‘Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’
| Date | 01 April 2005 |
| Published date | 01 April 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885105050447 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
‘Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’
EJPT
Rhetoric and Fantasy in the
European Journal
Lockean Social Contract
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
Linda M.G. Zerilli Northwestern University, Illinois
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 4(2) 146–163
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885105050447]
a b s t r a c t : John Locke famously sets the arts of rhetoric at odds with the pursuit of
knowledge. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Grassi, this article shows that Locke’s
epistemological and political arguments are parasitic on the very tropes and figures he
would exclude in any serious discourse. Accordingly, Locke’s attack on the divine
right of kings and his famous argument for the social contract is read as exhibiting a
rhetorical structure. This structure is crucial to Locke’s critique of heteronomy and
his attempt to facilitate the identification of oneself as a free subject.
k e y w o r d s : associationism, freedom, Locke, rhetoric, social contract
I confess, in Discourses where we seek rather Pleasure and Delight, than Information and
Improvement, such Ornaments as are borrowed from them, can scarce pass for Faults. But
yet, if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow that all the Art of Rhetorick,
besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words
Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the
Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.1
Among the many philosophers and political theorists who have railed against
rhetoric, John Locke surely counts as one of its staunchest opponents. Locke
famously casts rhetoric as ‘the Abuse of Words’ (Essay, 3. 10) and rhetoricians as
those ‘whose business is only the vain ostentation of Sounds’ (Essay, 3. 11. 7).
Regrettably, this ‘perverting the use of Words’ (Essay, 3. 2. 5) – perversion being
one of Locke’s own favorite words to describe the practice in question – ‘have
their place in the common use of Languages, that have made them currant’. To
which Locke adds:
It looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by: and Philosophy it self, though it
likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it appears in publick, must have so much Complacency,
as to be cloathed in the ordinary Fashion and Language of the Country, so far as it consist
with Truth and Perspicuity. (Essay, 2. 21. 20)
Is this not the familiar lament of the man of reason and advocate of plain speech,
Contact address: Linda M.G. Zerilli, Department of Political Science, Northwestern
University, Scott Hall, 601 University Place, Evalston, IL 60208, USA.
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Email: l-zerilli@northwestern.edu
Zerilli: The Lockean Social Contract
who cannot conceal his disdain for those who require serious rational ideas to be
dressed up in pleasing rhetorical form? According to Ernesto Grassi, Locke
expresses the view, widely held among western philosophers, that ‘to resort to
images and metaphors, to the full set of implements proper to rhetoric, merely
serves to make it “easier” to absorb rational truth’.2 Philosophy wears a ‘gaudy
dress’ because, sadly, men are passionate creatures in need of images.
Generations of readers have interpreted Locke’s works as monuments to
rational speech and to a subject that searches for knowledge of things as they
really are. In this spirit, Charles Taylor claims that such a subject emerges as part
of the Lockean project of self-understanding, the means by which reason can
attain full certainty of itself. In Locke’s view, says Taylor:
. . . many things have been declared authoritatively true . . . which have no real title to the
name. The rational, self-responsible subject can break with them, suspend his adhesion to
them, and by submitting them to the test of their validity, remake or replace them.3
We recognize here the inherited image of Locke as slayer of the ‘Idols of the
Mind’. Taking control of our symbolic production demands that we exclude every
rhetorical element in our thinking and speech, for the influences of affect disturb
the clarity of rational thought. Man in search of things as they really are, ever
vigilant over the incursion of unexamined belief into the chamber of the enlight-
ened understanding – what could be more Lockean than that?
Familiar though it may be, this account of the Lockean project tends to neglect
those aspects of Locke’s thought that call into question the power of reason and
rational language in the adjudication of political and philosophical debates.
