Whig Political Theory (2)

Question 1

Locke - Biography

Answer 1

• Locke, John (1632–1704)
• Born to family of marginal gentry who sided with Parliament in the Civil War
• 14th November, 1675, anonymous pamphlet attacking Earl of Danby (King’s chief policy maker) is published. Has been attributed to Locke, and definitely came from within Shaftesbury’s circle –> Locke in France 1675-79
• Wrote the Treatises in 1680
• 7th September 1683, Locke is in Rotterdam following the discovery of the Rye House Plot

Question 2

Locke - the key texts

Answer 2

• Two treatise on government

First Treatise:

• Belonged to the debate of 1680-81, concerned with the succession (and exclusion crisis)
• Part of Shaftesbury’s political campaign to get the exclusion bill passed in the parliamentary sessions of 1680-81

Second Treatise:

• An attack on Robert Filmers Patriarcha
• A justification for resistance to tyranny under Charles the II, and James II.
• Letter concerning Toleration?

Question 3

Locke - why is absolute monarchy not a form of civil gvt?

Answer 3

• Absolute monarchy is not a form of civil government, because there is no neutral authority to decide disputes between the monarch and a subject; in fact the monarch, in relation to his subjects, is still in a state of nature.
• Absolute monarchy is as if men protected themselves against polecats and foxes, “but are content,
  nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”
• Locke defines tyranny as “the exercise of power beyond right.” A just leader is bound by the laws of the legislative and works for the people, whereas a tyrant breaks the laws and acts on his own behalf - any executive body that ceases to function for the people is tyranny

Question 4

Locke’s system of government?

The State of Nature and the Social Contract

Answer 4

Advocate of Civil Government under a commonwealth

• The State of Nature: Men obey reason, and have ‘no superior, on earth. Men can punish attacks on themselves or property in the state of nature. Men surrender the right to do this when they enter into the Social Contract.
• The Social Contract: The people and the government are parties in a contract. Government must defend the rights of the people, as the people have surrendered the right to defend them themselves.
• Legislative was a single, hereditary figure. Locke did not advocate a new kind of constitution

Question 5

Locke - the importance of property

Answer 5

• Property is extremely important to Locke: ‘The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property’
• ‘nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another’
• If property is not protected, it may warrant resistance.
• FJ: property to Locke = life, liberty and estate (from Latin etymology)

FJ: For Locke, commerce (and accumulation of property) is a principal means by which man escapes the privation that unimproved state of nature condemns him to.

Question 6

Locke - the relationship between property and government

Answer 6

• Locke presumes people will understand that, in order to best protect themselves and their property, they must come together into some sort of body politic and agree to adhere to certain standards of behavior. Thus, they relinquish some of their natural rights to enter into a social compact.

Question 7

Locke - the right to resistance

Answer 7

• Locke advocated Social Contract Theory. If either party, Government or People, violated the contact, resistance was justified.

–> - If a monarch prevents the Legislative power from operating, they are ‘exercising force without authority’

—–> ‘when [the legislative power] are hindered by any force from what is so necessary to the society…the people have a right to remove it by force.’

———–> The use of force without authority, always puts him that uses it into a state of war, as the aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly. i.e. tyrants = beheaded

FJ: The people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens.

Question 8

Locke - the rights of the citizen

Answer 8

• Citizenry had surrendered certain rights to the government, but that does not mean that the government is a supreme or absolute power because the citizenry are sovereign, and the government’s power is predicated on them.
• ‘nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself; and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another’

Question 9

Locke - which citizens should participate in government?

Answer 9

• believed that reasonable beings (though born free and equal) would allow the most intelligent and competent to direct affairs. Women, children, and inferior males would all willingly accept the guidance of the strong, able, intelligent property owners who sat in Parliament; or, if they would not in fact accept it, they ought rationally to do so - and that was what counted.

