The Biological Naturalism of the Lockean Pursuit of Happiness

In some previous posts, I have identified myself as a Midwest Straussian--as someone who combines Aristotelian ethics and Lockean politics, in affirming (contrary to Leo Strauss) that one can combine ancient virtue with modern liberty.  If I have anything special to contribute to this Midwest Straussianism, it's my argument that Aristotelian liberalism can be rooted in a biological naturalism that is supported by Darwinian science.

Michael Zuckert is the paterfamilias of Midwest Straussianism, and Catherine Zuckert is the materfamilias.  They rule over their intellectual family from their Midwestern home base in South Bend, Indiana.  Although Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl would not identify themselves as belonging to any Straussian lineage, they have elaborated a defense of Aristotelian liberalism that Midwest Straussians should embrace.  A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts on this intellectual project of the two Dougs.  In recent years, Tom West has joined the family of Midwest Straussianism, having begun his intellectual life as a West Coast Straussian fighting the East Coast Straussians.  Having recently moved from the University of Dallas to Hillsdale College, West has set up a home base in Michigan not far from South Bend.

In considering West's many contributions to the Midwest Straussian combination of ancient naturalism and modern liberty, two stand out in my mind.  One is his defense of Thomas Aquinas against Straussian criticisms, on which I wrote a series of posts last year.  The other is his interpretation of Locke, which he has elaborated in a recent article in Social Philosophy and Policy.

West agrees with Michael Zuckert that Locke's political thought does not have to be grounded in religious belief--particularly, in the belief that all human beings have been created as the workmanship of God.  But while Zuckert sees self-ownership as the ultimate ground of Locke's argument, West thinks the true ground for Locke's argument is the natural human pursuit of happiness, so that government is justified insofar as it secures the conditions for that natural pursuit of happiness by securing life, liberty, and property.

Although I generally agree with West, I see this Lockean pursuit of happiness as rooted in Locke's biological naturalism, which includes a biological understanding of self-ownership as extended into a concern for others that is natural for social mammals like human beings.

Kenneth Dewhurst's medical biography of Locke and Roger Woolhouse's general biography make clear Locke's life-long passion for medical science, medical practice, and experimental research in natural philosophy generally, under the mentorship of people like Robert Boyle, Thomas Sydenham, and Thomas Willis.  For example, he contributed to Boyle's experiments with his air-pump to explore how air provided some element necessary for respiration, which apparently sustained the natural heat of the heart that was necessary for life.  Thus, Boyle and Locke were close to the discovery of oxygen's role in sustaining animal life.  One of Locke's earliest writings was a draft manuscript on the importance of air in respiration.  He wrote: "Nature's aim seems to have been to foster that universal heat or fire of our life.  For we live as long as we burn, and are nourished by the same fire" (quoted in Woolhouse, 68).  One can see here the natural teleology of functional processes in biology.  Locke also learned about how the human mind emerges from the brain and nervous system from Willis, who is often considered the founder of modern neurology.  Like Aristotle, Willis dissected monkeys and apes to study their neurological similarities to human beings, while also looking for differences that would explain the distinctiveness of the human mind.

In fact, if Locke had not joined the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper (the first Earl of Shaftesbury) in 1667, which drew Locke into the political activity of the Whigs, one can imagine that he might have devoted his whole life to natural science without becoming a political philosopher.  If one keeps this in mind, then one begins to notice the biological character of Locke's moral and political philosophy. 

Strauss and the Straussians have generally depicted Locke as promoting a moral relativism and atomistic individualism that set off a first wave of modernity that would lead inevitably to the third wave of nihilisitic crisis with Nietzsche and Heidegger.   West shows that the Lockean pursuit of happiness does not have to be interpreted as radically relativistic or atomistic, because it is rooted in the natural teleology of human nature.  I agree with this, but I would stress more than West does that this Lockean naturalism is biological, and that this biological naturalism is confirmed by modern Darwinian science.

That Locke's natural standard for the human good is set by the natural pursuit of happiness is most clearly stated in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in chapter 21 of book 2.  (This is one likely source for Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence.)  By nature, happiness, as the fullest satisfaction of our natural desires, is that "which we all aim at in all our actions" (II.21.36).  On this point, Locke agrees with Aristotle and Aquinas.

Many Straussians object, however, that Locke breaks fundamentally with Aristotle and Aquinas in denying that there is any natural summum bonum for human life.  In this very chapter on the pursuit of happiness in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke explains:

"the various and contrary choices that men make in the world do not argue that they do not all pursue good; but that the same thing is not good to every man alike.  This variety of pursuits shows, that every one does not place his happiness in the same thing, or choose the same way to it.  Were all the concerns of man terminated in this life, why one followed study and knowledge, and another hawking and hunting; why one chose luxury and debauchery, and another sobriety and riches, would not be because every one of these did not aim at his own happiness; but because their happiness was placed in different things" (II.21.55).
 

This leads Locke to apparently deny that there is any summum bonum: 

"the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue, or contemplation: and they might have as reasonably disputed, whether the best relish were to be found in apples, plums, or nuts, and have divided themselves into sects upon it.  For, as pleasant tastes depend not on the things themselves, but on their agreeableness to this or that particular palate, wherein there is great variety; so the greatest happiness consists in the having those things which produce the greatest pleasure, and in the absence of those which cause any disturbance, any pain.  Now these, to different men, are very different things. . . . Men may choose different things, and yet all choose right; supposing them only like a company of poor insects; whereof some are bees, delighted with flowers and their sweetness; others beetles, delighted with other kinds of viands, which having enjoyed for a season, they would cease to be, and exist no more for ever"(II.21.56).
 

As West indicates, Locke's reference to the peculiar "viands" of  beetles is probably a reference to dung beetles:  so it seems that some human beings are like flower-seeking bees, while others are like dung-eating beetles.  Doesn't this, many Straussians insist, show Locke's modern relativism, in which what is good for any human being is merely a matter of subjective taste?

And yet West rightly points to another passage in the Essay where Locke says that human beings "are both concerned and fitted to search out their summum bonum" (IV.12.11).  "In this passage," West observes, "Locke admits that there is a summum bonum--not one single good for everyone, to be sure, but a genuine highest good for each person" (37).

As the two Dougs have argued, this conception of the summum bonum as both humanly universal and individually diverse provides Aristotelian moral support for Lockean liberty.  If there are certain generic goods that are universally good for human beings--like health, property, friendship, parental care, and intellectual activity--then these generic goods constitute a natural standard for the human good.  But if the appropriate ranking or organization of these generic goods varies according to the temperament, talents, and circumstances of different individuals, then each individual has a distinctive summum bonum.  And if so, government cannot properly enforce a single summum bonum for all individuals, but it can properly enforce the conditions for people to have the liberty to pursue their summum bonum in the natural and voluntary associations of society.  Lockean government cannot guarantee the self-perfection of every individual.  But it can guarantee the self-direction that is the condition for the pursuit of self-perfection.  West seems to be defending a reading of Locke that is compatible with the argument of the two Dougs.

