It is the argument of this article that the leading modern edition of one of the world's most important works of political philosophy is based on disputable textual foundations. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of John Locke's Two treatises of government Footnote 1 is not only by far the best-seller among the one hundred texts in the series ‘Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought’ and a highly regarded piece of textual scholarship. It is also a landmark which set the standard for critical editions of political texts and revitalized not only Lockean studies but also an entire generation of academic study in the history of political thought. This was not least because Laslett's ground-breaking correction of the date of composition of Locke's text led him to put the emphasis on the methodological importance of the historical and intellectual context in which ideas are produced. Although Laslett never produced a theoretical account of the way he practised the history of ideas, he nevertheless became one of the founders of the ‘Cambridge school’ of intellectual history, along with John Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner, who went on to write pioneering methodological articles in the field.Footnote 2 The contextualist methodology soon became widely accepted and practised. Similarly, Laslett's edition of Locke's Two treatises soon became the reference.Footnote 3 Some of Laslett's assumptions, however, turn out to be faulty or, at least, questionable. While it is true that this finding does not do major damage to the edition of Locke we commonly use, it does undermine Laslett's resounding claims for the imperfection of all preceding editions, and novelty and authority of his own.
Perhaps more importantly, what follows reveals that the text we commonly use was in fact prepared, in Locke's circle, for quite a different purpose than Laslett supposed. That purpose was a new and improved translation of Two treatises into French. On the eve of his death, Locke had in fact two projects in mind: to secure both an improved English edition of Two treatises and a new French version of it designed to supersede the faulty translation of the Second treatise that had appeared in Amsterdam in 1691.Footnote 4 It will therefore be argued that the ‘copy-text’ adopted by Laslett – namely the annotated 1698 edition of Two treatises discovered in the library of Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1944Footnote 5 – while embodying many of Locke's intended amendments, also embodies adjustments preparatory to a French translation. As such, the Christ's copy (hereafter CC) represents an artefact of transcultural relations, belonging as much to the francophone world – specifically the Huguenot Refuge − as to an anglophone publishing schedule.
The key individual here is Pierre Coste, a French Huguenot exile who translated Locke's Thoughts concerning education and Reasonableness of Christianity into French before leaving the Dutch Refuge for England in 1697 to live in the same household as Locke where he served, until Locke's death in 1704, not, as Laslett tended to suppose, as Locke's amanuensis, but as his translator.Footnote 6 If it is a well-known fact that once in England, Coste carried on with his translation of Locke's Essay concerning human understanding and embarked on the translation of the Vindications of his Reasonableness, new evidence has surfaced indicating that he also commenced a new translation of Two treatises. The CC turns out to be the ground-clearing for this undertaking. The keys to demonstrating this case lie, on the one hand, in a close re-examination of the CC – which will inevitably render the ensuing discussion a little bit technical, as the filigree of textual details has, as we shall see, significant consequences for our understanding of Locke's intended meaning – and, on the other hand, in evidence lying in a near contemporary ‘Life of Coste’ which was discovered in 1991 and was unknown to Laslett.Footnote 7 This article accordingly focuses first on the nature of the CC, and then examines its annotations in the light of the ‘Life of Coste’ testimony.
I
Three editions of Two treatises were published in Locke's lifetime, in 1689 (dated 1690), 1694, and 1698. Each successive edition was extensively modified in minor ways and occasionally in more substantial ways. The fourth did not follow until nine years after Locke's death, in 1713, but also embodied the author's amendments since, when the publisher to whom Locke entrusted virtually all his works reprinted it, the following year, in the first collected edition of The works of John Locke Esq. (1714),Footnote 8 he announced, in his foreword: ‘I have this to advertise to the Reader, … that the Two Treatises of Government were never till now, publish'd from a Copy corrected by [Mr Locke] himself.’Footnote 9 As for the CC, it can safely be described as an amended and augmented copy of the third printing of Two treatises (1698), annotated between the lines, in the margins, and on the fly leaves by two different hands. Thornier is the issue of whose hands they are and why they intervened in those places. In this section, we turn to the admittedly dry, but obviously crucial, preliminary question of whose handwriting is to be found in the CC.
First, however, we should address the issue of the nature of the CC, for whether it can be said to be a book Locke owned or not also affects our understanding of its status and purpose. It is worth noting that the CC does not bear any of the idiosyncratic signs that Locke made in the books he possessed: Locke's name does not appear on the front cover, the last two digits of the date are not underlined on the title page, and the numeration of the final page is not overlined. Locke, therefore, does not seem to have registered ownership of the CC,Footnote 10 which also lacks the paraph which appears in some of his books, like his copy of the French translation of Two treatises.Footnote 11 As such, what are we to make of Laslett's description of the book as ‘Locke's own copy, corrected for posterity’?Footnote 12 Lacking as it does Locke's signature and peculiar diacritical marks, the CC is, in that respect, very much like the partially annotated 1694 edition of Two treatises which is part of the Bodleian Oak Spring collection,Footnote 13 and very much unlike another book of that collection, the fully annotated 1690 edition of Two treatises, which bears the hallmarks of a Locke book.Footnote 14
