Dividing Locke from God

Abstract

A “recent consensus” has emerged in Locke studies that has sought to place theology at the center of Locke's political philosophy, insisting that the validity and cogency of Locke's political conclusions cannot be substantiated independently of the theology that resides at their foundation. This paper argues for the need to distance Locke from God, claiming that not only can we “bracket” the normative conclusions of Locke's political philosophy from their theological foundations, but that this was in fact Locke's own intention, intent as he was to justify these conclusions to a diverse political audience often divided by faith. In other words, this “recent consensus” in Locke studies is premised on an erroneous understanding of Locke's political philosophy, even as advanced by Locke himself. Locke's own philosophical discourse bears witness to the very “bracketing” of his political conclusions from their theological foundations that these Locke scholars claim is impossible.

Keywords

Locke God Proast Rawls Waldron

Few scholars have ever doubted the sincerity of John Locke’s Christianity.¹ From his early writings on natural law to his Reasonableness of Christianity and A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, Locke gave eloquent expression to his deep religious faith and the importance that he placed upon it in his own life and in the lives of others. As he put it in his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’:

Every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery; whose happiness depending upon his believing and doing those things in this life which are necessary to the obtaining of God’s favor, and are prescribed by God to that end, it follows from thence … that the observance of these things is the highest obligation that lies upon mankind, and that our utmost care, application, and diligence ought to be exercised in the search and performance of them, because there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.²

Yet Locke also made clear that these religious concerns had no role in the foundations of civil societies, or, as we shall see, in either the justification or the ends of governments within them. As he put it:

Commonwealths, or civil societies and government, if you will believe the judicious Mr. Hooker, are, as St. Peter calls them (I Pet., ii. 13) … the contrivance and institution of man. … You must show them such a commission, if you say it is from God. And in all societies instituted by man, the ends of them can be no other than what the institutors appointed; which I am sure could not be their spiritual and eternal interest.³

Yet while seeking, in the passage above, to exclude religion as a specific source of political society, it is nevertheless true that, at the broadest level, Locke, as a sincere Christian, saw all the world, even the political world, as part of God's creation. Yet some Locke scholars, while justifiably acknowledging these theological sources at the root of Locke’s political philosophy, have sought to reduce both the meaning and the justification of this philosophy to those sources. As Michael Zuckert writes:

There is now something of a consensus growing up around the proposition that Locke’s political thought is religious, perhaps thoroughly theological, dependent on the Bible as a source of important premises and conclusions for his reasoning. … This governing consensus is not exactly new, but it is recent.⁴

Two scholars who have done more than anyone else to establish this ‘recent consensus’, albeit in very different ways, are John Dunn and Jeremy Waldron. Alex Tuckness has described both thinkers as providing the ‘dominant view’ of Locke on toleration, and has described this ‘dominant view’ as follows:

The dominant view of Locke is that while he was more tolerant than most of his generation, the theory of toleration he adopted is simply too narrow to provide an adequate basis for a modern doctrine.⁵

John Dunn most famously asserted this view, insisting that the irreducibly Christian foundations of Locke’s political philosophy limit its relevance for contemporary purposes.⁶ Jeremy Waldron, on the other hand, has recently made a concerted effort to resurrect the contemporary relevance of Locke’s political philosophy – ironically on the basis of these very same Christian sources.⁷ The influence of Waldron’s interpretation has been immense. Michael Zuckert has said that ‘Jeremy Waldron’s much noted book, God, Locke and Equality, has put the topic of “God and Equality in Locke” at the center of many, perhaps most, discussions of Locke these days’.⁸ This influence can also be seen in the fact that The Review of Politics, in 2005, devoted an entire issue to a symposium on Waldron’s book.⁹ Indeed the widespread influence of Waldron’s perspective suggests that he may be in the process of creating a new ‘dominant view’ of Locke – one very different to that referred to by Tuckness above.

And yet, as this article will show, both Waldron’s and Dunn’s perspectives on Locke, despite their differences, are fundamentally flawed – in the case of Waldron, in ways largely missed by his Review of Politics critics.¹⁰ It is true that Locke’s political philosophy retains a modern relevance and an applicability to contemporary circumstances, but this is despite its Christian foundations, not, as Waldron claims, because of them. In fact, as we shall see, Locke went so far as to justify the political conclusions of his philosophy on non-theological grounds, in ways entirely missed by Dunn and Waldron, and it is this fact, centered on Locke’s own intentions, which, above all else, underwrites his contemporary significance.

In this way, this article seeks to advance an alternative conception of Locke to the ‘recent consensus’ referred to above. Above all, it insists that Locke sought to separate the justification of his political conclusions from their theological foundations, and he did this to ensure the legitimacy of these conclusions to an audience which, Locke knew, was often fundamentally divided by faith, but nevertheless needed to coexist peacefully within civil societies.

Waldron and Dunn

John Dunn has been described as ‘probably the best-known interpreter of Locke’s political thought’.¹¹ It is Dunn who famously insisted on the irreducible and inextricable presence of Christianity within Locke’s political philosophy, claiming that this philosophy cannot be understood, either in terms of its meaning, interpretation, or intent, independently of this religious presence. As Dunn put it:

[Locke’s] thinking in its entirety was shaped and dominated by a picture of the earthly setting of human life as a created order, an order designed and controlled by an omnipotent, omniscient and also, mercifully, benevolent deity: the God of the Christians.¹²

Dunn has insisted that this pervasive presence of Christianity in Locke’s political philosophy renders it largely redundant for present purposes. For instance, in his early book on Locke’s Two Treatises, Dunn wrote:

I simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters. The only argument in his entire political philosophy which does seem to me still to be interesting as a starting point for reflection about any issue of contemporary political theory is the theme of the Letters on Toleration, and in Locke’s thought this rests firmly upon a religious premise. Indeed one of the central expository points made throughout this book is the intimate dependence of an extremely high proportion of Locke’s arguments for their very intelligibility, let alone plausibility, on a series of theological commitments.¹³

Alex Tuckness claims that in insisting, in this manner, on the extent to which ‘Locke’s thought depends heavily on various Christian assumptions that were prevalent in Locke’s era’, John Dunn ‘altered the direction of Locke scholarship’.¹⁴ In a more recent discussion of Locke’s political philosophy, Dunn has qualified his position above, suggesting that there is one aspect of Locke’s political philosophy, centered on ‘the contractarian approach to the understanding of legitimate authority’, that retains a contemporary significance independent of Locke’s Christian foundations.¹⁵ ‘What has killed off the others as Locke conceived them’, Dunn tells us, ‘or on the whole as they have been rethought by subsequent and more secular thinkers, is principally the extinction of Locke’s Christian conception of the nature of the human habitat and the role of the human species, at least as an animating frame of current theoretical understanding.’¹⁶

Jeremy Waldron has acknowledged the importance of Dunn’s contribution to Locke scholarship. As he put it:

I have learned more from John Dunn’s study of Locke than from anyone else’s; indeed it was Professor Dunn who set me off on this project with his startling claim that ‘Jesus Christ (and Saint Paul) may not appear in person in the text of the Two Treatises but their presence can hardly be missed when we come upon the normative creaturely equality of all men in virtue of their shared species-membership’.¹⁷

Yet whereas Dunn has insisted that the Christian elements of Locke’s political philosophy largely confirm, at least for our present purposes, that philosophy’s demise, Jeremy Waldron has insisted that it is precisely this aspect of Locke’s political philosophy that ensures its continuing relevance for the present. This is because, in Waldron’s view, a commitment to the fundamentally modern principle of equality is incapable of being advanced on a philosophically coherent basis unless it draws on religious premises. As he put it:

I actually don’t think it is clear that we – now – can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation.¹⁸

Waldron sees his views in this respect as very much in accordance with Locke’s own:

It is not reasonable, [Locke] suggests, to think that you can proceed safely in public discourse or in public life, without accepting the theism which in Locke’s view is an indispensable basis for equality and social stability. [As Locke states], ‘The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all’.¹⁹

And so contrary to Dunn, far from the theological elements of Locke’s political philosophy being a pre-modern residue that undermines that philosophy’s contemporary relevance, Waldron insists that it is precisely these aspects of Locke’s philosophy that confirm this relevance. Waldron explicitly distinguishes his position from Dunn’s in this respect.²⁰

