Locke as Father of Liberalism; some notes on the historians Stanton and Bell on Sabine with a walk on role by Bertrand Russell

In an important (2018) paper, “John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism” (The Historical Journal) by John Stanton it is (correctly) suggested that Locke’s status as the father of liberalism is a twentieth century backward projection and a fable. As regular readers know, I think that’s right. (I am working on a paper with John Thrasher at Chapman to explain the significance of this.) On my reading of the trajectory of liberalism, liberalism gets invented in the late eighteenth century — by Robertson, Smith, Bentham, and Constant, who all use ‘liberal’ in a modern way as well as Humboldt and Kant, who do not — as a response to the mercantile imperialism of Locke and his followers. Rather than re-telling my story here, I engage with the details of Stanton’s argument, which also leaves something desired.

So, for Stanton the idea that Locke is the father of liberalism is invented by critics of liberalism: first, from the Marxist left (Laski) and then from a new kind of right (Strauss). In both cases, Locke is thought of as a kind of neo-Hobbesian. In today’s post I ignore what Stanton says about these two phases. My interest is in the next step. I quote Stanton:

In the third phase, the two versions of the story are combined through the assertion of an identity between their leading protagonists. In his highly influential history of political theory of 1937, George H. Sabine informed the first of many echelons of American students and scholars that

Locke's theory, in all its social and political implications, was as egoistic as that of Hobbes…the two men fastened on social theory the presumption that individual self-interest is clear and compelling, while a public or a social interest is thin and unsubstantial…Locke set up a body of innate, indefeasible, individual rights, which limit the competence of the community and stand as bars to prevent interference with the liberty and property of private persons.

Sabine suggested that the influence of Locke, ‘precisely because it was less aware of its principles, was…more insidious’ than that of Hobbes. The insinuation was that Locke was responsible in some way for vast swathes of modern liberal thought.

Reflection has continued in these terms down to the present day….Sabine's observations about the egoistic and radically individualist character of Lockean and liberal political theory have spread into generalized criticisms of liberalism by the disappointed and censorious. [Apologies for the formatting, but Substack is not very good at indenting inside quotes.]

Now, in the material quoted by Stanton from Sabine, Sabine does not call Locke a ‘liberal.’ In fact, Stanton himself calls this insinuated by Sabine. Stanton is quoting from the first (1937) edition of Sabine’s A history of political theory, pp. 528–9. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the first edition, but only the third (1961) edition. Luckily, the material quoted by Stanton can be found on the very same pages in the third edition. In the preface to the third edition, Sabine informs us that the pagination stayed the same until p. 740! Unfortunately, the third edition does reflect the impact of Laslett’s work on Locke (p. iii), so maybe that’s important for what follows.

While Stanton calls him influential, Sabine seems largely forgotten. (I just checked and Rawls does not cite him in Theory of Justice.) But he was rather important in the Cornell department (also in the period when they trained a lot of women philosophers). And because I am interested in pre-Rawlsian American political philosophy, I thought it would be interesting to look at Sabine’s argument on Locke. (Sabine is sadly uninterested in Islamic, Chinese, Indian, Jewish etc. political thought, except when they impact his main narrative on Europe and north America.)

Now, in the chapter (26), on Halifax and Locke, Sabine never calls Locke a ‘liberal’ or the father of liberalism. In fact, in so far as Sabine suggests that Locke anticipates liberalism, he says this on the same page : “Like later liberals he assumed that the two things -- preservation of the common good and protection of private rights -- come to the same thing.” (p. 529) It’s important to realize that Sabine is here reconciling and citing the material Second Treatise, Chapter 1, section 3 with the later material (say in section 131, which Sabine also cites). We can discern a kind of proto-invisible hand argument in Sabine’s Locke, where the common good is achieved in virtue of protecting property rights (including, perhaps, property in slaves).

It’s important to recognize that the emphasis on the common good in Locke is not idiosyncratic with Sabine. As we have seen (recall), Willmore Kendall’s book on Locke (1941) [1959] John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule also emphasized this. In fact, Kendall criticizes Sabine for the focus on property rights, while underplaying the pure majoritarian-democratic elements in Locke. Mid 20th century the debate on Locke was to what degree he privileged property rights or majoritarianism.

This emphasis on the common good in Locke is entirely absent in the material quoted by Stanton from Sabine. In fact, in so far a Stanton discusses any focus on the common good he attributes it to a rejected theory in modernity by St. Thomas (and it is rejected by Grotius and even Suarez)!

