Professor Steven Smith:
It's so nice to see you again on
this gorgeous autumn day.
And we had a wonderful,
wonderful weekend,
didn't we?
Yes, we did.
Okay, today,
I want us to begin… we move
ahead.
We're moving ahead.
Today we begin with Mr.
John Locke.
For the next three classes,
Mr.
Locke.
It is hard to believe that a
little book like this,
in this not terribly
distinguished edition,
mind you, but nevertheless,
in this edition of just over a
hundred pages,
that a book of this length
could have such world shaping
effects.
If anyone would ever doubt the
importance of ideas,
political ideas,
in history,
I would only say to you to
consult the history and the
influence of John Locke.
Remarkable.
I want to talk today a little
bit about Mr.
Locke.
John Locke is,
for our purposes today,
I mean, there are many reasons
why one would read him in
different kinds of classes,
but for our purposes,
John Locke gives the modern
state, the expression that is
most familiar to us.
His writings seem to have been
so completely absorbed and
adopted by Thomas Jefferson when
he wrote the Declaration of
Independence that Locke
seems to have become virtually a
kind of honorary founding
father,
as it were, of America.
Among other things,
John Locke advocates the
natural liberty and equality of
human beings,
our natural rights to such
things as life,
liberty, and what he calls
"estate" or property,
the idea that government,
at least legitimate government,
is government by consent,
that legitimate government is
necessarily limited and limited
government constituted by a
separation of powers,
and that when governments
become repressive or that when
governments become abusive of
natural rights,
that the people have a right to
revolution.
In addition to this,
John Locke was a famous
advocate of religious
toleration.
His name is forever linked with
our ideas today of what we might
call liberal or constitutional
democracy.
He gives the modern
constitutional state,
again, its definitive and,
in many ways,
most familiar expression.
Yet, Locke did not arise ex
nihilo, nor did anyone.
Locke's writings come from
somewhere and from some source.
They were prepared,
in many ways,
in part by Machiavelli,
who had died approximately a
century before Locke's birth.
But more importantly,
by another English writer,
or by an English writer with
whom we have spent some time,
namely Mr.
Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes took Machiavelli's idea
of The Prince and,
in effect, turned it into a
theory or doctrine of
sovereignty.
The Hobbesian sovereign is at
the basis of our ideas of
impersonal, or what we might
call representative,
government.
He transforms princely rule,
Hobbes does,
into an office called the
sovereign.
And this office is,
for Hobbes, the creation of a
social contract,
or covenant,
as he calls it,
responsible to the agents or
persons who have created the
contract.
Hobbes had taught that the
sovereign is representative of
the people who create his office
in order to ensure peace,
justice, and order.
Without the power of the
sovereign, we would find
ourselves in a condition of
nature,
a state of nature,
a term coined by Hobbes to
indicate a world without civil
authority or at least with only
weak civil authority,
unable to enforce common rules
and laws.
Hobbes gave voice to the
doctrine of secular absolutism,
one that invests the sovereign
with absolute power to do
whatever is necessary to ensure,
again, the rule of law,
justice, and political
stability.
And out of these rather harsh
and formidable premises,
Locke created a different,
what we would think of as a
more liberal constitutional
theory of the state,
while being still,
in many ways,
very dependent on the premises
that Hobbes,
again, modifying Machiavelli,
had undertaken.
Locke set out a process of
domestication.
He set out to tame or to
domesticate Hobbes's fierce or
harsh theory of absolute
government, which had found few
defenders in his own day.
Locke's most important work of
political theory,
of political philosophy,
is his Two Treatises of
Civil Government,
of which we are only reading
the second.
The book we have before us is
often simply referred to as the
Second Treatise,
but you will probably have
suspected, I think,
that the Second Treatise
was preceded by a first
treatise.
The First Treatise is
much longer than the Second
Treatise,
and it was an elaborate and
painstaking,
one could almost say
deconstruction,
of the theory of the divine
right of kings,
which in his era,
had received expression by a
man named Robert Filmer,
whose name appears,
I think occasionally,
in the Second Treatise.
Filmer had written a book
called Patriarcha,
and the Patriarcha had
argued that all political
authority derives from the grant
of authority that God had given
to Adam,
and therefore,
that all legitimate authority
has divine right behind it.
Locke's First Treatise
is a very important,
but also, I have to say,
extremely tedious work,
and you should be grateful that
I am not assigning it to you.