Now the position that I argue for in this article is distinct from both Dunn’s and Waldron’s. On the one hand, like Waldron, I defend Locke’s contemporary significance, insisting on the relevance of his political philosophy for our own circumstances. But it is a defense that assumes the cogency of Dunn’s critique. In other words, if the conclusions of Locke’s political philosophy are inseparable from their theological foundations, as both Dunn and Waldron suppose, then I believe Dunn would be correct in insisting that these aspects of Locke’s philosophy make it redundant for contemporary purposes, confining it to a pre-modern past, if only because (as Dunn insists) so few people can share these theological assumptions today.²¹ This, of course, would still leave me open to Waldron’s objection that irrespective of the numbers of people who today can affirm Locke’s theological presuppositions, a philosophically coherent conception of equality may be impossible without them.²² But as this article will demonstrate below, both considerations are beside the point because Locke in no way sought to make the normative conclusions of his political philosophy dependent on their theological foundations. Indeed he sought quite the reverse, given the religious divisions of his time, as he wanted to advance his political philosophy on grounds that a diverse audience (even ‘pagans’) could affirm irrespective of their theological point of view.²³ In other words, not only can we divide Locke from God, but when it came to the justification of his political philosophy, this was in fact Locke’s own intention. To the extent that Waldron and Dunn fail to perceive this ‘secular’ aspect of Locke’s political philosophy, but instead insist on a Locke who believed it was ‘not reasonable … to think that you can proceed safely in public discourse or in public life, without accepting the theism which … is an indispensable basis for equality and social stability’, then it is Waldron and Dunn who are in error.²⁴

Due to limits of space I will focus primarily on Waldron, since of the two, it is he who offers the most recent interpretation of Locke. But given the influence of Dunn’s interpretation within the broader Locke scholarship, I have also drawn on Dunn where necessary and/or appropriate.

Waldron, Locke and equality

Early in his book God, Locke and Equality, Jeremy Waldron regales us with a reminiscence. It is about a much younger Jeremy Waldron who encounters the eminent historian of ideas, Alasdair MacIntyre, at Oxford University. The reminiscence is as follows:

When I was in Oxford in 1982, I heard the Carlyle Lectures delivered that year by Alasdair MacIntyre. I remember being very struck by MacIntyre’s observation that, as he read the Two Treatises of Government, the arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, to be taught in the public schools of the United States of America. And maybe he is right: a constitution interpreted in a way that prohibits even a non-sectarian blessing by a rabbi at the beginning of a public high school graduation [Lee v Weisman, 505, US 577 (1992)] is certainly in no position to allow students to be instructed in a doctrine of equality or equal protection that takes as its premise the proposition that we are ‘all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business’ (2nd T: 6). But I also remember in 1982 balking at this characterization of MacIntyre’s, fancying myself as an expert on the Second Treatise, and arguing (in a paper that I still have, but had the good sense not to try to publish) that the theology could be bracketed out of Locke’s theory and that, as it were, a defensible secular conception of equality would remain. Readers may reasonably assume that, seventeen years later, I would not have given the lectures on which this book is based … had I not had second thoughts about that bracketing possibility. So let me put the question: Why are we not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke’s commitment to equality? Why can’t we put the religious premises in parentheses – leaving them available for anyone who needs that sort of persuasion, but not presented as an integral part of the package – and still be left with something recognizably egalitarian in its content, which even an atheist could support?²⁵

Of course, Waldron spends the rest of his book answering this very question. He insists that MacIntyre was right – that we cannot interpret and understand Locke’s political philosophy independently of this ‘theological dimension’ and these ‘religious premises’, and that these latter cannot be ‘bracketed’ off from Locke’s political philosophy as a whole.²⁶ And yet it is my argument that not only is such bracketing possible, it was in fact Locke’s own intention. Waldron denies any such possibility, pointing to the equality at the center of Locke’s political philosophy:

Locke’s equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them. The theological content cannot simply be bracketed off as a curiosity. It shapes and informs the account through and through. … And so there is no way round it – Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine; it is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God.²⁷

It is true that equality is central to Locke’s political philosophy. This is particularly the case when it comes to individual rights. As Locke put it in the ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’: ‘the sum of all we drive at is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others’.²⁸ Indeed, Locke insisted that such rights ought to be extended equally to all members of civil society, irrespective of faith or theology – ‘Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.’²⁹ Given this centrality of equality to Locke’s political philosophy, if, as Waldron claims, Locke’s conception of equality cannot be understood outside of its ‘theological content’, then it is understandable that Waldron believes that no ‘bracketing’ of this ‘theological content’ is possible within Locke’s political philosophy.³⁰

We have seen that, in advancing this position, Waldron nailed his own philosophical colors to the mast by insisting that, in his personal view, it was not possible to ‘shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation’.³¹ For Waldron, therefore, any bracketing of Locke’s ‘theological content’ is inconceivable, not only in terms of Locke’s own perspective but from the perspective of a coherent defense of equality itself. Moreover, in joining Locke in what he believed was Locke’s insistence on the inherently theological foundations of equality, Waldron was aware of just how much he was moving against the secular spirit of contemporary liberal philosophy. As he put it:

The hope that some trick like this can be pulled off, the belief that some such bracketing must be possible – if not for Locke’s theory, then perhaps for Kant’s, or at least for some recognizable commitment to equality – this hope is crucial for modern secular liberalism.³²

‘Very tight indeed’

As we have seen, Waldron claimed that Locke’s conception of equality ‘makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God’.³³ In this respect, Waldron’s argument in God, Locke and Equality centers on what I call Locke’s ‘two key theological passages’ in the Two Treatises (§§ 4 and 6) where Locke sets out the normative relationship that he perceives between man and God.³⁴ As we shall see, it is Waldron’s reversal of this relationship that constitutes the crucial interpretive move by which he underwrites his claim that the ‘theological content’ of Locke’s political philosophy cannot be ‘bracketed’ from its normative conclusions. As such, it is only by ascribing to Locke a position concerning the relationship between man and God, which is the reverse of the one that Locke actually articulates in the Two Treatises, that Waldron is able to advance his case.

This reversal of Locke is the end-product of a series of stages that occur in Waldron’s argument in God, Locke and Equality. The first stage concerns his discussion of the theological foundations of Locke’s political philosophy, which center on the relationship between man and God discussed above, and that Locke articulates in his ‘two key theological passages’ in the Two Treatises. Waldron refers to this part of Locke’s argument in the Two Treatises by the number (1) quoted in the passage below. The second stage concerns the way in which these theological foundations lead (in Waldron’s opinion) to the political conclusions that Locke arrives at in that text, concerning our obligations to obey government authority and the need for consent to ensure these obligations. Waldron refers to this aspect of Locke’s argument as (2) in the passage below. He insists that within the Two Treatises, (1) leads directly to (2), the relationship between them being ‘very tight indeed’, with the result that the political conclusions of Locke’s Two Treatises (2) cannot be bracketed from the theological foundations (1) from which they arise:

[T]he Second Treatise begins with (1) an account of the ‘State all Men are naturally in’ (2nd T: 4), which is an elemental account of their relation to their Creator and their relation to others in virtue of their relation to their Creator, and it proceeds to (2) an account of what is required before anyone can be subjected to the political power of another: ‘Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent’ (2nd T: 95) … [I]t seems to me that the relation between (2) and (1) is very tight indeed. With a few exceptions … any exclusion at the level of (2) – whose consent is required? – has to be represented as an exclusion at the level of (1) – to whom does natural law apply? And that is quite serious because (1) is the basis not only of a person’s elementary rights, but also of his subjection to the duties of natural law. Unless a wedge can be driven between (2) and (1), it would seem to follow that if some individual X is not one of ‘the people’ for the purposes of (2), he cannot plausibly be represented as obligated by the laws of nature, and so authority cannot legitimately be exercised over him on the basis that he is so obligated.³⁵

