Placing the Two Treatises

Abstract

Since the Laslett ‘revolution’ in Locke scholarship John Pocock and others have cleared away the myth of the dominant place of the Treatises in early modern political thought. The myth consists in eight false but widely held assumptions: that the Treatises are (1) the mainstream Whig apology for the revolution of 1688; (2) the synthesis of Whig political thought in the early 1680s; (3) the paradigm of radical Whig and eighteenth-century ‘commonwealth’ demands and idioms; (4) the dominant form of political thought in eighteenth-century Britain; (5) the ideology of early capitalism; (6) the basic text of liberalism; (7) the exclusive ideology of the American revolution; and finally, (8) the inescapable political thought of the United States. Pocock discovered a complex, non-Lockean republic of letters that had been neglected as a result of the ‘assumption that everything in intellectual life after the year 1688 could be explained by his [Locke's] presence in the context’. The ancient constitution and Harringtonian republicanism; a multidimensional ‘dialectic’ between virtue and the corruptions of commercial society and parliamentary patronage; liberal languages of manners, polish, politeness, civility, sympathy and sociality; and a ‘republican synthesis’ in America – all these came into view as the Locke myth receded. While the roles of Locke's other publications appeared ‘authoritative’ and ‘incalculable’, the Treatises seemed at first sight to be different from these languages and relatively marginal to them. Unconventional in the 1680s, they came into play in the eighteenth century when a theory of popular resistance was needed – with Molyneux in Ireland, the English radicals after 1770 and the American revolutionaries – and among the Scottish jurists.

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