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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2015
Following the rediscovery of the ‘Christ's copy’ in 1944, Peter Laslett's decision to use it as the copy-text of his edition of John Locke's Two treatises of government (1960) was, in more ways than one, a landmark event. It not only revitalized an entire generation of academic study in the field of Lockean scholarship and, more broadly, in the history of political thought, but has also had a lasting impact in as much as Laslett's edition has remained, since then, the reference text that scholars use, persuaded as they have been by Laslett that it represents ‘the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’. However, by re-examining the Christ's copy in the light of a near contemporary testimony unknown to Laslett, this article reveals that, with its three layers of corrections, the Christ's copy seems to be a richer palimpsest than what has so far been supposed, belonging as much to the francophone world of Huguenot exile as to an anglophone publishing schedule, and represents, as such, an artefact of transcultural relations. This article therefore challenges Laslett's interpretation of the nature and purpose of the Christ's copy, and thereby questions his editorial decision.
I am extremely grateful to Mark Goldie for being so generous with his time and advice when commenting on earlier drafts of this article, to Colin Harris, Superintendant of Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford, for facilitating access to original Locke books and manuscripts, and to Balliol College, Oxford, for hospitality during my tenure at St John's College, Cambridge.
1 Locke, John, Two treatises of government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar.
2 See Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The history of political thought: a methodological enquiry’, in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, Walter G., eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd series (Oxford, 1962), pp. 183–202Google Scholar; Dunn, J., ‘The identity of the history of ideas’, Philosophy, 43 (1968), pp. 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Skinner, Q., ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), pp. 3–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Laslett has inspired a great number of historians, notably Noel Malcolm, to whom we owe a new critical edition of Hobbes's Leviathan analysed in context (Oxford, 2012).
4 Locke, John, Du gouvernement civil, où l'on traitte de l'origine, des fondemens, de la nature, du pouvoir, & des fins des societez politiques. Traduit de l'Anglois (Amsterdam, 1691)Google Scholar.
5 The CC is still kept there: shelf-mark BB. 3. 7a. It has also been recently digitized and is freely available to browse at: http://issuu.com/christsbooks/docs/bb37alocke?e=3803189/2905437. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Christ's College, Cambridge, for granting me access to the book and authorizing me to quote the annotations it contains.
6 This has already been underlined by Milton, J. R.. See his ‘Pierre Coste, John Locke and the third earl of Shaftesbury’, in Hutton, Sarah and Schuurman, Paul, eds., Studies on Locke: sources, contemporaries, and legacy (Dordrecht, 2008), pp. 195–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 196–7 and 203–5.
7 The manuscript of ‘La vie de Coste et anecdotes sur ses ouvrages’ was discovered by Anthony McKenna: Leyden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Marchand papers, MS March 45, fo. 12. It was edited in Bouchilloux, Hélène and Pitassi, Maria-Cristina, eds., Que la religion chrétienne est très-raisonnable, telle qu'elle nous est représentée dans l’écriture sainte, [et autres textes] (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar. It is from this edition that La Motte's ‘La vie de Coste’ will be cited.
8 Note that although the imprint of the 1714 Works refers to ‘John’ Churchill, we can presume that the guiding hand was, as it had always been, his elder brother and senior partner, Awnsham, who had served Locke in many ways.
9 Note that the 1713 edition of Two treatises and its 1714 reprint were, to all intents and purposes, identical. Therefore, they shall henceforth be referred to as the 1713–14 edition of Two treatises.
10 For a description of the unmistakable way in which Locke registered his ownership of a book, see Harrison, John and Laslett, Peter, eds., The library of John Locke (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 30–42Google Scholar, especially pp. 33–4.
11 On Locke's paraphs, see ibid., pp. 63, 278–9.
12 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, foreword, p. ix; italics mine.
