The Liberal Politics of John Locke

M. Seliger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367331078
• eBook ISBN: 9781000103960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Business General

Originally published in 1968. This book presents the synthesis of a coherent view of the Lockeian argument from his various works. This tests the inner consistency of Locke's political theory against his own examples from history. The layers of Locke's argumentation are analysed on metaphysics in the first part, his attitude towards historical precedents in the second, and in the third with the nature of the regime which he was ready to endorse. This provides the guidelines for a comprehensive reassessment of the liberal tradition, as well as an evaluation of what is still vital to it.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

THE following attempt to re-assess Locke’s political teachings grew out of increasing doubts as to the adequacy of prevailing opinions concerning what is, or is not, part of the historical tradition of liberal thought. The reasons for these doubts, and the bearing they have on a more comprehensive presentation of Lockeian politics than has so far been available, demand some prefatory explanation.

1. LIBERAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

As a recent writer has accurately remarked, criticism of liberalism from Right and Left has blurred the differences between early modern liberal thought and that of its continuators.¹ Yet, in arguing that early liberalism laid the foundation for the progressive devaluation of politics, the same writer himself enlarged upon a major theme in the long-prevailing assessment of liberalism. That assessment corresponds for the most part to what English idealist philosophers eventually found unacceptable in the liberal thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of German idealism, and especially of Hegel, easily accounts for the fact that early liberal theories have been criticized from the Right and from the Left, and even by liberals like T. H. Green, for an overemphasis upon individual liberty and a corresponding neglect of the positive aspects of community. Building upon this common foundation, conservative criticism has censured early modern liberal thought for ‘mechanistic’ conceptions which obscure, as it were, the naturalness of political organization. It has been held that its exaggerated belief in reason leaves little room for the appraisal of irrational motivation, for ‘the cake of custom’ and historical experience in general. The liberal state has been painted as a predominately artificial contrivance devised for men’s convenience, in which ‘minimal’ or ‘negative’ government would have been more than enough. Liberal government has been regarded as weak government by definition, the main purpose of the division of political authority being to protect individual liberty and especially to guarantee uninhibited acquisitiveness. At first sight, this evaluation of liberalism would seem to be borne out by Locke’s theory of the social compact, his appeal to reason over and above history, his division of political authority and his view of private property as the epitome of the individual rights consecrated by the law of nature, which is the law of reason and of God.

¹ S. S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (London, 1960), 293, and Chs. VIII and IX in general.

A. Non-Democratic Minimal Government

Liberalism does not identify a minimal state with weak government. To think so is to impute to it a serious fallacy. Clearly, to function effectively as the instrument of the socially and economically successful minority of society, a government can hardly be allowed to be weak. In the first place, specific political arrangements must be maintained, if the less fortunate members of society, who for the better part of history have been in the majority, are to be prevented from determining the composition of governmental bodies. Otherwise government interference with the aims and policies of privileged minorities would be legally possible. In fact, it is for this very reason that liberals, too, have for centuries denied the masses formal participation in politics. Moreover, early liberals, such as Locke, may have thought it easier than their successors in the second half of the nineteenth century to perpetuate political arrangements to that effect. They were no less aware than later liberals of the authoritarian and elitist character of the political arrangements by which limited political participation is tenable.

It has not escaped notice, of course, that in practice liberal politics has generally been associated with anything but weak and unoppressive government. The moral indignation and hatred that Marx, Engels and Lenin nursed against ‘bourgeois society’ stemmed from the realization that its ‘action-committee’, the state, lacked neither the will nor the means to assert its authority. The state could not have been supposed to guarantee the exploitation of the majority without a considerable show of force. Nor could it otherwise help to generate the final outburst of revolutionary zeal which signals the complete polarization of bourgeois society. Marx and Engels largely underplayed the fact that so far the bourgeois ‘action-committee’ had kept the masses economically as well as politically underprivileged mostly by withholding the suffrage from them or manipulating it to their disadvantage. And while the deprecation of universal suffrage as a fundamental hallmark of political democracy has survived Marx and Engels, for example in the conception of Schumpeter,² neither Marxists nor non-Marxists have failed to realize that political non-interference in the objectives of some people almost invariably means political interference in the interests of others. Statesmen who were keen on freedom of trade nevertheless ‘had to interfere with interferences’³; and this applies also to the policy of governmental non-intervention in socio-economic issues such as working hours or wages. The authoritarian character of interference with interferences is particularly obvious wherever the freedom of organization is directly or indirectly obstructed by law.

