John Locke ve Yalancı-Liberalizm
Aziz Yardımlı

Virginia’da satılmak üzere bekleyen köleler 
(Eyre Crowe, 1861)
 
 

 
John Locke: Yalancı-Liberalizmin Babası

 

  • One of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the Father of Liberalism.
  • Belongs to the School of British Empiricism, Social Contract, Natural Law.

 



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John Locke (1632-1704) onu önceleyen Thomas Hobbes'un (1588-1679) başlıca esin kaynağı “korku” olan monarşist politik kuramına karşı yazdı. Ama bu onun düşüncelerinden demokratik-liberal bir politik kuramın çıkarılabileceği anlamına gelmez. John Locke Anglikan Kilisesinin kültürü içinde büyüdü ve bu yarı-Katolik inanca bağlılığını sürdürdü.

 

Locke yalnızca köle tecimi yapan Royal Africa Company’nin bir yatırımcısı olmakla ve köle tecimine edimsel olarak katılmakla kalmadı. Carolina’nın Yeni Dünyada yarı-feodal bir aristokrasi kuran ve efendilere köleleri üzerinde saltık yetke tanıyan Anayasasının yazarı idi (“every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves”). Locke ayrıca çocuk emeği uygulamasını da destekledi. Çocukların 12-14 yaşına dek aylak kalmalarını eleştirdi ve küçüklerin üç yaşından başlamak üzere çalışmaya alıştırılması gerektiğini yazdı (“from infancy [three years old] inured to work” W).

 

Locke felsefesini dinden türetti. “Doğal yasa/natural law” dediği şeyi tanrısal bildiriş ile eşitledi ve politik kuramının temel kavramlarını Eski Ahit’ten türetti (Genesis ve başka metinlerden). Yine, İngiliz monarşisinin İngiliz halkı üzerindeki egemenliğini Tanrı tarafından belirlendiği gibi Adem’in Havva üzerindeki egemenliğine benzetti.

 

John Locke haklı olarak en etkili Aydınlanma düşünürlerinden biri olarak kabul edilir, çünkü Aydın despotizmi Aydınlanmanın politik kuramıdır. John Locke yine haklı olarak liberalizmin babası olarak kabul edilir, çünkü liberalizm edimsellikte bireysel özgürlüğü değil, bireysel özenci temsil eden ideolojidir ve Evrensel İnsan Hakları ya da Doğal Hak kavramını çiğneyen bu ideolojiyi anlatan “liberalizm” sözcüğü salt bir örtmece olarak kullanılır.

 

Sayısız politika bilimcisi ve felsefeci kuşağını aldatan ve bugün de aldatmayı sürdüren bu ideoloji Dünya Tarihinde Opium Savaşlarından Atlantik Köle Tecimine, Sömürgeciliğe sayısız trajedinin entellektüel aklayıcısıdır. Politikayı ve yasayı ahlak kavramından ayıran ideoloji duyunçsuzdur ve ayırdedici yanı kendini özgürlük ve eşitlik kavramlarına karşı, yurttaş toplumu ve demokrasiye karşı ileri sürmesidir. Bu sözde "liberal" felsefe, yararcı etiği ile, İngiltere'de işleyim devrimi sırasında yer alan etik-dışı ve insanlık-dışı her politikanın aklayıcısı oldu. Zoraki çocuk emeği, köle tecimi, serflik, tefecilik, sömürgecilik gibi uygulamalar yararcılık etiğinin grotesk kavramları tarafından moral olarak haklı uygulamalar olarak tanıtlandı.

 

Etnik İngiliz karakteri yalnızca Baronların haklarını tanıyan ve halkı kölelik ve serflik durumunda tutan Magna Carta ile başlamak üzere hakkın evrenselliğini yadsımaya alıştı. Etnik Anglikan Kilisesinin ikili karakteri ya da Protestan ve Katolik inançlar arasında orta yolculuğu ile tanımlanan bu tinde özgürlük hiçbir zaman evrensellik kazanamadı ve her zaman bütün bir uyruklar kitlesine karşı üst sınıfların tikel bir ayrıcalığı oldu. Özgürlük kavramına aykırı böyle ‘özgürlük’ yalancı bir “liberalizm” etiketi ile maskelendi.

 

Doğal Hak kavramını savunmak ve aynı zamanda köleciliği aklamak, etikten söz etmek ve sonra onu yararlık kategorisine uyarlamak, genel olarak ahlakı haz ve acı duyguları üzerine dayandırmak İngiliz Görgücülerinin kendilerinin moral niteliklerinin göstergesidir. Etik bilgi olmaksızın olanaksızdır. Görgücülüğün ve analitik ve pozitivist türevlerinin reddettikleri şey insanın bilme yetisinin kendisidir. Eğer bütün bir felsefe tarihinde kuşkuculuk aranacak olursa, bulunduğu yer görgücülüktür.

 

Görgücülük yalnızca akademik bir yozlaştırıcı değildir. Yalancı-yararcı etiği yoluyla evrensel insan haklarını çürütmesinde, görgücülük modern politik sürecin kendisi için bir problemdir. Pragmatizm usu, düşünceyi, kavramı yadsımasında görgücülük ile yakından akrabadır.

 

 

‘Liberal’ John Locke “Tüm insanlar özgür doğar” demez, çünkü “Carolinalı her özgür insanın hangi görüşten ya da dinden olursa olsun negro köleleri üzerinde saltık gücü ve yetkesi olacaktır,” der.

 

John Locke
     

John Locke (1632-1704) ilk Aydınlanma felsefecisidir. Ve İngiliz Görgücülüğünün kurucusudur. Bu nitelemeler düşüncelerini tanımlamak için bütünüyle yeterlidir ve bir de ‘liberalizmin babası’ olduğunu eklemek gereksiz, aslında geçersizdir. ‘Liberal’ olarak görülmesi Aydınlanmanın karakteristiği olan ‘despotizm’ ile bağdaşmaz. Ve normal olarak doğal hak kuramından kölelik gibi birşey çıkarsanmasa da, John Locke’un ‘liberalizmi’ buna izin verir.

 

 

Sözde liberal felsefeci John Locke köle tecimine edimsel olarak katıldı.

 

John Locke’un bir ‘liberal’ olduğu düşüncesi ancak Magna Carta’nın Amerikan Bağımsızlık Bildirgesini ve Fransız İnsan ve Yurttaş Hakları Bildirgesini esinlendirdiği düşüncesi kadar doğrudur. Böyle bir düşünceye mit denemez çünkü mitte bir saflık ve dürüstlük öğesi vardır. Bu açıkça yalandır ve nasıl doğduğu ve niçin sürdürülmekte olduğu, niçin bütün bir Batı entellektüalizminin bu yalanı yuttuğu sorusuna yanıt dönemin tarihinin daha başka bileşenlerini de ilgilendirir — Anglikan Kilisesini, İngiliz köle tecimini, bir sömürge ‘imparatorluğunu,’ İngiliz yararcı ‘etiği’ denilen etik-dışı kuramı.

 

Bu nedenle John Locke’u temel alarak sömürgeciliği ve emperyalizmi liberalizme bağlamak da geçersizdir, çünkü bu bağıntıda ‘liberalizm’ denilen şey liberalizm değildir. Libertas özgürlük demektir.

 

   
Libertas  

John Locke’un felsefesine ‘liberalizm’ diyebilmek için sözcüğün anlamını bozmak ve yabancı sözcüğün kafa karıştırıcı tılsımına sığınmak zorunludur. ‘Özgürlük/libertas’ sözcüğünden türeyen ‘liberalizm’ sözcüğü bugün pekçok kafada kapitalizm, tekelci-kapitalizm, emperyalizm, sömürgecilik gibi çağrışımlar yaratır. Yine, aynı kökenden türeyen ‘libertaryan’ sözcüğü de ahlaksızlıktan anarşizme çeşitli anlamları üstlenir.

 

Tarquin krallığının devrilmesi üzerine kurulan Roma Cumhuriyeti ile eşzamanlı olarak Roma Özgürlük Tanrıçası “Libertas” da yaratıldı. Romalılar Kraliyetin tiranlığa dönüşmesinden dehşete düşmüşlerdi. Kraliyeti sildiler, kralları kovdular, ve Cumhuriyete, özgürlüklerine ve yasalarına sarıldılar. İmparatorluk döneminde bile “Roma Senatosu ve Halkı” (SPQR: Senatus Populusque Romanus) sözcükleri Roma sancaklarından silinmedi. Yunanca Eleutheria/Ἐλευθερία sözcüğü de ‘Özgürlük’ ve ‘Özgürlük Tanrıçası’ anlamlarını taşır ve uygar Helenik tini barbarlardan ayıran başlıca kategori Özgür İstençtir. Batının Klasik Tinden ödünç aldığı ve modern uygarlığa etik aşılamak için çabalayıp duran yasa egemenliği kavramı Libertasın edimselleşmesidir.

 

John Locke’un evrensel insan haklarını tanımayan kuramlarına ‘liberalizm’ adının verilmesi bugün en ileri demokrasilerin henüz üstesinden gelemedikleri moral hamlık ve etik toyluk olgusunu ilgilendirir. Kavramı gözden çıkarmaktansa Locke’un banalitesinden kurtulmak hiç kuşkusuz çok daha kolaydır.

 

‘Özgürlük’ sözcüğü ancak soyut olarak, ancak özü olan hak kavramından soyutlanarak alınırsa “seçme özgürlüğü” anlamına gelir. Bu durumda “seçme” için hiçbir evrensel belirlenimin, hiçbir nesnel normun olmamasına bağlı olarak özgürlük serbestliğe ve keyfiliğe bozulur. Keyfilik ya da keyif doğal bilinç için doğallıkla popülerdir, çünkü bu bilinçte ‘özgürlük’ belirlenimsizlikten, sınırlanmamışlıktan, dilediğini seçebilmekten ve yapabilmekten öte bir anlama gelmez. Özgürlüğün, istencin özü haktır ve bu belirlenim onu hakka ilgisiz keyfilikten ayrır.

 

John Locke’un köleciliği savunmaktan da öteye geçerek onu tanrıbilimsel zeminlerde aklaması (“doğal hak Tanrının buyruğudur”) John Locke patentli ‘liberalizmi’ ABD’nin kuruluşundan yaklaşık iki yüzyıl sonra ortaya çıkan bölünme ve iç savaş ile bağlar.

 

John Locke, David Hume ve Immanuel Kant — üçü de Aydınlanmanın birincil felsefecileri olarak bilinir. Ve üçü de olanaklı en çirkin ırkçı metinlerin yazarlarıdır. Üçü de evrensel insan haklarını tanımayan entellektüellerdir. Görüşleri hiç kuşkusuz insan doğası ile anladıkları şeyden türer. Ve insan doğası ile anladıkları şey başka herşeyden önce bilgisiz insan doğasıdır. Kant açıkça inanca yer açabilmek için bilgiyi yok etmek zorunda kaldığını bildirir. İngiliz Görgücüleri ise felsefeleri ‘deneyim’ üzerine dayandığı için böyle keyfi bir özür ileri sürme gereksiniminde bile değildirler. Doğal olarak kuşkucu ve bilgisizdirler. Ve kuşkuculuk entellektüel bir gerilik yaratmanın yanısıra, ağır bir etik problem de yaratır, çünkü etiğin bir bilgi sorunu olması ölçüsünde kuşkucu bilinç için neyin etik ve neyin etik-dışı olduğunu ayırdetmek olanaksızdır. ‘Yararlı’ olana moral değer yükleyen bu barbarlık ancak kuşkuculuk zemininde olanaklıdır.

 

Bir düşünür pekala yanılabilir. Bu anlaşılabilir birşeydir ve insanlığın düşünme tarihi budalalar ile yeterince doludur. Ama köleliği yadsımak ve aynı zamanda aklamak bir yanılgı ya da yanlışlık değildir. Bir saçmalıktır. Ve bilerek yapıldığı için, bir dürüstlük yoksunluğudur. Görgücüler kavramları bir tür ‘toplumsal kurgu’ olarak, çevrenin, kültürün belirlediği düşünceler olarak da alabilirler, çünkü çevre, kültür vb. görgücülüğe göre kavramın doğum yeri olan ‘deneyim’ alanıdır. John Locke durumunda özgürlük kavramının çevre tarafından belirlenmesi savı bütünüyle geçerli olacaktır, çünkü kölecilik içinde yaşadığı, düşündüğü ve kuramlarını yazdığı ortamın birincil olgularından biridir. Ve ‘bir olgular toplamı olarak dünya’ ve ‘bir deneyimler toplamı olarak dünya’ bir ve aynı şeydir. Görgücü etik durumunda eksik olan şey iyi ve kötü, doğru ve eğri gibi moral kavramların a priori evrenseller olduklarının, deneyimleri, olguları, yaşantıları belirleyen ve biçimlendirenin kavramlar olduğu olgusunun bilgisidir.

 

Bu konuda dünyayı üç yüz yıl boyunca aldatmak açıktır ki büyük bir ustalık gerektirir. Ama bir tango iki kişi ile yapılır. Yetkeci bir politik kuram geliştiren bir düşünürün ‘liberal politik düşüncenin babası’ olduğu yalanını bütün bir dünyaya yutturmak dünyanın böyle bir yalana istekli olmasını da gerektirir. Batı dünyada modern etik bilincin doğduğu ve gelişmekte olduğu biricik bölgedir. Ve ‘gelişmekte olma’ henüz gelişmemiş olmayı anlatır.

 

Locke’un tutarsızlıkları gözden kaçırılmayacak kadar açıkta yatar. Ya çok aptalca ya da etik-dışıdırlar; ya da her ikisi birden. Ve bu karakteristikler görgücünün dansını artistik bir gösteri olmaktan çıkarır.

 

 

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) özellikle hedonist bir "ahlak felsefesi" ile tanınan bir İngiliz felsefecisidir. Ve onun adını "felsefe" ile birleştirmek felsefeye karşı yapılan en büyük haksızlıklardan ve felsefe tarihinin bir çöplük olarak görülmesine götüren başlıca etmenlerden biridir. Bentham John Locke ve David Hume’un görgücülüklerini izleyerek onların yazılarında henüz embriyo olarak bulunan ve sonradan “yararcılık etiği” denilecek olan etik-dışı kuramı ayrıntılı olarak formüle etti.


İngiliz kültürüne özgü mit yaratıcılık türü yalnızca Locke'a, Magna Carta'ya ya da sözde ‘liberalizm’ denilen yetkeciliğe sınırlı değildir. Başkaları arasında örneğin Isaac Newton durumunda da özellikle güçlü bir mit doğmuştur. Newton’ın boşinançlarının ve simyacılığının çoktandır açığa çıkmış olmasına karşın, Yerçekimi kuramı konusunda doğru hiçbirşey üretmemiş, ona yüklenen herşeyi başkalarından ödünç almış ve kendi başına kaldığında yalnızca geçersiz, değersiz ve saçma düşünceler üretebilmiş olmasına karşın, ve kalkülüsü keşfeden Leibniz’in bu bilimi ondan çaldığını ileri sürmüş olmasına karşın, tüm bu tür olgulara karşın pozitif ve ideal bilim insanı olarak Newton miti bugün de geçerliğinden birşey yitirmiş değildir. Bütün bir modern dünya bugün de önemli ölçüde İngiliz yalanlarının bir oyun alanı olarak görünmeyi sürdürmektedir.

 

John Locke’un çıkardığı vargıları niçin çıkardığını anlamak için anahtar İnsan Anlağı Üzerine Deneme’sidir. Düşüncelerin duyusal algının bir izdüşümü olduğunu kabul etmek onları realite ile ilişkiden bütünüyle koparmak ve insan için bilgisizliği doğrulamaktan başka bir sonuca götürmez. Locke dışsal duyu-algılarının bir tür tabula rasa olarak gördüğü kendi anlığı üzerindeki etkileri sonucunda üretildiklerini ileri sürdü. Bu görgücü öncül düzgün düşünmesini olanaksız kıldığı için, düşüncelerin (ister kılgısal olsun isterse kuramsal) nesnelliğini ya da mantıksal bağıntılarını yadsıdı, onları kafasında keyfi olarak birbirine tutturabileceği şeyler gibi gördü. Onu izleyen David Hume daha sonra görgül ‘bilgi’nin mantıksız ilişkilerinin gerçekte çağrışım ilişkileri olduğunu açıkladı. Ve çağrışım düzleminde her düşünce başka her düşünce ile bağlanabilir. Böyle bir serbestlik içinde, genellikle tutarsızlık olarak, giderek çelişki olarak görünen şeyler bile görgücü düşünür için bütünüyle doğal ve normal düşünce ya da dil oyunları olur. Nesnelliğin dürüstlük imlediği düzeye dek, görgücü zeminlerde genellikle dürüst olarak kabul edilen bir tarzda düşünmek olanaksızdır. Görgücülükte etik düşünmenin kendisi etik karakterini yitirir.

 

John Locke tam bir ‘liberalizm’ ile düşündü, özgürlüğü ‘dilediğini yapabilme’ olarak anladı, kitabının bir sayfasında köleliği yadsırken başka birinde onu doğruladı. Kavramlarını tarihsel realitesinin gereklerine uygun olarak biçimlendirdi, örneğin mülkiyet tanımını Amerikan yerlilerinin topraklarını mülkiyet edinemeyecekleri bir tarzda oluşturdu, ‘doğa durumu’ kurgusunu köleliği aklayacak bir tarzda yorumladı. Bir görgücü olarak, Locke kavramların nesnelliği kavramından yoksundu. Moral kavramlarını a posteriori türetildiğini kabul etti, ve bir a posteriori ‘ahlak’ kuramı zemininde düşündü. Bu olgu ile tutarlı olarak, Locke’un kendisi moral kavramların görgül kökenli keyfi kurgular olduğunu ileri sürdü. “Haz ve acı” duyguları üzerine kurulu enteresan bir moral kuram ile ancak etik-dışı yararcı ya da hedonistik kuramlar üretebilirdi.

 

LOCKE'UN AHLAK FELSEFESİNİN İLKELERİ: HAZ VE ACI


AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

BOOK I. CHAP. XXVIII
5. Moral good and evil. Good and evil, as hath been shown, (Bk. II. chap. xx. SS 2, and chap. xxi. SS 43,) are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us. Moral good and evil, then, is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or evil is drawn on us, from the will and power of the law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law by the decree of the lawmaker, is that we call reward and punishment.

 

BOOK II. CHAP. XX
§ 2. Things then are good or evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain.

 

BOOK II.CHAP. XXI
§ 42. Happiness then in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain ...Now because pleasure and pain are produced in us by the operation of certain objects, either on our minds or our bodies, and in different degrees; therefore what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us we call evil, for no other reason, but for its aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us, wherein consists our happiness and misery.

