Tawney, Hobhouse, and Locke as father of liberalism.

R.H. Tawney’s (1920) The Acquisitive Society argues for the re-organization of property and employment along functional and professional lines. Tawney (1880 – 1962) is usually described as a ‘Christian Socialist.’ But what makes The Acquisitive Society worth reading is, alongside the author’s fine pen, its astute analysis of the norms of a whole variety of work and its careful articulation of different kinds of property relations (not to mention a general impatience with socialist and free market sloganeering).

Today’s digression is orthogonal to Tawney’s main argument. As regular readers know John Thrasher (Chapman) and I have a project in which we simultaneously wish to debunk Locke as ‘father of liberalism’ and explain the historical moving parts that entered into the construction of this origin story. We self-consciously do so by building on the work of intellectual historians like Duncan Bell (2014) “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory, 42(6), 682-715 and John Stanton (2018) “John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism” The Historical Journal, 61(3):597-622. Bell and Stanton differ in subtle ways, but both defend the idea that Locke’s enshrinement in this fatherly role is a twentieth century construct partially inaugurated by new left liberals (like Hobhouse, as Bell notes) and given wider currency by liberalism’s critics (like Laski and Strauss in the 1930s as both Bell and Stanton note).

Now, before I get to Tawney, it’s worth revisiting Hobhouse. (I will emphasize slightly different features than Bell did.) Hobhouse treats Locke as a critic of arbitrary government, and as an advocate for a rule governed state, that is with laws promulgated publicly by the legislative and applying equally to each. Here’s how Hobhouse puts it early in his (1911) Liberalism:

Arbitrary government in this form was one of the first objects of attack by the English Parliament in the seventeenth century, and this first liberty of the subject was vindicated by the Petition of Right, and again by the Habeas Corpus Act. It is significant of much that this first step in liberty should be in reality nothing more nor less than a demand for law. “Freedom of men under government,” says Locke, summing up one whole chapter of seventeenth-century controversy, “is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it.”—Chapter 1.

Here the opposite of arbitrary power is the legal right to have one’s detention be evaluated in front of an impartial judge. It’s no small matter as the case of Rümeysa Öztürk recently reminded us. Locke, then, is treated as an advocate for the liberty of the subject, or as Hobhouse puts it, ‘civic liberty.’

As regular readers know I am a big-tent liberal. And I treat the embrace of the liberty of the subject as common ground among liberals. But it would be a mistake to treat it as a sufficient condition of any liberalism. Many Anglo-Saxon conservatives of different stripes may well also adopt such liberty of the subject. (In fact, in fairness to conservatives, they may well claim that this distinguishes them from other kinds of right leaning political thought.)

Notice, for example, that Hobhouse is careful not to identify Locke first with property rights. When he returns to Locke, Hobhouse treats him as a theorist of “natural order” by which Hobhouse means that civil rights have to be fundamentally rooted in natural rights. And he treats Locke as sharing a similar theoretical strategy as Rousseau and Paine.

Whatever the differences of outlook that divide these theories, those who from Locke to Rousseau and Paine worked with this order of ideas agreed in conceiving political society as a restraint to which men voluntarily submitted themselves for specific purposes. Political institutions were the source of subjection and inequality. Before and behind them stood the assemblage of free and equal individuals. But the isolated individual was powerless. He had rights which were limited only by the corresponding rights of others, but he could not, unless chance gave him the upper hand, enforce them. Accordingly, he found it best to enter into an arrangement with others for the mutual respect of rights; and for this purpose he instituted a government to maintain his rights within the community and to guard the community from assault from without. It followed that the function of government was limited and definable. It was to maintain the natural rights of man as accurately as the conditions of society allowed, and to do naught beside. Any further action employing the compulsory power of the State was of the nature of an infringement of the understanding on which government rested. In entering into the compact, the individual gave up so much of his rights as was necessitated by the condition of submitting to a common rule—so much, and no more. He gave up his natural rights and received in return civil rights, something less complete, perhaps, but more effective as resting on the guarantee of the collective power. If you would discover, then, what the civil rights of man in society should be, you must inquire what are the natural rights of man, and how far they are unavoidably modified in accommodating the conflicting claims of men with one another. Any interference that goes beyond this necessary accommodation is oppression. Civil rights should agree as nearly as possible with natural rights, or, as Paine says, a civil right is a natural right exchanged.—Chapter 3 (“The Movement of Theory”)

That civil rights effectively rest on the guarantee of the collective power in common rule is not the fashionable reading of Locke now. But it goes back to Condorcet (recall) at the end of the eighteenth century and received its most articulate defense in Willmoore Kendall’s (1941) John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. (I put Condorcet and Kendall in same sentence to alert the reader that this reading of Locke is shared by folk otherwise ideologically apart.)

In context, Hobhouse also reads Locke as a kind of social contract theorist. But Hobhouse’s Locke roots the contract in “king and people;” and only Rousseau and Paine are presented as theorists of a contract of people among “each other.”