‘some one good and excellent man having got a pre-eminency amongst the rest…’

Question 10

Locke on Liberty

Answer 10

• Attacked Filmer’s Patriarcha and the idea that people are not at liberty to choose their government as government is divinely ordained
• ‘lives, liberty, property and religion’ are rights afforded to all citizens
• these rights are protected when people enter into civil society

Question 11

Locke’s immediate significance

Locke’s Long-term significance

Answer 11

SHORT TERM

• Not published until 1690, so no immediate impact
• We can assume it was very significance in Shaftesbury’s inner circle and reflects their ideology. The ideas were significant, rather than the publication of those ideas.
• Toleration: A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), in favour of toleration because sees government and religion as separate, therefore should be treated separately. The government was for external interests (life, liberty, welfare) whereas religion was for internal interests (e.g. salvation). He argued that civil unrest is caused by religious groups reaction to being told by magistrates what they can practice, so should practice toleration.
• Didn’t include atheists because they could not perform public oaths or uphold other bonds of human society
• Didn’t include Catholics because they swear their allegiance to another Prince, the Pope and one cannot have protection under two princes.

LONG TERM

• Important long-term impact. Important statement on liberty and freedom from tyranny.
• Formative ideas for the American Revolution

Question 12

Algernon Sidney - biography

Answer 12

• Sidney, Algernon (1623-1683)
• a younger son of the Earl of Leicester
• Algernon fought for Parliament during the English Civil War
• He refused to take part in the trial and execution of Charles I, but did serve in the Rump Parliament until Cromwell’s seizure of power.
• After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Sidney lived on the Continent until 1677, when he returned to England and soon became involved with the Whig opposition.
• Algernon Sidney was executed on the evidence of informers and the manuscript of a a work written against Sir Robert Filmer’s theory of the divine right of kings.
• Sidney’s manuscript was eventually published as Discourses concerning government in 1698.

Question 13

Algernon Sidney - key texts

Answer 13

• Discourses concerning government written between 1681 and 1683
• a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680)
• self-defence of protestants, against persecution and popery, in which his ancestors had long been involved, and which had once again become necessary in England following the loyalist reaction.
• 3 (untitled) chapters responding to Filmer’s 3
• I. Paternal power is entirely different from political power.
• II. The people choose their governors by virtue of their natural right to liberty, and that government with a strong popular element is the best.
• III. Kings are entirely subject to the law, which in England means the Parliament.
• Court Maxims 1665–1666

Question 14

Why does Blair Worden say Algernon Sidney was influenced by Primogeniture?

Answer 14

• Worden argues that Sidney is influenced by primogeniture because of his older brother receiving the family title and of his economic dependence and duty of obedience to his father who only died when he was 54

Question 15

Algernon Sidney’s form of government

Answer 15

• Absolute monarchy is a ‘political evil’, advocate of social contract, free choice> birthright of rulers
• broadly the Court Maxims is a systematic assault upon monarchy - ‘as death is the greatest evil that can befall a person, monarchy is the worst evil that can befall a nation’
• As monarchy is private interest government and republicanism government in the public interest each is ‘irreconcileably contrary’ to the other.
• Not birth but free choice determines men’s rightful rulers
• The purpose of government goes beyond the protection of mere liberty; it must reward excellence and punish vice
• Sidney proceeds that partly or wholly democratic governments are his preference - most consistent with the liberty we are born to and provide the greatest opportunity for merit to receive its due reward
• to Sidney a healthy constitution was one that secured the rule of the virtuous

Question 16

Algernon Sidney - Property

Answer 16

• Praises commerce, wealth, and property in so far that it is an end of statesmanship. However, this is only because it can contribute to a nation’s fighting strength.
• Moneymaking is corrupting.
• Government must protect the people’s rights to their “lands, goods, lives, and liberties”

Question 17

Algernon Sidney - Right of Resistance

Answer 17

• In Court Maxims and Discourses he argues for rebellion against the restored monarchy
• it anticipates key features of Locke’s aswell as Sidney’s later classic justifications of resistance
• (Discourses) Just government being instituted by the consent of the governed and for ends limited by the natural law and by the original contract, it follows that the people have a right to overthrow their government when it violates these limits.
• Sidney argues that the people have not merely a right but also an obligation to disobey bad laws and to depose or kill a tyrant

Question 18

Algernon Sidney - Citizenship and participation

Answer 18

• Sidney believes that freedom and manhood are attained only by men who study the constitutions under which they live and who participate fully in politics as citizens.
• Sidney’s citizenry, like Machiavelli’s, is to be “armed and generous,” its hearts “filled with love to their country,” whose interests are identical to its own. Sidney has Machiavelli’s liking for “frugality” and “honest poverty” and a corresponding distaste for “luxury” and “effeminacy.” He agrees with Machiavelli that a healthy commonwealth will be a “commonwealth for expansion,” its citizens trained primarily for war rather than for trade.
• For Sidney, the goal of a true nobility is to lead a community toward moral and political fulfilment.

