Abstract

This dissertation represents an attempt at explicating the conception of nature lying at the foundation of John Locke's theory of justice or political legitimacy. In contrast to the major interpretive alternatives according to which Locke is either a more-or-less muddled heir of a medieval Christian natural law tradition or an esoteric Hobbesian nihilist, it applies the thesis of a "non-Lockean Locke" to Locke's treatment of foundational issues. In this view, Locke attempts to correct the tendency of premodern thought to contribute to political immoderation, while avoiding in the decisive respect a surrender to the principle of willfulness that he seems to recognize as the animating principle of pure modernity; his assent to the principles of philosophical modernity is in significant respects more qualified, more genuinely ambiguous, and more prudential than his most powerful critics have maintained. While those critics rightly call attention to the difficulties involved in the arguments on which Locke tends to rely in establishing his principles, we find that the presence of a nonexoteric, philosophically serious premodern or classical strain in Locke can nonetheless supply the basis for a nonideological, nonprudential, rationalist assent to the Lockean principles of natural rights