But it's a very interesting
book, in its own right,
of in many ways,
biblical criticism and
exposition.
But it's only in the Second
Treatise that Locke set out
to set out his own positive
theory of government,
as it were.
This book was written,
we now believe,
shortly before the famous Whig
Revolution of 1688,
and in it, Locke sets out his
theory of parliamentary
supremacy, rule of law,
and constitutional government.
To put it maybe slightly oddly,
Locke was in his day,
to some degree,
what Aristotle was to his.
The Second Treatise is
intended as a practical book.
It was a book addressed not so
much to the philosophers of his
age, but to Englishmen,
written to them in the everyday
language of their time.
He wrote to capture,
in a way, the common sense of
his time, although this is not
to say Locke was not,
at the same time,
a deeply controversial figure.
Locke had the ability,
and it's a very desirable
ability, to take,
in many ways,
radical or even revolutionary
ideas and express them in a kind
of language that makes people
believe that this is what they
had thought all along.
And that is,
to some degree,
the genius of the Second
Treatise.
In many ways,
that is easier for us,
because Locke's language has
become, for us,
the kind of I would almost say
common sense,
or shorthand language,
for the way we think about
politics.
And it was, again,
a mark of his genius to be able
to create that language and give
it a stamp that seemed to make
people believe that this is what
they had simply been thinking
all along.
Locke was himself a deeply
political man,
but he was also,
at the same time,
as I've just been hinting,
perhaps, a very reticent one.
He lived in a period of intense
religious and political
conflict.
He was just a boy in school
when a king, Charles I,
was executed and he was an
adult when another king,
James II, was overthrown and
forced into exile.
He was a younger contemporary
of Hobbes, but he lived in a
period of immense civil conflict
and war.
Locke spent many years at
Oxford, where he was both a
student and a fellow,
and he was suspected,
throughout much of his time
there, of harboring radical
political sympathies,
but he was so cautious and
careful in expressing them that
after many years,
even those closest to him were
unclear as to what his opinions
were.
The master of Locke's own
residential college at Oxford,
Balliol College,
described Mr.
Locke as the "master of
taciturnity," a master of
taciturnity because he could not
discover,
through questioning and so on,
Locke's opinions on religious
and political matters.
Just think of it.
There used to be a very
wonderful bust of Locke in the
lobby of the British Arts Centre
and I used to recommend to
students,
when they were down in that
part of campus,
to stop in and look at his
face,
because as with Machiavelli and
others, the face is very
revealing.
And I used to ask people to see
do you detect in here the sense
of the master of taciturnity
that his college master had
discussed?
Locke was a private secretary
and a physician to a man named
Anthony Ashley Cooper,
later known as Lord
Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury had a circle,
the Shaftesbury Circle,
of political followers who were
opponents of the monarchy and
who were forced into exile in
1683.
Locke followed them into exile.
He spent several years in
Holland in 1683 before returning
to England, again,
shortly before the Whig
Revolution, where his book,
the Second Treatise,
 was published and where he
lived until his death in 1704.
Just two years ago,
in fact, Yale,
at the Beinecke Library,
held a major conference in
commemoration of the 300th
anniversary of the death of Mr.
Locke.
So those are a few things about
his contributions and his
context.
I want to begin today the
substantive part of this talk by
focusing on the theme that,
in many ways,
forms the central core of
Locke's political doctrine,
his Theory of Natural Law.
This is a term that has come up
from time to time.
There is no modern thinker that
I'm aware of who makes natural
law as important to his doctrine
as does Locke.
The best way to observe the
working, or to reconstruct the
working, of natural law is to
follow a procedure that we have
seen before;
to think about what is the
condition of nature,
the state of nature,
where we can see the natural
law in its operative form.
The state of nature,
for Locke, in many ways,
as for Hobbes,
is not a condition of ruling
and being ruled,
as it is for Aristotle.
The state of nature is not a
political condition.
Locke describes the state of
nature as a condition of perfect
freedom.
While Aristotle said that we
were, by nature,
members of a family,
a polis,
a moral community of some kind,
bound by ties of civic or
family obligation,
Locke understands,
by the state of nature,
a condition without civil
authority or civil obligations.
The state of nature is not,
for him, an historical
condition, although he does
occasionally refer to the vast
tracts of North America as
suggesting a condition of
nature,
but the state of nature is a
kind of thought experiment.
What does human nature like in
the absence of authority?