I see all of this as rooted in a biological naturalism that Locke shares with Aristotle and Darwin.  As a physician and biological scientist, Locke recognizes that human beings share certain species-specific desires that characterize them as social mammals, but he also recognizes their biological individuality such that different individuals properly rank or organize their natural desires in distinctive ways.  Some are bees, and others are beetles.

In some ways, this is relativistic.  But in other ways, it is not.  This is relativistic in two ways.  First, the human good is not a cosmic good, because the generic goods of life are relative to the distinctive nature of the human species, which is not the product of any intentional cosmic design. 

Second, this human good is relativistic in being individualized, because the actual human good is always the good of some particular individual, which is why we need prudence or practical judgment in determining what is best for particular individuals in particular circumstances.

And yet this conception of the human good is not radically relativistic, because the generic goods of life conform to the reality of the biological nature of the human animal, and the individualized goods of life conform to the biological reality of human individuals. 

Moreover, as naturally social animals who cannot pursue their happiness without living cooperatively with others, human beings need to live in families and voluntary groups that cultivate their moral and intellectual virtues, and they need government to secure the liberty necessary for fulfilling their natural desires as the social mammals that they are.

REFERENCES
Dewhurst, Kenneth, John Locke (1632-1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London: The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963).

West, Thomas G., "The Ground of Locke's Law of Nature," Social Philosophy and Policy, 29 (Summer, 2012): 1-50.

Woolhouse, Roger, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Locke in the Declaration of Independence: A Response to Claire Rydell Arcenas's Argument

Over the years, I have written a lot about Lockean liberalism in American political thought--particularly as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.  But a new book by Claire Rydell Arcenas--America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life--argues that this idea that Locke's ideas (particularly in his Second Treatise of Government) influenced the Declaration of Independence is a "myth."  There are, however, two major weaknesses in Arcenas's argument that are illustrated by her handling of the intellectual history of the Declaration of Independence.

Nevertheless, I should say that her book is valuable as an intellectual history of John Locke's influence in America from the colonial period to the present.  She shows that that influence has been so deep and so enduring that Locke can indeed be identified as "America's Philosopher."  I find much of what she says persuasive.

I am not fully persuaded for two reasons.  She is not a careful reader of Locke.  And she employs a deceptive silence that allows her to ignore the best criticisms of her reasoning.  I will explain these two points, and then I will show how they are manifested in her account of the Declaration of Independence.

Although Arcenas's denial of the Lockean character of the Declaration of Independence is only a small part of her history of Locke in America, it is the crucial turn in her general argument.

A CARELESS READER

Arcenas speaks about what "careful readers of Locke's work" know about his writings (50).  Unfortunately, Arcenas offers no evidence that she is one of those careful readers.  On the contrary, she often suggests that either she has not read Locke at all, or that she has only glanced at some passages in Locke's texts with the help of some summaries by some scholarly commentators.  For example, after a brief survey of Locke's life and work, she refers her reader to "some succinct summaries of Locke's work" in The Cambridge Companion to Locke and elsewhere (6, 174, n.18).  When she writes about Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity and his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, she does not quote or cite any passages in those books, but instead, once again, she cites some scholarly summaries of those books (28-29, 184, nn. 115, 119).

At no point in her book, does Arcenas develop a careful reading of any portion of Locke's texts.  Now Arcenas might respond by saying that she does not present her book as an accurate interpretation of Locke's writing.  She explains: "This, then, is not a book about John Locke, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, but rather a book about how Americans over time have understood and made sense of him, his work, his ideas, and his relevance.  I present interpretations of Locke's life, ideas, and works through the eyes of my subjects--not the lenses of modern scholars" (4-5).  But, as we have just seen, she does rely on "the lenses of modern scholars" to provide accurate summaries of Locke's writings.  Moreover, she often corrects what she claims to be distortions of Locke's texts.  For example, she asserts that "careful readers of Locke's works" know that what the Declaration of Independence calls "the pursuit of Happiness" cannot be found in Locke's writing (50-51, 127).

DECEPTIVE SILENCE

A second weakness in Arcenas's book is that she is deceptively silent about the many good objections to her arguments.  One of the fundamental standards for scholarly writing is that if a scholar takes a position on some controversial topic, that scholar is obligated to explain and then rebut the best arguments for the opposing positions in the debate.  Arcenas does not do that.  Nowhere in her book does she explain to her reader the objections to her reasoning and then refute those objections.  Her silence allows her to ignore her critics without directly engaging them in debate.

She might respond by saying that in fact she identifies her critics by citing their writings.  And, indeed, in a few of the endnotes to her book, she does list some articles and books that argue against her position (176, n. 8, and 190, n. 72, 191, n. 75).  But she never explains the evidence and arguments laid out by these critics, and she never attempts to show how these critics are mistaken.  In this way, she makes it impossible for her reader to weigh the opposing sides in this debate.

LOCKE'S SECOND TREATISE IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Both of these weaknesses are manifest in what she says about "a central myth of the American Revolution"--that the Declaration of Independence shows the influence of Locke's ideas, particularly his political teaching in the Second Treatise (49-51).

The most obvious way to resolve this question is to compare the texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Second Treatise to see if there are any similarities in the language and ideas of these two works.  Surprisingly, Arcenas never does that, although she does argue that the language of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence is very different from "Lives, Liberties, and Estates" in the Second Treatise.

A careful reader who compares these two texts will see some remarkable similarities in their language, and these similarities have been noticed by many Americans from the time of the American Revolution to the present as clear evidence of Locke's influence on the Declaration.  Here I will point to ten of these similarities.

1.  In its first sentence, the Declaration appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."  Any careful reader of Locke's Second Treatise will recognize this as similar to expressions used by Locke.  He often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (66, 142, 195), the "Law of Nature" (1, 4), and "God and Nature" (60).  Similar expressions can be found widely in authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.  I have written about "Nature's God" as the deity of the Declaration.

2.  The famous second sentence of the Declaration begins by invoking those "truths" that are held to be "self-evident," of which the first is that "all men are created equal."  This echoes Locke's holding the "equality of Men by Nature" as "so evident in it self," there being "nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank" should be "equal one amongst another" (4-5).  Locke also speaks of "Men being . . . by Nature, all free, equal and independent" (95).  In Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration, he wrote that "all men are created equal & independent; that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable" (Becker 1942, 142).  Locke's phrase "equal and independent" also appeared in George Mason's Virginia Bill of Rights: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent."

3.  Also in the second sentence of the Declaration, the "unalienable Rights" are said to include "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."  This is the only passage in the Declaration that draws Arcenas's attention.  She says that this language cannot be found in Locke's Second Treatise.  Locke says that in leaving the state of nature, people "unite for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property" (123).  Clearly, Arcenas claims, this language in the Second Treatise cannot be the source for the passage in the Declaration.  Most importantly, she asserts, the phrase "pursuit of Happiness" is not Locke's (Arcenas 50-51).  This assertion will seem strange to anyone who has read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, because this book has a long chapter on "Power" that speaks repeatedly of the "pursuit of happiness" (II.xxi.39, 44, 48, 52-53, 61-63, 70).  It is surprising that Arcenas says nothing about this, particularly since she argues that for most of American history, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding was more widely read and studied than his Two Treatises of Government.  One has to wonder whether she has actually read Locke's Essay.  One also has to wonder why she says nothing about the passage in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration where he summarizes the Second Treatise in arguing that governments were established to secure people in their lives and property and in the things that contribute to the "Happiness of this Life," while "leaving in the mean while to every Man the care of his own Eternal Happiness" (Locke 2010, 46-47).  In such passages, we see Locke affirming that people have a natural right to the "pursuit of happiness," the same idea that is affirmed in the Declaration.

