In Search of the Radical John Locke

On November 15, 1688, William of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands, invaded England and put King James II to flight. Three months later, John Locke returned to England after six years of exile in Holland. In April 1689, William and Mary (daughter of James II) were crowned, having accepted the Declaration of Rights. This completed the “Glorious Revolution.” In late 1689, Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. As Locke explains in his preface, this work was published to justify the Glorious Revolution:

Reader, Thou hast here the Beginning and End of a Discourse concerning Government; what Fate has otherwise disposed of the Papers that should have filled up the middle, and were more than all the rest, ’tis not worth while to tell thee. These, which remain, I hope are sufficient to establish the Throne of our Great Restorer, Our Present King William; to make good his Title, in the Consent of the People.... (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed., [New York: Mentor Books, 1965], p. 171.)

Many commentators, misled by Locke’s preface, have assumed that Locke wrote the Two Treatises (or at least the famous Second Treatise) after William’s successful invasion of England. In 1960, Peter Laslett published his definitive edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and thereby changed the course of Lockeian scholarship.

According to Laslett, most of the Two Treatises of Government was written between 1679 and 1681, during a political struggle known as the Exclusion Crisis. This was a Parliamentary effort by Whigs, led by Lord Shaftesbury, to prevent the Catholic Duke of York (later James II and brother of Charles II) from succeeding to the Throne of England.

The Two Treatises, Laslett argues, “is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet” (p. 75). Thus, “Two Treatises in fact turns out to be a demand for a revolution to be brought about, not a rationalization of a revolution in need of defense” (p. 60). Similarly, Maurice Cranston, in John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1957), draws on Laslett’s research and concludes: “The Two Treatises of Government was...not something written after the event to ‘justify’ a revolution, but something written before the event to promote a revolution” (p. 208).

Laslett’s redating of the Two Treatises (or, more precisely, the Second Treatise) led to depicting John Locke as far more radical than his conventional image. And this “radical Locke” thesis gains momentum when we consider this question: Why did Locke, throughout his life, try to hide his authorship of the Two Treatises?

When Locke returned to England in February 1689, he was received warmly and was offered a government post. He had backed the right horse. So why did Locke publish the Two Treatises anonymously and strive assiduously to conceal his authorship, even from friends? Why not reveal his authorship and bask in accolades from a grateful public?

One traditional explanation is that Locke was a secretive man who eschewed public controversy. This is true, but it raises another question: Why should the Two Treatises—which was expressly published “to establish the Throne of our Great Restorer, Our present King William”—excite public controversy at all? If, as some commentators have argued, Locke’s theory of revolution was merely a summary of orthodox Whiggism, then it is difficult to understand why Locke tried so hard to remain anonymous.

Peter Laslett suggests a reason for Locke’s “extraordinary furtiveness about the writing of Two Treatises.” Throughout the 1690s, there was a possibility that James II might recapture the throne of England. And if this happened, Locke feared retaliation if his authorship of Two Treatises became known.

A better explanation is given by Julian Franklin in John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Locke’s theory of revolution, Franklin explains, was unacceptable to establishment Whigs who were seeking to justify William’s accession to the throne. According to Locke’s theory, when James II tried to subvert the English Constitution, he put himself in a state of war with the English people and dissolved the government. Thereafter, the power to erect a new government devolved to the “people” acting in their capacity as a political society.

Locke’s theory of a dissolved government, had it been accepted, would have released the people from their obligation not only to James II, but also to Parliament. Moderate Whigs were unwilling to accept the radical implication of this doctrine. They did not agree with Locke that the English government had been “dissolved” and that power thereby reverted to the people. Instead, moderate Whigs advanced the theory that James II had abdicated his throne and left it vacant. Afterwards, the two Houses of Parliament, assembling as a “convention,” filled the vacancy.

Thus, Locke’s theory of revolution was rejected as too extreme by most Whig apologists of the Glorious Revolution (a judgment repeated later by Edmund Burke and Sir William Blackstone). This, Franklin suggests, is why Locke didn’t want to disclose his authorship of the Two Treatises.

Locke’s awareness that his thesis was considered dangerous by all, helps to explain not only his decision to conceal his authorship, but his obsessive efforts to make sure that it was not disclosed by friends....[G]iven the radicalism of the Second Treatise, as it was generally understood, he had special reason to be fearful. Had his authorship become widely known even after 1689, he might have been exposed to prosecution and, at the very least, would have suffered damage to his reputation (p. 113).