The state of nature,
Locke suggests to us,
is not an amoral condition,
as it was for Hobbes.
It is not simply a condition of
war, of all against all.
The state of nature,
he tells us,
is in fact a moral condition.
It is governed by a moral law,
or a natural law,
that dictates peace and
sociability.
There is a moral law of nature
that determines that no one
should harm another person in
their life, liberty,
or possessions.
This natural law,
Locke affirms,
"willeth the peace and
preservation of all mankind."
So the natural condition,
for Locke, is a moral state,
one in which a natural law,
again, dictates the peace and
preservation.
It is not a war of all against
all.
Locke's natural law,
in some ways,
seems like a very traditional
form of moral law,
familiar to readers of his
time;
readers who would have been
familiar with the natural law
tradition, going back to Cicero,
the Roman Stoics,
St.
Thomas Aquinas,
and in Locke's own day,
an important Anglican divine by
the name of Richard Hooker.
Locke's theory of moral law,
or natural law,
sounds comforting and
traditional, and to some degree,
it is.
All civil authority has its
foundation in a law of reason
that is knowable,
by virtue of our rational
capacities alone.
The law of nature declares,
according to Locke,
that we are,
in his famous term,
the "workmanship of one
omnipotent and infinitely wise
maker."
And as products of divine
workmanship, we ought never to
harm anyone in their lives,
liberties, or possessions.
Locke, again,
seems to effortlessly weave
together the Stoic tradition of
natural law with these Christian
ideas of divine workmanship into
one seamless whole.
You can see the way in which
Locke's rhetoric here,
in his writing,
brings together different
strands of the philosophical and
theological tradition,
weaving them together in a kind
of effortless whole almost.
Do not be simply seduced by
this.
Why do I say that?
Because even within the same
paragraphs, Locke's natural law,
the law that,
again,
mandates or dictates "peace and
preservation of all mankind,"
turns into a right of
self-preservation.
From the beginning,
you have to say,
it is not altogether clear even
whether the natural law is a
theory of moral duty,
duties that we have to preserve
other's duties and obligations,
or whether it is a theory of
natural rights that mandates
that the highest priority be
given to individual
self-preservation and whatever
is necessary to achieve the
preservation of the individual.
The state of nature is a
condition without civil
authority.
The law of nature,
in other words,
has no person or office to
oversee its enforcement or its
application.
So this state of nature that he
once describes,
or early describes in the book
is a condition of peace and
mutual distrust,
quickly degenerates into a
condition of civil war,
or of war, where every
individual serves as the judge,
jury, and executioner of the
natural law.
The state of nature quickly
becomes a Hobbesian condition of
essentially every man for
himself.
Consider the following passage
in section 11 of the Second
Treatise.
"The damnified person," Locke
writes--someone who has been
mistreated in the condition of
nature--the "damnified person,"
who has been injured or
mistreated, "has this power of
appropriating to himself the
goods or services of the
offender by the right of
self-preservation,
as every man has a power to
punish the crime to prevent it
being committed again,
by the right he has of
preserving all mankind,
and doing all reasonable things
he can in order to that end."
In other words,
if you have been wronged,
or feel you have been wronged,
in the state of nature,
you have, according to the
natural law, for Locke,
the right to,
as he puts it,
appropriate to yourself the
goods or services of the
offender.
And you have that--to take from
them their goods,
their property,
their services in some way,
whatever you feel appropriate
as, again, the person who has
suffered some kind of wrong.
Every person becomes,
as it were, judge and
executioner of the law of
nature.
The fundamental law of nature,
Locke says here,
is the right of
self-preservation.
And this states that each
person is empowered to do,
again, whatever is in his
power, to preserve him or
herself.
Again, consider the following
in section 16:
"And one may destroy a man who
makes war upon him."
May destroy another who makes
war upon you.
"Or has discovered an enmity to
his being, for the same reason
that he may kill a wolf or a
lion,"
because such men "are not under
the ties of the common law of
reason."
They "have no other rule but
that of force and violence," so
also, they may be treated as
beasts of prey,
"those dangerous or noxious
creatures that will be sure to
destroy him whenever he falls
into their power."
Listen to that language.
From an original moral
condition, where we are under a
natural law not to harm others,
a law to preserve and protect
the well-being of others of our
kind, we have become like lions
and wolves to each other,
beasts of prey and other
noxious creatures.
