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Reply to Tate
Timothy Stanton
Political Theory 2012 40: 229
DOI: 10.1177/0090591711432842
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91711432842StantonPolitical Theory
2012 SAGE Publications

PTX40210.1177/00905

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On (Mis)interpreting
Locke: A Reply to Tate

Political Theory
40(2) 229236
2012 SAGE Publications
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sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0090591711432842
http://ptx.sagepub.com

Timothy Stanton1
I am extremely grateful for Dr. Tates response to my article,1 for it has captured, more concertedly and with far greater clarity than I evidently managed
to muster in the article, exactly the way of thinking about Locke that I wished
to expose to closer scrutiny and reflection. It has also shown, as I will demonstrate, why that way of thinking is so very inadequate to dealing with its
subject matter.
Dr. Tate suggests that my interpretation of Locke is inaccurate because, so
far from inscribing the presence (and the authority) of God at the center of
[his] political philosophy, Locke sought to remove God and His purposes
from the center of his political philosophy, and adopted three strategies to
achieve this. Yet Dr. Tate makes two concessions which, properly understood,
are obviously fatal to his position: that God is our creator2 and that He gives
us natural law.3 These concessions are fatal because it is natural law that
generates two natural rights which, in their turn, generate the authority to
produce government and identify its scope; and these, surely, are at the center
of . . . political philosophy.
To be specific, the duties under natural law to preserve oneself and to
preserve others4 generate rights to punish and restrain those who endanger
oneself and others, rights to preserve oneself and to execute natural law.5 So
people make a commonwealth the better to protect their rights and therefore
be able to perform their duties in natural law: Man being born, as has been
proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of
all the Rights and privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other
1

University of York, Heslington York, UK

Corresponding Author:
Timothy Stanton, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington York, YO10 5DD, UK
Email: [email protected]

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Political Theory 40(2)

man, . . . hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his
Life, Liberty, and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men; but
to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others, as he is perswaded
the Offence deserves, even with Death itself. . . . [T]here only is Political
Society, where every one of the Members hath quitted this natural Power,
resigned it up into the hands of the Community in all cases that exclude him
not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it.6
Civil government, then, is a device to secure the ends for which we enter
civil society, and those ends are well known to include the protection of our
own lives and the lives of others. These are certainly requirements of natural law, and as such Gods requirements. No doubt natural or material
interests7comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another,
in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties8are advanced in the process, but
it is entirely misleading to represent Lockes argument as one conducted in
terms of interest: when one actually consults the apparently impressive catena of citations which Dr. Tate adduces in support of this notion,9 one finds
that the word interest appears only twice in the twelve sections cited, and
then, in both cases, when used to refer to that which biases men and leads
them to misapply natural law in their own cases.10 Perhaps this is an example
of the rigorous substantiation which Dr. Tate finds wanting in my article.11
In any event, he has made a major error in overlooking the content of natural
law and the two rights which are derived from it, for both are necessary to
explaining why, as opposed to stating that, civil government is a secular body,
being confined in its scope to the relations of one human to another: the rights
which authorise it, and which people resign up to government, relate to concerns which are specific to the present life.
Dr. Tate appears to believe that God is concerned only with a future life and
notices no distinction between theology, whether natural or revealed, and religion, whether natural or revealed.12 Thus he expresses the view that the divine
purposes which underlie civil society, namely the preservation of each and all
and the perfection of the conveniences of life, embraced together in what
Locke called the great Design of God,13 are theological matters upon which
individuals, and religious congregations [which are quite beside the point in
this place], were likely to disagree.14 But Locke is perfectly plain that the
existence and attributes of God may be known by the human understanding
without the assistance of revelation.15 They are therefore indubitable facts, and
facts to be taken very seriously indeed, because as there is a being with these
attributes, He is the one who gives us directions.16 Thus reason shows that we
are under authoritative guidance by God, as a matter of certainty because as a
matter of knowledge.17 And reason is infallible.18