Even with the work of Laslett, Cranston, Franklin, and others, our picture of John Locke as a radical activist remained blurred. Fortunately, that picture has been put into focus by Richard Ashcraft in Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.

Ashcraft has given us what is perhaps the most important book on John Locke ever published. Massive (600 pages) and richly detailed, Revolutionary Politics draws on previously untapped resources and presents a John Locke who was hip-deep in the revolutionary politics of his day—first as a confidant to Lord Shaftesbury and, later, as a fellow conspirator among British dissidents in Holland.

Here I want to examine one of Ashcraft’s more interesting and provocative claims: that the Two Treatises was more indebted to the philosophy of the Levellers than scholars have previously assumed. As Ashcraft says: “I have throughout this work placed Locke in much closer proximity to the Levellers and to the radical political theory they developed than has previously been supposed.” And again: “[T]he relationship of Locke’s argument in the Two Treatises to the language used by the Levellers merits much more serious consideration than it has heretofore been given by interpreters of Locke’s political ideas” (p. 150).

The Levellers were an organized movement of radical individualists who flourished during the 1640s, a time of civil war between King and Parliament. The best-known Levellers included John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn.

Ashcraft concedes that there is no “direct link” between Locke and the Levellers. Indeed, most historians accept the conclusion of Peter Laslett that “as far as we know Locke never read Lilburne or the other Levellers....” (p. 34).

Did Locke own any Leveller pamphlets? Most historians say no, but Ashcraft raises an interesting point. Locke stored over 600 pamphlets in boxes, and only a fraction of these were listed by title in his library catalogue. Leveller pamphlets may have been among the hundreds of unmentioned items.

In addition, during his last two years of exile in Holland, Locke lived in Rotterdam with the Quaker merchant Benjamin Furley. Furley owned an impressive library—over 4,000 volumes, including “a substantial collection of Leveller tracts...to which Locke had constant access” (Ashcraft, p. 165). (Furley, we should also note, had been a close friend of the Commonwealthman Algernon Sidney.)

But even if Locke read the Leveller tracts in Furley’s library, this doesn’t support Ashcraft’s thesis of a Leveller influence on the Two Treatises. Locke didn’t meet Furley until 1687, six years after the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) during which most of the Two Treatises was supposedly written.

Whether Locke read the Levellers is a matter of conjecture, so Ashcraft doesn’t pursue this possibility very far. Instead, he accepts Laslett’s judgment that it was “from conversation and casual contact, not from documentary acquaintance, that Locke inherited the fruit of the radical writings of the Civil War.”

How, then, does Ashcraft build his case for Locke as a “closet-Leveller” (to overstate the point somewhat)? Basically, Ashcraft employs a sophisticated version of the old adage that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. In Ashcraft’s words:

[T]he more weight one places upon the decision of an author to identify himself with a particular political language selected from among a range of available choices, and the more one thinks in terms of the appeal that a specific political vocabulary has for specific social groups, the more plausible it becomes to think of Locke’s political theory in terms of this association.

Thus, it is by examining Locke’s “political vocabulary” in the Two Treatises and the audience to which it was addressed, that Ashcraft builds much of his case for a “radical Locke” with ties to the Levellers. Given the dearth of firsthand information about Locke’s political activities, it is understandable why Ashcraft uses this methodology. But it is highly speculative and can generate questionable results.

Such is the case, I believe, with Neal Wood’s The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social Study of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Wood employs Marxian class analysis in an attempt to unearth the political implications of Locke’s epistemology. Wood asks the same questions about An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that Ashcraft asks about the Two Treatises. “For whom,” Wood asks, “was Locke writing the Essay? What kind of audience was he interested in reaching?” The answer to these questions “may tell us something about the political nature of the Essay” (p. 41).

Now, perhaps it is simple-minded of me, but I suspect that Locke wrote the Essay (and the Two Treatises) for anyone who cared to read them. But Wood has a different opinion:

It is evident...that Locke wrote the Essay essentially for educated, intelligent men of property—peers and gentry, professionals, civil servants, men of letters, merchants and manufacturers—who had leisure and inclination for study and participation in public affairs (p. 46).

Not surprisingly, Wood concludes that the Essay “was a vehicle for the conveyance of the values and sentiments of the emergent bourgeoisie” (p. 5).

Locke’s audience as seen by Wood differs from Locke’s audience as seen by Ashcraft. For Ashcraft, Locke was addressing not just an “emergent bourgeoisie,” but also artisans and small tradesmen—the lower rungs of the working class. Thus, Ashcraft’s Locke emerges as far more radical than Wood’s Locke. Such disagreements are inevitable when we analyze an author in terms of his supposed audience and then read the values of that audience back into the author’s work.