That Arcenas is unaware of what Locke says about the "pursuit of happiness" is especially surprising because she cites C. Bradley Thompson's book America's Revolutionary Mind, which has a long section on how Jefferson could have borrowed the phrase "pursuit of happiness" from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Arcenas 2022, 190, n. 72; Thompson 2019a, 206-220).  Arcenas either cited this book without actually having read it, or she did read it but decided to pass over Thompson's argument in silence.

4.  In the third sentence of the Declaration, it is claimed that governments are instituted among men "to secure these rights."  Similarly, the Second Treatise often says that governments are established "to secure" or "preserve" natural rights (87, 131, 222, 225).

5. This establishment of government to secure natural rights is said by the Declaration to be based on "the consent of the governed."  This idea appears many times in the Second Treatise (102, 104-106, 112, 119, 121-22, 138, 140, 168, 175, 198).

6.  When a government fails to secure these rights, then the Declaration recognizes "the Right of the People to alter or abolish it," and to institute a new government that is "most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."  But prudence dictates caution in overthrowing any government that has been long established, "and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."  Locke expresses a similar thought in the Second Treatise, in responding to the objection that if people are taught that they have a right to dissolve a government that they don't like, this will lead to frequent rebellions and thus anarchy.  In fact, Locke insists, people are slow to rebel.  "For till the mischief be grown general, and ill designs of the Rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the greater part, the People, who are more disposed to suffer, than right themselves by Resistance, are not apt to stir" (230).  This phrasing of "more disposed to suffer" is identical in the Declaration and the Second Treatise.

7.  Similarly, the Declaration's phrasing of "abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed" repeats Locke's wording in the Second Treatise: "People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest.  They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledg'd Faults, in the Frame they have been accustom'd to" (223).

8.  But even though people are slow to rebel against their long-established governments, the Declaration explains, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."  This echoes Locke's language about how a government that shows an evident tendency towards despotism can provoke the people to revolution: "if a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the People, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, wither they are going; 'tis not to be wonder'd, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected" (225; compare 210, 230).

9.  Next, the Declaration asserts: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."  This introduces the longest section of the Declaration--a long list of grievances, a factual indictment of Great Britain based on an asserted history of abuses.  This part of the Declaration corresponds to Locke's many references to the political history of England under the Stuart Monarchy, in which he identified acts that might have justified a revolution against Charles II and that did in fact justify the Revolution of 1688 overthrowing James II and installing King William.

10.  Finally, in the last two sentences of the Declaration that formally declare the independence of America from British rule, there is an appeal "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" and to "the Protection of Divine Providence."  Similarly, Locke appeals to the "Supreme Judge of all Men," which is part of his "appeal to Heaven," which is an appeal to the God of Battles to settle the revolutionary dispute between the People and the government in war (21, 240-43).  And, in fact, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of war, an "appeal to Heaven."

The phrase "appeal to Heaven" was coined by Locke, and this phrase was put on the Americans' "Appeal to Heaven" flag, the first flag of the American Navy in 1775.  I have written about this previously.

THE AMERICAN DEBATE OVER WHETHER JEFFERSON PLAGIARIZED FROM LOCKE: 1801-1826

Arcenas might respond to all this by saying that this is irrelevant to what she has done in her book.  After all, as we have seen, she says that her book is not a book about John Locke or about what scholars today might see in Locke's texts.  Since she is writing about the intellectual history of how Locke has been interpreted by Americans from colonial times to the present, it doesn't matter for this purpose whether scholars today can see verbal parallels between the Declaration of Independence and Locke's Second Treatise.  The question is whether contemporary Americans of Jefferson's time thought that Locke's Second Treatise was a primary source for Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.  "In a word," she says, "the answer is no" (49).

But for Arcenas to say this, she must ignore the historical evidence that Jefferson's contemporaries really did see the remarkable influence of the Second Treatise on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration.  For example, Arcenas is silent about the American debate--during the last 25 years of Jefferson's life, 1801-1826--over whether Jefferson had plagiarized much of the Declaration of Independence from Locke's Second Treatise.  Oddly, in one endnote of her book (191, n. 75), Arcenas cites an article by Brad Thompson (2019b) that tells the story of this debate, but then she never explains the story or explains why this should not be considered crucial evidence against one of the main arguments of her book.

In 1800, Jefferson was elected president in one of the most acrimonious elections in American history.  This was the first presidential election in which two deeply partisan factions fought an ideological battle--with the Federalists led by John Adams and the Republicans led by Jefferson.  A few months after Jefferson's inauguration in 1801, the staunchly Republican New York City newspaper the American Citizen and General Advertiser published a two-part essay by the editors on "John Locke."  They identified Locke as "the first writer on political science that ever justly defined the principles of civil government," and they said that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence had stated those principles as first set forth in Locke's Second Treatise.  In fact, they observed, the reader of the Second Treatise "will find in it all the ideas and nearly the words verbatim, which are contained in that declaration."  They said that the "sentiments" in Jefferson's Declaration were "more elegantly expressed than in Locke's Essay, but the ideas are precisely the same, and the words nearly so."  So these pro-Jefferson newspaper editors in 1801 had seen the same similarities between the Second Treatise and the Declaration that we have just laid out.

Many Federalist newspapers were happy to reprint passages from the American Citizen's editorial as showing that Jefferson's reputation as the great author of the Declaration of Independence was fraudulent because he had plagiarized from Locke.  For example, the editors of Boston's Columbian Centinel said that Jefferson had "stolen all the ideas in the Declaration of Independence from Locke."

Writers for the Republican newspapers then tried to defend Jefferson from this charge of plagiarism.  The editors of Boston's Independent Chronicle said that if "Mr. Jefferson had copied from" Locke, "who was the parent and apologist of the modern revolutionary principles," then Jefferson "would have no reason to blush, nor his friends to be ashamed, that he had the wisdom to adopt the sentiments of that illustrious republican."

As Thompson has shown, this debate continued, off and on, until Jefferson's death in 1826.  And as Thompson indicates, what is remarkable is that everyone in this debate agreed that Locke's influence on Jefferson's Declaration was clear, and many of them compared passages from the Second Treatise and the Declaration to show the verbal echoes that confirmed the Lockean origins of the Declaration.

If the Declaration of Independence was intended to be "an expression of the American mind," as Jefferson said in 1825, then the evidence from this debate, Thompson concludes, supports a syllogism:

Major premise: The Declaration of Independence is an expression of the American mind.

Minor premise: America's revolutionary mind was an expression of Locke's political philosophy.