I don’t mean to deny that Sabine is interested in the origin of liberalism in A history of political theory. First, he treats the real founding of liberalism as a distinctly late eighteenth and early nineteenth century project. (I will return to that some time because it is not far from my own views.) And then he thinks that J.S. Mill and Spencer developed this subsequently into a confused version, which required the modernization of liberalism by T.H. Green and Hobhouse in England and Royce (and later Dewey) in the United States. In the preface of the third edition, he tells us that the reworked the chapter (32) on the modernization of liberalism extensively. (So before I write on that I want to compare editions.)

Of course, Sabine is also interested in the origins of liberalism, but while Locke is important to that story for Sabine he not central to his argument at all.* In fact, in so far as Sabine sees any seventeenth century group of thinkers as themselves proto-liberal in the nineteenth sense, he focuses on the Levellers and not Locke! But he treats them as a political failure:

“It failed in all its purposes but it represented with remarkable distinctness the modes of thought and argument which were to characterize revolutionary liberalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It drew the lines pretty definitely between the liberalism of the less privileged economic classes and the more conservative liberalism, or Whiggism, of the well-to-do. (p. 478)

In so far, thus, as Locke is a representative of any kind of liberalism at all, he is aligned with Whiggism that is to be overcome by what Sabine ends up calling ‘early liberalism’ (of Smith and Bentham (etc.)). In fact, Sabine explicitly treats Locke’s thought as the origin of modern conservatism as developed by Burke:

This phase of Locke's theory persisted in the Whig liberalism of the eighteenth century, which regarded government, while responsible for the common well-being, as a balance between the great interests of the realm, such as crown, nobility, church, and commonalty. With Edmund Burke this conception became a starting-point for the theory of modern conservatism. (p. 535)

In fact, again, it’s not Locke that looks ahead to twentieth century liberalism at all, but Milton on free speech is treated as anticipating the “intellectual liberalism” of J.S. Mill (p. 508—no mention of Harriette Taylor, or Wolstonecraft (etc.)).

If Locke is not the father of liberalism, who is in Sabine? This ur-origin Sabine locates in medieval political theory, especially “the conciliar theory of the fifteenth century” from which “there is a directly developing line of thought to the liberal and constitutional movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” especially in the idea that “lawful authority is a moral force.” (p 327) We see here the seeds of a narrative that becomes authoritative in twentieth century liberal fondness for the rule of law.

However, the first exemplar of this thought that is singled out is: Machiavelli:

Despite the cynicism of Machiavelli's political judgments, there is no mistaking his esteem for liberal and lawful government. It is this which explains the admiration for him felt by a constitutionalist like Harrington.

Closely related to his favorable judgment of popular government where possible, and of monarchy where necessary, is his exceedingly low opinion of aristocracy and the nobility. More than any other thinker of his time he perceived that the interests of the nobility are antagonistic both to those of the monarchy and of the middle class, and that orderly government required their suppression or extirpation. —Sabine, (p. 348; later Sabine identifies liberalism as a middle class theory (p. 432))

Harrington, who in our time is not thought of as a proto-liberal at all, matters to Sabine's argument because (echoing Machiavelli) he develops a number of constitutional mechanism that Sabine associates with liberalism (p. 507ff.). This is a feature of Spinoza’s and Hume’s thought as well, and clearly shapes Madison. And in my view this is quite perceptive about Sabine’s argument.

Now, it is true that, as Stanton implies, for Sabine Hobbes is an indirect source of nineteenth century liberalism. His views “were incorporated in the philosophical radicalism of the Utilitarians and in John Austin's theory of sovereignty. Hobbes's thought thus served the ends of middle-class liberalism, a cause with which the philosopher would have had little sympathy.” (p. 456) But what Sabine has in mind is the way Hobbes’ materialism and hedonism undermine “traditional loyalties” by “a presentation of enlightened egoism” (p. 477) And, of course, this materialism is rejected by Locke.

However, there is a further twist (well actually two) in today’s digression. What’s especially odd from the perspective of contemporary political theory about Stanton’s (2018) narrative is that on his view the social contract plays no role at all in advancing liberalism. Now you may think — because you have read Duncan Bell’s (2014) widely cited “What is Liberalism?” — that nineteenth century (and pre-Rawlsian 20th century) liberals thought of the social contract as “primitive” (p. 695) and “obsolete.” (P. 697) On Bell’s view, actual liberals of the nineteenth century seems to have thought of Locke as a Whig to be overcome. [Update: the previous sentence was corrected after feedback from Bell.]

