he construes a particular claim against the eminent domain of the sovereign in Two Treatises of Government (1.42) into a general right of the needy, and obligation of the government, to charity. On the other hand, when Locke declared criminals (or “crooks” as Waldron calls them anachronistically) against the law of nature “may be treated as wild beasts of prey,” he treats this general claim as specifically targeted against tyrants (149). Waldron skips nimbly from the particular to the general and then back to the particular.

Unlike John Marshall and David Wootton, who think Locke's arguments internally inconsistent, Waldron insists on philosophic consistency in Locke's mature writings. He does not deal with the fact that Locke rejected natural law and conscience as an innate practical principle in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, while they are central to Locke's Two Treatises, and specifically the individual right to interpret and execute the laws of nature (the basis of his right of revolution). Waldron does not note that Locke highlighted his departure from the traditional biblical taboo against private revenge when he referred to the individual right to execute the laws of nature as a strange or “a very strange Doctrine” (2.9, 2.13, 2.180). Locke wrote that criminals “may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger. … And upon this is grounded the great Law of Nature, Who so sheddeth Mans Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed.” Locke and Waldron omitted the reason given in Genesis 9:6, namely, that “man is created in the image of God,” as they do God's marking of Cain to indicate that vengeance belongs to God, not individual men. Locke's view that the right of private execution of the laws of nature—“so plain was it writ in the hearts of all Mankind”—is both central to his right of revolution and to his justification of the ownership of slaves. It also contradicts his rejection of innate ideas in his philosophical Essay.

While Locke justified slavery on the basis that criminals have forfeited their rights, and this justification is a key element of his mercantilist doctrine and labor theory of value, Waldron ignores slavery in his account of “crooks” and does not refer to the maximal extraction of labor as “the great art of government.” Locke asked us to consider the difference between “an Acre of Land, planted with Tobacco and Sugar” and an acre left in the American commons (2.40; also 2.41–42). But Waldron assures us that Locke could not “possibly believed in the moral legitimacy of African slavery as an institution in the English colonies in America” (203). Although he invested in slavery and wrote The Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas and Instructions to Governor Nicholson of Virginia justifying slavery, Waldron says that Locke was writing as secretary to his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, not in his own right. We have to remember that Locke did not have “academic tenure” or “a certain amount of prestige, safety and independent prosperity” and that he “was not the sort of man one would expect to fastidiously disassociate himself from power and patronage to vindicate his own moral views” (204–5). Waldron also questions the common historical interpretation that Locke's anti-Catholicism was integral to his political commitments from the Exclusion Crisis through the Glorious Revolution (218–23). Atheism cannot be tolerated because, again following John Dunn, it is a spiritual form of AIDS (223). However that may be, it is difficult to see how the intolerability of atheists is consistent with Locke's principle that belief cannot be coerced.

Historians will not likely learn any positive lessons from Waldron's ambitious book. Nor, in my view, are philosophers likely to learn as much from God, Locke and Equality as from Waldron's previous books. I would like to support Waldron's view that political philosophy is neither history nor ideology. But Locke's political theology, emancipated from historical relativism and rational justification, may become a spiritual weapon in the battle of liberal democracy against its enemies. John Rawls's view that political argument must stand independently of any religious doctrine is obsolete. God, Locke and Equality is George Bush's liberalism.