Conclusion: The Declaration of Independence was an expression of Locke's mind.

In writing her book, Arcenas decided not to confront and refute the evidence and arguments for this syllogism.  That was a mistake.

REFERENCES

Arcenas, Claire Rydell. 2022. America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Becker, Carl L. 1942. The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: Vintage Books.

Locke, John. 1970. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Thompson, C. Bradley. 2019a. America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It. New York: Encounter Books.

Thompson, C. Bradley. 2019b. "John Locke and the American Mind." American Political Thought 8 (Fall): 575-593.

The Pursuit of Punctuation in the Declaration of Independence

As we read the Declaration of Independence on this Fourth of July, we should pay special attention to its punctuation.  As a front-page article in the New York Times yesterday indicated, there is now an intense scholarly debate over a period in the second sentence of the Declaration.  According to the National Archives, the parchment copy of the Declaration engrossed by Timothy Matlack for the Continental Congress between July 19 and August 2, 1776, and then signed by the members of the Congress beginning August 2, reads this way:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Danielle Allen, a professor at Princeton University and the author of a new book on the Declaration of Independence, argues that the first period--after "pursuit of Happiness"--is incorrect, because when William Stone produced his engraving of the Declaration in 1823, the Matlack parchment was badly faded, and Stone read a period when he should have read a comma .  Her paper elaborating her reasoning is persuasive to me.  I have often found the punctuation of the Declaration puzzling, and now Allen has cleared this up for me.  In the fourth edition of my book Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker, I will replace that period with a comma in the copy of the Declaration in the Appendix. 

Oh, I know, many of you are thinking--what difference does it make whether it's a period or a comma?  But Allen has persuaded me that it does make a big difference in how we interpret the most philosophically important passage in the Declaration.  Most of her paper is about the textual history of the various copies of the Declaration.  But there's also an intellectual history of the philosophical implications of the punctuation.  And here she makes two points.  First, she argues that replacing the period with a comma makes this one long sentence, and this along with the two dashes makes clear the syllogistic structure of this sentence.  Second, she argues that the correct punctuation helps to emphasize the importance of the "pursuit of Happiness," which replaces "property" in the traditional Lockean and Jeffersonian phrase "life, liberty, and property."  I agree with the first point.  I partially disagree with the second point.

With Allen's punctuation, this passage becomes one long sentence with five "that" clauses.  She analyzes this as a syllogism, with the first three "that" clauses stating the major premise, the fourth "that" clause stating the minor premise, and the fifth "that" clause stating the conclusion.  Here's the way she structures it:

Premise 1: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Premise 2:  that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

[Implicit Premise 3:  that people have a right to whatever is necessary to secure their rights.]

Conclusion:  that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

 If we see a comma rather than a period after "pursuit of happiness," we can see this as one sentence rather than two.  And if we see the dashes after "pursuit of happiness" and after "consent of the governed," then we can see the three-part structure of this syllogism.  This makes sense to me.

But while I agree with Allen about the emphasis on "pursuit of happiness," I disagree with her claim that this was John Adams' substitution for "property," because Adams objected to slavery, and the Lockean right to property was used to justify slavery, while pursuit of happiness could be understood as a equal right of all human beings (see her paper, pp. 12, 23-26, 28-29).

Allen doesn't recognize that the phrase "pursuit of happiness" was first used by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (I.ii.3; II.xxi.39, 42-44, 48, 52-53, 55-56, 61-63, 70).  All human beings naturally desire happiness, and this is the ultimate natural desire that underlies all other natural desires.  The natural rights of human beings are rooted in their natural desires as directed to happiness as their final end, which explains what Allen identifies as the "implicit premise 3."  Human beings naturally assert their rights to whatever is necessary to secure their natural desires as expressing their ultimate desire to pursue happiness, and they can recognize that all are naturally equal in this assertion of natural rights.  And although different human beings place their happiness in different things, they all desire happiness.  So although there is no single summum bonum for all human beings, happiness diversely interpreted is the summum bonum for each individual (II.xxi.55-56).

Allen also doesn't recognize that the equal right to the pursuit of happiness, which denies slavery, is rooted in a Lockean conception of property as founded in self-ownership.  One cannot rightly claim to have property in other human beings, because this would deny the claim of all human beings to own themselves and the products of their labor.  It was this kind of reasoning that was employed by Abraham Lincoln--in his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--to deny the justice of slavery.

Notice that Allen does not quote anything from Adams that would indicate that he saw the idea of property rights as opposed to the idea of the pursuit of happiness.

I have developed some of these points in other posts here, here, here, and here, which include links to other related posts.

 

John Locke's Biological Naturalism

Leo Strauss and many of those influenced by Strauss have assumed that John Locke's political philosophy rejected the rule of nature in favor of the rule of convention. They have concluded from this that Lockean liberal thought generally has no ground in nature and thus prepares the way for modern relativism and nihilism. This reading of Locke is mistaken because it fails to recognize that in criticizing the Platonic naturalism of eternal essences, Locke is defending a biologically empirical science of natural history that points back to Aristotle and ahead to Darwin.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss insists that Locke's political philosophy is a revolutionary break with the philosophic tradition of classic natural right.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man--as distinguished from man's end--had become that center or origin. . . . The world in which human creativity seems to reign supreme is, in fact, the world which has replaced the rule of nature by the rule of convention. From now on, nature furnishes only the worthless materials as in themselves; the forms are supplied by man, by man's free creation. For there are no natural forms, no intelligible "essences": "the abstract ideas" are "the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use." Understanding and science stand in the same relation to "the given" in which human labor, called forth to its supreme effort by money, stands to the raw materials. There are, therefore, no natural principles of understanding: all knowledge is acquired; all knowledge depends on labor and is labor. (pp. 248-49)

Against this claim that Locke denies "the rule of nature," we might notice Locke's constant appeals to "the principles of human nature," which include the natural desires for survival, reproduction, social life, and knowledge, as expressing the natural pursuit of happiness as the ultimate end of human action (FT, 88-97; ST, 10, 67). "The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness" (ECHU, 2.21.52).

In recognizing this Lockean appeal to human nature and the nature of human happiness, I agree with Tom West and with Peter Myers in his book Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

Strauss assumes that in criticizing reasoning about "essences," Locke is rejecting the reality of "natural forms" altogether. But Strauss fails to see how this Lockean skepticism about Platonic essentialism is grounded on an empirical science of biological natural history that goes back to Aristotle, which was to be fulfilled by Darwinian evolutionary science.

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejects those scholastic proponents of reasoning about eternally fixed essences, because they "suppose their words to stand also for the reality of things," and because they understand natural science to consist in "the bare contemplation of . . . abstract Ideas" (3.2.5; 4.12.9). By contrast, Locke argues, "to define names right, natural history is to be enquired into; and their properties are, with care and examination, to be found out" (3.11.24).  Rather than studying human understanding through the logical analysis of mental abstractions, Locke relies on "this historical, plain method" of reasoning from observational experience of what actually happens (Intro., 2).

