Historiography

Question 1

John Dunn on Locke’s significance

Answer 1

The story of how the Two Treatises of Government was causally responsible for the direction of American political theory in the eighteenth century is, of course,
largely false.

Even in England the book at no time secured the
sort of unquestioned acceptance and esteem which it is customary to assert for it today.

There is certainly not enough similarity in the arguments of other authors nor enough detail in the confessions to infer that any parts of Locke’s text were circulated in
order to provide other conspirators with arguments or to influence them to the support of resistance, and the failure to identify Locke in the confessions as involved in composition of a justification of resistance makes it
seem unlikely that Locke’s text was circulated or discussed even in part by these conspirators.

Question 2

Dunn on Filmer and patriarcha

Answer 2

the most authoritative statement of the Tory ideology
was held to be Sir Robert Filmer’s masterwork Patriarch

When Filmer’s Patriarcha was at last published in 1680 it became imperatively necessary to provide an ideological counterweight

Question 3

Dunn on the Exclusion Crisis §

Answer 3

the politics of the Exclusion controversy mark
one of the critical stages in the elaboration of the Whig constitutional theory of responsible government2
and in the political struggle of the English gentry and aristocracy to establish effective control over the monarch’s conduct of policy

Question 4

Dunn on the second treatise

Answer 4

It was a refutation which not merely set out logical limits to the legitimacy of royal authority but which rendered these socially operational by empowering the community to judge when they had been transgressed and to reassert them in action. In short it was a theoretical proclamation of the ultimate right of revolution

Locke’s Second Treatise may, then, have been written with an awareness from meetings with other conspirators in late 1682 of the different agendas of the various co-conspirators, as a text constructed with deliberate reticence or ambiguity about the form of government to be re-established in a conscious effort to encompass their various stated desires and principles

It is very much more likely that the Two Treatises were intended to be published at the moment that resistance commenced in order to gain support

Question 5

Dunn, Differences between Locke and others

Answer 5

The arguments of Sidney’s Discourses and Ferguson’s Impartial Enquiry did thus replicate a significant number of the central themes of the Two Treatises^ and importantly defended the arguments that individuals could resist a tyrant, that governments were established by consent, and that governments had to seek the common good and ‘salus populi’.

Apart from the right of resistance, however, these parallel elements should not be overemphasised: views such as the necessity of rule for the common good and government from consent were singularly conventional views among the Whigs in broad outline