So it turns out that Tom West (who vindicated the Founders, among other things) reads postmodern conservative. He sent this note, which cries out for your comments:
Peter,
You keep repeating the same mistakes about Locke on your blog. You really need to read my article on “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature”:
If you don’t want to read the whole thing (I admit it’s a little long), take a look at section 8, “Is Nature Worthless?” (pp. 23-29). It is a response to the extreme “Straussian” view of Locke–a view that appears frequently on your blog.
I’ll respond quickly here to the most obvious error made by you and other scholars influenced by dogmatic Straussianism. You view Locke as essentially a rights-but-no-duties thinker. Thus moral autonomy and same-sex marriage follow in your view from Lockean principles.
But Locke, like the Declaration of Independence, emphatically repudiates moral autonomy. Specifically, Locke treats the family as required by the law of nature. And the law of nature is also the law of God.
Parents are, “by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate” their offspring (Tr. 2, §56), a mandate that Locke repeats and develops at length (Tr. 1, §88–100; Tr. 2, §58–74). For that reason, Locke rules out divorce until the children are grown up (Tr. 2, §78-79). Locke also writes, “The obligations of the law of nature cease not in society, but only in many cases are drawn closer, and have, by human laws, known penalties annexed to them to enforce their obedience” (Tr. 2, §135). Putting these two sentences together, the conclusion is that government should support marriage and make sure parents perform their natural law duties to their children.
In his Letter on Toleration, Locke writes, “Rectitude of morals, in which consists not the least part of religion and sincere piety, concerns civil life also, and in it lies the safety both of men’s souls and of the commonwealth. Moral actions belong, therefore, to the jurisdiction of both … the magistrate and conscience” (Klibansky ed., p. 123). Locke goes further: “no doctrines adverse and contrary to human society, or to the good morals that are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate” (p. 131). This, of course, was the view that prevailed in American law until around 1965, when sex outside of marriage and no-fault divorce began to be legalized and celebrated in pictures and print.
Locke does not spell out here what specific “good morals” are “necessary to the preservation of society.” The answer is given in the Second Treatise: government should enforce the law of nature. It should require people to refrain from harming each other’s life, liberty, and property. But it should also, Locke implies, encourage marriage, discourage or ban no-fault divorce when the children have not yet reached the age of majority, and discourage or forbid homosexuality, incest, and adultery.
Locke explains more forcefully than almost any other philosopher, ancient or modern, why “[a]dultery, incest, and sodomy” are viewed as “sins”: “I suppose,” he writes, that they “have their principal aggravation from this, that they cross the main intention of nature, which willeth the increase of mankind, and the continuation of the species in the highest perfection.” To that end, there is a need for “the distinction of families, with the security of the marriage bed” (Tr. 1, §59). Does your revered Aristotle say anything as strong as this on this topic?
In other words, these “sins” are wrong not principally because Scripture forbids them, but, as Locke implies, Scripture forbids them because the intact family (married mother and father with their children) is the best institution for producing, nourishing, and educating children. Locke implies that government not only has a right to discourage sex outside of marriage, but has a positive duty to do so, “the distinction of families, and the security of the marriage bed” being “necessary to the preservation of society.”
Locke understands better than any of our leading politicians or public intellectuals that when sex is seen as something merely “gay,” that is, as matter for gaiety, fun, frivolity, and entertainment, then it becomes detached from the serious business of child-producing and child-rearing–which are necessary for the preservation and “increase of mankind.” Nothing is more contrary to Locke’s teaching on the law of nature and politics than government approval of same-sex marriage.
But I do enjoy reading your blog.
Tom
It’s a challenging and fascinating view of Locke, one that I’ll talk about it as soon as I can study the linked article.
January 25th, 2013 | 1:09 pm
Here’s my review of the book in which Tom’s essay appears http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/debating-the-terms-of-the-american-founding/
His quarrel with Strauss (and Pangle) is fascinating.
January 25th, 2013 | 2:13 pm
Tom is right of course.
“You view Locke as essentially a rights-but-no-duties thinker. Thus moral autonomy and same-sex marriage follow in your view from Lockean principles.”