Rather than deductive reasoning from supposedly eternal and fixed "essences," Locke thus appeals to natural history as the way to understand "the nature of things themselves" through experience and observation. Such knowledge does not permit demonstration and certainty, but it does provide probabilistic knowledge. We can thus know "the regular proceedings of causes and effects in the ordinary course of nature," and this we call "an argument from the nature of things themselves" (4.16.6). Nature is so highly variable and contingent that we cannot reliably discover the unchanging essences sought by the scholastics. But we can discover with some probability the regular patterns in the natural world. "I would not here be thought to forget, much less to deny, that nature in the production of things, makes several of them alike: there is nothing more obvious, especially in the races of animals and all things propagated by seed" (3.3.13).

This reference to the natural order of the living world of plants and animals is significant because it manifests Locke's biological understanding. Locke was a medical doctor and medical researcher. In his personal library, he had more medical books than books of philosophy. He was an associate of Thomas Sydenham, the most prominent medical doctor and researcher of his time, who promoted medicine as an empirical science of natural history. Similarly, Locke's philosophical science of human nature was an empirical, probabilistic science that looked for recurrent patterns in the variable phenomena of human thought and action, a science of life that could be traced back to Aristotle and that was carried forward by Darwin.

That Locke is drawing from the Aristotelian biological tradition of understanding species is evident when one notices the passages in the Essay that are almost direct quotations from Aristotle's biological writings.  For example, Locke's comments on how "we shall find everywhere that the several species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees" (3.6.12; 4.16.2) echo passages in Aristotle's Part of Animals (681a10-15).  Like Locke, Aristotle is criticizing the Platonic tradition of essentialism in defending a biological concept of species rooted in an empirical science of natural history.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Was John Locke's Liberalism Proslavery?

In August of 1619, the English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, bought 20 or more African slaves from English pirates, who had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from the west coast of Africa.  This was the beginning of slavery in America, only 12 years after the English had first settled in Jamestown.  Over the next two centuries, over 12 million Africans would be taken captive by slave traders and sold as slaves in the New World.  Over 400,000 of them were sold to British colonists in North America.

In August of last year, on the 400th anniversary of that first landing of slaves in America, The New York Times began its "1619 Project"--a series of articles arguing that America was founded on and shaped by slavery.  It began with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine devoted entirely to the history of slavery and racial segregation in America.  This has sparked an intense controversy over whether these articles accurately depict the importance of slavery as manifesting the racist immorality of American culture, or whether these articles distort that history in ways that advance an ideology of cynical attacks on American traditions.

I will be writing about that controversy in a later post.  Here I am taking up a related controversy.  The 1619 Project has been influenced by historians and other social scientists who in recent decades have contended that the early modern liberal tradition was not only compatible with, but was even dependent upon, slavery.  It is said that the liberal defense of liberty included a defense of the liberty of European slave traders and slave masters to enslave Africans.  Moreover, it is argued that much of the wealth achieved in modern liberal capitalist societies was originally built up through slave labor.  One important piece of evidence for this view of liberalism as founded on slavery is the claim that the preeminent proponent of liberalism--John Locke--justified and profited from slavery.  If this is true, this might help to explain why the signers of the Declaration of Independence could affirm Locke's teaching about the human equality of the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while continuing to own slaves: the American Founders were following the example of Locke himself.

THE PROSLAVERY LOCKE?

Those who argue for this view of Locke point to three kinds of evidence: Locke's helping to write the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Locke's stock investment in the Royal African Company, and his just-war theory of slavery in the Second Treatise.  What I see here, however, is evidence that Locke engaged in secret writing in his often confusing and contradictory account of slavery--so that his careful readers could see that he was condemning slavery without explicitly saying so.  Nevertheless, I must admit that this does not resolve the question of Locke's apparent hypocrisy in supporting the Royal African Company and colonial slavery.

In 1669, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina were adopted by the eight Lord Proprietors of the Province of Carolina, which included most of what is now North Carolina and South Carolina.  It has often been included in publications of Locke's works (Locke 1997).  One of the eight proprietors was Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury), who employed Locke as an advisor and secretary who was also a member of the Shaftesbury household.  Locke acted as a secretary to the Lord Proprietors from 1669 to 1675.  The original manuscript of the Fundamental Constitutions shows Locke's handwriting in the first two paragraphs and in most of the large number of amendments.  

For those who see Locke as a supporter of slavery the most notorious sections are the two sections that recognize slavery.  In section 98, it is made lawful for slaves to join any church that they prefer; but yet, "no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master has over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before."  In section 101, it is declared: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever."

In 1672, Locke invested in the British slave trade by buying stock in the Royal African Company, which Charles II had just established as a chartered corporation with a monopoly over all British trade with Africa, which included buying enslaved Africans on the west coast of Africa for shipment to the New World (Pettigrew 2013).

In 1690, Locke's Two Treatises of Government was published.  It was an attack on the royal absolutism claimed by the Stuart monarchs and defended by Robert Filmer as an absurd attempt to persuade all men that they are born slaves.  Locke's scorn for slavery began with the first sentence of the book: "Slavery is so vile and miserable and Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't" (FT, sec. 1).  

Oddly, however, Locke also seemed to defend slavery in the Second Treatise when he identified "the perfect condition of Slavery" as one where the slave has "by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it" (ST, sec. 23).  In particular, we can properly identify slaves as those "who being Captives taken in a just War, are by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their Masters" (ST, 85).  Scholars like Peter Laslett have inferred from this that Locke regarded "negro slaves as justifiably enslaved because they were captives taken in a just war, who had forfeited their lives 'by some Act that deserves Death,'" and that Locke was satisfied "that the forays of the Royal Africa Company were just wars of this sort, and that the negroes captured had committed such acts" (Laslett 1988, 284-85).

HOLLY BREWER'S ARGUMENT FOR THE ANTI-SLAVERY LOCKE

Challenging  this apparent evidence of Locke's proslavery position, historian Holly Brewer--writing in the American Historical Review (2017)--has argued that Locke and the liberalism he initiated emerged in opposition to slavery and absolutism as based on the same principle of inherited status.  Explaining the idea of hereditary obligation that Locke denied, Brewer wrote: "Kings inherit the right to rule; subjects inherit the obligation to obey; and so did slaves inherit the obligation to obey masters" (2017, 1045).  Locke and Lockean liberalism rejected all of this.  (Brewer's short summary of her argument is available online.)

Brewer denies that the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina--in affirming the master's "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves"--testifies to Locke's support of slavery.  Locke was only acting as a secretary for the eight Lord Proprietors, Brewer insists, so "he wrote Carolina's constitution as a lawyer writes a will" (2017, 1052).  He was not endorsing anything said in the Fundamental Constitutions.

But in saying this, Brewer understates Locke's involvement in Carolina and its Constitutions.  In 1671, he was made a landgrave (a nobleman) of Carolina. Peter Colleton, one of the Lord Proprietors, wrote to Locke in 1673 remarking "that excellent form of government in the composure of which you had so great a hand."  Locke purchased a hundred copies of the Constitutions and distributed them to his friends.  He clearly was proud of what he had done in the Constitutions, and he was involved in revising them in 1782 (Armitage 2004).

