Ellen Meiksins Wood_Locke Against Democracy Consent Representation and Suffrage in Two Treatises

8/10/2019 Ellen Meiksins Wood_Locke Against Democracy Consent Representation and Suffrage in Two Treatises

1/33

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:CONSENT, REPRESENTATION AND SUFFRAGE IN THE

TWO TREATISES

Ellen Meiksins Wood*

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For awhile we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker.1Now we seem to be in aLocke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of itsown, but a radically democratic Locke not just the old Locke as liberaldemocrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller strains the interpretative imaginationmore than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have

been advanced in support of it, both textual and contextual. The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the contextof radical Whig politics in the 1670s and 80s, the struggles over religioustoleration and the royal succession, in particular the Exclusion Crisis of167981.2This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textualinterpretations having to do with Lockes conceptions of property, consent,representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things,these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say aboutthe extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would havesupported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost)manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and

probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas3). Most recently, inthese pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIII. No. 4. Winter 1992

* I would like to thank my colleague, George Comninel, for several discussions which helped mea great deal in clarifying my thoughts about Lockes doctrine of consent, and Neal Wood for his

comments and suggestions.

1 Neal Wood discusses some of the confusions surrounding the interpretation of Locke as abourgeois theorist, especially those arising from the tendency to identify capitalismwith thebourgeoisie, an urban class of merchants and industrialists, at the expense of the agrariancapitalism which was evolving in Lockes day, in Neal Wood,John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 1520.

2 Richard Ashcraft,Revolutionary Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government(Princeton,1986). Ashcraft provides a more detailed textual analysis inLockes Two Treatises of Government(London, 1987). For more philosophical arguments in support of an egalitarian Locke, especiallyin relation to his views on natural law, see James Tully,A Discourse on Property: John Locke and

his Adversaries(Cambridge, 1980).

3 See in particular Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Political Theory of the Levellers: Putney, Propertyand Professor Macpherson,Political Studies, 24, no. 4 (December 1976), pp. 397422.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011For personal use only -- not for reproduction


2/33

Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go.4Hisargument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a widerexploration of Lockes views on representation, consent and the franchise.

IConsent and Representation

Some Preliminary Observations on the Context of Lockes Thought

The argument that follows here will be largely concerned with interpreting thetext of Lockes Two Treatises and especially his theories of consent, repre-sentation and property, as they affect the question of the franchise. The objectis not to replace a contextual with a purely textual reading. If anything, anunderstanding of the texts could benefit from an expansion of the relevantcontext, beyond the largely episodic focus of Richard AshcraftsRevolutionary

Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government. It is, for example, verydifficult to appreciate the political role of someone like Lockes mentor,Shaftesbury, without understanding the conditions of English agrarian capital-ism, the configuration of property relations and the economic practices associ-ated with it.5But for the limited purposes of the present argument, we can takeas given Ashcrafts account of Lockes association with radicals in the political

4Martin Hughes, Locke on Taxation and Suffrage, History of Political Thought, XI (1990),

pp. 42342.

5 The term agrarian capitalism has been used to describe the distinctive system of social propertyrelations in early modern England, increasingly characterized by the so-called triad of landlord,capitalist tenant and wage-labourer. English tenants on economic leases were uniquely subject tothe imperatives of the market, to competitive pressures which compelled them to increase produc-tivity by innovation, specialization and accumulation. Since many landlords derived their wealthfrom this kind of economic rent, they too had incentives to encourage improvement, in a mannerquite unlike the traditional rentier. These distinctive agrarian relations had set in train a dynamicof self-sustaining economic growth (which made possible the development of industrial capitalism)with no historical precedent, and there was nothing quite comparable to it elsewhere in Europe.