 

Locke haz ve acı ile ne anladığını açıklar:


"By Pleasure and Pain … I must all along be understood … to mean, not only bodily Pain and Pleasure, but whatsoever Delight or Uneasiness is felt by us, whether arising from any grateful, or unacceptable Sensation or Reflection.” (II.20.15)

Bunların, "Delight" ya da "Uneasiness" duygularının "duygular" olmadığını düşünmek güçtür. Ve "duyunç özgürlüğü" kavramını böyle duygular üzerine dayandırmak pek olanaklı değildir. 


Görgücü bir ahlak kuramı yanlış değil, ama olanaksızdır. Locke'un da ait olduğu kültürün başlıca sorunu duyunç sorunudur. Ve duyunç üzerine bir kuramın kendisi duyuncun ürünü olmalıdır.


İngiliz Reformasyonunu Kıta Reformasyonundan ayıran şey birincinin Luther gibi, Melanchton gibi, Calvin ve Zwingli gibi Protestanların çabaları ve eylemleri sonucunda yer alırken, ikincinin kendisi bir Katolik olan ve ölünceye dek Katolik kalan VIII. Henry’nin öncülüğünde yer almış olmasıdır. Salt bu enteresan olgu bile İngiliz Reformasyonunda birşeylerin ters gitmiş olduğunu düşündürmeye yeterli olmalıdır,


Reformasyon Roma Katolik Kilisesinin yetkesinin reddedilerek duyunç özgürlüğünün kazanılmasında sonuçlandı. İngiltere’de Katolik Kilise hiçbir zaman bütünüyle ortadan kaldırılmadı ve Anglikan Kilise hiçbir zaman dışsal-duyusal nesneleri tapınma davranışlarından vazgeçmedi. Duyunç özgürlüğü hiçbir zaman tam olarak tanınmadı ve bir tür ulusal Hıristiyanlık temsilcisi gibi görünen Anglikan Kilise İngiliz tininin kendi ile uzlaşmasına hizmet etti. İngiltere'de demokrasi her zaman aristokrasi ile ve liberalizm her zaman kölelik ve sömürgecilik kurumları ile birlikte gitti.


İngiliz Görgücüleri pozitif etik kuramları ile, yararcı etikleri ile bu melez kültürün sürdürülmesine yardım ettiler. Locke’un feodalizmi ve köleciliği yasalaştıran Carolina Anayasası duyunç özgürlüğünün en kaba çiğnenmelerinden birini örnekler. 


Duyunç problemi olan bir kültür en büyük sefillikleri, sapıklıkları iyi ve doğru ve haklı görmede pek bir güçlük çekmez. Bugün de İngiltere'de Reformasyonun başlatıcısı olarak kabul edilen VIII. Henry bilinen en acımasız, en duyunçsuz tiranlardan biri idi. Ve koyu bir Katolik idi. Bu karakteri ile Anglikan Kilisesinin başkanı oldu.

 

 



17'nci yüzyıl Amerikası. Kolonilerin kuruluşu gerçekte belirsiz, korkutucu, ve insan bedeli açısından dile gelmeyecek denli ağır bir süreçti.

 

 

 

John Locke Hollanda'da sürgünde geçirdiği beş yıl dışında yaşamını İngiltere'de geçirdi. Çalışması genel olarak İç Savaştan saltıkçı Stuart hanedanını deviren "Görkemli Devrim"e (1688) dek İngiliz kralı ve parlamento arasındaki çatışmanın terimlerinde yorumlanır. Shaftesbury Düküne sekreter olarak "Carolina Temel Anayasalarını" yazdı. Amerikan kolonileri için sorumluluğu olan Council of Trade and Plantations'ın sekreteri (1673-74) ve Board of Trade'in üyesi (1696-1700) idi. Royal African Company ve Bahama Adventurers company yoluyla İngiliz köle teciminde önemli bir yatırımcı idi. İnceleme'sinde “savaş durumunun bir sürdürülmesi” olarak köleliği aklar ve doğa durumunda oldukları için Amerikan yerlilerine mülkiyet haklarını yadsır. Bunların dışında liberaldir.

 

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Two Treatises of. Government (1689) (pdf)

 

 

İki “Tract”

John Locke
     

John Locke 1660’da biri İngilizce’de ve öteki Latince’de olmak üzere yetkeci hükümeti savunan iki ‘tract’ yazdı ve sonra bunları yayımlamaktan vazgeçti (çok daha önceden bilinen bu yazılar her nedense 300 yıllık bir gecikme ile ilk kez 1967’de yayımlandı). Birincisi dinsel görenekler (Anglikan Kilise için “indifferent things” olarak görülen dinsel tapınma sorunları) konusunda karar vermenin bireysel duyunca bırakılması gerektiğini ileri süren ve duyunç özgürlüğünü savunan bir görüşe (1660’da, Edward Bagshaw) karşı yazılmıştı. Locke’a göre, bu şeyler tam olarak ilgisiz oldukları için yasa tarafından dayatılabilir ve insanlar onları yerine getirmeye zorlanabilirdi. Başka bir deyişle, hükümet insanların duyunçlarına karışabilmeli, din konusunda yasamada bulunabilmeli idi. Locke bu hoşgörüsüzlük denemelerinden sonra hoşgörü üzerine denemeler yapmaya ve yazmaya geçti.

 

“Indifferent things” hiç de “ilgisiz” şeyler değildi. Tersine, bunlar bütün bir Anglikan Kilisesini Protestanlığın yalınlık ve arılık karakterinden uzaklaştıran ve onu Roma Katolik Kilisesinin dışsallıkları ile kirleten bakış açısı ile ilgili konulardı. Ve İngiltere’de Anglikan Kilisesi tarafından Protestanların kendilerine (ya da Püritanlara) yapılan zulmün biricik nedeni bu “ilgisiz şeyler” idi. Locke’un ailesi Anglikan Kilisesine bağlı idi.

 

Locke yalnızca Hobbes’un izinde yürüyerek “yetkeciliği,” aslında “saltıkçılığı” savunmakla kalmadı, köleciliği kurumsallaştıran “anayasalar” da yazdı.

 

Savunduğu şeyler

  • İngiltere’deki mezhep savaşlarını, zulüm ve işkenceyi, ve kitle kıyımlarını ilgilendiriyordu.
  • Ve Yeni Dünyanın yeni ülkesi ABD’deki kölelik kurumunu, ülkenin bölünmesini ve acımasız iç savaşı ilgilendiriyordu.

 

‘İlgisiz şeyler’ normal olarak önemsiz şeyler olarak görünür. Ama mezhep savaşları, kitle kıyımları, insanları ateşlerde yakmalar gibi “dinsel” eylemler hiçbir zaman önemli ya da ilgili gerekçeler gerektirmez. Mass ayini ayakta durarak mı yoksa diz çökerek mi yapılmalı? İsa adı duyulduğunda baş eğilmeli mi yoksa eğilmemeli mi? Vaftizde haç kullanılmalı mı yoksa kullanılmamalı mı? Böyle uygulamalar “indifferent” olarak görülüyordu. Bu ‘önemsiz şeylerin’ önemi Roma Katolik Kilisesini temsil etmelerinde yatıyordu. Ve neden oldukları olayları tanımlayacak en uygun sözcük “gaddarlık” idi.

 

John Locke As “Authoritarian” / Leo Strauss

 

The “two tracts on government,” as the editor calls them, are in fact disputations on the question as to “whether the civil magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to religious worship.” Locke answers this question in the affirmative. He takes the side of law and order against “the popular assertors of public liberty” who would only bring on “the tyranny of a religious rage” (p. 120) if the civil magistrate did not have or exercise the disputed right. Locke is all in favor of gently dealing with “the sincere and tender hearted Christians” but against allowing them “a toleration ... as their right” (p. 160; cf. 185-86). He regards the people as an “untamed beast” p. 158).

 

Görgücülüğün kurucusu olan Locke ‘Tract’larda moral yasayı “God’s Law” dediği şey üzerine dayandırdı ve bu terim konusunda bir açıklama yapmadı. İnsan tanrısal ya da ahlaksal yasayı “ya genellikle doğa Yasası denilen usun keşifleri yoluyla, ya da Tanrının sözünün bildirilişi yoluyla bilir.”

 

Locke does not say much on God’s Law. The divine or moral law becomes known to man “either by the discoveries of reason, usually called the Law of nature, or the revelation of his word” (p. 124).

 

Descartes ve Leibniz'in doğuştan düşünceler kuramını reddeden Locke gene de kendine bir sınırlama getirir ve Tanrının insanı ahlaksal yasaları keşfetmesini sağlayacak bir ussallık payı ile donatılı olarak yarattığını belirtir. Buna göre, bu bölümsel usun yardımı ile, insanlar Tanrının varolduğunu çıkarsayabilir, onun yasalarını ve bunlara bağlı ödevleri saptayabilir, bunları yerine getirmeye yeterli bilgi edinebilir ve böylece mutlu ve başarılı yaşamlar sürdürebilirdi.

 

“The positive moral law of God” gibi terimler John Locke’un çürütülmeleri uğruna İnsan Anlağı Üzerine Bir Deneme’de gibi zahmetli bir çalışmayı üstlendiği doğuştan düşüncelerdir. Ama Locke uygun gördüğü zaman çürüttüğü şeyleri savunmada ve savunduğu şeyleri çürütmede hiçbir zaman bir sakınca görmedi. İçinde yaşadığı politik altüst oluşların verdiği sinyallere göre düşüncelerini alt üst etmede duraksamadı ve ustan inanca, ve inançtan yetkeciliğe dönmede hiçbir sorun görmedi. Aslında tüm bu tutarsızlıkları bütünüyle normal işler olarak yapmış görünür. Locke aptal değildi. Yalnızca etik-dışı bir yöntem uyguladı ve etik üzerine yazarken hiç sıkıntı çekmeden etiğin kendisini çiğnedi.

 



   
 
1669‘dan 1675’e dek John Locke yeni kurulmakta olan Carolina kolonisinin toprak sahiplerine onların sekreteri olarak hizmet etti. İşverenlerinin arasında koruyucusu olan Shaftesbury kontu Anthony Ashley Cooper da bulunuyordu. Locke yine 1673-74 yıllarında English Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations için de sekreterlik ve haznedarlık yaptı. Yirmi yıl kadar sonra, 1696-1700 yılları arasında, bu kurumun ardılı olan Board of Trade’in sekreterliğini üstlendi. Bu görevler nedeniyle açıktır ki John Locke’un ülkesinin tecim ilişkileri ile ve kolonileri ile ilgili olgular konusunda birinci elden bilgisi vardı. Bütünüyle doğallıkla, politik kuramını bu kültürün tam ortasında ve onun uygulamalarını aklama uğruna geliştirdi. Bunların bir bölümü doğal hak ya da evrensel insan hakları kavramını açıkça çiğniyordu. John Locke nesnel bir çözümleme yapmaya çalışmış görünmez. Kavramlarını çevrenin kültüründen çekip çıkarıyordu. Gerçekte görgücülüğünün sığlığından ötürü herhangi bir nesnellik kaygısını yadsımak zorundaydı. Bu tutum koloniler ile ilişkileri ve işleri ile de uyum içinde idi.

 


•  LİNK



 

Locke Yeni Dünyaya göç etmeye ve köle tecimine başlamış olan İngiltere’ye yeni yapılanmaları organize etme, kolonilere kimlerin kabul edilip edilmeyeceği, onlarda demokrasinin gelişmesini önleyecek feodal bir örgütlenmenin nasıl oluşturulacağı konusunda yol gösterdi. Locke’un ‘liberalizmi’ gerçek özgürlük ve despotizm arasında bir via media gibi görünür, tıpkı din kavramının evrenselliğine aykırı bir ‘Anglikan’ Kilisesinin de Protestanlık ve Katoliklik arasında bir via media olması gibi. Bu ‘liberalizm’ temelinde politika politikanın kavramından uzaklaşır, evrensel insan haklarını gözardı eder, pragmatizme varır ve buna göre başarılı sonuçların onlara ulaşılmasını sağlayan araçları akladığı kabul edilir.

 

Locke’un öğretileri başta Anglo-Saxon üniversitelerde ve sonra bunların kuyruklarında olmak üzere bugün de politik felsefenin temel dersleri olarak öğretilmektedir. Baştan bir ‘liberal’ olarak kabul edilerek okunmakta, ve böyle ön-yargılı okuma bütünüyle açıkta yatan despotik ıvır zıvırı sansür etmektedir.

 

Locke’un ortaya sürdüğü görüşlere yanlış demek doğru değildir, çünkü yaptıkları yanlışlardan çok daha başka şeylerdir. Bir uslamlama yanlışı, düşüncenin tasımlar arasında yolunu yitirmesi olarak yanlışlık bir dürüstlük sorunu değil, bir dikkatsizlik sorunudur ve normal olarak gürültü patırtı koparmaya değmez. Ama Locke neyi aklayacağına ve neyi çürüteceğine baştan karar vermişti ve nesnel çıkarsamalar yapmaya çalışmak yerine uslamlamalarını bu ön-yargılara uyarlamaya çalıştı. Etik üzerine düşünen bir kafa kuramlarını etik-dışı yöntemler yoluyla türetiyordu.

 

Genç Locke açıkça yetkeci, ya da daha iyisi despotiktir, çünkü özgürlük bilincinden yoksundur. Olgun Locke Hobbes’un izinden gitmekten ve yasanın temelini tekerkin bireysel kaprisine dayandırmaktan vazgeçmiş görünür. Bundan böyle pozitif yasaların zemini “doğa yasası” ya da “us yasası”dır. Ama kullandığı sözcükler aldatıcıdır, çünkü demek istediğinin ne doğa ile ne de us ile bir ilgisi vardır. “Tam doğa yasası” dediği şeyin Yeni Ahit’te olduğunu, yalnızca tanrısal bildiriş olduğunu ileri sürmüştür. Bu ‘olgun’ Locke’dur.

§ 135. Thus the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions, must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the laws of nature, i. e. to the will of God, of which that is a declaration; and the “fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind,” no human sanction can be good or valid against it.

 

§ 136. For the law of nature being unwritten, and so no-where to be found, but in the minds of men.

 

Bunlar güzeldir; ama tabula rasa kuramına uymaz.

Tüm felsefecilerde sık sık ya dizgesel bağıntılar ile ilgili yanlışlıklar buluruz ya da dizge ile bütünüyle ilgisiz ve bağlantısız kişisel görüşler görürüz. Ve bunlar felsefe tarihinin ilerlemesi ile devasa saçmalıklardan uzaklaşır, sayıca azalır ve küçülür. Bilgide gelişmekte olduğumuza ve dolayısıyla bilgide geri olduğumuza göre, bir süre daha böyle düşe kalka ilerlemeyi sürdürmek kaçınılmazdır. Ama görgücülüğün ilerlemesine ‘ilerleme’ demek yerine daha iyi bir sözcük bulmak gerekir. Çünkü bir yandan duyusal-deneyim kökenli ‘bilgi’ evrenselin bilgisi ve dolayısıyla bilginin kendisi olamayacağı için entellektüel bir erekten ve bir ilerlemeden söz edemeyiz. Öte yandan görgücülük felsefe tarihine bilişsel bir erek için değil, özellikle bilmeme uğruna katılan düşünce eğilimidir.

 

Duyusal-algıyı bilginin kaynağı olarak alan sofistlik ile başlayan aynı yöntem modern dönemde İngiliz görgücülüğünde yeniden diriltilmiştir ve başlıca mantıksal pozitivizm ve analitik felsefe adları altında usdışını temsil etmekte, ussallığı çürütmekte, ve böyle yaparak ussal düşünceye olumsuz olarak hizmet etmektedir. Eğer görgücülük bu gri ve kirli işi üstlenmiş olmasaydı, bir tür sınama olan bu işi rasyonalistlerin üstlenmeleri gerekirdi.

 

Tabula rasa, ahlak ve politika
John Locke’a göre insan anlığı için “white paper, void of all characters” en uygun tanımlamadır. “All the materials of reason and knowledge” deneyimden türer. John Locke bir tabula rasa olarak insan anlığı kuramını geliştirmiştir. Bu pekala bir görüş olarak alınabilir, ve bir görüş olarak tanıtlamasız olduğu ve kişisel kanılara, eğilimlere, kuşkulara dayandığı için bir bilgi değerinde olmadığını anlamak güç değildir. Kültürde ‘görüşlerden’ bol birşey yoktur. Ama John Locke yalnızca bir görüş ileri sürmekle kalmaz, ileri sürdüğü görüşleri çürüterek onlara karşıt görüşleri de ileri sürer. Ve eleştirilerinin hedeflerini bu ikili oyun zemininde vurur.

 

Doğuştan düşünceler kuramını yadsımasına ve bu yadsımanın en önemli entellektüel çabasının, Denemesinin güdüsü olmasına karşın, aynı John Locke insandan “a rational creature” olarak söz etmede hiçbir sorun görmez. Ve bu yaratığın us yetisini duyusal-algı yoluyla nasıl kazanabildiğini açıklama gereğini bile duymaz. Çünkü John Locke’un insana doğuştan düşünceler vermeyi uygun görmeyen Tanrısı her nasılsa aynı insanı doğuştan bir us ile donatmayı gözardı etmemiştir. John Locke’un ‘tanrıbilimi’ Tanrıyı bile kızdıracak bir pozitivizmdir.

 

 

Görgücü ‘Ahlak Kuramı’
David Hume ahlak kuramını “haz ve acı” duyguları üzerine kurar — haz verenin iyi ve acı verenin kötü olması anlamında. Ve Hume durumunda her zaman olması gerektiği gibi, bu da kendi buluşu değildir. Locke’dan ödünç alınmıştır. Locke’a göre “şeyler ancak haz ve acı ile ilişki içinde iyi ve kötüdür” (Essay, II.20.2; ayrıca II.21.42).

Chap XX. § 1. Amongst the simple ideas, which we receive both from sensation and reflection, pain and pleasure are two very considerable ones.

§ 2. Things then are good or evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good, or absence of any evil. And on the contrary, we name that evil, which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us; or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good. By pleasure and pain, I must be understood to mean of body or mind, as they are commonly distinguished; though in truth they be only different constitutions of the mind, sometimes occasioned by disorder in the body, sometimes by thoughts of the mind.