However that thought shall guide the following reflections, my concern here is
not to contest the idea that Locke seeks rational foundations for these debates but
rather to show that rational thinking and speaking is parasitic on the very rhetori-
cal – passionate, affective – speech Locke barely tolerates in ‘discourses where we
seek . . . Pleasure’ and would like to exclude in discourses in which ‘we would
speak of Things as they are’, that is, where knowledge is at stake. The idea that we
could speak of things as they are without employing rhetoric is based on a mis-
leading conception of what it means to know that such and such is the case. As
Grassi explains:
To prove [apo-deiknumi] means to show something to be something, on the basis of
something. . . . Apodictic, demonstrative speech is the kind of speech which establishes the
definition of a phenomenon by tracing it back to ultimate principles, or archai. It is clear
that the first archai of any proof and hence of knowledge cannot be proved themselves
because they cannot be the object of apodictic, demonstrative, logical speech; otherwise
they would not be first assertions. . . . But if the original assertions are not demonstrable,
what is the character of the speech in which we express them? Obviously this type of
speech cannot have a rational-theoretical character.4
Grassi’s challenge to philosophers like Locke is simple but significant: he shows
that the indicative or rhetorical speech that grounds philosophical or rational
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European Journal of Political Theory 4(2)
speech ‘provides the very framework within which the proof can come into
existence at all’. This indicative speech, he writes:
. . . is immediately a ‘showing’ – and for this reason ‘figurative’ or ‘imaginative’ . . . It is
metaphorical, i.e., it shows something which has a sense, and this means that to the figure,
to that which is shown, the speech transfers [metapherein] a signification; in this way the
speech which realizes this showing ‘leads before the eyes’ [phainesthai] a significance.
The premise of rational speech ‘is and must be in its structure an imaginative
language’.5 This conclusion radically alters the relationship of rational speech and
rhetorical speech. ‘The term “rhetoric” assumes a fundamentally new signifi-
cance; rhetoric is not, nor can it be the art, the technique of an exterior persua-
sion; it is rather the speech which is the basis of rational thought.’6
If Grassi is right, then philosophy does need something like its gaudy dress.
More to the point of this article, the core concepts of Lockean political theory –
not least the social contract – would have to be rethought as exhibiting a funda-
mentally rhetorical structure. The stakes here are significant: Locke is easily one
of the greatest thinkers on the subject of human equality and the fundamentally
consensual basis of political relations. The classic story of the social contract,
which vividly expresses equality and consent as the only legitimate ground for
relations of political rule, is commonly interpreted, to speak with Jeremy
Waldron, as having a ‘rational choice structure’. In Waldron’s view, as we shall
see, the classic tale packs tremendous ‘normative punch’ – it shows that men could
not possibly have consented to their subjection – but lacks historical credibility.
Thus Locke is led to narrate, parallel to the classic tale, a ‘gradualist, anthropo-
logical account’ of the shift from ‘inchoate patriarchal authority to formal politi-
cal institutionalization’.7 This account, however, offers no critical perspective
from which to judge the (patriarchal and monarchical) relations of authority that
developed over time. Thus the classic tale, says Waldron, provides a ‘moral
template’ with which to judge those relations as illegitimate. But how, exactly,
does the classic tale do that? If it is to offer a perspective from which to judge
historical events, this tale must exhibit a structure of freedom that, historically
speaking, did not exist and, further, persuade the subject to see itself, notwith-
standing its actual subjection, as free. We may take that freedom more or less for
granted, but there is no reason to assume that a 17th-century reader would have.
Rather than read the classic tale as a moral template based on rational princi-
ples with which to judge, I want to read it as an imaginative device that can
facilitate the identification of oneself as a free subject. Read in this way, the social
contract can be thought of as a rhetorical figure of the newly thinkable. It is
around this figure that it becomes possible to organize a new political world and
to tell a story of the emergence of a ‘we’ that is not already given (as Filmer’s
account of the origin of commonwealths would have it) but is founded in a free
act. Although Locke was deeply concerned with curtailing the forces of custom
and early education that forged strange forms of affect, he no more thought one
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Zerilli: The Lockean Social Contract
could eradicate such forms...
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