In this passage, Waldron claims that the normative relationship between God and man (1) is the primary determinant, for Locke, of whose consent is authoritative for government and therefore who can be said to be obligated to obey government (2). In Waldron’s interpretation of Locke, therefore, theological assumptions underwrite, inform and substantiate political conclusions. The textual reference that Waldron uses most consistently to illustrate (1) (the normative relationship between God and man) is the second of the ‘two key theological passages’ in the Two Treatises, regarding our equal status as God’s creatures. As Locke states:

For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.³⁶

Waldron continually reiterates this passage, as well as § 4 from the same text (quoted at note 39 below) to emphasize the theological foundations of Locke’s political philosophy – i.e. (1) – where (1) refers to the ‘particular account of the relation between man and God’ that (according to Waldron) underwrites the political conclusions Locke reaches in (2).³⁷ Now there are two key features of Locke’s passage immediately above that need to be understood if we are to understand Locke aright. The first is that, read in terms of its literal meaning, what Locke is describing in this passage is an objective status – our status as God’s creatures. And taken in and of itself, what the passage indicates is that this status as ‘creatures’ is determined not by us but by He who created us, thereby making us His property. In other words, our status as God’s creatures is not determined subjectively, by anything we think or do on our own account – either in terms of our own beliefs or actions or our views about God Himself. None of these, after all, determined that we be created and given the status of ‘creatures’. Rather, it seems, our status as God’s creatures is determined entirely by God, in terms of His progenitive capacity in creating us, and His prerogative in doing so. It is precisely this relationship between God and man, articulated in the passage above, that (we shall see) Waldron seeks ultimately to reverse, and, having reversed, ascribe to Locke.

The second feature of Locke’s passage above (and one with which Waldron would be in entire agreement) is that it provides the normative foundation underwriting Locke’s claims in the Two Treatises concerning human equality, where this equality is dependent on our equal status as God’s creatures. This is evident in the wider context in which the passage is situated, where Locke uses it to support the proposition that mankind, ‘being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions’.³⁸ Yet it is also evident elsewhere in the Two Treatises where Locke again cites our equal status as God’s creatures to justify our basic equality as human beings, and therefore our rights and duties in relation to each other:

… there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted Right to Dominion and Sovereignty.³⁹

This passage, and the one preceding it at note 36 above, constitute what I call the ‘two key theological passages’ in Locke’s Two Treatises (§§ 4 and 6). They are the passages most cited by Waldron as the textual basis for his claim that the conclusions of Locke’s political philosophy (2) have a theological foundation (1).⁴⁰ But they are also the basis for Waldron’s further claim that, the relation between (2) and (1) being ‘very tight indeed’, the former cannot be justified except in terms of the latter, with the result that no ‘bracketing’ of (1) in relation to (2) is possible.⁴¹

Waldron’s theological Locke

As we have seen, Waldron is thoroughly in sympathy with what he believes to be Locke’s attempt to affirm a religious justification of equality, stating that he is ‘inclined to believe … that a commitment to human equality is most coherent and attractive when it is grounded in theological truth, truths associated particularly with the Christian heritage’.⁴² Indeed, Waldron goes so far as to claim that we cannot even ‘understand’ Locke’s conception of equality outside of this frame of reference.⁴³

An atheist, according to Waldron, could only ‘come up with’ something like Locke’s concept of equality if that concept could be conceived and justified independently of theological foundations.⁴⁴ But Waldron denies any such possibility, insisting that the theological foundation of equality is inseparable from the justification of equality itself:

The hypothesis that we might be able to bracket out the religious content and concentrate on equality itself presupposes that the religious content has a purely external relation to the equality principle. By an external relation, I mean a relation that does not go to the meaning of the principle in question.⁴⁵

Waldron rejects any such suggestion, insisting that our very understanding of a principle is ‘necessarily sensitive to the reasons that are given in support of the principle’.⁴⁶ It is on this basis, therefore, that Waldron is able to go so far as to claim that not only Locke’s conception of equality, but also his conception of what it is to be ‘human’, and the equality that arises from this status (as articulated in §§ 4 and 6 of the Two Treatises) cannot be understood independently (or ‘externally’) from the theological justifications that Locke provides in support of these claims:

I shall argue in this chapter that, in Locke’s account, the shape of human, the way in which the extension of the predicate ‘human’ is determined, is not in the end separable from the religious reasons that Locke cites in support of basic equality.⁴⁷

It is here, in Waldron’s claim that, for Locke, the concept of ‘human’ cannot be understood or advanced independently of theological assumptions, that we see the beginnings of Waldron’s reversal of Locke’s relationship between God and man referred to above. This is because Waldron’s concern with Locke’s concept of ‘human’, as articulated by Locke in §§ 4 and 6 of the Two Treatises, leads Waldron from that text to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and to the apparent contradiction that, in the latter text, Locke questions the very coherence of the concept of ‘human’ altogether. It is in his confrontation with this apparent contradiction, and in his attempts to resolve it, that Waldron, beginning in the following section, imports a whole series of concepts like ‘range properties’ and ‘interests’, and is able to complete those stages of his argument that ultimately leads to the reversal of Locke’s relationship between God and man discussed above.

The Two Treatises and the Essay: an attempted reconciliation

Waldron insists that Locke’s reference to ‘Man’ and ‘human species’ in the two key theological passages of the Two Treatises, and the claims to equality that he associates with these, is entirely at odds with the ‘species skepticism’ that Locke exhibits in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he questions whether the concept of ‘human species’ has any self-evident meaning at all.⁴⁸ According to Waldron, this contradiction between Locke’s two texts is, to all appearances, damning for Locke’s project in the Two Treatises:

The danger that this poses to the moral and political argument is enormous. Species-distinctions, Locke says in the Essay, are just human conventions. But the special status of humanity and the equality of all members of the human species is asserted in the Two Treatises as a matter of natural law. It is fundamental to the whole basis on which Locke proposes to examine and evaluate human conventions. … His approach in the Two Treatises and in his other political writings is explicitly foundationalist, and the trouble with the argument about species in the Essay is that it appears to knock away the foundation on which Locke purports to be building.⁴⁹

Now Waldron might have left this contradiction alone by invoking the opinion of Peter Laslett, the editor of the standard edition of Locke’s Two Treatises, who frankly acknowledged the contradictions between the Two Treatises and the Essay, stating:

Locke is, perhaps, the least consistent of all the great philosophers, and pointing out the contradictions either within any of his works or between them is no difficult task. Sometimes it seems quite clear that he was unconscious of his inconsistency, at other times. … he himself realized his dilemma, but was unable to find a solution. … It is natural that posterity should have chosen to look upon the philosophical and the political work as complementary. But Locke himself … was perfectly willing, indeed very anxious, that they should be seen apart.⁵⁰

Waldron rejects Laslett’s view that ‘Locke’s politics can and should be studied in more or less complete isolation from the rest of his philosophy’.⁵¹ As Waldron writes: ‘I think it is fair to say that this view is no longer as widely accepted among historians of ideas as it used to be.’⁵² Instead, Waldron insists that we should try to overcome the contradictions between the Two Treatises and the Essay as an ‘act of faith in the unity of Locke’s thought’.⁵³

In the name of this ‘act of faith’, Waldron seeks to provide empirical evidence that Locke himself expected us to read the two texts as consistent with each other. But all he can provide as evidence is a single 3-sentence passage from the 748-page text of the Essay itself in which, he says, Locke considered the implication of his philosophy in the Essay for ‘morals and politics’.⁵⁴ Waldron then cites this single passage as proof that Locke did not ‘aim to seal off the one discussion from the other’, thereby, he says, making ‘nonsense of the Laslett thesis that he wrote his philosophy wearing an entirely different hat, without regard to its implications for political theory’.⁵⁵ Needless to say, this claim concerning Locke’s alleged desire for consistency between the Two Treatises and the Essay is an enormously long bow to draw on the basis of a 3-sentence passage from a 748-page text, particularly as Waldron himself admits that, with the exception of this ‘one exceptional passage in the Essay’, Locke himself does not give us much hope that the contradictions between the two texts could be reconciled nor, indeed, did he show much ‘awareness in either work that they need to be reconciled’.⁵⁶

Nevertheless, Waldron’s insistence on reconciling, as an ‘act of faith in the unity of Locke’s thought’, the apparent contradiction between Locke’s emphasis on ‘human species’ in the Two Treatises and his skepticism regarding this concept in the Essay, means that he can now set up a series of questions that demand answers – questions that, in Waldron’s argument, can only be answered by importing those concepts such as ‘interests’ and ‘range properties’ which (as mentioned above) allow him ultimately to reverse the normative relationship Locke establishes in the Two Treatises between God and man. It is therefore Waldron’s insistence that the Two Treatises be reconciled with the Essay Concerning Human Understanding which allows him to embark on the process whereby this reversal takes place.