The issue of how far Locke went in his correction of the CC is a vexed point. Apart from Jean S. Yolton, who confidently pronounced that the CC textual annotations were ‘chiefly in Locke's hand’,Footnote 15 the other two Locke scholars to have expressed themselves on the question were much more cautious in their assessment, and understandably so. Laslett did not give any specific indications as to the exact point up to which Locke annotated the CC. All he claimed was that ‘Locke's hand appears only occasionally after the first few pages’, and recorded only one such instance.Footnote 16 If J. R. Milton was more specific in his identification of the appearance of Locke's hand in the first few pages of the First treatise, specifying it was traceable ‘in §§1–4’, he was as unspecific and tentative as Laslett concerning the assessment of the rest of the volume, indicating that Locke intervened to make ‘probably only a few very small changes thereafter’.Footnote 17 My own examination of the CC, as well as comparison of it with several other books annotated by Locke, inclines me to reject Yolton's assessment of the CC as chiefly in the hand of Locke, and to concur with Laslett and Milton. Like them, I believe that the annotations to be found at the beginning of the book are in Locke's hand but I also believe, with Milton, that we can be slightly more precise than that, it being indisputable that the first four paragraphs of the First treatise are in Locke's hand. That being said, the annotations to be found in the pages of the paratext should not be lost sight of and I would therefore add that the corrections to the preface are also in Locke's hand. As for the rest of the book, a comparison of the CC with the 1690 and 1694 annotated copies of Two treatises figuring in Locke's own collection of books shows that overall, the handwriting which appears after the first few pages of the CC is much more spiky than Locke's handwriting to be seen in the margins of the first three paragraphs of the 1694 Bodleian copy and throughout Locke's own 1690 amended copy of the text.Footnote 18 This is not to say that Locke's hand does not appear ever again after the first few pages of the First treatise, but the reason why I would not venture beyond the fourth paragraph is twofold. First, it is virtually impossible to identify whose hand corrected the punctuation, underlined the various passages to be italicized and drew a capital M on the existing small m of ‘my’ in the fifth paragraph; and it is just as difficult to establish whether the two two-letter words which also appear in the margins of this paragraph were added by Locke. Second, it is worth noting that the ink which was used to make those corrections is darker than in the first few pages of the book. It therefore seems prudent to confine ourselves to stating what can confidently be established, i.e. that the first four paragraphs of the First treatise were annotated by Locke. In the rest of the text, his handwriting is far from predominant,Footnote 19 although it does appear here and there.Footnote 20
All this raises the question of who it is that took over after the first few pages. Laslett did not hesitate to ascribe agency to Coste, but as Milton rightly points out, Laslett's ground for doing so rests on derivative evidence – the say-so of the eighteenth-century donor of the CC to Christ's College – and not on any comparison of the handwriting to be found in the CC with other manuscripts in Coste's hand.Footnote 21 Milton, on the other hand, has so minutely worked on the Shaftesbury and Malmesbury papers that he has become very familiar with Coste's handwriting.Footnote 22 His initial inclination, however, was to doubt that Coste wrote anything apart from the annotation in French to be found on the end fly-leaf of the CC. This was my initial reaction, too, for what I found in the CC did not resemble the handwriting of Coste to which I was accustomed.Footnote 23 It is only after examining the rare letters this French Huguenot copied, in English, in the third earl of Shaftesbury's letter-book, that I became convinced by Milton's argument for Coste's paternity of the CC annotations, the differences from his usual hand being explained ‘partly by the limited space available in the narrow margins of the volume, partly by the use of English, and perhaps also by a tendency to imitate some of the symbols used by Locke …, especially his use of an ampersand resembling a Greek rho’.Footnote 24 I also observed that distinctive features of Coste's French handwriting appeared on the pages of the CC, notably French Ps and Rs, Gs with full loops and Vs not joining up, and finally recognized the idiosyncratic upward movement of Coste's final letters.
That being said, whether it was Coste, or anyone else after all, who annotated the text of the CC does not fundamentally matter at this stage, for the real question rather is: how can marginal annotations that are not in the hand of Locke, and not in a book he seems to have registered as his, be evidence of Locke's authority? This begs the question of whether Locke sanctioned those corrections and additions to his text, or whether they correspond to somebody else's revisions. In other words, the crux of the matter is whether those textual emendations reflect the intentions of the author.
Laslett's position on that question is well known: he believed that the CC did embody Locke's intentions, although he conceded that it did so at one remove. Given Coste's comment, to be found on the end fly-leaf of the CC: ‘C'est ainsi que Mr. L. a corrigé cet endroit dans l'Exemplaire sur lequel il souhaite que son Livre soit rimprimé après sa mort’,Footnote 25 Laslett argued that the CC was probably a ‘duplicate’ of a putative and now lost ‘master-copy’ of Two treatises, bearing Locke's final corrections and additions to the text. According to him, it was only to be expected of Locke, whom he perceived as a meticulous man, to seek to secure a copy of the ‘master-copy’ he had prepared for posthumous publication. The reason why Laslett contended the CC could not itself be the ‘master-copy’ prepared by Locke ‘for posterity’ is because he noticed that it differs, in a number of details, from the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises, presented as: ‘never till now, publish'd from a Copy corrected by [Locke] himself’.Footnote 26 So Laslett concluded that the CC and the 1713–14 edition must both separately derive from a missing ‘master-copy’ and, spotting that some elements of the 1713–14 edition hark back to the second edition and do not appear in the CC, he deduced that the missing ‘master-copy’ was an annotated copy of the second edition (1694). Observing that Locke's hand appears in the CC, which is a copy of the third edition of 1698, Laslett presumed that it was prepared between 1698 and Locke's death in 1704. He pointed out that if Locke worked at it, he left the most laborious copying process to his ‘amanuensis’, namely Coste.Footnote 27 Holding that Coste's duplication of the ‘master-copy’ was commissioned by Locke, who supervised the whole process since he intervened occasionally,Footnote 28 Laslett saw little reason to question the faithfulness of the CC to the ‘master-copy’. That was Laslett's argument for taking the CC as his ‘copy-text’.Footnote 29 It was also his argument for offering it as ‘the most obvious, authentic source for Locke's “text for posterity”’,Footnote 30 in the absence of the long since lost ‘master-copy’.
The discovery – or rather the rediscovery – of the CCFootnote 31 was such a landmark event in Lockean scholarship and Laslett's editorial work on the text was such an unprecedented and invaluable contribution to Lockean studies, earlier twentieth-century editions being admittedly so poor, that his interpretation of the CC has stood uncontested. However, if there is one thing that Locke taught us, it is to take advantage of our ability to reason. I would therefore like to grapple with the CC and Laslett's reasoning, with all due respect for this formidable editor and his legacy.