This, incidentally, also puts in question the argument, advanced by several commentators, thatthe relevant category in dealing with Locke is not capitalism but mercantilism. To manyhistorians, mercantilism is in any case a dubious category; but to treat it, especially in the Englishcontext, as some kind of mid-point between feudalism and capitalism is especially problematic. Ifmercantilism is a meaningful category at all, as an economic system distinct from both feudalismand capitalism, then it applies to a case like France where it is associated with absolutism, whichhas its own distinctive economic logic based not simply on the states interference in and regulationof trade but on the function of the state as an instrument of appropriation, a form of politicallyconstituted property, through (among other things) the tax/office nexus. In England, a very differenteconomic logic is already in play in the relevant period, the role of the state notwithstanding. Thismay not be full-blown capitalism. It certainly is not modern industrial capitalism. But it is an

economy with a new and distinctive systemic logic which justifies the by now conventionaldesignation, agrarian capitalism. For a discussion of the distinctive property relations of agrariancapitalism in early modern England in contrast to other European countries, see Robert Brenner,The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structureand Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cam-

bridge, 1985), especially pp. 299317. See also Wood,John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism.

658 E.M. WOOD



3/33

struggles of the 1670s and 80s. We can also accept that some of Lockespolitical theory can be read in the context of the Exclusion Crisis. It need onlybe demonstrated, as a preface to considering his political ideas, that Lockesactive association with the radical Whig politics of his day is compatible with

a reading of his political theory as undemocratic. Richard Ashcrafts contextual argument is based on a detailed account ofShaftesburys and Lockes active association with radical politics in the 1670sand 80s. Although he is careful not to make excessive claims about Shaftes-

burys political commitments on the basis of his tactical alliance with politicalradicals, the implication throughout his book is that, at least in Lockes case,such an association bespeaks a fundamental sympathy with them. Indeed,without that assumption, however convincing Ashcrafts evidence of Lockesassociation with radicals may be, the force of his contextual argument in

supporting the contention that Locke himself was a political radical would beconsiderably weakened. Martin Hughes, drawing on Ashcraft, makes the caseunambiguously. Faced with evidence that Locke and his mentor Shaftesburymight have been inclined towards a restricted franchise, Hughes suggests thatany concessions made by them on questions like the franchise were simply amatter of expediency. [N]o explanation for Lockes association with theradicals is available other than a degree of sympathy on his part with theirideas.6Any departure from these sympathies must, then, be attributed to thetactical requirements of appeasing conservative allies.

But another explanation is indeed available, an explanation no more specu-lative than the assumption that association testifies to sympathy, an explanationfar more consistent with everything we know about Shaftesburys career and,as will be argued here, with Lockes political ideas.7 Shaftesburys Whigs werenot the first non-democratic forces in England willing to risk an alliance (whichthey later abandoned or betrayed) especially with London radicals for the

purpose of mobilizing a popular force against the Crown.8A characteristicpattern of mobilization and exploitation of the multitude, followed by reversionto the principles of oligarchy at moments of aristocratic ascendancy, can be

traced from before the Civil War (and as one of its immediate causes) throughthe crises of the 1680s and beyond, to the manipulation of the crowd and pop-ular riots by aristocratic opponents of various administrations throughout theeighteenth century.

6 Hughes, Locke, p. 431.

7 For a discussion of Shaftesburys career and its relation to Lockes political theory, see DavidMcNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the FirstWhigs,History of Political Thought, X (1989), especially pp. 1825.

8 The repeated pattern of alliances between the propertied classes and radicals in seventeenth-century England is discussed in the Postscript to Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution:Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and Londons Overseas Traders, 15501653(Cambridgeand Princeton, 1992).

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY: 659



4/33

Indeed, there were what might be called deep structural reasons for thisrepetitive pattern in English political history. The English ruling class, morethan any other in Europe at that time, as the most completely demilitarizedaristocracy and in the most centralized state in Europe, was obliged to seek

alternatives to the private armies of traditional aristocracies to support itsrebellions against the Crown. Some aristocrats were more cautious than others,especially after the experience of the Civil War; but Shaftesburys readiness totake this dangerous route was not inconsistent with the undemocratic bentdisplayed, both early and late in his career, in everything from his earlierdefences of the House of Lords to the later proposals for reform of the franchisecommonly attributed to him.9

The Context Continued: The Question of the Franchise

Manipulation of the franchise was one of the principal means of establishingtactical alliances. Here, for example, is how one historian has summarized the

period between the Civil War and the Exclusion Crisis, starting with the gentrysefforts to expand the electorate in franchise disputes in 16401:

Whether obstructing a suspected threat from the Crown at a national level,or for their own local advantage, they [the gentry in their collective

political capacity in the House] were prepared to employ the commonsfor their own ends. In this, they acted in much the same way as they did

in the other main field where the commons were able to express them-selves, in riots. There too, the gentry were prepared to encourage thecommons to act in order to resist Crown exploitation, in the Fens and theSouth-West, and equally they often stirred up popular action against localgentry rivals. But the decisive factor here is the strength of the relativethreats. Before the war, the propertied classes, with occasional excep-tions, do not seem to have been excessively frightened of the threat from

below, whereas there was often considerable disquiet about the activitiesof the Crown. The events of the years 164260 reversed that estimate,

and a toughening of the attitude of the gentry became visible . . . and theCavalier Parliament proceeded to overturn previous expansionist prin-ciples on the franchise . . . The horrors of the revolutionary decades wereonly overlooked when in the Exclusion Crisis at the end of Charles IIsreign the danger from above once again appeared to outweigh that from

below and the Commons returned, if briefly, to their pre-war position ofespousing the rights of the meaner sort in order to defend their own

9

Shaftesbury proposed to eliminate anomalies, to enfranchise newer corporations and disenfran-chise rotten boroughs, thus extending the franchise as it were horizontally, while rendering it lesssocially democratic by setting a fairly high property qualification for the Parliamentary franchise(200) and introducing new, very high, property qualifications (10,000) for membership inParliament. See David Ogg,England in the Reign of Charles II(Oxford, 2nd edn., 1956), Vol. 2,

pp. 4812.

660 E.M. WOOD



5/33

liberties and privileges. The commons were in effect being politicallyexploited by the gentry in parliament.10

After 1689, Whig Parliaments decided time and time again in favour of anarrow franchise.11

This history provides the context in which the Exclusion elections, whichplay such a central role in Ashcrafts argument, must be seen. Ashcraft arguesthat the failure of the Whigs to pursue franchise reform (and, by extension,Lockes failure explicitly to advocate a democratic reform of the franchise) doesnot signify a lack of commitment to a fairly wide suffrage. Their silence can beexplained by the simple fact that the franchise was already widely exercised inthe seventeenth century. Indeed, the late seventeenth century was a high-watermark of democratic participation, not achieved again until the mid-nineteenthcentury.12

But while the franchise in the seventeenth century may have been unusuallywide, it was not uniformly so. As we have seen, it was certainly not so consistentand uncontested that no systematic comment was necessary from Whig

politicians or from Locke. If their silence tells us anything, it may simply bethat they subscribed to the opportunistic manipulation of the electoratedescribed by Derek Hirst, that their preferred position was a narrower franchise,closer to the undemocratic end of the existing spectrum of opinion, and thatthey favoured an extended franchise only in moments of crisis when tacticalconsiderations required them to exploit the commons for their immediate

political purposes. Nor was Shaftesburys strategy during the Exclusion Crisisinconsistent with the narrower franchise advocated in the proposal for franchisereform attributed to him or, after his death, by victorious Whig regimes oncetheir revolutionary objectives had been realized.

10 Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting under the Early Stuarts(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 1912. Ashcraft seems to ignore the fluctuations described here by Hirst.So, for example, in a paragraph devoted to how widespread the practice of voting was in the

seventeenth century, he lists various towns in which a fairly wide franchise existed, as if theseconditions applied to the seventeenth century in general, citing Hirst as confirmation (Revolutionary

Politics, p. 148). Yet Hirsts list refers specifically to 1641, a high point in the cycles he describes,after the Long Parliament had extended the franchise to an unusual degree and before thecontractions introduced soon thereafter, not to mention the restrictions reimposed (after a briefreversion in 1659) at the Restoration. Cromwell, for example, set a high property qualification 200 in real or personal property which meant that the franchise, while in some respects fairlydistributed, according to J.H. Plumb, was less, far less, generously interpreted than before the civilwar, keeping it firmly in the hands of the propertied classes (J.H. Plumb, The Growth of theElectorate in England from 16001715,Past and Present, 45 (1969), p. 108). The wide franchise

proposed by the Levellers, of course, made both Cromwell and Ireton wince with horror (ibid.,

p. 107). In the spectrum from Cromwell to the Levellers (even at their most pragmaticallyconservative moments), Shaftesburys 200 franchise puts him squarely on Cromwells side.