Ahlak ve Duyunç
Ahlak için duyunç özgürlüğü saltık olarak özseldir, çünkü ahlak iyilik ve kötülük, doğruluk ve eğrilik, haksızlık ve haklılık ile ilgilidir ve duyunç bu kavramları yargıya dönüştüren, onları eylemlerimizin yüklemleri yapan yetimizdir. Duyunç özgürlüğü (‘inanç özgürlüğü’ başka birşeydir) duyuncun doğal itkilerden, dürtülerden, duygulardan özgürlüğünü öncülü olarak alır. Ama Locke’un görgücü yöntemi, bilgiyi iç ve dış deneyime bağlayan bilgikuramı ona ahlak alanında da pozitif olgulardan, duygulardan başlamaktan başka bir yol bırakmaz. Locke’a göre moral yargının temeli yalın olarak duygular, haz ve acı duygularıdır. Böyle temeller üzerine ancak bir hedonist etik, ancak yararcı etik kurulabilir. Ama bunlara ‘etik’ demek için ahlaksız ve duyunçsuz olmak zorunludur.

 

Duyunç en sonunda bütün bir etiğin, bütün bir edimsel aile, toplum ve devlet yapılarının ya da biçimlerinin de yargıcıdır, ve etik değişimler ve dönüşümler, ilerleme adını hak eden bütün bir tarihsel süreç duyuncun bir alışkanlık yapısı olan etik düzeni, aile, toplum ve devlet yapılarını yargılaması yoluyla yer alır. Politika birincil olarak ahlak üzerine dayanır. Ve Locke’un görgücülüğünde haz ve acı duygularının ‘yargısı’ üzerine dayanır.

 

İnsanlara hedonizm üzerine kurulu bir ‘ahlak kuramını,’ açıkça ahlaksızlık olan bir öğretiyi “ahlak felsefesi” olarak öğretmek olanaksızdır, çünkü doğal us bu saçmalığı anlayamaz ve doğrulayamaz. Böyle ‘felsefeler’ yalnızca bir kafanın aptallaşmasının güvencesidir — entellektüel olarak ve etik olarak. Locke’un kendisinin de hem kendi bilgi kuramını hem de kendi ahlak kuramını açıkça çiğnemesi ve düşüncelerini ve moral yargılarını doğal usunun işleyişine bırakarak saçmalaması onun da bu kuralın dışında olmadığını gösterir. İki İnceleme bir pozitif tanrıbilim meseli olarak yazılmıştır ve yitmeyen değerini büyük ölçüde insanların bu metinleri okumamalarına borçludur. Böyle metinlerde bilginin yeri banalite tarafından alınır. John Locke’un sözde felsefesi yalnızca henüz duyunçsuz ve ahlaksız bir kültürün felsefesidir. Ve John Locke’un politik felsefesi üzerine dayalı bir politik kültür sık sık düşük bir pragmatik politik kültürdür. Eğer modern dünyada türesizlik henüz ağır basıyorsa, eğer eşitsizlik çılgınlık boyutuna yükseliyorsa, bu türesizlik en sonunda bu kültürleri biçimlendiren din ve felsefe anlayışlarının kendilerini ilgilendirir. Çünkü her iki bilgelik türü de, halksal bilgelik olduğu gibi felsefi bilgelik de çoktandır demokrasinin özünün evrensel insan hakları düzeyinde eşitlik olduğunu göstermiştir.

 

Şubat 1689. Parlamento Willam ve Mary'ye tacı sunuyor.

 

İki ay sonra tahta çıktılar.

Yüzyılın başında İngiliz tekerki I. James (1603-25) Kralların Tanrısal Hakkı görüşünü ve buna göre dilediği gibi yönetmek için saltık hakkını ileri sürdü. Ondan sonra I. Charles (1625-49) kendi yönetimi sırasında aynı görüşü kabul etti. Bu durum politik gücü Tekerk ile paylaşan Parlamento ile çatışmasına ve bir İç Savaşa (1642-46) götürdü. Charles yenildikten sonra da tutumunu değiştirmediği için 1649'da Oliver Cromwell önderliğindeki New Model Army (Yeni Model Ordu) tarafından yargılandı ve idam edildi. Kısa bir süre için bir Cumhuriyet kuruldu, ama 1660'ta monarşi geri döndü. Yüzyılın sonunda Parlamento Glorious Revolution ile Kral üzerindeki gücünü kabul ettirdi ve William of Orange İngiltere Kralı oldu.

 

Locke 1689'da Hollanda'dan geri döndü ve An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises on Government, ve A Letter concerning Toleration başlıklı çalışmalarını yayımladı. Londra'da ayrıca Isaac Newton ile görüştü.

 
 

 

 

Birinci İnceleme
Sir Robert Filmer’ın 1680’de yayımlanan Patriarcha’sında sunulan “kralların tanrısal hakkı” kuramına karşı yazılmıştır. Bu kurama göre, her kral Adem’den türeyişi yoluyla aklanan tanrısal bir yetke taşır. Adem İncil’e göre ilk kral ve insanlığın babasıdır. Locke Filmer’ın öğretisini herhangi bir tarihsel kayıt ya da başka herhangi bir kanıt yoluyla desteklenemeyeceği zemininde çürütür. Ayrıca Tanrı ve Adem arasındaki herhangi bir sözleşme soyun binlerce yıl sonraki üyeleri üzerinde bağlayıcı olmayacaktır, üstelik böyle bir soyağacını saptamak olanaklı olsa bile.

 

İkinci İnceleme
‘Politik güç’ ölüm cezalarını ve daha hafif cezaları da kapsamak üzere Yasalar yapma hakkı olarak kabul edilir. Böyle yasaların amacı mülkiyeti düzenlemek ve korumak, devleti yabancıların verebileceği zarara karşı savunmak, ve tüm bunları kamu iyiliği için yerine getirmektir.

 

John Locke’un hükümet ve mülkiyet arasında kurduğu ilişki Adam Smith tarafından yinelenir.

 

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” — Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part II.

 

 

Locke’un “doğa durumu”nda insanlar bütünüyle özgürdür. Ama bu özgürlük bir tam serbestlik durumu değildir, çünkü "doğa yasası"nın sınırları içindedir. (Locke'un doğa durumu dediği şey doğa durumu değil ama bir kültür durumudur, çünkü doğa durumu hayvanın durumudur.) Sürdürürsek, doğa durumunda insanlar tam bir eşitlik içindedirler ve Filmer'ın görüşüne aykırı olarak insanlar arasında bir doğal hiyerarşi yoktur. Doğa yasası altında her bir kişi özgür ve eşittir ve yalnızca "sonsuz ölçüde bilge Yapıcının/the infinitely wise Maker" istenci altında durur. Her bir kişinin bu yasayı yerine getirmesi ve ona boyun eğmesi gerekir. Bu ödev insanlara suç işleyenleri cezalandırma hakkını verir. Ama açıktır ki böyle bir doğa durumunda cezalandırma hakkını her bir kişinin ellerine bırakmak haksızlığa ve şiddete götürebilir. Bu durum ancak insanlar birbirleri ile bir bağıt ya da sözleşme ilişkisine girerlerse düzeltilebilir. Bu sözleşmeye göre yurttaşlar ortak onay ile bir yurttaş hükümetini tanıyacaklar ve hükümet devletin yurttaşları arasında doğa yasasını yürürlüğe koyacaktır.

 

Locke sözleşmenin (contract) keyfi olduğunu, insanların sözleşmelere girmeyebileceklerini, genel olarak bir sözleşme ilişkisine girme gibi birşeyin zorunluk içermediğini dikkate almaz. Ayrıca her sözleşmenin kendisinin daha yüksek bir yasa altında durması gerektiğini de dikkate almaz.

 

Yasa bir evrensel hak sorunu olduğu düzeye dek bir sözleşme sorunu olamaz. Yasa kavramı evrensellik ve zorunluk içerir. Sözleşme kavramı tikellik ve olumsallık içerir.

 

Locke’un mülkiyet kuramı tüm kuramları arasında en çarpıcı olanlar arasındadır, çünkü mülkiyetin ancak emek yoluyla olanaklı olduğunu ileri sürer (ve aynı zamanda “life, liberty and property”den “doğal haklar” olarak söz eder). Locke’a göre, bir nesne ancak birinin emeği ile karışmış ise o kişinin mülkiyeti olabilir. Geyiği öldüren yerli onu öldürmekle us yasasına göre geyiğin mülkiyetini kazanır, çünkü öldürme bir tür ‘emek’tir. Amerikan yerlilerine mülkiyet hakkını yadsımazken, yazdığı Anayasada gördüğümüz gibi, pamuk tarlasını eken ve ürünü toplayan Afrikalı için böyle bir hakkı dikkate almaz.

 

İkinci İnceleme:

§ 26. The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, or so his, i. e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life.


§ 30. Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian’s who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it.

 

Gene de bu hakkı çürütecek durumlar da vardır, çünkü ‘doğa durumu’nda yaşayan yerlilerin mülkiyet haklarının olup olmadığı belirsizdir:

 

§ 34. God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it), not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.

 

Doğa durumunda geçerli olması gereken bu mülkiyet kuramı ‘tembel ve usdışı’ oldukları düzeye dek, ya da ‘yabanıl’ oldukları düzeye dek Amerikan yerlilerinin topraklarını ellerinden alma hakkını aklamak için bütünüyle uygundur. Yine bu kurama göre, yerliler tarafından kullanılmayan toprakları eken ve biçen kolonistler de toprağa emeklerini kattıkları düzeye dek onu kendi mülkiyetleri yapmaktadır.

 

 

PHILIP ABRAMS (Cambridge University); JOHN LOCKE, TWO TRACTS ON GOVERNMENT

 

“The Lovelace Collection of Locke manuscripts acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1947 contains some 2,700 letters and about 1,000 miscellaneous items including notebooks, j ournals, accounts, academic exercises and drafts of several of Locke’s published works.

 

“One of these writings (MS Locke e. 7) is in English and has the title, Question: whether the Civill Magistrate may lawfully impose and determine the use of indifferent things in reference to Religious Worship.”

 

 

Despota Hoşgörü



Yeterli olarak yetkili kılındığı için, magisterin buyrukları yasalardır. Yasalar oldukları için, onlara boyun eğilmelidir. Locke yasayı bütünüyle keyfi bir yolda tanımlar. Yasaya yasa gücünü veren şey onu uygulayanın istencidir.

John Rogers despotizm ve liberalizm arasında bir ayrım olmadığını, aslında bir birlik olduğunu düşünür: “Despite their diverse subject-matter, there is an intellectual unity in Locke’s work not always appreciated by his commentators.” (Locke, 1994, 1)

Bir Yasalar Hiyerarşisi



En yüksek düzeyde tanrısal yasa vardır ve bunlar doğrudan doğruya Tanrının istenci tarafından ya tanrısal bildirişler (tanrısal pozitif yasa) olarak ya da usun ilkeleri (tanrısal doğal yasa) olarak verilen normlar ve temel moral ilkelerdir. Bu yasanın kapsamı dışında kalan herşey ilgisizdir ve kullanımı serbesttir. Bu yasanın altında insan ya da yurttaş yasaları, sonra Hıristiyanlara özgü olan “kardeşlik yasası/fraternal law” vardır. Son olarak kişisel ya da özel yasa gelir. Locke’un “yasa” tasarımında yasa kavramında olan hiçbirşey yoktur: “İlgisiz” dediği normlar da yasa, ama olumsal yasalardır; ve yasanın evrenselliği Locke için en ilgisiz konudur. Bir felsefeci değil, düşünen her insan yasanın evrensel ve zorunlu olması gerektiğini bilir.

Yasaların Yetkesinin Kaynağı



Magister tanrısal istencin uygulayıcısı olarak doğrudan doğruya Tanrı tarafından yetkili kılınır. Tanrının istenci ya gizemlidir (doğal yasa) ya da kutsal yazılarda bildirilmiştir. Bu yasalar kaynaklarını insanın özgür istencinde bulmadığı için, yasa tanrısal istencin temsilcisi olan magisterin, bir insanın yüksek istencine boyun eğilmesini ve kişinin kendi istencinden vazgeçmesini gerektirir. Locke Hobbes’un devlet kuramını yineler.

Pozitif Yasa ve Ahlak



“ That were there no law there would be no moral good or evil ...”

Locke’un sözlerini sözel olarak alırsak, yasa, ahlak, iyi ve kötü terimlerini yorumlamadan anlarsak, Ahlak bir Yasa sorunudur, ve İyi ve Kötü yasalar tarafından belirlenir. Bu görüş saçma, ama Locke’un doğuştan düşünceleri reddeden bilgi anlayışı ile tutarlıdır. Yasa ile anladığı şey, ister tekerkin keyfi istenci olsun, isterse Yeni Ahit’te bildirilmiş olsun, pozitiftir.

Metaetik ya da Yasaların Zemini




John Locke, Tract

Magisterin Keyfi (= Saltık) Yetkisi



Tract’larda şunlar vardır: “... the supreme magistrate of every nation what way soever created, must necessarily have an absolute and arbitrary power over all the indifferent actions of his people.” (İtalikler Locke’un.) Two Treatise’de söylenenler başka türlüdür: “Absolute monarchy is indeed inconsistent with civil society” (II, Sect. 90ff.).

George Santayana



George Santayana started a lecture on Locke saying that a good portrait of him “should be painted in the manner of the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all the implements of domestic comforts and philosophical enquiry: the Holy Bible open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation—the terrestrial globe.” (Santayana, 1933, p. 1).

John Locke Hıristiyanlığın bütün bir pozitif yanının “ussal” olarak gösten bir çalışma da üretti: The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures.

Zaman zaman Euklides’in geometrisine benzer bir tümdengelimli bir etik dizgesi üretmenin ilkede olanaklı olduğunu ileri sürmesine karşın, böyle bir girişimde bulunmadı.

Hıristiyanlık Üzerine



John Locke “spent the last years of his productive life to better understand the Holy Scriptures and explaining the benefits of Christianity, as well as becoming a great champion of theology. This was a science that stood ‘incomparably above all the rest’, which has as its scope ‘the honour and veneration of the Creator, and the happiness of mankind. This is that noble study which is every man’s duty, and every one that can be called a rational creature is capable of.’ (Locke, [1697] 1802, p. 72). Locke added: ‘This is that science which would truly enlarge men’s minds, were it studied, or permitted to be studied everywhere with that freedom, love of truth, and charity which it teaches, and were not made, contrary to its nature, the occasion of strife, faction, malignity, and narrow impositions.’ (Locke, [1697] 1802, p. 73)

Evde Kutsamalar



He also lived his faith well, according to an unnamed biographer, “‘as he was incapable for a considerable time of going to church, he thought proper to receive the sacrament at home, and two of his friends communicated with him; as soon as the office was finished, he told the minister that he was in the sentiments of perfect charity towards all men, and of a sincere union with the Church of Christ, under whatever name distinguished.” The same biographer states that he spent his time “in ‘acts of piety and devotion’ exhorting those at his bed-side that this life should only be regarded as a preparation for a better.” (Locke [1697] 1802, p. vii)

Joseph Mallord William Turner’s “Slave Ship” (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) (W)
🔎


  Liberalizm

 

John Locke hem bir aydın hem de liberal midir?

 

Bir ideoloji olarak Liberalizmin ilk kez Aydınlanma Çağında ortaya çıktığı görüşü Aydınlanmanın liberal ya da özgürlükçü bir programı olduğu anlamına gelmez. Özgürlük modern dönemin birincil belirlenimidir. Aydınlanma ön-moderndir, çünkü despotik-kraliyetçi bir programı vardır. Aydınlanma ilerlemenin aydın despotların istenci yoluyla olacağını kabul ediyordu.

 

Aydınlanma felsefecileri başlıca "doğal hak" kavramına saldırdılar, çünkü ancak "pozitif hak" varolabilirdi ve görgücü programlar salt bir "gerek" olanın, bir "dir" olmayanın "metafiziksel" ve deneyim-ötesi olduğunu kabul ediyorlardı.

 

Liberalizmin bir "ideoloji" olduğu görüşü "özgürlük" ve "eşitlik" kavramlarının ideolojik terimler olarak kabul edilmesini gerektirir. Dahası, "Doğal Hak" ya da "Evrensel İnsan Hakları" kavramının da ideolojik ya da tarihsel bir kurgu olduğu çıkarsamasına götürür. Buna karşı, ideolojinin başlıca karakteristiği "doğal hak" kavramını yadsıması ve politik bir Partinin tikel bir kavram çevresinde belirlenen politik programını ileri sürmesidir. Bu ideolojik programlar özgürlük ve eşitlik kavramlarının ya da bunların anlatımı olan yurttaş toplumu kavramının reddedilmesi ve devrilmesi uğruna belirlenir. İdeoloji kurtarıcılık karakteri nedeniyle de modern politika kavramı ile bağdaşmaz ve evrensel istenci tanımaz. Reddettiği "Evrensel İnsan Doğası" kavramını çiğneyen tikel programına göre doğal değil yapay, ussal değil usdışı bir "toplum" ve "devlet" yapısı kurmayı hedefler. Tikel programında istence ve özgürlüğe karşı çabaladığı için, ideoloji kaçınılmaz olarak zor ve şiddet üzerine dayanmak zorundadır.

 

Özgürlük ve eşitlik kavramları hiç kuşkusuz monarşi, kralların saltık hakkı, aristokrasi, teokrasi, kalıtsal ayrıcalık, devlet dini gibi ön-modern kavramları olumsuzlar. Ama bunları bir ideoloji uğruna olumsuzlamazlar.

 

"Liberalizm" çoğunlukla Anglo-Saxon kültür bağlamında kullanılan bir propaganda terimidir ve özellikle John Locke’un "a distinct philosophical tradition" olarak görülen politik felsefesi için ayrılır. Ama John Locke'un Evrensel İnsan Haklarının bilincinde olmaması nedeniyle bu görüş de bir propaganda değerini taşır.

 

Özgürlük ve eşitlik kavramlarını ve "doğal hakkı" anlattığı düzeye dek, "Liberalizmin" yararcılık üzerine kurulduğu görüşü "yararcı-etik" denilen etiğin bir etik olmaması nedeniyle geçersizdir. Yararlığın birincilliği öncülü özgürlük, eşitlik, doğal hak gibi kavramları çiğner. Liberalizm ancak "kapitalizm" olarak anlaşılırsa yararcı-etik kavramına izin verir. Ama "kapitalizm" kapitalin birincilliği ideolojisidir.

 

Doğal Hakların ya da Evrensel İnsan Haklarının bilincinin kazanılması özgürlük bilincinin kazanılması ile aynı şeyi anlatır. İnsanın ussal özgür istenci onun yaratacağı etik düzenin biricik belirleyicisi, ve İnsanın moral özü onun kuracağı etik biçimin biricik yargıcıdır. Hak kavramı insan özüne özünlü olarak evrenseldir ve eşitlik, özgürlük, yasa, demokrasi kavramlarının başlangıç noktasıdır. Kavramın tarihsel olarak aşamalı edimselleşmesi Hayek'e bir "kendiliğindenlik" olarak görünür. Ama bu sığ kavramın kullanımında diretmesi Hayek'in kafasını karıştırır ve düşüncelerini sık sık çocuksu uslamlamalara indirger.

