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The Anxiety of Freedom : Imagination and Individuality in Locke’S Political Thought / Uday Singh Mehta

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The Anxiety of Freedom : Imagination and Individuality in Locke’S Political Thought / Uday Singh Mehta CONTEST ATIONS CORNELL STUDIESIN POLITICAL THEORY A series edited by WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY The Anxiety ofFreedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought by Uday Singh Mehta The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture by George Kateb The Anxiety of Freed om Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought Uday Singh Mehta Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1992 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1992 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mehta, Uday Singh. The anxiety of freedom : imagination and individuality in Locke’s political thought / Uday Singh Mehta. p. cm. — (Contestations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-2756-5 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2638-5 (pbk.) 1. Locke, John, 1632–1704—Contributions in political science. 2. Liberty. 3. Authority. 4. Imagination. 5. Individuality. I. Title. II. Series. JC153.L87M44 1992 320'.01—dc20 92-8147 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Bhabhi and for Carol in memory of and gratitude for their inspiring friendship Contents Acknowledgments lX 1. Introduction Passions of the Mind 3 Madness and the Imagination 1 5 Below the Threshold: Liberals and Communitarians 24 Obscured Beginnings 3 1 2. The Critique of Scriptural Politics 3 7 Scriptural Politics: An Underlying Discourse 40 Prescribing the Context 49 Paternity and Property 56 The Emergence of a Political Narrative 59 "Binding Men's Consciences" 63 3. Curiosity, Imagination, and Madness 80 The Naturalistic Problematic: Interests and Appetites 82 Curiosity and the "Busy Mind" 93 Madness and the Imagination 104 4. Molding Individuality: Direction and Compromise 119 Education and the Malleability of the Mind 127 Self-Restraint and Submission 132 vm Contents The Privatization of Public Standards 141 Distinctions: A Sense of Self and One's Place in the World 148 The Political Compromise of Individuality 1 54 5 . Conclusion 168 Bibliography 1 75 Index Acknowledgments This book is a reading of John Locke's political thought, and, because it is, I am particularly indebted to the two teachers and friends who taught me how to read-Sheldon Wo lin, then at Princeton University, and the late David Lachterman, then at Swarthmore College. From both of them I learned that a text is much more than a compilation of ideas which should be distilled and held up to the scrutiny of critical gaze. From both of them I learned that the activity of reading involves straining to hear distant echoes and making them clear by an active process of imaginative mutuality. It seems fittingthat in a work that focuses on the imagination I should have had the guidance of Sheldon Wolin. While at Princeton, I benefited from the help of numerous friends. Irene Applebaum, Peter Benda, Sandra Clarke, Beenu Mahmood, Kirstie McClure, Tim Mitchell, and Helen Pringle all made valuable contributions to this project. JeffTu lis and Anne Norton have continued, through the process of revision, to offer help, criticism, and counsel. Their contribution, as they know all too well, has been indispensable. More recently, Hayward Alker and Steven Macedo offered challenging critiques. Ellen Immergut and Bonnie Honig pro­ vided numerous insights, especially for the introduction, and helped refashion the work. Maria Clelia Guinazu helped in nu­ merous and timely ways. I am also deeply indebted to Eva Nagy forall her help. x Acknowledgments Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press performeda minor miracle for this book. I am deeply grateful to him. Joshua Cohen has read and reread more drafts of this book than either he or I care to recall. His exacting critical standards are happily matched with an intellectual generosity that is sim­ ply exemplary. He has led me to rethink a project in which I was deeply invested, and yet somehow he has made that process exhilarating. Peter and Mary Katzenstein literally kept me going at a point when I did not think I had the physical or intellectual resources to continue. This book is evidence of their longstanding kindness and persistence. To Mary in particular I owe that special intellec­ tual debt that stems fromobserving, speaking with, and listening to someone in whom ideas (and actions) are braided with deep and generous convictions. In its original form this work owed its conception and its completion to the friendship, support, example, and faith of Yesim Arat. Through the process of revision, she has continued, despite the distance of time and space, to serve as an unerring inspiration. And finally, my debt to my wife, Tej: There are too