John Locke and Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics
| Published date | 01 March 1992 |
| Author | David Wootton |
| Date | 01 March 1992 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1992.tb01762.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
PoliticaI Studies
(1992),
XL,
79-98
John
Locke and Richard Ashcraft’s
Re
volutionary
Politics
DAVID
WOOTTON
University
of
Victoria, British Colombia
This article assesses Richard Ashcraft’s
Revolutionary Politics and Locke
‘s
‘Two
Treatises
of
Government’.
It argues that Locke’s dealings with the colony
of
Carolina show that he was a social conservative in the 1670s. The text of the
Second Treatise
does not support Ashcraft’s claim that Locke held similar views
on the franchise to those of the Levellers. The views he expressed in 1688 suggest
that he wanted to preserve, not transform, the ancient constitution. His
Report on
Poor Relief
shows that he was unsympathetic
to
the poor in 1697. Although
Ashcraft is right
to
portray Locke
as
working for revolution between 1681 and
1688, and although his redating
of
the
Second Treatise
is persuasive, he overstates
Locke’s social and political radicalism.
The
Argument
In 1986 Richard Ashcraft published
Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two
Treatises
of
Government,
followed a year later by
Locke’s Two Treatises
of
Government.‘ Revolutionary Politics
is an impressive, lengthy, scholarly account
of the political and biographical context within which Ashcraft believes the
Two
Treatises
must be read;
Locke’s Two Treatises
is a close analysis of the text.
Unquestionably the first
is
the more important of the two books, and it is with
it
that
I
will primarily be concerned here. It presents a series of arguments which,
taken together, may be termed ’the Ashcraft thesis’. Scholars before Ashcraft had
argued that Locke became an advocate of toleration under the influence of
Shaftesbury, and that the two were involved in a close political collaboration
from 1667 until Shaftesbury’s death in 1683.’ But Ashcraft wants to radically
rethink the nature and purpose
of
this collaboration. His claims are:
1
that from 1675, when the
Letter
from
a Person
of
Quality to his Friend in the
Country
was published, Locke and Shaftesbury were committed to a radical
opposition
to
the pro-Catholicism and aspirant absolutism of Charles
11,
an
opposition that was already based upon egalitarian principles;’
’
R.
Ashcraft,
Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises
of
Government
(Princeton,
Princeton University Press,
1986);
R.
Ashcraft,
Locke’s Two Treatises
of
Government
(London,
George
Allen
&
Unwin,
1987).
’
Ashcraft,
Locke’s Two Treatises,
p.
21.
’
Ashcraft avoids describing the
Letter
as a radical text, but dates the re-emergence of radical
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1992
Political Studies
80
Debate
2
that from the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in
1681
Locke and
Shaftesbury were committed to a revolutionary conspiracy which culminated
in the Rye House Plot;4
3
that the
Firsr Treatise
was written in thecontext ofthecampaign for Exclusion,
which was defeated at Oxford; while the
Second Treatise
was written
to
justify
the revolution that was planned after Oxford;5
4
that in support
of
the Exclusion campaign and then in support
of
the planned
revolution, Locke and Shaftesbury sought to build a mass movement that
would ally Dissenters and tolerant Anglicans; gentlemen, merchants and
artisans. In order to build such a broad-based popular movement they adopted
arguments which closely corresponded to those previously used by the
Levellers. Locke’s strategy implied social as well as political radicalism;6
5
that the
Second Treatise
consequently offers not only a defence of revolution
against tyranny, but arguments for a more extensive participation in political
decision-making and a view of property which
is
anti-aristocratic and
sympathetic to the rights of the poor;’
6
that after Shaftesbury’s death and the failure
of
the Rye House Plot, Locke in
exile in Holland continued
to
plot against the government, and that he was
engaged in helping to finance Monmouth’s invasion and in purchasing arms
for an uprising;’
7
that Locke, along with other radical Whigs, was disappointed by the
conservative nature of the
1688
settlement, and that the
Two
Treatises
were
published as a reassertion of radical principles and as a way
of
‘keeping the
faith’.’
In this paper
I
want
to
question some, but not all, of these arguments. Of the
seven points listed above,
I
accept numbers
2,
3
and (with some reservations)
6.
Let me start therefore by stressing Ashcraft’s remarkable achievement in
building up a case for these arguments. They alone, if they are accepted,
constitute a revolution in Locke studies.”
politics to
1675.
Less
cautious is
J.
Tully in his introduction to
J.
Locke,
A
Letter Concerning
Toleration
(Indianapolis, Hackett,
1983).
p.
9.
In
1980
Ashcraft was prepared to call the
Letter
‘a
prolegomena of the position to
be
developed in the
Two Treatises’;
see
R. Ashcraft, ‘Revolutionary
politics and Locke’s
Two
Treatises
of
Government’. Political Theory.
8
(I
980), 429-85.
at p.
434.
C.D.
Tarlton,
‘The
Exclusion controversy, pamphleteering, and Locke’s
Two Treatises‘. Historical
Journal,
24 (1981). 49-68
(not cited by Ashcraft) also sees the
Lefter
as a precursor of the
Two
Treatises.
‘
Ashcraft,
Locke’s Two Treutises,
p.30.
Ashcraft.
Locke’s Two Treatises,
pp.
286-97.
Peter Laslett has replied to Ashcraft’s argument
in the latest paperback version
of
his edition of the
Two
Treatises
(Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press,
1988)
but has not refuted his arguments.
Ashcraft,
Revolutionary Polirics.
pp.
149-65. 228-85.
’
In
Revolutionary Politics,
Ashcraft provides a summary of his interpretation
of
the
Second
Treatise
on pp.
579-85.
On p.
272
he writes
of
Locke’s ‘radical endorsement of the claims of labor
over those of land ownership’. Strangely, Ashcraft does not refer to
J.
Richards. L. Mulligan.
J.K.
Graham, “‘Property” and “People”: political usages
of
Locke and some contemporaries’,
Journal
of
the
HistoryofIdeas.42(198l).29-51.
Ashcraft,
Revolutionary Politics,
Ch.
9.
’
By a curious displacement, Ashcraft
uses
the phrase ‘keeping the faith’ as the title
for
his
chapter on Locke’s activities between the failure of Monmouth’s invasion and
1688,
when Locke had
littlechoice but to ‘keep the faith’. The obvious question is whether he kept it after
1688!
On p.551 it
appears that this was part of Locke’s motive for publication.
lo
Ashcraft’s
1980
article, ‘Revolutionary politics’, is superior
to
the books in that it concentrates
upon these, in my view correct, arguments. An even earlier version of his position, ‘The
Two Treatises
and the Exclusion crisis: the problem of Lockean political theory as
bourgeois
ideology’, in
John
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