What is the state of nature,
but, in the words of Dorothy
Gale, "lions,
tigers, and bears,
oh my!"
This is what we are to one
another.
This is what I've come to think
of as Locke's bestiary,
and in fact,
the Second Treatise is
rife with language of comparing
human beings and our behavior to
animals.
He speaks about lions and
wolves.
Elsewhere he speaks about
polecats and skunks and foxes.
If, in fact,
we are all beings,
as he says, created under a
natural law, we seem to quickly
degenerate into almost bestial
behavior.
Beasts of prey,
far from being cooperative and
peace seeking creatures.
The very freedom that such
beings as ourselves enjoy in a
state of nature leads us to
abuse that freedom and,
in turn, requires or is at the
basis of the need for civil
government.
However, in the meantime,
the question that any reader of
the Second Treatise has
to ask of themselves--and I hope
you've put this forward in your
sections to one another--is
whether the natural condition,
as Locke understands it,
is one overseen by a moral law
of justifying or sanctifying
peace and security,
or whether Locke's state of
nature is simply a thinly veiled
description, a thinly
papered-over description,
of the Hobbesian war of all
against all.
Was Locke simply Hobbes,
in some way,
in sheep's clothing?
Remember his famous taciturnity.
Locke seems to be speaking two
very different languages,
in other words,
one of traditional natural law
that holds out duties to others
as primary and the other,
in some ways,
a modern Hobbesian conception
of natural rights that maintains
the priority of right and each
individual's right to
self-preservation.
Is Locke, in other words--and
this is perhaps more of an
historical than a theoretical
question--is Locke a member of
the ancient,
in some ways,
Ciceronian and Thomistic
tradition of natural law or a
modern Hobbesian?
Do his politics derive from a
theological conception of divine
workmanship or an ultimately,
you might say,
naturalistic conception or
account of the human passions
and the struggle for survival?
Do his priorities go to duties
or to rights?
Or is Locke simply confused?
Is he confusing two different
languages or is he being
intentionally ambiguous in his
account?
A recent book,
by a well-known scholar of
Locke has argued,
I think quite powerfully in
some ways,
that Locke's idea of equality
in the state of nature
specifically relies upon a
certain kind of Christian
theological context of argument.
Locke's statement in paragraph
four of the Second
Treatise,
his statement that "there being
nothing more evident than that
creatures of the same species
and rank,
promiscuously born to all the
same advantages of Nature,
should also be equal to one
another."
That Locke's statement that
creatures of the same species
and rank should be equal to one
another,
this is said to rely upon and
depend upon a very specific
religious argument.
What it means to belong to a
species and why belonging to the
same species confers a special
rank or dignity on each of its
members only makes sense,
according to this recent
interpretation,
if you believe or if it is
believed that the species in
question has a specifically
moral relation to God.
The question,
I think, is whether Locke's
idea of equality in the state of
nature,
or his idea of the moral law in
the state of nature,
relies upon this belief,
or whether it can be inferred
from such things as the basic
principles of freedom,
whether this can be inferred,
as it were, from purely non
theological, naturalistic
premises or grounds.
Locke, to be short,
is silent in the Second
Treatise about the
theological foundations of his
position.
There are no discussions of
important theological figures,
such as Jesus or St.
Paul or the New Testament,
at least in the Second
Treatise; he discusses these
issues at length elsewhere.
These may be,
in some way,
thought of as background
considerations,
but the question remains,
I think, for us whether these
are deeply embedded in Locke's
arguments about divine
workmanship or whether or not
that language of divine
workmanship simply serves as a
kind of window dressing,
again, for a purely secular
naturalistic theory of human
nature and political authority.
Very important issue,
I think, in coming to
understand Locke and indirectly,
very important for how we come
to think of the American regime
because--I'll just say,
simply as a kind of footnote to
what I've been saying--if Locke
is thought of in some ways,
as his doctrine as being,
in some ways,
at the founding principles of
the American regime,
the Declaration of
Independence most notably,
it becomes very important.
It becomes part of a
contemporary public argument
whether those foundations owe
their authority to some kind of
theological doctrine,
as Jefferson calls it in the
opening of the
Declaration,
"the Laws of Nature and
Nature's God,"
seems in some way to have
Lockean overtones to it.
Do our founding documents imply
a theology of some kind,
"the Laws of Nature and
Nature's God,"
or are those principles,
again, purely of a naturalistic
secular kind that can do without
theology altogether?
