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Response to Critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Jeremy Waldron
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Extract

I am grateful to all the participants in this symposium for the attention they have paid to my arguments in God, Locke, and Equality (GLE) and for the kind things they say about the book. I am grateful, too, to the editors of this Review for offering me the opportunity to respond. In this brief note, I want to answer some of the criticisms that have been made of my interpretation, particularly in regard to Locke's account of the underpinnings of basic equality. I shall not say much about the suggestion which I advanced at the beginning and the end of GLE to the effect that we—even now, in the twenty-first century—ought to take seriously the view that the principle of basic equality requires for its elaboration and support something along the lines of Locke's religious views and that, just as basic equality was not conceived or nurtured on purely secular premises, so it cannot be sustained on purely secular premises. A full elaboration and defense of this suggestion would require much more space than I allotted it in GLE or than I can allot it here. I hope eventually to provide this in a book, which will deal with basic equality directly rather than through the lens of John Locke's work. Here I will discuss this aspect only by way of brief response to the efforts by Professors Zuckert and Reiman to show (not just to say) that basic equality can be supported on purely secular foundations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Summer 2005 , pp. 495 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar – referred to hereinafter as “GLE.”

2. Sigmund, Paul, “Jeremy Waldron and the Religious Turn in Locke Scholarship”—referred to hereinafter as “Sigmund”—p. 415Google Scholar.

3. Dunn, John, “What History Can Show: Jeremy Waldron's Reading of Locke's Christian Politics” referred to hereinafter as “Dunn.”—at p. 433Google Scholar.

4. Dunn, , p. 442Google Scholar.

5. Locke, John, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, two volumes, ed. Wainwright, Arthur W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

6. Dunn, John, “What is Living and What is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke,” in his collection Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981–1989 (Oxford: Polity, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 99, cited in GLE, p. 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Sigmund, , p. 415Google Scholar.

9. Dunn, , p. 442Google Scholar.

10. Professor Dunn, (p. 439)Google Scholar may be right that Laslett never really intended his remarks about the Treatises and the Essay to be “treated as all-purpose standing constraints on interpretive heuristics.” But he agrees that to the extent that they have been treated in that way, they have had a deleterious effect on Locke scholarship.

11. Reiman, Jeffrey, “Towards a Secular Lockean Liberalism—referred to hereinafter as “Reiman”—pp. 476–77Google Scholar.

12. Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, II, sect. 4.Google Scholar

13. Reiman, , p. 484Google Scholar.

14. We must not forget that the passage quoted above does not stand on its own. Locke devotes the whole of the First Treatise to a demonstration that there is not the warrant in scripture for subordination among us that royalists like Robert Filmer suppose. The brief statement of section four of the Second Treatise explains, in effect, why that protracted biblical excursus was necessary.

15. Zuckert, , “Locke—Religion—Equality”—p. 424Google Scholar.

16. Zuckert, , p. 425Google Scholar.

17. Zuckert, , p. 425Google Scholar.

18. For Locke's basic teleology of the human, see Locke, , Two Treatises, I, sect. 86Google Scholar: “God … made man, and planted in him, as in all other animals, a strong desire of self-preservation, and furnished the world with things fit for food and raiment, and other necessaries of life, subservient to his design, that man should live and abide for some time upon the face of the earth, and not that so curious and wonderful a piece of workmanship, by his own negligence, or want of necessaries, should perish again, presently after a few moments continuance.”

19. I think Zuckert is wondering whether I want to impute to Locke the view that atheists are less equal than the rest of us, because they lack this actualized knowledge; see Zuckert, , p. 426Google Scholar. Now as I argued in the final chapter of GLE, Locke held very firm views on atheists. But he did not argue, nor did I impute to him the argument, that they are less than the equals of their theistic fellow-humans. They are a menace because they don't believe in God, but their status remains fully human.

20. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Introduction, p. 45, cited in GLE at p. 79Google Scholar.

21. In section 5 of the Second Treatise, Locke also infers a principle of equal concern from these elementary facts about our status. Unlike Professor Reiman—Reiman, , p. 479Google Scholar—I attribute no secret significance to the fact that Locke credits Richard Hooker with this argument rather than developing it in is own voice.

