An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts brings together Professor Tully's most important and innovative statements on Locke in a systematic treatment of the latter's thought that is at once contextual and critical. Each essay has been rewritten and expanded for this volume, and each seeks to understand a theme of Locke's political philosophy by interpreting it in light of the complex contexts of early modern European political thought and practice. These historical studies are then used in a variety (...) of ways to gain critical perspectives on the assumptions underlying current debates in political philosophy and the history of political thought. The themes treated include government, toleration, discipline, property, aboriginal rights, individualism, power, labor, self-ownership, community, progress, liberty, participation, and revolution. (shrink)

This collection of essays looks at the distinctively English intellectual, social and political phenomenon of Latitudinarianism, which emerged during the Civil War and Interregnum and came into its own after the Restoration, becoming a virtual orthodoxy after 1688. Dividing into two parts, it first examines the importance of the Cambridge Platonists, who sought to embrace the newest philosophical and scientific movements within Church of England orthodoxy, and then moves into the later seventeenth century, from the Restoration onwards, culminating in essays (...) on the philosopher John Locke. These new contributions establish a firmly interdisciplinary basis for the subject, while collectively gravitating towards the importance of discourse and language as the medium for cultural exchange. The variety of approaches serves to illuminate the cultural indeterminacy of the period, in which inherited models and vocabularies were forced to undergo revisions, coinciding with the formation of many cultural institutions still governing English society. (shrink)

"This is one of the most significant contributions to Locke studies in the twentieth century.

This volume guides the reader through a detailed examination of the text to an understanding of Locke’s political ideas in relation to his writings on philosophy, education, religion and economics and the influence these ideas had upon eighteenth-century political theorists. The author shows how Locke carefully constructed his political perspective as a defence of the principles of natural rights, constitutional government and popular resistance. He offers an original interpretation of the Two Treatises…, emphasizing the specific ways in which Locke’s political (...) purposes in writing the work influence his discussion of such concepts as the state of nature, property, consent and tyranny. The author discusses the historical and biographical context of the work and demonstrates how eighteenth century political thinkers developed or rejected aspects of Locke’s political theory and summarizes important recent studies of Locke’s work. (shrink)

From the seventeenth to the mid?nineteenth centuries, the language of natural law and natural rights structured the commitment of liberalism to the development of both a market society and democratic political institutions. The existence of widespread poverty was seen, at various times, as a problem to be resolved either by an expanding commercial/capitalistic society or through democratic political reform. As Thomas Home shows in Property Rights and Poverty, liberalism as apolitical theory has, from its origins, been deeply committed to (at (...) least a minimalist) social welfare policy. Nevertheless, not only have the dimensions of the problem of poverty increased with the growth of democratic capitalist society, but also, viewed from an historical perspective, it is the problem of poverty that exposes the fundamental tensions at the heart of liberal political theory. (shrink)

'It would ... be a pity if the sketch of religious controversy in the 1670s contained in Richard Ashcraft's bold and exhilarating attempt to reconstruct the argument and intellectual framework of Locke's political thinking and activity should be thought to represent the entire debate accurately.' (Spurr 1988, 567 n. 17).

As the title intimates, my aims in this essay are twofold: first, I wish to defend the claim that there are radical dimensions to John Locke's thought, and by extension, that there are radical dimensions to the tradition of discourse which seeks to provide an intellectual defence for the social practices and institutional structures characteristic of a market society and a democratic political system insofar as such an intellectual defence is dependent upon or makes use of certain Lockean statements and (...) arguments. As this objective maps out a rather large and exceedingly difficult terrain for discussion, prudence dictates that I provide the reader with a brief clarification of the direction and limitations of this part of my argument before indicating the second and, in my view, more difficult problem to be addressed. (shrink)

Contrary to Thomas Horne's propensity to consider arguments concerning property rights and poverty as exclusive and self?contained topics within the political discourse of liberalism, they should be seen as part of the defense of democratic and market institutions that is central to the historical development of liberalism. The problems arising from the relationship of property rights to poverty, therefore, need to be included in any assessment of the success or failure of the institutions of a democratic market society to realize (...) their objectives. (shrink)

This work is the second in the Routledge Series of Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers . Each volume of the series presents a comprehensive selection of the critical literature commenting on the life and works of a major political philosopher. John Locke (1632-1704) is a key figure because his political philosophy was one of the foundations for both the American Constitution and the French Revolution. He defined government as based on a free contract between people which can be subsequently (...) modified, and he stressed the importance of religious toleration. Locke also wrote extensively on other aspects of philosophy, on education, and on religion. The present volumes provide students of politics and philosophy with immediate access to Locke's contribution and show how his work has been received and modified by others. (shrink)