many respects in which this work is the product of a joint effort. On every page and paragraph, I have had her advice and help. This book would not have been possible without her. U.S.M. Cambridge, Massachusetts The Anxiety of Freedom CHAPTE R ON E Introduction The chief, if not only spur to human industry and action is uneasiness[of the mind]. -John Locke The liberalism with whichJohn Locke (1632-1704) is commonly identified has its origins in two widely shared and profoundly influential seventeenth-century assumptions: first, that human beings are by their nature free, rational, and equal; second, that they are thereforecapable of murder, theft,and mayhem and are hence in mortal danger. Liberalism thus originates in ambiva­ lence-in the need to order, if not limit, what it valorizes to be natural and emancipatory. The commitment to constitutional government, with its au­ thority limited by the sovereignty of the people, the emphasis on the rule of law as the means by which this authority is to be exercised, and, crucially, the identificationof and protection from arbitrary abridgement of individual rights, including the right to property-these are the familiarrespon ses, subsequently desig­ nated as liberal, to the hope and vexation that stem fromthese two epochal assumptions. In Locke, and more generally in the liberal tradition he has spawned, the intuitive justification for the in­ stitutions these responses define derives from the presumption that they establish determinate spheres of moral right which comport with the interests of free, rational, and equal, individuals and in so doing avert the diabolical consequences immanent in the unregulated interactions of our natural condition. Liberal politi- 2 The Anxiety of Freedom cal institutions, one might say, are motivated and guided by the artifice of embedding the interactions among individuals within normative precincts and allowing individuals to be who they are within the constraints and possibilities of those precincts. The definingproblem of modern political philosophy, and of liberalism as a salient instance of that philosophy, is the justifica­ tion of political authority and its various subsidiary institu­ tions-an authority that is required for the stability of liberal­ ism's normative precincts. This is so precisely because such institutions place constraints on what is taken as fundamental and natural, namely, the freedom of the individual. It is in response to this problem that the conflicts among individuals, that is, their capacity to murder and infringe on each other, are most commonly traduced as a justifying basis. Because we have interests and appetites and the acknowledged freedomto pursue such interests, and because in such pursuit we encounter others similarly motivated, and finally because such encounters can lead to violent and dire consequences, we agree, within con­ straints, to have our interests and freedom ordered and limited by an external authority. This is the archetypal narrative under­ lying the modern justification of political authority. It has a flexibility that allows it to take various forms. Interests, for instance, can be attached simply to individuals or to groups based on social and economic class, occupational commonalities, gender, ethnic associations, and various other combinations. Whatever their particular configuration, they are meant to vindi­ cate the basic idea that a conflictof interests backed by appetites occasions the need forins titutions that can ameliorate the diabol­ ical effects of such encounters. As a response to a historical predicament, this account captures many of the central political and social modalities of seventeenth­ century England. The fact that Locke was deeply preoccupied with such sources of conflictand instability and that the political institutions he designed were meant at least in part as a redress to Introduction 3 them is beyond credible dispute. He was writing during and in the immediate aftermath of the most turbulent and fractious years of English history: it would have been almost impossible to have remained indifferent to or complacent about the varied interests that had all but shattered the society he lived in. Passions of the Mind Notwithstanding the significanceand reach of interests and ap­ petites as motivators and explanators of conflict (and coopera­ tion), they do not come close to exhausting the sources of such behavior, or of human endeavor more generally. In this book I pursue this simple insight. In contrast to the common emphasis on interests and appetites as underlying the project of liberalism, I view this project, as Locke elaborated it, as a response to cognitive concerns and specificallyto a concern with the effects of the imagination and other passions associated with the mind. The contrast between the consequences of interests and the consequences of cognitive considerations is ultimately a matter of emphasis.
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