Many commentators are unconvinced by Carl Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes's political theory which, to their minds, remakes Hobbes in Schmitt's own authoritarian image. The argument advanced in this essay comprises three claims about Hobbes and Schmitt and the ways in which they are construed. The first claim is that certain commentators are bewitched by a picture of authority which biases their own claims about Hobbes, perhaps in ways that they may not fully appreciate. The second claim relates to Hobbes's individualism. (...) On Schmitt's account, it was this individualism that opened the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the state through which it was worm-eaten by liberalism. This essay argues that Hobbes's individualism is not what Schmitt or his critics take it to be. The individualism that figures in Hobbes's discussions of covenant and conscience, pace Schmitt, is an illusion, albeit one that lies at the very heart of his conception of the state and animates his understanding of the relationship between protection and obedience that sustains it. The essay concludes with some remarks about the wider implications of the argument it advances. (shrink)

This essay argues that many modern discussions of Locke's political theory are unconsciously shaped by an imaginative picture of the world inherited from the past, on which authority and freedom are fundamentally antipathetic. The consequences of this picture may be seen in the distinction made customarily in Locke studies between the 'authoritarian' Locke of Two Tracts on Government, for whom authority descends from God, and the later, 'liberal,' Locke, for whom authority arises from the will and agreement of individuals, and (...) felt in the emphases placed on consent and resistance in most interpretations of Lockean political thought. The essay examines the composition and contours of this picture and, by holding up a mirror to contemporary Locke scholarship, draws attention to some of the ways in which it unwittingly distorts Locke's thinking. (shrink)

An introduction to the special issue on Hobbes and Locke: Meaning, Method, Modernity.

This chapter examines the influence of Locke in eighteenth-century British philosophy. It argues that a good deal of eighteenth-century British philosophy can be seen, without manifest distortion, as a single sequence of thought, one that developed in response to questions raised in and by Locke’s philosophy. The chapter traces that sequence across several areas of thought, paying particular attention to debates about the nature of ideas, thinking matter, personal identity, the soul, morality, the relations of church and state, toleration, and (...) the place of Christianity in the polity. It distinguishes some of the roles played by Locke in eighteenth-century philosophy and emphasizes the range of contrasting uses to which he was put by his successors, from Berkeley, Hume, Smith, and Reid, to Toland, Tindal, and Priestley. In doing so it shows the continuing importance of Locke to any adequate understanding British philosophy in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This book looks at the development of the idea of toleration into something like its modern shape in the early enlightenment period and its consequences on the ways in which states treat religion. Essays discuss a range of thinkers and challenge both their image and that of the early enlightenment as the seedbed of liberal modernity.

This essay disputes one of the central claims in Jeremy Waldron?s God, Locke, and Equality (2002), that being the claim that Locke?s arguments about species in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding undercut his assertions about the equality of the human species as a matter of natural law in Two Treatises of Government. It argues, firstly, and pace Waldron, that Locke?s view of natural law is foundational to his view of man, not vice versa, and, secondly, that Two Treatises is written (...) in an idiom different from Locke?s philosophical writings, such that directly transposing the ideas discussed in one idiom to the other is as confused as it is confusing. After providing a new account of the relationship between Locke?s philosophy and his views of morality, politics and religion, the essay concludes that Waldron fails to grasp the style and structure of Locke?s thinking, and so cumulatively misunderstands and distorts Locke?s views about moral identity, toleration, religion and politics alike. (shrink)

The charge of Hobbism assumes a prominent position in some accounts of Locke's thought. This essay argues that the charge is misconceived, not least because it fails to appreciate the true character of Hobbes's thinking and its relation to Locke's. Hobbes's architectonic retains the traditional intellectual structure of natural law thinking, articulating it around the demands of his metaphysics in ways important for his political theory. Locke decisively rejects this structure and in doing so opens up the conceptual space that (...) makes his own, very different political theory possible. At the same time, the essay establishes how Locke's account of natural law implies, and receives support from, views of Jesus Christ and Christianity quite different to those preferred by his contemporaries -- including Hobbes -- but consonant with the demands of his political theory. (shrink)

Bevir's doctrine of ?weak intentionalism?, developed in the course of his criticism of the work of Quentin Skinner, at once modifies and qualifies Skinner's approach by specifying the beliefs of individuals rather than their utterances as the loci of their intentions and the things that fix the meaning of their utterances. This has the effect of broadening the scope of meaning, by disengaging the meaning of utterances from their status as speech acts, of narrowing the relevance of linguistic contexts, by (...) denying that historians are required to study those contexts in order to understand the intended meaning of texts, and of blurring the historicity of texts, by suggesting that the utterances of which they are comprised may mean different things to author and audience. The paper draws attention to ambivalences in Skinner's position that Bevir does not take into account, and draws out continuities in Skinner's thought that Bevir's narrative does not register. (shrink)

Locke’s views on toleration and natural law have recently received a ‘reassessment’ at the hands of John William Tate. This article demonstrates some of the many and various ways in which Tate has mangled Locke’s positions and misconstrued the views of interpreters of Locke whose interpretations he finds uncongenial. It finds that there are no textual grounds for Tate’s claims and invites readers to reassess whether and how far they ought to be taken seriously.

Locke refrained from engaging explicitly with Hobbes in any of his writings. Locke’s policy of non-engagement should be interpreted, we argue, neither as evidence of his lack of interest in (or ignorance of) Hobbes’s arguments, nor as an attempt to conceal from the uninitiated Locke’s covert Hobbesian commitments. Locke’s silence reveals rather than conceals. What it reveals is an absolute determination to “distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between them”. (...) Approached in this way, precisely because Locke’s account of the “business of civil government” says nothing about ecclesiastical government, the second of Two Treatises can be read, in its entirety, as a powerful critical response to Hobbes. To see why, it is necessary to grasp that Part iii of Leviathan (“Of a Christian Common-wealth”) is integral to Hobbes’s positive argumentative purposes in the work. (shrink)