I suppose the difficulty would be in drawing out “principles” from Locke.
You can draw different principles from On Education and conclude that Locke was a stoic: i.e., bathe your children in cold and warm water to acclimate them.
Of course in the way Tom presents it, this fuller Locke is actually not all that far from the reality of our common law principles embeded in our legal system today. A legal standard involving the health and the welfare of children is THE Loadstar of familly law in almost every jurisdiction.
Tom’s Locke is closer to the Locke that has trickled down.
Of course in reality Locke was a brittish bureaucrat. His constitution of South Carolina was never adopted.
January 25th, 2013 | 3:53 pm
[...] So it turns out that Tom West (who vindicated the Founders, among other things) reads postmodern conservative. He sent this note, which cries out for your comments: Peter, You keep repeating Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 25th, 2013 | 4:52 pm
Thanks Ken…bought the book immediately.
January 25th, 2013 | 7:28 pm
Thanks for sharing West’s article (and note)!
January 26th, 2013 | 12:32 am
A few months ago, a contributor to the volume drew my attention to West’s essay particularly as a “must read,” which it indeed is (and in its entirety).
**Spoiler Alert**
I had hardly expected the riveting suspense of the essay’s first half, in which West surprisingly seems to concede a great deal to the “Straussian” interpretation of Locke as a critic of the idea of nature/nature as a standard. Basically, on this interpretation Locke suggests in various ways that nature points in multiple directions and therefore cannot serve as a guide to reason or for human life. Throughout the essay’s first half, West makes a strong case for the plausibility of this position; as late as section 7, he is found using the heading “Why Nature is too Ambiguous to be the Standard.” West begins to turn against the “Straussian” interpretation in section 8 (“Is Nature Worthless?”), though he continues to cite and respond to additional evidence for it throughout the remainder of the essay.
The basis for West’s “turn” seems to be as follows: In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (& sometimes in the Treatises), Locke appears to deny the existence of a natural order, just as the Straussians claim. However, Locke also crucially indicates that nature has implanted in man a desire for happiness. L often suggests that happiness is purely subjective, in which case it would not tell us anything about man as such. This, however, is not the whole story. We are also told (in the Two Treatises) that reason can discover a number of “specific things” that contribute to most men’s happiness–”life and property, generating and raising children, liberty, and friendship.” Working in tandem, then, the natural desire for happiness and reason reveal–or prompt us to discover– that there is, after all, a common human nature. As West states, “If happiness is Locke’s standard, then nature is vindicated.”
Just a few observations/comments:
1) There seems to be a substantial and odd disjuncture between where the bulk of West’s textual analysis points (in favor of the “Straussian” interpretation) and his conclusion: after all, “nature is vindicated.” In particular, one is left wondering why Locke would bother with all the radical anti-nature/anti-species, etc., stuff only ultimately to defend a rather (updated & modified, to be sure) Aristotelian conception of man. The brief treatment of this matter on (40) is not, in my view, adequate.
2) Why couldn’t Strauss’s distinction between philosophical and civil discourse explain the tension between the “philosophical” anti-essentialist Locke and the “civil” more-or-less essentialist Locke? Why do civil and philosophical discourse have to be consistent–an assumption many interpreters and followers of Strauss make as evidenced by their various attempts to reconcile the Treatises and the Essay?
3) I hope the latter half of comment 2 is sufficient to rescue me from the charge of “dogmatic Straussianism.”
4) Glad to hear that many Pomocon readers will soon enjoy this provocative & thoughtful piece.
January 26th, 2013 | 7:53 am
Peter, shouldn’t he be invited to blog here?
January 26th, 2013 | 10:29 am
One thing worth noting here is that whether or not Tom West is right (…but that quote on Locke’s condemnation of adultery, sodomy, and incest is a doozy, ain’t it? ….and you gotta love Tom’s dig at “our revered Aristotle”!), is that his family-values natural rights liberalism, or to put it another way, his Prudential devotion to the securing of natural rights, really does seem to have been the creed (sincere for most if merely public for a few) of the non-Anti-Federalist Founders.
