Traditionally neglected, Locke’s First Treatise of Government has taken on new significance with feminist interpretations that recognize the importance of its sustained engagement with patriarchal power. Yet feminist interpreters, both critics and admirers alike, read Locke as a champion of the “man of reason,” a figure seemingly immune to the influences of passions, imagination, and rhetoric. These interpreters wrongly overlook Locke’s extended engagement with the power of rhetoric in the First Treatise, an engagement that troubles the clear opposition of masculine reason and its feminine exclusions. Taking Locke’s rhetoric seriously, I argue, makes the First Treatise newly important for what it shows us about Locke’s practice of political critique. In following the varied and novel effects of Locke’s feminine figures, we find a practice of political critique that depends on a mutually constitutive relation between rhetoric and reason.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Hereafter cited in text by paragraph number. The First Treatise is treated here as a related, but distinct, text in its own right. The Two Treatises’ publication history suggests that it can be read as one or two texts (4-14). David Wootton emphasizes the difference in the political contexts and aims of these two texts: "Introduction," John Locke: Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 52.
2.
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P.Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
3.
Charles Tarlton , "A Rope of Sand: Interpreting Locke’s First Treatise of Government,"The Historical Journal21, no. 1 (1978): 43-73, 46.
4.
On the poor reception of the First Treatise, ibid., 43-47. Uday Mehta depicts the First Treatise as "among the most neglected, indeed maligned, major portion of an otherwise celebrated and much discussed body of work in political theory": The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke’s Political Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 37-39. See also Jeremy Waldron, Locke, God, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16. Mehta and Waldron see intellectual significance in the First Treatise despite what they take as Locke’s preoccupations with minutiae. Michael Zuckert appreciates its value and blames Filmer for the tiresome quality of the refutations, placing him closer to Locke’s own claims: "An Introduction to Locke’s First Treatise," John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1991), 121-37, 121.
5.
Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 7.
6.
Melissa A. Butler, "Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke’s Attack on Patriarchy,"American Political Science Review72, no. 1 (March 1978): 135-50, 149.
7.
Waldron, God, Locke, 6.
8.
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 48-49.
9.
Pateman, The Disorder of Women ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 46.
10.
Ibid., 53. Genevieve Lloyd , The Man of Reason (London : Routledge, 1993).
11.
The language of covert/overt to describe modes of gendering in Locke’s texts comes from Terrell Carver, "Gender and Narrative in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government," Feminist Interpretations of John Locke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 187-212, 188-89.
12.
Barbara Arneil , "Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/ Private Divide,"Canadian Journal of Political Science44, no. 1 (March 2001): 29-54.
13.
Nancy Hirschmann, "Intersectionality before Intersectionality was Cool: The Importance of Class to Feminist Interpretations of Locke" in Feminist Interpretations, 155-86.
14.
Carver, "Gender,"199-206.
15.
My approach follows feminist theorists who emphasize the signifying or symbolic power of "woman" in a text rather than solely inquiring into what entity, "women," the text refers to: Sarah Kofman, "Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetishism," Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 21-49; Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3-23; and Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1-15.
16.
Locke’s "apparent indifference, and presumed hostility, towards the realm of the aesthetic" has prevented detailed analysis of his rhetoric. S. H. Clark, "‘The Whole Internal World His Own’: Locke and Metaphor Reconsidered," Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 2 (April 1998): 241-65, 243. Ernesto Grassi, e.g., characterizes Locke as exemplary of philosophy’s hostility to rhetoric. As I argue below, however, Grassi’s concept of rhetoric can be used fruitfully to understand Locke’s rhetoric in the First Treatise in new ways. Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 18. Locke has been associated with an antirhetorical depiction of the New Science as well. Richard Foster Jones, The Seventeenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 143-64.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3.10.34, 2.11.2.
19.
Wilbur Samuel Howell, "John Locke and the New Rhetoric,"Quarterly Journal of Speech53, no. 4 (December 1967): 319-33; and Edward P.J. Corbett, "John Locke’s Contributions to Rhetoric,"College Composition and Communication32, no. 4 (December 1981): 423-33. Locke praises order and clarity in the same breath that he pits rhetoric against judgment (Essay, 3.10.34), drawing a contrast between two kinds of rhetoric rather than rhetoric against reason.
20.
William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge niversity Press, 1994), 14-18.
21.
Paul de Man , "Epistemology of Metaphor"Critical Inquiry5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 13-30.
22.
Brian Vickers , "The Royal Society and English Prose Style: A Reassessment," Vickers and Nancy Struever, Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library , 1985), 3.
23.
Ibid., 62
24.
Ibid., 8.
25.
Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, 122.
26.
Ibid., 120-21.
27.