First, Laslett contended that Coste was Locke's ‘amanuensis’ but, as Milton argued, although it is generally assumed that Coste was Locke's secretary, ‘there is little if any evidence for this’. For one thing, Coste was not employed by Locke but by Sir Francis Masham, as tutor to his son. For another, Locke had a manservant acting for him as his amanuensis, so that ‘there seems to be no evidence among Locke's own papers that [Coste] was ever used as a secretary or as an amanuensis’.Footnote 32 However, although Milton's finding threatened Laslett's position, Milton did not fully unpack the implications of his insistence that Coste's ‘usefulness to Locke lay in his command of French’.Footnote 33
Second, had Coste been acting simply as an amanuensis, one would have expected the evidence of the text to show only clear and meticulous copying from another source. If there is indeed evidence that some of the alterations were simply reproduced from elsewhere, the problem is that other amendments are far from looking like a neat fair-copy. On the contrary, there are second-thoughts, erasures. Take for instance the correction of ii, §26. Take also the muddle in ii, §50. The erasures, second thoughts, entangled additions, etc., suggest that the passage underwent extensive alteration and, more importantly, that those alterations were made in fits and starts. Laslett himself had difficulty decoding some of these, and had to refer to other editions, notably the 1713–14 edition, for clarification, explaining: ‘the correction in the CC seems to have been made at various times’.Footnote 34 As such, how can the CC still be seen as a mere ‘duplicate’ of a master-copy, from which Coste would just have had to copy out the final corrections intended by Locke for posterity? It rather bears testimony that some correcting process occurred in the CC itself.Footnote 35
By portraying Coste as Locke's amanuensis, faithfully duplicating the ‘master-copy’ between 1698 and 1704, Laslett therefore gave us a skewed perspective of the situation and also failed to confront the real issue, for he did not address the question of whether the entangled corrections, that were not copied out but were inserted by Coste, were sanctioned by Locke. Indeed, that Locke's hand occasionally appears in the CC cannot be taken as a proof of his overseeing all the annotations it contains. So until evidence is brought to bear, it seems fair to cast doubt on Laslett's appreciation of the CC as ‘the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’.Footnote 36
To be fair to Laslett, when Milton remarked that Coste's ‘usefulness to Locke lay in his command of French’, and further argued that it is in view of the production of ‘a new [French] translation’ of Two treatises that Coste secured for himself ‘a copy incorporating Locke's final revisions’,Footnote 37 Milton had the benefit of reading a document that was not available to Laslett. The document in question is the manuscript version of ‘La vie de Coste et anecdotes sur ses ouvrages’ in the hand of and signed by his ‘best friend’ Charles Pacius de La Motte.Footnote 38 This account, in French, of the life and works of Coste, has attracted the attention of scholars working on Coste and Shaftesbury,Footnote 39 but has failed to generate a similar interest on the part of Locke scholars until recently.Footnote 40 However, it highlights the francophone dimension of Coste's activities at Oates and can thereby shed light on the history of Two treatises.
Milton relied on it to make an important addition since he specified that it was in view of the production of ‘a new [French] translation’ of Two treatises that the CC was prepared. Yet, he remained very close to Laslett in his assessment of the CC as ‘a copy incorporating Locke's final revisions’. As a result, the problem remained. For how can such ‘a copy’ contain entangled annotations?
II
In this section, I would like to analyse the CC annotations in the light of both La Motte's testimony and Coste's translation habits in order to propose an alternative interpretation of the CC. Instead of viewing it as ‘a copy incorporating Locke's final revisions’, I would like to argue that with its various types of annotations, the CC is a very rich and complex document. The annotations appear to range from the meticulous to the botched recording of Locke's intended emendations, and from the mere duplication of the author's corrections to the translator's own insertions of emendations. The entangled annotations accordingly reflect the new thoughts and extra changes generated by the collaboration which took place between author and translator when Locke was still alive and further emending the English text of Two treatises, prompted by Coste's work towards an improved French translation of it. I would therefore like to argue that the different layers of intervention made, some of them after Locke's death, but most of them while he was still alive, reveal not one but two writers grappling with the text in the margins of the CC: Locke himself and his translator, Coste. In this cross-cultural dialogue between the English author and his French translator, the CC appears to have been used as an active working document, in which Coste prepared the ground for his French translation of the text, while Locke remained engaged in the process of amending Two treatises. Such a reassessment of the nature of the CC annotations and the context in which they were produced will lead me to question Laslett's assumptions and ensuing decision to use the CC as the ‘copy-text’ for his edition of Two treatises.
Before turning to La Motte's testimony to glean information about the circumstances in which Coste became involved in this transcultural project, we first need to note that there had already appeared, in 1691, a French translation of the Second of Locke's Two treatises, under the title of Du gouvernement civil, which was the work of another Huguenot refugee, David Mazel.Footnote 41 What La Motte's account reveals is that Locke was ‘greatly dissatisfied’ with Mazel's job, and twice attempted to persuade Coste to prepare an improved French translation of Two treatises, a project that was ‘very dear to him’.Footnote 42 The former, which foundered on Coste's reluctance to embrace the project, occurred a few months before Locke's death. If it was indirectly, through Lady Masham, that Coste was asked to translate a book for Locke, he was nonetheless directly told that the book in question was ‘the Essay of Civil Government’.Footnote 43 The latter attempt occurred a few days before Locke's death. This time, Coste was directly asked by Locke to translate a book for him but was not directly told what the ‘Book’ in question was.Footnote 44 After Locke's death, a packet was delivered to Coste which ‘contained the Book on Civil Government, with various Additions and Corrections, which Mr Coste then handed over to Churchil for reprinting’,Footnote 45 namely the master-copy of Two treatises, on which the 1713–14 edition was based. The packet was accompanied by a letter which put on paper what, two days before dying, Locke had verbally engaged Coste to do and engaged himself to do in return for him.Footnote 46 La Motte's account further reveals that Coste, who had been reluctant to embark on the translation of ‘the Essay of Civil Government’ during Locke's lifetime, did work, after his death, on the French translation of his ‘Treatise of Civil Government’,Footnote 47 before burning what he had translated upon discovering that the ‘handsome sum of money’ that Locke had promised to reward him with for his translation amounted to virtually nothing.
