A prologue on the last champion of the enlightenment (in Wilson's scheme): Condorcet.

Condorcet was acquainted with Franklin and Jefferson, little evidence his voting theory affected our own founders--indeed his opposition to bi-cameral system obviously rejected. In other regards--equal rights for women, abolition of slavery-- his causes fell on deaf ears.

But one aspect of this theory is fundamentally consistent with early 'liberalism' (in the academic sense of a system from individual liberties), shared by Locke and the framers: The ultimate source of rights/ entitlement to a share in the community is the very capability of perception and reasoning (perhaps most clearly expressed in defense of women's rights):

"The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights or else they all have the same ones: anyone who votes against the rights of another...forfeits his own." (on giving Women the Right of Citizenship 1790).

Not to overlook one aspect of Condorcet's social theory that made it less congenial to Wilson, more appealing to his comrades in 1790: his statistical validation of popular opinion appears to be rooted in something like the General Will (which for Wilson is the font of fascism).

"...our main task is to find the probability which, even for a law passed by the smallest majority, gives sufficient assurance that it is not unjust to subject others to that law and that it is proper to submit to it oneself...Every man has the right to live by his own reason; but when he joins society he agrees to submit some of his actions to common reason; ... his own reason requires that he submit and obey [this common reason] even as he foregoes [the dictates of his own reason] Thus when he submits to a law contrary to his own opinion, he must say to himself: this is a question not of myself but of all; therefore I must act not by what I think reasonable but by what all who like me have abstracted their own opinion must regard as conforming to reason and truth" (1785).

This reads very much like something out of Rousseau. In other words, for Condorcet the basis for civil society is a common allegiance to this general will-- antithetical to the basis for popular sovereignty in our own system, which goes back to a different source or bridge between science and social theory, hence Hobbes.

 

Hobbes (a hundred and fifty years before Condorcet) built different bridge from science to social theory, and a version of social contract that is not quite so clearly rooted in individual reason. Hobbes' agenda is to build a justification for absolute monarchy without invoking divine right.

H was oughly contemporary with Newton and Galileo: too early to be profoundly affected by Newton, as later political thinkers would be, but very much influenced by Galileo whom he visited in his Florence confinement.

But Hobbes was not himself a player in the scientific revolutions of the time. He is by training and temperament a quintessential translator. Schooled in the classics, as a young man H worked as scribe to Francis Bacon. In the Baconian project he translated Aristotle and Thucydides--his translation of the historian still valuable.

His great synthesis of political theory out of mechanistic psychology took shape in 3 versions beginning with the Elements of Law 1640. With that provocative publication, H went into self-imposed exile to the continent, where he tutored the future Charles II. Charles I was executed 1649: Leviathan appeared soon after, in 1651

From emerging science a mechanistic model of causation applied to human psychology, perception appetites, reasoning itself; and hence to the basis of rights and the way we construct society: Ch. 1:

"The cause of Sense is the External Body or object which presseth the organ proper to each sense... which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves and other strings and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain and Heart, causeth there a resistance or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart ..."

This imprint or 'counter-pressure is the source of 'imagination' or 'fancy', the mental image of an outward reality.

Ch. 2 reveals a recognizably Galilean theory of motion: "That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stirre it, it will lye still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat else stay it ...is not so easily assented to." H goes on to reject the Aristotelian/Scholastic notion that "Heavy bodies fall downwards out of an appetite to rest..." which "ascribing appetite ...to things inanimate [is absurd]".

H conceives of the mental image as an internal motion, decaying by a sort of drag or dissipation:

"...as we see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rowling for a long time after; so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal parts of a man, then when he Sees, Dreams, etc. For after the object is removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure ...this is it, the Latins call Imagination ...the Greeks, Fancy ...Imagination...is nothing but decaying sense...other objects...succeeding and working on us, the Imagination of the past is obscured and made weak."

Ch. 6, H explains Appetites as driven by these 'motions' of sensation:

"...Sense is Motion in the organs and interior parts caused by the action of things we See, Heare, etc. ... Endeavor ...toward something which causes it is called Appetite or Desire..."