13 Oxford, Bodleian Library: Locke 8.175a.
14 Oxford, Bodleian Library: Locke 8.175.
15 Yolton, Jean S., John Locke a descriptive bibliography (Bristol, 1998)Google Scholar, p. 36.
16 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, pp. 146 and 477.
17 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke and Shaftesbury’, p. 201 n. 29.
18 It is undeniably the same hand which, in the 1694 copy in the Bodleian Library and the 1698 copy in Christ's College Library, amended the first three paragraphs of the First treatise in the outer margins. But stopping at line 8 of page 3 (i, §3), the annotations were not proceeded with in the 1694 Bodleian copy, whereas Locke further corrected the third paragraph before carrying on with his correction of the text in the 1698 CC.
19 As Milton put it: only ‘a few of the many additions and corrections [the CC] contains are in Locke's hand’. Milton, ‘Coste, Locke and Shaftesbury’, p. 201.
20 See the margin of ii, §52 where the correction is in both a well-rounded handwriting and a clearer ink than the rest of the annotations. Note that this is a correction made in the light of the errata for the 1698 printing.
21 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke and Shaftesbury’, p. 201 n. 29.
22 See in that respect his article on one of the Malmesbury letters by Coste: Milton, J. R., ‘Pierre Coste, John Locke, and the Shaftesbury family: a new letter’, Locke Studies, 7 (2007), pp. 159–71Google Scholar.
23 My work on the Huguenots has led me to consult Coste's extant correspondence at the Bibliothèque de la Société de l'histoire du protestantisme français, Paris (La Motte papers); the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester (Malmesbury papers); and the National Archives, London (Shaftesbury papers). It is almost entirely in French and consists almost exclusively of original pieces composed on relatively large sheets of writing paper, whereas the annotations to be found in the CC are in English and are crammed into the narrow margins of the book where they seem to have been copied out.
24 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke, and Shaftesbury’, p. 201 n. 29.
25 An English translation of it could be: ‘This is how Mr L. corrected this passage in the Exemplar on which he wishes his book to be reprinted after his death.’
26 See above, p. 27.
27 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, pp. 9–10, 146.
28 Ibid., p. 10.
29 Ibid., foreword, p. ix.
30 Ibid., p. 149.
31 It was first discovered and acquired by Thomas Hollis in the eighteenth century, and formed the basis of Hollis's 1764 edition of Two treatises, which proudly announced: ‘The present Edition of this Book … has the Advantage of [the Author's] last Corrections and Improvements, from a Copy delivered by him to Mr Peter Coste, communicated to the Editor, and now lodged in Christ College, Cambridge.’
32 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke, and Shaftesbury’, p. 198; see pp. 197–8.
33 Ibid., p. 197.
34 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, p. 477.
35 This can be further observed at ii, §§26 and 44.
36 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, p. 146.
37 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke, and Shaftesbury’, pp. 197 and 205.
38 It served as the basis to the ‘Avertissement de l'Editeur’ [Jean Neaulme] to the 3rd edition of Coste's Histoire de la vie du prince de Bourbon (La Haye, 1748), but the homage that was paid to Coste in the editor's foreword to this book was far from being so lavish in detail as the manuscript version of La Motte's account.
39 Dybikowski, James, ‘Letters from solitude: Pierre Coste's correspondence with the third earl of Shaftesbury’, in Beaurepaire, Pierre-Yves, Häseler, Jens, and McKenna, Antony, eds., Les réseaux de correspondance à l’âge classique (Saint-Etienne, 2006), pp. 109–33Google Scholar.
40 Milton, ‘Coste, Locke, and Shaftesbury’, pp. 195–222.
41 The identity of the translator has been confirmed by Savonius, Sami. See his ‘Locke in French: the Du gouvernement civil of 1691 and its readers’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 47–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 56–60.
42 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 243.
