Forthcoming in The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. David Armitage, Teresa Bejan, and Felix Waldmann (Oxford University Press). Under the Influence: Hobbes and Locke, Revisited Timothy Stanton & Tim Stuart-Buttle (University of York) John Locke’s Valedictory Speech as Censor of Moral Philosophy at Christ Church, delivered in 1664, culminates in the following expression of gratitude to his Junior Censor, Benjamin Woodroffe: For I was [Locke declares] a shadow while I lived; in you lay all the strength and power of command, and what is told of Castor and Pollux is found in our relationship, namely that, though we were two brothers, there was only one single life and that was yours. Hence it is not surprising that we were both of the same mind and always of the same opinion, and that when we could not act with equal force, we certainly did all in the same spirit … ‘Locke’s Valedictory Speech’ [1664], in Essays on the Law of Nature and Associated Writings, edited by W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 235–7. A similar opinion of the relationship between Locke and Hobbes, as bound together by the threads of fate, has fertilized Locke studies for at least three generations. The temptation to view the pair as twins and sparring partners, ‘both of the same mind and always of the same opinion’, doing all ‘in the same spirit’, sharing in and securing one another’s immortality, has proved difficult to resist. Marxists, Straussians, Liberals, and their opponents alike have embraced it. Peter Laslett’s trailblazing scholarship of the 1950s, capped by his critical edition of Two Treatises of Government (1960), did little to temper it, even as it sought to establish that the work was composed not in response to Hobbes, but rather in reaction to royalist supporters of Charles II during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, and, more specifically, to the writings of Sir Robert Filmer. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). References are henceforth provided to treatise and paragraph number. The recent rediscovery of a resentful memoir by Locke’s erstwhile friend James Tyrrell, representing the young Locke as an ‘obsessive reader’ of Hobbes’s Leviathan, has only emboldened further speculation. Felix Waldmann, ‘John Locke as a Reader of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: A New Manuscript’, Journal of Modern History 93, no. 2 (2021): pp. 245–82. Hobbes’s influence on Locke, we are assured, is ‘now confirmed’ beyond all doubt—even as the precise nature of that influence, long conjectured, remains contested. Nasser Behnegar, Devin Stauffer, Rafael Major, and Christopher Nadon, ‘From Laslett to Waldmann: The Case for Reconsidering Strauss on Locke’, Review of Politics 84, no. 4 (2022): pp. 570–91, at p. 571. It is likely to remain so. Nicholas Jolley, Toleration and Understanding in Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 14, describes the issue as ‘perennially fascinating’. Jeffrey R. Collins tells us that Tyrrell’s peevish recollections ‘confirm’ his thesis, advanced in In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (2020), that Hobbes exerted ‘an influence over Locke … first positively and then negatively’. This influence initially pulled Locke towards the ‘science of sovereignty’ expounded in Leviathan until evidence of its potentially suffocating consequences for religious liberty pushed him to develop his own thinking about the rights and duties of conscience, which ultimately placed worship beyond the scope of the civil magistrate’s authority. Jeffrey R. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 5; 371. So understood, the ‘gradual emancipation of Locke from Hobbesian patterns of thought’ Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, p. 6. that Collins postulates is a dialectical process in which the Hobbesian positions Locke had once expounded live on in his later thought as negations that are themselves products of a Hobbesian influence at one remove. As Collins puts it, Locke ‘abandoned … the prerogative tolerantia [he had] encountered in Hobbes…. partly to counter powerful clerical critics who opposed Hobbism as a violation of ecclesiae libertas. His own theory of toleration thus emerged as a translation of their churchly anti-politics and their sustained critique of the Stuarts’ politique mode of religious governance’. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, p. 7. Hence the title of Collins’s monograph and its organizing conceit—that when he addressed questions of sovereignty, right, and religious conscience, Locke was operating at every turn in the shadow of Leviathan and under ‘the influence of Hobbes and Hobbism’. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, p. 5. The ‘influence’ model Collins’s confident assertions exhibit none of the ‘anxieties of influence’ that have dogged historians of ideas for decades past. As discussed in Francis Oakley, ‘“Anxieties of Influence”: Skinner, Figgis, Conciliarism and Early Modern Constitutionalism’, Past & Present 151 (1996): pp. 60–110. Much of this anxiety was generated by a series of admonitory observations about the limitations of the influence model of historical explanation made by Quentin Skinner in the 1960s, which, it has been claimed, ‘put the word “influence” as used by intellectual historians under a sort of ban’. David Wootton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 44. With exquisite irony, Oakley, ‘“Anxieties of Influence”’, p. 64. Skinner later attributed his scepticism about ‘the use of the concept of “influence” in the history of ideas’ to the impact upon his thinking of Laslett’s scepticism about ‘the capacity of Hobbes’s alleged influence to explain any features of Locke’s Two Treatises’ See Quentin Skinner, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, edited by James Tully (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 231–88, esp. 233 n.12 & 13. and it does seem that suspicion of the assertion that it was possible to ‘explain the structure of Locke’s political philosophy by considering the influence of Hobbes supplied the immediate cue for reflection on Skinner’s part about the nature and limits of historical explanations. It was the example to which he recurred time and again. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, Philosophy 41, no. 157 (1966): pp. 199–215, at 206–7. Skinner identified formidable philosophical difficulties in establishing that one author (A) had influenced another (B), such that the characteristic ideas of B might be explained in terms of that antecedent influence. ‘The inner connection between two ideas’, he argued, where the ‘one is said to have influenced the other’ has to be shown ‘on the one hand to be sufficiently close to be inseparable from chance’ and ‘sufficiently loose-limbed on the other hand to be separable from causality’. The result is that one idea has to be ‘in some sense dependent on another yet not entirely dependent; and that they are thus alike yet not exactly alike’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 204.—something less than direct copying but more than mere material coincidence. The first problem is that to identify ‘the one idea as the necessary source for an influence said to be observed in a later idea … presupposes … the isolation and investigation of [that idea’s] most characteristic features. The judgment that the influence on [B] must undoubtedly have derived from [A] cannot otherwise be made without risk of confusion with other possible antecedent ideas similar to [it].’ The judgment that A influenced B seems to entail that we see repeated in B’s idea the elements which also give A’s idea its characteristic form. But as Skinner notes, ‘It will always remain open to the sceptic, confronted with such an explanation, to claim that the correlations are random’, that the features of A’s idea have been repeated in B’s by chance, and so ‘that no necessary inner connection has been demonstrated at all’. Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, pp. 207–8. The second problem is that, even supposing that some inner connection does exist, it is ‘always possible to think of many possible connections’ that explain the character of B’s idea. The alternative is a kind of reductio of the ‘Cambridge School’ approach indelibly associated with Skinner and his confederate John Dunn For a discussion of Cambridge approach in wider historical perspective see James Alexander, ‘The Cambridge School, c.1875–c.1975’, History of Political Thought 37, no. 2 (2016): pp. 360–86. —that the challenge confronting the interpreter is that of limiting the context—in which the ‘lexically possible set of colligations of the uttered proposition’ is narrowed to one by the ‘simple ellipse’ of supposing ‘that Locke must surely have been addressing himself to Hobbes’. See John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy 43, no. 164 (1968): pp. 85–104, at 98. To complete the case, the interpreter ‘typically tries to build up a more and more detailed picture’ of their connections. ‘As well as trying to show that the doctrines most characteristic of Hobbes are also found in the writings of Locke, he may try to provide something like independent testimony—to show, perhaps, that Locke owned Hobbes’s works and was known to have read them; and perhaps that Locke often wrote or was known to have spoken specifically about Hobbes.’ As Skinner writes, this line of argument ‘typically culminates in effect with an appeal to the type of probabilistic world which we inhabit. To refuse to be convinced, it is assumed, would itself be to adopt a perverse and unconvincing point of view.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 208. This is precisely the approach adopted by Collins, who combines claims about the perceived ‘correlations’ between what he sees as Hobbes’s and Locke’s most important and enduring ideas with an appeal to ‘something like independent testimony’. Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan, p. 3: ‘The chapters that follow will suggest how John Locke should be read in the shadow of Leviathan. The book excavates Locke’s direct commentary on Hobbes, which proves more extensive and thematically consistent than is often recognized. [It] reconstructs the biographical and political context of the Interregnum and Restoration, on the theory that—whatever his reticence in print—Locke wrote on fundamentally Hobbesian themes in a context saturated with polemical disputes over Hobbes’s influence. Locke’s engagement with Hobbes was thus often deflected or glancing, a by-product of his more explicit entanglements with third parties. It emerges clearly only when situated in a reconstructed political, and polemical, setting… Alongside, the study will reconstruct the polemics over Hobbism that pervaded Locke’s entire career. The book will chart his own experience of this printed debate as it left marks in his notes and library. Finally, the evidence of Locke’s direct engagement with Hobbes will be reconsidered. This evidence takes the form of excerpts, allusions, brief unpublished commentaries, and suggestive mentions of Hobbes in manuscripts. The evidence for direct engagement is uneven but not nearly as fragmentary or accidental as is often assumed. Closely examined, it emerges as both intellectually significant and thematically consistent.’ In the final analysis, Skinner continues, the only way to convince the sceptic irrefutably would be to show that ‘every idea and attitude found in Locke’s writings could also be found, expressed in identical language, in the works of Hobbes’. But this would not in fact complete the case at all. Even if the claim were true—‘and in this example it is of course very obviously false’— a paradox remains. For the result ‘cannot possibly be what the [interpreter], in invoking the concept of influence, had intended to point out’. The whole point of using the concept of influence ‘seems to be … to show how an attitude or situation may be grounded rather than caused, how an influence may be genuine yet covert or partial. The capacity to make the concepts of influence and inner connectedness meaningful must entail the capacity to distinguish them from examples of mere adoption or paraphrase. But the more [we] insist on the inevitability of … the reasons why a writer could not have performed other than as he did, the less does this suggest any place for the special concepts which [interpreters] use: the more it seems to be to assert a simple causal relation.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 209. Influence coagulates into copying, which is not the case being tried. At this juncture, Skinner observes, the best defence against the sceptic is thus to revert to the commonsense position that there must come a point at which only wilful perversity explains the refusal to concede that B’s ideas were influenced by A. This claim, however, relies for its persuasive force on a host of assumptions which, once exposed to view, are shown to be either arbitrary or false. It assumes, for example, that A and B alike are purveyors of abstract doctrines which fall into discernible patterns, the reproduction of which counts as evidence of imparted influence. Skinner argues that such doctrines are invariably the creations of the interpreters themselves, who dispose of whatever inconsistencies they encounter in the writings with which they are concerned to produce a seamless tessellation of ideas to be bequeathed to later writers. Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, pp. 209–10. The same claim further assumes that it must be from the most important of such doctrines that influence derives; but again, Skinner urges, this assumption ‘requires a further defence and explanation which it seems never to receive. For it must be at least equally plausible to suggest that a writer’s influence could derive from a chance remark, or even a misunderstanding of a remark, being taken up and developed.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 210. Yet to recognise this possibility, Skinner insists, is in effect ‘to concede that the attempt to trace influences must be irreducibly arbitrary. If we cannot assume that the alleged influence must derive from a leading doctrine, we shall have to concede that it might derive from any point whatever. The evidence required to supply any single convincing explanatory account is thus impossible to recover.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 210. Accordingly he concludes that to speak of influence is to commit oneself ‘irreducibly to the language of betting and guessing. There seems to be no decisive procedure by which the inner connections between ideas … can be traced out without involving either the covert use of causal language or being liable to the charge of elevating coincidences into positive connections.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 211. In short, all claims that A influenced B are hopelessly indeterminate. They necessarily resolve themselves either into the assertion that B derived such-and-such from A wholesale or the very different assertion that B’s ideas remind one of A’s, an assertion which reveals rather more about the interpreter than the object of their interpretation—principally (Skinner elsewhere remarked) their propensity to ‘foreshorten the past with [their] own reminiscences’. Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): pp. 3–53, at 27. Skinner acknowledged that it was open to the interpreter to attempt ‘to restore the usefulness of his explanatory concepts by re-formulating, in a looser form, the types of relationship which they are taken to be capable of explaining’—to speak instead of hints, echoes, correlations and the like, suggesting a coincidence of outlook or ‘the influence merely of a certain ambience’. This is the position Skinner attributes to Leo Strauss, who claimed that Locke ‘followed the lead given by Hobbes’ even as he declared that Locke was not closely familiar with Hobbes’s works. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 211, 221; adduced by Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 211 n. 2. But such analysis, Skinner laments, is ‘simply without content … If the suggestion is… that it was Hobbes who influenced Locke, it becomes quite unhistorical. There can be no sufficient reason for pointing to Hobbes’s work—rather than to a large number of similar doctrines—as the necessary source for the influence on Locke. All that can be unarguably demonstrated on this formulation is something that the historian must already have known: that similar situations or interests tend to presuppose similar language or directions of effort, and that apparent but perhaps quite illusory historical patterns will tend in consequence to arise.’ Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, pp. 211–2. Skinner subsequently retreated from the suggestion that the influence model was meaningless to the scarcely less combative position that it was entirely elusive and usually pointless. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, p. 25. Some years later, much to the surprise and consternation of readers and reviewers who self-identified as the intended recipients of his earlier blows, he made unapologetic and indeed extensive use of the influence model in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). For some of these, see David Boucher, ‘New Histories of Political Thought for Old’, Political Studies 31, no. 1 (1983): pp. 112–21 (at 118–19). Boucher identifies there many of the pertinent pages in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Oakley, ‘“Anxieties of Influence”’, p. 64 n. 13, supplements Boucher’s list with ii, p. 112; pp. 114–18; p. 321; p. 346. J. H. Burns, ‘Jus Gladii and Jurisdictio: Jacques Almain and John Locke’, Historical Journal 26, no. 2 (1983): pp. 369–74, casts doubt on one such claim relating to the sources of Locke’s thinking (made in Foundations, ii, p. 119). To complain that he shifted his position is unlikely to wound one who has written that ‘we change our minds over the same issue in different moods and at different times’. Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 210. A more interesting observation is that Foundations simply ignores the difficulties to which Skinner originally drew attention—spectacularly so in his own case. The ‘Collingwoodian’ approach Foundations is presented as exemplifying the ‘particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of historical texts’ that Skinner had advocated in his earlier articles. That approach, he now claimed—with enviable audacity—was ‘much influenced by … the theories of R. G. Collingwood’, Skinner, Foundations, i, p. x n. 2. in particular, Collingwood’s belief that ‘one of the central goals of interpretation should be that of seeking to understand the intentions of authors and what they may have meant by what they wrote’ by recovering ‘the precise questions to which the philosophical texts we study were designed as answers’. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Rise of, Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought’, in The History of Political Thought in National Context, edited by Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 175–88 (at 180–1 and 177), and cp. Skinner, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 234: in both instances, Skinner refers to R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). Collingwood had claimed that anyone would admit that philosophical texts like ‘Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan’—or, for that matter, Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Two Treatises—‘are about two things which are in one way the same thing and in another way different. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the kind of sameness and the kind of difference.’ It was in pursuing this line of enquiry, Collingwood explained, that he came to the crucial realisation that the history of political theory was not ‘the history of answers given to one and the same question’, but rather the history of problems (and of solutions to them) that were more or less constantly changing. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 62. This insight, now central to the Cambridge School approach, guided Laslett’s editorial work on Filmer and Locke. Though Laslett relied on other sources for it. See Admir Skodo, ‘Idealism, the Sociology of Knowledge and Revisionist History of Political Thought: Peter Laslett’s Reappraisal of Whig Historiography’, History of Political Thought 35, no. 3 (2014): pp. 538–64. It informed Skinner’s initial strictures against claims of influence, for such claims would only make sense if both A and B ‘had been trying to solve the same intellectual puzzle’—to answer the same question—and if A’s efforts had in some way helped B to solve that puzzle; but as the problems were constantly changing, such claims were bound to be ‘systematically misleading’. Skinner, ‘The Limits of Historical Explanations’, p. 207. They were also bound to be unhistorical, because history just was this ceaseless process of change. Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 62. The same insight was deployed to still more trenchant polemical effect in John Dunn’s seminal work of 1969, The Political Thought of John Locke which, as its subtitle emphasised, promised to supply ‘an historical account of the argument of the Two Treatises of Government’. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) (emphasis added). Dunn devoted a relatively short chapter of his book (Ch. 7) to Locke’s relationship to Hobbes. He accepted Laslett’s argument that ‘lining Locke up against Hobbes and comparing their various dimensions was not the way to approach the study of Locke’—adding, parenthetically in passing, that perhaps it was not even ‘a way’. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 77. He recognised nonetheless that it was difficult to credit the idea that Hobbes was altogether irrelevant to Locke’s concerns in Two Treatises. ‘Is it conceivable historically’, Dunn asked, ‘that a man with Locke’s philosophical ambitions could have written such a work … without his intellectual course being powerfully deflected by [Hobbes’s] magnetic pull?’ The operative word here was ‘historically’. Because it was ‘plausible to claim that there must have been some sense in which Locke felt himself in the intellectual presence of Hobbes in writing the book’, and because we are fascinated with the relationship between the two philosophers, so ‘we are prone to suppose that the confrontation [of the two] must be the key to the meaning of the book, that, as it were, enables us to crack the structural code of the work’. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 78. This, however, is an historical error—and one that Dunn proceeded to explain in Collingwoodian terms. Dunn claimed ‘that the disputed “influence”, negative or positive, of Hobbes upon the Two Treatises [was] irrelevant to the historical comprehension of that work’. It was irrelevant because the problem Locke needed to discuss ‘in order to refute Filmer is not at all the same as Hobbes’s problem’. Hobbes’s problem [Dunn continued] is the construction of political society from an ethical vacuum. Locke never faced this problem in the Two Treatises because his central premise is precisely the absence of any such vacuum. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 79. It was therefore historically inept, and indeed inexcusable, ‘to regard the Two Treatises as a gloss on Leviathan’. No matter how ‘sympathetic one were to the picture of Locke’s intellectual life as lived in a conscious tension with Hobbes’, the ‘focus’ of that tension could not ‘conceivably be located’ where the Marxists, Straussians, and Liberals alike located it, ‘in the Two Treatises’. There, Hobbes’s ‘arguments are not answered. They are merely and blandly ignored.’ Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 82–3. ‘Ignored’ might seem like overstatement. It is likely that Dunn used the word quite deliberately to rebuke the Straussian insinuation that Hobbes was present in Locke’s text by reason of his absence—that Locke had artfully suppressed any direct reference to Hobbes to mask the true extent of the latter’s influence on the argument he was advancing. Artistry and inattention suggest rather different states of mind. Dunn’s point, we take it, was to emphasise that something had not happened, not because Locke had something to hide but because Hobbes was altogether beside Locke’s point. This chapter dissents from that conclusion, for reasons that require us to return our attention briefly to Collingwood. A curious feature of Skinner’s invocation of Collingwood is that in effect it attributes a ‘doctrine’ to him—the doctrine that philosophical texts must be understood as answers to questions—that is abstracted away from his wider conception of history. That conception is a congeries of at least three connected elements: what Collingwood called the logic of question and answer, the idea of re-enactment, and that of absolute presuppositions. Only the first element is discussed at length in Collingwood’s Autobiography For the logic of question and answer, see Collingwood, An Autobiography, pp. 29–43; for re-enactment, pp. 112–3; for absolute presuppositions, pp. 66‒7. A fuller discussion of re-enactment is offered in The Idea of History, edited by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), pp. 282–302; absolute presuppositions are the marrow of An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), esp. part 1, esp. Ch. 5. and it is with this element, which Skinner takes to establish the requirement to study texts in the appropriate intellectual and historical context, that he formally identifies the Collingwoodian approach. See Skinner, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 234: ‘I am directly indebted [to Collingwood] for what remains my fundamental assumption as an intellectual historian: that the history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed.’ He dismisses re-enactment as so much mumbo jumbo See Skinner, ‘Collingwoodian Approach’, p. 185. Many of his contemporaries were similarly unconvinced, e.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), p. 46, which commends Collingwood’s ‘logic of question and answer’ as ‘compellingly evident’ but rejects reenactment as a ‘misleading confusion’. and discusses presuppositions only in passing, See Skinner, ‘Collingwoodian Approach’, pp. 185; 184 and cp. ‘Meaning and Understanding’, p. 7, n. 18. preferring to adopt J. L. Austin’s language of ‘intentions and conventions’ as part of the wider enterprise of treating historical writings as spoken utterances and these utterances as deeds which embody the intentions of their authors. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding’, pp. 42‒7, adopting the jargon of J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Skinner later stated that this was at Dunn’s suggestion. See ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 327, n. 14. This exercise in subtraction and substitution has the striking effect of repudiating what Collingwood represented as the central ambition of his theory of historical knowledge, namely the ‘attempt to bring about a rapprochement between philosophy and history’, Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 77. establishing in its place a sharp separation of philosophy and history and a concomitant division of labour: Collingwood himself once disparaged that division of labour as ‘the doctrine of the historian as eunuch’. See ‘Can Historians be Impartial?’, printed in R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of History, edited by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 209‒18, at 211. philosophers are concerned with questions of truth whereas ‘the historical task [should] be conceived as that of trying so far as possible to think as our ancestors thought and to see things their way’. What this requires is emphatically not that we should seek ‘to re-enact’ their thoughts and experiences but rather ‘that we should recover the concepts they possessed, the distinctions they drew and the chains of reasoning they followed in their attempts to make sense of their world’. Quentin Skinner, ‘Interpretation, Rationality and Truth’, in Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 27–56, at 47. Note, however, that Collingwood makes plain that ‘those elements in experience whose being is just their immediacy (sensations, feelings &c. as such) cannot be reenacted’ and that ‘thought itself can never be re-enacted in its immediacy’, only by reconstructing and thus resurrecting it from the surviving evidence (Collingwood, The Idea of History, 296‒7). Dunn agreed with Skinner that reenactment made little sense See John Dunn, ‘Practising History and Social Science on “Realist” Assumptions’, in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited by Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 145–75, at 166: ‘the historian’s practicable project of analysing past actions is not happily represented as the execution of a deliberate metempsychosis’. but he did not agree that philosophy and history should or could be separated. Like Collingwood, ‘he wanted history and philosophy to be fused at a higher level where they would, in effect, become the same thing’. James Alexander, ‘Review: Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge School on the History of Political Thought by Martyn P. Thompson’, Cosmos + Taxis 8, nos. 2 and 3 (2020): pp. 66‒83, at 70. In Dunn’s view, ‘the connection between an adequate philosophical account of the notions held by an individual in the past and an accurate historical account of these notions is an intimate one’ and ‘both historical specificity and philosophical delicacy are more likely to be attained if they are pursued together, than if one is deserted for the other’. Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, p. 86. More precisely, as he put it in 1968, ‘the completion of both types of investigation is a necessary preliminary to the construction of an indefeasible explanation of either type; … a rational explanation of a past philosophical dilemma [together with] a causal explanation of a past philosopher’s enterprise … will display a considerable symmetry of form’. Dunn suggested that ‘most of the unsatisfactory features of the history of ideas as written comes from its notable lack of resemblance to any such form’. Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, pp. 86‒7. The Political Thought of John Locke, published in the next year, brought that form to life. In this classic work Dunn dwelt at length on the premises of Locke’s argument and the philosophical enterprise upon which he was embarked. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 87–147. It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to this fact. As James Alexander notes. See Alexander, ‘Review’, p. 69. Dunn showed that it was necessary to analytically reconstruct Locke’s arguments, to examine what he said and meant, what positions he was logically committed to, and how strong his arguments were, as part of an historical account of those arguments, not as an alternative to such an account. Paraphrasing Johan Olsthoorn and Laurens Van Apeldoorn, ‘The Value of Methodological Pluralism in the Study of Locke on Slavery and Absolutism: A Rejoinder to Felix Waldmann’, Locke Studies 21 (2021): 88‒104, which sets their ‘philosophical’ approach in direct opposition to the ‘imperious’ and ‘dogmatic’ view that ‘studying past philosophical works in any way other than through … contextualist methods … is unhistorical’. It is ironic that they should subsequently resort to ‘contextualist dogma’ at a crucial point in their own argument in assuming that the ‘polemical target’ of Locke’s claim that voluntary slavery is impermissible must be another ‘seventeenth-century philosopher’, a ‘leading defender … of political absolutism in the period’—someone from the same historical context. Hobbes is duly identified (pp. 91, 95). Attention to Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Books VI, VII, VIII, edited by P. G. Stanwood (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), Book 8, chs. 3.1‒3.3, pp. 334‒41, may produce a different conclusion. His discussion of Hobbes was peremptory because his subject was Locke. He assumed, without much argument, that Locke was addressing different questions than Hobbes and that he was doing so on the basis of very different presuppositions. Plainly these assumptions are different, but they are united in their tendency to render claims of influence otiose—the first for reasons that Skinner indicated, the second for reasons that Collingwood indicated. Collingwood supposed that it is because people have different presuppositions that the ‘frivolous and superficial type of history’ which simply ‘says that A is influenced by B or that A borrows from B’ must be dismissed out of hand. This type of approach focuses on propositions apparently advanced in common but it ‘never asks what there was in A that laid it open to B’s influence, or what there was in A which made it capable of borrowing from B’, namely, their shared presuppositions. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 128. Our discussion turns Collingwood’s compass 180 degrees and focuses instead on the contrasting presuppositions of Hobbes and Locke as the key to ‘the structural code’ of Two Treatises. It is by this means that we propose to ‘unlock the meaning’ of Locke’s text as ‘an answer to Hobbes’. This is not to deny ‘the Cambridge Orthodoxy’ that Locke’s primary purpose in the work was to refute Filmer’s arguments and to replace them with explanations of civil life that connected it firmly with a non-absolute polity. Olsthoorn and Van Apeldoorn, ‘The Value of Methodological Pluralism’, p. 94. Two Treatises performs these conjoined tasks by dismembering the Filmerian body politic and using the parts to generate the Lockean one. Locke distinguished various relations that Filmer had colligated and, in so doing, modified their content and changed their purpose. The full titles of the two Treatises indicate that Locke saw these dual tasks as connected but distinct: the first, detecting and overthrowing the false principles and foundation of Filmer’s (and Filmerian) theory; and the second, disclosing the true original, extent, and end of civil-government. The latter contains two sequences of explanation: one largely about politics, one largely about society, with both proceeding from the same point of origin—the Lockean deity. Locke sets out political and social arrangements in terms that differ not only from Filmer and his followers, but also from Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, and many others. For this reason, it seems a trifle precipitous to declare, with Felix Waldmann, that in the Second Treatise ‘Locke was not responding to Grotius or Pufendorf’—or, one presumes, Hobbes—because ‘he was responding to Filmer’. We are inclined to explore the possibility that he may have been doing all these things at once. Felix Waldmann, ‘Slavery and Absolutism in Locke’s Two Treatises: A Response to Olsthoorn and Van Apeldoorn’, Locke Studies 21 (2021): pp. 1–9 (at 4). Our argument, like Locke’s, requires us to perform two connected but distinct tasks. The first is to show that Dunn’s view that Hobbes’s problem was not Locke’s problem needs to be refined somewhat, because, given Hobbes’s presuppositions, his problem cannot be what Dunn took it to be. The second task is to show that Hobbes’s problem as we construe it was one to which Two Treatises offered a decisive Lockean answer. As we shall see, this answer was one that Locke presupposed in the other writings in which, Dunn conceded, one might conceivably locate the focus of Locke’s lifelong tension with Hobbes—the Essay concerning Human Understanding and, we submit, the Epistola de tolerantia. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, pp. 80–1. (Along with the Essay, Dunn discerns the ‘psychological core of Locke’s answer’ to Hobbes as revealed all too clearly in The Reasonableness of Christianity; no mention is made of the Epistola.) In this way Dunn’s argument ‘becomes an element in the point of view from which the mind raises its next problem’ R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, or the Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 317.—a fittingly Collingwoodian tribute, we hope, to the inspirational quality of his scholarship. Hobbes’s problem: Grotianism without limit We have been told that putting Hobbes and Locke in context means approaching them against the background of the fundamentally like-minded theorists who together comprise ‘the modern tradition of natural law theory’ inaugurated by Hugo Grotius. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 4, and compare Victor Nuovo, John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 186. In this tradition, some version of natural freedom, and in some instances natural equality, possessed by each and every individual as a matter of right, conducts the human race from a state of nature to a civilised common life under a government in the city or body politic. See Ian Harris, ‘The Legacy of Two Treatises of Government’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 3 (2007): pp. 143–67 (at 147–8). As Annabel S. Brett explains, both Grotius and Hobbes ‘pictured the individual in the state of nature not primarily as a moral agent in pursuit of the natural good of man’, but as a free agent under his own right [sui iuris] ‘in pursuit of his own advantage’. Annabel S. Brett, ‘The Development of the Idea of Citizens’ Rights’, in States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects edited by Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97–112 (at 104). In analysing human advantage, ‘both theorists primarily stressed the disadvantage which could accrue to individuals from the presence of other equally free individuals. … The legal device of contract was analysed and deployed in such a way as to allow natural man easy passage into the city but then to bar his way out. Individual right [ius] was conceived in an almost commercial vein as natural man’s original capital, to be spent on advantage.’ Advantage was secured by exchanging one’s rights for the protection of government—if necessary, via a complete surrender of rights to a sovereign. In this case, as Brett puts it, ‘the man who bought citizenship with his rights could not then claim those same rights against the city’. Brett, ‘The Idea of Citizens’ Rights’, p. 105. For an exemplary account of the complexities of Grotius’s view, see Annabel S. Brett, ‘Natural Right and Civil Community: The Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius’, Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): pp. 31–51. Several recent commentators have interpreted Hobbes as following out Grotius’s logic in his own account of the institution of sovereignty, See e.g. Deborah Baumgold, ‘Hobbes and Grotius: The Elements of Law and De Jure Belli ac Pacis’, History of Political Thought 43, no. 4 (2022): pp. 693–713, and Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 82–100. but this misconstrues Hobbes’s position, which was at once more subtle and more subversive. As Brett recognizes (‘The Idea of Citizens’ Rights’, pp. 104–5). In Hobbes’s hands, the relationship between nature and the city was radically reconfigured. Earlier writers had dwelt on the ways in which civil society arose out of nature and harnessed it to particular ends but Hobbes, like Grotius, aimed ‘not at managing a nature that still exists within the city but at constructing the city from a nature which is then left behind’. Brett, ‘Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius’, p. 33. Michael Oakeshott touched upon this point in his introduction to Leviathan, where he described Hobbes’s work as the ‘head and crown’ of a new tradition of political theorizing in which the master-conceptions were will and artifice, and which stood in pointed contrast to a rival tradition in which the master-conceptions were reason and nature. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Introduction to Leviathan’ (1946), in idem, Hobbes on Civil Association (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), p. 7. Any appeal by an individual ‘from the city to a nature understood as normative’ threatened to dissolve it from the inside. Brett, ‘Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius’, p. 33; idem, ‘The Idea of Citizens’ Rights’, p. 104. Grotius’s theory, on Hobbes’s interpretation, exacerbated rather than escaped this danger. To understand why, it is necessary to say a word more about the nature of Hobbes’s ‘philosophical enterprise’. Dunn represents that enterprise as the construction of political society from an ethical vacuum. He sees this as a consequence of the lexical priority Hobbes accorded to natural right in relation to natural law. Since ‘Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty’, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. The English and Latin Texts, edited by Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). References are provided to Part and Chapter, followed by pagination in the first (1651) edition (here 1.14, p. 64). Hobbes’s premise is that my right is not the counterpart of your duty: it is a right to everything and so to do anything. That is why the problem in Leviathan is to show how a civil constitution can be constructed in temporal sequence by individual agents who use their natural freedom to remove themselves from this anarchical condition and place themselves under government, agreeing, each one with every other, to lay down their natural rights and submit themselves to its laws, authorising a single sovereign power to bear their collective person. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.14, pp. 65‒7; 1.16, pp. 80‒2. As early as Elements of Law, however, Hobbes was quite clear that stories of this kind, which purport to show how human agents can generate political society ex nihilo, taken literally, are beyond human understanding. There Hobbes suggested that the origination of a civil society ‘by arbitrary institution of many men assembled together’ using their own natural power was ‘like a creation out of nothing by human wit’, something he regarded as incomprehensible. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, edited by Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969), Part 2, Ch. 1, §1, p. 108. It is very difficult to integrate nature within the city if, as Hobbes supposed, nature and civilisation, like libertas and imperium, are by definition mutually exclusive and more difficult still to explain how the first begets the second, except by a kind of miracle. Our suggestion is that Hobbes was not offering a creation story in which a multitude ‘constructs’ or ‘generates’ through their own actions the body politic that Hobbes names ‘Leviathan’ but rather a story about the construction of a name which, applied to the body politic to which they already belong, transforms their understanding of their own condition and their own conduct concomitantly, so that the city becomes, so to speak, worthy of the name. This suggestion finds support in Hobbes’s conception of generation, which he construes not as a synonym for creation but instead as a generic process in which something undergoes ‘a change which makes us assign to, or remove from . . . [it] the name that answers the question: “What is the thing?”’. See Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined ed. Howard Whitmore Jones (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1976), v. 3, pp. 58‒9. The change is what signifies and changed behaviour is what signifies the change. The aetiology of the change is, in one sense, beside the point—which is why sovereignty is the same regardless of the route by which it is acquired—but in another sense, it is the point, because the purpose of the story Hobbes provides is not to narrate a determinate causal sequence or even to hypothesize one such possible sequence but to raise images In this respect Hobbes’s story is akin to the malfunctioning X-ray machine invoked by Dunn to illustrate the mismatch between what interpreters saw when they looked at Hobbes and Locke (the central nervous system), and what they imagined themselves to be seeing (its skeletal system). See Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 79. which touch the affections of the reader. To do this can scarcely be thought to be a purely speculative activity because its effect is not simply cognitive, but practical: not only to develop ideas but to affect conduct. It might be added that since Hobbes assimilated affections to conceptions, conceptions to images, and termed ‘The Imagination that is raysed in man ... by words, or other voluntary signes’ the ‘Understanding’, it cannot be otherwise. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.2, p. 8. Understanding—imagination—at once changes and constitutes reality. This aspect of Hobbes’s enterprise is discussed briefly in Timothy Stanton, ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, History of European Ideas 37, no. 2 (2011): 160‒67, and developed further in Robin Douglass, ‘The Body Politic “is a Fictitious Body”’, Hobbes Studies 27, no.2 (2014): pp. 126‒47. Hobbes’s enterprise was to frame the minds of his contemporaries to imagine the commonwealth as something constructed out of, and upon, the natural rights they so noisily and recklessly trumpeted—a skeletal structure of rights and obligations established by covenant—because, by his own definition, every commonwealth is and must be so structured, to ensure that nature is buried in its foundations. This point holds regardless of the fact that, in Leviathan, it is universal representation by one sovereign, rather than a mutual surrender of right per se that unites the multitude into a commonwealth. As Hobbes himself tells us, this ‘reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person’ is to be understood as having been ‘made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS’. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, p. 87. For discussion of Hobbes’s general position, see Johann Olsthoorn, ‘Leviathan Inc.: Hobbes on the Nature and Person of the Commonwealth’, History of European Ideas 47, no. 1 (2021): pp. 17‒32. The effect of the definition is to establish that natural right is self-deconstructing: no vestige of nature remains within the city. To avoid appeals to nature destroying the city from the inside, subjects need to reconcile themselves to the fact that its life is sustained by, and indeed equivalent to, its vital motion, which is their motion. They give life to the commonwealth through their unstinting obedience to it. It lasts as long as their obedience lasts; and whilst their obedience lasts, it lives, because they think and act as citizens. The key issue, in this frame of reference, is not possession but enforcement, not rights but obligations, not natural laws but submission to authority in recognition of benefits received from it, without which no civilized common life is possible. When we attend to what Hobbes says about the generation of the commonwealth, it is clear that the alienation of rights by individual agents is an effect rather than the source of sovereign right. In De Cive, he tells us that ‘in every commonwealth, the Man or Assembly to whose will individuals have subjected their will … is said to hold SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY (SUMMAM POTESTATEM) or SOVEREIGN POWER (SUMMUM IMPERIUM) or DOMINION (DOMINIUM). This Authority (Potestas), this Right to give Commands, consists in the fact that each of the citizens has transferred all his own force and power (potentia) to that Man or Assembly’. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive / On the Citizen, edited by Richard Tuck, translated by Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). References are provided to book, chapter, and paragraph number (here 2.5.11). At least by definition, then, Hobbes’s sovereign is omnipotent; but his right is a function of his power, not a function of rights laid down or contracted away by others. The reason for this, we suggest, is that Hobbes wishes to emphasize precisely what his critics, from Filmer onwards, took to be a fatal flaw in his argument—that his natural rights are self-dissolving, and that any attempt to erect a civil condition upon them is akin to laying the foundation of one’s house on sand. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20, p. 107. As Oakeshott observed, the ‘deplorable over-confidence about the exposure of faults in Hobbes’s philosophy’ owes much to the assumption that Hobbes constructed his theory on foundations that could not possibly bear its weight. The problem here, Oakeshott continued, is not so much that Hobbes’s critics err in their assumptions as to where the foundations of Hobbes’s theory are laid, but that the search for foundations itself betrays ‘a false expectation with regard to the nature of a philosophical system. For what is expected here [Oakeshott continues] is that a philosophical system should conform to an architectural analogue, and consequently what is sought in Hobbes’s system is a foundation and a superstructure planned as a single whole, with civil philosophy as the top storey. Now, it may be doubted whether any philosophical system can properly be represented in the terms of architecture, but what is certain is that the analogy does violence to the system of Hobbes’: ‘Introduction to Leviathan’, pp. 15‒16. Hobbes’s crucial move was to recognize that subjective rights could not function in the way in which their proponents, notably Grotius, required them to function. Grotius argued that individuals have a right, by nature, to preserve those things that belong to them as their native possessions: their suum, in which he included life and limb, liberty, and honour or reputation. To deprive another person of anything pertaining to their suum was, according to Grotius, iniustum. Hence Grotius’s first definition of the law of nature in De Iure Belli ac Pacis as ‘the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s’. Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], edited by Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005 [1625/1631]), Preliminary Discourse, §VIII, p. 86, p. 88 n. 7, and compare I.2 1.5, pp. 181‒2. In De Cive, Hobbes included the very same items in his inventory of what people take to be their natural endowments, over which they reckon themselves to enjoy exclusive control. Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.2. Yet Hobbes argued that these were not subjective rights, but rather intersubjective ones—there was no ‘exclusion zone’ This helpful formulation is owed to Brett, ‘The Idea of Citizens’ Rights’, p. 105. around each individual, however minimal, because the right of governing themselves gave everyone the right to use the life, limbs, liberty, honour and reputation of others as means to their own ends. Grotius’s suum was not a shield but instead a sword, a source of permanent contention and conflict. This was most obviously true of honour or reputation, because it is a positional good: it ‘is nothing’, Hobbes observed, ‘if everyone has it, since it consists in comparison and pre-eminence’. Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.2. But the same point held for all of Grotius’s subjective rights, including that to self-preservation: there was nothing that anyone could not make use of which might be thought helpful to that end, including one another’s bodies. Jerome Schneewind calls his chapter on Hobbes, ‘Grotianism at the limit’ Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, Ch. 3 (‘Grotianism at the limit: Hobbes’). but what Hobbes seeks to show is that, at the limit, Grotianism dissolves. The only coherent position is one that does away with natural rights entire, even as it necessarily uses the language of natural right to do so. This is the ground of Hobbes’s famous claim that, in the natural condition, there can be no ‘Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans, that he can get, and for so long, as he can keep it’. By nature, there is no exclusive control over anything because everyone has a right to everything, which is to say, as Pufendorf astutely observed, that no-one really has a right to anything. In the ‘pure natural state’, the only ‘Measure of right [ius] is interest [Utilitas]’. Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.10. Right and utility collapsed into each other and, as Grotius had himself observed, utility ‘can justify just about anything, for the individual is the measure of his own utility’. Brett, ‘Civil Philosophy of Hugo Grotius’, p. 48. Our natural rights are limitless, and there is no standard or rule of natural justice to regulate the interactions of individuals: ‘For although one could say of anything, this is mine, still he could not enjoy it because of his neighbor, who claimed the same thing to be his by equal right and with equal force’. Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.11. In this frame of reference it is not easy to see what wronging one’s neighbour can consist in, in the absence of the rule that a Grotian (or Ciceronian) standard of natural justice is meant to provide: ‘For injustice against men presupposes Human Laws, and there are none in the natural state’. Hobbes, De Cive, 1.1.10. This underpinned Hobbes’s claim in Leviathan that ‘to declare, what is Equity, what is Justice, and what is morall Vertue, and to make them binding, there is need of the Ordinances of Soveraign Power, and Punishments to be ordained for such as shall break them; which Ordinances are therefore part of the Civill Law’. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.26, p. 138. In making this point, Hobbes gleefully turned Cicero against Grotius. For Grotius’s own (and often explicit) debts to Cicero see Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’s Natural Law, trans. Belinda Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). As Straumann observes, Grotius’s ‘largest debt in his doctrine of the sources of law’ in De iure was ‘Cicero’s treatment of “nature”’ in De legibus (p. 37). Cicero had derived ius naturale from lex naturalis with pointed effect: to justify tyrannicide or, more concretely, the murder of Caesar by those whom he considered to be his friends. On this account, a tyrant was one who did not rule according to ius and lex naturalis, and thereby put himself outside of the moral community of mankind, bound together by justice. Yet ‘even Cicero (a passionate defender of Liberty)’, as Hobbes archly observed, attributeth all Propriety to the Law Civil, Let the Civill Law, saith he, be once abandoned, or but negligently guarded, (not to say oppressed,) and there is nothing, that any man can be sure to receive from his Ancestor, or leave to his Children. And again; Take away the Civill Law, and no man knows what is his own, and what another mans. Seeing therefore the Introduction of Propriety is an effect of Common-wealth; which can do nothing but by the Person that represents it, it is the act onely of the Soveraign; and consisteth in the Lawes, which none can make that have not the Soveraign Power. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.24, pp. 127‒8. This brings us to the two maxims paradoxically invoked by Hobbes at the beginning of De Cive. If man is a wolf to man, it is because, by nature, he is potentially lethal to other human beings. If man is a god to man, See Hobbes, De Cive, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, [1], p. 3. it is because, just as nature is, as the first line of Leviathan proclaims, the ‘Art whereby God hath made and governes the World’, Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘The Introduction’, p. 1. so art is man’s nature. The essence of humanity is not obscured, but revealed, in the man-made structures of a sophisticated civilization. But this requires all citizens to understand what sustains the civil condition and its benefits—sovereign power—and to sustain it by behaving as if they had divested themselves of their natural rights entire. As Hobbes declared in De Cive, the claim that ‘individual citizens have absolute Dominion [Dominium] over their possessions’ is both ‘not true’, and ‘inimical to commonwealths’. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.12.7. Hobbes made no attempt to sweeten the pill. Subjects of a commonwealth are as slaves to a master, because ‘those who have a Lord [Dominus] do not have Dominion’ and ‘the commonwealth by its formation is the Lord of all the citizens’. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.12.7. For discussion see Daniel Lee, ‘Sovereignty and Dominium: The Foundations of Hobbesian Statehood’, in Hobbes’s On the Citizen: A Critical Guide, edited by Robin Douglass and Johan Olsthoorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 126‒44. The effect of human artifice is to ‘erect a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their own industrie, and by the fruits of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly’. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, p. 87. By contrast, those who invoke nature or natural rights, or who eschew civil conversation in favour of the natural passions which characterise men sub specie hominis, must be understood as seeking, wittingly or unwittingly, to abandon the civilization that has removed them from the incipient violence and brutality of that bestial condition. A life of lasting security is possible only in the context of the city, or state; and the state can exist only where there is sovereign authority of a sort which is as absolute as it is possible to conceive. It follows that any commonwealth in which any remnant of these natural rights was held to remain the property of individual agents was built upon sand. Such a commonwealth was exactly what Hobbes claimed all politics down to his own day had actually been: the continuation of civil war under a different name. Locke’s commonwealth: Law’s limits and the Great Design of God On the argument we are advancing, the ‘generation’ of the Hobbesian commonwealth is in one sense no different than the generation of the Lockean one. It purposes to explain society and government in terms intended to persuade Hobbes’s readers that the polity so described is the only acceptable or legitimate one—the only one, that is, deserving of the name ‘commonwealth’. Locke, for one, was not persuaded, not least because he understood law and right in different terms. The idea that Locke shared Hobbes’s view of the relationship of natural law to natural right—meaning that ‘natural law must be deduced from the desire for self-preservation’, which was ‘the sole root of all justice and morality’—was famously advanced by Strauss, Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 181, 183 (Hobbes); 227, 248 (Locke). but given short shrift by James Tully. It is ‘misleading’, Tully declared, to see Locke ‘as a theorist of natural rights and not of natural law’, because ‘the law of nature is rather the foundation of Locke’s … natural rights, [and] men have natural rights because they have natural duties’. James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 63. Plamenatz had earlier reached the same conclusion: that Locke was reviving an older, more traditional conception of natural law in which right was a reflex of duty. John P. Plamenatz, Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx (London: Longman, 1963), p. 222. Tully evidenced his claim by appealing to Dunn’s suggestion that, for Locke, human life is defined by a set of duties, these being derived from natural law. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 218; cited by Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 63. On Richard Tuck’s influential interpretation, by contrast, Locke offered ‘the most faithfully Grotian political theory’ of the late seventeenth century. ‘All that was needed to establish the constraint on absolutism’, Locke is said to have grasped, ‘was… a clear statement of what kind of rights men may possess over each other in a pre-civil society’—a statement, crucially, that would show that such rights were limited. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 172‒3. That Locke considered it essential to show that people’s rights correlate to others’ duties to respect those rights cannot be denied. ‘The Sum of all we drive at’, Locke declared in the Epistola, ‘is, That every man may enjoy the same Rights that are granted to others’. This is Popple’s translation, as reproduced in Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration and Other Writings, edited by Mark Goldie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), p. 57. More contestable, however, is the claim that Locke pursued this aim either in a ‘faithfully Grotian’ manner, or by reviving an older and more traditional conception of natural law. So what does explain the limits Locke set to the rights both of the individual and government? The answer is that it is not natural law—or even the ends of that law—that define the limits of our natural rights. It is, instead, the ends or purposes for which natural law is promulgated by its author, and man’s ‘supreme legislator’, God. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, no. 1, p. 111. These ends and purposes are expressions of His will. As Locke put the point in 1663–4, ‘it is quite evident that God intends man to do something’, and that He does so ‘for no other end than His own glory’. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, no. 4, p. 157. This is a neat anti-Hobbesian move, for Hobbes had claimed that God has no ends (or at least none that were scrutable to human reason). Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.31, p. 190. In Locke’s account, the wider purposes God authorizes, which mark out the type of course that human society should follow, are essential to the architecture of his argument—it is ‘the great Design of God’ that sets the limits to our natural rights. C. B. Macpherson was therefore mistaken to speak of Locke ‘removing’ natural law limits from appropriation. ‘Locke’s astonishing achievement was to base the property right on natural right and natural law, and then to remove all the natural law limits from the property right’: C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 199. It was not natural law that sets those limits in the first place, but rather the injunction to subdue the earth as means of securing the conveniences of life and of improving the conditions of each and all. So, too, self-preservation ceases to be a brute datum and is explained in alternative terms: our property in our person is a means to realise God’s Great Design through our own labour, which answers both to the divine direction to subdue the earth and to the exigency in which God has placed people. See Harris, ‘Legacy of Two Treatises’, p. 153. One might go so far as to say that, on Locke’s account, human beings do not really have a suum by nature, but solely by the grace of the lawgiver who endows us with certain powers to certain ends. Here, Popple’s use of the language of ‘natural right’ in his translation of the Epistola—e.g. ‘Liberty of Conscience is every mans natural Right’; it is lawful for subjects ‘to resist Force with Force, and to defend their natural Rights’—is misleading, as Mark Goldie notes (Letter concerning Toleration, ed. Goldie, pp. 53 & n.141, 61 & n.162). Locke himself is more careful, speaking in the second case of jura sibi a Deo et natura concessa (‘the rights which God and nature have granted them’). He makes no mention of a natural right to liberty of conscience, speaking in the relevant place only of a duty on the part of churches to teach the principle of toleration of others. See Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia / A Letter on Toleration: The Latin and English Texts, edited by Raymond Klibansky and translated by J.W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 146‒7; pp. 134‒5, and see note 58 on p. 161. Rights, with Locke, do not merely accord with law, but relate to the purposes for which that law is made. If Hobbes reached a broadly similar (and radically anti-Grotian) conclusion, then Locke emphasises that the lawgiver in question is and can only be the Immortal God, not an all-too-human sovereign. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.17, p. 87. The distinctiveness of Locke’s argument for the extent (and limits) of natural rights is often overlooked, even by commentators who acknowledge the central place of God within it. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Johan Olsthoorn, for example, have recently argued that Locke’s appeal to the ‘theological premise’ of ‘divine ownership of human life’ was hardly novel—Grotius (and many others besides) had done similarly. The inference they subsequently draw, that divine ownership is insufficient to ground the kinds of limits Locke set to legitimate political authority in Two Treatises, is no more novel. As we have already seen, Hobbes considered Grotius’s theory (like many others besides) to be constructed on foundations of sand; and if Locke’s theory is indeed ‘faithfully Grotian’, one would be forced to concede either that Locke was unconcerned by (or unaware of) Hobbes’s criticisms, or that his attempt to respond to them was fairly hopeless. But Locke’s God is not merely our creator. He is our continuous sustainer. See Locke, Two Treatises, II, §6. Compare Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, no. 4, pp. 153‒5: ‘it necessarily follows that above ourselves there exists another more powerful and wiser agent who at his will can bring us into the world, maintain us, and take us away. Hence, having inferred this on the evidence of the senses, reason lays down that there must be some superior power to which we are rightly subject, namely God who has a just and inevitable command over us and at His pleasure can raise us up or throw us down, and make us by the same commanding power happy or miserable.’ This raises certain difficulties for Olsthoorn and Van Apeldoorn’s claim (‘The Value of Methodological Pluralism’, pp. 96‒7) that Grotius and Locke shared identical premises. As a result, he alone enjoys the ‘maker’s rights’ that Filmer vests in fathers: as the epigraph to the Essay, drawn from Ecclesiastes, declares, God ‘maketh all things’. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 1. Tully’s attempt to extend this model to human agents is insufficiently attentive to the fact that they are creatures, not creators. See Tully, A Discourse on Property, passim. On Locke’s account it is God to whom praise, glory and gratitude is due in the highest. We are dependent upon Him for all the benefits that we enjoy and can ever hope to receive. This idea that human beings are continually subject to God’s direction and will, as servants to a master, is less obviously present in Grotius, Pufendorf, or, especially, Hobbes. For a judicious discussion, see Alan Cromartie, ‘The God of Thomas Hobbes’, Historical Journal 51, no. 4 (2008): pp. 857‒79. It is interesting that Hobbes extends the rights of generation to those who sustain, rather than merely create (because they are responsible for the change that makes it appropriate to continue to apply to the same name over time to what they sustain). This may help to explain why his sovereign is an object of civil worship, for it is to him ‘wee owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence’. See Hobbes, Leviathan 2.17, p. 87. Hobbes begins with sovereign individuals whose natural rights are limitless and thereby ‘useless’, to argue that sovereign authority creates absolute and undivided jurisdiction (i.e. imperium over those subjected to that authority). On Locke’s account, conversely, this is true only of God, under whose sovereignty we enjoy jurisdiction over ourselves, and thereby possess rights that correlate to the duties of our fellows to respect those rights. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §7. As ‘God wills that we do something’, so we establish political and religious societies to facilitate the performance of our duties as God’s subjects. Locke, Two Treatises, I, §6. But the ‘true origin, scope, and end’ of each of these societies is discrete: we enter into them as a means of sustaining a different inventory of rights and to perform different duties. ‘He mixes heaven and earth together, things most remote and opposite, who confuses these two societies, which in their origin, their end, and their whole substance are utterly and completely different.’ Locke, Letter concerning Toleration (ed. Klibansky), pp. 85‒7. The purpose for which civil government exists is to sustain the rights to the Lockean trinity of life, liberty, and property. These rights are construed by Locke as powers coordinated to ends that go beyond the preservation of each and all to the achievement of a wider purpose. God wills us to subdue the earth and to ‘improve it for the benefit of Life’. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §32. The right to property, which is a right to appropriate, is granted in the service of this end, the ‘Great Design of God, Increase and Multiply’. Locke, Two Treatises, I, §41. In Locke’s words, The law man was under was … for appropriating. God commanded, and his wants forced him to labour. That was his property, which could not be taken from him wherever he had fixed it. And hence subduing or cultivating the earth and having dominion, we see, are joined together. The one gave title to the other. So that God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to appropriate. And the condition of human life, which requires labour and materials to work on, necessarily introduce private possessions. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §34. In short, right and the limits of right alike answer to God’s design, not to natural law only. Likewise it is not labour per se, but labour under divine authorisation that gives anyone ‘a propriety’ in anything; if what was appropriated went to waste, the would-be proprietor ‘was liable to be punished: he invaded his neighbour’s share, for he had no right farther than his use called for any of them, and they might serve to afford him conveniencies of life’. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §37. The same measure, Locke elsewhere added, ‘may be allowed still’. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §36. Some of these themes are explored in a different way in Johan Olsthoorn, ‘Between Starvation and Spoilage: Conceptual Foundations of Locke’s Theory of Original Appropriation’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0121. In this fashion the concerted force of theology and morality is aligned behind limited government: it is an instrument which serves and secures the ends embodied in God’s design by protecting rights that are the necessary means of doing His work. The state thus extends beyond government to the creation of the conditions of self-subsistence, productivity, and plenty that government itself only exists to better enable and protect. Locke gave the highest place amongst natural duties to the worship of God. The proper work of human beings, and one for which they were naturally prepared, as Locke always emphasized, was that of rendering praise, honour, and glory to God, and doing so publicly. See Ian Harris, ‘John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration’, in Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment, edited by Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 59–105. Human beings instituted religious societies (viz. churches) for this purpose. If Lockean natural law not only prescribes duties but serves ends, in this instance it does so by requiring of every human being worship that expresses the care for souls—their own, and others’—that God has made in His image, and of which they are merely the bearers and custodians. Locke reckoned that because every mortal had an immortal soul, and its welfare depended upon what was prescribed by God, to follow those prescriptions was an obligatory requirement to be observed before all others, because nothing belonging to the mortal condition was comparable to the fate of the soul. This duty of public worship is incumbent upon every individual: it is obligatory rather than optional, because—to underline the point—the individual is not sovereign over their own body and mind. The discussion is not about whether, but rather about how to perform this duty. And this discussion is not one that involves civil government in any way. One of Locke’s objectives in Two Treatises is to demonstrate that the transactions that produce civil government omit any sort of transfer or fiduciary grant in relation to this particular natural duty because, as Locke declared in the Epistola, ‘the care of the eternal welfare of the soul is left to each one’. Locke, Letter concerning Toleration (ed. Klibansky), pp. 90‒1 (translation amended). A result is that Locke is not aptly construed as an exponent of a Hobbesian ‘science of sovereignty’. He is quite clear that, among human beings, if it makes sense to speak of sovereignty at all, it is only as a species of jurisdiction, and not, as it was for Hobbes, its source and supreme expression. Cp. Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.42, p. 312: ‘by the Law of Nature … the Civill Sovereign in every Common-wealth, is the Head, the Source, the Root, and the Sun, from which all Jurisdiction is derived’. Locke’s answer to the question, who has jurisdiction? has three parts. First, there is God, who, because He has complete sovereignty, also has universal jurisdiction. Then there is the jurisdiction of each and every competent person over their own actions under God. Locke, Two Treatises, II, §7. Third, and last, there are ecclesiastical jurisdiction and civil jurisdiction, and power is exercised without right—as Locke puts it in Two Treatises—when these discrete jurisdictional limits are elided. Both commonwealths and churches alike require laws internal to them in order to sustain their ends, but the laws of civil society are distinguished by coercive force, which magistrates have a commission and power to use to protect citizens and the commonwealth itself against earthly threat. ‘Every man is entitled to admonish, exhort, convince another of error, and lead him by reasoning to accept his own opinion; but it is the magistrate’s province to give orders by decree and compel with the sword’: Locke, Letter concerning Toleration (ed. Klibansky), p. 69. That is the only end for which such power may be lawfully or rightfully employed, as Locke’s account of the true origin, scope, and end of civil-government in the Second Treatise establishes. It follows that in laying claim to unlimited jurisdiction over subjects whose obedience is without stint, the Hobbesian sovereign exercises ‘Power without Right’. Natural law underpins both natural and political power because that law represents the will of a being, God, who is the fount of all power and glory, and whose will cannot be personated by any entity of merely mortal extraction – all of whom are His creatures. Pace Hobbes, for whom the sovereign represents God before his subjects, and his subjects before God. For further discussion, see Timothy Stanton and Tim Stuart-Buttle, ‘Hobbes, Locke, and the Christian Commonwealth’, Hobbes Studies, forthcoming. It is God, made flesh in Christ, who is our ‘Prince of peace’; Locke, Letter concerning Toleration (ed. Klibansky), p. 65. He alone is our Lord (Dominus), before whom we have no possessions and no rights—that is to say, no suum. It is our contention that this claim is fundamental to the ‘structural code’ of Two Treatises and that it enables us to see how that text represents a response not merely to Filmer, but also to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Hobbes. It is only once it is recognized, with Collingwood and Dunn, that a historical account of the text must be at the same time a philosophical account that the full power and complexity of its arguments are brought into view. Concluding remarks If, as Hobbes claimed, Cicero was incapable of maintaining his distinction between natural and civil law, then, for Locke, the reason was not far to seek. The heathen philosophers had failed to identify the source and ends of natural law in the will of a divine being who stood apart from His creation, and who sustained and directed human life according to His purposes. Tim Stuart-Buttle, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Ch. 1. As Locke declares in the Epistola, ‘the taking away of God, even only in thought, dissolves all’. Locke, Letter concerning Toleration (ed. Klibansky), p. 135. Pace Grotius, no account of moral and political obligation would hold ‘if we should even grant, what without the greatest Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God, or that he takes no Care of human Affairs’. Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, Preliminary Discourse, §XII, p. 89. Absent God’s Great Design—the wider ends and purposes for which natural law was promulgated—and the priority of natural law over natural right is rendered unsustainable. The consequences would be as Hobbes described. But our rights, Locke is scrupulously careful to say, are granted to us ‘by God and nature’. See above, n. 110. If God and His purposes are removed from the picture, then such rights would indeed be self-deconstructing, generating a miserable condition of perpetual distrust and conflict, and a clash of wills, out of which no legitimate forms of human authority could possibly be created. If, ‘violating the dignity of the supreme legislator, we wish to make reason responsible for that received law which it merely investigates’, then the limits Locke set to power and jurisdiction—individual, civil, and ecclesiastical—likewise dissolve. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, no. 1, p. 111. In such a condition, Locke observed in his lectures on natural law, ‘men can have no social intercourse or union among themselves’, and ‘every community … falls to the ground’. Men would seek protection from a ‘supreme authority’ possessed of the ‘most unrestrained liberty, … in whose power it is to make or remake laws at their will and as the masters of others to do everything in favour of their own dominion’. Neither could this condition readily be escaped, because the condition of this superficially illimitable authority is really no more secure than that of its subjects: positive civil laws are not binding by their own nature or force or in any other way than in virtue of the law of nature, which orders obedience to superiors and the keeping of public peace. Thus, without this law, the rulers can perhaps by force and with the aid of arms compel the multitude to obedience, but put them under an obligation they cannot. Without natural law the other basis also of human society is overthrown, i.e. the faithful fulfilment of contracts. … Everything would have to depend on human will, and, since there would be nothing to demand dutiful action, it seems that man would not be bound to do anything but what utility or pleasure might recommend. … Man would not be able to act wrongfully, since there was no law issuing commands and prohibitions, and he would be the completely free and sovereign arbiter of his actions. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, no. 1, p. 119. All of which brings us back to Castor and Pollux, who make another appearance in the final paragraph of the Letter from a Person of Quality (1675). In their introduction to this text in the Clarendon Edition of Locke’s works, the editors alight upon this passage as one that ‘could very easily have come from [Locke’s] pen’ as author rather than merely as scribe. John Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667‒1683, edited by J.R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), ‘General Introduction’, p. 118. Castor and Pollux are figured here as ‘Priest’ and ‘Prince’. A Letter from a Person of Quality, to his Friend in the Country, in Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration and Other Writings, p. 376. Locke rails against those who have, in recent years, ‘truckt away the Rights and Liberties of the People in this, and all other countries wherever they have had opportunity, that they might be owned by the Prince to be Jure Divino, and maintain'd in that Pretention by that absolute power and force, they have contributed so much to put into his hands; and that Priest, and Prince may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipt together as Divine in the same temple by Us poor Lay-subjects; and that sense and reason, Law, Properties, Rights, and Liberties, shall be understood as the Oracles of those Deities shall interpret, or give signification to them, and ne’r be made use of in the world to oppose the absolute and free Will of either of them.’ As Locke’s manuscripts from this period attest—and the Epistola subsequently argued at length—it was the elision of the jurisdictional limits of religious and civil authority that was responsible, in his view, for all the mischiefs and disorders that had plagued the commonwealths of the Christian era. Few theorists had tried harder to elide those jurisdictional limits than Hobbes, the Christian writer whose great achievement it was to reunite the two heads of the eagle. Our aim in this essay has been to ‘elucidate why it was that Locke said what he said, wrote what he wrote, and published what he published in the Two Treatises of Government’. Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, p. 6. Locke wished to persuade his readers that the polity he was describing was the only legitimate polity. All others were predicated on a fundamental misapprehension of the true origins, scope, and end of political power, and merely licensed the continuation of civil war under a different name. Filmer’s theory was one such, for reasons that Locke laboured at length in the First Treatise. But the centrality of God’s Great Design to the architecture of Locke’s argument in the Second Treatise detects and overthrows the false principles and foundation of another erroneous conception of political power—one forever associated with name of Thomas Hobbes. It is only by removing Locke from the shadow of Leviathan, and by considering in clearer light the presuppositions that structure his vision of human life and the philosophical arguments he erected upon them, that it becomes possible to explain the structure of Locke’s political philosophy in historical terms whilst at the same time giving Hobbes his due. Our bet is that this conclusion is unlikely to win many friends; but there is consolation in the certain knowledge that it will not influence people. Political Thought of Locke Draft: March 2024 34