Needless to say, it is impossible to attest the absolute veracity of La Motte's testimony. However, evidence shows that La Motte was a man of great probity who was very cautious about what was being offered to the public and anxious to protect the memory of Locke, for whom he had the highest esteem.Footnote 48 He must therefore have taken the utmost care when drafting this ‘Life of Coste’, which he knew would be used by Prosper Marchand for publication.Footnote 49 Besides, La Motte's testimony is corroborated by various others, notably by Jean Barbeyrac's – as far as the existence of an ‘Exemplar’ of Two treatises left to Coste by Locke, and intended to be used for the publication of a posthumous corrected and augmented English edition of it, is concernedFootnote 50 – as well as by the testimony of the publisher of the 1714 edition of The works who, as we have seen, proudly announced: ‘that the Two Treatises of Government were never till now, publish'd from a Copy corrected by [Locke] himself’.Footnote 51 Churchill's and Barbeyrac's testimonies concur with La Motte's and confirm that at his death, Locke left to Coste a copy of Two treatises annotated and corrected in his hand, and that it is upon this copy that the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises was published. What La Motte's testimony adds is the reason why the exemplar on which Locke wished Two treatises to be republished by his English publisher, Churchill, after his death, was left to Coste. Indeed La Motte reveals that Coste had promised to grant Locke his last wish, namely to translate Two treatises into French.Footnote 52
Coste was a translator who had the utmost respect for both the spirit and the letter of Locke's texts, and who had taken great care for the corrections and additions Locke had for instance made between two editions of the Essay concerning human understanding and Education.Footnote 53 As such, was it not to be expected of him that he would prepare the ground for his French translation of Two treatises, by copying out in his copy of the book (Two treatises, 1698, i.e. the CC) the passages that Locke had corrected in his copy of it (Two treatises, 1694, i.e. the ‘master-copy’),Footnote 54 to be printed by Churchill after his death? If there are indeed annotations in the margins of the CC which constitute passages meticulously copied out by Coste from the ‘master-copy’, the most compelling evidence being the very neat correction to i, §154,Footnote 55 there are also other annotations which, as we have begun to see, undermine the thesis that, after Locke's death, Coste did no more than faithfully reproduce Locke's pre-exisiting emendations.
Indeed, a minute comparison of the marginalia of the CC and of the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises, against the backcloth of the analysis of the text of the 1694 and 1698 editions, reveals that the CC also contains annotations and corrections that Locke does not seem to have sanctioned, as they do not appear in the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises, which was presented as based on the text Locke had prepared for posterity.
What is worth noting is that those additional corrections only appear in the Second treatise, and, more precisely, only in the first few paragraphs of the Second treatise. Since La Motte's testimony reveals that after Locke's death, Coste ‘seriously’ started to work on the translation of Two treatises up until the moment when he was told how much money he was to receive for it, and since it must have been a short time between Locke's death and Coste's stopping his preparatory work upon finding out how little Locke had left him in his will, there is ground to believe that those annotations were made by Coste, in the days or, at the most, in the very few weeks following Locke's death, as he was working towards a new French translation of Two treatises. What is also worth noting is that those additional corrections testify to the meticulousness with which Coste worked as they all seem to show him preparing the ground for his translation by reading the English original text in the light of Mazel's translation of it.
Indeed, in ii, §10 Coste seems to have spotted that Mazel omitted a passageFootnote 56 and to have tried to understand why his predecessor had skipped it. Noticing that the English original was not that clear,Footnote 57 Coste seems to have grappled with it in an attempt to clarify the passage in view of his own translation of it, since this is how it was corrected in the CC: ‘there is commonly injury done, and∧ to some Person or other, ∧& some other Man receives damage by his Transgression’.Footnote 58 There was apparently no change in the master-copy, since the 1713–14 edition – which was presented as based on the exemplar Locke had prepared for posterity – reads exactly the same as the 1694 edition. However, Laslett decided to adopt the CC corrections in his edition of Two treatises.
