Bertrand Russell on Locke as the Philosopher of the Global Social Contract

I have started a project with John Thrasher (Chapman) on the role of Locke in contemporary political philosophy. This blog post is the product of our conversation.

As Duncan Bell (here) and Timothy Stanton (here) have shown, Locke's role as one of the key founders of liberalism was invented at the start of the twentieth century. In addition, Locke was invented as the ‘father’ of liberalism by folk who themselves had little affection for or self-identification with liberalism (Laski, Strauss, Sabine, etc.) in the context of the threat of totalitarianism and fascism. Especially striking is their evidence that 19th century liberals – when liberalism was in many ways both an important party-program in the UK and an important set of principles (in France, US, Netherlands, Latin America, etc.) – did not treat, on the whole, Locke as one of their own. In so far as liberalism is a continuous political tradition and set of doctrinal (albeit evolving/developing) commitments and principles, Locke was not retrojected into it as its father until about a century ago. Since, Locke's status as the father of liberalism has proliferated.

However, in political philosophy the impact of the work by these intellectual historians has had negligible impact. Leaving aside disciplinary intellectual self-isolation, perhaps this is so because Bell's argument is offered in a nominalist spirit in which it seems there is no such thing as liberalism left at all. Stanton offers his narrative in the service of a Locke committed to the fundamental idea of a freedom to love, which is orthogonal to much that passes for political philosophy today; the contemporary heir of that program is bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions.

As I noted yesterday, in his hugely influential and opinionated and therefore entertaining (1946) A History of Western Philosophy (hereafter: History), Russell claims (and now I quote), “The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke.” This is not a side comment. Russell had already anticipated the significance of Locke’s liberalism in his introduction to the History, where he writes:

Against the more insane forms of subjectivism in modern times there have been various reactions. First, a half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual. This begins, in its modern form, with Locke, who is as much opposed to "enthusiasm"--the individualism of the Anabaptists--as to absolute authority and blind subservience to tradition.

This assigned role to Locke is interesting for four reasons: first, Russell may well be the first self-described (widely read) liberal, who accepts the critics’ re-interpretation of the liberal tradition in which Locke figures as the key founding figure. In fact, Russell goes on to divide the evolution of the tradition in terms of an “early liberalism” (of the eighteenth century) and a “new liberalism” of the nineteenth.

Second, Russell closes his “introduction” with the claim that the “essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community.” This re-emphasizes how important Russell takes liberalism to be to his understanding of modern civilization (and this connects up to the larger theme of philosophy’s role in civilization). And later he connects this idea to Locke’s personality, “A characteristic of Locke, which descended from him to the whole Liberal movement, is lack of dogmatism.” (Russell recognizes a few exceptions to this claim.

Third, Russell’s use of ‘comprehensive’ is important feature to his larger argument because throughout his argument he is regularly alert in all kinds of places to anticipations of liberal ideas earlier than Locke. (And also alert to ‘illiberal’ practices and ideas.) One of my favorites is this passage that “The tone of the Discourses, which are nominally a commentary on Livy, is very different. There are whole chapters which seem almost as if they had been written by Montesquieu; most of the book could have been read with approval by an eighteenth-century liberal.” That is, according to Russell, Locke did not invent the elements of liberalism; it has diverse roots (including in theology). The reader of the History. has already been prepared for this explicitly by the (earlier) chapter XII on “philosophical liberalism.” (Of course, sometimes Russell uses ‘liberal’ in a different sense of ‘generous.’) The denial of Locke’s originality is thoroughgoing. I quote a representative passage:

In Locke's theory of government, I repeat, there is little that is original. In this Locke resembles most of the men who have won fame for their ideas. As a rule, the man who first thinks of a new idea is so much ahead of his time that every one thinks him silly, so that he remains obscure and is soon forgotten. Then, gradually, the world becomes ready for the idea, and the man who proclaims it at the fortunate moment gets all the credit. So it was, for example, with Darwin; poor Lord Monboddo was a laughing-stock.

This echoes the tenor of Schumpeter on Adam Smith.

Fourth, Locke’s liberalism offers a model for the reconstruction of a new post WWII global order. Now this is a topic that Russell had confronted already during WWI in Political Ideals, and had rethought in (1936) Which Way to Peace? (But without use of Locke.) I quote:

A new international Social Contract is necessary before we can enjoy the promised benefits of government. When once an international government has been created, much of Locke's political philosophy will again become applicable, though not the part of it that deals with private property.

So, the part of Russell’s History devoted to Locke is meant to be instructive to the development of a new international system in which government can supply its proper fruits. To be sure, Russell has many things to say about Locke that resonate with subsequent uses of Locke by later liberals. But this strikes me as a rather distinctive claim of why Locke matters.

To be continued.