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It follows that where Scripture agrees with reason, it too has a content
which certainly comes from God.19 The great Design falls into this category.
So many civil interests, including the ones upon which Dr. Tate dwells, such
as the acquisition and protection of private property, and others upon which
he does not, such as marriage and the continuation of the species,20 are features of Gods purposes and ceteris paribus to be pursued. On this basis it is
hard to share Dr. Tates confidence that Locke in no way sought to subordinate the ends of individuals, civil society, or government to divine purposes.21 It might be added that since Locke stated explicitly in his first
treatise that God the Maker of Heaven and Earth was the sole Lord and
Proprietor of the whole World, and that Mans Propriety in [His] creatures is
nothing but that Liberty to use them, which God has permitted, something
which He might alter, and indeed had altered, and enlarged,22 to better suit
His purposes, Dr. Tates claims about the liberation of human beings from
those purposes are as distantly related to the textual evidence as his claims
about the limits on liberty to which individuals might or might not consent.
That he cites Locke via Richard Hooker and St. Peter to support the view that
Locke wished to expunge divine purposes from politics should, or so one
would have thought, have given him at least some pause for thought.
Dr. Tate is correct to insist that one such purpose is absent from politics,
namely the salvation of souls. But once more his way of thinking about Locke
quite fails to make sense of Lockes arguments for its exclusion from the
proper scope of politics. Dr. Tate asserts that Locke pursues a strategy of
privatization, which reduces faith in its various aspects to a private matter,
that is, a matter of individual belief, conscience, and choice.23 This is a little
hard to square with Tates stated view that God has given natural law to people, for natural law includes a duty to worship God, to be performed by all, in
public: as Locke puts it in his Epistola de tolerantia, Deum publice colendum
et sciunt et agnoscunt omnes, all men know and acknowledge that God ought
to be worshipped publicly.24 There is nothing optional or private about it. For
why else, Locke asks, must they come together in public assemblies, quorsum alias ad coetus publicos cogimur?25 That is to say, religious societies are
requirements of natural law, being integral to the performance of the natural
duty to worship publicly: there is a choice of ecclesia, but not a choice of
whether to worship. These societies have as their end the public worship of
God, and by that means, the gaining of eternal life, Finis societatis religiosae... est cultus Dei publicus et per eum vitae aeternae acquisitio,26 an end
which is contrasted immediately with that of civil society: in religious societies, Locke continues, nothing is or can be done that relates to civil or earthly

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goods, Nihil in hac societate agitur nec agi potest de bonorum civilium vel
terrenorum possessione.27
It is in these terms, of natural law and natural reason, that problems connected with revealed religion are addressed by Locke, for his Epistola is concerned with the relations between societies which are, in their different ways,
vehicles of natural law, both of which come into existence through the consent of people to incorporate into societies, but for very different ends: for
mutual protection against terrestrial hazard in the one case, to worship God in
the manner they believe will be acceptable to Him in the other. As Ian Harris
has established, Lockes explanation of the differences between the two societies has little, if anything, to do with a perceived contrast between a public
realm of law and government and a private, interior realm of personal belief
and preference. In the Epistola, Locke used the word privatus and connected
terms in drawing a contrast between those who did not and those who did
have a special duty in [a commonwealth], and therefore between what did or
did not relate to the status and authority of the latter. So privatus was understood in contrast with an office-holder, or with civil authority.28 Lockes
point, in other words, was that salvation was not part of the magistrates concern, not that it was a private matter in the sense that Dr. Tate insinuates.
Locke used English, rather than Latin, to make the point in his Essay concerning Toleration of 1667, when he contrasted my private interest in an
other world with the magistrates authority.29
Again Dr. Tate is correct when he says that that authority extended only
to civil affairs and not to mens souls.30 Unfortunately his subsequent
invocation of Lockes proscription of Catholics and atheists when elaborating upon this assertion saws off the branch on which he is sitting, since it is
not obvious why, if Gods purposes are indeed absent from politics, atheists
in particular are such a menace in Lockes view. Are they not bearers of material interests centered on their lives, liberties, and estates? One might think
that that is more or less all that they could be on Dr. Tates view. Dr. Tate
further fails to consider why Locke thinks that belief in God is the foundation of all morality.31 It is so with Locke because in denying God the atheist
denies natural law and so also morality. If atheism is inconsistent with morality, and the practice of morality (or parts of it) upholds civil society, then
atheism undermines society and the magistrate must act against it.32 Roman
Catholic loyalty to the Pope, meanwhile, is not simply a threat, real or imagined, to public security,33 but a repudiation of the integrity of the commonwealth, its independence of religious society, and of the character proper to
each, which Locke had demonstrated by natural law arguments. Lockes
positions cannot be explained without reference to natural law; and, once it is