If, as Philippe Beneton among others has said, the Founders were setting a Lockean-autonomist “time bomb” that wouldn’t fully explode until the 1960s, that’s because by relying on Locke’s doctrine, they were “building worse than they knew.” Far worse. This is Deneen’s view, too, and it of course assumes that Tom is wrong about Locke. Hence Deneen’s and Wilson Carey McWilliams’ nostalgic/Quixotic love of the “alternative American tradition” from the Winthropian Puritans to the most Aristotelian Anti-Federalists on up into Wendell Berry.
I will let Peter and Sara engage on the Locke question, but I just want to stress that studying Tom on the Founders is a great way to get a good sense of what really was their view, and why arguably incoherent as it was at the deepest level, arguably “bomb-setting” as it was, it worked for them. It really could work for us. Moreover, right understanding of the Civil War knows that (in purely human terms–see 2nd inagaural for more) it was that view that really defeated slavery. Again, it did not necessarily have to morph into either libertarian-spirited market-worship nor liberal autonomy doctrine, nor the utterly godless combination of them.
For me, West’s Founders and Lincoln are the exemplars of the primary (if not first in time) American understanding of Liberty: Liberty is the prudential protection of natural rights. Serious a) classical, b) Christian, and c) Montesquieuan/British/Publius-ian content is found in that prudence.
The other fundamental ideas of American Liberty are:
2) “Classical/Communitarian” see McWilliams
3) “Commercial Individualism” see the Lochner majority, and contemporary market libertarians
4) “Social Justice of the National Community” see the Progressives
5) “Autonomous Individualism” see the Griswold, Casey, and Lawrence majorities, and the Sexual Revolution generally.
I hope to turn this schema into a book someday. My impression is that with West, the danger is that conservatives become too convinced that Founderism necessarily will turn out to be his brand of family-values Founderism. But we must not underestimate the deep attraction, whether it is legitimately called Lockean or not, to that fifth understanding of Liberty, an attraction shared by many conservatives so-called. Right now in a period of apparent Progressive Ascendancy, we are too apt to forget that many American conservatives would be ready, especially if the proggie tide were decisively beat back, to identify Jefferson and the Founders with sexual autonomy and the Casey “mystery” passage. Indeed if you push them, you find that many assume that, whether or not Griswold’s interpretational living-constitution means were wrong, and even if Roe goes too far in elevating the liberty right to bedroom privacy over the right to life, there really oughtta be a constitutional right to such privacy. “Don’t Tread On My Bedroom Privacy” is a plausibly “Founderist” American slogan. Far more plausible than the FDR and Obama attempts to shroud their goals in Founderist rhetoric.
Somewhat off-topic, I know, and way too long, but along with touting my own ideas here, I want to remind us that regardless of the outcome of this debate over Locke, who for Peter (see his wonderful path-breaking book Modern and American Dignity) is more Christian than he knew or intended (which is why the Declaration’s compromise perfects him as much as he can be), while still quite dangerous and to be kept firmly in the “Locke box”, and who for Tom really knew he was Aristotelian and Christian on morals, contrary to Strauss and the Straussians, the battle against autonomist liberty and its potential alliance with libertarian commercialist individualism will still have to be fought.
Both Peter and Tom keep us from the Raging against the Lockean Machine, a la Deneen, but Peter, methinks, keeps us more alive to the tragic trade-offs (good-bye, polis liberty) that McWilliams at his best, and Tocqueville at all times, makes us aware of. Tom, I fear, makes American conservatives less nimble, less ready to restrain now, or openly pivot against later, the libertine and Three-cheers-for-capitalism understanding of Tea-Party-ism/Founderism.
January 26th, 2013 | 11:36 am
Tom is, of course, welcome to comment whenever he pleases. But I’d be thrilled if Sara signed up. She is a very indirect way pointed to the rhetorical character of Tom’s interpretation and causes us to wonder whether the distinction between levels of discourse doesn’t apply to his work too.
