Response to Reply by Terrell Carver
| Author | Linda M.G. Zerilli |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885106067287 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Response to Reply by
Terrell Carver
Linda M.G. Zerilli Northwestern University, USA
In his reply to my essay Professor Carver claims that I have tackled ‘one of the per-
sistent puzzles in political theory, namely how to reconcile Locke’s closely tested
empiricist epistemology in the Essay on Human Understanding with his own Second
Treatise of Government, where “the right rule of reason” is treated as comparative-
ly unproblematic’, p. 469, this issue. That may well be an ongoing puzzle in Locke
scholarship, but it was not the problem that motivated my essay. My primary
concern was, rather, the persistent tendency to read Locke as a rationalist. This
rationalist reading, which I associated with Jeremy Waldron among other Locke
scholars, occludes Locke’s own deep entanglement in the very rhetorical practices
he otherwise decries as being at odds with the proper use of reason. To contest
this reading, I tried to develop not the ‘Freud’s-eye view’ of Locke’s work that
Carver attributes to me but an account that shows why Locke’s ostensibly
rationalist arguments would never get off the ground without the use of rhetori-
cal figures. Following Ernesto Grassi, I wanted to contest the received idea of
rhetoric as the mere form in which rational arguments are made and argue instead
for the ancient and early modern humanist understanding of rhetoric as the
source of inventive political and philosophical thinking, indeed, as the very
‘ground’ of rational thought.
Missing the centrality I accord to this originary figuration or rhetorical ground-
ing in Locke’s political argumentation, Carver claims that I attribute to the figure
of the social contract both a novelty that, historically speaking, it did not have and
far more importance than Locke himself gave it. But I say quite explicitly that
Locke did not invent this figure of the contract (or ‘compact’, to use his preferred
term), let alone the idea of consent as the basis for political society. My point was
not to attribute to Locke the act of radical invention but rather to show, in con-
formity with insights gained from the rhetorical tradition, how he employs the
figure of the contract to order a set of contrasts between lawful and unlawful
forms of power and to lay bare for his readers the respective normative stakes
479
reply to response
Contact address: Linda M.G. Zerilli, Department of Political Science, Northwestern
University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208-1006, USA.
Email: L-Zerilli@northwestern.edu
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 5(4)479–482
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067287]
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