Question 19

Algernon Sidney - Liberty

Answer 19

• it appeals to the godly to resist the restoration of religious persecution.
• it defends the principles (liberty, reason, and virtue) informing that classical moral philosophy which established the necessity of republican political architecture.
• “men are naturally free,” equal liberty being “the gift of God and nature.”
• “Liberty without restraint,” however, is undesirable, “being inconsistent with any government, and the good which man naturally desires”
• liberty is acting in accord with reason, not passion.
• Sidney, on toleration, maintained since belief is not the act of the will its not in anyone’s power to believe what they please. Every man has a rational and natural right to dispute what is uncertain until convinced it is true. To mix church and state is to pollute the purity of the spirit with the filth of the world

Question 20

Sidney’s significance, short term and long term

Answer 20

Short Term

• Sidney’s argument might seem to have been vindicated five years after his death by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The forced abdication of King James II broke up the last attempt to impose absolute monarchy on England. (although long opponent of the oranges)
• his posthumous admirers have divided between Whig dissenters and Whig deists, both of whom have claimed Algernon for their faiths
• Whig leadership were embarrassed by him. He was very much rooted in the ‘country’ and championed by the radicals
• while radicals might hope to make Sidney’s contract theory respectable, his republicanism and his views on resistance were more problematical. The radicals played them down and concentrated in- stead on Sidney’s antipathy to courtly corruption.

Long Term

• Among those who cited Sidney prominently in their writings, besides Jefferson and Adams, were Jonathan Mayhew, the spirited patriot preacher of Massachusetts, and Arthur Lee, a leading revolutionary politician of Virginia.
• Many prisoners in France during the Revolution likewise found that the image of Algernon Sidney came into their minds. French revolutionaries carried busts of Sidney on demonstrations.
• declaration of independence
• Celebrated and respected by Romantics e.g. Byron, Shelley and Southey

BUT

• Declining influence down the centuries
• Reputation shattered in 1773 when Dalrymple published documents from the French archives that showed that Sidney, whom the eighteenth century had come to know as a patriot inflexibly opposed to bribery and corruption, had taken money from the French ambassador Barillon
• The intellectual body blow to Sidney’s reputation was dealt by the leading Whig historians of the earlier nineteenth century, who, al- though of course enamoured of 1688, were careful to distance themselves due to his inflexibility on abstract ideas

Question 21

James Harrington - Biography

Answer 21

• Harrington, James (1611–1677)
• Family of parliamentarians
• Very close with Henry Neville
• Gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles I (1647)
• Wrote ‘Oceana’ in 1856, two years before Cromwell’s death
• Radical works to the end of Cromwell’s reign, and with the restoration of the Rump Parliament

Question 22

James Harrington - The Text

Answer 22

• Oceana was published in 1656
• First published in September, but censored by Cromwell
• Republished, successfully, in November.
• Dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, yet printed at a time of frustration with the republican regime
• The purpose of Harrington’s book was to demonstrate that England was ripe for republican government and to provide a blueprint for the type of republic that ought to be adopted - Hammersley

The Text

• ‘Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana’, a draft constitution consisting of thirty ‘Orders’.
• This constitution is prefaced by three sections:
• ‘The Introduction or Order of the Work’, in which the scene is set;
• ‘The Preliminaries, showing the Principles of Government’, which sets out the political theory and history behind the model constitution
• ‘The Council of Legislators’, which explores the context in which the ‘Model of the Commonwealth’ was supposedly drawn up.
• The work then closes with ‘The Corollary’ in which the consequences of the introduction of this type of government are set out.