43 This is my translation of La Motte's: ‘L'essai du gouvernement civil’, in ibid., p. 242. This entailed the disclosure of the secret of Locke's authorship of Two treatises to Coste, which would not have been a first since Coste had also been let into the secret of his authorship of the two Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, upon translating them into French at Oates.
44 This is my translation of La Motte's: ‘Livre’, in ibid., p. 243.
45 This is my translation of La Motte's: ‘Le paquet contenoit le Livre qui étoit celui du Gouvernement Civil, avec diverses Additions et Corrections que M. Coste fournit dans la suite à Churchil pour le reimprimer’, in ibid., p. 243.
46 Ibid., pp. 243–4.
47 This is my translation of La Motte's: ‘Traité du Gouvernement Civil’, in ibid., p. 244.
48 For direct evidence, see his own correspondence with Desmaizeaux: London, British Libaray (BL), Desmaizeaux papers, MS 4286, fos. 242, 248, and 11. For indirect evidence, see for instance Bernard's comment, ibid., MS 4281, fo. 144, quoted by Milton in ‘Coste, Locke, and Shaftesbury’, p. 201.
49 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 260. It is only a much summarized and largely unnoticed version which was eventually published. See p. 32.
50 La Motte to Desmaizeaux, 5 Nov. 1709, London, BL, Add. MS 4286, fo. 91.
51 Locke, The works of J. Locke Esq. (1714), foreword ‘To the reader’.
52 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 243.
53 See Coste to Locke, 28 June/8 July 1695, 3/13 Sept. 1695, and 23 June/3 July 1696, in de Beer, E. S., ed., The correspondence of John Locke (8 vols., Oxford, 1976–89)Google Scholar, v, letters 1917, 1940, and 2107.
54 Note that likewise, the 4th edition of Locke's Essay concerning human understanding was not set up from a copy of the 3rd printing, but of the 2nd printing of 1695. See Yolton, Bibliography, p. 80.
55 Too neat to have been jotted under dictation, the correction to i, §154 takes the form of a long addition which is started in the margin along the text and overflows in the blank space under the text, and of a footnote which appears at the foot of the page, as it should, right underneath the last sentence of the long addition. What is striking is the way in which the sign (i), indicating the position where the footnote should be read in the flow of the sentence, was inserted. Far from being squeezed in the margin, either after ‘observe’ at the end of the line, or just in front of ‘how’ at the beginning of the next, the sign (i) sits comfortably and in its own rights in front of ‘how’, which undoubtedly proves that Coste was copying from another copy in which the footnote had been added to the long addition as an afterthought. It was clearly not the case in the CC where the colour of the ink remains uniform throughout. The various additions are so neatly inserted that it rather suggests the corrections were copied out all in one stretch, pretty mechanically.
56 Compare Du gouvernement, i, vii and Two treatises, ii, §10.
57 The original read: ‘there is commonly injury done, and some Person or other, some other Man, receives damage by his transgression’ (Two treatises, ii, §10, p. 227 of the 1690 edn), which is the passage Mazel failed to translate.
58 CC, ii, §10, p. 172.
59 Coste being a Frenchman, clarity was for him a sacrosanct principle. We see him obsessed with it in all the prefaces of his translations of Locke's works where he makes specific comments about his deep aversion of equivocations. See Essai philosophique concernant l'entendement humain (Amsterdam, 1700), ‘Avertissement du traducteur’, sigs.**3v–**4r; De l'education des enfans (Amsterdam, 1695), ‘Préface du traducteur’, sig.**3r; Le christianisme raisonnable, tel qu'il nous est représenté dans l’écriture sainte (Amsterdam, 1715), ‘Avertissement du traducteur’, p. vi.