 

 

Hayek ve "Kendiliğinden Düzen"

Hayek'in "kendiliğindenlik" ilkesi dediği şey etik sürecin gelişiminin boşa çıkabileceği ve "tutuculuğa" saplanabileceği gibi bir kuşkuyu barındırır, çünkü bu bütünüyle genel "kendiliğndenlik" terimi istenç ve ereksellik arasındaki bağıntıyı göstermez. Hayek’in kuramcılığı naivliğini — tıpkı onu sunan yorum gibi — önemli ölçüde ideolojik, dizgesiz ve dolayısıyla tanıtlamasız olmasına borçludur.

 

 

 

 

 

  Klasik Liberalizm

 

İdeolojik bir "liberalizm" teriminin insan doğası kavramını doğrulayan ve aynı zamanda yadsıyan çelişkili karakteri "klasik liberalizm" gibi ikinci bir çarpık terimin doğmasına götürdü ve bununla "liberalizmin" bir ideoloji olarak daha tutarlı bir içerik kazanması amaçlandı. İdeolojik olarak düşünen bir bilinç şunları yazdı:

 

Classical liberals believe that individuals are "egoistic, coldly calculating, essentially inert and atomistic" and that society is no more than the sum of its individual members. Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from each other and that the purpose of government should be to minimize conflict between individuals that would otherwise arise in a state of nature.

 


 

 

 

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT
DAVID ARMITAGE

 



John Locke "bireyciliğin" kurucusu olarak da görülür. Bireycilik bireye hakkını vermekten daha çoğunu yapar ve ilk olarak onu toplum karşısında birincilleştirir. "Birey" hiç kuşkusuz "yurttaş" ile aynı şey değildir. Ama ikisi de özgürlüğün realitesidir. Bireyselliğin gelişmesi insan potansiyelinin gelişmesidir ve doğal olarak özgür politik durum içinde olanaklıdır. Ama “bireycilik” tam olarak karşıtı olan “toplumculuk” gibi tek-yanlı bir aşırılıktır, ve başkasını hiç sayan bencilliğe doğru gider. Bireycilik bir ideoloji olarak toplumculuk ile çarpışır. "Kapitalizm," "liberalizm," "klasik liberalizm" gibi ideolojiler böyle bir bireyciliğin anlatımlarıdır.

John Locke
The Works of John Locke, vol. 4
Economic Writings and Two Treatises of Government [1691]


 

CHAPTER XI.
Of The Extent Of The Legislative Power.

§ 134. The great end of men’s entering into society being the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety, and the great instrument and means of that being the laws established in that society; the first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power; as the first and fundamental natural law, which is to govern even the legislative itself, is the preservation of the society, and (as far as will consist with the public good) of every person in it. This legislative is not only the supreme power of the commonwealth, but sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community have once placed it; nor can any edict of any body else, in what form soever conceived, or by what power soever backed, have the force and obligation of a law, which has not its sanction from that legislative which the public has chosen and appointed; for without this the law could not have that, which is absolutely necessary to its being a law,* the consent of the society; over whom nobody can have a power to make laws, but by their own consent, and by authority received from them. And therefore all the obedience, which by the most solemn ties any one can be obliged to pay, ultimately terminates in this supreme power, and is directed by those laws which it enacts; nor can any oaths to any foreign power whatsoever, or any domestic subordinate power, discharge any member of the society from his obedience to the legislative, acting pursuant to their trust; nor oblige him to any obedience contrary to the laws so enacted, or farther than they do allow; it being ridiculous to imagine one can be tied ultimately to obey any power in the society, which is not supreme.


Leibniz, Not Locke, Inspired The Declaration of Independence

🛑 Leibniz, Not Locke, Inspired The Declaration of Independence

Editorial Note:
Why we reprint this article

 

It's the Fourth of July, and most Americans will celebrate the founding of our nation in some way. Yet, tragically, these same Americans, thanks to the degradation of history and culture in this country, for approximately the last 100 years, know almost nothing about the revolutionary principles of the birth of our republic.

Although our nation was established in a self-conscious effort to build the first sovereign nation-state based on Christian principles, against the British Empire’s feudal oligarcy, most people today believe the popular myth that our founding was based on a tax revolt!

For that reason, we are reprinting here, a significant excerpt of a report published in the Executive Intelligence Review of December 1, 1995. This report provided detailed historical documentation of an argument which is of vital importance to understanding this nation: the United States was founded on the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, not John Locke and Isaac Newton.

Why is this history so important? Becuase, without recapturing the soul of the United States in the principles and ideas of Gottfried Leibniz and the Platonic Golden Renaissance, not only our nation, but the entire world, faces extinction. The enemy of humanity, and our nation, is still the oligarchy centered in the British Isles, committed to suppressing mankind's impulse of creativity and progress. The only nation ever established as a conscious counter to that oligarchy, was the United States. And to save the United States, you must recapture the ideas which will defeat that oligarchy, in the days, months, and years ahead.

 


Leibniz, Not Locke, Inspired The Declaration of Independence

 

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

 

One of the most persistent, destructive historical myths, is the one which claims that the American revolution against Britain was inspired by British liberal philosophy.

The original documents of U.S. history show, that, excepting those Presidents who were sympathetic to the New England opium-runners or the pro-slavery faction, the United States government recognized the British monarchy as the principal enemy of the United States, from our 1776 Declaration of Independence, until 1901. Even as late as the middle 1930s, the U.S. maintained a plan for war against British aggression, “War Plan Red.” The leaders of both sides, the Americans and the British, recognized then, that the 1776-1783 U.S. war for independence was the consequence of an irreconcilable conflict over fundamental issues of political and moral principle, the same issues of the 1940-1945 war-time conflict between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the conflict which persists to this present day.

Later, during the incumbencies of two Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, each a shamelessly overt admirer of the tradition of the Confederacy, a lying myth was fabricated. That myth proposes, that the American Revolution was merely the accidental result of excessively bad British government policy at the time, not the consequence of a fundamental conflict in political and moral philosophies. That myth was employed to justify a “special relationship,” with our ancient enemy, Britain. This “special relationship,” launched under those two rabidly Anglophile Presidents, paved the way to two world wars, economic depression, and the continuing genocides of the Twentieth Century.

The hub of falsehood around which that Anglophile’s myth revolves, is the baseless supposition: that the strongest influences on the American founders include the political philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), and his predecessor Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), as well as the allegedly rational-scientific system of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In this report, we examine some of the documentary proof, that exactly the opposite was true. The characteristic belief of the leading Americans, as typified by the case of Benjamin Franklin, was their commitment to eradicate any influence of Locke or Hobbes upon the law and political institutions of these United States....


 

Locke and Newton as Enemies of America

 

The American Revolution was directed, not only against the corrupt ideology of Locke and Newton, but also against the very institutions and policies which both of them had personally labored to establish. Locke, especially, was a dedicated and declared enemy of American liberties, and of every principle of justice and morality upon which a republican form of government may be founded.

Locke was a prototype for the well-paid populist “neo-conservative” demagogue. He managed to amplify simple-minded populist nostrums--such as “balanced budget,” “free market,” and “free trade”--into shameless justifications for each and every crime of the British Empire. During his career as an imperialist functionary and propagandist, Locke advocated, among other wickedness: usury, feudalism, black chattel slavery, white slavery (serfdom), and forced child labor; and the unbridled taxation, exploitation, and political repression of the American colonies.

A crucial step towards the creation of Locke's and Newton's Empire was accomplished in 1694, with the foundation of a private corporation called the “Governor and Company of the Bank of England.” The Bank was intended by its chief controllers, the financier Charles Montague (made Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694) and his Dutch backers, to be the sole creditor of the English monarchy in its continuous wars against France--and to thereby achieve a financial stranglehold over state policy. As government debt zoomed upward, secured by future revenues, so would looting of the colonies, via the land tax, malt tax, stamp tax, and other oppressive measures, later excoriated in the Declaration of Independence.

However, until its 1714 defeat, with the death of Queen Anne, a powerful “national party” opposed to imperialism still existed in England, and rallied around the political figures of Jonathan Swift and English patriot Robert Harley. Harley's parliamentary faction launched a series of bold economic and political initiatives, directly counter to the imperialist design. These included:

  1. proposing legislation, in 1691, to limit interest rates to 4%;
  2. establishing a Public Accounts Commission of the House of Commons, to investigate corrupt practices of the City of London financial district and its agents in government;
  3. causing the publication in 1696 of Daniel DeFoe’s “Essays Upon Several Projects,” which attacked the Bank of England, and proposed that it be placed under “public authority”:
    • “[A] bank might be very beneficial to this kingdom; and this might be so if either their own ingenuity or public authority would oblige them to take the public good into equal concern with their private interest.
    • “To explain what I mean:--

      “Banks being established by public authority, ought also, as all public things are, to be under limitations and restrictions from that authority, and those limitations and restrictions being regulated with a proper regard to the ease of trade in general and the improvement of the stock in particular, would make a bank a useful, profitable thing indeed.” (see note, below)

DeFoe also insisted that interest rates be limited to 4%.

4. the authorization, by Parliament, of a National Land Bank in February 1696, designed as a direct competitor and alternative to the Bank of England. The commissioners of the Land Bank were mandated to raise a sum of £2,564,000, to be loaned to the goverment at 7% interest, and secured by a tax on salt. In exchange for the loan, the subscribers would be granted a corporate charter.

However, the sole financial operation of the Bank (required by law as DeFoe had demanded), would be to lend at least £500,000 annually on the security of land, at a maximum rate of interest of 4%. The Land Bank was intended as a government-regulated source of low-cost credit for the improvement of farming, and for the construction of homes and factories, to undercut and destroy the money monopoly of the Bank of England.

By the end of 1696, each of these economic initiatives had been crushed by the imperialist forces, and the Bank of England's monopoly secured by an Act of Parliament. One last hope remained yet, to strangle the new Empire in the cradle--the “Leibniz card.”

 


 

Leibniz Becomes the Rallying Point

 

Basing itself upon Leibniz's exhaustive historical and legal researches since his 1676 appointment as court librarian in Hanover, the Harley faction passed the Act of Settlement in March 1701--providing that the House of Hanover should succeed to the English throne upon the death of the childless Queen Anne. With his brilliant student, the Electress Sophia, thus next in line to become Queen of England, Leibniz became the rallying-point of republican forces all over the English-speaking world, including the American colonies.

Throughout all this, the evil, grasping Locke (himself a founding investor in the Bank of England), together with the pathetic misanthrope Newton, each revealed himself as eager lackeys of the Empire, and enemies of American liberties.

To counter proposals to limit interest rates, Locke was commissioned to produce a propaganda tract in defense of usury. His 1691 booklet, “Some considerations of the Consequences of lowering the Interest and raising the Value of money,” argues that any law capping interest rates must fail, since it will always be evaded and violated by the rich. Shedding crocodile tears, Locke argues that such a law “will be a prejudice to none, but those who most need assistance and help; I mean widows and orphans, and others uninstructed in the arts and management of more skillful men....”

That Locke was speaking from personal knowledge on this score, is indicated by one biographer, who references a large sum of money lent by Locke to a David Thomas, who subsequently died. “There were complaints by Mrs. Thomas,” the account continues, “that Locke had demanded too much interest” . The widow, however, paid up.

Invoking the “free market,” Locke insists that the rich man has the right to charge the “natural interest” for his idle money, without interference by government or moral considerations, and goes on to ridicule the idea that low interest rates would encourage economic growth through investment in agriculture and manufacture. He rejects production as a source of wealth, in favor of mere buying and selling, using populist “balanced budget” jargon:

“It is with a kingdom as with a family. Spending less than our commodities will pay for, is the sure and only way for the nation to grow rich.”

 

Accordingly, Locke argues that England can only accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest of the world, through control of world trade. Commerce, he says, will do for England what conquest did for Rome:

“In a country not furnished with mines, there are but two ways of growing rich, either conquest or commerce. By the first the Romans made themselves masters of the riches of the world; but I think that, in our present circumstances, nobody is vain enough to entertain a thought of our reaping the profits of the world with our swords....

“Commerce, therefore, is the only way left to us...” .

Four years later, Chancellor of the Exchequer Montague again called upon Locke, to develop a scheme designed to financially bankrupt the anti-imperialists and sabotage the National Land Bank. This became the “Great Recoinage.”

When a financial crisis hit England in 1695, within a year of the founding of the Bank of England, Montague blamed the “clipping” of English coins for the country's economic problems. “Clipping” was a long-standing form of counterfeiting, which simply involved cutting off the edges of silver coins, and melting the collected clippings into bullion.

Harley's national party, represented by Secretary of the Treasury William Lowndes, proposed to solve the problem with the minimum disruption of the economy. Arguing correctly that the value of the currency should be regulated in the best interest of the nation, Lowndes proposed that the Mint produce new milled coins 25% lighter in silver content than the existing standard, so that a new shilling would have about the same silver content as a clipped shilling in circulation. Holders of clipped coins could then simply surrender them into the Mint for an equal face value of new money, and go about their business.

Locke responded with his “Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money,” denouncing Lowndes for “defrauding” landlords and creditors, and demanding that the Mint produce new coins containing the full silver content of the existing standard. He insisted, therefore, that someone holding 100 clipped coins, should turn them in to the Mint and receive only 75 new ones in return! Locke was demanding that the savings of the average Englishman be cut by 25% or more in one stroke.

Montague introduced legislation based on Locke's plan, which passed into law on Jan. 21, 1696. The scheme provided that clipped money would no longer be recognized as legal tender as of May 4, 1696, to be replaced by new money at an undetermined future date.

To manage his recoinage, Montague required an unscrupulous individual, who would not shrink from impoverishing his poor countrymen, and ruthless enough to enforce the penalty of death against alleged counterfeiters. He also required someone of sufficient reputation, to thwart the vigilant investigators of Harley's Public Accounts Commission. Accordingly, Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint on April 13, 1696. For the next three years, Newton managed the recoinage, personally handling the prosecution of even the pettiest counterfeiter, advocating the death penalty wherever possible, opposing all pardons or remissions, and eventually being rewarded with the lucrative post of Master of the Mint in 1699, which he held until the end of his life.

The National Land Bank legislation passed into law on April 27, one week before much of the money in the kingdom was scheduled to be removed from circulation by Newton's Mint. The Land Bank predictably failed to fulfill its subscription, and passed out of existence.

 


 

Locke’s War Against America

 

As the imperialist faction seized control of English finances, it turned its attention towards the colonies. American leader--such as the Winthrops and Mathers in Massachusetts, and William Penn and James Logan in Pennsylvania--had taken full advantage of the political turbulence within England, to promote colonial self-government and independent economic development. This included the creation of a government-issued paper currency in Massachusetts for the promotion of farming and manufactures, an “American System” of economics later developed by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and enshrined by them in Article One, Section Eight of the U.S. Constitution.

For these American leaders, the colonies were “as a city upon a hill” (John Winthrop), and “the seeds of nations” (William Penn). Locke's faction was determined to assault that hill, and destroy that city.

A royal patent was issued May 15, 1696 to establish a commission of trade and plantations, also known as the Board of Trade. This Board was to control British policy towards America, as well as all other British possessions throughout the world, enforcing the very policy of looting, exploitation, and inhumanity which led to the American Revolution. The Board was officially abolished in 1782, but the policy continued in other forms up to the present day.

Ironically for those deluded souls who accept the myth of Locke's influence upon the ideas of American independence, the same John Locke was appointed a founding member of the Board of Trade, and proved himself the greatest imperialist and most implacable enemy of America.

Locke had revealed his intense hostility to American liberties almost 30 years before, as a paid functionary of the aristocrat Lord Ashley, later the First Earl of Shaftesbury. When King Charles II revoked all earlier patents, and granted the territory of Carolina to eight “lords proprietors,” including Ashley, Locke became the company's chief secretary. In that capacity, he wrote the “Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina” in 1669, an abominable plan to transplant European-style feudalism to America.

Locke's preamble stated: “that we may avoid erecting a numerous democracy;” Locke's “constitution” established the eight lords proprietors as a hereditary nobility, with absolute control over their serfs, called “leet-men”:

“XIX: Any lord of a manor may alienate, sell, or dispose to any other person and his heirs forever, his manor, all entirely together, with all the privileges and leet-men there unto belonging....

“XXII: In every signory, barony and manor, all the leet-men shall be under the jurisdiction of the respective lords of the said signory, barony, or manor, without appeal from him. Nor shall any leet-man, or leet-woman, have liberty to go off from the land of their particular lord, and live anywhere else, without license from their said lord, under hand and seal.

“XXIII: All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations.”

Black chattel slavery received particular sanction and protection under Locke's law:
“CX: Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”

 

From 1672-74, Locke served as secretary of King Charles II's Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations (at the same time profiting from personal investments in trade with the Bahamas). Locke's Council passed the infamous Navigation Acts, enforced by the punitive Plantation Duties Act of 1673, imposing onerous taxes on colonial trade, restricting it to English vessels, and prohibiting trade with foreign countries by requiring that all colonial goods be shipped “to England, or Wales, or the town of Berwick upon Tweed, and to no other place, and there to unload and put the same on shore.”

Throughout this period, Massachusetts remained in the forefront of American resistance to Lockean oppression, under the inspired leadership of Increase and Cotton Mather. When the Crown's agent Edward Randolph demanded submission to the Navigation Acts, and the effective revocation of the Massachusetts charter, Increase Mather warned his countrymen: “We shall sin against God if we vote an affirmative to it.” He attacked the Crown's demands as a “Plot then managing to produce a General Shipwreck of Liberties,” and as “inconsistent with the main end of their fathers' coming to New England.... Let them put their trust in the God of their fathers, which is better than to put confidence in princes.”

 


 

Franklin Sent to James Logan’s Philadelphia

 

Massachusetts was finally forced to submit to royal domination in 1691, a disaster which later led Cotton Mather to deploy his young protégé Benjamin Franklin out of Boston, to James Logan's Philadelphia.

With Locke's appointment as a Commissioner of Trade in 1696, proposals for a more vigorous subjugation of America were generated at a furious pace, including suppression of colonial paper currencies, and the appointment of a royal prosecutor in each American colony under the personal direction of Locke's crony Edward Randolph, the same tyrant earlier deployed against Massachusetts.