Now, Bell is also interested in Sabine. And devotes part of a long paragraph to him. It’s worth quoting in full:

The change in meaning is captured in the evolution of George Sabine’s influential conspectus of Western political thought, which was the standard textbook in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. It was one of the first major scholarly texts to discuss liberalism in any detail. Published in 1937, the first edition located the tradition squarely in nineteenth-century Britain, figuring it as a distinct position between socialism and conservatism. (Locke was not classified as a liberal.) Moreover, like so many of his contemporaries, Sabine worried that it “was a diminishing force in modern society.” In the revised edition of 1951, however, his account of liberalism was both more capacious and more confident, and he asserted that it now had two main senses. The first, which he associated with Fascist and Marxist critics, saw it as the “social philosophy of the industrial middle class” and thus coterminous with laissez faire capitalism. Rejecting this critique, he endorsed a far broader account of liberalism as both the “culmination” of Western history and largely synonymous with democracy. Watkins, who had recently celebrated liberalism as the “secular form of Western civilization” and the “modern embodiment of all the characteristic traditions of Western politics.” Sabine concurred: “political liberalism has been deeply implicated in the whole development of Western culture.” (The ultimately unsuccessful attempt to retroject liberalism back into the ancient Greek world, thus making it coterminous with Western civilisation, was one of the signature ideological moves of the era.) An irony appears lost on Sabine. Whereas linking democracy and liberalism had, in the nineteenth century, served to delimit its chronological scope, it was now employed to buttress the claim that liberalism was the spiritual inheritance of the West itself. (Bell, 2014, pp. 701-702)

First, a minor clarification. Sabine’s concurrence with Watkins’ view occurs in a book-review (as Bell notes). It’s not something one can easily derive from the narrative of his History (although it’s not wholly absent).

Second, it’s important to realize that even in the revised edition Sabine does not identify Locke with democracy. As Sabine puts it explicitly, “The power of the people over government, however, is still not quite as complete in Locke as it came to be in later and more democratic theories.” (P. 534.) Locke as democrat is really Kendall’s position on Locke (who is ignored by Bell).

Third, and this is the first twist I foreshadowed above, Sabine does claim Locke’s social contract mattered greatly to the history of liberalism. I quote Sabine:

The theory of contract, taken in the large, need not be used as a means of limiting the power of government or of defending resistance, though of course it frequently was so used. Hobbes and Spinoza bent it, or perhaps distorted it, to a defense of absolute power. Althusius and Locke used it to defend the thesis that political power is necessarily limited, and the latter made it the defense of a successful revolution. Perhaps most writers, like Grotius and Pufendorf, followed a middle course: without justisfying resistance they stressed moral limitations on rulers. The real emphasis of the theory was that law and government fall within the general field of morals; they are not merely expressions of force but are properly subject to ethical criticism. On the whole, therefore, the theory had a general bias toward political liberalism.—p. 431

This may have been missed by Stanton and Bell because it occurs not in the chapter on Locke, but earlier in the chapter (21) on “The Modernized Theory of Natural Law,” which is mostly about Grotius. In the chapter on Locke the social contract is not trivial however. I quote the key summing up by Sabine in order to set up my second twist:

The two phases of Locke's theory are united -- very precariously, it must be admitted -- by the hypothesis that an act of the community is constituted by the agreement of a majority of its members. The consent by which each person agrees with others to form a body politic obligates him tosubmit to the majority; as Pufendorf had argued, the fiction of a social contract must be helped out with the further fiction of unanimous consent. And the agreement of a majority is identical with an act of the whole society. p. 533 (Sabine then quotes section 96 of Locke’s Second Treatise.)

This has become rather long, so let me close quickly with the second twist. Sabine here kind of hints that he finds Locke’s political theory bordering on the inconsistent. In other places he points out that his “theory” of the fiduciary power of the legislative “was logically arbitrary” (pp. 534-5, citing Rousseau’s authority). In fact, that Locke could influence 18th century revolutions, modern conservatism, democratic theory, and even some liberalism is on Sabine’s account the effect of Locke’s fundamental inconsistency (this is from a section titled, “The Complexity of Locke’s Theory”):

Locke's political philosophy can hardly be represented in a simple and straightforward exposition because of the logical difficulties which it reveals when it is subjected to analysis. (p. 537) … The defects of logical structure in Locke's political theory arose from the fact that he never made up his mind what exactly was fundamental and what was derivative. (p. 538)

This way of reading Locke turned out to be hugely influential because it was amplified by Bertrand Russell who (as we have seen here; and here) treats Locke as the father of the early liberalism of the 18th century in his (1946) History of Western Philosophy. (Stanton ignores the History, Bell doesn’t but doesn’t engage with Russell’s account of Locke, although notes that for Russell “at the present time Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.”) For Russell (recall) starts the History with the claim that Locke’ was a "half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual." So, Russell does treat Locke as foundational to liberalism. And then later writes, “Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency.”

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*I am ignoring Sabine’s interest in the origins of ‘liberal’ religion. As Helena Rosenblatt has argued in The Lost History of Liberalism this is is a non-trivial source/stream in the origin of liberalism as a political movement/ideology, but that’s for another time.