January 26th, 2013 | 1:00 pm
I took a course with Dr. West on Locke and the Enlightenment when I was a student at UD. I haven’t really thought about it much since then, but I’m starting to think West may be correct on Locke with regard to a very important subject for ethics, Happiness, although it’s a rather complicated point. My thinking may not be clear on this yet, but here goes.
Locke famously says in the “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” that there is no single Summum Bonum. To a Thomist or a person from a Virtue Ethics background this is an absolutely incorrect statement. However, it may not be wrong from an Aristotelian standpoint, depending on whether Locke saw the “highest good” as designating 1) a way of life exclusively devoted to a profession involving reason [such as a philosoper] or 2) a mental state of affairs where contemplation is maximized, and NOT 3) a way of life defined and characterized by reasoning but not necessarily devoted to any one profession involving reason.
I think Dr. West makes a good case that Locke in fact did hold to #3, though he rejects #1 and #2 (which had been proposed by others as a sumum bonum). It’s the difference between an INCLUSIVIST and EXCLUSIVIST END. In the current scholarship on Aristotle, there is a big debate over whether he in fact had an inclusivist view of happiness (the Eudemian Ethics certainly looks that way). At least one interpreter of Aquinas (Anthony Kenny) claims that he saw the imperfect happiness of this life an INCLUSIVIST END and the perfect happiness of the next an EXCLUSIVIST END.
John Rawls in “Theory of Justice” argued against Aquinas and Aristotle based on the fact that they adhered to a rigid exclusivist end which only gives moral importance to one aspect of human life, contemplation. The truth is, plausible arguments can be made that neither Aristotle, Aquinas, NOR Locke were exclusive end thinkers, but saw several different ways of living a happy life still characterized by virtue and reason.
January 26th, 2013 | 6:02 pm
Sara,
Thanks for the intelligent summary and criticism of my Locke article. I am not used to having such astute readers.
Point 1. You write, “one is left wondering why Locke would bother with all the radical anti-nature/ anti-species, etc., stuff only ultimately to defend a rather (updated & modified, to be sure) Aristotelian conception of man.”
I answer: In the article, I argue that the reason for “all the radical anti-nature” stuff is that Locke, like Shakespeare, thought that human beings need to take a more active role in life. They should stop resigning themselves passively to “providence,” i.e., to the condition of life that they happen to be born in. In politics, Locke taught men about natural rights, consent, and revolution. Be prickly and stick up for what is right! Push back (prudently) if government misbehaves! In “Of Property,” he taught people to think of wealth not as something inherited and belonging to the aristocratic class, but as something produced by intelligent labor taking advantage of legal protection of private property. The route to national greatness is also the route to improving the lot of the poor and enabling most of them to become what we call the middle class.
Shakespeare helped the Lockean enterprise by teaching people that potentially tragic circumstances can sometimes be fixed by well deployed prudence. Even cross-dressing women can do it! So get to work and stop being passive in the face of evil! Don’t follow the example of Hamlet and listen to ghosts, and then wreck your life (and others’) by agonizing indecisively over justice, revenge, the dirtiness of sex, and suicide.
The reason for “all the anti-species stuff” in Locke is different. This serves the cause of philosophy. For Locke, as for Socrates, the great enemy of philosophy/ science is the complacent belief that we already know the truth, that we already know the “real essences” of things. Locke, like Socrates, pretends to be modest: “it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.” But what he means is that the “master-builders” of the “commonwealth of learning” think they know things that they do not know. They with their supreme confidence, no less than the scholastics with their essences, are obstacles to genuine inquiry.
Locke does not deny the existence of discernable patterns in nature, such as typical human characteristics (hunger, love of dominion, sexual attraction, capacity for reason, etc.). He is denying that we can know fully the essence of anything. In Essay bk. 4, Locke argues for probable judgment as our best human approximation to genuine knowledge. He implies that that is the most that can be done in the study of politics and morals.
Do I defend an “Aristotelian conception of man”? I would rather avoid that label. Probably quite a few philosophers would agree with the position I attribute to Locke, even if they express themselves in ways that look superficially quite different.