Brewer also denies that Locke's stock in the Royal African Company shows his endorsement of the African slave trade.  When Locke received his stock in the RAC in 1672, Brewer explains, he was the secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations, which was Charles II's committee with oversight over colonial affairs.  Shaftesbury was the chair of that committee.  Since the crown was short of money at that time, Charles II had both Locke and Shaftesbury paid in RAC stock.

In June of 1675, Locke sold his RAC stock; and Shaftesbury began selling his.  1675 was the year in which Locke and Shaftesbury broke with the Stuart monarchy because of its increasing absolutism, which they saw as the enslavement of all the king's subjects.  They became leaders of the new Whig Party in opposition to the Tories.  Shaftesbury was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.  Locke fled to France.  In 1683, Locke and Shaftesbury fled to Holland.  Charles II attempted to have Locke extradited on charges of treason.

After 1675, the RAC shifted more towards the slave trade rather than trade in African goods.  Charles II and James II promoted the slave trade because of the huge revenue it brought to the crown.  After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with William and Mary on the throne, the number of slave trading voyages of the RAC dropped dramatically, as shown in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, although independent traders who competed with the RAC increased their voyages (Pettigrew 2013, 11-13).

In 1696, William created a new Board of Trade and Plantations, and he appointed Locke as one of the members.  Locke used his position on the Board, Brewer argues, to reform the laws in British colonies to favor liberty over inherited status.

The Board began to investigate the laws and practices in Virginia, the first and largest of the colonies in America.  They found many problems.  One of them was that while originally the King had provided that anyone settling in Virginia would be granted 50 acres of land, this rule had been changed so that people were granted 50 acres for each indentured servant or slave that they purchased.  Consequently, large landowners owning many servants and slaves could hold 20 to 30 thousand acres of land, much of it uncultivated.  The Board condemned this headright system as a perversion of the original rule.  They instructed the new Governor of Virginia--Francis Nicholson--to change this.  As chief justice of Virginia's General Court, the Governor in 1699 ruled that the headright of 50 acres of land should go only to individual settlers not to those who might be their masters.  Locke received a written report about this decision saying: "He has made an order against taking up land for the importation of negroes."  In the margin, Locke wrote: "Well Done."  For Brewer, this is a clear indication of Locke's efforts to reduce the slave trade (Brewer 2017, 1065-1070).  Unfortunately, she observes, these efforts were overturned after the death of King William, when Queen Anne renewed the promotion of the slave trade favored by the Stuart monarchs.

Still, however, we might wonder whether Brewer's argument for Locke being anti-slavery is refuted by Locke's just-war theory of slavery--that those who have been taken captive in a just war may by natural right be enslaved as the proper punishment for their crime of unjust aggression.  As Brewer indicates, Locke here seems to be following the traditional justification of slavery, as expressed by Bracton: "Free men are made bond by capture."  But Locke puts severe restrictions on this traditional teaching, so that it cannot justify the actual practice of African-American chattel slavery.

The just conqueror who repels an unjust invasion cannot take the invader's property, which belongs to his family (ST, sec. 180).  Nor can the conqueror enslave those who did not participate in the unjust invasion, because they have not earned the punishment of enslavement (sec. 179).  Nor can the conqueror enslave the children of the unjust invaders, because the children share no responsibility for the unjust war.  Consequently, slavery cannot be an inherited status.

Moreover, contrary to what Laslett says, Locke never says that the slave traders were taking captives in a just war.  In fact, the slave traders were themselves unjust aggressors who took their captives by force, and so their captives would be justified, on Lockean grounds, in rebelling against their captors.

Once one sees that Locke's standards for his just-war theory of slavery cannot possibly be satisfied by African-American slavery, one must suspect that Locke was aware of this, and that he might be intimating to his careful readers the injustice of such slavery.

JAMES FARR:  LOCKE'S SECRET WRITING AGAINST SLAVERY?

James Farr has written some of the best articles on Locke's view of slavery (Farr 1986, 2008).  And although he does not directly say so, I see Farr's writing as suggesting that Locke engaged in secret writing in his account of slavery--so that his careful readers could see that he was condemning slavery without explicitly saying so.

Farr notes that Locke's complicity in the slave trade and in colonial policy allowing slavery contradicts his teaching about human equality in natural rights, and that he "never addressed, much less resolved, this contradiction," because he remained silent about this (1986, 263).

Farr goes on to argue that Locke's just-war theory of slavery is consistent with his natural rights teaching.  But Farr also wants "to show that this theory is woefully inadequate as an account of Afro-American slavery and, further, that Locke knew this.  Indeed, Locke's theory positively condemns 17th century slave practices and any ongoing institution of slavery whatsoever" (264).  So Locke knew that his theory condemned slavery!

Farr also says that "he wrote not a word" to justify New World slavery (2008, 510).  In explaining his just-war theory of slavery, Locke never says that the African-American slaves had been captured in a just war.  Indeed, Locke does not even give one example of people being enslaved in a just war.

 Moreover, Farr says, "no one thought Locke succeeded in justifying slavery in America" (515).  Farr also observes that the antebellum Southern apologists for slavery "rejected Locke's just war theory" and his argument for natural rights in the Second Treatise, which was condemned by people like George Fitzhugh (513).

Farr also notes that Locke ridiculed as childish the notion that "A Negro is Not a Man" because white color is a defining trait of the human species (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.7.16; Farr 1986, 279).

In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke deprecates any "Distinction made between men and men, upon account of their different Complexions, shapes, and Features; so that those who have black Hair (for example) or gray Eyes, should not enjoy the same Privileges as other Citizens" (Locke 2010, 55-56).  Locke was not a racist.

So while Locke was silent about how his liberal political theory condemned slavery, he surely understood this.  Moreover, we know that some of Locke's careful readers saw this.  For example, Farr quotes from James Otis' Rights of the British Colonists Asserted and Proved (1764), who quoted Locke's teaching about the natural equality of rights among human beings in support of the claim that "the Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black." So Otis understood Locke's principles as condemning slavery in all forms, including the American enslavement of African-Americans (Otis 1764, 6, 29; Farr 2008, 511).

Farr says that "Locke is not unlike Aristotle in his mismatch of theory and practice despite their substantive differences about natural slavery" (2008, 520, n. 57).  Aristotle seemed to justify slavery as natural.  But his standards for what counted as a natural slave could not be satisfied by the actual practice of slavery, which was by convention or law (nomos) not by nature (physis).  For that reason, Bartolome de Las Casas could use Aristotle's standards to condemn the enslavement of American Indians as contrary to nature.

All of this looks to me like a secret teaching that slavery is contrary to Lockean natural rights, although Locke does not openly say this.

I grant that this still leaves unresolved the question of Locke's apparent hypocrisy in supporting the Royal African Company and colonial slavery.

REFERENCES

Armitage, David. 2004. "John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government." Political Theory 32: 602-627.

Brewer, Holly. 2017. "Slavery, Sovereignty, and 'Inheritable Blood':  Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery." American Historical Review 122: 1038-1078.

Brewer, Holly. 2018. "Does Locke's Entanglement with Slavery Undermine His Philosophy?." Aeon, September.