So how does Waldron go about reconciling these two very different texts? In the first place, in order to circumvent the species skepticism of the Essay, Waldron insists on the need to identify those creatures who, Locke supposes in the Two Treatises, enjoy the rank of equality, and then distinguish these from those ‘inferior ranks’ which, Locke says, are made for our ‘use’.⁵⁷ Yet the skepticism of the Essay does not allow us to do this:

… the point about Locke’s anti-essentialism [in the Essay] is that it leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundaries of humanity wherever he likes. … Locke’s skepticism really does discredit the whole enterprise. It leaves him with no naturalistic basis whatsoever for distinguishing those creatures one is allowed to hunt, exploit, enslave, or eat from those that must not be treated in any of these ways.⁵⁸

As we shall see in the next section, it is the search for the point of demarcation identifying those creatures with a rank of equality, and therefore to whom obligations are owed, from all others made for our ‘use’, which leads to the next stage of Waldron’s argument, concerning ‘range properties’ and ‘interests’. Yet what is important to recognize at this point is that the necessity for this search arises solely from an exegetical problem introduced by Waldron himself, centered on the need to impose consistency between the Two Treatises and the Essay, a need that itself arises solely on the basis of Waldron’s own ‘act of faith in the unity of Locke’s thought’.⁵⁹ It is, in other words, a problem entirely of Waldron’s own making. Once he insists (contrary to Laslett) that the Two Treatises must be read as consistent with the Essay, he is able to engage in the search for the point of demarcation referred to above, via ‘range properties’, ‘interests’ and other concepts introduced by Waldron, all of which ultimately allow him to engage in his crucial interpretive move of reversing the relationship that Locke establishes between God and man and, having done this, to ascribe that reversed relationship to Locke himself.

The reversal of God and man

Waldron’s first step along this path is his insistence that, in order to reconcile the Two Treatises with the species-skepticism of the Essay, we need to do away with the concept of ‘species’ within our interpretive framework altogether and search for an alternative criterion of comparison that is capable of designating the relevant scope of equality between God’s creatures, as well as determining who or what is excluded from that scope. Waldron finds this criterion of comparison in Locke’s concept of ‘resemblances’:

I think that in order to make Locke’s account of equality in the Two Treatises consistent with his discussion in Book III of the Essay, we have to forget about real essences, and abandon the emphasis on species altogether. I think we should focus instead on what Locke is prepared to concede – namely, real resemblances between particulars: ‘Nature makes many particular things, which do not agree one with another in many sensible qualities’ (E: 3.6.36). We have to make do with that. We must ask which resemblances are actually doing the crucial work in Locke’s account of equality, whether they afford a basis for a natural kind or not. That will give us his definition of humanity, at least for moral purposes.⁶⁰

Within this framework of ‘resemblances’, Waldron tells us, equality is ascribed by Locke to those with ‘the possession of faculties that can be regarded as the same or (relevantly) similar’.⁶¹ The result is that we do not start with the category ‘human species’ and then ‘come up with some likeness in their faculties that will, as it were, do the job so far as a basis for equality is concerned’.⁶² Rather, Waldron says, ‘we have to start from the idea of a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough to sustain the sort of equality thesis Locke wants, and then actually look and see what class of creatures that applies to, i.e., what class of creatures comes within the range of the relevant similarity’.⁶³

So what is the ‘relevant similarity’ that Waldron believes Locke intended to use as the foundation of equality, demarcating those with this ‘similarity’ from those ‘inferior ranks of Creatures’ who are made for our ‘use’? In the first instance, the ‘relevant similarity’ is ‘corporeal rationality’ – a concept which Locke refers to in the Essay as follows:

… when we say that Man is subject to Law: we mean nothing by Man, but a corporeal rational Creature: What the real Essence or other Qualities of that Creature are in this Case, is in no way considered. And therefore, whether a Child or Changeling be a Man, in a physical Sense, may amongst the Naturalists be as disputable as it will, it concerns not at all the moral Man, as I may call him, which is this immovable unchangeable Idea, a corporeal rational Being.⁶⁴

Waldron says that this ‘corporeal rationality’ acts as a ‘certain real resemblance’ which, in place of species-membership, might serve as a basis of equality, insofar as ‘a number of creatures of various shapes and sizes’ might possess it, and if they do, ‘might loosely be termed “men” (in both a gender-neutral and non-speciesist sense)’.⁶⁵ Yet Waldron also points out that any such criterion of comparison begs a crucial question – ‘[W]hat exactly is the relation supposed to be between possession of this property (however we end up defining it) and the normative consequences associated with equality?’⁶⁶ In other words, how or why does possession of ‘corporeal rationality’ give rise to a normative claim to equality between all those creatures ‘of various shapes and sizes’ who possess it? This question is compounded by another – what Waldron refers to as the issue of threshold.⁶⁷ At what point does a creature’s possession of ‘corporeal rationality’ become so negligible as to exclude that creature from the realm of equality associated with this attribute and consign him or her to the ‘inferior ranks of Creatures’ made for our ‘use’? As Waldron tells us, it is not evident at what point such a consignment occurs because ‘corporeal rationality’ is not a ‘binary concept’ capable of clearly distinguishing those who have it from those who do not.⁶⁸ Some may have more or less ‘corporeal rationality’ but, on the basis of this spectrum, it is not clear at what point we can distinguish those who have it from those who, not having it sufficiently, fall below the threshold of equality.

In an attempt to overcome this problem and narrow the field of relevant candidates for equality, Waldron suggests that of all those with ‘corporeal rationality’, perhaps Locke believes that only those with the capacity for ‘abstraction’ are the relevant candidates who remain above the threshold of equality. As Waldron states:

Locke needs to specify a threshold. Here’s how I think he does it. In Book II of the Essay, he argued that what distinguishes humans from other animals is not their capacity to reason per se – for brute animals have some sort of reason – but rather the ‘power of Abstracting’, the capacity to reason on the basis of general ideas. Animals have and act on ideas, and therefore have some reason: ‘but it is only in particular Ideas, just as they receiv’d them from their Senses’ – they don’t have ‘the faculty to enlarge by any kind of Abstraction’. … It is ‘the having of general ideas’, a faculty connected of course with the use of language, which puts ‘a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes’, if not in the sense of biological taxonomy, then at least in the sense required for the moral application of the idea of corporeal rationality.⁶⁹

Yet as with ‘corporeal rationality’ above, Waldron says that a capacity for ‘abstraction’, on its own, will not tell us how or why such a quality gives rise to a normative claim to equality.⁷⁰ And without this, we cannot justify why ‘abstraction’ should be the appropriate threshold of equality. Waldron insists that what is needed is, first, to conceive of ‘abstraction’ as a ‘range property’ within whose confines those who qualify for ‘equality’ can be identified, and second, to identify some ‘interest’ that will give the range property itself its purpose by justifying why those falling within its confines qualify for equality and others do not.⁷¹ The importance of the ‘interest’ is that, without it, ‘a range property seems merely arbitrary. One might stipulate it. But it would be hard to see the point. To return to some terminology we introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the interest shapes the range property and makes it intelligible.’⁷²

