Interlude: John Locke as OG Tortured Liberal
Writing in the mid-17th century, his philosophy of government ran headlong into slavery and colonialism
John Locke is considered the founder of the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition. His 2nd Treatise on Government, written in 1660 but published in 1689, was held to provide the philosophical justification for the 1688 Glorious Revolution, and his work established the foundations for thought about human rights and political legitimacy which occupy central roles in practically all Western political thought. That treatise is amongst the first required reading for any first-year Oxford PPE student.
Consent, liberty, human rights - the justifications for.
I’m sure you can guess where this is going, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.
John Locke wrote in the late 17th century, well after Barbados was established and as chattel slavery was becoming the dominant labour force. The Second Treatise was written in 1660, just a year before the 1661 acts which set West Indian slavery on a nakedly racist footing.
We must understand that Locke was no political naif when it came to West Indian slavery. Rather, it’s fair to say that at times he was up to his neck in it. His patron, for whom he acted as secretary, and with whom he developed his philosophical ideas, was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury,
Shaftesbury’s political life was dazzling even by the explosive standards of British 17th century standards. By the time he died in 1683 - in Amsterdam having fled after a(nother) failed uprising - he had danced every possible step in Britain’s hangman politics, from parliamentarian to restoration statesman, to rebel (again). However, his interest in the West Indies started early (taking a stake in a Barbados plantation in 1646), and continued long, lobbying for changes in the Navigation Act’s sugar duties in 1871, and helping set up the Bahamas Adventurers’ Company a year later.
At Shaftesbury’s side, Locke also played a part in drafting the a constitution for Carolina, which, of course, endorsed slavery. His work for Shaftesbury brought him a shareholding in the Royal African Company, after Charles II put Shaftesbury in charge of the Council on Foreign Plantations in 1675.
He cannot, therefore, not have known what was going on. He cannot not have thought about slavery. Re-reading the Second Treatise whilst bearing this in mind is revealing and disconcerting - among other things, we are reading the mind of one of the smartest and most engaged men of its century as it tortures itself to avoid, or confront, or avoid again, the impossible ethical problem of slavery.
To highlight Locke’s involvement in slavery is not to slander him, or to demand the foundations of our political philosophy must be ‘decolonised’. Rather, recognizing that Locke was thinking and writing whilst stretched by the most severe ethical contradictions, gives us a fuller understanding of his work.
In that light, the 2nd Treatise comes alive, not least because it rapidly becomes clear how impossible the problem is. In fact, slavery and its implications are central to the very structure of the 2nd Treatise’s argument. Though this is only obvious if you know the context. Locke starts by setting out a benign ‘state of nature’ where everyone can ‘order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit . . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.’ Since all are equal, there is a natural tendency to ‘do as you would have done to you.’
But since no man has the right to destroy himself (or by extension his property), so likewise he has no right to ‘take away, or impair the life, of what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another’. And by further extension, anyone who breaks that rule , everyone - everyone - has a right to punish the offender.
Locke views this as absurd, not least because it implies a universal legal right to punish: but ‘those who have the supreme power of making laws in England, France or Holland, are to an Indian, but like the rest of the world, mean without authority’. It also dodges the claims of reparation. ‘The ‘everyone’ clause fails, which in turn makes the case for civil government, where people ‘mutually . . . enter into one community, and make one body politic’. The benign state of nature, then, devolves into a consent-based political economy.
This is the bedrock of his political philosophy. But Locke has no sooner stated it, than he veers into a problem immediately pertinent to what’s going on in the West Indies. There is the problem of a state of war: if someone has a ‘sedate settled design upon another man’s life’ or (by extension, and always in Locke, property) Then there is a state of war, and, of course, ‘one may destroy a man who makes war upon him’.
Locke explicitly has the West Indies in mind, as he makes clear in Section 17: ‘No body can desire to have me in his absolute power, unless it be to compel me by force to that which is against the first of my freedom: ie, make me a slave’. ‘He who makes an attempt to enslave me, thereby puts himself into a state of war with me.’
And Locke’s definitions are broad: if the slaver will do it to me, he’ll do it to everyone; and more, ‘if when he set on me to rob me but of my horse or coat,. . . . permits me my own defence, and the right of war, a liberty to kill the aggressor.’
He repeats: ‘And therefore it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a state of war with me, i.e. kill him if I can’.
Bad news for Barbados, then.
So the very next chapter (Chapter IV) is ‘Of Slavery’. It is a curious chapter too. It starts out with the premise that since no person under God has power over his own life, he can’t agree to become a slave. But if ‘having by his fault forfeited his own life by some act that deserve death: he to whom he has forfeited it may. . . delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service, and he does him no injury by it.’ ‘This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive’.
More - and this is important as well as curious - ‘if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery cases, as long as the compact endures.’
What he is describing here, what he is writing a justification for, is not, of course, chattel slavery. Rather, it is an exact description of the indentured servitude which at the time of writing had formed the bedrock of Barbados’ forced labour force. (Again, the Treatise was completed in 1660, a year before the racist 1661 acts establishing West Indian slavery on racial grounds). Those shipped from Britain into indentured servitude in the West Indies were, precisely, either criminals or people caught out on the wrong side of the Civil War (sold by Cromwell) or the Restoration (sold by Charles II), or those who had sold themselves to it out of economic desperation.
By providing a justification for indentured servitude, Locke must have hoped he had swerved the far more radical injustice of chattel slavery.
But he hadn’t, and that failure haunts his the justification of property and the generation of economic value into which he then dives.
Locke’s basic understanding is that a man’s ‘property’ gains its value from the labour he puts into it, and that this, therefore is the justification for ownership. The labour of his servant also counts. But how far can this theory of value/property be extended? After all, even elementary agricultural work turns out to involve myriad separate inputs, all of which will have some claim. And is there any limit to the amount of property a person might amass?
It is generally agreed that Locke tortures the argument for answers at this point, without great success. But repeatedly, he defaults to an economic justification for colonial exploitation. ‘An acre of land that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in America which, with the same husbandry, would do the like are, without doubt, of the same natural intrinsic value, but yet the benefit mankind receives from the one in a year, is worth 5l, and from the other possibly not worth a penny, if all the profit an Indian received from it were to be valued.’
‘Let any one consider what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco or sugar, sown with wheat or barley, and an acre of the same land lying in common. ‘
And he is even more explicit in Section 48, where he asks us to imagine, and lament, ‘an island, separate from all possible commerce with the rest of the world’ but undeveloped.
There can be no doubt that Locke’s political vision has at least one eye on the extraordinary and violent expansion of Britain’s ‘first empire’ in the West Indies and America. Indeed, how could it be otherwise. But though he recognizes the violence implicit in the ‘state of war’ which his country is bringing to the ‘state of nature’ in these places, his justification all too often is found in ‘the benefit mankind receives’ from the economic development which follows.
To be honest, this tension in the liberal mind has never gone away. Even today, it is rare to find the most ‘enlightened’ Western liberal prepared to think about the fate of the Uighurs in China, the persistence of slavery in parts of Africa, the industrial processes which bring us our iPhones. If we condemn Locke, we merely extend our hypocrisy a further league.