That is an argument,
a kind of scholarly and
academic argument,
to be sure, but it spills over
into many of our public debates
over the role or place of
religion in public life,
whenever we talk about issues
of the appropriateness of issues
like school prayer or should the
Ten Commandments be publicly
displayed in courthouses or in
other public places?
Or if you want to take another
famous Jeffersonian position,
is there a kind of absolute
firewall,
a wall of separation,
between religion and the state?
These issues that we very much
work on today and think about
are, you can see,
deeply embedded in how we think
about Locke and those opening
sections of the Second
Treatise dealing with
natural law and the state of
nature.
So you can see,
again, how these ideas
penetrate deeply into the marrow
of our public or political
culture.
Are we so different?
Have we become so different?
Will people living
three-hundred years from now
think of us as so different,
and our public debates so
different, from those that
animated the public issues in
the time of John Locke?
Maybe not.
Maybe we aren't that different.
So enough for contemporary.
Let me go back to Mr. Locke.
The core of Locke's theory of
natural law in the state of
nature is arguably lodged in his
account of property,
chapter 5 of the Second
Treatise.
If you remember anything about
Locke after this class,
remember chapter 5.
It is, by all accounts--maybe
chapter 19 as well,
"The Theory of Revolution," but
chapter 5, account of property;
certainly, in many ways,
one of the most characteristic
doctrines of Lockean political
thought.
Locke's view of human nature is
that we are very much the
property-acquiring animal.
Aristotle had said we were
political by nature;
Locke says we are
property-acquiring beings.
Our claims to property derive
from our work.
The fact that we have expended
our labor, our work,
on something gives us a title
to it.
Labor confers value and is the
source of all values.
The state of nature is a
condition, he tells us,
of communal ownership,
what Karl Marx would have
called "primitive communism."
The state of nature is given to
all men in common,
Locke says.
Parts of it become private
property only when we add our
labor to something.
Let me read a famous formula
from sections 27 and 28.
"Every man," Locke says,
"has property in his person:
this no body has any right to
but himself."
We all, in other words,
come into the world with a
certain private property,
property in our person.
No one else has a right to that.
"The labour of his body," Locke
continues, "and the work of his
hands, we may say,
are properly his for labour
being the unquestionable
property of the labourer,
no man but he can have a right
to what is once joined to,
at least where there is enough,
as good left in common for
others."
"That labour," Locke says,
"puts a distinction between him
and the common:
that added something to them
more than nature,
the common mother of all,
had done;
and so they become his private
right."
So we have moved here,
in this one paragraph,
from the state of nature,
which he says is common to all,
to a condition of rudimentary
private property,
which we have in our body,
our person,
which he says also includes the
labor of the body and the work
of the hands,
how we expend our activity.
That labor, he says,
which puts something between us
and the common,
becomes the source of ownership
of things around us,
and that ownership then,
in turn, becomes a right.
So they become,
he concludes there,
his private right,
the source of a right to
property.
The natural law,
as Locke seems to be saying,
dictates a right to private
property and it is to secure
that right that governments are
ultimately established.
In a striking formulation,
Locke tells us that the world
was created in order to be
cultivated and improved.
Those who work to improve and
develop nature,
who add to nature through the
labor of their body and the work
of their hands,
those who develop and improve
nature are the true benefactors
of humanity, of humankind.
"God gave the world to men in
common," he says,
section 34, "God gave the world
to men in common,
but since He gave it to them
for their benefit and the
greatest conveniences of life
that they were capable to draw
from it," he writes;
the world was given for our
convenience, he says,
to be drawn from,
"it cannot be supposed He meant
it should always remain common
and uncultivated."
And then he adds,
"He gave it to the use of the
industrious and the rational and
not to the fancy or covetousness
of the quarrelsome and
contentious."
God gave the world for our
improvement of it and therefore,
He gave it to the industrious
and the rational.
Locke seems to suggest in that
very phrase that the state will
be a commercial state,
that the Lockean republic or
the Lockean state will be a
commercial republic.
Think of that.
Ancient political theory,
Plato, Aristotle,
regarded commerce,
regarded property,
as in many ways subordinate to
the life of a citizen.
Plato would have instituted a
kind of communism of property
among the guardians of his
Kalipolis.
Aristotle thought of the
necessity of private property,
but simply as a means to allow
a few of those citizens,
to engage in political life.