 The Will is determined by a sort of chain of appetites and is no less operative in other animals: [defining Deliberation] ..."This alternate Succession of of Appetites, Aversions, Hopes and Fears is no less in other living Creatures than in Man, and therefore Beasts also Deliberate...In Deliberation the last Appetite or Aversion immediately adhering to the action or omission ...is that we call the Will. And Beasts that have deliberation must necessarily also have Will."

The human creature driven by sensation and appetites is thus characterized (ch. 11): [by]

"... a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, ... but because he cannot assure the power and the means to live well, which he hath at present, without the acquisition of more."

It is because of this otherwise insatiable desire of Power and fear of loss that men band together out of the state of nature to form society. And the mechanism for this, for Hobbes is Covenant, a sort of quid pro quo, with binding contractual effect. Ch. 14:

"The mutual transferring of Right is that which men call Contract ...[understood as] transferring of Right to the Thing [and not simply handing over the property itself]. Again, one of the Contractors may deliver the Thing contracted for on his part and leave the other to perform his part at some determinate time after and in the meantime be trusted; and then the contract ...is called Pact or Covenant."

In brief, this is the sort of arrangement the body of men has made with the Sovereign ruler. By Hobbes' construction, we have conveyed to him all our rights to property etc. in return for the guarantee of his protection and support in future. We have 'alienated' our rights in this legalistic sense. By this contractual arrangement, we have no legal grounds to invalidate the covenant except if the Sovereign fail to perform duties required--and then only if the contract is voided in respect to the whole community, not just a dissatisfied faction.

It is in regard to this defining contract, the way rights and obligations are created and conveyed, that Locke's liberalism differs so profoundly from Hobbes. And that difference is at least partly rooted in different science and different assumptions about the intrinsic mechanism of human character.

John Locke (1632-1704) was caught up in the mechanistic worldview of his own contemporaries, Newton and Boyle--much affected by the 'corpuscular theory' of the latter: in effect he adapts the mechanistic model of sensation we find in Hobbes to corpuscular form--the senses are bombarded by the atomies that John Donne complained of (d. 1631).

There is a fundamental difference in the way Locke treats the reality of perceived objects call it, Locke's assault on 'pre-modern science' (based on Myers 1998)" L rejects the teleological Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine of "substantial forms" or natural species.

With Aristotle, objects and creatures in the world conform to certain categories (or species in the larger sense) by intrinsic nature. This is easy to illustrate with living things: a plant or animal growths through predetermined development to a foreordained maturity--it is what it is because the order of the world has made it that way. Similarly material objects (even raw materials as substance) conform to certain categories by intrinsic purpose or design. Fish are fish, birds are birds, gold is gold, --because the world is an orderly place.

Now Locke opposes this neat orderly world on two fronts, psychological and physical--and these two parts of the argument may seem somewhat inconsistent: (1) on the one hand, following the mechanistic model of sensation, a little further than Hobbes would go, he argues famously that there are no innate ideas: we don't have a pre-progammed notion of any categories or principles-- rather we form such categories and rules from experience. Prior to experience the mind/understanding is the famous "white Paper void of Characters" (~ tabula rasa). And (2) just as revolutionary, there really are no neat categories in the world: the species and substances that we recognize are things that we have constructed out of experience.

But wait a minute, remember he said we have no innate ideas to go by; how do we construct these categories if we don't have a blue-print? The answer is a fundamental realism: objects that we perceive have real attributes, that strike our senses in characteristic ways; so from continual impact of these images from outside us, we (countless generations of social beings) have built up these constructed species and substances--the essential qualities and the simple ideas that the mind forms from them are real, but the categories we impose are nonetheless artificial.