11 J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 16751725(Harmondsworth, 1969),p. 102.

12 Ashcraft,Revolutionary Politics, p. 166.




6/33

Another point must be made here about the electoral alliance at the core ofAshcrafts argument. He suggests that Lockes theory of property can besituated in the context of Whig electoral strategy in the Exclusion elections. Intheir effort to sustain an alliance between the country gentry on the one hand

(while driving a wedge between them and the larger landed aristocracy) and onthe other hand the urban radicals, the Whigs were obliged both to satisfy themore democratic aspirations of the latter while disavowing levelling tenden-cies in order to reassure the former; and in this delicate balancing act, thequestion of property naturally loomed large. Ashcraft treats the chapter on property in the Second Treatiseas one of themost radical critiques of the landowning aristocracy produced during the lasthalf of the seventeenth century.13 In the context of electoral politics, thiscritique, based on Lockes advocacy of industry and improvement, can,

argues Ashcraft, be construed as an appeal to the industrious sections of thenation: merchants, tradesmen, artisans and shopkeepers, as well as yeomanfarmers and the gentry, as opposed to the idle, luxurious, and useless largelandowners who allowed their property to go to waste.14 While Ashcraftqualifies his remarks about Lockes attack on the landed aristocracy by pointingout that it applies only to the idle and useless members of that class, hisanalysis is clearly predicated on a more or less systematic division between a(largely?) useless aristocracy and a generally industrious class of smalllandowners, the latter constituting a more natural constituency for the Whigs if

only the smaller gentry could be alienated from the aristocracy, as well as fromthe Crown and the Anglican Church.15

Yet this picture of English society in the late seventeenth century, and of thesocial divisions which the Whigs sought to exploit, is misleading from the start.It seems to be based less on the evidence of English history than on theconventional opposition between a passive, parasitic aristocracy and a forward-looking, productive bourgeoisie. No such schema, even if the bourgeoisie issupplemented by an industrious rural class of small proprietors, can do justiceto the realities of English agrarian capitalism. The culture of improvement

was already well established among large sections of the landed aristocracy.Shaftesbury, the model Whig aristocrat, was himself a landowner of this kind.It is not at all clear that industry in this sense was better represented amongthe smaller gentry than in the larger aristocracy; and the pressures on yeomen-tenants to improve typically came from such landlords. In fact, if the veryexistence of smaller proprietors was, as Ashcraft points out, threatened by largelandowners, then it was in large part because those landowners were engagedin improvement, whether on their own or through their tenants, by means,among other things, of enclosure and engrossment and by making less produc-

tive properties economically unviable in a competitive setting. Nor, for that

13Ibid., p. 273.

14Ibid., p. 244. 15Ibid., p. 243.

662 E.M. WOOD



7/33

matter, were landed aristocrats less productive and industrious than the largeold company merchants of London, who had so often supported the Crownagainst Parliament.16In the context of Englands growing agrarian capitalism,there is nothing in Lockes chapter on property that could not represent the

interests of a great improving landlord like Shaftesbury, and there is nothingin it that bespeaks a brief for small proprietors and labourers against the landedaristocracy. There will be more in what follows about Lockes theory of property, hiscommitment to improvement and industry. For the moment, the point issimply this: nothing in Whig electoral politics during the Exclusion Crisis norin the political alliance with radical elements precludes a fundamental prefer-ence for a restricted franchise. Shaftesburys political career as a whole, togetherwith his known and explicit convictions, argues in favour of such a preference,

and the following discussion is intended to demonstrate that Lockes politicaltheory is, at minimum, consistent with it too. On the connection betweenLockes political associations and his sympathies, it would be just as plausibleto reverse Hughes argument: if there is anything in Shaftesburys political

practice or in Lockes political theory that suggests an opening towards democ-racy (and it will be argued in what follows that there is very little of that in theTwo Treatises), it is this, and not more conservative positions, that representsa tactical concession.

