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The Evolution of Democracy:
Part 4:
John Locke on Divine Right:
John Locke was born in 1632. Thus, he was but a youngster when
the English civil war (1642 - 1648) ended the reign of Charles
I. Possibly because of his youth, that conflict did not affect
Locke quite as severely as it did Hobbes. What did affect him
much more profoundly was the vengeful hand of James II. When Charles
II died in 1685, James II ascended the throne. His government
immediately put Locke on a hit list for his earlier services to
a political enemy of James II, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
As fortune would have it, Locke had the good sense to escape to Holland shortly before he became a fugitive from English justice. He remained in Holland during James' reign and went so far as to live under an assumed name. When the Glorious Revolution put William of Orange on the throne Locke returned to England.
Even as that revolution was taking place, Locke was preparing to publish his own political masterpiece, "Two Treatises of Civil Government." In the first treatise, he attacks the theory of divine right monarchy. He also undermines Hobbes' theory of absolute sovereignty, wherein the sovereign once created cannot be dissolved. We can let it be a matter of scholarly nit picking whether undermining Hobbes was inadvertent or by design.
The attack of Locke was mainly addressed to the arguments of the major spokesman for the divine rights of kings, Sir Robert Filmer. Let me digress for a few lines into the theory of Filmer. In his treatise "Patriacha," he presents a rather verbose and convoluted construct in which he bad mouths everyone in sight, with particular attention to the various churches of the time. I did attempt to read his work and I confess I only read parts. I got bogged down in the verbiage.
My reading problem was mostly due to Filmer's style. My word processor tells me that his average words per sentence was 38 with one sentence topping out at 232 words. There were 39 pages of this and I did read quite a bit of it. I will not claim that I understand his diatribe, but as I got it, I must agree with Locke on his points.
Locke reduces Filmer to this; "Men are not born free, and therefore could never have the liberty to choose either governors, or forms of government. Princes have their power absolutely and by divine right, for slaves could never have a right to compact or consent. Adam was an absolute monarch and so are all princes ever since."
Now why would anyone buy into such nonsense? We must understand that at that time much of Europe was ruled by absolute monarchs. If we study the history of just the French monarchy we must conclude that most of these kings would have been found certifiably insane by any contemporary measure. Megalomania was their primary disease.
Of course, the king would argue, "I'm not megalomanic, I really am great." To be sure, the duller the mind, the more likely it is to believe that. We can also be sure, just as now, that there were plenty of sycophants about to pump them up. So we find that too many of these loony-land personalities were unbridled and ruthless in their exercise of power. This ruthlessness, we can guess, might cause many people to take Filmer's theory seriously, or to at least give it lip service. This was not so likely in England where divine right had already been set aside.
Locke continues his first treatise with a sarcastic point by point destruction of Filmer and the theory of divine right. He argues that it cannot be shown that Adam had divine authority and that, in fact, he did not have it. In addition, even if Adam had such authority, it would not be possible to determine who, if anyone, was heir to that power. Locke concludes that it is impossible that the current rulers should be able to claim any benefit or gain any authority from "Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction."
Locke then makes note of the problems which divine right is supposed to circumvent. This is the notion that without rulers men would live together by the rule of the beast where the strongest carry the day. This he agrees would result in almost constant disorders, conflicts, and intrigues of one form or another. He points out that man must find some other form of government to insure against this condition of anarchy.
To lay the foundation for that, Locke defined political power. "Political power then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good."
Now, I criticized Filmer for his verbosity. in fairness I must point out that the above sentence weighs in at a whopping 58 words. I have noticed this problem with all of the earlier writers and philosophers I have read. There seems to be a tendency to confuse ponderous verbosity with profundity. I cannot visualize these thinkers and writers ever making it with a modern publishing house. If they were considered at all, most of them would be sent back to their writing desk to tighten up their prose. Great thinkers they were. Great communicators they were not.
Of course, we can still observe this phenomena in Washington, DC. Willie Gaffer has called it Verbosalitis in his book, The Gaffer's Shorts. The logic, I suppose, goes something like this. ‘If one wisheth to be viewed as learned, one must needs necessarily to be ponderous, both in manner and in speech.'
Next time I will discuss Locke's second treatise where he lays
out his own theories of civil government. We will see how that
contributes to the American concepts of freedom and democracy.
Back to The Evolution of
Democracy.
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