2. In your second point, you ask, “Why couldn’t Strauss’s distinction between philosophical and civil discourse explain the tension between the ‘philosophical’ anti-essentialist Locke and the ‘civil’ more-or-less essentialist Locke? Why do civil and philosophical discourse have to be consistent?”
Ans. I don’t see the need to call the Essay “philosophic” and the Treatises “civil” discourse. There is philosophic and civil discourse in both works. E.g., there are plenty of unproven and unknowable theological assertions in both. My point is that both writings complement each other, and both works are complemented by the Toleration, the Education, and the Conduct of the Understanding.
Your point 3.
Ans. No dogmatic Straussianism in Sara!
January 27th, 2013 | 4:22 pm
One of those classes I wish I could take would be a Locke class from Sara. I echo Peter’s comment that her blogging here would be welcome.
We’ll see if she finds these answers satisfying.
And it goes without saying that we are honored to have a scholar as distinguished as Tom West chiming in here. I had a recent post http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2013/01/21/notable-new-books-i-read-in-2012-pt-2/in which I mentioned one of Alan Gibson’s chapters as a necessary moderation of West’s Vindicating the Founders, but that book remains really an essential one for most folks’ education. One needs West’s vindicating, with all its fervor, prior to Gibson’s qualifications of it. To the extent it is becoming dated, it is because it is one of those few scholarly books that really made a difference, that helped make the 90s-era PC calumnies and dismissals of the Founders less common in our time. I have a feeling Gordon Wood, for one, was healthily chastened by West’s just criticisms of his kowtowing too much to the 90s manner of speaking about the Founders.
One more complement: Peter’s initial Public Square post linked well below that prompted Tom’s response really is a classic Lawler essay. Don’t know why it’s rec’d no comments here, but eventually I will say something about its important interpretation of Tocqueville on the Puritans.
January 27th, 2013 | 8:03 pm
Really great thread. Tom West gets Locke right.
I am not sure why it is relevant, but Tom West gets Locke right. If you create a market (a legal structure for a game) in which getting Locke Right is paramount, then Tom West scores the most points.
Beware Sara Tom West, she is a siren. Sure she is an astute reader, but can a writter really afford to write for such? Isn’t Sara essentially a scholastic? In my opinion you can turn Locke into Aristotle. That is you can create a market in which excellence is familiarity with the work of such an author. (as it happens my theoretical market isn’t much different from an american classroom in which Locke is taught, that is alienated to students, and the professor “authenticates” the knowledge of Locke and gives to each student a scarlet letter, A thru F.)
In such a market you finally get the praise your work deserves. But its functionality/relevance is constricted by the market which made Locke (or historically Aristotle relevant).
My reading (or memory, neither of which is great) is that both Locke and Hume encountered a theological world, or a world in which there was a market structure created in large part by the catholic church, the anglican church, monarchy et al, that sought to structure greatness/relevance loosely speaking around Aristotle. In a rather funny way I think you can find a micro-society that Aristotelianizes(creates market relevance) for Hume (status confered for aitheism and logical positivism.)
See the funny story about AJ Ayer facing off with Mike Tyson at a party, with Naomi Cambell. ”Do you know who . . . I am?” Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ”I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” ”And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,” Ayer answered politely. ”We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.”
You Mike Tyson are a champion in the market for bashing face, I AJ Ayer am a champion in the market for mastery of the analytic brittish tradition. As it happens capitalism rewards both, albeit as a historian I must ask is the hypothetical story about AJ Ayer(who is quasi-Lockeian-Humeian) all that different from a hypothetical I could envison concerning a “bad knight” who was trying to have his way with feminine virtue only to be restrained by a religious/philosophical “Aristotelian” who reminded him of his vows?
So there was in the time of Locke essentially a practical political economy+tradition bound scholastic encrustation, and Locke sought to go beyond the route memorization of aristotelian catagories to clear the way for the reception of enquiry for Newton(his stated purpose in his epistemology), and Hume went even further than this. “sophistry+illusion…commit it then to the flames.”