60 Locke, Two treatises, ii, §13, pp. 231–2 of the 1690 edn.
61 Locke, Du gouvernement, i, x, p. 14; italics mine.
62 CC, ii, §13, p. 175.
63 Locke, Two treatises, ii, §13, p. 232 of the 1690 edn.
64 Locke, Du gouvernement, i, x, p. 14; italics mine.
65 Locke, Two treatises, ii, §13, CC, p. 175; italics mine.
66 See Locke, Du gouvernement, i, ii, p. 3.
67 Hooker's original reads: ‘how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless my self be careful to satisfie the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other Men, we all being of one and the same nature?’ (Book i, section 8; italics mine).
68 The 1713–14 edition reading: ‘other Men, being of one and the same nature,’ (ii, §5, p. 182 of the 1713 edn, and p. 160 of the 1714 edn), Locke's master-copy seems to have been corrected in the light of the errata of the second edition of 1694, as follows: ‘other Men weak, being of one and the same nature,’ (ii, §5). The CC correction was patterned on it but supplemented the missing question mark, as follows: ‘other Men., We all being of one and the same nature;?’ (CC, ii, §5).
69 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, p. 149.
70 Note that in his edition of Two treatises, Laslett nonetheless preferred to follow the 1713–14 editor rather than to insert the end fly-leaf correction.
71 Italics mine.
72 As Coste's comment is placed right underneath another annotation, we can also assert that this addition, which corresponds to the addition Locke wished to make to ii, §37, was also made by the author during his lifetime.
73 See the description of Locke's two different attempts above (p. 33–4): the former entailed the translation of ‘the Essay of civil government’, i.e. the Second treatise (subtitled: an Essay concerning the true original, extent, and end of civil government; underlining mine), which had been mangled by Mazel, while the latter entailed the translation of the Two treatises ‘Book’, i.e. both the First and the Second treatise making up the ‘Beginning and End of [Locke's] Discourse concerning Government’, which was then handed over to Churchill.
74 See the marginalia to ii, §§19 and 26.
75 Savonius, ‘Locke in French’, pp. 74–5.
76 Mazel interpreted the lacuna left by Locke in the original English passage: ‘so by the like reason when his own Preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as can to preserve the rest of Mankind, and ø not unless it be to do Justice on an offender, ø take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the Preservation of the Life, the Liberty, Health, Limb or Goods of another’ (ii, §6, p. 223 of the 1690 edn; italics mine) as a stylistic effect designed to avoid the repetition of ‘ought he … to’ in the second part of the sentence, which led him to use ‘doit’ (see Du gouvernement, i, iii), i.e. ‘ought he’. It seems to have been how Locke became aware that the formulation could indeed lend itself to such an interpretation in the absence of precision on his part. To avoid any ambiguity and clarify what he meant, Locke seems to have felt the need to add the modal ‘may’ in front of ‘take away’. It appeared in both the 1713–14 editions and the CC (see p. 169 of the CC, p. 183 of the 1713 edn and p. 160 of the 1714 edn).
77 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, p. 477.
78 Note that the two Bodleian copies of Two treatises mentioned earlier (see pp. 28–29) only contain very neat textual and marginal corrections. In that respect, they are very much unlike the CC. The fully annotated 1690 edition of the text is so neatly and thoroughly amended by Locke throughout that it can give us an idea of what the master-copy for the 1713–14 edition could have looked like.