Waldron says that, in the interpretation of Locke, it is at the level of the ‘interest’ that ‘the religious argument comes in’.⁷³ This is because, according to Waldron, the ‘interest’ which gives Locke’s ‘power of abstraction’ its ‘appropriate sense and shape as a range property’, and therefore its status as a criterion of equality, is centered on the purpose for which God bestows this power of abstraction on particular beings.⁷⁴ According to Waldron, this purpose is to give these beings, in Locke’s words, ‘Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties’.⁷⁵ In other words, the ‘interest’ which allows us to consider the ‘power of abstraction’ the relevant range property for equality is our need to discover God’s purposes for us and the duties these purposes entail. As Waldron puts it: ‘Knowing that he has been sent into the world by God, “by his order, and about his business”, the individual person has an interest in finding out pretty damned quick what he is supposed to do.’⁷⁶ This ‘interest’ gives the ‘power of abstraction’ its ‘appropriate sense and shape as a range property’ because the ‘power of abstraction’ is necessary to realize this ‘interest’. It is necessary because ‘abstraction’ is required for us to reason to the existence of God, and also to derive from this knowledge our understanding of God’s purposes or duties for us. Our claim to equality therefore becomes dependent on our capacity to reason in this way and arrive at these theistic conclusions. As Waldron states, ‘[t]hat, it seems to me, is the interest that is driving and shaping Locke’s moral conception of “man”, and motivating the interest in the particular range of capacities that forms the basis for Lockean equality’.⁷⁷

It is here, with the claims Waldron makes above, that the reversal of Locke’s original relationship between God and man most fully occurs. Once Waldron conceives of ‘interest’ as being our interest in knowing God and his purposes for us (‘finding out pretty damned quick’ what we are ‘supposed to do’) then our very understanding of ‘abstraction’ comes to be defined, not in terms of its being a capacity that God has given equally to us as His creatures, but rather as something whose worth and status as a criterion of equality are defined by how we use it in relation to God – i.e. to arrive at a knowledge of His existence and His purposes for us.⁷⁸ In this way, Waldron reverses the relationship between God and man that Locke establishes in the ‘two key theological passages’ (§§ 4 and 6) of the Two Treatises. Our equality is no longer dependent on a status that God has bestowed on us (as His creatures), which does not depend on anything we think or do on our own account. Instead, it is dependent on what we choose to do in relation to God (to arrive at a knowledge of Him and His purposes for us). In this respect, it is not our creaturely status, being ‘all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker’, that ensures our equality, so that ‘there cannot be supposed any Subordination among us’ (Locke’s position in § 6 of the Two Treatises). Rather, such equality is dependent on our capacity, via the range property of ‘abstraction’, to fulfill a specific ‘interest’ – i.e. to arrive at specific theological conclusions concerning God’s existence and the duties this entails for us. As Waldron says, ‘the range property on which Locke relies is simply unintelligible apart from these religious concerns’.⁷⁹

Whose equality?

It might be argued that there is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, bestowing on the range property of ‘abstraction’ an ‘interest’ (where this ‘interest’ is defined by the possibility of coming to know God and His purposes for us), and, on the other hand, saying that only those who have arrived at this knowledge, and so fulfilled this ‘interest’, fall within the range property and gain the benefit of equality. In the first case, all those with a capacity for ‘abstraction’ would be equal because they have a potential to know God, and therefore a capacity to fulfill this ‘interest’, irrespective of whether they do or not. In the second case, however, a fundamental shift would have taken place, where what was merely an ‘interest’ giving significance and purpose to a range property (coming to know God and His purposes for us) has now become the minimum threshold of equality itself, defining who qualifies for equality, and excluding all those (such as atheists) who fail to arrive at this knowledge, and therefore fail to realize this ‘interest’. If Waldron in fact ascribed this second position to Locke, he would no longer be able to claim, as he does elsewhere in his text, that Locke believes ‘a certain sort of respect is due to each one of God’s human creatures as such, irrespective of what they have chosen or what their value is’.⁸⁰

Waldron’s statements in God, Locke and Equality equivocate as to whether he ascribes to Locke the first position above, centered on the potential to know God and His purposes for us, or the second position where the ‘interest’ substitutes for ‘abstraction’ as the minimum threshold of equality, so that only those who have arrived at this knowledge of God fall above that threshold. In the pages of the Review of Politics, in response to an inquiry from Michael Zuckert, Waldron sought to clarify:

Zuckert wonders whether the attribute that I have identified as crucial to Locke’s account of human equality is actualized knowledge of God and moral duty or the mere potentiality for that knowledge. If it is the former, then maybe only those who believe in God are one another’s equals. I was careless in the formulations I used in the book, but I can say here that the potentiality interpretation is the correct one. All who have the power of abstraction, which, on Locke’s view, is what one needs to figure out that there is a God, are in the position of having been created in this special teleological sense – not just for God’s purposes, but about God’s business. Particular individuals among them may not have figured this out yet. They may not have awoken to the fact that they are sent into the world about God’s business. If one may speak irreverently, God may be waiting for them to figure that out. But their status, so far as the rest of us are concerned, is that we are to regard their creation and existence in that light, whether they see it or not.⁸¹

However, while this clarification saves Waldron from the charge that he has substituted the ‘interest’ in knowing God for ‘abstraction’ as the minimum threshold of equality, it renders his account of atheists in the final chapter of his book extremely problematic. Within that chapter Waldron claims that, according to Locke, it is atheists’ failure to ‘get hold of’ a cogent conception of equality that renders them a threat or menace to society, and therefore justifies their proscription.⁸² And this failure (Waldron says) is in turn due to their failure to ‘get hold of’ a knowledge of God.⁸³ In other words, in Waldron’s discussion of Locke’s conception of atheists, it is actual knowledge of God, not mere potential, which defines the minimum threshold of equality, and determines that atheists shall fall beneath this (Locke proscribing atheists within civil society).⁸⁴ But this is again to substitute an ‘interest’ (‘knowledge of God and His purposes for us’) for ‘abstraction’ as the minimum threshold of equality, since it is the absence of this knowledge of God, rather than an absence of a capacity for ‘abstraction’, which ultimately (for Waldron) explains Locke’s proscription of atheists and the denial of their rights of equality.⁸⁵ In other words, Waldron’s account of atheists, in the final chapter of his book, substitutes precisely that ‘actualized knowledge of God’ for ‘mere potentiality’ that he denies he is doing in his response to Zuckert in the Review of Politics statement above.

Consequently, Waldron cannot have it both ways. He cannot, in the Review of Politics, claim that all are entitled to equality if they have the ‘potential’ to arrive at a knowledge of God and His purposes for us (even if they don’t), and yet, in God, Locke and Equality, provide an account of Locke’s proscription of atheists which justifies this proscription (and therefore the denial of equality to atheists) precisely in terms of the absence of this knowledge. He must choose one or the other, and if he chooses the latter, then atheists are excluded from the range property that defines equality and are placed among those creatures who, falling below this threshold, Locke says are made for our ‘use’.⁸⁶ Waldron himself seems to provide some plausibility that the relevant threshold of equality should be understood in this second sense, with the result that atheists are understood as lying outside all that we conceive as commensurate with ourselves, when (momentarily forgetting his embargo on the predicate ‘human’ and its replacement by ‘resemblances’ above) he says that ‘the shape of human, the way in which the extension of the predicate “human” is determined, is not in the end separable from the religious reasons that Locke cites in support of basic equality’.⁸⁷

As such, Waldron is caught in an invidious either/or. He can either endorse his Review of Politics statement above and insist that the ‘range property’ includes those who have not yet arrived at a knowledge of God, merely having the potential to do so, in which case his account of Locke’s proscription of atheists in God, Locke and Equality loses its coherence. Or he can bite the theological bullet and insist that, in Locke’s view, only those who have actually arrived at a knowledge of God fall above the minimum threshold of equality (thereby substituting ‘interest’ for ‘abstraction’), and so endorsing his account of atheists in the final chapter of his book. If he chooses the latter, then Waldron would be affirming that Locke not only denies atheists equality but also something far more fundamental (‘resemblance’), which banishes them to some outlying realm of alterity beyond all we consider commensurate with ourselves. Needless to say, such a view might have its place within a twenty-first century theocracy, but less so in a contemporary liberal democracy.

