Rhetoric and Fantasy Revisited
| Author | Terrell Carver |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885106067285 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Rhetoric and Fantasy Revisited
A Response to Zerilli’s ‘Philosophy’s Gaudy
Dress’
Terrell Carver University of Bristol, UK
Zerilli has tackled in a new and surprising way one of the persistent puzzles in
political theory, namely how to reconcile Locke’s closely tested empiricist episte-
mology in the Essay on Human Understanding with his own Second Treatise of
Government, where ‘the right rule of reason’ is treated as comparatively unprob-
lematic and therefore generally accessible to the ‘man of reason and advocate of
plain speech’ (II. 10; 146). She attempts this by arguing that Locke himself,
despite his own primary arguments in the Essay and in fact quite contrary to them,
nonetheless maintained – in hitherto little remarked sections of that work – that
neither the human psyche nor language itself can ultimately be tamed into total
rationality, and that rhetorical figures will therefore necessarily play a role in
countering the ‘wrong associations’ between ideas to which the human mind is
continually subject in an almost mad, obsessional way (153). Applying this novel
reading of the Essay, which is quite against the grain of most explications of
Locke’s text, to his Second Treatise, she then reads the ‘classic tale’ of rational ‘men’
forming a political (or civil) society by compact as a rhetorical and fantastic rather
than strictly rational and rationalistic device (II. 14, 87, 97, 99). Thus in her view
the social contract (as Locke’s compact is commonly known) functions in the
Second Treatise as a rhetorically and politically powerful response to the common-
place and widely held ‘divine right of kings’, against which Locke sets his
argument. Zerilli finds evidence that ‘divine right’ was ‘established’ and indeed
‘naturalized’ in Locke’s society when Locke constructs a ‘developmental narra-
tive’ of adult sons in archaic times imperceptibly consenting to a Filmerian
father-king in the Second Treatise (II. 105–12, 159, 161–2).
Thus on Zerilli’s argument, Locke’s social contract is an imaginative trope or
‘gaudy dress’ of rhetoric through which a new form of association can first be
thought, whereas purely rational arguments and relentlessly literal language (as
the primary theses of the Essay would have it) will never dislodge the orthodoxy of
‘divine right’ (146–62). Methodologically for Zerilli this line of thinking derives
469
response to article
Contact address: Professor Terrell Carver, Department of Politics, University of Bristol,
10 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK.
Email: t.carver@bristol.ac.uk
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 5(4)469–477
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885106067285]
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