79 Note that Locke expanded no less than three passages belonging to chapter v (‘Of Property’) in the copy he prepared for posterity (ii, §§ 37, 42, and 50). The further argument he added to ii, 37 shows Locke as a political economist, drawing on what his activities at the Board of Trade and Plantations have taught him (see the comparison between the situation in Devonshire and in America) to highlight that cultivated fields (in Devonshire) produce 10 times (not to say 100 times) more than waste lands (in America), which leads him to suggest that the English agrarian enclosure system is not prejudicial but beneficial to mankind since by increasing the productivity of the land they cultivate, the industrious English farmers contribute to increasing the stock and thereby labour not just for themselves but also for the public good. Locke therefore presents the greater productivity generated by the acquisition and accumulation of private property made possible by the introduction of money in a positive light. The digressive remark added to ii, §42 echoes this point. There, Locke adds that the strength of a country is not to be measured in terms of territory but in terms of population, which has been interpreted as being in keeping with his argument in favour of the increase of the English population, which he championed in his economic writings of the 1690s, in the context of William III's war against Louis XIV's France. However, it should not be overlooked that in ii, §42, Locke does not just insist on the primacy of population over territory. He specifies that the art of government is to protect property and promote the industriousness of the people, and sounds confident that this is how a country can assert its strength in the face of hostile neighbours, which suggests that Locke believed that by encouraging the productive industriousness of the English population, William III could gain the upper hand over France. The qualitative aspect of the population dutifully labouring in its calling therefore seems just as important as numbers of people, i.e. the quantitative dimension. Locke linked the opposite phenomenon (i.e. depopulation) to absolute monarchy and highlighted the fact that absolute monarchs were acting contrary to God's command to be fruitful and multiply (see Genesis 1:28, as quoted in i, §§ 33 and 41). We are therefore not that surprised to see him concluding ii, §42 by suggesting that in following his advice about the English population, William III would act as a ‘godlike’ prince, dutifully making laws conformable to God's commands. The expression was not new. Locke used it as early as 1690 (see ii, §166, 1690 edn and all subsequent edns), despite his abhorrence of divine right kingship.
80 Locke, Two treatises, ii, §50; italics mine. Locke's original passage read: ‘It is plain, that the consent of Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth; I mean out of the bounds of Society and Compact: for in Governments the Laws regulate it, they having by ø consent, found out and agreed in a way how a Man may rightfully, and without injury, possess more than he himself can make use of by receiving Gold and Silver, which may continue long in a Mans Possession, without decaying for the overplus, and agreeing those Metals should have a value’ (ii, §50, pp. 268–9 of the 1690 edn; emphasis mine).
81 For more details see Tully, James, 1980: A discourse on property: John Locke and his adversaries (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 146–54Google Scholar, especially pp. 149–50.
82 As Tully puts it: ‘Locke's analysis of money furnishes the most powerful motive for entering into political society’ (ibid., p. 150). This is indeed the one important respect in which Locke distanced himself from Grotius and Pufendorf (ibid., pp. 98–100). Unsurprisingly, Locke's original conception of how money modified the conditions of enjoyment of natural property led him to propose a no less original account of the conditions of emergence and mission of civil government.
83 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 245.
84 Here is an idea of the liberties Mazel took with the text, which ended up twisting its meaning: ‘il est clair, par une conséquence nécessaire, que le mesme consentement [celui des hommes] a permis les possessions inégales & disproportionnées … & que ce moyen c'est l'or & l'argent, lesquels peuvent demeurer éternellement entre les mains d'un homme, sans que ce qu'il en a, au-delà de ce qui luy est nécessaire, soit en danger de se pourrir & de déchoir: le consentement mutuel & unanime rend justes les démarches d'une personne qui avec des espéces d'argent, agrandit, étend, augmente ses possessions; autant qu'il lui plait’ (Du gouvernement, iv, xxv, p. 62; italics mine).
85 My own translation of Mazel's: ‘le consentement mutuel & unanime’ (ibid.).
86 As he put it in ii, §35: ‘The Law Man was under [in the beginning and first peopling of the great Common of the World], was … for appropriating.’
87 Locke, Two treatises, ii, §45.
88 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 245.
89 See Soulard, D., ‘Anglo-French cultural transmission: the case of John Locke and the Huguenots’, Historical Research, 85 (2012), pp. 105–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Locke, Essai philosophique concernant l'entendement humain (Amsterdam, 1700), ‘Avertissement du traducteur’, sigs. **3v and **4v, and ‘Monsieur Locke au libraire’, sig. ***1r.
