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The Critique of Scriptural Politics

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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the nineteenth century, Fox Bourne, a generally sympathetic critic and biographer, found the First Treatise "entirely out of date" and with little to recommend it. 1 Early in the twentieth century, Harold Laski, notwithstanding his remarkable capacity to illuminate works of alleged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. Te dious would be per­ haps too flattering an adjective forit ."4 Clearly, Herbert Rowen's admonition almost thirty-five years ago that the First Treatise merits more attention has, among scholars writing in English, yet to be fullyacknow ledged. 5 Some obvious and weighty reasons do underlie and inform this distinguished tradition of neglect. Most conspicuous is that interest in Locke's political thought has usually been spurred by an interest in the normative concerns that attend liberalism. Given these motivating concerns, the Second Treatise is clearly the principal text for their interrogation, and the First Treatise has apparently less, if anything, to offer. The First Treatise is, after all, in the main reactive, and as such it at least appears to be implicated by the narrow purview of Filmer's own concerns. Related to the obsolescence of the First Treatise is the simple fact of the work's main foci. Divine grant and paternity as the basis of political sovereignty are substantive claims that are, at best, tangential to the major theoretical and concrete preoccupa­ tions of political life since at least the seventeenth century. The 4 Dante Gennino, "The Contemporary Relevance of the Classics of Political Philosophy," in Handbook ofPo litical Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 1:264. Charles D. Ta rlton, in "A Rope of Sand: Interpreting Locke's First Treatiseon Government," Historical Journal 21, no. 1 (1978), 43-73, gives a synoptic survey of what he calls "a vicious circle of oversight, prejudgment, and caricature which has effectively prohibited detailed, structural interpretation of the First Treatise." s Herbert H. Rowen, "A Second Thought on Locke's First Treatise,"Journal ofthe History of Ideas 17 (1956), 132. In the journal literature, there are a few exceptions to this claim; see, for example, Tarlton, "A Rope of Sand," Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, Pangle, The Sp irit of Modern Republicanism, and James Tully's truly creative and synthetic work, "Governing Conduct," in Conscience and Casuistry in Early ModernEurope, ed . E. Leites (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1986). The Critique of Scriptural Politics 39 silencing of these Filmerian positions especially in the aftermath of the political and ecclesiastical settlement of 1688 is decisive. In the fractious working out of church, state, and crown relations, in the internecine denominational debates of the eighteenth cen­ tury, in the protracted process through which the meaning of the Toleration Act was settled, in all these and virtually anything else of consequence Filmer's arguments are merely distant and inaudible embarrassments. 6 It is not surprising, then, even if ironical, that Locke's First Treatise in having contributed to Fil­ mer's eclipse is by association similarly afflicted. From a more specificallytextual standpoint, the First Treatise is burdened by a variety of limitations that almost assure and contribute to its obsolescence. Notwithstanding the controversy regarding its date of writing, the First Treatise more than the Second appears to be an outcome of a very precise and local contextual pressure. 7 Locke himself identified the work as orig­ inating in the particular and surprising reception given Filmer's Patriarcha. Perhaps forreasons of his own, Locke emphasizes the dramatic effect of Filmer's work: "Had not the Gravity of the Title, and Epistle, the Picture in the Front of the Book, and the Applause that followed it, required me to believe, that the Au­ thor and the Publisher were both in earnest," he would have given it up as "another exercise of Wit" (First Treatise, p. 159). Filmer is clearly an author of doubtful seriousness. It appears 6 See Laski, Political Thought in England, pp. 54-85. 7 The classic statement of the issues surrounding the dating of Locke's two treatises remains Laslett's well-known introduction to his edited version of the Tw o Treatises. Laslett places great significance in the discovery that the Second Treatisewas , in fact, written before the First Treatise. This claim appears to belie Locke's own emphasis in view of the fact that the treatises were published in their present order on at least two separate occasions, on Locke's sanction during his own lifetime. Also see Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Tw o Treatisesof Government(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially pp. 39-127. 40 The Anxiety of Freedom that but for the circumstances surrounding his work he would have been an unworthy opponent. 8 Finally there is the style of Locke's text, which limits its viability to a specific political and intellectual milieu. The First Treatise is a painfullyrepetitive work, a feature that suggests the intention of rhetorical effectivity rather than careful theoretical articulation. It is a response to what Locke believes are ultimately mischievous interests and which must therefore, at least in part, be countered with polemical flair.Locke creates an atmosphere of sophistic combat in which his adversary is entangled in shreds of his own verbiage. When Locke strays fromthis style, he does so only to settle into an arcane form of scriptural hermeneutics in which citations of chapter and verse are marshaled in the manner of scholastic disputation. And all this in a work that ends in midsentence, and in which the missing section is acknowledged to be "more than all the rest" (Preface, p. 1 5 5 ). Clearly, the scholarly tradition of neglect has much with which to justify its omission of the FirstTrea tise. Indeed, the onus of justificationappears to lie with those who, in the faceof such reasons, insist on its theoretical significance, both as a worthy if not a necessary precursor to its more studied successor and for the broader role it plays in the understanding of Locke's political and moral thought. It is to these reasons that I turn. Scriptural Politics: An Underlying Discourse The confrontation taken up in the First Treatise is plainly of fundamental and foundationalsig nificance. At the broadest level s My point here is simply that Lockepresents Filmer in such a doubtful light. This view, as with so much else in the FirstTrea tise, is repeatedly emphasized in the preface and the first few chapters. My claim, therefore, is not meant as a challenge to Gordon Schochet, Mark Goldie, and Richard Ashcraft, all of whom have persuasively argued that Filmer's theory was an important, perhaps The Critique of Scriptural Politics 4 1 it involves two uncompromisingly conflictingvis ions of the ori­ gins and basis of political power and authority, the status of fatherhood and the family, the role and significance of property, and the relationships among property, paternity, and authority. Despite the degree to which, in Locke's view, Filmer's motives may be impugned by expedience, his doctrine incoherently pre­ sented, and its implications irredeemably contradictory, nev­ ertheless Filmer does in a systematic manner deny the view that human beings are naturally freeand that thereforethere is a limit to the legitimate authority that fathers, property holders, and governments can have over them. By braiding together mon­ archy, paternity, and property and giving them, as Locke em­ phasizes, an inescapable and extensive reach, Filmer conflates the very terms around which Locke places demarcating and limiting fences. Filmer's views in a general sense sustain the edificeof feudal authority relations. Hence, notwithstanding the plausibility of the reasons that make the First Treatise appear puzzling and of questionable significance, if considered in terms of the issues at stake it is of unquestionable gravity. But there is a danger in viewing the First Treatiseas merely the stage on which this precise confrontation on issues of sover­ eignty, paternity, and property occurs. Despite the stakes at­ tending these issues, if they alone are allowed to determine our view on the First Treatise, we are liable to overlook its multi­ farious echoes and to recognize their collective significance. We are liable to overlook, not only that the conception of political power Locke articulates at the outset of the Second Treatise is different in its specifics and implications fromFilmer's concep­ tion, but that this difference stems from a more general diver­ gence regarding the appropriate language, context, and method even principal, source of royal absolutist doctrines during the seventeenth century.
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