Pocock, J. G. A. The myth of John Locke and the obsession with liberalism.--Ashcraft, R. The two treatises and the exclusion crisis: the problem of Lockean political theory as bourgeois ideology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 133 argument that the third dream contains an anticipation of the "Cogito, ergo sum," in that Descartes, towards the end of the dream, recognizes that he is dreaming. This monograph is rounded out with Sebba's reflections on some of the problems involved in writing the history of philosophy, including the need for the historian to be philosophic in a way which exceeds the need for a historian (...) of science to be an active scientist. Here Sebba expressed his debt to his friend and mentor, the intellectual historian Eric Voegelin. As an indication of his plans (sadly, never to be realized), Watson has also included some notes Sebba put together, in which he reacted especially to Richard Popkin's work on the history of scepticism. The Descartes student is grateful not only to Sebba for these studies, but also to Professors Watson and Popkin for the care they have taken to bring this work before the public via the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series. In the light of their generosity, it seems churlish to wish they had added an index and a bibliography of works referred to. DESMOND J. FITZGERALD University of San Francisco Andrzej Rapaczynski. Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 3o2. $29.95. Ruth W. Grant.John Locke'sLiberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. viii + 22o. $~4.95. Both Grant and Rapaczynski claim that their books clarify the place of Locke's political theory with respect to liberalism as a set of beliefs and social practices transmitted from one generation to the next over time, although each author premises this claim upon a different interpretive approach to Locke's political thought. Professor Rapaczynski maintains that a historical dimension is indispensable to an understanding of political theory (a), but since he offers no historical evidence, uncovers no new facts or information, and generally fails even to make use of available evidence produced by other historians, this pronouncement appears to be little more than a defensive piece of rhetoric divorced from his actual interpretive practice. Historical accuracy is an important element of interpretation, he writes, "but I have not felt bound by the strictures that would constrain a more narrowly historical work" (5), and he is "quite prepared," he insists, for the objection that his reading of Locke is anachronistic (15). Well might he be prepared for such a criticism, for his interpretation of Locke's thought is not only anachronistic, but replete with errors and unsubstantiated assertions. Apparently, for Rapaczynski, historical accuracy is a necessary ingredient of a "narrowly historical" work of scholarship or a "narrowly contextualist reading" of Locke's Two TreatisesofGovernment, but in order to grasp "the proper historical meaning of liberal doctrine" (5, 15-16) and Locke's place in the tradition of liberalism, interpretive leaps into the evidential void are required. Rapaczynski is right to focus upon the recovery of meanings from a text, for that is what interpreters do. Yet, meanings are neither arbitrarily created by the author (or ~34 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY I990 the interpreter) nor are they wholly contained "in" the text; rather, meanings are conventional, embedded in social practices, and are significandy affected by those factors which increase or decrease the causal efficacy of beliefs in relation to the execution of actions with which those beliefs are assumed to be associated. If, therefore, Rapaczynski interprets Locke's ideas as expressing a secular viewpoint, an indifferent attitude towards nature, an understanding of natural law premised upon a mechanistic model of natural science, and as the embodiment of an unqualified defense of capitalism (117-~5), the question arises, from what source are such meanings to be drawn? They are certainly not reflections of Locke's intentions or authorial meaning, nor are they expressions of the conventional meanings accepted by Restoration thinkers. They cannot even draw upon the general authority of "the political tradition to which Locke's readers have belonged," as Rapaczynski assumes (5), for that tradition includes Paine and Adam Smith, Bentham and Hegel, Defoe and John Stuart Mill, individuals for whom Locke's arguments carried... (shrink)

v.1. The Renaissance -- v. 2. The age of reformation.

This essay, as the title suggests, is not just a reply to Richard Ashcraft -- although it is certainly that too. Its intention is to say something about the political theory of Locke, about his historical context and about the methodological question of contexts in general. About his political theory, I want to make two or three main points which, I think, have important consequences for our understanding of Locke: that he both appropriates and, on critical issues, deliberately (...) neutralizes the radical �discourses� of his time -- so that, for example, he adopts Leveller premises to arrive at something more like Cromwell's (or even more conservative) conclusions; and that he deprives these radical discourses of their most democratic implications less by excluding people from membership in the political nation than by restricting the rights of membership itself. This means, among other things, that the relevant debate is not the one that has so preoccupied Locke scholars -- namely, the controversy about who is a �freeman� or who belongs to the �people�. The decisive question is rather what political rights the �people� have. (shrink)

In Property Rights and Poverty, / argued that seventeenth? to mid?nineteenth?century liberal theories of the natural right to property included both the ability to exclude others from resources lawfully acquired and the ability to claim as property the resources necessary for life and livelihood. Virtually every defense of the right to exclude written during this period carried limits which allowed and even required the government to enforce the rights of those without resources to the property of others. But although Locke, (...) among others, was a theorist of welfare rights, it is a mistake to describe him as a radical, as Richard Ashcraft does, which identifies Locke's purposes too closely with the legitimately radical theorists of the early nineteenth century who were deeply influenced by his work. (shrink)

This classic, provocative introduction to classical metaphysical questions focuses on appreciating the problems, rather than attempting to proffer answers.