Don't throw them out just yet. Let's try to understand what L is getting at: He seems to be remarkably impressed by all the reports, biological and anthropological, that come of the Age of Exploration: and one of the things he's struck by is the seemingly infinite variation of living things. (Essay 3.6.12)

"...down from us, the descent is by easy steps, and a continued series of Things that in each remove, differ very little one from the other. There are Fishes that have Wings and are not strangers to the airy Region: and there are some Birds that are inhabitants of the Water ...There are Animals so near kin to both Birds and Beasts that they are in the middle between both... There are some Brutes that seem to have as much Knowledge and Reason as some the are called Men...the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms are so nearly join'd that if you take the lowest of one and the highest of the other, there will scarcely be perceived any great difference between them ...we shall find everywhere that the several Species are linked together and differ [only] in almost insensible degrees." (The sort of stuff that got Darwin excited 150 years later)

In other words the old, scholastic Great Chain of Being is reduced to a seamless web of infinite variation: there are no certain divisions where one category leaves off and the other begins. The blurring of categories further by 'monsters'...mutations, disfigured, defective (by standards of our categories, but otherwise viable).

"There are Naturals amongst us, that have perfectly our shape, but want Reason, and some of them lack Language." We call such creatures 'men' human beings like ourselves, but the category seems dubious.

So our species ideas are "made by the mind and not by Nature" (3.6.26) and one of the devices by which we make such categories, of course, is language. The ideas we form are "nominal essences": there is much in the name. Categories and the names we give them are products of "convention", and Locke is sometimes faulted as a "conventionalist" in this sense, that he seems to ignore reality and focus on convention as an arbitrary source of our ideas--we call a thing by a certain name and know it by that category.

Be that as it may, of interest for us is the common thread linking this assault on Aristotelian science with his assault on traditional notions of property and political rights. For Locke himself seems to acknowledge, "Man's Power is much the same in the Material and Intellectual World" (2.12.1; 2.2.2)

That is, the world is what we make it, both in terms of our labor, shaping material worth, and our understanding that shapes the way we see the world through ideas.

To see what a difference this makes in our rights and property in the material world, let's put it in contrast to the traditional view of property, a position stoutly defendedby Edmund Burke at the time of the French Revolution (and still, I suspect, a mainstay of British conservatism). Property and the bundle of rights that go with it is like an entailed inheritance: we have the use of what has come to us, for the time we are here (it isn't really ours to 'alienate').

Liberal thinkers like Locke insist that property is produced by labor--your right to what you have is largely what you have made of it--and here again the Age of Exploration has had a great impact. In the 2nd Treatise on Gov. L keeps coming back to the example of primitive and pioneer life in America. 5.27:

"Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his person; this nobody has any right to but himself" Elsewhere, in opposing slaver, he insists that we cannot alienate that property--it is unalienable like the rights Jefferson speaks of in the Declaration.

Similarly, "The labor of his body and the work of his hands ...are properly his. Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature has provided...he has mixed his labor with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property ...For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what [his labor] is joined to."

Of course it's not a simple as that in most property disputes. But notice the examples chh.28 and 30: "He that is nourished by the acorns he picked ...or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, When did they begin to be his? ...the law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who has killed it: it is allowed to be his goods who has bestowed his labor upon it, though before it was the common right of every one."

Value is almost entirely what man has made for himself, not endowed or inherited:

" ... of the products of the earth useful to the life of man, nine-tenths are the effects of labor; nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use ....we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on account of labor."

And similarly, Locke's civil society is something human beings construct and give validity by their consent to governing authority. It is not something that can be simply endowed by god or hereditary right of some dynasty. Ch. 89:

"Whenever, therefore, any number of men are so united into one society as to quit every one his executive power of the law of nature and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political or civil society. And this is done wherever any number of men, in the state of nature, enter into society to make one people, one body politic, under one supreme government ...for [each constituent] authorized the society, or ...the legislative thereof to make laws for him as the public good of the society shall require...."

Locke argues that a rightful king (such as William III, recently installed) can only be elected by this legitimate 'legislative' or law-making authority, and that grant of power cannot be transferred--without approval of parliament one king can not bequeath the throne to his heir. As recently argued (A. Jayne 1998) this is one of the arguments that Jefferson seems to have followed most closely.

In sum, Locke's version of the contract is far different from Hobbes: the king holds power by fiduciary trust--not because the citizens all have transferred their rights to him. And this more recognizably liberal theory seems to be rooted in new scientific ideas about the physical basis for human rights and human reasoning.