Throughout this book, I have challenged Locke's commitment to liberty or freedom, at least insofar as they are defined as autonomy. I have insisted that Locke theorizes freedom as selfgovernment, that is, as the capacity to limit oneself to the habits of virtue. By juxtaposing the Second Treatise to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, I have questioned Locke's appeal to reason and truth as a foundation for ethics and politics. I have argued that in place of natural political agents, he theorizes malleable subjects born to protean possibility, blank paper upon which almost anything can be written. Drawing on Locke's trenchant skepticism in the Essay, I pressed his doubts there to sap his confidence in the Second Treatise, his too-ready recourse to the idea of a natural law immediately apparent to all who but consult reason. This tension pushed me to reconsider Locke's “government of men” as an exercise of disciplinary power rather than a discovery of immediate, unquestionable truths, and I suggested that Locke proposes an architecture of power, constructed by parents and tutors, to shape the yet unformed minds of children into the industrious, decent, reasonable governing class of Britain.

I have also challenged his commitment to equality, illustrating that Locke's educational and poor reforms imply an embrace of inequality and the use of power without consent. That Locke recognized the need for discipline and the subtle, corrective use of power in education is clear, but that he wished to subject the idle poor to panoptic visibility in an inverse oubliette might strike my reader as far-fetched. This is not because we lack evidence from Locke's own pen, but because the idea that he was willing to imprison, observe, lash, and correct the poor is discordant with the notion of fundamental equality structuring the argument of the Two Treatises.