In ii, §13 of the CC, there are two passages which were corrected by Coste. If the correction to the former was very French, consisting in reformulating a potentially equivocal passage,Footnote 59 the correction to the latter seems to have been more directly triggered by Mazel's free translation of the passage. Let us first consider the translation of:
I desire to know what kind of Government that is, and how much better it is than the State of Nature, where one Man commanding a multitude, has the Liberty to be Judge in his own Case, and may do to all his Subjects whatever he pleases, without the least question or controle of those who Execute his Pleasure?Footnote 60
Here is how Mazel translated it:
N'est-ce pas un gouvernement où un seul homme commandant une multitude, est juge dans sa propre cause, & peut faire à tous ses sujets tout ce qu'il lui plait, sans que personne ait droit de se plaindre de ceux qui éxécutent ses volontez, & de former aucune opposition?Footnote 61
It is to be noted that Mazel's addition of the radical ‘& de former aucune opposition’ at the end of his French translation of the passage was not adopted while at the same time, Coste seems to have sanctioned Mazel's reading of the equivocal passage, since he seems to have patterned his clarification of the English text on it. In other words, Coste found some of Mazel's formulations helpful, but others unfaithful to Locke's meaning. Indeed, Coste amended the English original in a way which makes it clearer that agency is indeed on the part of the subjects against the ruler, and invalidates the potential misreading of the passage as implying agency on the part of the ruler:
I desire to know what kind of Government that is, … where one Man commanding a multitude, has the Liberty to be Judge in his own Case, and may do to all his Subjects whatever he pleases, without the least ∧liberty to any one to question or controle of those who Execute his Pleasure?Footnote 62
Let us now turn to the translation of what followed:
And in whatsoever he doth, whether lead by reason, mistake or passion, must be submitted to? Which Men in the State of Nature are not bound to do one to another.Footnote 63
Mazel's free translation of that ii, §13 passage reads:
je souhaite que ceux qui font cette objection, se souviennent que les Monarques absolus sont hommes, & que si le Gouvernement Civil est le reméde des maux qui arriveroient nécessairement, si les hommes estoient juges dans leurs propres causes, & si par cette raison, l'estat de nature doit estre abrogé, on peut dire le mesme de l'autorité des Puissances Souveraines.Footnote 64
This is tantamount to a call for the abrogation of government. Coste seems to have invalidated such radical conclusions since here is how the CC was corrected:
I desire to know what kind of Government that is, and how much better it is than the State of Nature, where one Man commanding a multitude, has the Liberty to be Judge in his own Case, and may do to all his Subjects whatever he pleases, without the least ∧liberty to any one to question or controle of those who Execute his Pleasure? And in whatsoever he doth, whether led by Reason, Mistake or Passion, must be submitted to? Which Men Much better it is in the State of Nature wherein Men are not bound to do one to to submit to the unjust will of another.Footnote 65
What all those comparisons reveal is that the CC corrections of those two ii, §13 passages seem to repudiate the radical twist given by Mazel's translation of it. The former does so negatively, by not adopting for inclusion Mazel's addition of a radical element, whereas the latter does so positively, by amending the English original in a way which counters the extreme conclusions drawn by Mazel, and defuses any such potentially radical reading of the passage. What is worth noting is that, once again, the master-copy does not seem to have contained those corrections since they do not appear in the 1713–14 edition, but they were adopted by Laslett in his edition of Two treatises.
In ii, §5 of the CC, a missing question mark was inserted in Locke's quotation of the ‘judicious Hooker’. Mazel had spotted Locke's omission and taken it upon himself to add a question mark to his translation.Footnote 66 In the light of what has been shown about ii, §§10 and 13, it seems hard to believe that the addition of a question mark in ii, §5 of the CC was sheer coincidence. Of course, it cannot be definitely ascertained that it is Mazel's version that Coste was following, but what we can be sure of is that it was not Hooker's original for if the accuracy of Locke's quotation had been checked in Hooker's Laws of ecclesiastical polity, it would have become apparent that in the sentence lacking the question mark, Locke had also made an error of transcription.Footnote 67 Laslett did not restore Hooker's original either. Instead, he adopted, once again, the CC corrections.Footnote 68
A priori, Laslett's decision to use the CC as his ‘copy-text’ when evidence seemed to suggest that Locke had not sanctioned all the annotations it contains, since they do not appear in the 1713–14 edition presented as based on the exemplar Locke had prepared for posterity, was rather dubious. My analysis of those additional corrections suggests that they were made by Coste, after Locke's death, as he was reviewing the text of the Second treatise in the light of Mazel's translation of it, with the aim of producing an improved version of it. This renders Laslett's description of the CC as ‘the copy which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’ and his ensuing decision to adopt it as his ‘copy-text’, rather seem faulty, or at least questionable.
It is true that Laslett granted:
there is a possible case for supposing that the 4th edition [i.e. the 1713 printing of Two treatises, and by implication the 1714 printing contained in the Works] was indeed a printing of the other “exemplaire” referred to by Coste, that this was a copy of the 1694 printing more authoritatively corrected, and that a critical edition should be based on this text … and not on the Christ's Copy.Footnote 69
However, he discarded that hypothesis, on the ground that the passage Coste copied out on the end fly-leaf of the CC, with a brief comment indicating that he was taking note of the way Locke had corrected the passage in the exemplar he had prepared for posterity, does not correspond to the passage to be found in ii, § 172 of the 1713–14 edition presented by Churchill as ‘publish'd from a Copy corrected by [Locke] himself’.Footnote 70 Laslett deemed the problem insuperable. Yet, I believe that this apparent mystery can be solved by analysing Coste's note on the end fly-leaf, as well as all the CC marginalia more closely.
The first thing to note is that the comment written by Coste on the end fly-leaf of the CC – ‘C'est ainsi que Mr. L. a corrigé cet endroit dans l'Exemplaire sur lequel il souhaite que son Livre soit réimprimé après sa mort’ – is written in the present tense (il ‘souhaite’) and not in the past tense (il ‘souhaitait’),Footnote 71 which indicates that Locke was still alive when Coste copied out, in the CC, the corrected version of ii, §172, as Locke had reformulated it in the ‘Exemplar’ of Two treatises he had already prepared for posterity.Footnote 72 This evidence suggests that if some CC annotation were added right after Locke's death-when, true to his word, Coste undertook the second project by meticulously recording all the corrections Locke had made to the whole of Two treatises in view of his full translation of it, before turning more specifically to the Second treatise and reading it in the light of Mazel's translation of it-up until the moment he discovered how little Locke had left him in his will; others were made during Locke's lifetime, presumably when the first translation project was presented to Coste. At that time, the Huguenot translator was not, according to La Motte, very keen to retranslate Mazel's Du gouvernement. In that respect, it is to be noted that in certain places, Coste appeared to record carelessly some of Locke's corrections. When, in ii, §49 and ii, §159, he inserted the parentheses Locke had added to his text to facilitate the reading of long sentences, the Huguenot translator did not do his job properly. In ii, §49, he closed the parenthesis in the middle of a sub-clause, rendering the independent reading of the main clause incomprehensible, and in ii, §159, put them in the wrong place again. In both cases, those parenthetical marks were the only two things Locke seems to have added to his sentences. It thus seems totally unlikely that the master-copy was unreadable. Coste therefore had no excuse. It just seems that he was doing a botched job for, if he had really paid attention to what he was doing, he would undoubtedly have noticed that by closing those parentheses, he was not clarifying the text, as intended, but rendering it meaningless. Knowing that all those passages are to be found in the Second treatise, which is precisely the part of the work that Coste did originally not want to retranslate into French,Footnote 73 cannot we advance the case that it is when Coste refused to embrace the philosopher's first translation project, that is to say a few months before Locke's death, that he sloppily copied out, in the CC, emendations that Locke intended? So on top of containing annotations ranging from the mere duplication of the author's corrections to the translator's own insertions of emendations, the CC would also contain annotations ranging from the botched recording of Locke's intended emendations inserted during the philosopher's lifetime, to the meticulous recording of Locke's final corrections added right after his death.
