A proper treatment of Locke would have to explain howJohn QuigginHow then did Locke get such a high reputation? The answer isn’t all that mysterious. Locke was closely involved in the British colonisation of North America, both as an investor and as a participant in political activity such as the drafting of the Constitution of the Carolinas, which ratified the expropriation of the indigenous population and enshrined the absolute power of slave-owners....
- His theory of natural rights in property was designed to justify the expropriation of indigenous populations
- His advocacy of freedom included support for slavery
- His theory of religious toleration excluded atheists and Catholics
- His theory of political freedom did not extend to freedom of speech.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
John Quiggin — John Locke, an enemy of freedom
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4 comments:
Sounds to me rather that he was a big advocate of 'freedom'...
He just advocated for the freedom to enslave others...
Who cares about the others? that's their problem...
Textbook libertarianism 101
Review Essay: Edward Feser‘s Locke and Eric Mack‘s John Locke
http://reasonpapers.com/pdf/32/rp_32_10.pdf
There are essentially two ways of reading philosophy. The first is to read the texts and interpret them as stand-alone documents that speak for themselves.
The other way is to read them in relation to historical context, both in terms of the development of that person's thought and also in terms of the context of the time in which the person was writing. The context involves not only history but also sociology: Über-sociologist Randall Collins wrote a magisterial tome entitled The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change.
From this vantage it is clear that Locke was typically English rather than Continental. He was a member of the bourgeoisie that was rising at the time., in which the context was replacement of the feudal order with the bourgeois order.
The liberalism that Locke wrote about was not so much personal freedom of individuals as freedom from the constraint of feudal government as remnant of the moribund feudal period in which rentiers ruled as a privileged class. Locke's liberalism was about making space for bourgeois ascension to power and wealth.
The result was bourgeois liberalism that was not concerned with distributed liberty or wealth other than from the feudal rentier ruling class to the rising industrially productive and commercially oriented bourgeoisie. The rising bourgeoisie regarded distributed liberty and equality as dangerous after the manner of Plato's fear of democracy as the rule of the rabble. Bourgeois liberalism is therefore the liberalism of "men of property." For Locke, everyone is free in the negative sense of freedom from government constraint on opportunity, but there is no right to share in the commons equally. In fact the goal is to privatize the commons to make it productive and Locke laid down the rationale for this primitive accumulation and subsequent transfer of private property in accordance with contract law. This was bourgeois through and through.
See Wikipedia on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
No doubt this view of bourgeois liberalism was a huge advance in the development of liberalism as both and idea and a social, political, and economic reality. At the same time, it was limited by the context in which it was elaborated. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then and looking back at Locke as an authority now is anachronistic.
Since that time the context has changed. In fact, it began changing soon after the Locke and the Enlightenment, with the American and French Revolutions, which established Enlightenment ideas in social, political and economic institutions. That in itself brought about changes, but so did the inevitable push back from vested interested in the status quo. The 19th century was a century of conflict over these ideas and their implementation.
While WWI destroyed the remnant of the feudal age, the dialectic begun in the Enlightenment is still playing out globally. Marx established a tradition on the left, and Neoclassical economics on the right. This morphed into the neoliberal world order under the US. With the demise of the USSR, the neoliberal world order of the US is now confronting the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist order of the PRC mediated by Deng and now Xi, with the world dividing into two camps pretty much along the lines of the Atlanticists and the ROW.
History has a liberal bias and the saga continues, but not necessarily in a straight line. The historical dialectic is more like a sailboat that is dependent on the wind and must tack with shifts in the wind than a self-propelled motor boat.
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