A new Navigation Act was promptly passed in 1696, adding strict enforcement provisions targeting the alleged “artifice and cunning of ill-disposed persons.” Locke's scheme included:

  • requiring all colonial governors and commanders in chief to “take a solemn oath” to enforce the letter of the law, upon the penalty of a massive fine and removal from office;
  • granting customs officials broad powers of search and seizure;
  • declaring that all colonial “laws, by-laws, usages or customs” contrary to the Act “are illegal, null and void, to all intents and purposes whatsoever....”
  • authorizing customs officials to “constitute and appoint such and so many officers of the customs in any city, town, river, port, harbour, or creek, ... when and as often as to them shall seem needful....”
  • permitting juryless vice-admiralty courts to try cases arising under the Act;
  • explicitly prohibiting colonial trade with Scotland and Ireland, along with all foreign countries, “unless the same have been first landed in the kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick upon Tweed, and paid the rates and duties wherewith they are chargeable by law, under the penalty of the forfeiture of the ship and goods....'

 

Locke's Navigation Act was quickly followed by the Woolen Act of 1699, prohibiting the export of all woolen products from America, along with other measures designed to suppress colonial manufacturing, and force the colonies to remain a source of cheap raw materials for the mother country.

Soon after his retirement from the Board of Trade for reasons of health, Locke's anti-American policy was totally endorsed in the Board's infamous Report of March 26, 1701, which demanded revocation of all American colonial charters and imposition of direct imperial rule.

So, far from inspiring the ideas of American independence, John Locke and his faction, including Newton, were responsible for initiating that “long train of abuses and usurpations,” leading to the revolution against the very empire which they had worked to create.

In fact, the Declaration of Independence specifically condemned several of the despotic measures originally imposed by Locke himself, as later enforced by King George III and the British Parliament, “all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States”:

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation;... For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world; for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent; For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury;... For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments; For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.”

 

John Locke's theoretical writings also reveal him as the consummate philosopher of Oligarchy, on the model of Venice, as Hobbes was the philosopher of Tyranny, both being virulent opponents of republican ideas.

The classic definition of oligarchy was provided by Plato in his dialogue The Republic, as, “The regime founded on a property assessment, in which the rich rule and the poor man has no part in ruling office.”

Locke could not be more explicit. His major political treatise, the 1690 “Essay Concerning The True Original Extent And End Of Civil Government” (written to justify the overthrow of the hereditary monarch James II in the 1688 “Glorious Revolution”), purports to prove that “government has no other end but the preservation of property.”

Locke argues that Man once existed in a dog-eat-dog “state of Nature,” like Hobbes's “war of each against all.” Instead of subjecting himself to the will of one man--the tyrannical monarch of Hobbes's Leviathan--“he seeks out and is willing to join in society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name--property.

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property, to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting.”

 

And further:

“The great end of men's entering into society being the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety.... to preserve their lives, liberties, and fortunes, and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet.... For the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society ... to preserve the members of that society in their lives, liberties, and possessions.... The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property....”

And so forth ad nauseam.

 


 

 

Locke’s Defense of Human Slavery

 

On this basis, Locke creates a cold-blooded justification of human slavery, by insisting that a person without property has no rights at all:

“These men having, as I say, forfeited their lives and, with it, their liberties, and lost their estates, and being in the state of slavery not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.”

 

That Locke was an inveterate enemy of the concept of inalienable human rights, and an unabashed oligarchist, is also seen in his wicked project for enslaving the poor of England.

As the economic policies of Locke's imperial faction impoverished the country at an accelerating rate, the streets had become filled with whole families of destitute beggars. Accordingly, the original royal commission for the Board of Trade required it “to consider of some proper methods for setting on worke and employing the Poore of Our said Kingdome, and making them useful to the Publick, and thereby easeing Our Subjects of that Burthen...” (original spelling preserved).

Locke drafted a comprehensive plan, including a monstrous scheme of forced child labor called the “working school,” and presented it to the Board in 1697:

“The multiplying of the poor, and the increase of the tax for their maintenance, is so general an observation and complaint that it cannot be doubted of.... If the causes of this evil be well looked into, ... it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners;|...

“The first step, therefore, towards the setting of the poor on work, we humbly conceive, ought to be a restraint of their debauchery.... (LINK)

“But for the more effectual restraining of idle vagabonds, we further humbly propose that a new law may be obtained, by which it be enacted,

“That all men sound of limb and mind, above fourteen and under fifty years of age, begging in maritime counties out of their own parish without a pass ... be sent to the next seaport town, there to be kept at hard labour, till some of his majesty's ships, coming in or near there, give an opportunity of putting them on board, where they shall serve three years, under strict discipline, at soldier's pay (subsistence money being deducted for their victuals on board)....

“That all men begging in maritime counties without passes, that are maimed or above fifty years of age, and all of any age so begging without passes in inland counties nowhere bordering on the sea, shall be sent to the next house of correction, there to be kept at hard labour for three years....

“That, if any boy or girl, under fourteen years of age, shall be found begging out of the parish where they dwell (if within five miles' distance of the said parish), they shall be sent to the next working school, there to be soundly whipped and kept at work till evening.... Or, if they live further than five miles off from the place where they are taken begging, that they be sent to the next house of correction, there to remain at work six weeks....”

Locke's ruthlessly malevolent design extended to “the children of labouring people,” complaining that they “are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old.”

Locke's inhuman plan speaks for itself:

“The most effectual remedy for this that we are able to conceive, and which we therefore humbly propose, is, that, in the fore-mentioned new law to be enacted, it be further provided that working schools be set up in every parish, to which the children of all such as demand relief of the parish, above three and under fourteen years of age, whilst they live at home with their parents, and are not otherwise employed for their livelihood by the allowance of the overseers of the poor, shall be obliged to come.

“By this means the mother will be eased of a great part of her trouble in looking after and providing for them at home, and so be at the more liberty to work; the children will be kept in much better order, be better provided for, and from infancy be inured to work....

“If therefore care be taken that they have each of them their belly-full of bread daily at school, they will be in no danger of famishing.... And to this may also be added, without any trouble, in cold weather, if it be thought needful, a little warm water-gruel; for the same fire that warms the room may be made use of to boil a pot of it....”


 

Leibniz Exposes Locke's Hoax

 

Locke’s 1690 “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” is a similarly cynical apology for Oligarchy, full of contemptuous disdain of “innate ideas,” such as universal moral principles and the very concepts of human virtue and love. The same Locke who cold-bloodedly plotted to break up poor families, and herd their three-year-old babies into forced labor, will not even allow the love of parents for their children to be considered “innate.” He shamelessly argues that virtue is “generally approved, not because innate, but because profitable.”

Locke plagiarizes Aristotle's tabula rasa, comparing the human mind to “white paper, devoid of all characters, without any ideas,” and asks, “How comes it to be furnished?|... To this I answer, in one word, from experience.” Human beings, like animals, are creatures of the senses, Locke argues, and are motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain:

“Things then are good or evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain.... Happiness, then, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain.”

 

Accordingly, Locke reduces morality to arbitrary rules enforced by the powerful, so that basic moral duties, such as “the duty of parents to preserve their children,” cannot, he says, “be known or supposed without a lawmaker, or without reward and punishment....

“Moral good and evil, then, is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or evil is drawn on us, from the will and power of the law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law by the decree of the law-maker, is that we call reward and punishment.”

As the English “national party” reeled under the political and ideological onslaughts of the imperialists, Leibniz intervened to directly challenge their champion Locke, and rally the opposition.

Leibniz circulated a paper attacking Locke's “Essay” among his English allies in March 1696, telling his English correspondent:

“You may communicate it to whomever you please, and if it falls into [Locke's] hands, or those of his friends, all the better.”
Leibniz's friends made sure that Locke personally received this paper, but, except for cowardly snide remarks communicated privately to his cronies, he refused to respond. While this first critique continued to circulate throughout Europe, Leibniz authored a second attack on the Essay, which was delivered in England by August 1698. Once again, Locke dodged any direct response, but by then an open and vigorous opposition to the Essay had broken out in England, with a friend and correspondent of Leibniz, Thomas Burnet, in the lead.

Burnet's 1697 “Remarks Upon an Essay...” questioned Locke's “general Principle of picking up all our Knowledge from our five Senses....

“As to Morality, we think the great Foundation of it is, the Distinction of Good and Evil, Virtue and Vice, Turpis & Honesti, as they are usually call'd: And I do not find that my Eyes, Ears, Nostrils, or any other outward Sense, make any Distinction of these Things, as they do of Sounds, Colours, Scents, or other outward Objects; ... or that it consists only in Pleasure and Pain, Conveniency and Inconveniency.”

 

Locke responded publicly to Burnet in the most bitter terms, accusing him of being part of a conspiracy to launch a “Storm” of criticism, in order to discredit the Essay!

Burnet replied with biting sarcasm in his “Second Remarks”:

“But I know no good Reason you can have for writing in such a snappish and peevish way.... There is nothing, I'm sure, in my Words or Expressions that could offend you: It must be in the Sense, by touching, as it may be, upon some tender Parts of your Essay, that would not bear pressing without giving Pain....

 

“As to the Storm you speak of, preparing against you, I know nothing of it, as I told you before, yet I can blame none that desire such Principles of Humane Understanding as may give them Proofs and Security against such a System as this, Cogitant Matter, a Mortal Soul, a Manichean God (or a God without Moral Attributes,) and an Arbitrary Law of Good and Evil.... The ready way to prevent any such Storm, is to give such a plain Explication of your Principles, without Art or Chicane, as may cure and remove any Fears of this Nature.”

The storm against Locke grew in intensity, however, as the polemics of Leibniz's friends and others exposed the insidious nature of the “Essay,” and established Locke's affinity to the detestable Hobbes. As one anti-Locke diatribe, approved by several Anglican officials, declared:

“When that Writer [Locke] was framing a New Christianity, he took Hobbes's Leviathan for the New Testament, and the Philosopher of Malmesbury for our Saviour and the Apostles....”

(The same author went on, mercilessly ridiculing Locke's pretensions as a physician, as well as a writer:

“He hath spent some time, he saith, in the study of physic, and especially of the guts, which he very feelingly and concernedly discourses of as if they were that part of the body which he most minds.... We see the physic has worked, as all the filth and excrements of his papers show. Dirt and ordure and dunghills are the frequent embellishments of his style.”)

 

From 1697-1699, Locke was forced into three public exchanges of open letters with the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, who attacked his degraded notion of the human soul as a material thing, i.e., “thinking matter,” and therefore perishable, barring the miraculous intervention of God. Leibniz intervened directly into this debate as well, with his “Reflections on the second reply of Locke,” circulated by his friends in England, and also delivered personally to the harried Locke.

 


 

Differences of Some Importance

 

Leibniz's “Reflections” became the jumping-off point for his New Essays on Human Understanding, written between 1700 and 1704, and designed as a chapter-by-chapter refutation of Locke's entire system. Leibniz's arguments therein were rapidly diffused throughout the world via countless correspondences (despite the fact that the work itself evidently remained unpublished until a German edition in 1765, with the first complete English edition delayed until 1895).

“Our differences are on subjects of some importance,” Leibniz emphasizes in his Preface.

“The question is to know whether the soul in itself is entirely empty, like the tablet on which nothing has yet been written (tabula rasa) according to Aristotle and the author of the Essay, and whether all that is traced thereon comes solely from the senses and from experience; or whether the soul contains originally the principles of several notions and doctrines which external objects merely awaken on occasions, as I believe, with Plato, and even with the schoolmen, and with all those who take with this meaning the passage of St. Paul (Romans 2, 15) where he remarks that the law of God is written in the heart.”

 

Leibniz patiently explains that the “innate” creative power of the human mind sets mankind above and apart from the beasts, since “men become more skilled by finding a thousand new dexterities, whereas deer and hares of the present day do not become more cunning than those of past time.” He adds ironically: “This is why it is so easy for men to entrap brutes and so easy for simple empirics to make mistakes.”

Leibniz demonstrates how Locke is driven to the absurd conclusion that matter can think, as a consequence of his false comparison of the human soul to a “blank tablet,” i.e., a material thing. Therefore, Locke can have no answer to the Bishop of Worcester, except to assert that God arbitrarily “adds to the essence of matter the qualities and perfections which he pleases,” in this case, immortality!

Locke can provide no rational or moral explanation for this assertion, Leibniz shows, other than to cite the authority of ... Isaac Newton, since Newton also had recourse to the miraculous and irrational to account for the mutual attraction of hard atoms through empty space, i.e., “action-at-a-distance.” Leibniz insists, following Johannes Kepler, that the phenomenon of “gravitation” must be scientifically explained, by discovering the true “curvature,” or geometry, of space, rather than by inventing an ad hoc mysterious “force” to explain it away.

Having exposed their common irrational premises, Leibniz attacks both Locke and Newton for reviving “occult, or, what is more, inexplicable, qualities...|; and in this we would renounce philosophy and reason, by opening asylums of ignorance and idleness....” Leibniz prophetically warns that blind acceptance of the Newtonian dogma would revive a “barbaric” or “fanatical philosophy,” like that of the Rosicrucian cultist Robert Fludd:

“They saved appearances by forging expressly occult qualities or faculties which they imagined to be like little demons or goblins capable of producing unceremoniously that which is demanded, just as if watches marked the hours by a certain horodeictic faculty without having need of wheels, or as if mills crushed grains by a fractive faculty without needing anything resembling millstones.”

 

In a discussion significant for future scientific developments in America, Leibniz counters the Newtonian credo of “atoms and the vacuum” by insisting, “It is necessary rather to conceive space as full of an originally fluid matter....” Leibniz rejected Newton's doctrine of “indivisible hard atoms,” arguing that “there always remain in the depths of things slumbering parts which must yet be awakened and become greater and better, and, in a word, attain a better culture. And hence progress never comes to an end.” On this basis, for example, Leibniz encouraged the researches of Denis Papin into the “force of fire,” leading to the invention of the world's first direct-action steam engine in 1707.

 


 

Leibniz and the “Pursuit of Happiness”

 

Leibniz also clashes with Locke on the question of the “pursuit of Happiness.” Where Locke defines happiness as “the utmost pleasure we are capable of,” objects:

“I do not know whether the greatest pleasure is possible. I believe rather that it can grow ad infinitum.... I believe then that happiness is a lasting pleasure; which could not be so without there being a continual progress to new pleasures.... Happiness is then, so to speak, a road through pleasures; and pleasure is merely a step and an advancement towards happiness, the shortest which can be made according to the present impressions, but not always the best. The right road may be missed in the desire to follow the shortest, as the stone which goes straight may encounter obstacles too soon, which prevent it from advancing quite to the center of the earth. This shows that it is the reason and the will which transport us toward happiness, but that felling and desire merely lead us to pleasure....

 

“True happiness ought always to be the object of our desires, but there is ground for doubting whether it is. For often we hardly think of it, and I have remarked here more than once that the less desire is guided by reason the more it tends to present pleasure and not to happiness that is to say, to lasting pleasure...” (emphasis and punctuation added).

Here, Leibniz follows Plato in insisting that no society can be based on pursuit of pleasure, or love of mere property. In the dialogue The Symposium, Plato argues that

 

“men are quite willing to have their feet or their hands amputated if they believe those parts of themselves to be diseased. The truth is, I think, that people are not attached to what particularly belongs to them, except in so far as they can identify what is good with what is their own....”

Plato shows that “happiness consists in the possession of the good,” but that this must be different from love of pleasure, since mere pleasure cannot last. This leads to the idea that “love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good.” Plato then develops the metaphor of “birth” and “procreation” as

 

“the nearest thing to perpetuity and immortality that a mortal being can attain...|; but there are some whose creative desire is of the soul, and who long to beget spritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in general; and thus all poets and such craftsmen as have found out some new thing may be said to be begetters; but far the greatest and fastest branch of wisdom is that which is concerned with the due ordering of states and families, whose name is moderation and justice” .

 

Thus, since perpetuation of the good requires a good government and good laws, the “pursuit of Happiness,” in the sense of Leibniz and Plato, as opposed to that of Locke, must lead to the founding of well-ordered states, or republics.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln had this metaphor in mind at Gettysburg, where he spoke of Franklin and the other American founders as “our fathers,” who “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom...”

 


Isaac Newton's Hoax

 

Although Locke's death in 1704 saved him from being forced into a direct debate, the impact of Leibniz's relentless polemics and patient explanations grew continuously within England, including within the aristocracy itself.

One of Leibniz's most important adherents became Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was the grandson of Locke's former patron. The Third Earl had been personally tutored by Locke, during his childhood, but became a key political ally of the Harley/Swift faction.

Shaftesbury rejected his former teacher in the harshest terms:

“|'Twas Mr. Locke, that struck the home blow: for Mr. Hobbes’s character and base slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy. 'Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural; and without foundation in our minds....

 

“Then comes the credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild nations, that have no such idea, (as travelers, learned authors! and men of truth! and great philosophers! have inform'd him)....

“Thus virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on Law and Will: and God indeed is a perfect free agent in this sense; that is, free to anything, that is however ill: for if he wills it, it will be made good; virtue may be vice, and vice virtue in its turn, if he pleases. And thus neither Right nor Wrong, Virtue nor Vice are anything in themselves; nor is there any trace or idea of them naturally implanted on human minds. Experience and our catechism teaches us all!”

In 1712, Leibniz wrote a “Judgement of the Works of the Earl of Shaftesbury,” full of fatherly criticism and encouragement. Shaftesbury expressed his delight with “the criticism of the worthy and learned Mr. Leibniz,” and declared it “a real honor done to [me] and (what is far more) as a just testimony rendered to truth and virtue.”

 

With Leibniz's political allies having reassumed key positions within the government of Queen Anne, and with his intellectual influence growing, the imperialist faction became desperate to destroy his authority and reputation. Isaac Newton, still protecting the interests of the Bank of England as Master of the Mint, was deployed for this job in his capacity as “president-for-life” of the Royal Society.

The “Newton-Leibniz controversy” which followed, wherein Leibniz was reviled and condemned as a plagiarist, and falsely accused and “convicted” of stealing the calculus from Newton, was no more than a blatant and cynical political ploy, calculated to inflame English chauvinism and xenophobia. To provoke the confrontation, the Royal Society published the following crude ravings of John Keill in May 1711:

“Surely the merits of Leibniz in the world of learning are very great; this I freely acknowledge, nor can anyone who has read his contributions to the Acta of Leipzig deny that he is most learned in the more obscure parts of mathematics. Since he possesses so many unchallengeable riches of his own, certainly I fail to see why he wishes to load himself with the spoils stolen from others. Accordingly, when I perceived that his associates were so partial towards him that they heaped undeserved praise upon him, I supposed it no misplaced zeal on behalf of our nation to endeavor to make safe and preserve for Newton what is really his own. For if it was proper for those of Leipzig to pin on Leibniz another's garland, it is proper for Britons to restore to Newton that which was snatched from him, without accusations of slander.”