Irrespective of which option Waldron chooses, the fact that he ensures that the ‘range property’ of abstraction has its purpose defined entirely in terms of an ‘interest’ in (either potentially or actually) knowing God means that Waldron’s reversal of Locke’s principals, God and man, is complete. Our equality is now defined not in terms of our equal status as God’s creatures – i.e. a status God bestows on us – which (we saw) is how Locke describes matters in §§ 4 and 6 of the Two Treatises (and what Waldron appears to refer to at note 80 above).⁸⁸ Rather, it is defined in terms of our (potential or actual) knowledge of God. In other words, whereas the first relationship is one defined by God (as Creator) and affects all of us equally as His ‘created’ (atheists included), the second relationship is one defined by the attitude or orientation we (either potentially or actually) adopt towards God (arising from our interest in discovering His purposes for us and ‘finding out pretty damned quick’ what we are ‘supposed to do’). In this second scenario, the direction of the relationship, and therefore the basis for equality, has been reversed, with the result that some (such as atheists) may miss out on equality altogether if the minimum threshold is defined in terms of an actual knowledge of God and His purposes for us.

It is only on the basis of this reversal that Waldron can plausibly claim that there can be no ‘bracketing’ of Locke’s ‘theological content’ (1) from his political conclusions (2).⁸⁹ After all, once our entitlement to equality is dependent on either our potential capacity to know God or our actually having done so, we cannot conceive of equality (with all its associated claims within civil society of rights, duties and consent) independently of our (potential or actual) relationship with God. The connection between (1) and (2) becomes, in this instance, ‘very tight indeed’. It is therefore Waldron’s reversal of the relation between Locke’s principals, God and man, which is the linchpin of his depiction of a ‘theological Locke’ – i.e. a Locke whose theological assumptions cannot be ‘bracketed’ from his political conclusions – and informs the confidence behind Waldron’s pronouncements such as the following:

If all this is accepted, then it is pretty clear that the bracketing strategy we spoke about at the beginning of this chapter – bracketing off the God stuff from the equality stuff – is simply not going to work. The two parts of the Lockean doctrine are intricately related.⁹⁰

Waldron may object to the account above by arguing that no ‘reversal of principals’ has taken place.⁹¹ After all, he may say, it is necessary for individuals to understand their own relationship to God before they can understand themselves as ‘God’s creatures’, with obligations of equality towards each other. On this basis, he may say, there is no distinction between God’s relationship to us (as Creator/created) and our relationship to God (in terms of our knowledge of Him and His purposes for us), since one is the condition of the other. But if he adopted such a position, Waldron would again be making actual knowledge of God the minimum threshold of equality (contrary to his claim about ‘potentiality’ in the Review of Politics above) since in this scenario, it is this knowledge (rather than its ‘potential’) that informs us of our status as God’s creatures and so of our obligations of equality towards each other.

A different Locke

Thus we see that Waldron’s argument concerning (1) and (2) – where the conclusions of Locke’s political philosophy cannot be understood or endorsed separately from their theological foundations – is premised on an illicit reversal of the normative relationship that Locke advances, in the Two Treatises, between God and man, a reversal that Waldron then insists is consistent with the views of Locke himself. However if we retain the original relationship that we saw Locke establish in §§ 4 and 6 of that text, where God as Creator bestows an equal status on ‘Man’ as His created, so that ‘being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker’ there is no ‘Subordination among us’, then, contrary to Waldron, we shall see it is possible to engage in precisely that ‘bracketing’ that Waldron denies is possible, defending Locke’s political conclusions on grounds independent of their theological foundations. Further, the cogency of this ‘bracketing’ will be evident when we realize that such a process was one that Locke himself engaged in when advancing these conclusions.

Waldron may object that such a move begs the question of species skepticism that initiated his departure from the Two Treatises and his flight towards the recondite passages of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the first place. After all, who is this ‘Man’ with whom we share a creaturely equality if the very concept of a common ‘species’ is placed in question in the Essay? But in response to Waldron, I think such questions are avoidable. After all, as we saw, they arose from an exegetical issue of Waldron’s own making, centered on his desire to impose a consistency upon the Two Treatises and the Essay, based on an ‘act of faith in the unity of Locke’s thought’. Such questions did not arise from anything intrinsic to the Two Treatises passages themselves. If we accept the Laslett thesis concerning the discontinuity between these two texts, and do not press our claim to the contrary (as Waldron does) on the strength of a 3-sentence passage in the 748-page Essay, then the exegetical problem does not arise and we can read Locke’s references to ‘man’ and ‘species’ in §§ 4 and 6 of the Two Treatises in terms of their overt meaning.⁹²

Locke’s theological foundations

Now at the broadest level, it is clear that Locke grounds his political philosophy in theological foundations, since as a believing Christian he views the world itself as God’s creation. This is evident in the case of natural law. Locke perceives natural law as a normative source in nature and society because, in Locke’s view, it emanates from the will of God.⁹³ Further, he identifies natural law, and therefore the will of God, with human reason, and insofar as individuals in the state of nature engage in a rational negotiation, based on their mutual material interests in stability and security, to establish civil societies and governments, Locke says these outcomes may be seen as also arising from God, since it is natural law which gives these individuals both the reason, and the authority, to rationally comprehend their own interests and also to contract with others on the basis of these interests.⁹⁴ Yet at the very place that Locke makes these claims, he also insists that this is consistent with a profane origin for civil society, insisting that ‘though it be true, those powers that are, are ordained of God; yet it may nevertheless be true, that the power any one has, and the ends for which he has it, may be by the contrivance and appointment of men’ – and it is in this context that he once again endorses his earlier claim, quoted at note 3 above, that this ‘contrivance and appointment’ does not include, among the mutual interests giving rise to civil society and government, a ‘spiritual and eternal interest’.⁹⁵

Yet it is at this point that we perceive Locke engaging in that first piece of ‘bracketing’ that seeks to separate his political conclusions from these theological foundations. Although perceiving natural law as an ultimate normative source, because of its origin in God’s will, Locke did not believe it could be applied as a basis of public justification or agreement within civil society, and therefore a basis for political relations or institutions, since although all could lay claim to their particular conception of natural law, based on their own reason, no individual had unique access to God’s will, and so there was no authoritative basis for determining its content or application in any specific situation, and resolving disagreements concerning this. As Locke put it:

For the Law of Nature being unwritten, and so no where to be found but in the minds of Men, they who through Passion or Interest shall mis-cite it, or misapply it, cannot so easily be convinced of their mistake where there is no establish’d Judge; And so it serves not, as it ought, to determine the Rights, and hence fence the Properties of those that live under it, especially where every one is Judge, Interpreter, and Executioner of it too, and that in his own Case.⁹⁶

So while the law of nature was the only source of normative authority in the state of nature, Locke insisted that it could not be a basis of collective justification or agreement in civil society because it was not a source capable of securing common agreement or assent, nor could it provide a generally accepted criterion for resolving disagreement. It was for this reason, Locke argued, that individuals in a state of nature sought the ‘common umpire’ of government, establishing a rule of civil law by which all could abide because arising from a government to which all had consented.⁹⁷

Locke makes clear that natural law still imposes, at the level of principle, broad injunctions on civil society. For instance, it places an ultimate limit on the legitimacy of government within civil society, since it accords to each individual the possession of certain God-given natural rights which (short of defeat in a state of war) none has the authority to surrender to another, thereby giving rise to a right of resistance to government should these individuals believe these rights to be threatened.⁹⁸ Further, all other things being equal, natural law provides some broad guidelines for conduct of individuals in civil society, such as that each individual is to preserve as much of humanity as possible and not harm another in their ‘Life, Health, Liberty or Possessions’.⁹⁹ But other than these broad limits, it was individual consent, not natural law, that Locke believed determined the legitimacy of government, the basis and content of its laws, and therefore the obligations to obey it, as well as determining the scope and limits of its jurisdiction within civil society.¹⁰⁰ This is evident in the Two Treatises where Locke explicitly distinguishes natural law from individual consent as a source of governance and legitimacy, identifying one with the state of nature and the other with civil society:

The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule. The Liberty of Man, in Society, is to be under no other Legislative Power, but that established, by consent, in the Common-Wealth, nor under the Dominion of any Will, or Restraint of any Law, but what the Legislative shall enact, according to the Trust put in it.¹⁰¹

Indeed, Locke is even more explicit in identifying individual consent as the sole source of political legitimacy within civil society as follows:

Men being, as has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent. The only way whereby any one devests himself of his Natural Liberty, and puts on the bonds of Civil Society is by agreeing with other Men to joyn and unite into a Community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it.¹⁰²

