by David Azerrad
In a new book, Steven Forde offers a compelling portrait of a “non-Lockean” Locke who is neither morally corrosive nor oblivious to the tension between individual rights and the common good and whose philosophy develops in response to the new empirical science that shattered the classical and medieval worldviews.
According to one popular account of the decline of Western Civilization, everything was humming along splendidly until the moderns came along and ruined it all. The Greeks, we are told, had essentially given us the correct account of man and politics. Their medieval heirs then tweaked Aristotle’s teaching and harmonized it with the Scriptures. And so the magnificent edifice of scholasticism stood—until the moderns set in motion forces that would lead to the slow, steady, and inexorable decline of the West.
While there is some disagreement among critics of modernity as to who kicked off that doomed enterprise, there seems to be a consensus that it’s a slippery slope from that inauspicious break to the nihilistic cul-de-sac diagnosed by Nietzsche. The truly radical core of modernity, critics contend, while part of the project from its beginnings, only shows itself clearly over the course of time.
In this declinist account, John Locke is often singled out as the lead villain. For Pierre Manent, Locke is the quintessential modern whose work is “central in every sense of the word” to grasping what modernity has wrought. By substituting rights for the teleological conception of human nature, Locke set the stage for the radical emancipation of man: “man and the rights of man form a perfect and self-sufficient circle that contains the promise of an absolutely unprecedented liberation of man.”
Lockean autonomy is particularly corrosive of community and family. According to Patrick Deneen, “an ever more Lockean society would result in fewer families and fewer children.” Ultimately, Lockean man “displaces God and assumes the role of creator and destroyer.” Lockean freedom, according to these critics, is like a poison that, once ingested, slowly but surely kills. And America, infected by Lockeanism at the time of its Founding, now exhibits all the gruesome pathologies of radical Lockean individualism.
Conspicuously absent from most of these laments is any consideration of why modernity arose in the first place. Surely Locke and the other early moderns must have sought to correct what they perceived to be certain defects in the classical or medieval teaching. They no doubt tried to address certain political, moral, and epistemological problems that the older teachings, in their estimation, could not deal with (or perhaps even exacerbated).
It may well be that they were mistaken or that the remedy they proposed proved to be worse than the disease, but any serious study of modernity cannot ignore this paramount question. The widespread failure even to raise this question among critics of Locke and modernity leads them to romanticize the past, dismiss the moderns out of hand, and take for granted the impressive achievements of Lockean liberalism.
All those who distrust Locke and long for a return to the ancients would do well to read Steven Forde’s new book on Locke, Science, and Politics. Forde, a professor at the University of North Texas who identifies with the “devotees of the ancients,” offers a compelling portrait of a “non-Lockean” Locke whose philosophy develops in response to the new empirical science that shattered the classical and medieval worldviews.
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