Our Founders' Warning. Strobe Talbott
to England, nor could he be sure that several projects he had been working on for nearly two decades would ever be read. Although he was sufficiently comfortable and safe, he seemed unmoored, spending time “much in my chamber alone,” sitting by a fire, reading, and corresponding with friends in a homeland he might never see again.34 And though he returned to medicine, his passion would always remain the study of the mind.
When Charles II died in 1685, the Crown passed to his stunningly inept brother, James II, who wasted no time making powerful enemies. He raised suspicions that he intended to roll back Parliament’s hard-won prerogatives, infuriated the Anglican establishment by promoting his fellow Catholics to high posts, and sidled up to Britain’s archrival, France. After four tumultuous years, James was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter, Mary, keeping the Stuart dynasty on the throne. Mary, in turn, insisted that her husband, William of Orange, join her as co-monarch, adding to his status as stadholder (effectively, chief executive and commander of five Dutch Republic provinces) the title King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Convoluted as this maneuver was, the reigning couple brought to English politics a measure of stability and liberalism—two trends that do not always come in tandem. It was now possible for Locke to return home and publish his books.
In his masterwork, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejected the concept of “native ideas” stamped “upon [our] minds, in their very first being.”35 The mind at birth is a tabula rasa, he believed—a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”36
Rationality, he concluded, was an innate human faculty that produces ideas as we accumulate knowledge through experience: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”37 By studying our environment and exercising rationality in our own lives, we gain the capacity and incentive to form ideas on how to cope with the opportunities and challenges of life.38
Locke, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that happiness—or at least an environment in which it could be pursued—was a perquisite for an enlightened polity and society. “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles, which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing: These may be observ’d in all Persons and all Ages, steady and universal.”39
In present-day English, happiness usually carries the connotation of personal good fortune or contentment, fleeting or otherwise. But, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers gave it added moral weight. Happiness should be the result of altruism and empathy. A worthy person should care for the happiness of others, and an enlightened government should care for the collective happiness and prosperity of society as a whole.
Locke had been revising the Essay for almost a decade before he launched into Two Treatises of Government. It would not be published until 1689 and even then, anonymously. Despite growing tolerance following the Glorious Revolution, Locke knew his ideas were ahead of his time and therefore dangerous.
The Two Treatises was a model social contract between the governors and the governed. He considered rationality, tolerance, and happiness critical for both. Whether surveying the world around us or probing inward to understand our minds, we are each a monarch unto ourselves, entitled to personal liberty in thought, belief, persuasion, religion, and speech.40
Locke denounced “received doctrines” such as the divine right of kings. He asserted that all individuals are free—and, moreover, obligated—to use their wits to understand the world and cope with it ethically.
Locke, Hobbes, and Spinoza believed that, in nature, there was no such thing as right or wrong, virtue or sin. It was incumbent upon the state to set rules and to enforce them with punishment or reward. Hobbes did not trust the Leviathan’s subjects to have leverage over their government, whereas Locke (like Spinoza) insisted the opposite. Hobbes believed an authoritarian regime would, inevitably, repress its subjects, whereas an enlightened government would respect the inborn, inherent rights of its citizens: “Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”41
No one meant no one, including the ruler of the state. In the Second Treatise, Locke rejected the belief that the divine creator of the universe also judged the affairs of “man,” and he insisted that man-made law must be based on due processes of government and legislature. This assertion that an abusive monarch is an illegitimate one is essentially the same argument that cost Algernon Sidney his head. It also inspired the American founders to risk their own lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding also endorsed separation of religion and politics in a chapter titled “Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces.” He knew both provinces and was clear about their differences and their boundaries.42 While a dedicated rationalist, he was also a member of the Church of England who was well-read in the Bible. His letters from Holland to friends in England suggest that excluding accounts of supernatural events, he had found wisdom in both the Old and New Testaments. He had faith in God but would never try to persuade others to do likewise, since he could offer no proof of the deity’s existence.
Back in the Province of Reason, Locke could explain and defend his propositions with evidence and logic. Authorities could enact laws and create institutions as long as they did not intrude into the private chapel of the mind. During the first four years after his return to England, he wrote A Letter concerning Toleration, laying down a broad admonition to any government: “The care of each man’s soul, and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self.”43
Locke believed that no “judge on earth”—rulers and lawmakers—possessed the capacity to pronounce verdicts on spiritual matters.44 For that reason alone, officials of the state had no business forcing citizens to adopt a “true religion” while suppressing adherents of other faiths.45
Publishing the Two Treatises of Government anonymously may not have been necessary, given how little notice it received. The British historian John Kenyon writes that Locke’s ideas were mentioned rarely in the early stages of the Glorious Revolution, up to 1692, “and even less thereafter, unless it was to heap abuse on them.”46
The aging philosopher ached with disappointment as he approached the end of his life. He saw himself as a second-tier figure in the eyes of his contemporaries and likely to be unknown in the future. According to his Essay, when he scanned the landscape of “the commonwealth of learning,” he saw “masterbuilders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity.” He singled out Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of nature put him in the first rank of physics, astronomy, mathematics, optics, and cosmology. Comparing himself with Newton, Locke was, he said, “an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”47 Locke’s reputation as a master designer of republican government reached its apex well after his death. The Declaration of Independence embraced the concept that all human beings are equal at birth and have unalienable liberties, one of which is the pursuit of happiness. Locke made the argument for the right of revolt against an unjust ruler. The Constitution endorsed Locke’s rationale for separating the branches of government, and the Bill of Rights echoed his promotion of freedom of speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition for grievances.
The founders of the United States of America were intensely aware that among those Englishmen who prepared the philosophical ground