Lockes Doctrine of Consent

In the end, everything depends on what Locke means by consent and whatconditions must be met to satisfy the requirements of government by consent.Who gives consent and how, and, in particular, does it imply the right to vote?Interpretations of Lockes doctrine have been legion, and it is unlikely that anyinterpretation will ever dispose of all the ambiguities and inconsistencies in hisvague and unsystematic references to consent, tacit and express. Theargument that follows, while it cannot pretend to tie up all the loose ends, is

based on the conviction that Locke-the-radical-democrat is even more untidy. One point needs to be stressed at the outset. The notion of consent hashistorically been so capacious that it has been able to accommodate everythingfrom absolutism to democracy. At one extreme, there have been doctrines ofconsent that subject every individual, without condition, to some notionaloriginal founding agreement on behalf of a mystical community to which he(always he), like all generations before and after him, belongs. This kind ofdoctrine is completely compatible with absolutism. At the other extreme there is a democratic doctrine which denies that anyindividual can be bound by any prior agreement, made on his behalf as part ofa corpus mysticum, and that he must have the right to give his own active andcontinuing consent to the acts of government, in the form of the franchise.Between these extremes lie doctrines in which the original act of consent is

16 See Brenner,Merchants,passim.




8/33

conditional, in the sense that powers originally alienated may be reclaimed inmoments of crisis and tyrannical power. In such doctrines, the notion of consentimplies a right of resistance but has no bearing on the right to vote. Typically(as in the case of the French monarchomach tracts) the right, indeed the duty,

of resistance belongs not to individual citizens but to corporate bodies, officersand lesser magistrates: nobles, municipal officials, councils and estates.Anti-absolutist such doctrines certainly are, but not particularly democratic,having more to do with defending the independent powers of aristocrats andmunicipal notables against a centralizing monarchy than with the extension of

political rights to the common people. It was in England that such corporate conceptions of the polity had been, byLockes time, most powerfully challenged and that a completely new concep-tion of individual and continuous consent had emerged, notably in Leveller

ideas advanced during the Civil War. With this new doctrine on the table,advocates of less democratic forms in England were obliged to conduct theirarguments on a different terrain. Even a defender of absolutism like Hobbes feltcompelled in theLeviathanto construct his case on the basis of the doctrine ofconsent in its most radical form. It no longer seemed adequate to invoke a corpusmysticumon whose behalf political powers had been unconditionally alienated.An airtight case for absolutism could be constructed only by demon- stratingthat every individual had actually consented to or authorized it.17

In Lockes time a very wide spectrum of ideas on consent was on display.

Among the most important, certainly for Locke, is that of Richard Hooker, whoconjures up some kind of mystical community to which every individual

belongs and whose prior act of submission is binding on future generations. Ina passage quoted approvingly by Locke, which Hughes cites as evidence ofLockes democratic inclinations, Hooker writes:

For any prince or potentate to exercise [the power of making laws] notby commission from God or else by authority derived at the first fromtheir consent upon whose persons they impose laws is no better thantyranny . . . And to be commanded we do consent when that Society,whereof we be a part, hath at any time before consented, without revokingthe same after by the like universal agreement.18

In the course of the same passage (in words not quoted by Locke, thoughtheir fundamental meaning is contained in the passage which he does quote, tothe effect that we do consent when that Society, whereof we be a part, hath atany time before consented . . .), Hooker writes:

17 David Wootton has given a persuasive explanation of Hobbess theory of authorization as aresponse to radical conceptions of consent in his Introduction to Divine Right and Democracy(Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 567.

18 Richard Hooker,Ecclesiastical Polity, I (1594), Ch. x, section 9, quoted by Locke in a note toSecond Treatise, para. 134. Hughes slightly abbreviate[s] Lockes quotation from Hooker, leavingout the rather significant sentence which explains that we consent when that Society, whereof we

be a part, hath at any time before consented. Hughes, Locke, p. 437 and note 40.

664 E.M. WOOD



9/33

Wherefore as any mans deed past is good as long as himself continueth;so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithencestandeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, becausecorporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and

they in their successors do live still.

And in the preceding paragraph:

As in parliaments, councils, and the like assemblies, although we be notpersonally ourselves present, nothwithstanding our assent is by reason ofother agents there in our behalf. And what we do by others, no reason butthat it should stand as our deed, no less effectually to bind us than ifourselves had done it in person. In many things assent is given, they thatgive it not imagining they do so, because the manner of their assenting is

not apparent.

