The Critique of Scriptural Politics
CHAPTE R TW O The Critique of Scriptural Politics Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who firstspoke or wrote them. -Bishop Benjamin Hoadly The first treatise of Locke's Tw o Treatises of Government has the unfortunatedist inction of being, along with the latter half of the Leviathan, among the most neglected, indeed maligned, major portion of an otherwise celebrated and much discussed body of work in political theory. In fact, a scholarly tradition chronicles and advertises this neglect. Already in the nineteenth century, Fox Bourne, a generally sympathetic critic and biographer, found the First Treatise "entirely out of date" and with little to recommend it. 1 Early in the twentieth century, Harold Laski, notwithstanding his remarkable capacity to illuminate works of alleged insignificance, corroborated Fox Bourne's view, adding that the work was a "tiresome response to the historic imagina tion of Sir Robert Filmer."2 Similarly, Richard Aaron, although not usually rushed in his scholarly endeavors, found the work sufficiently barren so as not to be long detained by it. 3 This list 1 F. H. R. Bourne, The Lifeof john Locke (London, 1867) , 1:16 9. 2 Laski, Political Thought in England, p. 38. 3 Richard Aaron, John Locke, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 274. 3 7 38 The Anxiety of Freedom could easily be extended into the present. The attitude it would evince is sufficiently encapsulated in Dante Germino's remark that "the First Treatise, which virtually no one reads anymore, is a line-by-line refutation of Filmer's tome.
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