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admitted, the first two strategies to which Dr. Tate commits Locke melt into
air.
Little space remains to respond in detail to Dr. Tates comments about
Lockes third strategy, in which claims about the intellectual consequences
of Lockes extended skirmish with Jonas Proast are supported by a reference
to the work of John Rawls.34 I have written about this episode elsewhere, and
explained what I take those consequences to be.35 That Dr. Tate and I would
probably disagree about these is as unimportant in the wider scheme of things
as the various ways in which, I think unfairly,36 he fillets and refries my article
in representing it as lacking in insight, rigour, or substantiation.
I have shown why, as opposed to stating that, it is Dr. Tates claims that are
unfounded in relation to the relevant textual evidence. He seems unable to
recognise that evidence, so committed is he to pursuing a particular course in
the interpretation of Locke, which admits of no deviation, and which cannot
contemplate the possibility that Locke thought in anything but the secular
liberal terms of a Rawls. He thus perpetuates a way of thinking about Locke
which prejudicates the evidence, knowing, without troubling over the actual
content of his texts, what he said and what he meant.
Dr. Tate is trapped inside a framework of thought which cannot explain
much that is relevant and of vital interest, not only to the study of Locke, but
to the possibilities and privations of liberalism. The ambition of my original
article was to exhort Locke scholars to challenge that framework of thought
wherever they found it, whether in themselves or in others, in order to escape
its unhappier results. I prefaced that article with a remark of Wittgensteins;
let me end my response to Dr. Tate with another: a man will be imprisoned
in a room with a door thats unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does
not occur to him to pull rather than push.37
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. J. Tate, Locke, God, and Civil Society: Response to Stanton, Political Theory
40, 2, 2012, 222-28. Subsequent references to Dr. Tates reply are by page
number only.

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2. 223.
3. 223.
4. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960), II.ii.6, 311.
5. Locke, Two Treatises, II.ii.7, 311.
6. Locke, Two Treatises, II.vii.87, 366-67.
7. 224.
8. Locke, Two Treatises, II.viii.95, 375.
9. 224, which cites Locke, Two Treatises, II.iii.21, 323; II.vii.87, 366-67; II.vii.94,
372-74, II.ix.123-27, 395-97, II.ix.131, 398-99; II.xi.134, 401-2; II.xi.136, 404-5,
II.xv.171, 428-29; II.xix.222, 460-62.
10. Unsurprisingly, the eighth of Lockes disputations on the law of nature answered
the question Is every mans interest the basis of the law of nature in the negative. See J. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1954), 204-14.
11. 227 (n. 9).
12. See e.g. 223, 224, 225, 227, for confusion between theology and religion, the
assumption that the first always is revealed and that the second is always a
synonym for Christianity.
13. Locke, Two Treatises, I.iv.41, 205.
14. 223.
15. J. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), IV.x.3-6, 620-21. Compare Bodleian MS. Locke c. 28,
fols. 119-20, at 120, for a train of reasoning beginning with internall perception
self consiousnesse or intuition from whence therefore may be drawn by a traine
of Ideas the Surest and most incontestible proof of the Existence of a God.
16. See Stanton, Authority and freedom, 18-20 and, more fully, I. Harris, Lockes
Political Theory, in S. Brown, ed., British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 96-122, at 97-99.
17. Locke, An Essay, IV.vi.3, 579-80.
18. Locke, An Essay, IV.iv.4-8, 563-66.
19. See e.g. Locke, Two Treatises, I.ix.86, 243, II.v.25, 327; II.vi.52, 345.
20. Locke, Two Treatises, II.vii.79, 362, cast expressly in terms of the Rule, which
the infinite wise Maker hath set to the Works of his hands.
21. 223.
22. Locke, Two Treatises, I.iv.39, 202-4.
23. 225.
24. J. Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia/A Letter on Toleration, ed. R. Klibansky, trans.
J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 100. See also Locke, Essays, 156,
for the natural duty to render this worship, and Bodleian MS. Locke c. 34, 76-77:

