Beyond Locke and Towards a More Accurate Intellectual History of American Constitutionalism (Elias Neibart, September 5, 2023, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy)
As Arcenas points out, Locke was best known in early America for his work in philosophy, specifically his Essays Concerning Human Understanding.[19] It was Locke’s epistemology, not his political thought, that enjoyed great purchase in the nascent nation. In fact, Locke was often associated with that piece of writing—not his Second Treatise.[20] Along with his philosophical contributions, Americans regularly engaged with Locke’s important ideas regarding education,[21] child rearing,[22] and self-improvement.[23] Of course, his Letter Concerning Toleration was also widely regarded as an essential exposition of religious freedom in the nascent republic.[24] Yet, despite Locke’s otherwise warm reception, his political thought did not enjoy the same purchase.
The framing generation, as they endeavored to craft founding documents, sought out practical lessons in statecraft.[25] Locke offered valuable theories on the nature of civil society, but, to this generation, his ideas were just that—theories. His musings on the state of nature did not provide the new republic with a concrete blueprint for state formation. The framers were aware of Locke, then, but largely disregarded his political thought. Instead, they found what they were looking for—tangible ideas regarding constitutional construction—in other thinkers, including Baron de Montesquieu and James Harrington.[26] Locke’s political thought, in fact, was “a negative model, an example of what Americans should avoid: namely, a reliance on theory or abstract philosophy, rather than practice or experience.”[27]
Indeed, early Americans observed how Locke’s abstract political theory was haphazardly translated into constitutional government, and they did not like the result. In particular, the framing generation took issue with Locke’s involvement in the writing of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina[28]—“120 briefly stated declarations, or laws, for the English colony of Carolina.”[29] John Adams, for instance, bemoaned the fact that Locke “gave the whole authority, executive and legislative, to the eight proprietors, [several lords], and their heirs.”[30] Adams viewed Locke’s plan for Carolina as a “new oligarchical sovereignty.”[31] To Adams, Locke did not appreciate that “when popular elections are given up, liberty and free government must be given up.”[32]
In other words, in his single foray into constitution making, Locke contemplated a government that was anathema to the core principles Americans sought to protect, chiefly popular sovereignty. Notably, Locke—who would centuries later be championed as the prototypical liberal democratic theorist—was pilloried for proposing a rather undemocratic form of government. That is not to say, however, that Adams viewed Locke as an illiberal thinker. In fact, quite the opposite is true.[33] But, irrespective of Locke’s liberal political thought, the Fundamental Constitutions failed at putting liberal theory into practice. As Americans saw it, “good laws and good governments originated organically from the people and conditions on the ground”; they did not, as Locke reputedly believed, derive “abstractly or speculatively from the private study of a philosopher.”[34] The American reaction to Locke’s constitutional failure evinces that the philosopher offered very little to the statesmen contemplating constitutional design.
While not outrightly rejected, Locke’s conception of natural rights was also of little interest to the framing generation. Although Michael Zuckert has argued that Locke’s natural rights theory fused with Whig political science to usher in a newly conceived “natural rights republicanism,”[35] Arcenas shows how Locke’s arguments, with respect to natural rights, were “thought to lie at the heart of the English constitution itself.”[36] In other words, Locke’s ideas were not radical or revolutionary; they were recycled. They were viewed as largely derivative of “English and British constitutional legal sources that the founders and framers knew well.”[37]
Even the Declaration of Independence, so religiously associated with Locke, had little to do with his political thought. Many understandably read the “Declaration of Independence’s ‘pursuit of Happiness’ as a substitution for, or translation of, Locke’s ‘property’’ in the Second Treatise.’”[38] But “happiness” to the Revolutionary generation did not equate with the protection of private, individual property. Instead, “happiness” was “synonymous with public, social happiness resulting from a people’s well-being . . . not as atomistic individuals but as a society.”[39] In this respect, Locke and the Declaration were out of step.
Arcenas puts it bluntly: “A central myth of the American Revolution is that John Locke (who died in 1704) first gave life to American independence and then to the United States itself.”[40] But “it is entirely possible to write about Locke in the eighteenth century without mentioning the American founding documents.”[41]