Economy, you might say,
was always subordinate to the
polity.
Locke turns this ancient and
medieval doctrine,
as well, on its head in many
ways.
The world belongs to the
industrious and the rational,
those who, through their own
efforts,
through their labor and work,
increase and enhance the plenty
of all.
It is only a relatively short
step from John Locke to Adam
Smith, in that respect,
the great author of The
Wealth of Nations,
again, just under a century
after Locke's Second
Treatise. For Locke--and let
me just go on a little more
about this--there are no natural
limits to property acquisition.
And this is,
in a way, the essential point.
The introduction of money or
coinage into the state of
nature, an issue I'm not going
to talk much about here,
but that becomes an important
moment in his chapter 5 in his
account of the state of nature,
the introduction of money makes
unlimited capital accumulation
not only possible,
but even a kind of moral duty.
It becomes our duty to enhance
and work upon the raw materials
of the natural world around us.
By enriching ourselves,
we unintentionally work for the
benefit of others.
Consider the following
remarkable sentence:
"A king of a large and fruitful
territory in America,"
he says, "feeds,
lodges, and is clad worse than
a day labourer in England."
Because, of course,
our work, Locke thinks,
has enhanced the plenty of all
in some way.
The creation of a general
plenty, the common wealth--and
think of the way in which the
revealing use of that term
"common wealth,"
the wealth of all--is due,
in many ways,
to the emancipation of labor
from the previous kinds of moral
and political restrictions
imposed upon it by the ancient
philosophical,
as well as religious,
traditions.
Labor becomes,
for Locke, his source of all
value and our title to common
ownership and in a remarkable
rhetorical series of shifts,
he makes not nature,
but rather human labor and
acquisition the source of
property and of unlimited
material possessions.
He begins this chapter,
chapter 5, with the assertion,
think about it,
that "God hath given the world
to men in common,"
once again suggesting that the
original state is one of common
ownership.
He then suggests that every
person is the owner of their own
bodies and that one acquires a
title to things through labor
that we have mixed with that
common world.
But what starts as a very,
very modest title to the
objects that we have worked on,
his example is something as
simple as picking apples from a
tree, the act of picking gives
us a title to the apple,
that very simple or rudimentary
form of property soon turns into
a full scale explanation of the
rise of property and a kind of
market economy in the state of
nature.
"Labor accounts," he tells us,
"for ten times the amount of
value that is provided by nature
alone," he says at section 37.
Our labor enhances the value of
nature ten times.
But he then goes on to add very
quickly, "I have here rated the
improved land very low in making
its product but as one to ten
when it is much nearer a hundred
to one."
Our labor advances things a
hundred-fold.
Shortly later,
in section 43,
he says that the value of
anything is improved a
thousand-fold due to labor.
Again, what began as a fairly
rudimentary discussion of the
origins of private property at
the beginning of chapter 5,
limited by the extent of our
use and spoilage,
has, by the end of that same
chapter,
you might say,
morphed into an account of
large scale ownership with
considerable inequalities of
wealth and possession.
By the end of chapter 5,
there appears to be almost a
direct link between Locke's
dynamic theory of property in
chapter 5 and James Madison's
famous statement in
Federalist No.
10.
As Madison says,
"the protection of different
and unequal faculties of
acquiring property is the first
object of Government."
Seems a very Lockean
proposition in The
Federalist.
Locke gives,
in other words,
to commerce,
to money-making,
to acquisitiveness,
a kind of pride of place and a
sort of moral status,
you might even call it,
that it never enjoyed in the
ancient and medieval worlds.
The new politics of the Lockean
state will no longer be
concerned with glory,
honor, thumos,
virtue, but Lockean politics
will be sober,
will be pedestrian,
it will be hedonistic,
without sublimity or joy.
Locke is the author of the
doctrine that commerce softens
manners, that it makes us less
warlike,
that it makes us civilized,
something that reaches its,
you might say,
highest expression in the
twentieth chapter or the
twentieth book of Montesquieu's
Spirit of the Laws.
Commerce does not require us,
for Locke, to spill blood or
risk life.
It is solid,
reliable, thoroughly middle
class in some ways.
Locke is, again,
the great author of the idea
that the task of government is
to protect not just the rights
of property,
but the right to acquire and
build upon the property that we
already own.
So I want to end on this note
and begin on Wednesday talking a
little bit about what we might
call John Locke and the spirit
of capitalism.