Colonial expansion, too, contradicts the fiction that liberal government must necessarily be weak. The historical fallacy of associating the practice of liberal rule with ‘minimalness’ or ‘negativeness’ has already been recognized. It has even been acknowledged that, on the plane of theory, ‘realism and liberalism can very well go together’.⁴ It is seldom realized, however, to what extent strong and high-handed government has been sustained by liberal theory.

When Robert Michels broke new ground with his theory of ‘democracy and the iron law of oligarchy’, he recognized that liberal ideology did not base its aspirations upon the masses and that, for the liberals, the masses were no more than a necessary evil.⁵ Yet the fact that liberalism had become committed to universal suffrage caused Michels to adopt a course of argument which presupposed an original liberal commitment to democracy. In the light of this erroneous assumption, he assessed the attempts of liberals at a conciliation with monarchic autocracy.⁶ Instead of confronting liberal and democratic principles in historical perspective, he confused them retrospectively. He failed to see that, for the greater part of its history, the liberal tradition had been opposed to general suffrage, and hence to democracy, and that it was also on this ground that it had in the past come to terms with the autocratic prerogatives of monarchs. Had this been taken into account by Michels and those who followed him, they might not have been satisfied with a realistic juxtaposition of democratic ideology and modern democratic practice. They might have become aware of the attempts, which culminated in the political theory of John Stuart Mill, to reconcile democratic theory with the elitism which non-democratic liberal theory had all along put forth in the form of both an assertion of ethico-political norms and the different capabilities of men. As it is, a renowned political sociologist still regards as something of a revelation the mere suggestion that the liberal tradition lacked a popular base and that in essence it is ‘perhaps an elitist tradition’.⁷ Conversely, even when Locke’s theory is credited with having anticipated almost all the tenets of the English idealists, this is not seen as detracting from Locke’s supposedly democratic outlook, and his concessions to executive prerogatives are roundly asserted to be in accord with democratic principles.⁸

² J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942. Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 244, 276.

³ Cp. C. J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy (rev. ed., New York, 1950), 25.

⁴ Cp. G. Sartori, Democratic Theory (Detroit, 1962), 40. See also F. Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, 1957), 22, and Wolin, op. cit., 312.

⁵ R. Michels, Political Parties (Dover Books, 1959), 7.

⁶ Ibid., 9–10.

As for the general historical significance of both democratic and non-democratic liberal ideas, there is certainly something to be said in favour of considering them in terms of the progressive devaluation of politics and its autonomy.⁹ But if all liberal thought had sought to assign an inferior status to politics, liberal theory might still reflect the awareness of irrefutable demands of politics in its own right and not merely for as long as it has not become what it is destined to be. It is trite to observe that ends require appropriate means as much as the available means restrict the realization of ends, even if the appraisal of available means does not (as common sense suggests that it should) circumscribe the conception of ends in the first place. In any case, political means are needed to reduce the status and prestige of politics as well as to keep it restrained. Much as liberalism has proceeded from premises which have served anarchism and, in the long run has tended to deprive politics either of its autonomy or of its prestige as the predominant means in the implementation of human values, it has remained aware of the continued importance of the political system.

