Abstract

The need for the critical edition of texts was not ended by the advent of printing. If anyone were naif enough to think so he could hardly be better instructed than by having his attention drawn to the cautionary tale of Locke’s Treatises Admittedly there were special circumstances affecting the printed text, notably Locke’s ‘determined anonymity’, understandable in the conditions of the time and given the drift of the work, but taken by Locke to the extremes of dealing with his printer through an intermediary and of using a code-name for the work in his own private lists. Yet when allowance is made for these circumstances the fact remains that the text of Locke’s Treatises currently used is a gravely defective one. It is not that the variants are individually important or substantially affect the sense in more than a tiny minority of cases; it is rather that there are so very many of them that, cumulatively, they undermine confidence. As Mr Laslett points out there is a strong case for applying the canons of criticism, traditionally applied to the classics of the Ancient World and of modern literature, to documents of modern political theory. The resulting changes may not be great; and most are of the order of the abandonment of the solecisms Two Treatises of Civil Government and Second Treatise of Civil Government where Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government and Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government But scholarship owes it to Locke to use all its resources to ascertain his text.