22. Zuckert, , p. 429Google Scholar.

23. Faulkner, Robert, “Preface to Liberalism: Locke's First Treatise and the Bible”—referred to hereinafter as “Faulkner”—p. 455Google Scholar.

24. Locke, , Two Treatises, II, sect. 112Google Scholar; see also Faulkner, p. 463Google Scholar.

25. See, e.g., Locke, , Two Treatises, II, sect. 24Google Scholar, at the basis of his theory of property.

26. Zuckert, , pp. 429Google Scholar.

27. Sigmund, , p. 415Google Scholar.

28. Hazlitt, William, “On Prejudice” in Sketches and Essays (London: Richards, 1903)Google Scholar.

29. Faulkner, , pp. 456–57Google Scholar: “The final paragraph of the First Treatise recounts the ‘destruction’ of the Jews by the Romans (I.169) and hence their demise as ‘God's peculiar People.’ Consider. Jews, Chosen by God, could never agree that their divine significance had been erased by a political event. And Christians, who are of course Locke's chief audience, would expect a turn from the defects of Jehovah to the saving Messiah. Yet the suppositions of a righteous God and a saving Jesus are missing. …[T]he veiled disappearance of the biblical God is the truth hidden by the missing middle, but indicated by ‘evidence’ elsewhere in the Treatises, and the central teachings of Christians as well as Jews are replaced by Locke's central teachings of natural freedom and civil government. One is then led to wonder, then, whether it is merely coincidence that the argument for natural freedom begins just after the central section of the first Treatise (I. 86), and the argument for ‘Dominion and Control’ by government, at the central section of the second (II. 223).”

30. I discuss this especially with regard to the Paraphrase and Notes in GLE at pp. 195–98.

31. GLE, p. 208.

32. GLE, pp. 215–16.

33. About the closest I got to anything esoteric was to toy with a political explanation of why the Second Treatise makes no reference to toleration: arguing for toleration at the time the Second Treatise was drafted might have played into the hands of the Stuarts' cynical use of the tolerationist agenda at that stage.

“James II was trying to enlist the support of Dissenters in favor of the repeal of Test Acts against Catholics, which meant that during the mid-1680s, tolerationist rhetoric was being used against the Whigs. So there was every reason for those opposed to James … to play down this aspect of their overall position” (GLE, p. 212).

But I now don't think that can be right. It doesn't explain why Locke failed to insert anything on toleration at the time—years later—when the book was put into its final form and published. (We know that a certain amount of rewriting and reassembly did go on at that time.) And anyway it neglects the fact that Locke's tolerationist view was always and easily able to distinguish itself from the pro-Catholic agenda of the Stuarts.

34. Zuckert, , pp. 428 and 429Google Scholar.

35. See GLE, pp. 195–98.

36. Zuckert, , pp, 422–236Google Scholar.

37. Grotius, , “Prolegomenon” to The Laws of War and Peace,—.Google Scholar

38. Reiman, , p. 484Google Scholar.

39. Se GLE, p. 96.

40. Professor Zuckert says that “Locke famously declared Christianity ‘reasonable,’ i.e., in accord with reason” (Zuckert, , p. 424Google Scholar). But as I am sure he knows, The Reasonableness of Christianity is not at all a work like Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. What Locke argues in this book is that Christianity is not unreasonable in the demands that it makes on our beliefs. He doesn't mean it demands only beliefs that accord with secular reason, but that it involves only a fairly small—though certainly a significant and far-reaching—set of non-secular propositions (such as that Jesus is the Messiah).

41. Locke, , A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Tully, James H. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983)Google Scholar.

42. GLE, p. 13, quoted by Reiman at p. 1.

43. Reiman, , p. 481Google Scholar.

44. See above, text accompanying note 27.

45. See GLE, pp. 241–42.

46. Dunn, , pp. 445–46Google Scholar.

47. Reiman, , p. 482Google Scholar.

48. Zuckert, , p. 431Google Scholar.

49. Reiman, , p. 488Google Scholar.

50. Reiman, , p. 488Google Scholar.

51. Reiman, , p. 483Google Scholar.

52. Locke, , Two Treatises, I, sect. 6Google Scholar.