Liberalism is characterized not by serious consideration of the dispensability of the state but by the contrary emphasis on constitutionalism, that is, the insistence on political guarantees for the maintenance of individual liberties. Only as a combination of a particular philosophy of values with an elaborate theory of political organization is the liberal tradition a specific product of the political tradition of the West, and indeed only one of the West’s political traditions. The appearance of one or another liberal tenet in it does not make a system of thought part of the liberal tradition.¹⁰ If ideological pluralism were accepted as a generally applicable rule, the recognition that non-liberal systems contain liberal tenets might be paralleled by the view that liberal systems exhibit illiberal elements. Even so, and especially in view of the prevailing image of liberalism which does not fit observed liberal practice, the essential question is whether such deviations are only occasional aberrations or not. If no consistently justified concessions to authoritarianism and extra-legal practice exist in representative liberal theory, it must be pronounced invariably at cross-purposes with liberal practice. This conclusion has been avoided only because the questions which lead to it have been left unasked and where they have been hinted at, no attempt has been made to follow up their implications. To imply by default, or to assume more or less inadvertently, that liberal practice and theory are incompatible is to assume either the intellectual inadequacy or the dishonesty of liberal thought. It means to assume that liberal political philosophy has constantly misunderstood, or turned a blind eye on, the nature and requirements of political power.

⁷ S. M. Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1960), 97, quoting A. A. Rogow, ‘The Revolt Against Social Equality,’ Dissent IV (1957), 370. The italics are mine.

⁸ Thus W. Kendall, ‘John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule,’ Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. XXVI, 2, 1941.

⁹ Cp. Wolin, op. cit., 286 f.

B. The Inner Unity of the Liberal Outlook

Misapprehensions about liberal theory are largely the result of endeavours to cope with the urgent political problems of our century. Just as in these endeavours liberalism has often been indiscriminately associated with democracy, it has also been oversharply set apart from it.

Mosca, Pareto and Michels, each of them moved by different ideological purposes, were concerned to show that in practice democratic institutions fail to live up to the idea they claim to implement. Yet democratic theory itself has been seen to contain ideas which justify totalitarian dictatorship as the means towards the ultimate realization of radical egalitarian democracy. Liberal theory has been pronounced intrinsically different in this respect. Lord Lindsay has traced to Rousseau the ‘totalitarian’ conception of sovereignty, taken up by the French Revolution, and contrasted it with the Anglo-Saxon conception and realization of the natural rights theory.¹¹ To Bertrand de Jouvenel the phrase ‘la démocratie totalitaire’ denotes that stage in the ‘natural history’ of power in which the democratic extension of liberty leads to an unprecedented governmental supremacy; when the defence of individual liberty against a government acting in the name of all becomes illusory, if not a sin. Rather than prevent the eventual degradation of politics and liberty under dictatorship, democratic principles are found capable of promoting it.¹² J. L. Talmon¹³ has modernized and refined the reaction of Burke and the French theocrats to the French Revolution and to the Enlightenment which begat it. The totalitarian practice of the Left, he argues, emanates from the very nature of the ideologically determined patterns of behaviour attendant upon, or engendering, the ideal of radical democracy. The totalitarian practice of the Jacobins, as well as of the Bolsheviks appears, therefore, due to the paradoxes in the political messianism of the Left, as if the requirements of conquering and maintaining political power had never predominated over ideology. Thus, where totalitarianism is concerned, ideology and theory, i.e. the consciousness of what ought to be done and what actually is done, are given more than their due. Liberal ideology and theory are given less than their due exactly because an idealized version is read back into the historical tradition of liberal thought. Its realistic concern with political power as the means of safeguarding ideals remains unconsidered or, to use the language of psychoanalysis, is being suppressed under the weight of upholding liberalism as the antidote against totalitarianism. Only radical egalitarianism would reflect a paradox of freedom on the philosophical level; only egalitarian ideology would seem to acknowledge that one might have to resort to extra-legal coercion in order finally to reduce coercion and increase freedom.

¹⁰ This is obscured in F. Watkins, The Political Tradition of the West, A Study in the Development of Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1948) and to some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter I. Introductory
• Part One: Metapolitics And Politics
• Part Two: Metapolitics and History
• Part Three: The Acceptable Regime
• Bibliography
• Index