 

Leibniz alerted his English correspondents to “the plot that I learned of to attack me in your country,” and publicly demanded justice from the Royal Society. The Society responded by forming a committee of Leibniz's enemies, which issued an official report on April 12, 1712, drafted by Newton himself, later published under the title Commercium Epistolicum. This kangaroo court declared “Mr. Newton the first inventor; and are of opinion that Mr. Keill in asserting the same has been no way injurious to Mr. Leibniz.”

 


 

Campaign of Hatred and Slander v. Leibniz

 

So began the campaign of hatred and slander against Leibniz within England, designed both to discredit and suppress his philosophy, as well as to avert the immediate political threat that, should Queen Anne die too soon, Leibniz might arrive in England as the Prime Minister of the next English monarch.

With the death of Sophia on June 8, 1714, the position of Leibniz and his allies rapidly collapsed. When Anne died on Aug. 1, the succession passed to Sophia's misanthropic son George Louis, a long-time paid asset of the imperialist faction. The new King George I refused Leibniz permission to come to England. Harley was arrested and charged with treason, while Swift fled to Ireland.

As Leibniz wrote to Sophia's daughter-in-law Princess Caroline, speaking of her untimely passing: “It is not she, it is Hanover, it is England, it is the world, it is I who lost thereby.”

However, it was Leibniz's influence on this same Princess Caroline, wife of the future King George II, which finally forced Newton's controllers Samuel Clarke and the Venetian Antonio Conti, to engage in the momentous public debate, immortalized as the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondences.

As Clarke writes, addressing Caroline in his Dedication to the 1717 edition of the Correspondences,

“The late Learned Mr. Leibnitz well understood, how great an Honour and Reputation it would be to him, to have his Arguments approved by a Person of Your Royal Highnesses Character.”

 

In fact, Clarke barely dissuaded her from having Leibniz's Theodicy translated into English.

The ideology of Locke and Newton was utterly demolished in the course of this debate, where Leibniz heaped particular scorn on the Newtonian “atoms and the vacuum” dogma, and established, at the outset, the threat to civilization posed by the new orthodox British philosophy, stating bluntly: “Natural religion itself seems to be declining [in England] very much.”

Where Clarke defends “action-at-a-distance,” and characterizes Newtonian gravitation as “invisible, intangible, not mechanical,” Leibniz comments: “He might as well have added, inexplicable, unintelligible, precarious, groundless, and unexampled.”

When Clarke cites the “vacuum discovered by Mr. Guericke of Magdeburg, which is made by pumping the air out of a receiver,” Leibniz objects, “that there is no vacuum at all in the tube or receiver: since glass has small pores, which the beams of light, the effluvia of the loadstone, and other very thin fluids may go through.”

Leibniz hammers away against the Newtonian “occult” force of attraction, championed, he says, by “minds a little too much carried away by the misfortune of the times,” and insists that the true cause of gravitation remains to be discovered: “What has happened in poetry, happens also in the philosophical world. People are grown weary of rational romances...|; and they are become fond again of the tales of fairies.”

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in Hanover on Nov. 14, 1716--only then could the imperialist faction feel secure in their triumph within England, founded upon a Newtonian/Lockean intellectual tyranny throughout the Empire.

The Scotsman John Ker attempted one final meeting with Leibniz, in a last-ditch effort to save the situation. Ker reports:

“I arrived in Hanover in the Month of November 1716, on the very Day the late famous Monsieur de Leibnitz died, which plunged me into so much Sorrow and Grief, that I cannot express it. I shall not pretend to give the Character of this incomparable Senator, for more able Pens have already made Encomiums upon this truly great Man, whose very meritorious Fame must continue while Learning or the World endures;|...

 

“I must confess it afforded me Matter of strange Reflection, when I perceived the little Regard that was paid to his Ashes by the Hanoverians; for he was buried in a few Days after his Decease more like a Robber than, what he was, the Ornament of his Country.”

 


 

Logan Battles the Newtonians

 

As the Newtonian dark age settled over the Empire, resistance became more determined in the American colonies, leading directly to the American Revolution 60 years later. The true history of this process unfolds in the pages of H. Graham Lowry's How The Nation Was Won--America's Untold Story, 1630-1754.

The letters and unpublished manuscripts of James Logan provide further proof of the explicitly anti-Locke, anti-Newton commitments of the greatest American leaders, and of the direct influence of the ideas and person of Leibniz on the movement towards American independence.

Logan was born in Ulster, the son of a Scots Quaker schoolmaster. By the time he was selected by William Penn to be his secretary and accompany him to Pennsylvania in 1699, Logan had taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish (he undertook to learn Arabic, Syriac, and Persian at age 70), and had begun his lifelong studies of mathematics, astronomy, and the physical sciences. Before meeting Penn, he had sold his first library of 800 volumes for capital to start a business.

Penn returned to England in 1701, to join Harley and Swift in defense of colonial rights against Locke and his Board of Trade. Logan visited England in the significant years of 1709-1711, and again in 1723-1724, where he attended a meeting of the Royal Society, presided over by the decrepit Newton. Penn died in England in 1718, but not before naming Harley in his will as a protector of his province, an arrangement nullified with the succession of George I.

Thereafter, until his death in 1751, Logan remained a leading political and intellectual figure in the colony, holding at various times every important public office, including mayor of Philadelphia, president of the Assembly, Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor. He supported every measure for colonial unity and defense, even denouncing the hypocrisy of Quaker pacifism.

When Logan's library was catalogued in the early 1970s, researchers counted 2,185 titles in 2,651 volumes. Benjamin Franklin's obituary of Logan was impassioned on this point:

“But the most noble Monument of his Wisdom, Publick Spirit, Benevolence, and affectionate Regard to the People of Pennsylvania, is his LIBRARY; which he has been collecting these 50 Years past, with the greatest Care and Judgment, intending it a Benefaction to the Publick for the Increase of Knowledge, and for the common Use and Benefit of all Lovers of Learning. It contains the best Editions of the best Books in various Languages, Arts and Sciences, and is without Doubt the largest, and by far the most valuable Collection of the Kind in this part of the World, and will convey the Name of Logan thro' Ages, with Honour, to the latest Posterity.”
Logan read most, if not all, of his books, and his extensive marginal annotations in a variety of languages are still quite legible. His handwriting is present, for example, in the margins of some pages of the 1717 edition of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondences, a book which later appears in the 1741 catalogue of Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia, possibly donated by Logan.

Logan's letterbooks also show him particularly anxious to assemble a complete set of the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, the learned journal which published the works of Leibniz and his allies, including Papin and the Bernoullis, and which was the center of continental European resistance to the Newtonian onslaught. Logan informed a correspondent in 1749, “I have all the Acta Eruditorum from 1688 to 1727 except for three intermediate years between 1700 & 1710 & some Supplementa.”


 

Logan’s Allies Plan Westward Development

 

A frequent correspondent of Logan was Robert Hunter, then-Governor of New York and New Jersey, and an important political ally of Harley and Swift. Hunter collaborated with Virginia Gov. Alexander Spotswood's plans for westward development of the American colonies, and arranged that his own successor in 1720, William Burnet, would continue the project. Burnet also maintained the correspondences with Logan.

Logan's letters to Hunter and Burnet prove that these American leaders were quite conscious of the political implications of the Newtonian tyranny, including especially the witchhunt against Leibniz.

An outraged Logan wrote to Hunter, Sept. 22 1715, protesting the politically-motivated editing of the second edition of Newton's Principia. The name of Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed had been censored, Logan declared, because

“Poor Flamsteed has appeared a violent Whig ... and the better (I Suppose) to express their abhorence of his Principles, they have now almost everywhere left out his name....

“This will be owned I Suppose to be Carrying the mattter very far, and, indeed, upon the whole, they seem, on all sides, to be ripening for their own destruction. Our unhappy divisions in the last Years of the Queen appear'd terrible. And now, after so favorable a Conjuncture thrown in by Providence that one might have expected would set all to rights, they are rendered more dreadful than ever.... The unhappines of having a Nation generally distempered seems to me to be inexpressible....”

Logan's shock and indignation against the Newtonians reached a breaking point in 1727, when he received the Principia's infamous third edition, wherein even the cursory mention of Leibniz's name as an independent discoverer of the calculus had been totally erased.

In a letter dated Feb. 7, 1727, Logan told Burnet in no uncertain terms:

“|'Tis certain the world was obliged only to Leibnitz for the publication of that method, who was so fair as to communicate it in a great measure to Oldenburg in 1677, when Sir Isaac was so careful of concealing his, that he involved it in his Letter [of] 1676 in strange knotts of Letters, that all the art & skill of the universe could never Decipher.... And yet foreigners have generally been so Just as to pay all possible deference to Sir Isaac as an Inventor, tho' till his Publication of the Principia in 1687, they never had anything of it from him. I have often indeed wished that Sir Isaac himself had never entered into the Dispute, but would, if it must be disputed, have left it to others, for then the world would have been inclined to do him more Justice than now perhaps they will, when he is considered as a party, which he has so warmly made himself.”

Logan goes on to express his disgust at the absurd deification of Newton in England, as seen in the ridiculous portrait of him featured in the same edition of the Principia:

 

“But there is not less Humour shewn in his Picture in the front, much more like W. Leybourn in his own hair at the age of 40 or 50 than Sir Isaac Newton at 83. And by all those who have seen him of late, as I did, bending so much under the Load of years that, with some difficulty, he mounted the stairs of the Society's Room, that Youthful Representation will, I fear, be considered rather as an object of Ridicule than Respect, & much sooner raise Pity than Esteem.”

Logan dashed off another letter on the same date directly to a member of the Royal Society, venting his outrage about both the ludicrous picture of Newton and the suppression of Leibniz. Logan added a thinly-veiled warning concerning the political implications of these developments for the future of colonial relations:

“Should the management of the more momentous Councils about a Mile further up the Thames [in Parliament] be like these, in the present unaccountable Commotions of Europe, that seem to point out fate to us pregnant with vast events, we might have reason to tremble, and those should think themselves happiest who are farthest out of their reach. But it may be hoped our State Politicks far exceed those in the way of Learning. How it may prove, time only must show.”

In his next letter to Burnet, May 10, 1727, Logan questions Newton's sanity, and further dissects the political motives for the frameup of Leibniz, expressing his wish that the succession had been accomplished by 1710 (which would have made Sophia Queen of England):

“He [Newton] is, however great, but a man, & when I last saw him in 1724 walking up Crane Court & the stairs leading to the Society's Room, he bent under his Load of years exceeding unlike what they have Represented him two years after as in body. 'Tis but reasonable to expect a declension elsewhere, so that for his own honour as well as the Nation's, to which he has been a very great one, had he & Queen Anne both been gathered to their Ancestors by the year 1710, before that fierce, unnatural Dispute broke out between him and Leibniz, which I always believed, was blown up by the forces of the society in opposition to the house that had so long employ'd Leibniz....” (emphasis added)

 

After Newton's death in 1727, Logan could not resist a final irreverency, in a letter to Burnet (Jan. 10, 1728):

“I hope also G. Strahan has by this time furnish'd thee with the new Edit. of Newton, for whose age & strength, death has not, it seems, consulted his new picture.” (emphasis added)
The more that Logan investigated the facts and circumstances of the Leibniz-Newton controversy, the more he became convinced of the fraudulent nature of Newton's claims. In fact, Logan and Hunter had already passed judgment on Leibniz's accuser John Keill, who had visited New York in about 1710. As Logan later wrote to an English correspondent:

 

“I am sensible John Keyl was a great Mathematician, but when at N York with Genl. Hunter, he shewed himself an intolerable Debauchee, whimsical, irregular in all his Conduct.... This was the character I had of him from G. Hunter, an Excellent Judge of men....”

Although Newton's preoccupation with alchemy and witchcraft was not exposed until the Twentieth Century, Logan pitilessly attacked the irrational ravings of two of Newton's rarely-mentioned published works of that period: “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended” (1728), and “Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel” (1733). In letters to Burnet and others, Logan derided Newton's arguments in blunt terms, such as, “nothing can be more imaginary or groundless,” “a piece of finesse only,” and “a sally of fancy and Imagination.” “I am exceedingly grieved at this Performance of his,” Logan wrote Burnet, “which cannot but expose his memory to the Censure of all rational Judges.”

 


 

Logan and Franklin

 

In 1727, the 21-year-old Benjamin Franklin, recently deployed to Philadelphia by his Boston mentor Cotton Mather, organized a “club of mutual improvement” called the Junto, composed of the city's most “ingenious” young men. Franklin's autobiographical outline for this period includes the note: “Logan fond of me. His library.”

Along with opening his home and library to Franklin and his young associates, Logan is credited with arranging the first large job for Franklin's new printing business in 1731. Franklin also printed Logan's translations of Cato's “Moral Distichs” in 1735, and Cicero's “Cato Major” in 1744, Franklin's preface to the latter expressing the wish that “this first Translation of a Classic in this Western World may be followed with many others ... and be a happy Omen that Philadelphia shall become the Seat of the American Muses....”

About this time, Logan resolved to write his own philosophical tract, designed as a polemic against British ideology, starting with what he called the “detestable notion” and “pernicious thesis” of Hobbes, “taking this for my foundation against Hobbes that Man was primarily in his Nature formed for Society.”

Logan titled his book The Duties Of Man As They May Be Deduced From Nature, and circulated copies of each chapter among the circles of Franklin's Junto, and to his correspondents in England. The manuscript was supposedly “lost” in England, and little was known of its contents until it was rediscovered in 1971. A photocopy of the 400-page work, in Logan's longhand, is in the possession of this author; otherwise, it still sits unpublished on the shelves of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

A thorough reading of the work reveals it to be a direct attack on the authority of Locke and Newton, as well as Hobbes, precisely in the line of argument of Leibniz and his English allies earlier. Where Locke denied the existence of “innate ideas,” reducing morality to the arbitrary rules of the lawgiver, Logan's thesis is that all morality is naturally “implanted” in human beings. Logan's point echoes Leibniz's famous comment, “Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much....”

Logan's challenge to Newtonian orthodoxy, expressed in a lengthy footnote to his Chapter 2, “Of the Exterior Senses,” is of particular significance for its discussion of electricity.

Franklin began his electrical experiments after attending a lecture in Boston in 1743, only a few years after Logan wrote and circulated these ideas. Franklin's subsequent scientific work is usually mis-portrayed as mere tinkering based on “trial and error” (or even more ludicrously, as “Newtonianism!”), and as concerned with practical results, not “theory.” However, Logan's “heretical” conjecture that electricity might somehow constitute a “subtle fluid” filling space, of the type discussed by Leibniz and other opponents of the Newtonian “vacuum,” suggests that Franklin was indeed inspired by “metaphysical” considerations.

Logan explains that, “Electricity was formerly regarded but as a trifling appearance in Nature, and therefor in the last curious age was very little considered; for that quality was supposed to be excited, only by putting into motion the finer parts of the body it was found in....” He refers to certain “surprising phenomena arising from electricity” in recent experiments, in which

“we may see a field open for Speculations, that if duly persued, may probably lead us into more just and extensive notions of our bodies, and the world we live in, than have hitherto been generally thought of.

And if there be no heresy in mentioning it in the present age, why may we not venture to question the reasonableness of asserting a vacuum as indispensably necessary to the continuance of motion?|: The argument may indeed hold in relation to all such bodies, the matter of light excepted, as our senses are formed to take cognicance of, but shall we from thence presume to judge of all the kinds of subtile matter that space may be filled with? Can we be sure that there is no electric or elastic medium that instead of obstructing or retarding motion may be the very means of continuing it?

“Can we say an exhausted receiver is a vacuum because the air is drawn out of it, while at the same time we see it filled with light, the matter of which in the true nature of things and on a just estimate of them, tho' not according to our apprehensions, may possibly be a more essential substance than the earth or stones we tread on.

“But if a vacuum be not absolutely necessary, as that alloted by some to the atherial spaces cannot be, then undoubtedly to have all space in the universe possessed by some kind of matter is much more consistent with the dignity, beauty, and order of the whole than to imagine those vast voids which carry even a kind of horror in the thought” .

 


Franklin’s crucial experiments in electricity

 

Franklin performed his famous kite experiment in Philadelphia in June of 1752, proving the identity of lightning and electricity. Franklin says his paper on that topic had been “laughed at by the connoisseurs” of the British Royal Society, but had achieved great notoriety in France, where his “capital experiment” was successfully duplicated before King Louis XV and his court, and therefore could no longer be suppressed.

In fact, what Franklin had accomplished, as his own correspondences of that period prove, was a crucial experiment, designed by him to overthrow the Newtonian system--he had proven that electricity was no “trifling appearance in Nature,” but that it, in some fashion, permeated space.

Franklin's exchange of letters with New Yorker Cadwallader Colden in the period leading up to his experiment, also demonstrates the extent to which the Leibniz-Newton conflict defined the intellectual battlelines in pre-revolutionary America.

Franklin met Colden in 1743, the same year in which he began his electrical studies. The two collaborated for awhile on scientific and philosophical matters, and Colden backed Franklin's plan for colonial unity at the 1754 Albany Convention, but eventually broke with him on the issue of American independence.

Colden brought the wrath of the Newtonian tyranny directly down upon his head, writing a paper in 1745 which he titled, “Explication of the First Causes of Motion in Matter, and of the Cause of Gravitation.” Colden had rejected “action-at-a-distance,” and presumed to suggest that the effect of gravity might have a rational explanation.

Franklin offered to print the work “at my own expense and risk,” and circulated copies in Philadelphia, where it aroused a storm of intellectual ferment. Logan's opinion, according to Franklin, was “that the Doctrine of Gravity's being the effect of Elasticity was originally Bernoulli's, but he believed you had not seen Bernoulli.”

Colden wrote to Franklin on May 20, 1752, reporting on the progress of his ideas in Europe:

“I have received a copy of the Translation of my first piece into High Dutch with animadversions on it at the end of it printed at Hamburg and Leipsic in 1748, but I do not understand one word of them. I find my name often in company with those great ones, Newtone, Leibnitz, and Wolfius, and Leibnitz's Monades often mentioned: a new doctrine which, perhaps, you have seen, and is of great repute in Germany” (emphasis and punctuation added).

 

Colden's work had been printed in Germany, because the opposition to him in England was too violent. As a sympathetic Royal Fellow later explained to him:

“The state of the case seems to be this--that every one is so satisfied with Sir Isaac's [system] that they have no curiosity to examine yours. Was it in Latin--in Germany or France it would not want for perusal.”