Question 23

James Harrington’s Theory of Government

Answer 23

• Ancient jurisprudence: ‘preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest’, ‘it is the empire of laws and not of men’
• ‘the commonwealth consisteth of the senate proposing, the people resolving, and the magistracy executing, whereby partaking of the aristocracy as in the senate, of the democracy as in the people, and of monarchy as in the magistracy’
• rotation of office and the adoption of a special ballot to minimise corruption

Question 24

James Harrington - Property

Answer 24

• for Harrington the relationship between land and political power was crucial.
• Distribution of property changed the form of government that was appropriate: land owned by one man was suited to a monarchy; by many, to a commonwealth
• rule founded on Agrarian Law: maintance of the balance of property
• The Second Part of the Preliminaries’: Argues that Henry VII and VIII dispensed property to the people, so that by the time the Stuarts reigned the power was with the people

Question 25

James Harrington - Resistance and Revolution

Answer 25

• Revolutionary in the sense of moving away from monarchy and trying to change the course of events after the interregnum
• However, important that Harrington did NOT articulate a position on Resistance

Question 26

James Harrington - Citizenship and Participation

Answer 26

• Believed that individuals worked for their own self-interest, but that this could create a virtuous whole
• ‘be mannerly at the public table, and give the best from himself unto decency and the common interest’
• People incapable of debate but could resolve (see ‘Government’)
• People divided into citizens and servants, the latter being unfit to participate
• It was crucial for Harrington that all citizens were engaged in both political and military tasks—these being the twin components of citizenship.
• academy of provosts, a daily venue to which citizens could come in order to debate political matters or present their own proposals: ‘to the end that not only the ear of the commonwealth be open unto all, but that, men of such (p. 541) education being in her eye, she may upon emergent elections or occasions be always provided of her choice of fit persons

Question 27

James Harrington - Liberty

Answer 27

• Harrington’s system was far from completely egalitarian - only male citizens (not servants) over the age of thirty were to be enfranchised. He wanted a series of hierarchically organized assemblies from the parish at the bottom to the national level at the top. These assemblies (“tribes”) were to be divided - according to wealth - between commoners and knights.

Question 28

James Harrington - Short-Term Significance

Answer 28

• Oceana generated considerable debate.
• Matthew Wren, son of the Bishop of Ely: publishes Considerations upon Mr Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana; Monarchy Asserted
• Wren insisted that commonwealths were no more empires of laws than monarchies. He also attacked Harrington’s failure to trace the true origins of government. Wren put the case for monarchy as the older, and therefore more legitimate, form of government and he insisted that power is always the basis of authority.
• Differed in opinion with the ‘Godly Republicans’: Vane and his associates placed much greater emphasis on the religious foundations of the commonwealth against Harrington’s belief in ‘human prudence’ and the balance of property.
• Harrington’s political ideas were drawn into parliamentary debates in February 1659 during Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, but they proved more influential after the collapse of the Protectorate and the restoration of the Rump in May. On 6 July a ‘Humble Petition of diverse well‐affected persons’ was presented to Parliament
• 1959, Coffee House meetings of The Rota Club to discuss Harrington’s proposals

Question 29

James Harrington - Long-Term significance

Answer 29

• ‘Oceana probably exercised greater influence abroad than it did at home.’ - Rachel Hammersley
• ’ While Harrington did not succeed in introducing his system into England in the 1650s, his ideas exercised a considerable influence during the 150 years that followed’
• Influenced later ‘neo Harringtonians’ like Neville- Pocock
• in Britain Harrington’s ideas did not have any perceptible political influence. By contrast, in both North America and France they exerted a practical impact, being echoed in the Massachusetts state constitution and even forming the basis of a draft constitution addressed to the French National Assembly in 1793

Question 30

Henry Neville - Biography

Answer 30

1620-1694

• Angered and disappointed by Oliver
  Cromwell’s expulsion of Parliament by military force in 1653, Neville subsequently joined the political opposition and became involved in plots against the Cromwellian Protectorate.
• Neville was active in the political crisis of 1659-1660 and a political exile in Italy in the 1660s. He contributed in print to the debates of the so-called Exclusion Crisis of 1678-1681
• Second son of Sir Henry Neville (sr.), so didn’t inherit estate and experienced ‘downward social mobility’ –> Had to marry rich women, Elizabeth Staverton
• -> Resentment of heirarchy and inhereted wealth
• Resentment of forest fines in Berkshire which would have affected the Neville family (anti-tyrannical)

Question 31

Henry Neville - The Text

Answer 31

• The pamphlet, which has come to be known as
  The Isle of Pines by Henry Neville, tells the story of an Englishman, George Pines, who sails from England in 1569 and after a tempest at sea is marooned on an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean with four other passengers, all women, one a Negro servant.
• Food is bountiful, the climate temperate, and
  shelters easily built. After a few months George starts sleeping, sometimes openly, with the women, including the Negro. He establishes a rotation of intercourse and childbearing, and populates the island. He leaves a brief written record of his experiences
• Death of George Pines brings disorder → Henry Pines starts adminstration
• After Henry dies, his son William succeeds him.

Question 32

Henry Neville - (implied) theory of government

Answer 32

• George was a ‘Patriarch’, and there was disorder under him
• Georges unwillingness to try to create order derives in part from his patriarchal assumptions and attitudes. George is so centered on what he wants, so oblivious to what others may want, and so willing to impose on everyone what he feels and wishes, that?while he does play some roles as father of the family well (he is fruitful and multiplies; he builds a family shelter; he marries off his children)?he does not govern politically. - Stillman
• What George has done, in other words, is to replay, in slightly different terms, the political failures and moral corruptions of Adam, the patriarchs, and Noahs descendants. - Stillman

Question 33

Henry Neville - Property

Answer 33

• Williams failures: the failures of politico-religious rules, of the rule of law, and of Hobbesian force, highlight the absence, in that political system, of property rights, and suggests the need for rights of property and contract.
• Such rights would set bounds to behavior, provide a (non-familial) basis for political representation and political order, and ensure that the government can be both strong (because supported by the property of the state) and limited (because effective political power follows the distribution of property). - Stillman

Question 34

Henry Neville - Right of Resistance

Answer 34

• The sharp contrast between George’s sexual potency as a father in peopling his island and his impotence as a statesman in organizing his people is, ultimately, a critique of Englands current and future monarchs, of patriarchal rule, and of one dominant justifying argument for absolute monarchy- Stillman

Refers to Indian/Brahmin customs:
- after five years a marriage has no children, the husbands can cohabit with other women. A warrior or hero is only rewarded when he brings back in his hands the severed head of his victim. Finally, that “which is strangest, and indeed most barbarous”: when one is sick, his friends kill him rather than let him wither. The Brahman practices contrast with English/The Pines

→ When the body?or the body politic? is in bad health, it should not be allowed to weaken and wither slowly. Instead, it should be killed and a new healthy body politic established

Question 35

Henry Neville’s short-term significance

Answer 35

• In doing so, we need to follow Neville s eighteenth-century publisher, Thomas Hollis, who re-published The Isle together with Nevilles Parliament of Ladies (1647) as part of a republican canon and located it, through a reference to John Locke’s reflections on the royal prerogative in the Two Treatises of Government,within the seventeenth century dispute about political patriarchalism

Question 36

Robert Filmer - Biography

Answer 36

• Filmer, Robert (1588?–1653)
• eldest son of a country gent
• Trinity College, Cambridge 1604
• knighted by King James I in 1619
• Said neutral in civil war but his works say otherwise

Question 37

Robert Filmer - Key Text

Answer 37

• Patriarcha
• written 1620, published 1680
• 3 chapters
• I. That the first Kings were Fathers of Families.
• II. It is unnatural for the People to Govern, or Choose Governours.
• III. Positive Laws do not infringe the Natural and Fatherly Power of Kings.

