America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life by Claire Rydell Arcenas

Author:Claire Rydell Arcenas [Arcenas, Claire Rydell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: PHI000000 PHILOSOPHY / General, PHI019000 PHILOSOPHY / Political, PHI016000 PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Modern, HIS036000 HISTORY / United States / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

7

Lockean “-isms”

“‘Locke the liberal,’” wrote Leo Strauss in 1960 to his friend and fellow political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, “is the chief or perhaps the sole idol in the temple of liberalism and whoever questions that idol is guilty of what the liberals themselves call ‘unorthodoxy.’”1 Strauss’s aggrieved words capture the essence of Locke’s place in 1960s America. To question “Locke the liberal” was akin to questioning a deity. But some, like Strauss and Kendall, would have none of it. In the decades following World War II, this cantankerous duo emerged to challenge the ever-growing “liberal consensus” interpretation of Locke and refute what they saw as a liberal myth of Locke’s magnificence.2 They questioned whether Locke should be heralded as a defender of natural or individual rights and whether his rendering of such rights should be celebrated at all. In a broader culture enamored of the liberal Locke, they offered an alternative perspective that differed markedly in its evaluation of Locke himself, his political philosophy, and his supposed importance for both the discipline of political science and American culture as a whole.

From the country’s intellectual and political right, Kendall and Strauss (sometimes joined by others, such as historian Russell Kirk) mounted a sustained challenge to a liberal worldview they abhorred and thought was still too soft on communism.3 They sought to dismantle the Lockean genealogy they saw being assembled before their very eyes to uphold that worldview. In the echo chamber of the liberal consensus—“the prevailing climate,” as Strauss called it—his and Kendall’s thinking confronted serious obstacles.4 They faced the rise of behavioral, quantitative political science increasingly resistant to political theory in general.5 And they faced the intense, active, and largely successful construction of Locke as the “idol,” to use Strauss’s word, of the liberal political consensus that had come to undergird the American Political Tradition. “The Lockeans in America,” Kendall proclaimed in 1963, “are the Liberals; and the Conservatives, who disagree with the Liberals . . . in all the crucial points, must learn to understand themselves as the anti-Lockeans.”6

To a large degree, they were unsuccessful in surmounting those obstacles. Their biting critique of behaviorialism failed, for the most part, to persuade their colleagues in political science departments. And not all conservatives saw themselves as anti-Lockeans. Far from it. Even as schools of “Straussian” political philosophy were taking off in the 1970s, a very different set of conservative political thinkers—libertarians—found a new purpose for Locke, yoking him (and the adjective “Lockean”) to an ideology of libertarianism.7 With the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick played the starring role in this story. In part a response to his liberal colleague John Rawls’s powerful defense of egalitarianism and a robust welfare state in A Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick’s arguments in favor of a minimal state, which relied heavily on the Second Treatise, cemented Locke as a pillar of libertarian thinking in the United States. Nozick’s work ushered in the rise of “Lockean libertarianism,” a more

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