Friday Interview: The Role of Violence in Locke’s Second Treatise

John Locke was a 17th-century English philosopher whose work had a profound impact on the American founders. One of Locke’s key works was the Second Treatise on Civil Government. Dr. Brandon Turner, assistant professor of political science and a faculty affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, has examined the role of violence in Locke’s Second Treatise. He discussed the issue with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Kokai: First of all, let’s remind people, John Locke’s Second Treatise: Why is this something that’s of significance to people here in the United States?

Turner: Sure. Probably the primary reason is its influence that it had on America’s founders, and in particular, Thomas Jefferson. So, for example, when Jefferson was recommending books that needed to be included in classrooms at the University of Virginia, Locke’s Second Treatise was one of a couple that he had there. So I think he had three total recommended, and Locke’s Second Treatise had to be there.

And then, as some of you may know, the Declaration of Independence actually draws very heavily, not only on the ideas that you find in the Second Treatise — in particular, the very peculiar idea, which is that the people exist as a kind of entity before government steps in and that the government exists only to protect the rights they already have naturally, right — so the idea of natural rights, the idea of government as being consistent with natural law, and as the government as a tool that we adopt to help us realize projects and ends that we already have sort of naturally … these are all sort of hallmark Lockean ideas that he borrows.

And then, of course, even the phrasing — this idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which maps on very closely to Locke’s notions of life, liberty, and property, and the importance of those three things for our ends. So in the American context, that’s probably the most relevant feature.

Kokai: And much of what the Founders were writing and saying built upon what Locke was saying in this document.

Turner: Absolutely. I mean, so for a very long time, a guy named Louis Hartz, in the middle of the 20th century, wrote this book that was very influential and characterized the American founding as a thoroughly sort of Lockean invention. … There’s been a kind of revisionist take since then, over the last 20 or 30 years. But for a very long time, Locke’s name was synonymous with the founding of America in the sense that really the first true Lockean revolution was actually the American rather than the English revolution of the 17th century.

Kokai: Now you’ve put together an entire presentation that focuses on one specific piece of the Second Treatise, and that is the role of violence. Tell us about that.

Turner: Sure. So it’s an academic piece that I’ve constructed to sort of respond to one sort of almost really a critique of liberalism. And the idea is that liberals have a tendency to deflate the importance of violence or that liberals don’t have the conceptual vocabulary needed to properly deal with violence and the role that violence plays in society.

And so typically the liberal story goes something like this: From the beginning — that is from Locke as the kind of father or grandfather of classical liberalism — violence was understood as something that should be minimized in the state. So what you have is, you have this problem where people can use violence sort of subjectively in the state of nature and the state comes in legitimately to sort of cut off those ways of using violence and to become a sort of — the phrase we us is a “monopoly on force.”

So the idea is that a legitimate state is that which exercises a monopoly on force through the police powers and through the powers associated with the military. And so typically that story — this idea of the state coming in and kind of dampening down the violence that you normally find in society — that story sort of begins with Locke. And so I’ve tried to sort of actually go back and sort of revisit that basic thesis. And my argument is that, actually, violence and, in particular, the threat of violence by individuals against the state itself, plays a key role in that text.

Kokai: Why did you think it was important to come up with this answer to the critique?

Turner: Politically today, there has been sort of renewed attention to the prospect of unrest, I guess you might say, and, in particular, a kind of revolutionary unrest, so sort of properly situating liberalism’s founders, properly situating the sorts of ideas that really become American ideas in the 18th century. So ideas about the rights of individuals to resist state force, the rights of communities to resist state force, and sort of to kind of properly locate these ideas in their intellectual context.

Kokai: What should modern-day Americans know about what Locke thought about violence?

Turner: … For a very long time we thought that Locke published the Second Treatise — not to delve too deep in; he published it in 1689 after what we refer to as the Glorious or the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 — and so, in other words, the Second Treatise was written as a way to sort of theoretically or conceptually justify the shift from the monarchical regime that was associated with James II at the time, to a new sort of parliamentary regime, a new regime that was — that with sovereignty located in the legislative, which of course maps on to our American system.

That was the story we had for a very long time. Very recently, like in the last, say, 40 or 50 years, we’ve come to discover that’s actually not when Locke wrote the Second Treatise, that he wrote it maybe even a decade earlier in 1679, or lately it’s been suggested in 1682, ’83. And he did it in order to justify, not the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution, but actually a series of unfortunately bloodier conflicts that occurred between his sort of party, the Radical Whigs, and the monarchy at the time.

And in particular, we’ve come to associate the Second Treatise with this event or this idea called the Rye House Plot — which was actually an unsuccessful plan to assassinate the king and the heir to throne, James II, who was Catholic — to assassinate them both on their way back from a trip. And so, in other words, what we have now, this kind of, the new historical inflection is that … the Second Treatise isn’t sort of the nice and sort of acceptably nonviolent tract that closes off this revolutionary period that begins in 1640 and ends in the 1680s — but he’s actually sort of stoking the fires here.

That in some ways, and what I argue in this paper, is that the Second Treatise is written … not to sort of explain what’s been done, but actually to maximize the case for violent revolution. And so that’s essentially, that’s the Locke I’m trying to bring out, is this revolutionary Locke — this potentially quite violent and even advocating violence on essentially religious grounds — that’s the Locke that I’m trying to bring out in this particular piece.

And so, in other words, the kind of broader point is that there is a kind of a mixed legacy handed down from these foundational documents. Is Locke’s Second Treatise a founding document in the classical liberal tradition? Absolutely. Is its role in America’s founding and, in particular, in the spread of values that we still hold dear today, and with good reason, is it integral in that process? Absolutely. But do we need to deal with essentially these thornier problems?