John Locke and Anglican Royalism

Abstract

Whom did Locke attack? We know that the Two Treatises replied to Filmer, not Hobbes, and was written during the Exclusion crisis, not after the Revolution. Yet there is more to the historical context. Locke assaulted a whole generation of Anglican ideologists, who endorsed Bodinian doctrines of sovereignty and embarrassed the Whigs with the claim that their politics derived from both revolutionary Calvinism and ‘popish’ scholasticism. The clericalist hegemony in Restoration polemics, and the persecution, by statute, of Nonconformity, are constant themes for Locke and the Whigs. One result was an ambiguity about the Crown: they did not always align against Crown-and-Church, but sometimes with the Crown against the Church. The defence of Dissent, and the attack on the priestcraft of a hierocratic episcopate, render Locke's politics as much a work of radical Protestant ecclesiology as of secular revolutionism.

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