Incommensurability

Now because the justification of political authority and civil law arises from individual consent, such law has to elicit the common agreement of a wide assortment of individuals divided on a wide range of matters, not least religion.¹⁰³ After all, as Locke tells us in his ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’, the rights and obligations of civil law must apply not only to ‘Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers and others’, but also ‘pagans’, ‘Mahometans’ and ‘Jews’.¹⁰⁴ Yet just as natural law does not provide a basis of commensurability upon which public agreement or political justification can be established, neither, in this plural context, does religion or revealed theology. After all, as Locke insists, ‘every Church is orthodox to itself; to other, erroneous and heretical’.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, in his earliest political writing, Locke acknowledged that it was upon religion that individuals were most likely to disagree, and upon which they were most likely to come to blows:

And he must confess himself a stranger to England that thinks that meats and habits, that places and times of worship, etc. would not be as sufficient occasion of hatred and quarrels amongst us, as leeks and onions and other trifles described in that satire by Juvenal was amongst them, and be distinctions able to keep us always at a distance, and eagerly ready for like violence and cruelty as often as the teachers should alarm the consciences of their zealous votaries and direct them against the adverse party.¹⁰⁶

It is hardly likely, therefore, that a man so aware of the endemic nature of religious disagreement would choose a set of explicit theological concerns (knowledge of God and His purposes for us) as the basis for agreement, justification, or consent within civil society, or as a criterion for political equality, civil rights, or political obligation – what Waldron refers to as (2) at note 35 above. Indeed the fact that Locke did quite the opposite is evident in his engagement with the Anglican clergyman, Jonas Proast. In this engagement, Locke explicitly seeks to remove theology as a basis for political action or political agreement within civil society.

Proast sought to justify state persecution of those outside the Church of England on the grounds that this Church embodies the ‘true religion’.¹⁰⁷ Locke’s response is that, as it is the issue of ‘true religion’ which is most likely to be in dispute between Proast and his antagonists, this is an incommensurate basis upon which to justify state actions such as persecution, since (as with natural law) there is no accepted criterion to determine ‘true religion’, with the result that disagreement on the matter will be irresolvable, and therefore interminable.¹⁰⁸ Locke points to this absence of criterion as follows:

Men in the wrong way are to be punished: but who are in the wrong way is the question. You have no more reason to determine it against one who differs from you, than he has to conclude against you, who differ from him: no, not though you have the magistrate and the national church on your side. For, if to differ from [the national church] be to be in the wrong way, you, who are in the right way in England, will be in the wrong way in France. … So that true and false, as it commonly happens, when we suppose them for ourselves, or our party, in effect, signify just nothing, or nothing to the purpose; unless we can think that true or false in England, which will not be so at Rome, or Geneva: and vice versaȃ.¹⁰⁹

Thus, even though Locke seems to believe there is ‘but one truth, one way to heaven’, he knew that, as with natural law, there was no means to decide between the mutually exclusive propositions arising between individuals on the basis of this assumption. Each involved rival claims to knowledge of the will of God for which there was no impartial means of adjudication, with the result that individuals would remain endemically divided on such matters.¹¹⁰ This was the case despite Locke’s claim in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that ‘the knowledge of a GOD, be the most natural discovery of humane Reason’.¹¹¹ After all, as Locke points out in the same text, this knowledge is not innate, but the product of a rational exercise of our faculties and reflection upon the world, which not all exercise at the requisite level, some failing to come to a knowledge of God at all.¹¹² Thus although Locke insists that God has ensured that individuals have ‘Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties’, nevertheless ‘in the same Country, under one and the same Name, Men have far different, nay, often contrary and inconsistent Ideas, and conceptions’ of God.¹¹³ Such differences are even further exacerbated, Locke insists, by those who, often for ulterior motives, play on the consciences of their ‘zealous votaries’, dividing society even further on matters of religion.¹¹⁴

Locke understood, therefore, that for all the reasons discussed above, religion and theology constituted no basis for public deliberation or civil and political agreement, either concerning the role and purpose of government, individual consent to that role, or the obligations arising from these.¹¹⁵ Far from Waldron being correct that Locke links (1) and (2) so that their relation is ‘very tight indeed’, Locke, in his account above, points to the inherent incommensurability (and therefore conflict) which arises from any attempt to seek political agreement on the basis of religious or theological foundations, or to justify the exercise of political authority on that basis, precisely because there is no authoritative or independent means arising from religion (or anywhere else) to decide between the competing claims of different religious perspectives themselves. Locke makes this point again as follows:

[H]owever clearly we may think this or the other doctrine to be deduced from Scripture, we ought not therefore to impose it upon others as a necessary article of faith because we believe it to be agreeable to the rule of faith; unless we would be content also that other doctrines should be imposed upon us in the same manner; and that we should be compelled to receive and profess all the different and contradictory opinions of Lutherans, Calvinists, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, and other sects, which the contrivers of symbols, systems, and confessions are accustomed to deliver unto their followers as genuine and necessary deductions from the Holy Scripture.¹¹⁶

From animal sacrifice to atheism

Consequently it was precisely to provide commensurate grounds for public deliberation and political agreement, capable of eliciting broad-based consent to the exercise of political authority, among individuals thoroughly divided by religion, that Locke himself engaged in that ‘bracketing’ process which excluded religion and theology from such processes. We saw this in the context of the Proast debate above. Another way was in Locke’s excluding ‘spiritual and eternal interests’ from the mutual interests upon which civil society is founded, at note 3 above, and instead basing these on material interests that all shared irrespective of their religious differences – not least their ‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’.¹¹⁷

However, we can see this same bracketing process occurring elsewhere in Locke’s political philosophy, particularly where he discusses the actual exercise of political power by government. He insists, for instance, that government ought to justify its exercises of power and authority solely in terms of the purposes for which consent was given to its rule.¹¹⁸ We saw that those purposes involved the material, not the religious, interests of those subject to government, and so Locke insists that governments ought not to justify their actions on religious grounds. For instance, Locke argues that governments may legitimately proscribe animal sacrifice as a religious practice within civil society, but not on the grounds of religion, however ‘sinful’ such a practice might be perceived. Rather, they may do so only for the purpose of protecting public food supplies, this being a material interest of common concern to all civil society.¹¹⁹ On the other hand, idolatry, however ‘sinful’ it may appear from a religious perspective, Locke insists must be tolerated by government, precisely because it has no material consequences that could justify civil proscription – it being ‘not prejudicial to other men’s rights’ nor breaking ‘the public peace of societies’.¹²⁰

Equally, Locke insists that although ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ are a ‘vigorous, active part of religion … wherein men’s consciences are very much concerned’, yet the magistrate must not prescribe or prohibit these because they are ‘the duties of man to God and the way to his mercy and favour’.¹²¹ Rather, the magistrate must do so solely as a result of their civil effects – virtues being ‘the advantages of man with man’ and ‘the strong ties and bonds of society’.¹²² Conversely, Locke says that if these virtues and vices have no civil effects, and do not impinge on material interests, they are no longer a public matter subject to the magistrate’s command. Rather, they become ‘the private and super-political concernment between God and a man’s soul, wherein the magistrate’s authority is not to interpose’, this being because ‘[t]he magistrate, as magistrate, hath nothing to do with the good of men’s souls or their concernment in another life’.¹²³

We can see the same bracketing process in regard to Locke’s proscription of atheists. Contrary to Waldron, Locke proscribed atheists for the purely civil consequences of their absence of belief in God, rather than for the theological consequences. Locke argued that atheists are ‘incapable of all society’ because, belief in God being ‘the foundation of all morality’, they cannot be trusted to act ‘morally’ and therefore cannot be trusted to abide by their ‘promises, covenants and oaths’.¹²⁴ As is fitting for someone who justified political authority in contractual terms, on the basis of individual consent, Locke took oaths extremely seriously, referring to them as the ‘bonds of human society’ and insisting that ‘Grants, Promises and Oaths are Bonds that hold the Almighty’.¹²⁵ The England of Locke’s time also placed oaths at the center of political obligation and obedience – the Test Acts and the various Oaths of Supremacy being instances of this.¹²⁶ And so the fact that atheists could not be relied upon to abide by oaths (being unable sincerely to ‘swear by Almighty God’) meant that their absence of belief had dire civil consequences. It was these civil consequences that I believe Locke was referring to when he wrote that, in the case of atheists, ‘[t]he taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all’.¹²⁷ After all, he makes this statement directly after referring to oaths as the ‘bonds of human society’, and so presumably it is these ‘bonds’ which are the subject of the ‘dissolution’ that Locke refers to in this passage. To those atheists who might try to counter such civil motives for their proscription by insisting that their beliefs are a matter of ‘religion’, and therefore ought to be subject to toleration on this basis, Locke replies:

[T]hose that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.¹²⁸

Consequently, as with idolatry, animal sacrifice and virtue/vice, atheism is only the subject of civil proscription, involving the exercise of political power, when it impinges on the material interests of others, and so has civil effects. John Dunn may be correct that Locke, in private terms, viewed atheism with abhorrence and believed it was a belief to which ‘it was inexcusable to succumb’.¹²⁹ But unlike Dunn, who believes Locke proscribed atheism on this basis because it is at odds with ‘the clear priority of an individual’s duty to worship God’, I argue that, in civil terms, Locke viewed atheism as no different from any of the other proscribed religious beliefs and practices with which Locke coupled it in the ‘Letter’ – all of which he proscribed for their civil consequences – such as those who ‘arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative … opposite to the civil right of the community’, or advance opinions contrary to the ‘moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society’.¹³⁰

Ultimately, therefore, in the examples above, we see Locke ‘bracketing’ theology from the exercise of political authority for one overriding reason – to ensure that this exercise of authority is capable of eliciting the consent of those over whom it is exercised. Locke knew it was only if such authority were exercised on the basis of reasons, and interests, that all held in common, irrespective of their wider differences, that it would be able to elicit consent and common agreement within civil society, and so ensure a framework of governance consistent with civil peace. Locke understood that religion, like natural law, was incapable of this, because it was not able to provide a commensurate basis of agreement and consent. On the contrary, Locke recognized that if individuals sought to establish civil society on religious foundations – claiming, for instance, that ‘dominion is founded in grace’ – then ‘No peace and security, no, not so much as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved amongst men’.¹³¹ Indeed, it was precisely such peace that Locke, from his Two Tracts on Government onwards, wished to preserve, and developed his political philosophy to achieve – though after the Two Tracts, largely in ways consistent with individual liberty.

For all these reasons, Locke insisted that governments treat all matters of religion (as well as all other matters) as ‘things indifferent’, and therefore as ‘enjoined, tolerated, or forbidden’ only insofar as ‘they carry with them the good and welfare of the people’ (these being the civil purposes for which government authority was established).¹³² In all the examples above, therefore, seeking to distance political authority from religious justification, we see Locke giving expression to two things. The first is one half of that separation of church and state which Locke explicitly endorses.¹³³ The second is that ‘bracketing’ of theology – involving a separation of theological foundations (1) from political conclusions (2) – that Waldron denies is possible.

Waldron, Locke and Rawls

Once we perceive Locke himself as engaged in this ‘bracketing’ process then many of the issues Waldron raises in God, Locke and Equality, on the assumption that Locke was not engaged in this process, become non-issues. This is the case concerning his contrast of Locke and John Rawls at the end of the book. Waldron adopts a position on Rawls that many communitarians, and indeed many non-communitarians (such as Stanley Fish), have adopted, arguing that Rawls’ position in excluding religion from the public sphere is not a neutral, impartial, or non-sectarian move but one that depends on certain substantive commitments which are themselves highly partial.¹³⁴ As Waldron states:

Rawls is not saying that religious conceptions of equality or religious paths to equality are crazy or unreasonable. But there is no question of their representing a consensus for a well-ordered society under modern conditions. … The medium of deliberation and decision is public reason, and since that is the medium through which state power is exercised, it must be kept free of any taint of sectarian philosophical conviction. There must be a commitment on the part of all who participate in public reason to offer up and to act upon only those reasons that it is reasonable to expect that others involved and others affected can accept.¹³⁵

Waldron then presents this Rawlsian strategy – of excluding religion by offering and acting only upon ‘those reasons that it is reasonable to expect that others involved and others affected can accept’ – as constituting a fundamental contrast to Locke, who, he says, believed a religious foundation of civil agreement and political justification to be ‘indispensable’. As Waldron puts it:

If the Lockean view that I have been outlining is correct, it may be impossible to articulate certain important egalitarian commitments without appealing to what one takes to be their religious grounds. … But of course the Lockean position goes far beyond this debate. Locke is not just saying that religious argumentation about equality should be permitted in public life; he is arguing that it is indispensable.¹³⁶

But contrary to Waldron, we have seen that this ‘Lockean view’ he seeks to ascribe to Locke is fundamentally incorrect. Far from ‘religious argumentation’ being ‘indispensable’, we have seen that Locke explicitly tries to exclude it from the justification of civil and political arrangements and the exercise of political authority associated with these arrangements. Instead, in his debate with Proast and elsewhere, Locke seeks to base such justification on material (civil) interests alone – grounds upon which individuals are able to agree, irrespective of their differences in religion, since it was for the sake of these interests (e.g. ‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’) that they (or their predecessors) first entered civil society and created government.¹³⁷

Consequently, the Rawlsian strategy of only offering and acting upon ‘those reasons that it is reasonable to expect that others involved and others affected can accept’ is in fact Locke’s own. It was precisely such a strategy that, we have seen, Locke adopted in response to Proast, insisting that Proast not premise his arguments justifying the coercive use of state power on the assumption that such power is exercised for the sake of ‘true religion’, since this being a claim equally available to his antagonists, with no impartial criterion to decide the issue, it is not a claim they can accept and so no basis for public agreement or consensus:

[A]nd you build all you say, upon this lurking supposition, that the national

religion now in England, backed by the public authority of the law, is the

only true religion, and therefore no other is to be tolerated; which being a

supposition equally unavoidable, and equally just in other countries, unless

we can imagine that every where but in England men believe what at the

same time they think to be a lie.¹³⁸

Conclusion

Perhaps the young Jeremy Waldron should have published that paper challenging Alastair MacIntyre’s reading of Locke and defending a non-theological version in its stead. With all due respect, it is likely that such a paper would have given a more accurate account of Locke’s political philosophy than the ‘theological’ version advanced by the more mature Jeremy Waldron in God, Locke and Equality. Above all else, this ‘theological’ Locke advanced by Waldron, and also by Dunn, is counter-intuitive. Why would a man who, on his own admission, emerged into a world riven by religious strife, who had first-hand experience of the division and violence these religious differences could produce, and who believed such differences ‘cannot be avoided’, make theological belief the ‘indispensable’ basis of coexistence within civil society, grounding upon it our political deliberations, obligations, and (in the case of atheists) our proscription?¹³⁹

In other words, why would Locke make the basis of political justification and political agreement that upon which, he knew, individuals were most divided, and therefore least likely to agree? Indeed, contrary to Dunn and Waldron, Locke does precisely the opposite – seeking to ‘bracket’ and ‘quarantine’ theological concerns from public deliberation, and the agreements which arise from it, precisely because they are an incommensurable and irresolvable source of division – each Church being ‘orthodox to itself’, with no authoritative means to decide between them. With such ‘quarantine’, although religious divisions are not resolved, Locke hoped they would be less likely to disturb civil peace, since, no longer forming a basis/rationale for public deliberation and political action (instead being confined to individual conscience and voluntary church attendance), the fate of civil society is no longer perceived to be dependent on them. The consequences of the alternative, when theological claims do perform such a political role (i.e. where ‘dominion’ is believed to be ‘founded in grace’), Locke has made clear at note 131 above.

Consequently, Locke was of the view that only if theological foundations (1) were separated from political conclusions (2), so that one was not perceived to be dependent on the other, would it be possible, via his political philosophy, to justify political arrangements for a diverse civil society – one encompassing, in his own time, not only ‘Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers and others’, but also ‘pagans’, ‘Mahometans’ and ‘Jews’.¹⁴⁰ To achieve this,, far from the relationship between (1) and (2) being ‘very tight indeed’, we have seen that Locke was at pains to ‘bracket’ one from the other.