Liberty, Governance and Resistance: Competing Discourses in John Locke’s Political Philosophy, John William Tate, Routledge, £135.

Between 1960 (Peter Laslett’s edition of Locke’s Two Treatises) and 1994 (John Marshall’s John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility) a series of distinguished scholars debated Locke’s arguments for religious toleration and political revolution. The literature on Locke continues to grow, but it has turned to new topics, such as slavery and colonialism. It’s a peculiar feature of John Tate’s book that it involves a sort of time travel, for it picks up debates that have never been resolved, but have been sidelined. I stopped working on Locke in 1993, but all the significant literature debated here was familiar to me – and, one might add, some relevant more recent literature is ignored, such as Philip Milton’s John Locke and the Rye House Plot (2000).

Why did the Locke scholarship of 1960 to 1994 become an intellectual byway? Where did the heavy traffic go? First, there was the rise of a preoccupation with republicanism, beginning with JGA Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment (1975), continued in the work of Quentin Skinner and numerous others. In part, this derived from an assessment that the republican tradition was more important than the natural law tradition for the American Founders; at the same time, though, it was a response to works such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) – liberalism and utilitarianism had had little to say about virtue, but republicanism aimed to restore it to its proper place in political discourse.

World events also bore a considerable responsibility. The debate about Locke was a debate about legitimate responses to tyranny; the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) seemed to signal the ‘end of history’, according to Francis Fukuyama, meaning the end of revolutionary conflict. Earlier debates could be characterised as being between Marxists and non-Marxists, but after 1989 Marxism seemed a lost cause. In a world in which constitutional democracy would soon become the norm, the issues Locke and Locke scholars had debated might come to seem less relevant – it’s hard to know, as that world never came into existence, but the misreading of events which led people to assume that liberal principles would quickly become uncontested, and so uninteresting, certainly encouraged a turn to postcolonialism, identity politics, and a postmodern rejection of Enlightenment rationalism.

That turn has made liberalism seem increasingly awkward and unresponsive as an intellectual position. What does Locke have to say in the age of Farage, Meloni, Le Pen and Trump? What, for that matter, has the republicanism of the likes of Skinner got to say that addresses our present problems? We seem to have entered a new age in which books that only recently seemed of pressing importance, have come to be (let’s say since 2016) irrelevant. In 1975 Pocock offered a new account of the American founding; now we seem to be watching the republic’s unfounding.

John Tate has written an important book – important, that is, if Locke still matters. He has a claim (a strong claim, though not an entirely convincing one) to have correctly understood Locke; even more important, he seeks to explore the aporias, the instabilities, the competing or conflicting discourses that characterise Locke’s thinking. All too often such intellectual discrepancies are glossed over, brushed aside, or presented as momentary lapses; Tate’s claim is that both Locke’s intellectual development and his individual texts cannot be understood unless one recognises their significance. This is a new sort of history of political theory.

He presents Locke as having three major lines of argument: a set of arguments in support of political stability; a set in support of liberty, in particular, religious liberty; and, by the time he writes the Two Treatises, an individualist argument in support of a right of resistance, rebellion and revolution. On Tate’s reading, a Protestant doctrine of the unquestionable authority of an individual’s conscience was in profound tension with Locke’s arguments for political stability; as was his argument for a right of revolution.

This simple schema works surprisingly well. It tends to miss, though, some of the originality of Locke’s thought. Thus, Tate thinks that Locke’s claim that political power exists only to serve the public good was uncontentious for contemporaries, but this is false. Most contemporaries assumed that the secular flourishing of a society was inseparable from its religious orthodoxy; that God would reward a society which held to the true religion and punish one which did not; and that the public good therefore lay in the pursuit of true piety. Locke’s secularisation of politics would have seemed deeply contentious to most contemporaries. So, too, Tate thinks it obvious that Protestantism placed central importance on the individual conscience. But Luther’s watchword was not conscience above all else but scripture alone (sola scriptura); and in defending the rights of the erring conscience, Locke (like his contemporary Pierre Bayle) was redefining the moral claims of conscientious disagreement. It is a surprising defect of the book that there is no extended discussion of the Letter Concerning Toleration, and, indeed, no mention of Bayle.

The most important claim in the book is that Locke fundamentally contradicts himself on the nature of the right of resistance in the Second Treatise. By and large, he argues that anybody who has been subjected to tyrannical treatment has a right to resist, although, in practice, sensible people won’t resist unless there is a good prospect of success. But on at least one occasion (in the Second Treatise) he seems to say that resistance is only legitimate if it has the support of the majority, thus denying the rights of oppressed minorities.

Tate’s reading is a very interesting one, although not I think conclusive. My first objection would be that Tate thinks it is easy to distinguish between normative and pragmatic arguments. As a consequence, he treats prudential arguments as merely pragmatic. But prudence is a virtue. If, when making mayonnaise from scratch, I add the oil to quickly and the egg and oil separate I have failed a practical test. But let us suppose I am a Quaker in the England of Charles II. The government treats me tyrannically. I have a right of resistance, but I belong to an oppressed minority. If, like Guy Fawkes, I try to destroy the existing political order by blowing up Parliament, it is most unlikely that I will succeed, but certain that a number of people (perhaps only my fellow conspirators) will die in agony. To say that it was for the best, that it was ‘just’, that I should fail, as Fawkes failed, before I had killed anyone is not to say the Quakers were not victims of tyranny; it’s not to say that rebels should only plan to blow up Parliament if they are confident of success; it is to say that a Fawkesian Quaker would have failed to understand that even if he had been successful, by far the most likely result would have been the persecution and destruction of his fellow Quakers, and the death of many Anglicans as well. In such circumstances one might have a right to rebel, while at the same time it would be immoral to rebel. Here we don’t have a simple clash between normative and pragmatic arguments; we have a clash between competing norms: the right to justice on the one hand, and the obligation not to cause avoidable suffering on the other.

This, I think, is the point Locke makes when he writes, again in the Second Treatise: ‘He that appeals to Heaven must be sure he has right on his side, and a right, too, that is worth the trouble and cost of the appeal, as he will answer at a tribunal that cannot be deceived, and will be sure to retribute to every one according to the mischiefs he hath created to his fellow-subjects – that is, any part of mankind.’ A notional Quaker rebel in 1666 would have had right on his side; but he would be guilty of causing greater suffering than could be justified. The situation in 1683 was arguably different; and it was certainly different in 1688: then, resistance, with widespread support, could reasonably expect to make significant gains at limited cost.

What Locke is proposing is a simple utilitarian calculus, where rebels must weigh the possible gains against the predictable mischiefs. Such a calculation is not merely expedient; it is also morally obligatory. Fiat iustita et ruat coelum is a fine slogan, but it is not Locke’s.

On the interpretation of this key passage, Tate and I disagree. Locke, on my reading, holds both that individuals have a right to resist tyranny, and that it is morally wrong to take actions which will increase the sum of human suffering. This is not an inconsistency, but it certainly creates a tension in his thought between a radical rights theory and a conservative duties theory. Whether he is right or wrong, this book is an important contribution to what is unfortunately a moribund discussion. All those interested in the founding principles of liberalism should read it; and perhaps, as a result, the subject will yet come back to life.