Another colonial correspondent of Colden's, Alexander Garden of South Carolina, bluntly denounced the

Royal Society as

“either too lazy and too indolent or too conceited to receive any new thoughts from any one but an F.R.S. [Fellow of the Royal Society].... They would stumble at them promulgated by one in America tho supported by the clearest reasoning and demonstration.”

 

We learn from other correspondences from Garden, that Colden wrote his own study of the Leibniz-Newton controversy, which was forwarded to the Royal Society of Edinburgh:

Nov. 22, 1755: “... What you lastly observe about Mr. Leibnitz gives me great pleasure, for tho I believe your principles are sufficiently supported by your consequent natural account for the Phenomena, yet so great an authority is very agreeable.”

 

Jan. 10, 1757: “I have just now copied over your very ingenious reflexions in the Newtonian and Leibnizian Controversy to send to the Edinburgh Society....”

April, 15, 1757: “He [Dr. Whytt of Edinburgh] received your former Letter to me with great joy and satisfaction, but says he is afraid that some of the Socii will (they are all rigid and literal Newtonians) have their objections. He was to read it before them at first meeting. I have sent him your observations on the Leibnitzian Controversy.”

The attitude of colonial thinkers to Newton is also neatly expressed in a letter to Colden from his friend at Albany, Capt. John Rutherford, who evidently was concerned about Colden's tendency to propitiate the Newtonians:

 

“To humble you a little further about Sir Isaac,|... remember he differs 500 years in his Cronology from the rest of Mankind, in which he has not yet been followed by one Author at home or abroad, nor can I ever envy a man or call him truly great who never enjoyed any pleasure in society, died a virgin, and wrote upon the Revelations...” .

 

Rutherford also acknowledged himself an adherent of Leibniz's most famous doctrine, “the best of all possible worlds”:

 

“I am firmly persuaded The Great Author of Nature at the Creation, of all possible Worlds chused the best or most perfect & allways maintains it so....”

 

The threat of an American revolt against Newton was evidently considered such a serious matter, that the worst traitor to Leibniz to be found on the continent of Europe, Leonard Euler of the Berlin Academy, was deployed directly into the fray. Euler's remarks on Colden's work, dated Nov. 21, 1752, were forwarded to him via London.

 

Euler rudely dismissed Colden's idea as “destitute of all Foundation,” and criticized his “attempts to attack the best Establish'd propositions of the late Sr. Isaac Newton....” Colden reported this to Franklin, saying of Euler, “He writes much like a Pedant highly conceited of himself.”

Franklin was quite aware of the scientific and technological revolution he was about to unleash with his electrical discoveries, telling Colden, “There are no Bounds (but what Expence and Labour give) to the Force Man may raise and use in the Electric Way.” Proving that the static electricity collected in his bottles, was of the same nature as an awesome bolt of lightning, would establish this fact in the most dramatic fashion.

 


Franklin’s Revolutionary Intentions

 

The dialogue between Franklin and Colden, just prior to the 1752 kite experiment, also establishes, beyond any doubt, Franklin's equally revolutionary intentions against the Newtonians.

Colden wrote to Franklin on March 16:

“In my opinion no set of experiments which I have read lead so directly towards discovering the cause of Electricity as yours do. However I find it difficult to form any conception of this cause which in any degree satisfies my mind. I conceive it to be a most subtile elastic fluid like our air, but incomparably more subtile and more elastic.”

 

Franklin replied on April 23, explicitly rejecting the Newtonian “particles and the void” dogma, and proposing that electricity may very well be that “subtle elastic fluid” which fills the “regions above our atmosphere”:

“Your conception of the Electric Fluid, that it is incomparably more subtil than Air, is undoubtedly just. It pervades dense matter with the greatest Ease: But it does not seem to mix or incorporate willingly with mere Air, as it does with other matter.... Who knows then, but there may be, as the Antients thought, a Region of this Fire, above our Atmosphere, prevented by our Air and its own too great Distance for Attraction, from joining our Earth?|... yet some of it be low enough to attach itself to our highest Clouds, and thence they becoming electrified may be attracted by and descend towards the Earth, and discharge their Watry Contents together with that Etherial Fire. Perhaps the Aurorae Boreales are Currents of this Fluid in its own Region above our Atmopshere, becoming from their own Motion visible....

 

“But I must own that I am much in the Dark about Light. I am not satisfied with the doctrine that supposes particles of matter call'd light continually driven off from the Sun's Surface, with a Swiftness so prodigious!|...

“May not all the Phaenomena of Light be more conveniently solved, by supposing universal space filled with a subtle elastic fluid, which when at rest is not visible, but whose Vibrations affect that fine Sense the Eye...|?” .

Franklin was quite conscious that he was thus plotting the downfall of the Newtonian establishment, as he concludes his letter with the following:

“|'Tis well we are not, as poor Galileo was, subject to the Inquisition for philosophical heresy. My whispers against the orthodox doctrine in private letters, would be dangerous; your writing and printing would be highly criminal. As it is, you must expect some Censure, but one heretic will surely excuse another.”
Franklin first announced the success of his experiment in a letter to his English scientific correspondent Peter Collinson, explaining how to construct a kite made of a silk handkerchief--“fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of a Thundergust without tearing”--with a sharp wire protruding above its wood frame, and a key tied to a silk ribbon on the twine near the experimenter's hand.

In a thunderstorm,

“when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this key the Phial may be charged; and from Electric Fire thus obtained, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be performed, which are usually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.” (emphasis added)

 

Franklin remained consistent to his anti-Newtonian principles until the end of his life, a philosophical commitment morally identical to his determination to overthrow the “absolute Tyranny” of the British Crown. In 1784, at Passy, France, with the first phase of the Revolution accomplished, Franklin wrote his “Loose Thoughts on a Universal Fluid,” still founded on the premise that, “Universal Space, as far as we know of it, seems to be filled with a subtle fluid, whose motion, or vibration, is called light.”

About the same time, in a letter addressed to the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris, the anti-populist Franklin also militantly disposed of Locke's sacred right of “Property”:

“The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets....

 

“All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seem to me to be the creature of public convention. Hence the public has the right of regulating descents, and all other conveyances of property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”

Thus does the most famous aphorism concerning Franklin--“He stole lightning from the Heavens, and the sceptre from Tyrants”--assume its true significance, since the one achievement was a lawful prelude to the other. Thus also should we learn, as Lyndon LaRouche insists, that no lasting victory over the oligarchy is possible, without defeating the legacy of Locke and Newton in our intellectual life today. Note: In all quotes, original spelling has been preserved, while emphasis has been added by the author.

 

For the complete article, "The Anti-Newtonian Roots of the American Revolution", by Philip Valenti, see EIR Dec. 1, 1996. Additional writings in American history, including the original writings of Leibniz and Franklin, see The Political Economy of the American Revolution, edited by Nancy Spannaus and Christopher White; and How the Nation Was Won by H. Graham Lowery.

 


Appendix

- The Declaration's Suppressed Anti-Slavery Clause -

The hostility of the greatest of the American founders to Locke's ideology of “property” and “free market,” is further revealed by a little-known clause of the Declaration of Independence, which was personally approved by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, but later excluded from the document in a fateful compromise. This was the indictment of King George III for the promotion of black chattel slavery, which read:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

 

Calling slavery “an atrocious debasement of human nature,” Benjamin Franklin went on to found the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Tolerating slavery, Franklin warned prophetically, would draw down “the displeasure of the great and impartial Ruler of the Universe upon our country.”


Captions

Benjamin Franklin, with the other authors of the Declaration: Jefferson, Adams, Livingston, and Sherman.

Locke's 1690 `Essay Concerning The True Original Extent And End Of Civil Government,' purports to prove that `government has no other end but the preservation of property....' John Locke was appointed a founding member of the British Board of Trade, and proved himself the greatest imperialist, and most implacable enemy of America.

`Our differences are on subjects of some importance,' Leibniz emphasizes in his `Reflections,' a refuation of Locke's entire system: `The question is to know whether the soul in itself is entirely empty, and whether all that is traced thereon comes solely from the senses and from experience; or, as I believe, with St. Paul (Romans 2: 15) where he remarks that the law of God is written in the heart.'

Library of Congress
Thomas Hobbes
Issac Newton

The falsehood around which the Anglophile myth revolves, is that the strongest influences on the American founders, were the political philosophy of John Locke and his predecessors, Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton. In fact, they were responsible for initiating that `long train of abuses and usurpations,' leading to the revolution against the very empire which they had worked to create.

Dover Pictorial Archive Series
King George III

The Declaration of Independence specifically condemned several of the despotic measures originally imposed by Locke himself, as later enforced by King George III and the British Parliament, `all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....'

Library of Congress
Queen Anne

Thanks to the 1701 Act of Settlement, Leibniz's brilliant student, the Electress Sophia would succeed to the English throne, with the death of the childless Queen Anne, thus, Leibniz became the rallying-point of republican forces all over the English-speaking world, including the American colonies.

Library of Congress
Jonathan Swift
Robert Harley
Until its 1714 defeat, a powerful “national party” opposed to imperialism still existed in England, organized around the political figures of Jonathan Swift and English patriot Robert Harley. Harley's parliamentary faction launched a series of bold economic and political initiatives directly counter to the imperialist design.

Library of Congress
James Logan
Logan's library held over 2,600 volumes. Franklin wrote: “It contains the best Editions of the best Books in various Languages, Arts and Sciences, and is without Doubt the largest, and by far the most valuable Collection of the Kind in this part of the World, and will convey the Name of Logan thro' Ages, with Honour, to the latest Posterity.”

Library of Congressbr> Franklin's Philadelphia Book and Printing Shop

Along with opening his home and library to Franklin and his young associates, Logan is credited with arranging the first large job for Franklin's new printing business in 1731. Franklin also printed Logan's translations of Cato and Cicero, writing in a preface his wish that: `this first Translation of a Classic in this Western World may be followed with many others....'


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The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.

 



John Locke Against Freedom

🛑 John Locke Against Freedom

John Locke's classical liberalism isn't a doctrine of freedom. It's a defense of expropriation and enslavement.

or classical liberals (often called libertarians in the US context), the founding documents of liberalism are John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Letters on Toleration, which set out the case for a limited government, respectful of private property rights and tolerant of religious differences. Locke lived in England (and for five years in exile in the Netherlands) in the seventeenth century, and his work is normally interpreted in terms of the struggles between the English king and parliament from the Civil War to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, in which the absolutist Stuart dynasty was overthrown.

For those who get around to actually reading the Treatise, there are some unappealing passages in which Locke justifies slavery (as applied to captives taken in war) and denies that his theory of property rights applies to hunter-gatherer societies such as those of Native Americans. But these issues seem so far removed from Locke’s social context in seventeenth-century England as to be mere asides, irrelevant to the main argument.

Considering both his own life and his historical impact, however, Locke is more accurately regarded as an American philosopher than an English one, even though he never crossed the Atlantic in person. Recent scholarship on Locke has focused on facts that have always been well known but, like other unpleasant historical facts, have been overlooked or disregarded. This historical reappraisal implies a new and radically different understanding of his political philosophy.

In a career of fluctuating fortunes, Locke was intimately involved with American affairs. As secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, then chancellor of the exchequer, Locke assisted in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. He was secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–74) and a member of the Board of Trade (1696–1700), with responsibility for the American colonies. He was a major investor in the English slave trade through the Royal African Company and the Bahama Adventurers company.

Thus, when Locke wrote about slavery and the conditions under which property in land might be acquired, American conditions were far more directly relevant than those in England, where chattel slavery was unknown, and where the original acquisition of land was a historical fiction.

Given his reputation as a defender of property rights and personal freedom, Locke has been accused of hypocrisy for his role in promoting and benefiting from slavery and the expropriation of indigenous populations, actions that would seem to contradict his philosophical position. This is too charitable.

The real contradictions are to be found within Locke’s philosophical writings. These are designed to fit his political positions both in England, where he supported resistance to the absolutist pretensions of the Catholic James II, and in America, where he was part of the slave-owning ruling class (albeit from afar).

An early example of Locke’s doctrinal flexibility can be found in his Letters Concerning Toleration. Although the argument for toleration appears general, Locke manages to find reasons for excluding both Catholics and atheists. So, in the context of seventeenth-century England, the only group who would benefit from Locke’s proposed policy of toleration was Protestant dissenters from the established Church of England. This was, not surprisingly, the group to which Locke belonged.

Locke’s theory of property is similarly self-serving. It’s generally seen as a historical fiction, used to justify currently existing property rights, despite the fact that they cannot really have been acquired in the way that Locke suggests. As Hume objected, “there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.”

That’s true of course. Considered in the American context, however, Locke is not offering a theory of original acquisition. Rather, his theory is one of expropriation, designed specifically to justify the “fraud and injustice” to which Hume refers.

Locke’s central idea is that agriculturalists, by mixing their labor with the soil, thereby acquire a title to it. He immediately faces the objection that before the arrival of agriculture, hunters and gatherers worked on the land and gained sustenance from it. So, it would seem, the would-be farmer has arrived too late. The obvious example, to which he refers several times, is that of European colonists arriving in America. Locke’s answer is twofold.

First, he invokes his usual claim that there is plenty of land for everybody, so appropriating some land for agriculture can’t be of any harm to the hunter-gatherers. This is obviously silly. It might conceivably be true for the first agriculturalist (though on standard Malthusian grounds there is no reason to suppose this), or the second or the fiftieth, but at some point the land must cease to be sufficient to support the preexisting hunter-gatherer population. At this point, well before all land has been acquired by agriculturalists, his theory fails.

Locke must surely have known his claim to be false, not as a matter of abstract reasoning, distant history, but in terms of contemporary fact. His Treatises on Government were published in 1689, a year after the outbreak of King William’s War (the North American theatre of the Nine Years War). The core issue in this war, as in a string of earlier conflicts, was control of the fur trade, the most economically significant form of hunter-gatherer activity. But underlying that was the general pressure arising from the steady expansion of European agriculture into lands previously owned by Indian tribes.

As a capitalist, and shareholder in American businesses such as the (slaveholding) Bahama Adventurers, Locke could scarcely have been unaware of these facts. Indeed he refers in the Treatise to American contacts who gave him his information.

Locke’s real defense is that regardless of whether there is a lot or a little, uncultivated land is essentially valueless. All, or nearly all, the value, he says, comes from the efforts of the farmers who improve the land. Since God gave us the land to improve, it rightfully belongs to those who improve it.

This is exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court majority in Kelo v. City of New London. Ms Kelo and her neighbors were indeed occupying the land in question, but, so the Court concluded, they weren’t able or willing to make the best use of it. So, the only way the city could ensure the best economic use of the land in question was to use its eminent domain power of compulsory acquisition.

All of this relates back to the point I’ve raised before, that the credibility of any Lockean theory defending established property rights from the state that established them depends on the existence of a frontier, beyond which lies boundless usable land. This in turn requires the erasure (mentally and usually in brutal reality) of the people already living beyond the frontier and drawing their sustenance from the land in question.

Now for Locke on slavery. Locke’s reputation as an opponent of slavery rests in part on misunderstanding and in part on the fact that he offered a more limited justification of slavery than earlier writers.

As regards misunderstanding, Locke’s oft-quoted statement that “SLAVERY is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation; that it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it” sounds like a statement of absolute condemnation. In fact, however, it is more appropriately understood as an early rendition of the jingoism expressed in the sentiment that “Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves.”

Locke’s intention, in this passage, was to demolish the idea of Sir Robert Filmer that Englishmen (including English Americans) could voluntarily agree to submit to a government with the absolutist claims of the Stuarts — it was this submission to which the term “slavery” referred. At the same time, he allowed for absolute chattel slavery, with power of life and death, in the case of “prisoners taken in a just war.” In his work on the Constitution of the Carolinas, Locke extended the same absolute power to the owners of African-American slaves.

There’s an obvious contradiction here. While Africans were frequently enslaved as a result of war, there was no reason to suppose this war to be just, and it was obviously impossible to extend this justification to their children.

Some Locke scholars have concluded, as a result, that his political position was in hypocritical contradiction of his theoretical views. That seems too generous to Locke as a theorist.

As we’ve seen, his theory of property in general has precisely the same characteristics: a liberal-sounding defense of the rights of Englishmen to property and freedom, used to justify their deprivation of those rights from indigenous people. Similarly, in his much-vaunted Letters on Toleration, he managed to find reasons to exclude Catholics and atheists, so that the only proposed beneficiaries of toleration were dissenting Protestants like himself.

Locke is American in another crucial respect. His writings were largely ignored in England, and gained their prominence almost entirely from their influence on the founders of the United States.

More precisely, Locke’s principles perfectly suited the Southern Federalists who dominated the early years of the United States. On the one hand, they justified rebellion against the British Crown. On the other hand, they rejected any interference with property rights, including slave ownership. More broadly, Locke’s theory stood in opposition to the radical democratic possibilities of the American Revolution, represented by figures like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

The contradictions inherent in Locke’s position were pointed out by critics at the time, and summed up by that old-fashioned Tory, Dr Samuel Johnson, who remarked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” (Johnson’s friendship with his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber, a former slave, was a striking testimony to his character.)

But history is written by the winners. Locke benefitted from the same historical amnesia that has absolved all the US founders, most notably Jefferson and Madison, along with antebellum leaders like Calhoun and Clay, from their role in maintaining and extending slavery. This amnesia was reinforced by the dominance of the pro-slavery Dunning School in historical discussion of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It is only since the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement that these questions have been reopened.

If Locke is viewed, correctly, as an advocate of expropriation and enslavement, what are the implications for classical liberalism and libertarianism? The most important is that there is no justification for treating property rights as fundamental human rights, on par with personal liberty and freedom of speech.

The true liberal tradition is represented not by Locke, but by John Stuart Mill, whose wholehearted commitment to political freedom was consistent with his eventual adoption of socialism (admittedly in a rather refined and abstract form).

Mill wasn’t perfect, as is evidenced by his support of British imperialism, for which he worked as an official of the East India Company, and more generally by his support for limitations on democratic majorities. But Mill’s version of liberalism became more democratic as experience showed that fears about dictatorial majorities were unfounded. By contrast, Locke’s classical liberalism has hardened into propertarian dogma.

As Mill recognized, markets and property rights are institutions that are justified by their usefulness, not by any fundamental human right. Where markets work well, governments should not interfere with them. But, when they fail, as they so often do, it is entirely appropriate to modify property rights and market outcomes, or to replace them altogether with direct public control.

Received ideas change only slowly, and the standard view of Locke as a defender of liberty is likely to persist for years to come. Still, the reassessment is underway, and the outcome is inevitable. Locke was a theoretical advocate of, and a personal participant in, expropriation and enslavement. His classical liberalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone except owners of capitalist private property.