However, all the emendations to be found in the CC do not belong to either of the two types just described, i.e. the more or less faithful duplication of the author's corrections, and the insertion of the translator's own annotations of the text. This is notably the case of the further correction of ii, §172. In order to account for it, I would like to argue that between the moment Coste copied out, on the end fly-leaf of the CC, the version of ii, §172 as he saw it couched in the exemplar Locke had prepared for posterity – ‘noxious brute that is destructive to their being’ – and the moment when, a few months later, Locke died, the author carried on improving his text. What seems to strengthen this hypothesis is that the version of ii, §172 to be found in the 1713–14 edition is identical to the formulation noted down in the marginalia of ii, §172, on page 301 of the CC – ‘noxious brutes with whom Mankind can have neither society nor security’. It is also worth noting that the ii, §172 marginalia were not crossed out, while other marginalia first inserted by Coste in the margins and spaces of the CC were then crossed out and removed, or crossed out to be formulated differently,Footnote 74 which proves that Locke changed his mind several times and that Coste took note of the various changes intended by the author. It is true he did not cross out the version of ii, §172 that he had first copied out on the end fly-leaf of the CC, but it is worth noting that whenever the version of the text underwent several changes – notably in ii, §19, ii, §26, and ii, §172 – the ultimate annotation made by Coste in the margins of the CC corresponds to the formulation to be found in the 1713–14 text. All of which suggests that the various late changes made by Locke to his text were recorded in the CC and that the final intended version was then included in the now lost master-copy. That is why instead of viewing the CC as ‘a copy incorporating Locke's final revisions’, I would like to argue that the CC was rather used as an active working document in which Locke remained engaged in the process of emendation. As such, it is a rich and unique document which enables us to follow the evolution of Locke's thought in the final months of his life. Moreover, I would like to point out that a minute study of the CC marginalia reveals that as well as being a unique palimpsest, this document also holds the key enabling us to understand not only what drove Locke to revise once again the text he wished to leave to posterity, but also how this text acquired its final form.
At this stage, it is perhaps worth recalling that Sami Savonius has remarked that some of Mazel's better readings seem to have been adopted in the CC.Footnote 75 To Savonius's perspicacious remark can be added that Locke also seems to have made small corrections to his text in the light of Mazel's misinterpretations. To give but one example, the modal ‘may’ was added in the margin of ii, §6, which had the effect of countering the way Mazel had filled the lacuna left by Locke in his original formulation of the passage.Footnote 76 Similarly, could Locke have spotted that in ii, §50 Mazel referred to a ‘mutual and unanimous consent’ in his translation of the passage, and therefore felt the need to fill the lacuna left in his original formulation by specifying, in his text for posterity, that it was a tacit and voluntary consent which had given rise to the use of money? What is relevant to note is that the CC marginal addition of ‘a tacit & voluntary’ is written in a thicker ink than the rest of the corrections to ii, §50, which seems to indicate that it was not added at the same time. If in the case of ii, §6, Locke's addition of ‘may’ was enough to solve the translation problem, in the case of ii, §50, it seems further correction of the original passage was needed. Of course, Locke could add precisions to his text when spotting that Mazel had been mistaken when filling out one of his lacunae, but he seems to have needed the linguistic skills of his French translator when the passages were more complex, to understand the deeper-rooted reasons why his predecessor had fallen into such pitfalls. That is probably the reason why ii, §50 evidences two layers of correction: the former, relatively superficial, could have been made by Locke himself, the latter, more complex, could have been the result of a collaborative work between Coste and Locke. In ii, §172, the existence of two layers of corrections is even easier to identify as the two variant readings of the passage do not figure on the same pages of the CC.
In any case, what we can be sure of is that ii, §50 was heavily corrected before being brought to its final form. Laslett himself described those corrections as made ‘at various times’,Footnote 77 and understandably so since the deletions and corrections are such a maze that Coste had to link one part of his correction to another to make sense of the emendations. So it is visually quite clear that this part of the text was greatly corrected, and above all that the corrections were inserted at various times. It is worth recalling at this stage that Laslett experienced some insuperable editorial difficulty when he tried to recover the text of ii, §50 from the CC. By contrast, his 1713–14 counterpart had apparently no trouble editing ii, §50 from the copy prepared by Locke for posterity. What those considerations cannot but lead us to infer is that the correcting process was carried out in ii, §50 of the CC – which would represent the foul-copy – and the correction then adopted by Locke for inclusion in the master-copy – or fair-copy.Footnote 78 The question it raises of course is how and why Coste was involved in the process of correcting the English text of Two treatises, which Locke wished to leave for posterity.