Nevertheless, although some of Ashcraft’s points are questionable, I believe he presents a credible case for a radical Locke. Now, let’s glance at some of the arguments used by Ashcraft in his effort to forge a link between Locke and the Levellers.

The Leveller Connection

It is well-known that Locke was a friend and protégé of the First Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), and that Locke worked closely with Shaftesbury in opposition to Charles II. Unfortunately, Locke was highly secretive about his political activities, so a good deal of educated guesswork becomes necessary.

In 1676, Shaftesbury moved to London, where he began to organize a coalition of Dissenters and commercial interests. A year later, political dissidents in London formed the Green Ribbon Club, a political organization with secret membership. The name of the Green Ribbon Club is significant, for green ribbons had been the Leveller insignia.

Information on the Green Ribbon Club is scanty, so Ashcraft cannot establish a definite connection between it and Shaftesbury (and, by implication, Locke). Nevertheless, the Green Ribbon Club shared the ideology and political goals of Shaftesbury’s circle; and, as critics noted, Shaftesbury often rubbed shoulders with “state-malcontents” and the “meanest and basest of the people”—the same kind of people who belonged to the Green Ribbon Club.

Throughout his book, Ashcraft emphasizes how Shaftesbury, while building his opposition party during the Exclusion Crisis, appealed to merchants, tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers—the “pert tradesmen,” “meaner sort of people,” and “rabble,” as Tories liked to call them. These were the same groups from which the Levellers had drawn their support decades earlier. Thus, critics assailed the radical Whigs for their “levelling” tendencies. The Whigs, Tories charged, would unleash “a many-headed monster” on society and plunge England into anarchy.

Shaftesbury’s Whigs were repeatedly accused of harboring Leveller and Republican principles. Some historians dismiss these charges as propaganda, but Ashcraft believes that we should take them more seriously. Ashcraft concedes that Shaftesbury was not a closet Leveller, but former Levellers and Commonwealthmen did assist Shaftesbury’s efforts. Ashcraft mentions a number of people (the most famous being John Wildman and Algernon Sidney), but his list accentuates a recurring problem in Revolutionary Politics. A few of the men on Ashcraft’s list had Leveller connections, but the majority are more accurately described as “Commonwealthmen,” that is, those who sided with Parliament during the Civil Wars.

Now, to demonstrate a relationship between Locke and the Commonwealthmen is one thing, but to show a similar relationship to the Levellers—the radical wing of the Commonwealthmen—is another thing entirely. Ashcraft wants to highlight the Leveller influence on the Two Treatises, but he often uses “Leveller” in the same breath with “Commonwealthman” and “Republican.” Had Ashcraft differentiated these terms, I believe he would have avoided some needless confusion.

Ashcraft regards as plausible “the fears being expressed on behalf of the gentry that Commonwealthmen and Levellers were beginning to reappear in the political arena” (p. 249). Shaftesbury and his cohorts, therefore, needed to reassure the landed gentry (another group courted by Shaftesbury) that the radical Whigs were firm believers in property rights. This, Ashcraft maintains, is “especially instructive in explaining why the chapter on property is accorded such prominence in the Two Treatises” (p. 251).

At times, I think Ashcraft pushes this kind of speculation too far. For example, he observes that Locke shared the Leveller hostility to primogeniture, but this doesn’t tell us much until we know how widespread such opposition was among non-Levellers. Additional research in this area might prove illuminating.

Another suggestion by Ashcraft is even more troublesome. Some seventeenth-century theorists, such as Grotius and Pufendorf, defended first-occupancy as the foundation of land ownership. Locke, in contrast, defends a labor theory of ownership, where labor must be “mixed” with the land to bestow title. Beginning with Locke’s emphasis on labor, Ashcraft spins out an elaborate argument designed to show that “Locke’s chapter on property is one of the most radical critiques of the landowning aristocracy produced during the last half of the seventeenth century” (p. 273). Here, then, is another link to the Levellers.