Philip Vogt’s reading is based on the Essay and "An Examination of Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God": John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Press2008), 10-27.
28.
The phrase comes from Hannah Dawson’s characterization of Locke’s philosophy of language in its relationship to the whole Renaissance curriculum of rhetoric, grammar, and logic: Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.
29.
Jules David Law , The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1.
30.
Vogt, Rhetoric of Modernity, 70; Clark, "The Philosophical Rhetoric of Locke’s Essay,"The Locke Newsletter17 (1986).
31.
Zerilli, "Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress," European Journal of Political Theory 4, no. 2 (2005): 146-63. Carver objects to the particular way in which Zerilli draws connections between the Essay and the Second Treatise, presenting the social contract as a rhetorical device for remedying adherence to patriarchalism as a disease of association. Laslett’s depiction of the Essay and Two Treatises as incompatible has considerably less purchase on the interpretive strategy I bring to the First Treatise, however. Using Laslett’s description of the aim of the Essay as portraying "the character of our knowledge by showing up its limits" (83), we find an important connection with the First Treatise. In the First Treatise, Locke is centrally concerned with showing how Filmer’s universalism exceeds any reasonable claim to political authority, revealing an affinity with his critique of innate ideas in the Essay. See note 56. Carver, "Rhetoric and Fantasy Revisited: A Response to Zerilli’s ‘Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress,’" European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 4 (2006): 469-77; Zerilli, "Response to Reply by Terrell Carver," 479-82.
32.
Grassi, 92. See Aletta Norval , Aversive Democracy (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007 ), 85-87.
33.
The importance of rhetoric in Locke’s Essay is not the only reason to read the political writings rhetorically. Growing attention to rhetoric in Thomas Hobbes’s thought has generated rich and various interpretations by readers willing to look beyond his early modern "rhetoric against rhetoric." For three very different approaches, see David Johnson, The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James Martel, Subverting Leviathan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Don Herzog’s reading of Leviathan’s "rhetoric of unmasking" particularly resonates with my reading of Locke’s efforts to inhabit and redeploy the language of patriarchalism as a strategy of political critique: "Hobbes’s nefarious genius is to grab his opponents’ language and use it against them": Happy Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 90.
34.
Grassi, 32.
35.
"Fatherhood" appears seven times in Patriarcha, but only two cast the fatherhood as a possessive subject (I.8, II.1). The others refer to "the right of fatherhood," after the extinction of the fatherhood (I.3, 8, 9, II.1).
36.
Laslett, "Introduction," 57-59. Patriarcha may have been written in the 1620s. Richard Tuck, "A New Date for Filmer’s Patriarcha," The Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (March 1986): 183-86. According to Laslett, Locke did not see Patriarcha until 1680, after beginning the Second Treatise. Ashcraft, John Marshall, and Wootton disagree, contending that the Second Treatise was begun after the major part of the First Treatise completed, though they disagree on how much later. They agree that work on the First Treatise began after January 1680, but not about how long composition lasted. Wootton believes it was completed by 1681, with some later additions. Marshall argues for mid- or late 1681 and J.R. Milton for earlier in mid-1680, but Jonathan Scott argues that it was not written before late 1681. Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises and Revolutionary Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Wootton, "Introduction," 63; Milton, "Dating Locke’s Second Treatise" History of Political Thought 16, 3 (Autumn 1995): 356-90; Scott, "The Law of War: Grotius, Sydney, Locke and the Political Theory of Rebellion," History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 565-85, 572.
37.
Living on beyond the author is a trait of another key seventeenth-century royalist text, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, published upon Charles’ execution. Eikon Basilike, ed. Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), 13.
38.
Tarlton, "Rope of Sand,"54.
39.
Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture 1649-1689 ( Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 158.
40.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
41.
Locke acknowledges alternatives to Filmer, e.g. Sibthorpe or Manwaring (I.5). Schochet accords Filmer sufficient significance to warrant Locke’s attention: "The Filmerian position very nearly became the official state ideology" (Patriarchalism, 193). James Daly, however, emphasizes Filmer’s distance from conventional royalism; Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 146-50, 162.
42.
Locke’s reconstruction of Filmer’s rhetoric aligns Patriarcha with court-style speech and "the corruption and exaggeration of a court that bows steadily in the direction of French manners and morals" (Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 159).
43.
Waldron argues the opposite, pitting Locke’s generalist egalitarianism against Filmer’s particularist inegalitarianism and overlooking Locke’s critique of patriarchalism’s timeless universalism; God, Locke, 22.
44.
Zwicker, Lines of Authority , 160.
45.
Filmer’s position is reported by Locke, not directly from Patriarcha.
46.