Question 38

Robert Filmer - Theory of Government (long)

Answer 38

• Patriarcha defends absolute monarchical power, no matter how lawless, cruel, or tyrannical it might be.
• Filmer accepted that the three pure forms of government - monarchy, aristocracy and democracy - were legitimate, but denied the possibility of “mixed” forms (where power was held partly by a king and partly by a representative body).
• Filmer argued on the basis of the Bible as well as of experience and reason unassisted by faith. Unlike other royalists, Filmer liberated his king from all earthly restraint.
• No human beings were ever born into freedom, because from creation onwards royal-patriarchal authority was in the hands of successors to the patriarchal authority of Adam, and then again of Noah.
• Filmer maintained in Patriarcha that kings rule by right of birth.
• He thought monarchy the most natural form of government because it is based on the most natural of all relations, the family, in which the father rules.
• Filmer saw political power as no more consensual than paternal power, and he claimed that subjects had no more right to disobey, resist, or bully their king than children did their father.
• A king is a father writ large, patriarch of his country. Therefore, the king is not subject to any human law, including even the English common law. He is himself the source of law.
• he argued that the Commons had been summoned only from the time of Henry I. This proved, so Filmer argued, that the people had no natural or original right to parliamentary representation.

Question 39

Robert Filmer - Resistance

Answer 39

• In response to the ousting and execution of Charles I and to Cromwell’s seizure of power, Filmer argued in 1652 that usurpation could never be legitimate. Divine providence, he now claimed, could never fully extinguish the rights of the old ruling dynasty.

Question 40

Filmer - Sovreignty, citizenship and participation

Answer 40

• Filmer complained that contract theory suggested that democracy was the natural, default form of government, instituted by God. But almost everyone agreed that democracy was the worst form of government - little better than mob rule.
• Filmer also pointed out that the “people” was a highly ambiguous term. Was it meant to include women and children? If so, why were they in fact excluded from political affairs? And if not, why not? To say that women and children are subordinate to husbands and fathers is to deny the freedom and equality on which the theory of original popular sovereignty, and the contractual origins of monarchy, was based. The people changes every time someone is born or dies. Should we re-assemble the people on each occasion to learn its sovereign wishes?

Question 41

Filmer -property

Answer 41

It is the Multitude of People, and the abundance of their Riches, which are the only Strength and Glory of every [[69]] Prince: The Bodies of his Subjects do him Service in War, and their Goods supply his present Wants,

–> therefore, if not out of Affection to his People, yet out of Natural Love to Himself, every Tyrant desires to preserve the Lives, and protect the Goods of his Subjects, which cannot be done but by Justice, and if it be not done, the Prince’s Loss is the greatest;

——-> on the contrary, in a Popular State, evey man knows the Publick good doth not depend wholly on his Care, but the Common-wealth may well enough be governed by others though he tend only his Private Benefit, he never takes the Publick to be his Own Business; thus, as in a Family, where one Office is to be done by many Servants, one looks upon another, and every own leaves the Business for his Fellow, until it is quite neglected by all

Question 42

Filmer - liberty

Answer 42

• Men are born neither free nor equal
• it refuted all accounts of human society that suggested that the people were originally free, and that political authority originated in the consent of these free people.
• The liberties of parliament existed only by the monarch’s grace

Question 43

Filmer - short-term significance

Answer 43

• Though his writings were little noticed by his own contemporaries they were to stimulate extensive debate when republished after 1679.
• In the turbulent years after 1678, the supporters of Charles II drew upon Filmer’s writings in their efforts to rebut arguments for the exclusion of the king’s brother James, duke of York, from the succession, and for the limitation of the monarchy.
• Opposing responses from Sidney and Locke who directly address Patriarcha

Question 44

Filmer - long-term significance

Answer 44

• Filmer’s adherence to Spelman’s view that the House of Commons was no older than the thirteenth century proved a powerful weapon against the whigs.
• More recently there has been a sustained reappraisal of Filmer’s work, made possible especially by Peter Laslett’s 1949 edition of his political writings. All Filmer’s writing may be understood as attempting to apply the scriptures to contemporary problems—usury, theological dispute, politics, witchcraft—but the application was undertaken with intelligence.

Question 45

Give the date of creation AND publication for each key text

Answer 45

TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT
Written: 1680
Published: 1689

OCEANA
Written AND Published: 1856

THE ISLE OF PINES
Written AND Published: 1688

DISCOURSES ON GOVERNMENT
Written: 1681-3 (Unpublished)

PATRIARCHA
Written: 1620
Published: 1680

Question 46

Key Historiography for Locke

Answer 46

• Richard Ashcraft - Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatise on Government
• Bertrand Russell - History of Western Philosophy
• G. A. Aylmer - Locke no Leveller
• John Dunn - The Political Thought of John Locke
• Philip Milton - John Locke and the Rye House Plot

Question 47

Key Historiography for Sidney

Answer 47

• Jonathan Scott, Algneron Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (1991) E
• Blair Worden, ‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985)

Question 48

Key Historiography for Harrington

Answer 48

• Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana and the Republican Tradition
• Pocock, J. G. A. The Political Works of James Harrington,

Question 49

Key Historiography for Neville

Answer 49

Gaby Mahlberg, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century

Peter G. Stillman, Monarchy, Disorder, and Politics in The Isle of Pines

Question 50

Richard Ashcraft: Dating Locke’s Treaties

Answer 50

DATING THE TREATIES

• Published anonymously in 1690. However, historians debate when it was written. Assumed to have been written after the Glorious Revolution (1688), but Peter Laslett argues it was written after the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81)

OPTION ONE - WRONG
- If Locke’s Two Treatises were begun in 1679 when the Whigs’ political strategy centered on the exclusion of the Duke of York by constitutionally legal means, how can that work have been intended to provide a defence of the revolution Shaftesbury was accused of planning in 1682?

• To put the matter in its sharpest terms: If Locke wrote the Second Treatise in 1679, then he did not write it for “Shaftesbury’s purposes,” since neither Shaftesbury nor anyone else had organized themselves to undertake such a revolution in that year

OPTION TWO - RIGHT
- If the Second Treatise is associated with Shaftesbury’s plans (for a revolution), then the pamphlet is dated to 1681
(when these plans were being made)

—-»» Locke writes Second Treatise After April 1680. He purchased Patriarcha in January and was on the move for four months.

Question 51

Ashcraft: Why did Locke write the treaties?

Answer 51

SECOND TREATISE

• RICHARD ASHCRAFT: ‘as a political tract, it seeks to provide a justification for the political activity of those who have decided to resist, on the grounds of self-defense (of their “lives, liberty, property and religion”), the actions of a tyrant, i.e., one who exercises “force without lawful authority’
• Charles’ dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 meant that the threat of tyranny in the future by James II was superseded by the threat of tyranny under the current monarch
• Justification for the Rye House Plot?

Question 52

How significant were the ‘little people’ (Roger L’estange) to Whig-led rebellions?

Answer 52

HISTORIOGRAPHY: 
- Still, the core and dynamic impetus of the radical movement was provided by the brewers, tailors, shoemakers, silk dyers, weavers, and carpenters, men from the same social class which later ‘supplied the backbone and force for Monmouth’s illfated rebellion

EVIDENCE
- Finally, there were the professional men,
lawyers, doctors, ministers, and journalists. They wrote most of the pamphlets and tracts setting forth the radical political perspective

Question 53

Quote from Locke: The State of Nature

Answer 53

“Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.”

they obey “reason,” which is the same as “natural law,”, so no need for law enforcement

Question 54

Quote from Locke: The Social Contract

Answer 54

civil government is the result of a contract, and is an affair purely of this world, not something established by divine authority’

Question 55

The Association of Henry Neville and James Harrington

Answer 55

• Moreover, Neville’s most important work, Plato Redivivus (1681)?written in response to the Exclusion Crisis?and Oceana share the central hypothesis: ultimate distribution of political power is related to the distribution of landed
  property. 2 As the amount of land belonging to the King and his nobility had been declining from the Reformation to the Civil War and the wealth of the “lesser gentry and the commoners” had been increasing, for both Harrington and Neville the political power of King and nobles also had to diminish in favour of the majority of the people (Neville, Plato 88, 114, 120).
• Henry Neville defended ‘Harringtonian’ ideas in Richard Cromwell’s parliament

Question 56

How did Sydney feel towards Shaftesbury and his circle

Answer 56

Lee Ward - The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America
- Sidney feared and distrusted the Orange interest as much as the Stuarts, and saw the crisis more
as a way to severely circumscribe the power of the crown (or, ideally, establish a republic) than as a way merely to ensure a pliant Protestant successor
to Charles.
- Shaftesbury and Sidney disliked each other

Question 57

What happened to the Whig Leadership after Shaftesbury’s death?