Of course, it is implied in Hobhouse’s narrative that civil rights include at least some defense of property because the social compact transformed “the assemblage of free and equal individuals” into unequal subjects (“subjection and inequality”) of “political institutions.” But on Hobhouse’s Locke’s status of a defender of property rights, while presupposed, is quite mitigated; these are historically/socially conditioned and will vary according to circumstances (“conditions of society.”) Hobhouse treats this approach as the fount of nineteenth century Manchester liberalism and Benthamite radicalism.*

Now, if we move to Tawney, we see him following and adjusting Hobhouse’s argumentative contours. To be sure, Tawney never uses ‘liberal’ in his whole argument. (Tawney does often uses ‘conservative’ because Cecil is one of his explicit targets.) But his narrative is familiar enough to the narrative of the rise of liberalism. Let me quote:

The result of such ideas in the world of practice was a society which was ruled by law, not by the caprice of Governments, but which recognized no moral limitation on the pursuit by individuals of their economic self-interest. In the world of thought, it was a political philosophy which made rights the foundation of the social order, and which considered the discharge of obligations, when it considered it at all, as emerging by an inevitable process from their free exercise. The first famous exponent of this philosophy was Locke, in whom the dominant conception is the indefeasibility of private rights, not the pre-ordained harmony between private rights and public welfare. In the great French writers who prepared the way for the Revolution, while believing that they were the servants of an enlightened absolutism, there is an almost equal emphasis upon the sanctity of rights and upon the infallibility of the alchemy by which the pursuit of private ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good. Though their writings reveal the influence of the conception of society as a self-adjusting mechanism, which afterwards became the most characteristic note of the English individualism, what the French Revolution burned into the mind of Europe was the former not the latter. In England the idea of right had been negative and defensive, a barrier to the encroachment of Governments. The French leapt to the attack from trenches which the English had been content to defend, and in France the idea became affirmative and militant, not a weapon of defense, but a principle of social organization. The attempt to refound society upon rights, and rights springing not from musty charters, but from the very nature of man himself, was at once the triumph and the limitation of the Revolution. It gave it the enthusiasm and infectious power of religion.—Tawney, Chapter 2.

Not unlike Hobhouse, Tawney treats the seventeenth century attack on arbitrary government as foundational to his narrative. But this is treated (not implausibly) as a historical presupposition to Locke. Locke, then, is introduced as the great advocate of the sanctity of private rights; ‘private’ because disassociated from public duty/obligations and considerations of the public good.

On this narrative, it’s the eighteenth-century physiocrats (the servants of absolutism) — Turgot and Condorcet are, in fact, mentioned a few paragraphs down — who defend the sanctity of private rights and (taught by Mandeville, we might add) claim that “the pursuit of private ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good.” In Tawney’s hands the physiocrats first propagate (but do not invent) “the conception of society as a self-adjusting mechanism.”

As an aside, this conception is rooted, according to Tawney in previous paragraphs, in the disappearance of social function, or providence, from eighteenth century social theory while maintaining the ordered-ness of the social machinery. (This is, thus, Spinozism.) For Tawney this conceptual structure is modelled on “the appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and the receipt of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the most numerous shares.”

For Tawney, Locke is the founder of eighteenth-century liberalism through Physiocracy. What they have in common is a defense of property. And this shapes the narrative in the next paragraph:

What happened in England might seem at first sight to have been precisely the reverse. English practical men, whose thoughts were pitched in a lower key, were a little shocked by the pomp and brilliance of that tremendous creed. They had scanty sympathy with the absolute affirmations of France. What captured their imagination was not the right to liberty, which made no appeal to their commercial instincts, but the expediency of liberty, which did; and when the Revolution had revealed the explosive power of the idea of natural right, they sought some less menacing formula. It had been offered them first by Adam Smith and his precursors, who showed how the mechanism of economic life converted "as with an invisible hand," the exercise of individual rights into the instrument of public good. Bentham, who despised metaphysical subtleties, and thought the Declaration of the Rights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic religion, completed the new orientation by supplying the final criterion of political institutions in the principle of Utility. Henceforward emphasis was transferred from the right of the individual to exercise his freedom as he pleased to the expediency of an undisturbed exercise of freedom to society.

According to Tawney, Benthamite utilitarianism generates “organized inequality.” If we step back, we can see that Hobhouse wouldn’t disagree with Tawney on this point; for Hobhouse organized inequality is distinctive of the whole arc of liberalism from Locke to Benthamite radicalism. But in Tawney’s polemical retelling Locke has been elevated into the more familiar advocate of (near) absolute and unassailable property rights of possessive individualism.

I don’t claim Tawney originates this idea—we do find it in nineteenth century writings.** This requires special attention to Lockean roots of American libertarian thought (Spooner, Hodkin, etc.) as delineated by Daniel Layman in his excellent (2020) Locke Among the Radicals: Liberty and Property in the Nineteenth Century. But it is also lurking in then mainstream English thought: Spencer, for example, assumes familiarity with Locke’s account when he deals with property in The Principles of Ethics. And Sidgwick reduces Locke’s ethical theory to a defense of property as a confused mixture of Hobbes and Grotius in The Outlines of The History of Ethics. But in neither Spencer nor Sidgwick is Locke playing the familiar role of father of liberalism. For this move we need to look at a surprising source: Thomas Huxley.

To be continued.

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*Later in the book Hobhouse tells the story slightly differently in which Smith is elevated in prominence.

**See, especially, Bruce Smith’s Liberty and Liberalism. But he seems to have been unknown outside of Australia. The