All this is highly speculative, to say the least. Did the “first occupancy” theory lend aid and comfort to that idle portion of the aristocracy who made no effort to improve their land? Ashcraft advances this theory, but then pulls back. Tories didn’t much to say about the origin of property rights; and to the extent that they did express opinions, most believed that all land in the kingdom ultimately belonged to the King. Moreover, some Whigs (including Locke’s friend James Tyrell) upheld versions of first-occupancy theory, so the dispute over original property titles did not divide along party lines. I agree with Ashcraft that Locke’s theory of property was radical, but I think he misses (or at least doesn’t sufficiently emphasize) the major reason for this. Locke shared the belief of many of his contemporaries that natural resources had originally belonged to all men in common. (Ashcraft detects radical undercurrents even in this seven-teenth-century truism.) Grotius, Pufendorf, and others explained the transition from common dominion to private ownership by arguing that all mankind had consented to the change (though they stipulated that this consent was “tacit” and occurred in stages.) Thus, for these theorists, property rights were “conventional.”

Sir Robert Filmer, Locke’s chief antagonist in the Two Treatises, shot a gaping hole in this theory. Filmer pointed out the improbability of private property arising from the unanimous consent of mankind. Yet, “without such a unanimous consent, it was not possible for community to be altered: for if but one man in the world had dissented, the alteration had been unjust [and] robbed him of his right to the common use of all things.” (“Observations Upon H. Grotius,” in Peter Laslett, ed., Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949], p. 273.)

Locke was thoroughly familiar with Filmer’s works, and he undoubtedly was aware of Filmer’s demolition of the “consent theory of property.” Near the beginning of his chapter on property, Locke states his intention to justify private property without relying on consent:

“I shall endeavor to shew, how Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common, and that without an express Compact of all the Commoners” (Laslett ed., p. 327).

Locke begins his defense of property by positing an exception to common dominion: the individual person. “[E]very person,” Locke writes in a famous passage, “has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself.” Next, Locke introduced labor as one facet of self-ownership, and he concludes: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labor with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”

The upshot of Locke’s argument is that private property is not a social convention resting on consent. On the contrary, private property is a natural right required for human survival; as Locke states, “The condition of human life, which requires labor and materials to work on, necessarily introduces private possessions.”

Ashcraft criticizes those who treat the Two Treatises solely as an abstract work written for the ages. Instead, he believes that the Two Treatises shows both Locke the philosopher and Locke the political activist.

Specifically, Locke’s discussion of property was meant, in part, “to provide a defense of ‘the industrious’ and trading part of the nation—the constituency to whom the Whigs Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975], pp. 68–70). There are interesting similarities between Overton and Locke, beginning with Overton’s defense of self-proprietorship:

To every Individuall in nature, is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe-propriety, else could he not be himselfe, and on this no second may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature, and of the Rules of equity and justice between man and man....

Overton, like Locke, believes that man is naturally free, so legitimate political power can arise only from “deputation, commission, and free consent.” Political rulers so commissioned are empowered to preserve the “safeties and freedomes” of the people, “but no more.” These similarities don’t prove much, because many non-Levellers (such as John Milton) employed the same kind of addressed their appeals—against the idle, unproductive, and Court-dominated property owners” (p. 264). Thus, we should not view Locke’s defense of property as merely theoretical. Following Shaftesbury’s agenda, he needed to reassure the gentry that their property would be secure under a Whig regime; while, at the same time, he retained the radical natural-rights language “that appealed to the urban commercial classes of Whig supporters” (p. 281). In Ashcraft’s opinion, Locke did a good job in his dual role as philosopher and activist:

If we place Locke’s discussion of property within this political context, we can appreciate how admirably he fulfilled these requirements [of appealing to the gentry and commercial classes] while also resolving the theoretical problem of property that had preoccupied Grotius and Pufendorf (p. 281).

Similarities and Differences

One way to test Ashcraft’s thesis of a Locke-Leveller connection would be to compare the theories and proposals of both. This formidable undertaking may prove fruitful for a student in search of a dissertation topic. I can only scratch the surface here.

One of the most theoretical of Leveller tracts is Richard Overton’s “An Arrow Against All Tyrants” (in G. E. contractarian language during the 1640s. But Overton does anticipate Locke with an argument that was not as common. According to Locke, a people cannot contract themselves into political slavery (absolute monarchy), because the individual does not possess the right to destroy himself. Thus lacking this absolute power over himself (a power possessed only by God), the individual, or a nation generally, cannot delegate this right to another. The same argument was articulated by Overton:

[A]s by nature, no man may abuse, beat, torment, or afflict himselfe, so by nature, no many may give that power to another, seeing he may not doe it himselfe, for no more can be communicated from the generall than is included in the particulars, whereof the generall is compounded.

