The political theory of John Locke is generally credited with
having provided both a philosophical justification for the American Revolution
and a practical roadmap for the founding of the Republic. It is in this
sense, for instance, that historians often point to that celebrated phrase in
the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson, citing
Locke, declares the People's right to "Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Happiness". On this view, the influence of
Locke on American political culture was decisive, unproblematic, and
"happy". But such a celebratory view of Locke's influence on
American political culture correlates less with historical truth than it does
with the poetic half-truths of a national myth. This myth tells us that
Locke was a champion of liberty, of civil rights, and equality. The
historical truth, while not completely debunking this myth, nevertheless
unsettles the truths contained in it.
Locke was a champion of liberty; but he was also a champion of
British imperialism. He defended the right of individuals to enjoy
negative liberty --that is, their right to be free from coercion and tyranny,
but he also defended the positive liberty of "industrious" people
i.e., the British, to conquer foreign lands: both those lands that
were inhabited only by barbarians (which for Locke amounted more
or less to the entirety of North America, where he had a claim to a significant
tract of land in the Carolinas), or those lands that had been conquered by
people who were not industrious and had therefore neglected to improve the land
with their labor, (which for Locke essentially summed up vast areas of the
Spanish colonies in the Americas). This tension between negative and
positive liberties, between autonomy and sovereignty, is the true inheritance
that Locke bequeathed to America's Founding Fathers. It is a tension or
ambiguity that combines republican rights with imperial virtue.
Insofar as he was an enlightened thinker, Locke was not the first
to formulate this ambiguity. Some sixty years prior to
the publication of Locke's Two Treatises on Government,
Francis Bacon had already defined enlightenment as a combination of potentia and productio.
Locke, however, takes this double aspect of enlightenment thought and
applies it, not merely to Man's dominance over Nature, but also to Man's
ownership of the land.
For Jefferson, who dreamed of U.S. expansion in terms of an Empire
of Liberty, the issue was not so much the right to property as the right to
pursue happiness, which he conceived in the terms of an agrarian utopia of
ever-expansive liberty. Locke did not, however, mince his words after
such a fashion. For him, government was meant to secure the rights of
individuals to life, liberty, and property.
Locke's theory of property combines negative freedom and positive
freedom. Negative freedom is at work in what he calls the Law of Nature.
In the Second Treatise, he writes: "The State of Nature
has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: And Reason, which is
that law, teaches all mankind ... that being equal and independent, no one
ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions."
For its part, Positive Freedom is at work in what Locke refers to as a
Biblical injunction to improve the land through labor. In this sense,
Locke writes elsewhere in the Second Treatise: "God, when he
gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labor and the penury
of his condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to
subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life."
Accordingly, Locke argues, God gave the land "to the use of the
Industrious and Rational (And Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the
Fancy or Contentiousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious".
Locke's theory of property thus combines negative liberty, which protects
individuals from invasion of their land, with the positive liberty to invade
lands that have not been improved by the labor of others.
Now what is truly worthy of note about this theory is the extent
to which it is intimately bound up with justifications for British incursions
into the Spanish colonies in the Americas. In this sense, Locke writes in
his Second Treatise: "Nay, the extent of Ground is
of little value, without labour, that I have heard it affirmed,
that in Spain it self, a Man may be permitted to plough, sow,
and reap, without being disturbed, upon Land he has no other Title to, but only
his making use of it. But, on the contrary, the Inhabitants think
themselves beholden to him, who, by his Industry on neglected, and consequently
waste Land, has increased the stock of Corn, which they wanted."
Here Locke speaks with philosophical admiration of the manner in which
Spaniards in his time would recognize labor as the only title necessary to own
common lands that would otherwise be left alone in a state of
"wastelands". But Locke was not only an enlightened philosopher. He
was also a Landgrave of Carolina and the Secretary of the Council for Foreign
Plantations appointed by King Charles II of England. In this capacity, he
ordered a study of the history of the Royal Society, in which the argument on
wastelands is turned against Spain's colonies in the Americas. In this
work commissioned by Locke, we read: "how unfit the Spanish humor is, to
improve Manufactures, in a Country so distant as the West-Indies; we may learn
by their practice in Spain itself: where they commonly disdain to exercise any
Manual Crafts, and permit the profit of them, to be carry'd away by
strangers" (Quoted in Eva Botella-Rodinas' "Debating Empires,
Inventing Empires: British Territorial Claims Against the Spaniards in America,
1670-1714" in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No.
1, 2010).
Locke and his contemporaries in England viewed the Spanish as
"lazy" and "sinful", their empire already in decline and
doomed inevitably to collapse. The colonies in the Americas were, on this
view, wastelands --lands that the Spanish, who were according to this logic
interested only in silver and gold, had neglected to improve. This
prejudice, which in Locke is only in its nascent form, will with the passing of
the centuries guide not only British imperial pursuits in the Americas but
eventually also those of the United States of America: a Republic which
expanded across the continent first and then across the globe in order,
supposedly, to civilize the world and turn it, as Jefferson fondly dreamed, into
an Empire for Liberty.
No comments:
Post a Comment