Farr, James. 1986. "'So Vile and Miserable an Estate': The Problem of Slavery in Locke's Political Thought." Political Theory 14: 263-89.

Farr, James. 2008. "Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery." Political Theory 36: 495-522.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Otis, James. 1764. Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Boston: Edes and Gill.

Pettigrew, William A. 2013. Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Darwinian Neurobiology Supports Spinoza: Self-Preservation, Freedom of Philosophizing, and Lockean Liberalism

In the fall of 1972, I was in the second year of my graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago; and I was a student in Joseph Cropsey's course on Benedict de Spinoza's Ethics.  I wrote a paper for the course entitled "Spinoza on Preservation," which I typed on my manual Smith-Corona typewriter, using "white-out" to correct my mistakes.  (You millennials out there might have seen an ancient typewriter in a museum or in some old movies.) 

My grade for the paper was A-.  Cropsey had a bad habit of slipping with his pen and leaving a minus mark after writing an A.  (I have written some posts on Cropsey here, here, and here.)

I recently found this yellowed paper in an old file of papers and notes on Spinoza, and I read it for the first time in 45 years.  I was surprised by three discoveries.  First, I was surprised to see how much of my thinking in Darwinian Natural Right and other writings included ideas from Spinoza--particularly, the principle that the good is the desirable as rooted in the evolved biological nature of human beings.

My second discovery was noticing how much of what Spinoza said about the human mind as the activity of the human body and brain has been confirmed by research in neurobiology over the past 40 years, which is the argument of Antonio Damasio in Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Harcourt, 2003).  In writing Darwinian Natural Right, I was influenced by an earlier book by Damasio--Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Putnam's Sons, 1994)--in which he shows that neurobiology refutes Kant's claim that morality depends on pure reason without emotion, and supports Hume's claim that morality depends on reason but also on the moral emotions that arise in the brain to guide us to survival and well-being as social animals.

My third discovery was seeing how Spinoza had formulated most of the foundational ideas for John Locke and the modern liberalism that Locke initiated.  This became especially clear to me recently when I read Wim Klever's unpublished paper "Locke's Disguised Spinozism," which is available online.  To support his assertion that Locke's thinking in The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Two Treatises of Government, and The Letter on Toleration derives from his reading of Spinoza, Klever places quotations from Spinoza and Locke side by side to show Locke's borrowing from Spinoza's thought and language. 

When Bishop Stillingfleet accused Locke of "Spinozism" in presenting Revelation as a product of human imagination, Locke responded: "I am not so well read in Hobbes and Spinoza to be able to say what were their opinions in this matter."  But as Klever indicates, the persecution of Spinoza--his reputation as a dangerous atheist, his expulsion from the Synagogue by the Amsterdam Sephardic rabbis, and the suppression of Spinoza's books--would explain why Locke, who himself lived in fear of being arrested and beheaded for his subversive writing, would need to hide his adoption of Spinozist ideas.

This has led me into thinking about how Spinoza's account of the biological nature of self-preservation supports Lockean liberal thought, and of how this might be confirmed by modern Darwinian neurobiology.  I also thought about how the empirical evidence for human progress over the past two centuries might show that the increasing freedom brought by Spinozist and Lockean liberalism has indeed increased the survival and well-being of human beings around the world.

Damasio says that when he was young, he read Spinoza and copied a quotation that he liked.  Years later, he renewed his interest in Spinoza when he decided to check the accuracy of the quotation that he had kept on a yellowed piece of paper.  He found it in The Ethics:  "the foundation of virtue is this very striving to preserve one's own being, and that happiness consists in man's being able to preserve his being" (IV, prop. 18, schol.)

As he continued reading The Ethics, Damasio found a second quotation that appealed to him as a neurobiologist who explains the human mind as the expression of the brain's mappings of the body's striving for survival and well-being: "The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body" (II, prop. 13).  In my next post, I will probe this Spinozist neurophysiology of the mind as grounded in the body, in contrast to the Cartesian separation of the immaterial mind and the material body as two substances.

The first quotation points to how the biological striving to preserve one's own being provides the natural ground for the liberal understanding of the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as rooted in biological self-ownership.  (In another post, I have written about the neurobiology of self-ownership.)

Damasio observes:

". . . It is an affirmation that at the base of whatever rules of behavior we may ask humanity to follow, there is something inalienable: A living organism, known to its owner because the owner's mind has constructed a self, has a natural tendency to preserve its own life; and that same organism's state of optimal functioning, subsumed by the concept of joy, results from the successful endeavor to endure and prevail.  Paraphrased in deeply American terms, I would rewrite Spinoza's proposition as follows: I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created such that they tend to preserve their life and seek well-being, that their happiness comes from the successful endeavor to do so, and that the foundation of virtue rests on these facts.  Perhaps these resonances are not a coincidence" (170-71).

Spinoza recognizes that grounding virtue in the natural concern for oneself will be criticized by those who believe "that this principle--that everyone is bound to seek his own advantage--is the foundation, not of virtue and morality, but of immorality"--the immorality of selfish individualism (IV.prop. 13, school.).  His response to this criticism is to argue that since human beings are naturally social animals who need the cooperation of others, "to man, then, there is nothing more useful than man," and man "can wish for nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree in all things that the Minds and Bodies of all should strive together, as far as they can, preserve their being; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all."  Therefore, those men who are governed by reason in seeking their own advantage "want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for other men." 

This striving to leave in peaceful mutual cooperation with others is an extension of the striving to preserve oneself.  Evolutionary theorists today recognize this as showing the evolved propensity for cooperation based on kinship, mutual aid, and reciprocity.  The propensity to reciprocity includes the right to punish cheaters who are not trustworthy cooperators.

In the state of nature without government, human beings can enforce the natural law of cooperation by rewarding those who are cooperative and punishing those who cheat or aggressively attack others; and thus the state of nature can be a state of peace. But since many people are not rational enough to obey this natural law, the state of nature can become a state of war.  To escape this state of war, people can consent to a government to secure their natural rights through enforcing formal laws for peaceful cooperation and the punishment of aggressors.  Government thus rests on a social contract.

Hobbes had also argued for government being based ultimately on consent, but the difference between Hobbes and Spinoza was that unlike Hobbes, as Spinoza said, "I always preserve natural right unimpaired" (letter 50).  Even when they live under an established government, people have a natural right to resist oppression, and when government becomes too oppressive, it will so provoke the people that they will rebel and seek a new government better designed for their safety and happiness.

Another difference from Hobbes is that Spinoza, in The Political Treatise, ranked monarchy as the least desirable form of government, aristocracy as a better form of government, and democracy as the best.  Spinoza was thus the first major philosopher to clearly and forcefully endorse democracy as the best form of government.  He conceded, however, that in certain historical circumstances monarchy could be best for a society.

Spinoza suggested that the fundamental principle of politics is that the power of political leaders depends on their having the support of what some political scientists today call a "minimum winning coalition." (I have written about that here.)  No ruler can rule alone.  Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and so the dictator must do everything necessary to win and maintain their loyalty.  Consequently, the private interest of the dictator's small coalition of supporters is advanced at the expense of the public interest of the people at large, and that provokes resentment among the people who will become rebellious.  For that reason, the larger the minimum winning coalition supporting a government, the more powerful it is.  Democracy approaches being the most absolute form of government.