Hookers intention may not have been to defend royal absolutism at least,he was opposed to rule by the arbitrary will of one man, without known laws

but his notion of consent is perfectly compatible with absolute monarchy.His first example of cases in which men give consent not imagining they doso is precisely this: when an absolute monarch commandeth his subjects thatwhich seemeth good in his own discretion, hath not his edict the force of lawwhether they approve or dislike it?19The other two major forms of consentavailable to Locke were Hobbess theory of authorization in defence ofabsolutism, and the Levellers democratic theory which tended to associateconsent with the franchise. Where, then, did Locke situate himself on this spectrum? Hughes, and otherdefenders of the radical Locke like Ashcraft and Tully, would place him at, orclose to, the Leveller pole. But two points in particular argue against thisinterpretation: first, that Locke associates himself with Hookers doctrine of thecorpus mysticum; and second, that his theory of tacit consent breaks theconnection which the Levellers had established between the obligation to obeygovernment and the right of consent in the form of the franchise. Let us take these two points in turn. There can be no doubt that Lockesinvocation of Hooker is significant. Any interpretation of his theory of consentmust take into account the fact that he aligns himself with that part of Hookersdoctrine which stipulates that to be commanded we do consent when thatSociety, whereof we be a part, hath at any time before consented, withoutrevoking the same after by the like agreement. This conception of consent is,on the face of it, undemocratic in its presumption that an individual can beconstrued as having consented without giving any overt sign of agreement andthat he can be bound by agreements in which he played no part. Indeed, thereis no reason why even an open objection could not be construed as consent (asHookers remarks on absolute monarchy suggest), as long as the objectorremains part of that Society which has previously consented, and in the

19 Hooker,Ecclesiastical Polity, I, Ch. x, section 9.




10/33

absence of any universal consent to revoke the original agreement. This isconsistent with the most undemocratic ideas of virtual representation (aboutwhich more later) and argues strongly against the association of representationwith the franchise.

Locke, however, was clearly not prepared to countenance absolute monarchy.He therefore was obliged to consider more closely the terms of the originalagreement which were to remain binding on future generations, and to attachconditions to it that would preclude absolute power in a way that Hooker hadfailed to do. Furthermore, in the wake of the Levellers, Locke like Hobbes

felt compelled to proceed not simply from the corpus mysticumbut also froma notion of individualconsent. In the conditions of post-revolutionary England,it was no longer enough, as it had been for the Huguenots in France, to assertthe corporate privileges and independent powers of the ruling classes against

the Crown. In any case, Locke clearly saw the advantages of individual consentin challenging the claims of the monarchy, and especially in defending the moreradical Whig position which was prepared to situate the right of resistance notsimply in Parliament but in some broader and more socially inclusive categoryof People outside Parliament.20

So Locke set himself a double task: to devise a theory that would unequivo-cally rule out royal absolutism but to do so in a way that would foreclosemore democratic options, a theory of individual consent that would make thestrongest case for the right of resistance without carrying the dangers which

others notably Filmer, but also Cromwell and Ireton in the Putney Debates had warned against in their responses to radical doctrines.21

Here a distinction must be made between Lockes conception of consent asit relates to the origins of civil society, and his views on consent as it relates tothe ongoing legitimacy of government and the obligation of people to obey it.

No conclusions about the latter can be safely drawn from the former. It is thefirst question that concerns Locke in his effort to rule out absolutism. Theexpress consent which individuals gave in the original act of foundation, theconsent at the first from which the authority of government ultimately derives,

was not an agreement to just any kind of government. Thisdoctrine of consentis meant to establish what it is that any individual, in future generations, can beconstrued as having consented to; and there are limits. It is this that distinguishesLocke most clearly from Hobbes. But beyond that, Locke seems not at all keen to assert the right of individualsto renew the legitimacy of government and their obligation to obey by giving

or withholding their active and continuing consent, except in the

20 This point is discussed in Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 305 ff. Other, less radicalinterpretations of Lockes views on the right of resistance are possible; but my argument does notdepend on denying him a fairly radical position on this, since the right of resistance need not haveimplications for more normal political rights like the franchise. More on this later.

21 See McNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty, for a discussion of other aspects of Lockes attemptto deprive radical ideas of their most dangerously democratic consequences, especially in his theoryof property.