To start with, it should be noted that the correction of ii, §50 consists in both the correction and the extension of a sentence, which gives rise to one of the longest additions to the text, but that ii, §50 is unmistakably different from all the other longer additions to the text preceding it in terms of the nature of the correction made to the passage. Far from consisting in the addition of a biblical quotation, a personal comment, a further argument, or a digressive remark, as is respectively the case in i, §§58 and 154 and ii, §§37 and 42, the long addition to ii, §50 turns out to provide an explanatory gloss on the original sentence which is rewritten to that effect. Not a single new idea is introduced. The aim is simply to clarify a point, namely the way in which accumulation of possessions was made practicable.Footnote 79
It is true that in the earlier versions of the text (the 1690, 1694, and 1698 editions), Locke had not been very specific about the origins of property. He had simply referred to ‘the consent of Men’, stating that it was ‘by consent’ that men had ‘found out and agreed in a way how a Man may rightfully, and without injury, possess more than he himself can make use of by receiving Gold and Silver, which may continue long in a Mans Possession, without decaying for the overplus’ (ii, §50). There was therefore scope for specifying which type of consent had brought about the use of money, which is precisely the clarification that appeared in the CC. But what is striking is not so much that the reformulation made it clear that it was tacitly that men had accepted the use of money, and as such inequality of possessions, than the didactic aspect of the tone adopted in the explanatory gloss. Consider the passage:
It is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metals not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This Partage of things, in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of Society, and without Compact only by putting a Value on Gold and Silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money. For in Governments, the Laws regulate the right of Property, and the possession of Land is determined by positive Constitutions.Footnote 80
Note the presence of ‘and’ which reveals that it is not just in one but two important ways that Locke had been misunderstood, which begs the questions of who it is that had not understood how inequality had arisen, and who it is that had not understood that for Locke, the accumulation of possessions had started as early as in the state of nature. It was a crucial point in so far as the introduction of money heralded, so to speak, the beginning of the end by triggering the disruption of the natural order and the necessity to create a new social order designed to make the actions of men comply again with the precepts of God.Footnote 81 On a proper understanding of this crucial point therefore hinged a proper understanding of the argument of Two treatises.Footnote 82
It is perhaps worth recalling, at this stage, that Locke was, according to La Motte, ‘greatly dissatisfied’ with Mazel's French translation of his work.Footnote 83 If we turn to Du gouvernement to assess how Mazel fared in the translation of ii, §50, we are not surprised to discover that he failed to translate that it was in the state of nature that the accumulation of possessions had started. What is more, he grossly misunderstood the significance of the passage in which Locke explained how inequality had arisen, by giving the impression that appropriation was conventional,Footnote 84 resting on ‘the mutual and unanimous consent of men’,Footnote 85 whereas for Locke appropriation was first and foremost natural,Footnote 86 and ‘Compact and Agreement’ only ‘settled the Property which Labour and Industry began’.Footnote 87 So it is clear that, in this passage, Mazel had completely ‘mangled the sense of the Author’.Footnote 88 We are therefore not surprised that Locke should have wished to secure a ‘better translation’ of Two treatises into French, for posterity.
However, for all its weakness, Mazel's translation testifies to his grappling with ii, §50 in an effort to make sense of a passage which, in its original form, was not clear. Indeed, the original passage took the form of one longwinded sentence, in which Locke jumped from one consideration to another without properly demarcating his propositions. By contrast, the structure of the text Locke left to posterity is extremely rigorous, the didactic tone adopted contributing to the clarity of the passage which falls into three clear-cut sentences. As such, the rewriting of the passage amounted just as much to an improvement of style as to a clarification of meaning.
It is in that respect reminiscent of the effect Coste's French translations of Locke's other works had on the English originals.Footnote 89 Coste's foreword to the reader and Locke's letter to the libraire-éditeur, as printed in the first edition of the Essai philosophique (1700), attest that before sending his translation of Locke's Essay concerning human understanding to the press, Coste had read it out loud to the author so that he could check the faithfulness of the translation to the original.Footnote 90 Moreover, in his 1705 ‘Eloge’ of Locke Jean Le ClercFootnote 91 revealed that Coste's work on this French translation made Locke aware of obscurities in his text and prompted him to clarify the original: ‘The Author being present, he corrected several places in the Original, that he might make them more plain and easie to translate.’Footnote 92 La Motte's testimony confirms that Coste's difficulty in translating the Essay ‘enabled Mr. Locke to clarify many a passage that were found obscure’. He even specifies that Locke ‘eagerly lent himself’ to being ‘consult[ed]’ by Coste. But if he acknowledges that Coste ‘could never have reached the end of his translation’ if he had not been able to ‘consult the author at any time’, he also indicates that Locke ‘made the most of it’ to clarify many a passage.Footnote 93 As such, Locke and Coste's collaborative work contributed both to the success of Coste's French translation and to the improvement of Locke's English original text. It was a real two-way exchange.
Coste publicly highlighted this modus operandi in the revised foreword to the second edition of the Essai philosophique (1729). There, he pointed out the positive influence his work on the French translation of the Essay had had on the English text of the Essay itself, indicating that the fourth English edition had gained in clarity and precision over the preceding ones thanks to it.Footnote 94 Indeed English readers seem to have noticed the difference.Footnote 95 In the 1708 foreword to De l'education des enfans, Coste boasted less about the debt Locke owed him as far as the improvement of the style of the English original was concerned, more that Locke had adopted one of his ideas for inclusion in Some thoughts concerning education.Footnote 96 All of which suggests that Locke's original texts gained much from Coste's translation of them. Could this have been one of the reasons why the project of a French translation of his political work was so ‘dear’ to him?