91 Bibliothèque Choisie, 6 (1705), Art. v, pp. 342–411, at pp. 379–80.
92 I quote according to the English translation of Le Clerc's ‘Eloge’ made in 1706: Le Clerc, Jean, The life and character of Mr. John Locke, author of the Essay concerning humane understanding (London, 1706)Google Scholar. The original quotation is in Bibliothèque Choisie, 6 (1705), Art. v, pp. 342–411, at pp. 379–80.
93 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, p. 239.
94 Locke, Essai philosophique (Amsterdam, 1729), ‘Avertissement du traducteur’, sig. ***1v.
95 La Motte, ‘Vie de Coste’, pp. 239–40.
96 Locke, De l'education des enfans, p. xvii. Indeed, in 1695, §177 of the 1693 edition was expanded into §§188–90, and this is where we find the addition of Coste's idea. See Some thoughts concerning education (London, 1695), §189, pp. 333–4.
97 Laslett, ed., Two treatises, footnote to ii, §172.
98 Ibid., pp. 491–2; emphasis mine.
99 First, in his free translation of Locke's: ‘it is the effect only of Forfeiture, which the Aggressor makes of his own Life, when he puts himself into the State of War with another’, which reads: ‘Il n'y a qu'un cas où l'on puisse avoir justement un pouvoir arbitraire & absolu, c'est lors qu'on a esté attaqué injustement par des gens qui ses sont mis en état de guerre, & ont exposé leur vie & leurs biens au pouvoir de ceux qu'ils ont ainsi attaquez.’ Second, in his translation of Locke's: ‘he renders himself liable to be destroyed by his Adversary, when-ever he can, as any other noxious and brutish Creature that his destructive to his Being’ (ii, §172, p. 395 of the 1690 edn) as ‘ils … méritent d'estre detruits, dés que l'occasion s'en présentera, par ceux qu'ils avoient dessein de détruire’ (Du gouvernement, xiv, iv, p. 225; emphasis mine).
100 On the distinction between the right of ‘punishing’ a crime for ‘restraint’, which belongs to everybody, and the right of ‘taking reparation’, which only belongs to the injured party, see Two treatises, ii, §§10–11.
101 On the ‘State of War’ as levelling all social distinction, and thereby entitling the people to punish their king, see Two treatises, ii, §235. On the necessity to punish the crime to avoid greater evil when ‘the Welfare of Millions’ is at stake, see ii, §240.
102 My own translation of Mazel's above quoted passage (italics mine).
103 II, §172 (CC, p. 301); emphasis mine.
104 Ibid.
105 See also ii, §37 and note that in the case of ii, §§37 and 172, the layered, dialogic nature of the emendations and conversations it records is easier to identify since the first version of the correction appears on the bound-in end fly-leaf and is then reworked in the margins of the text. See also ii, §§42, 107 and 110 which, like ii, §37, tend to show Locke in a conversational mode, spelling out his meaning more clearly (see ‘This shews …, and that …’ in ii, §42; ‘… and so …’ in ii, §107; ‘which ever of these it was… certain it is that…’ in ii, §110 and ‘I have here rated the improved land very low … For I aske whether…’ in ii, §37).
106 Mark Goldie is preparing a new edition of the Second treatise for the Oxford World's Classics series, based on the 1713–14 edition. This will not be a text-critical edition, unlike the new edition of Two treatises which Ian Harris is preparing for the Clarendon edition of the Works of John Locke.
107 For more details on the translation practices of the day, see Cointre, Annie and Tran-Gervat, Yen-Maï, eds., Histoire des traductions en langue française, XVII–XVIIIe siècles, 1610–1815 (Paris, 2014)Google Scholar, an interdisciplinary volume which gathers the work of historians and literary scholars.
108 See Marshall, J., John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar; D. Soulard, La fortune de l’œuvre politique de John Locke dans la république des lettres, 1686–1704 (Paris, forthcoming); and M. Goldie and D. Soulard, eds., The early lives of John Locke (Oxford, forthcoming).
