That Damned Liar, John Locke
An archival discovery catches the philosopher with his pants down and answers a centuries-old question
These kinds of things aren’t supposed to happen anymore: Dr. Felix Waldman, Cambridge historian, was going through an old tranche of 18th century writings on John Locke (1632 - 1704). In the middle of all these essays and encomia that Waldman had seen a hundred times before, out comes something else: five pages of notes and transcripts, in French, taken down by the hand of one Pierre des Maizeaux, journalist, interviewing an anonymous friend of Locke. Des Maizeaux was already known to Waldman as an admirer of Locke and evangelist for his work in France; it was a surprise, then to glance at the first page and see, in Waldman’s English translation:
When he [Locke] was at Oxford, he did not study at all; he was lazy and nonchalant, and he amused himself with trifling works of wit. The English translation of Voiture’s Lettreswas all his delight, and occupied him the most. He despised Science and Erudition. Nonetheless, he almost always had the Leviathan by H. on his table, and he recommended the reading of it to his friends. . . however he later affected to deny, in the future, that he had ever read it. He prided himself on being original, and he scorned that which he was unable to pass off as his own. This inclination often made him reel off, with great ceremony, some very common claims, recite, pompously, some very trivial maxims. Being full of the good opinion that he had of himself, he esteemed only his own works, and the other people who praised him. The book that wrote about Money is a copy of another . . .
As far as anybody can tell, these notes from an interview around 1718 with one of Locke’s few surviving friends sat, unnoticed and uncited, for two and a half centuries, passed over among the blizzard of files and documents that have always surrounded England’s most famous philosopher: theorist of the social contract and blank slate, philosopher of individual selfhood, father of liberalism, fountainhead for all legal theory, political science, and psychology in the English-speaking world. To the extent that our society presumes we are all born equal, without innate ideas but with certain inalienable rights that no government can infringe upon, we are all Lockeans. He is one of the most-studied figures of his time, one of very few philosophers that even high school students can recognize. Though he was occasionally on the wrong side of Britain’s tumultuous politics, by the time he died Locke was considered a Great Man, a wise and important thinker that you weren’t supposed to say mean things about. And yet, here is, allegedly, one of his closest friends telling a journalist that Locke was a plagiarist, a jackass, and a liar.
Taken on its own, this just looks like a bit of biographical color. What elevates this into a full-blown archival miracle is that part about Locke reading the “Leviathan by H.,” which is of book is Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Eclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679). That Locke would read the masterwork of his most famous and influential predecessor is, by itself, no surprise. The problem is that Locke really did deny, vociferously and regularly, that he’d read Hobbes or been influenced in any way by him at all. It’s an absurd claim on its face, not least because we’ve known for decades that this is a lie--in the 1950s, one intrepid historian searched the stacks of a remote hunting lodge to find Locke’s personal library catalog, which listed Leviathan among his books. Waldman’s own article, which I’ve been relying on throughout, lists thirteen other minor citations and mentions of Hobbes throughout Locke’s thousands of pages of extant writing. Still, this is a remarkably thin paper trail for what looks like an obvious connection. To hear Locke’s anonymous friend tell it, the man simply couldn’t give credit where it was due.
To be fair, there are other reasons why Locke, already used to living in exile and under the shadow of arrest in the political tumult of the late 1600s, might want to avoid associating his controversial new philosophy of government with, uh, the Devil. In his day, people hated Thomas Hobbes. He sided with the royalists in the Civil War, only to alienate them with Leviathan, whose entire theory of absolute popular sovereignty was a rebuke to an exiled monarchy no longer popular or sovereign and, therefore, illegitimate. Being neither a fan of puritanism nor Parliament, he wasn’t welcome on Cromwell’s side, either. As a philosopher he supported Descartes’s revolution against the old-guard fogies clinging to Aristotle’s skeleton, but disagreed strongly with Descartes’s actual views. His philosophy was seen was as so hostile to church and state that Parliament passed an anti-heresy act specifically calling out Hobbes. (Imagine how much scarier Republicans’ current legislative tantrum over “critical race theory” would be if they were also literally calling for Ibram Kendi’s head on a pike). As much as John Aubrey sketches a portrait of a curious and witty gentleman who wrote geometric proofs on his thigh, practiced the bass viol obsessively, and in bed sang “prick-songs” at the top of his lungs (for his health), to most of his countrymen Hobbes was eccentric, moody, and particular in an age that called for servility and lunatic certainty. For most of his very long life, it was a war of all against Hobbes.
Locke wasn’t stupid, then, to downplay any associations with the Heretic of Malmsebury, even if it also happened to play into his vanity. Des Maizeaux’s account, if true--and Waldman’s pretty sure that it is--turns an old philosophical mystery into a very old, very familiar tale in philosophy: youthful obsession and absorption, then rejection and distance. The mature work grows in new, unexpected directions, but follow it to the root and the old teacher is always there. This is Aristotle with Plato, Kant with Hume, Wittgenstein with Wittgenstein. Locke was fascinated by Hobbes’s account of the origins of society, the social contract, the government monopoly on violence, the nature and role of power among associations of individuals; out of political canniness and personal vanity, he never made the connection clear, and exactly what Locke thought he was doing with the philosophy of Hobbes may never be known--but his friends, at least, remembered him as a young jackass who pushed Leviathan on everybody.
That Locke wasn’t as perfect as his first biographers and philosophy textbooks will also serve as ammunition for his critics, who have been pointing out for years that Locke’s full-throated defense of liberty and equality seemed to have no impact on his entanglement with slavery or his investments in British colonialism. His ideas on property development as ownership were used as justification for stealing native land. This stuff is complicated, and getting into it is above my pay-grade. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of it in the biographical work now percolating after this discovered manuscript, and it all deserves to be aired.
But beyond any nitty-gritty details of early modern philosophy and intellectual transmission or the axe-grinding of columnists, there’s a wonderful thrill to the fact that we can still find new material from past centuries. The unfortunate truth is that when you look too closely at any history older than six or seven minutes, you’ll find all kinds of gaps, losses, and lacunae. Some of these gaps are significant: Samuel Johnson is one of the most well-documented lives of his century and we don’t know where the hell he was for an entire year--and that year was the most significant political crisis of his lifetime. Most ancient and medieval literature is irretrievably lost. Far more often than not, these are the breaks for book lovers: there is no buried copy, no secret memoir, no overlooked inscription. For centuries, Lockeans have been resigned to not knowing about Locke’s relationship to Hobbes. And then one day, in AD 2021, a manuscript slips out of a folder, and suddenly we know.
Postscript: going forward, I’ve decided to do a little postscript after each post highlighting one or two things that I think are worth sharing, since blogging is a gift economy.
Speaking of archives and recovered books: maybe it’s because I came of age slumming in thrift shops at a college town where these things were everywhere, but I’ve always had a soft spot for those mid-century academic paperbacks with imposing titles like THE POLITICAL ANIMAL IN REVOLT or DOSTOIEVSKI AND EXISTENTIALISM with stark, geometrical designs on an off-white background. You could find them all over thrift shops and used bookstores in Eugene, OR, somehow costing $4 in 2013 when they sold for $2.75 in 1973. I had a special soft spot for Grove Press, which published Beckett and a lot of the other late modernists that I worshiped.
All this is to say that I love this video Covers by the artist and designer Henning Lederer, which takes those old books and animates their minimal designs, picking up on the motion implied by the original artwork: the swirls really swirl and the spinners really spin. I’m hopeless at talking about art and design, so all I can really say about these is that I find them soothing, hypnotic, and hopelessly bookish. If you’re reading this blog, you’d probably consider it five minutes well spent.