We can now turn to ii, §172, in order to focus more specifically on the two variant readings of the passage, which do not figure on the same pages of the CC (one appears in its place in the text (on page 301) and the other on the end fly-leaf). The remarks made by Laslett concerning the sharpening of Locke's sentiment against despots in between the initial and posthumous versions of Two treatises seems to me very cogent,Footnote 97 especially in the light of two additions – first, the addition, on the fly-leaf facing the title, of the quotation from Livy denouncing the savagery of despots and second, the addition in the margins of i, §58 of the quotation from Psalm 106:38 highlighting that the wrath of God was incurred by the shedding of innocent blood – whose presence in the posthumous edition seems to indicate that they were both sanctioned by Locke for inclusion in his text for posterity. However, Locke's insistence on the despots' forfeiture of their humanity should not blind us to his no less forceful insistence on the fact that by stooping to the level of beasts, it is in a ‘State of War’ against the whole of mankind that despots put themselves. Laslett seems to have missed the point when he noted: ‘except for the word “their”, this [the version of ii, §172 recorded by Coste on the end fly-leaf of the CC, i.e. ‘noxious brute that is destructive to their being’] is a reversion to the text of the early printed editions [i.e. ‘noxious brute that is destructive to his being’]’,Footnote 98 for his comment gave the misleading impression that in his text for posterity, Locke had reverted to the wording of the early printings, when, in fact, the one important change in the sentence was the correction of ‘his’ to ‘their’. This slight change belied the import of what was at stake, i.e. the proper understanding of Locke's meaning. For, with the first correction to ii, §172, Locke seems to have reacted to the French translation of the passage by Mazel who not just once, but twice, misinterpreted Locke to mean that only the injured party had a right to destroy the despot.Footnote 99 It was, however, not a case of seeking ‘reparation’ for a crime, as Mazel intimated, but of ‘punishing’ the crime for ‘restraint’,Footnote 100 the whole society being threatened by the despot's ‘Breach of the Peace’.Footnote 101 Hence, Locke's clarification: despots are destructive not just of the being of the victim – i.e. of ‘his’ being – but of the being of the whole society – of ‘their’ being.
At this stage, the clarification of ii, §172 was very tentative, but it was superseded by a forceful assertion whose tone and nature cannot but remind us of the effect the second correction of ii, §50 had on Locke's final text for posterity. Indeed, one cannot but be struck by the profoundly didactic tone adopted and, once again, the reformulation has the effect of spelling out the meaning of Locke more clearly, while offering an important corrective to the French translator's interpretation of the passage. Mazel's ‘[the aggressor] exposes his Life and Property to the hands of the injured party’Footnote 102 seems to be directly countered by: ‘he renders himself liable to be destroyed by the injur'd person and the rest of mankind, that will joyn with him in the execution of Justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute with whom Mankind can have neither Society nor Security’.Footnote 103 What is put into sharper relief is ‘the common bond whereby humane kind is united into one fellowship and societie’,Footnote 104 which is the key to understanding why, by declaring a state of war against even just one party, a despot represents a threat to the preservation of the whole of society and is therefore liable to be destroyed by any member of the society, whether they belong to the injured party or not.
What the Mazel-triggered correction of ii, §50 has in common with the Mazel-triggered correction of ii, §172 is that neither of them was made ex nihilo. Both the addition of ‘a tacit & voluntary’ consent in ii, §50, and the correction of ii, §172 to ‘noxious brute that is destructive to their being’ seem to have figured in the copy prepared for posterity, before Locke and Coste's discussion of Mazel's translation of the passages led to the superimposition of a second layer of corrections which had the effect of spelling out the meaning of Locke more clearly, and thereby of facilitating the future translation task of Coste.Footnote 105 By contrast, the third layer of corrections added by Coste after Locke's death was not sanctioned by Locke and, even if it seems to have been triggered by Mazel's misinterpretation of the English original, it appeared in passages not previously corrected by Locke. As such, those additional corrections do not have their rightful place in a scholarly edition of Two treatises.
With its three layers of annotations inserted, most of them during Locke's lifetime, but also some others after his death, the CC is a rich document that, among other things, enables us to follow the train of Locke's political thought in the last months of his life. Besides, the CC reveals the manner in which Locke's prose and ideas were honed to greater perfection and shows that the exchanges that Mazel's misunderstandings triggered between author and translator were useful to them both – Coste could thereby prepare an improved French translation of Two treatises, and Locke could not only make sure of the good interpretation of his work by his second translator, but also clarify the sense of the English text and thereby leave to posterity an English version of Two treatises with some of its ambiguities removed. Finally, it enables us to see Coste undertaking meticulous preparatory work for his French translation after Locke's death. So, boasting as it does not one but two writers – the author and his French translator – grappling with the text in the margins, the CC can be defined as an active working document, belonging as much to the francophone world of Huguenot exile as to an anglophone publishing schedule. It is, as such, an artefact of transcultural dialogue.
The implication of such a reassessment of the nature and purpose of the CC is that the CC cannot represent the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death. The only version which, I believe, can qualify for such a status is the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises, which incorporated Locke's final revisions without marring the text by including Coste's further emendations. It therefore seems to me that students and scholars alike should handle Laslett's reigning edition of Two treatises with greater care until a new edition, based on the 1713–14 edition of the text, is produced.Footnote 106 Ideally, Laslett's edition of Two treatises would have to be overhauled by just as scholarly an edition of the text as his 1960 edition of it, the introduction and notes to the new edition appealing to a wide range of readers – historians, philosophers, political economists, linguists – by reaping the benefits of the findings of this article, notably in terms of the reinterpretation of some key passages of the English text amended by Locke in the margins of the CC, in the light of their French translation. Thus, by bringing to the fore the context in which the text Locke wished to leave to posterity was produced, the new edition could pay homage to Laslett's methodological legacy while offering modern readers the version of Two treatises which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death.
All this reveals the significance of the francophone dimension of Locke's circle of influence, and invites historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not to overlook the importance that French language and culture enjoyed at that time. While it is true that few authors of the period could, like Locke, work with their French translators to make sure their works were faithfully translated into the lingua franca of the day, and fewer still invited their French translators to participate in collaborative authorship or improvement of their original English texts,Footnote 107 it cannot be denied that the presence of Coste in the same household as Locke enabled the English writer to hone his prose and ideas to greater perfection. Such a francophone context of production or betterment of texts was paralleled, in the case of Locke, by the role that the Huguenots of the Refuge played in disseminating the ideas of the English philosopher, and shaping both the reputation of the man and the reception of his works.Footnote 108 So, overall, Locke probably owes more than any other English thinker to his French connections.