Locke is ambivalent on Eve and her significance for women. He argues that Eve’s curse has implications for "the female Sex only, and import no more but that Subjection they should ordinarily be in to their Husbands." Rejecting the absolute authority of Adam, he emphasizes the contingent and contractual nature of marriage yet concludes that "there is . . . Foundation in Nature for" the subordination of wives (I.47). See also Carver, "Gender," 193-98.
47.
On the supplement, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 141-60.
48.
The affinity I emphasize here is not the use of Eve to show the error of patriarchalism (which Pateman would acknowledge) but the recollection of Eve as missing mother to destabilize the opposition’s claim to universality.
49.
Northrup Frye , Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays ( New York: Atheneum, 1966), 224.
50.
Parody is "the critical refunctioning of preformed literary material with comic effect": Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19, citing Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Postmodern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35. Satire and parody both may render their target the object of laughter, but satire does not necessarily entail the imitation, distortion or citation of external material: Rose, Parody, 81-2.
51.
Locke is well recognized as an object of satire and parody but not for engaging in such styles himself. Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 161; Phiddian , Swift’s Parody, 122-27.
52.
Laslett attributes this point to Locke’s medical training: Two Treatises, 178n. A broader debate over theories of reproduction also plays out in the First Treatise. Susan C. Greenfield, "Aborting the ‘Mother Plot’: Politics and Generation in Absalom and Achitophel," ELH 62, 2 (Summer 1995): 267-93, 269. This Aristotelian tradition features many cases of maternal activity in reproduction, often tied to a maternal imagination that yields monsters. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37-45.
53.
This passage echoes an earlier medical claim contrasting Eve’s condition with subsequent mothers: "there is here [in Eve’s curse] no more Law to oblige a Woman to such a Subjection, if the Circumstances either of her condition or Contract with her Husband should exempt her from it, then there is, that she should bring forth her Children in Sorrow and Pain, if there could be found a Remedy for it" (I.47).
54.
The contrast between Locke as medical authority and Filmer continues with Filmer as the physician who covers the bitter taste of his tonic with deceptive palliatives, i.e., with "mere" rhetoric (I.7).
55.
Locke refers to a French translation of Garcilaso de La Vega’s Commentarios Reales: Le commentaire royal, ou l’Histoire des Yncas, roys du Peru, trans. Jean Baudoin (Paris, 1633). The English translation is Locke’s own. Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 72n6, 92-3; Laslett, Two Treatises, 277n. On the evidence for the practices described by Garcilaso and his rhetorical appropriation of earlier texts, see Ian Campbell Ross, "‘A Very Knowing American’": The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Swift’s Modest Proposal," Modern Language Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 2007): 493-516.
56.
Locke’s critiques of innate ideas in the Essay and patriarchalism both draw on travel literature, specifically Garcilaso, to show the unbounded plurality of human ideas and practices to challenge universalist claims (Essay, I.3.9-12).
57.
Frye, Anatomy , 224. As iconic satirist John Dryden writes, "The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction": "Absalom and Achitophel," Selected Poems, ed. Zwicker and David Bywaters ( New York: Penguin, 2001), lines 72-73.
58.
This reading resonates with Joanne H. Wright’s interpretation of Locke’s midwifery notes as presenting a notion of the family as "traditionally hierarchical, oriented to propagating the human species and the passing down of property": "Recovering Locke’s Midwifery Notes," Feminist Interpretations, 213-40, 216.
59.
See I.123 for another list of heirs and ensuing questions of legitimacy: "Who has the Paternal Power, whilst the Widow-Queen is with Child by the deceased King, and no body knows whether it will be a Son or a Daughter? Which shall be Heir of two Male-Twins, who by the Dissection of the Mother, were laid open to the World?" Again Locke invokes medical knowledge of pregnancy, specifically caesarian section, to challenge the Fatherhood. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.
60.
For Locke and Shaftesbury, the illegitimate son of Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth, was a more suitable heir to the throne than Charles’ brother, James. Laslett, "Introduction," 31-33, 123; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 286-87.
61.
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 349. The poem was published at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. The poem is an allegory for the political controversy and takes particular aim at Shaftesbury, figured as Achitophel (Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 164). Marshall writes that Locke surely read the poem of 1681, citing Wootton that the poem "reflects an intellectual situation to which Locke needed to respond at a time of alleged composition [of the Second Treatise] in ‘summer and autumn’ 1681" (Locke, 146, 236, also 199-200). My argument does not depend on Locke’s having read the poem, but it is worth noting that the poem’s publication coincides with Marshall’s and Scott’s time frames for the First Treatise’s composition. See note 36.
62.
"Absalom," line 1013. I rely here on the interpretations of Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 142, and Greenfield, "Aborting," 285-87.