So in my view a good version of Locke risks becomming Aristotelian. Or at least you are back to trying to justify “History” as a major. Trading dollars and Labor for an “A” in Locke really is not the same thing as trading dollars for land and Labor for increasing the produce of a parcell of land. From a modern political economic picture then I would simplify by saying that Locke essentially laid out/outlined a way of thinking that showed how the world was in an “Aristotelian” bubble. Yet it is quite possible to get into a “Lockeian” bubble.
Furthermore this is not abstract per se, but actually happened. To see why I agree with you, read AJ Ayer A life by Ben Rogers.
If you institutionalize Locke you Aristotelianize him, and be it at Oxford or any place else he breaks thru, because in the end Locke spoke of the productivity of real property, and yet Aristotelianized Locke ends up being Copyright and Trademark falsefying patent. In this sense we can see both Locke and AJ Ayer as disgruntled customers seeking to purchase a more functional and mechanical account of the world.
There is always “Constitutional Law”, but call it Living Constitutionalism or call it Lockeianism, or call it small c-constitutionalism, or call it Intellectual Property…I am not actually sure there is any robust debate at all in Constitutional Law, just this small c-constitutional law which we can call progressivism, i.e. Article I section 8 clause 8, and all you do by writing anything is “advance the progress of science and the useful arts”, rather dubiously on the copyright sphere.
So after a whole lot of study it still argueably looks like David Hume was right, that all disputes are really small c-constitutional debates or arguments over property(including IP), and that confusion over IP and its relation to the question of scarcity and how much we can expand indifference curves, et al, it all comes down to property. And there is a nostic teaching in rock+paper+sissors. Ultimately Patent wins, and if you want to seperate the wheat from the shaft you need to buy the right type of combine head.
America producing philosophers is bad, because it is a master activity, and master activities always lead to alienation from the means of production. In order to have empire your philosophers must be hungry Lockeians like Aj Ayer, disciplined stoics ready to overthrow the Shebola of the masters.
Of course this is not actually as “true” of the United States as it is of Germany. Germany is more of a mercantilist state perpetually locked in to a property/patent based slave pragmatism that intends before our very eyes to accomplish the destruction of Aristotelian rhetoric via auterity and the subjegation of the Greek and Catholic people (essentially the PIIGS).
Of course it is much more slave and much more Lockeian to think of yourself practically as an individual, only when you hegelianize your Lockeanism do you see such a story in modern Germany. But the morality tale, and the limited capacity to actually alienate this so called Lockeanism, has me running from theory(of property) to go do pennance by pulling out an engine, changing some oil et al.
We must not become Greek:)
I
January 27th, 2013 | 8:57 pm
Perhaps I am missing something, but why does West think that Locke’s defense of the family is so noble – the passage he cites on incest, et. (Treat. 1 sec. 59) is merely a utilitarian defense of the family. Is Locke a utilitarian, and does he really teach that human beings have a duty to be utilitarians in their family life?
For utilitarian reasons Locke doesn’t let couples get divorced until their children are grown – Aristotle says husbands and wives can (and should) be friends.
Some might consider the latter a stronger endorsement of family life.
January 28th, 2013 | 12:36 pm
Great comment, Carl. Like Locke himself, the Founders realized that a prudential defense of natural rights almost certainly excluded certain things (e.g. in principle, slavery) and required others (e.g. limited government) but was by no means sufficient to answer all political questions, be they related to the constitutional structure or matters of public policy. Though a dominant element in the Founding brew, from the beginning Locke was baptized (or American Xianity was Lockeanized), (less often) opposed, and mixed with other considerations and “traditions.” The notion that there was a Lockean germ that had to develop in such and such a way both ignores this history and takes Strauss’s “three waves” thesis too seriously in the wrong way (as a philosophy of history).
Tom West, thanks for your response to my criticisms & for starting the debate.
Peter, part of me would really like to be an initiator rather than an occasional commenter on the blog, but unfortunately now is not the right time for all sorts of reasons that you can probably imagine. Hopefully the invitation will stand for a while!
January 28th, 2013 | 1:31 pm
Sara, I understand and the invitation will stand for as long as I do. I really, really agree with the last sentence of your first par.
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