 



Confronting Child Labour (New Internationalist)

🛑 Confronting Child Labour

The Victorian chimney sweep in Britain, the first industrial nation, was once an even bigger symbol of inhumanity than the bonded child labourer of Pakistan and India today. There are lessons we can learn from the past about how to combat child labour – but there are also myths to discard.


Children have always worked. But the nature of their work has changed according to the social conditions of the time – and so has our notion of ‘childhood’. In peasant societies children have always participated in the working life of the family – on a seasonal basis in agriculture and more constantly in domestic tasks, as shown by the tapestry below, from ninth-century Europe. The tasks recorded as having been given to children in sixteenth-century Spain – collecting firewood, herding livestock, helping with ploughing, collecting pests from crops – are not dissimilar from those still allocated to children in rural areas of the developing world today.

Children have also always participated in light industry – and as industrial activity increased in eighteenth-century Europe, so the economic opportunities increased too. People in general were rarely troubled by the sight of children working – rather the contrary. When the author Daniel Defoe toured England and reported on what he had seen, far from being concerned at the sight of four-year-olds at work in Lancashire’s cotton industry he was delighted that they were finding useful employment. The philosopher John Locke also wrote reports on how to deal with the children of the poor: ‘The children of the labouring people are an ordinary burthen to the parish and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old.’ The conclusion drawn by Locke (left) was that poor children should be put to work at three years old with a bellyful of bread daily, supplemented in cold weather by ‘a little warm water-gruel’.

Locke’s views were not extraordinary at the time: childhood had never up to this point been seen as a cordoned-off area of innocence but rather as a period in which children learned skills that made them employable – which is exactly the same view held in Bangladesh today according to the article on Page 12. The modern Western idea of childhood is a relatively recent creation which emerged from the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The conception of childhood by the poets Blake and Wordsworth as a period of innocence and visionary imagination was nothing short of revolutionary – and Blake directly counterposed to this the bitter experience of child labourers in an increasingly industrial England.

 

It was another Romantic poet, Coleridge, who coined the term ‘white slaves’ when he referred in 1819 to ‘our poor little white slaves, the children in our cotton factories’. By the 1830s the phrase was in common usage and people routinely contrasted the humanitarian concern for the children of slaves abroad with the apparent indifference to the suffering of child labourers at home. The Factory Commission of 1833 revealed that children were often employed from the age of six and made to work 14-to-16-hour days during which they were kept awake by beating.


The conditions in mines were even worse, and the inclusion of line drawings in the 1842 report on mines profoundly shocked the Victorian public. These helped produce the world’s first serious legislation against child labour – but even this only banned children under nine from working in factories and those under ten from the mines. The idea that child labour in Britain was abolished almost single-handedly by the sterling efforts of Conservative politician Lord Shaftesbury has crystallized into a national myth which still affects attitudes to child labour all over the world.


It was not legislation and inspection that ended widespread child labour in industrial countries such as the US (the photo above shows a cotton mill in South Carolina in 1900) – the first truly effective federal law against child labour did not come until 1938 – so much as economics and education. First, as industry became increasingly mechanized there was less demand for child labour anyway. But just as important in eradicating mass child labour was the provision of universal education, which in Britain was made compulsory for children under ten in 1880 and free of school fees in 1892 – and the school-leaving age has risen steadily throughout the industrialized world in this century. Making school compulsory did not automatically mean children turned up – the process took decades. But if history teaches us that there is a single mechanism most likely to reduce hazardous child labour then compulsory primary education would be it.


All but three governments in the world (the US, Somalia and the Cook Islands) have now ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – the fullest embodiment of the modern view of childhood. Article 28 requires governments which have ratified to ‘make primary education compulsory and available free to all’. It only remains for them to put their money where their mouths are – and strike a significant blow against hazardous child labour in the process.

 



 

Slavery-entangled philosophy

🛑 Slavery-entangled philosophy

John Locke, who lived through two revolutions in 17th-century England, remains perhaps the most important theorist about democracy. Translated into many different languages, Locke’s ideas inform contemporary philosophical debates about justice and rights, from relative egalitarians such as John Rawls to libertarians such as Robert Nozick to Amartya Sen’s critique of Western-based theories of justice. Locke’s writings inspired the language of rebellion in the United States’ Declaration of Independence (1776) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), which shaped the French Revolution.

After the Second World War, Locke’s ideas circumscribed debates over democracy and social justice within the United Nations and in international law. The principles that government should be based on the consent of the governed, that most people can make reasonable choices, that all men are created equal, that people have inalienable rights – his animosity towards hereditary privilege – have had many critics too. Locke’s influence probably reached its height in the 1960s. Since then, criticism has grown. On the Right, critics see him as too idealistic and impractical: all people are not and cannot be equal. On the Left, critics contend that Locke was a hypocrite, a philosopher who put forth radical ideas while working on behalf of slavery and colonialism. C B Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962) made the most influential case that Locke regarded private property above all, including property in slaves. Postcolonialist thinkers, in particular Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire (1999), saw Locke’s philosophy as emblematic of ‘Western’ ideas about democracy and rights that serve as a cover for the oppression of indigenous peoples. Implicating Locke in the causes of slavery and colonialism has cast a shadow over Western liberalism, and indeed democracy itself.

However, history tells a different story. Colonialism and slavery emerged from ideas and practices much older than Locke about the divine and absolute rights of kings. As a mid-level functionary in 17th-century England, Locke directly encountered the realities of monarchy and inherited status. Such experiences opened his eyes. Over time, he came to believe that slavery was deeply wrong, that it was the most extreme instance of the evils of inherited status that infected the entire social order. Locke’s celebration of consent defined his political theory. As his opposition to royal policies developed, he faced punishment for his radical ideas.

During the English Civil War of 1649, Locke’s father sided with Parliament and the principles of ‘consent of the people’. At the end of the war, King Charles I was tried for treason against his own people and executed on 30 January 1649. Locke was 16. His school was a 10-minute walk from Charles’s execution site by the steps of Banqueting House, Whitehall, and he almost certainly witnessed and supported it. But after more than a decade of political instability, Locke supported a new king. In May 1660, in the person of Charles II, monarchy returned to England. London mobs and rival armies readied to fight each other, opening a spectre of anarchy. Locke wrote that he would fight, if only he knew for whom: ‘Tis the great misery of this shatterd and giddy nation that warrs have producd noething but wars, and the sword cut out worke for the sword.’

Over the next few years, Locke lived in Oxford, as a scholar and tutor, specialising in medicine and philosophy. He probably would have stayed there, and written little of note, had he not in 1668 saved the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury drew Locke into Stuart court restoration politics, into imperial governance, and into the thick of the king’s promotion of slavery.

Those who emphasise Locke’s hypocrisy point to two pieces of evidence during this decade. First, they contend that Locke authored The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which explicitly supported hereditary nobility and slavery: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves …’ Second, they show that Locke owned stock in the Royal African Company, which ran the African slave trade for England.

Of course, Locke’s service to the Earl of Shaftesbury and involvement in the Stuart court shaped his ideas. But his political philosophy developed in opposition to the policies and practices of Charles II’s court, not in harmony. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued against the very root of slavery: inherited status, which derived from the same set of ordering ideas and commitments as the monarchy – the divine and hereditary rights of kings. Just as a prince is born the son of a king, with a right to rule, a subject was born to a subject, and a slave born to a slave, each with the obligation to obey king and master.

During 1660-85, England under Charles II pursued slavery vigorously, and not only because it helped to justify monarchy. Slaves helped to produce profitable crops such as sugar and tobacco that generated huge tax revenues for the monarch. By 1687, the tax revenue (in the form of customs) on these staples comprised a third of crown revenue, paying for the navy, the army, and much else. Charles II married Catherine of Braganza from Portugal for her dowry, which included forts off the African coast. He put his brother James in charge of a new Royal African Company to enable the slave trade; James led two wars against the Dutch to gain access to the slave trade.

In England’s colonies in the Americas, Charles II appointed royal governors who supported slavery and offered rewards of land to those who purchased slaves or indentured servants. In Virginia, the king offered 50 acres per slave or servant bought; thus, some men accrued estates of 20,000 acres and more. Charles II’s judges presided over court decisions, especially one in 1677 that said that those who were aliens (ie, not subjects) had no rights under the law, and could be considered simple property.

Locke was a secretary who drafted a legal document as a lawyer drafts a will

Historians have long noted Locke’s role in drafting the Carolina constitutions, and its protections for slavery. The implication is not so much personal hypocrisy as evidence that Western liberalism, from its foundational theorist, promoted slavery. But such a story is based on a misapprehension of Locke’s position. In terms of the Carolina constitutions, Locke was a secretary – he drafted a legal document as a lawyer drafts a will. He composed it for the eight men who owned the Carolinas (given to them as a reward by Charles II). These men desired ‘that the government of this province may be made most agreeable to the monarchy under which we live’. They sought to ‘avoid erecting a numerous democracy’. The principles it espoused – including hereditary nobility and slavery – both predated Locke’s involvement, and reflected the ideals of the owners. It is a deep error, therefore, to contend that Locke’s role in the Carolina constitutions should guide interpretation of his later work, much less liberalism.

The matter of the Royal African Company stock has also lent itself to misinterpretation. Beginning in 1672, Charles II put Shaftesbury in charge of the Council on Foreign Plantations, which oversaw England’s colonies overseas. Locke was Shaftesbury’s personal secretary and so became the Council on Foreign Plantations’ official clerk. In 1672-73, Charles paid Locke in Royal African Company stock. During this period, the council sought political reform overseas (less power for governors) but mostly did the king’s bidding. There is much in these records about African slaves, and Locke’s handwriting, as clerk, transcribes that word over and over.

But within two years, both Locke and Shaftesbury stopped cooperating with the king and his policies. Shaftesbury had emerged as Charles II’s strongest opponent, inasmuch as one could safely criticise the king during that period. Shaftesbury opposed not only the Test Act of 1673 (barring both Catholics and Dissenters – non-Anglican Protestants – from political office) but also probably a 1674 attempt to create an imperial slave code for England, both of which Charles supported. In 1675, Shaftesbury and Locke co-wrote and published debates in the House of Lords questioning if Charles II sought too much ‘absolute’ power. Charles ordered the book burned as seditious. Locke fled to France for four years ‘for his health’, and Shaftesbury ended up imprisoned without trial in the Tower of London. In July 1675, Locke sold his stock in the Royal African Company, and Shaftesbury quickly followed.

If the story ended here, we would know little of Locke. He was a minor actor in a political contest dominated by major figures struggling over empire and questions on the nature of power. But the story did not end in 1675, which rather marked an abrupt turning point.

From today’s perspective, it is easy to think that ideas about human rights and democracy have always existed in some kind of fully articulated form. Perhaps they are culturally innate: certainly the Golden Rule ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ – from the New Testament – inspired Locke, and exists in many forms in different cultures. But the broad-based arguments about human rights that emerged in Locke’s (and others’) writings during this period had a very specific origin. They began as a repudiation of claims of divine and hereditary absolute power. They responded to Charles II’s court and council, to ideas articulated and enacted by ministers, politicians and political thinkers, on behalf of royal power.

More substantively, Locke and Shaftesbury grew horrified over what they found to be Charles II’s oppressive governance of England and its colonies, and also his promotion of slavery. They began to argue that absolutism possessed a common essence, and took different forms – of kings over subjects, and masters over slaves – but that all forms were wrong. Without his involvement in imperial policymaking, Locke would never have composed the Second Treatise, his theory of democratic governance. He wrote it not to propound Stuart ideals and practices, but against them, compelled by his legal and administrative encounters with slavery, a corrupt colonial government and a tyrannical monarch. His Two Treatises was a different kind of constitution than the one he had helped to draft for Carolina.

Locke opposed slavery on the same grounds as hereditary monarchy

Locke’s hatred of absolutism and slavery helped to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688 against James II. That revolution was necessary, Locke contended, because every pulpit in England preached the principles of ‘an advocate for slavery’. James II was in fact the governor of the Royal African Company at the same time he was king. Ministers of the Church of England, of which he was head, preached passive obedience to him because he was chosen by God to lead them. During the 1680s, the Royal African Company brought as many as 100,000 people from Africa to England’s colonies in the New World. James II was directly involved in that trade in human cargo.

Locke’s First Treatise begins: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man … that ’tis hardly to be conceived’ that anyone would support it. He attacked the principle of divine and hereditary power methodically. Why should the eldest son inherit all power by primogeniture, even over his brothers? He also compared the king’s claims to power to the also-illegitimate claims of masters over their slaves: neither had hereditary and rightful claims. The king might argue that his right to rule descended from Adam, but neither he nor masters of slaves had power over others by such specious claims. Locke’s Second Treatise speculated about what form of government would emerge in a state of nature. He began with postulates (including the Golden Rule) and built principles: government should be based on consent, and has particular purposes, mainly to protect its subjects. People do not have to obey a government that no longer protects them, and the consent of an ancestor does not bind the descendants: each generation must consent for itself.

Locke supported slavery only as punishment for a terrible crime for which one’s life could be forfeit – in particular, for starting a war that was unjust. And he insisted that it should never be hereditary. He opposed slavery on the same grounds as hereditary monarchy. People do not inherit their status. Government should be based on the consent of the governed, not on divine and hereditary privilege. Labour, also, should be based on consent. The first thing anyone owns and cannot give away is his own person. It is a propriety, a belonging, that is higher than any other kind of ownership. ‘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 man … hath by nature a power … to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate …’ Thus each person has a right to his own person and labour, a right that includes the ability to contract with someone else. That right is very different from slavery, which is forced labour.

After the Glorious Revolution, King William and Queen Mary gradually retreated from many earlier policies that had encouraged slavery. Shaftesbury’s political party, the Whigs, gained control over Parliament. Under pressure from them, William III appointed Locke to a new and more powerful governing council over the colonies, which he called the Board of Trade. There, Locke sat in judgment over many colonial policies. He became particularly concerned about abuses of power in Virginia. Along with other members, he investigated Virginia’s laws and constitution. He then wrote a 40-page plan for law reform in Virginia. That plan resides in the Bodleian library at Oxford, where librarians discovered it rolled into a cubby hole in his desk when they acquired his papers. It has long been assumed, even though it was in his handwriting and that of his secretary, that he did not write it. I show that he did. His work on Virginia’s constitution reflects Locke’s own ideas.

That plan for reforming Virginia’s constitution led to a reversal of many of the earlier policies that had promoted hierarchy and slavery. In particular, it admonished that Virginia should no longer follow Charles II’s policy of granting masters 50 acres of land for each slave or servant purchased, a policy that had fostered large estates and bound labour. Locke arranged for the appointment of a new governor for Virginia: Francis Nicholson. By court decision in 1699, Nicholson got rid of the land bounty for buying a slave. He sent a copy of that decision back to England. Next to the report that masters would no longer be rewarded with large estates for the ‘Importation of Negroes’, Locke responded, ‘Well Done.’

Locke’s plan for Virginia specified that all people should have equality under the law. ‘As people of different perswasions enjoy Lybertie of Conscience, so let people of all Nations be naturalised, and enjoy equal privileges with the other English inhabitants residing there.’ However, he understood that under English law at that time, most rights belonged only to subjects, and to become a subject one had to swear an oath of loyalty to the king – and to do that one had to be Christian. Locke was also familiar with the English High Court decisions that had justified slavery only for aliens. He therefore urged that the children of ‘negroes’ and ‘Indians’ should be ‘baptised, catechised, and bred Christians’.

By urging their baptism, Locke was undercutting the rationale for slavery. Subjects could claim rights to protections against maiming and assault, to trial by jury, to testify, to own land, and to freedom from forced labour. The High Court decisions affected American colonies then just as Supreme Court decisions often affect state law today. These judges were appointed and dismissed at the king’s pleasure. So King James II could dismiss judges and appoint new ones on his slightest whim, which he did. After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament fired and punished all of James II’s judges for corruption. William III appointed completely new judges. In 1696, they reversed the earlier High Court decisions and ruled that no man could own another. That new decision worked hand in hand with Locke’s Virginia plan to undercut slavery.

Slavery’s origins were in absolutism, not liberalism

Of course, slavery did not end in Virginia in 1699. Locke’s actions faced broad political headwinds. After a political crisis that led to the fall of the Whigs in 1700, Locke, who was old and sick, resigned from the board. William III died after a hunting accident in 1702. And his successor Queen Anne, daughter of James II whose court idealised slavery as the source of imperial wealth, reversed all of these policies again. Her crowning achievement was obtaining a grant to supply the Spanish empire with all their slaves for the next 30 years. That contract, the asiento, made Britain the main importer of slaves to the New World by 1750.

Neither slavery nor colonisation had their origins in Locke’s Two Treatises. His ideas about how people could claim rights to property did justify a certain kind of colonisation. He argued that, by making objects, by farming the land, one could derive ownership, goods and ground. However, his was a more egalitarian ideal of ownership than that offered by King James I’s right of discovery by Christian princes who could then grant dominion – the right of ownership and governance. Locke’s was founded on individual action, the Stuart kings’ on divine status.

Such attention to historical context matters. These complex debates over justice shaped the early modern world, and continue to shape ours. If we pretend that Locke and the Stuart kings were the same, and that their policy struggles did not matter, we ignore the impact of our own policies. If we dismiss Locke’s ideas as paradoxical, we forget that in these fires were forged not only slavery but also crucial principles of human rights. It is not only that the big questions were fiercely contended, but that small policies often had huge impacts. Reversing Charles II’s reward of land for buying slaves was a major move against inequality and injustice, and against the idea that kings could grant dominion over others. So too was his suggestion that all people be naturalised and have equal protections under the law.

The effort to compress such fierce disputes into a flat narrative of hypocrisy belies not only the past but the present. The effort to condemn liberalism (and Locke) as a theory of slavery and oppression, and to see within liberalism the origin of slavery, misrepresents the very essence of his theory, which was about human rights. It silences intense political debates over such rights that had dramatic practical repercussions. Slavery was justified by theories that all people were born to a divinely ordained status, ideas that were harmonious with racism, but not defined by that racism. Slavery’s origins were in absolutism, not liberalism.

Liberalism arose in reaction to slavery. It sought inclusion, and defined rights with broad promises, albeit ones that could be opened to exclusions. Indeed, one could argue that the breadth of such promises made racism (and other forms of prejudice) necessary in order to once again justify hereditary hierarchies. But for many others, it opened wide promises of inclusion. The theory itself was one that strained for relative equality under the law for all those who could give meaningful consent. The similarity of these disputes to ones we conduct today becomes more apparent with such context. For example: do rights inhere in all human beings or only in citizens? Abstract philosophical debates emerged from real dilemmas but also helped to shape policies that affected millions of people’s lives. They still do.

 



 

 

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