Spinoza saw a liberal democracy as the best form of government, because it is "the most  natural state," "the one which approached most nearly the freedom nature concedes to everyone" (Theological-Political Treatise, xvi, 36).  This idea that a modern liberal democracy approaches the freedom that human beings enjoyed in the state of nature of human hunter-gatherer ancestors has been part of my argument for the evolution of Darwinian liberalism.

Another difference from Hobbes is that while Hobbes denied that there was any highest good (summum bonum) for life (Leviathan xi, 1), Spinoza affirmed that the philosophic or scientific life of understanding the laws of nature was the perfection of our nature and thus our highest end, and that a liberal democracy that cultivates the arts and sciences and secures the freedom for philosophizing allows those few human beings capable of such philosophizing to achieve that highest human life (TTP iv, 9-12).  (Locke agreed that "the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness" [ECHU 2.21.51].)

The Dutch Republic had moved far towards such intellectual freedom--providing refuge for people like Locke--but still, as Spinoza's life indicated, even the Dutch Republic put some limits on freedom of thought and expression.  Spinoza's primary aim was to promote the future achievement of a "free republic" where "everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks" (TTP xx). 

So while Spinoza's life did illustrate what Leo Strauss saw as "persecution and the art of writing," Spinoza foresaw that the future triumph of liberalism would secure a liberty for the philosophic life that would make esoteric writing unnecessary.  I have argued for this in some posts  here and here.  I have also argued, against Strauss and the Straussians, that this shows how the bourgeois virtues of a liberal open society include the moral and intellectual virtues of  the highest human excellence (here).

In a series of posts in November and December of 2016, I surveyed the empirical evidence for human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment of the past two centuries.  We have more freedom--both personal freedom and economic freedom--that has promoted human survival and well-being more fully than ever before in human history.  We have more lives and longer lives.  Life is healthier.  Life is richer and less impoverished. Life shows more equality of opportunity.  There is more freedom for people to think what they wish and to say what they think.

Spinoza was right.

Lockean Liberalism as Symbolic Niche Construction: Locke's Mixed Modes, Searle's Institutional Facts, and McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues

If we accept the modern scientific explanation of the natural world, how can we explain the human mind and human society?  This is the fundamental question of modern intellectual life. 

There are at least three ways to answer this question.  One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science.  Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society.  A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices. 

According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature.  According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.

As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best.  There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution.  According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics.  According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.  

So, for example, biology must be consistent with physics and chemistry, but biological phenomena have an emergent complexity that cannot be fully reduced to physics and chemistry.  The mind and society are also emergent phenomena that must be compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, but without being fully reducible to those physical and chemical laws.  Some of my posts elaborating these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010).  Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.

"How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits--as mindful, rational, speech-act performing, free-will having, social, political human beings--in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless, physical particles?  How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts?" (ix)

Like me, Searle assumes that we live in one world--that we live in one reality with physical, mental, and social aspects--and that our explanations of mental and social life must be compatible with the physical sciences but not simply reducible to those sciences.  And so, for example, in Making the Social World,  he offers an explanation of social reality as created and maintained by language, while explaining language as a natural product of the human biological evolution of the brain that enabled the human mind to create social institutions through what he calls "collective intentionality."

I mostly agree with Searle about all of this.  My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics.  If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.

We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality.  Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill.  Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services.  As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it.  But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange.  Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States.  It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such.  Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."  (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)

Similarly, Barack Obama is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures of the United States Constitution.  I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States.  I own a house, a car, and other property.  I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country.  Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.

The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions.  The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.

To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism.  Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality.  Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.

Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions.  But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities.  (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)

So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males.  But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.

Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality.  "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty.  In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles.  As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles.  Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species.  Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.

This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract.  But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning.  Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.

Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists.  He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society.  "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature."  His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62).  Both of these claims are mistaken.

Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature."  There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).

This was the first human society that was created by informal consent--collective recognition or acceptance--through language, and language itself was a social creation in which certain sounds were given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" (ECHU, III.2.8).  But this society was not a political society, because there was not yet any consent to a formal government or legal system (First Treatise, pars. 86-93; Second Treatise, pars. 6-14, 25-35, 77-90).  Searle is mistaken, therefore, in assuming that Locke thought there were no human institutions in the state of nature.

Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society.  In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5).  Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).

According to Locke in the Essay, all our ideas originate in experience, either in experience of the external world, which we have through sensation, or in experience of our own thinking and wishing, which we have through reflection.  We form our simple ideas in our minds directly from these experiences.  We can then form complex ideas by combining and comparing simple ideas, and we can form general ideas by abstracting one idea from others with which it is associated.  Thus, all human thought arises either as an impression from experience or as a modification of such impressions by some faculty of the mind.

Locke distinguishes the complex ideas of substances from complex ideas of modes and relations.  Complex ideas of substances are combinations of simple ideas that represent particular things that exist by themselves, for example, man, sheep, army, and gold.  Modes are complex ideas that do not contain any representation of anything existing by itself; rather, modes are ideas conceived as modifications of simple ideas.  Simple modes are combinations of a single simple idea, for example, space and duration.  Mixed modes combine several different simple ideas, for example, triangle, gratitude, obligation, and murder.  Ideas of relations are a special kind of mixed mode that arises by comparing one idea with another, for example, father, whiter, cause and effect.

Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes.  Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.

Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes.  The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence.  Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable.  But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly."  Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4). 

This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist.  Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!'  Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity.  We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!'  'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)

But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas.  And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?

Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7).  Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings.  The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73).  In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.

So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep.  This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11).  And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7).  Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.

Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights.  And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).

But while Seale sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God.  He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."  Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183).  And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions.  In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe."  But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).

Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56).  He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73).  And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.

But then when the Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," this suggests a natural creationism--that is, Nature's God creates through natural law, perhaps through a natural evolutionary process.  And indeed many Christians are theistic evolutionists who see God working through natural evolution.  Locke often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (Second Treatise, pars. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195).

Men might be created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights through the human evolution of a large and complex cerebral cortex that allows them to collectively recognize human equality of rights.

In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments.  Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games.  And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.

Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction.  "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024) for an idea first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.  We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations.  Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.

As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism.  This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction.  The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.

The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous.  This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues."  In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration:  Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).

Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument.  In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution.  But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.

Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle:  Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions?  Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173). 

Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power.  This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).

Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II.  Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason.  While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradicted to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]).  Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy.  The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.

The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle.  So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of reasoning from principles, but it was also a declaration of war.  And if the Patriots had not won some decisive battles--such as the battle of Saratoga in October of 1777--they would have lost the war (Weddle 2021).  This is part of the evolutionary history of humanity through group selection in war.

As Winston Churchill observed: "Battles are the principal milestones in secular history.  Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy.  But great battles, whether won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times, University of Chicago Press [2002], II: 381).

Some of these points are elaborated in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.