Answer 57

Lee Ward - The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America
After Shaftesbury’s flight to Holland and subsequent death, Sidney and the rest of the “Council of Six,” including Monmouth, Essex, Russell, Hampden, and Howard, assumed leadership of the Whig movement and tirelessly sought French support for a broad-based Whig insurrection in England and Scotland.

Sidney was arrested and sent to the Tower along with other top Whig leaders in June 1683 after the discovery of the Rye House Plot to kidnap the king and the duke of York.

Question 58

What are the arguments that have been put forward for how radical Locke was?

Answer 58

G. A. Aylmer, Locke no Leveller
ASHCRAFT
- ‘I have throughout this work placed Locke in much closer proximity to the Levellers and to the radical political theory they developed than has previously been supposed.’
- Levellers were NOT homogenous, and there were ‘true Levellers’ and ‘progressive individualists’
MACPHERSON
- Levellers more interested in property rights - a ‘possessive individualism’ - than campaigning for a full democracy. Less populist Levellers = Locke more compatible with Leveller thought than before

LASLETT vs ASHCRAFT
- Laslett: Second Treatise written 1679—80, and the First Treatise in 1680, with additions to the former being made in 1681 and continued alterations and amendments into 1682 and 1683, followed by final revisions in 1689.

• Ashcraft: First and Second Treatises were written in that order during 1681—82 after Exclusion Crisis.
• -> a revolutionary manifesto against Charles II, and one so potentially dangerous to its author that it could not be published until after the death of that King and the overthrow of his brother.

Question 59

G. A. Aylmer on Locke and the Levellers

Answer 59

IN Locke’s dissolution of government, which is equivalent to a revolution, ‘the people’ at large are entitled to participate.

Locke’s discussion on legislative still saw legislative as a single, hereditary figure: categorically not any kind of revived call for a Leveller-style new constitution, such as has been demanded back in 1647-49.31

The evidence that Locke took part in planning the Rye House or any other murder scheme against Charles and James is nonexistent; but even if he were drawn into discussions of armed insurrection after the
Oxford Parliament and the reaction which followed its dissolution, it would by no means prove that either his actions or his political thinking were Leveller-influenced

John Locke may reasonably be thought of as an individualist liberal, a constitutionalist and (in language nearer to his own) a Whig and a believer in the right and
duty of resistance to tyrants, even to the point of violent revolution. It remains to be demonstrated that he owed much to the ideas or the example of the mid-century Levellers.

Question 60

Stone on Patriarcha

Answer 60

The Causes of the English Revolution
‘it seems to have been more a last-ditch effort to prop up a crumbling institution than a symptom of triumphant ideological resurgence’

Question 61

JOHN LOCKE AND THE RYE HOUSE
PLOT
PHILIP MILTON

Answer 61

Locke was probably aware that Shaftesbury and others were planning (or at least talking about) an insurrection, but there is little to indicate that he was directly involved. An analysis of his movements during the autumn of 1682 suggests if anything that he was deliberately keeping out of the way. There is even less reason for thinking that he was involved in plans to assassinate Charles II

what is justifiable in theory may be inadvisable in practice,

and in the autumn of I 682 a prudent man would have realized that the prospects for a successful insurrection were already slim and were growing slimmer. Locke was a very prudent man.

Question 62

H. R. Fox Bourne, The life of’John Locke

Answer 62

H. R. Fox Bourne, Locke’s nineteenth-century biographer, was sure of his innocence. ‘It is certain’, he wrote ‘that he had nothing to do with the later plots in which Shaftesbury had been engaged

Question 63

Stillman on lack of order in Neville

Answer 63

Williams failures?the failures of politico-religious rules, of the rule of law, and of Hobbesian force?highlight the absence, in that political system, of property rights, and suggests the need for rights of property and contract

Question 64

Sidney, quote on grounds for resistance

Answer 64

If the laws of God and men are therefore of no effect… seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man