It would be interesting to explore how widespread this argument was among English theorists. If it should turn out to be an argument peculiar to the Levellers, then, since Locke used the same reasoning, it might support Ashcraft’s thesis of a Leveller connection. Other parallels between Locke and the Levellers are readily available, but these exist in the realm of theory—and, again, much of this theory was shared by other, less radical, theorists. When we descend to specific Leveller proposals, however, the parallels virtually disappear. There were many parts of the Leveller agenda on which Locke was silent. Here is a partial list:

The Levellers wished to broaden the franchise to include all men twenty-one and over (except “servants” and those receiving alms). They called for annual elections and rotation in office. They opposed military conscription and self-incrimination. They denied to Parliament the right to pass any laws that interfere with free trade or that impose “excise or customs” duties “upon any sort of food, or any other goods, wares or commodities.” They called for the abolition of debtor’s prison, tithes, and capital punishment (except for murder “or other like heinous offences destructive to humane society”). And they insisted that the military power should never “come to be superior to the Civil Authority.” (“An Agreement of the Free People of England,” 1649, in Aylmer, pp. 160-168.)

The Levellers called for specific and severe constraints on the powers of Parliament. Locke, in contrast, says that Parliament should promote the public good and remain true to its public trust, but he is extremely vague regarding details. Moreover, we don’t find in Locke the typical Leveller assault on the English legal system as a vestige of the Norman Conquest. (“Our very laws were made by our conquerors,” as John Wildman put it in 1647 during the famous “Putney debates.”) If Locke intended the Two Treatises to be a 1680s version of Leveller thinking, we must wonder why he omitted virtually every major plank of the Leveller platform.

Ashcraft does discuss one apparent discrepancy between the Shaftesbury-Locke group and the Levellers: manhood suffrage. In the process, Ashcraft rebuts C. B. Macpherson’s skewed interpretation of the Levellers contained in his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). In their final platform—the third “Agreement of the People”—the Levellers excluded “servants” and alms-takers from the suffrage. But, as Ashcraft asserts, this was a compromise, a “realistic political bargain” made with the more conservative followers of Oliver Cromwell. And, contrary to Macpherson, the label “servant,” as used in the seventeenth century generally and by the Levellers specifically, did not mean “wage-earners.” This is “simply a fiction of Macpherson’s creation” (p. 158). Ashcraft writes:

[W]hen the Levellers excluded servants from their post-Putney writings, they clearly were not thinking of the thousands of miners, the weavers receiving piece-rate wages, seamen or soldiers; it was the personal servant within a household they had in mind.... [E]ven after their pragmatic

concessions, the Levellers could view themselves as defenders of the enfranchisement of 85 percent of adult males (p. 160).

Having rehabilitated the Levellers on the subject of manhood suffrage, Ashcraft turns to Shaftesbury and his formation of the Whig Party during the Exclusion Crisis. In 1679, Shaftesbury proposed a drastic revision of England’s voting law. He wanted to scrap the traditional “40 schilling freehold” requirement in favor of restricting the vote to property holders of 200 pounds or more. This doesn’t sound very Leveller-like; but, as Ashcraft assures us, this proposal (later abandoned) was designed to combat “the bribery of voters being practiced by the Court’s supporters.” Maybe so, but it still doesn’t sound very Leveller-like.

The conduct of Shaftesbury’s party during the Exclusion Crisis is what most disturbs me about Ashcraft’s case for a Leveller connection. The Exclusion Crisis came on the heels of a tragic episode known as the “Popish Plot.” This fictitious conspiracy, hatched from the fetid brain of the renegade clergyman Titus Oates, led to the execution of 35 Catholics, including Oliver Plunket, primate of Ireland.

The Popish Plot created a rabid anti-Catholic hysteria (even by English standards) and spread panic throughout England. Shaftesbury (and presumably Locke) exploited this sordid affair for political advantage and rode the anti-Catholic bandwagon into the Exclusion Crisis. This may be the real reason Shaftesbury solicited political support from the lower classes. Indeed, as Ashcraft points out, members of the Green Ribbon Club organized spectacular pope-burning demonstrations—a popular form of protest among those who associated Catholicism with absolute government and the policies of France.

In any case, Locke remained a firm opponent of toleration for Catholics (as we see in his Letter Concerning Toleration). Here we have a direct conflict with the Levellers, who called for complete toleration (though they wished to exclude Catholics from holding public office).

Ashcraft’s case for a Locke-Leveller connection is intriguing and suggestive, but more research is needed to make it wholly convincing. In any case, this theme constitutes but a small part of Revolutionary Politics. Every serious student of Locke should study this magnificent book carefully. It is packed with fresh insights that cry out for further exploration.

George H. Smith is General Editor of the Audio Classics tape series produced by Knowledge Products and a Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies.