Abstract
In this chapter, the standard arguments often made for the Lockean character of the American Revolution were rejected in one crucial aspect: They fail to explain the critical belief all revolutionary Americans shared—that they, as members of colonial political societies had a right to unilaterally secede from the mother country. This belief was expressly claimed not only in many political pamphlets but also in the very Declaration of Independence. The main problem with the theories of Lockean ancestry of the Revolution is that they fail to capture a territorial dimension of the dispute, and more radically—its constitutional dimension. Relying on Locke and language of natural rights fails to explain how it was possible that the North American colonials in the 1770s could have believed that the British Empire was a composite, complex, confederated polity, rather than a unitary kingdom, explicitly equated with “body politic” in Locke’s Second Treatise. The chapter sketches the evolution of the state-building theory and practice in England from the seventeenth century onwards and reviews the radical responses by Americans in the eighteenth century.
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- 1.
Arthur Schlesinger Sr. (1918: 15–49) explains that the restrictions put in place by the Navigation Act were very light, because British merchandise was generally of higher quality and less expensive than the rival European goods, so the tariffs on foreign goods just reinforced the consumer and investment preference for domestic products that most American had anyway; and the provision that all European ware had to be shipped via English ports to America was also by and large redundant since London had been the main entry point for intercontinental trade anyway.
- 2.
For the doctrine of the two body of the king, see Kantorowicz (1957), especially, pp. 7–61.
- 3.
John Philip Reid (1991) and Jack P. Greene (2010) come very close to this interpretation but they, in a manner typical of the historians eager to protect the integrity of the “founding generation” at every cost, shy away from openly characterizing the new Constitution as an anti-American counterrevolution, the characterization which is in my view fully justified, and moreover, required, by their own analysis.
- 4.
Abraham Lincoln follows Johnson and European tradition of an “organic,” consolidated state to the utmost “…my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government -- that nation -- of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864,” in Roy P. Basler ed. (1953).
- 5.
In a metastatic proliferation of innovative ideological explanations for the Revolution, the “founders,” perhaps inevitably, had to become “royalists” at some point. And, sure enough, they did, see Eric Nelson (2014).
- 6.
- 7.
Actually, Locke did not use the term “branches” himself but “powers.” However, the subsequent interpretations very often use this term which is quite fitting, having in mind the consolidationist and majoritarian assumptions from which Locke starts.
- 8.
In fairness to Locke, one can say that for any liberal, some level of state is required to guarantee liberties. This is not to say that ONLY the state plays a role in guaranteeing liberties, since for Locke, natural rights to property precede and legitimize the state, so their exercise is arguably more important than the state’s role in backstopping them. However, the “Hobbesian” element in Locke is that he does not allow for the multiple and/or concurrent levels of jurisdiction and territorial organization, the aspect of the American situation which was of the utmost importance for the Revolution.
- 9.
This insistence on consolidation in Locke’s philosophy should not be treated as a part of a general discussion of liberal philosophical principles, even less as arguing against Locke’s dominant influence on liberal thought (including the American decentralist revolutionaries!), but just to underscore the main objective of this section—to show that Locke was on the opposing side of the American Revolution in one of the critical aspects of this Revolution: The problem of territorial localization of power and the problem whether the British Empire was a “state” or a composite, decentralized confederation.
- 10.
In his book John Locke and the Doctrine of the Majority Rule (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1959: p. 118). Wilmore Kendall perceptively notes: “In a word Locke apprehended…a tremendously important logical relation between the doctrine that the whole people have a right to have their way and the doctrine that the majority have a right to have their way.”
- 11.
Locke never explicitly says that the “People” whom he authorizes to change the oppressive government acting against social contract means “majority of the people,” but that is the most logical inference. However, even if we allow that it is not quite clear whether he thinks that only majority can act, whoever has a right to act in a Revolution, this right is limited to changing the central government, not to territorially reorganizing the state! And the latter was exactly what the American colonists strove to do in the 1770s.
- 12.
This follows from the general definition of the body politic Locke gives in Locke (2003: 140), see p. XX above.
- 13.
For an elaborate explanation of the secessionist nature of the Declaration, see Pocock (1975).
- 14.
A good complement to this analysis is the fact emphasized by Bernard Bailyn (1967) that both revolutionaries and loyalists equally used Locke in their dispute over the American secession from the British Empire. We today tend to identify Lockeanism with the revolutionary spirit only because of the accident of history; that revolutionary “Lockeans” won and loyalist “Lockeans” lost. And a leading expositor of the winning side’s arguments used some of the memorable Lockean phrases in crafting the Declaration of Independence.
- 15.
But, even for them, the problem is that the American colonists in 1776 made just a small subset of British subjects, and the fact that the Westminster Parliament had not been disbanded as a result of American rebellion, testifies to the fact that no Lockean Revolution in America had taken place, just as the Revolution in the South had not taken place after the South Carolina “ordinance of secession” was adopted. The most precise way to describe the American Revolution from the Lockean point of view would be “an unlawful rebellion.” Lincoln and other American nationalists cannot have it both ways; if secession in 1860 was illegal and criminal, so was the “revolution” of 1776.
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Jankovic, I. (2019). When in the Course of Human Events…—Hobbes, Locke, and the Long Parliament Against America. In: The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03733-8_5
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