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Men finding it their duty to honour, & worship the God they served were to
doe it by publick acts of devotion owneing to the world thereby that Deity by
solemne acts of worship to whom they payed the internal acts of veneration in
their hearts. And twas for this that men were obliged to enter into societyes for
Religion, with those who were of the same beleif & way of worship with themselves. Belief, then, is part of religion, but it is not private but is to be exercised
publicly through worship.
25. Locke, Epistola, 100.
26. Locke, Epistola, 76.
27. Locke, Epistola, 76.
28. I. Harris, John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration, in Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment ed. J. Parkin and T. Stanton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See Locke, Epistola, 78, 80,
86, 126, for the contrast between privatus and an office holder. Compare Cicero,
In Catilinam, I. 3, where Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio (consul 138
BC) is described as acting privatus, that is, not in the capacity of public office,
in putting Tiberius Gracchus to death: P. Scipio, pontifex maximus, Ti. Gracchum
mediocriter labefactantem statum rei publicae privatus interfecit.
29. See J. Locke, An Essay concerning Toleration and other Writings on Law and
Politics, 1667-1683 ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford, 2006), 272-73.
30. 225.
31. 225.
32. On this point see J. Dunn, Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 58-59
and I. Harris, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 190.
33. 225.
34. 225-26. Dr. Tate forgets his own point when citing Rawls, for he has already admitted (225) that Locke presupposed that theism was a key basis of social-cooperation, since it underwrites the keeping of contracts. The other side of this story is
that atheists could have no place in Rawlsian-style deliberations about the creation
of an overlapping consensus, being irrational, indeed criminal and mad, in Lockes
view, and so belonging to the class of unreasonable citizens who present to their
fellow citizens the practical task of containing themlike war and diseaseso
that they do not overturn political justice. See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 48-65, esp. 64, n. 19. For atheism being
a crime, which, for its madness as well as guilt, ought to shut a man out of all sober
and civil society, see J. Locke, A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity,
in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), vol. 7, p. 161.
35. T. Stanton, Letters concerning Toleration, in S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, J. Walmsley,
and P. Schuurman (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Locke (London: Continuum,

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2010), 257-65. Suffice it to say that true religion in Lockes exchanges with Proast
almost invariably refers to the truth claims made on behalf of specific branches of
the Christian church, rather than Christian doctrine in general or natural theology. So
Dr. Tates citation of it does not touch Lockes point that natural law requires people
to worship God, whether inside or outside a commonwealth. See e.g. J. Locke, A
Second Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1690), 4: you build all you say upon
this lurking Supposition, that the National Religion now in England, backd by the
Publick Authority of the Law, is the only True Religion; J. Locke, A Third Letter for
Toleration, to the Author of the Third Letter concerning Toleration (London: 1692),
152: your bringing Men to the True Religion, being to bring them to Conformity to
the National.
36. Consider e.g. footnote 6, which claims that I simply take it for granted that individuals will know when resistance to government is justified, when I say explicitly that only God is in the position to know and to judge this, or footnote 8,
which turns a claim about the individual into a claim about consent. See also fn.
13, which claims that I suggest that there is a duty to inaugurate government.
I do not suggest any such thing, since Locke mentions none, emphasising (as
I therefore do) only the instrumental usefulness of doing so. There is, however,
a duty to inaugurate religious societies, in virtue of the duty to worship under
natural law. Or see fn. 17, on duties to God, where, pace Dr. Tates misleading
paraphrase, I obviously mean that government is not concerned with the duty to
worship, only with matters relevant to the duties to self-preservation and the
preservation of others.
37. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. P. Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 42.

About the Author

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