666 E.M. WOOD



11/33

ambiguous sense that they can be construed as having consented withoutknowing it. The original act of consent, as Locke formulates it, makes itnecessary for him to insist that nothing but express consent can make a man amember of civil society; but express consent after the original act the

consent whereby men, as they come of age, become members of an alreadyexisting society and accept its laws and institutions tends to be of the kindwhere the manner of their assenting, to quote Hooker again, is not apparent. In fact, Locke attacks the right of active individual consent from twodirections, by invoking Hookers notion of corporate consent and by proposinga theory of individual consent according to which individuals can take uponthemselves the obligation to obey merely by giving tacit consent, the kind ofconsent anyone gives by his mere presence in the commonwealth.22This meansthat the conditions of individualconsent could be met by virtual representation.

The importance of Lockes concept of tacit consent should not be under-estimated. It may never be possible to establish precisely what Locke intended

by introducing this ambiguous idea (whether, for example, it was meant to applyspecifically to foreigners23), but it has one very unambiguous consequence: insharp contrast to radical ideas which associated the obligation to obey with theright to vote, Lockes theory neatly severs the connection. The significance of his argument can be assessed by placing it against the

background of the Putney Debates in which the Levellers advanced theirargument for a more democratic franchise. It should be emphasized that, in the

debate between the Army radicals and the grandees, notably in the person ofIreton, bothsides proceeded on the assumption that consent had to do with thefranchise or, at any rate, Ireton chose to challenge the radicals on their ownterms for the purposes of this debate. His response to the Leveller demand fora more democratic franchise, which they made on the grounds that people couldnot be obliged to obey a government to which they had not themselvesconsented, was not to maintain that people had somehow consented withoutimagining they had done so. Nor did Ireton invoke some notion of prior consenton behalf of a notional community. He simply insisted that people could, indeed,

be obligated to obey a government to which they had not given consent as,for example, we expect anyone to do who breathes the air or travels thehighways of our commonwealth. It must surely be significant that Locke, citingthe very same example, argues that such people actually have consented. His

22 Locke, Two Treatises, II, 119.

23 Ashcraft suggests that tacit consent does not refer solely to foreigners, and that the distinctionbetween tacit and express consent cannot be reduced to any simple dichotomy, viz., landownersv. non-landowners, property-owners v. propertyless, native-born v. aliens (Ashcraft,Lockes Two

Treatises, p. 195, note 27). I agree; but, since I have a different conception of what constitutesmembership in political society, I would attach less importance than does Ashcraft to theabsoluteness of the association of express consent with the individualspersonand not with propertyownership of any type. For Ashcraft, this association apparently implies that, since the propertylessman is capable of the express consent that makes him a member, he may have full political rights,including the franchise. For me, the rights of membership stop short of the right to vote.




12/33

criteria of consent are clearly a good deal less stringent than Iretons in thelatters opposition to the Levellers. In one clean operation, the connection

between consent and the franchise, assumed by both Ireton and the Levellers,has been decisively broken. It must be emphasized again that Locke achieves

this effect not by invoking some mystical community but by attributing consentto individuals.24

Richard Ashcraft has argued that Locke never dissociated himself from theradical implications which Filmer (and, we might add, Cromwell and Ireton)attributed to radical arguments from natural rights and consent. Filmer hadwarned that any invocation of such ideas would carry the consequence of giving

political power to the proletarian rabble. Locke, argues Ashcraft, far fromdisclaiming these radical consequences, almost flaunts the language of naturalrights and consent in the Second Treatisein the face of Filmers challenge on

the question of suffrage, and thus the silence of his reply to Filmer isendowed with considerable political significance.25

It is worth observing that even Hobbes flaunts the language of natural rightsand consent in his defence of absolutism. But, in any case, is Locke reallysilent, and does he really fail to disclaim the democratic consequences ofLeveller ideas on the franchise? The concept of tacit consent is enough by itselfto dissociate Locke from Leveller ideas, simply by admitting a type of consentthat carries the obligation to obey without the right to vote. The argument hereis not, like C.B. Macphersons, that the distinction between tacit and express

consent corresponds to a distinction between those who have full rights ofcitizenship, notably the franchise, and those who do not. The point is rather thatLockes idea of tacit consent dissociates consent from the franchise altogether. Nor does the idea of expressconsent improve matters. Indeed, the difference

between tacit and express consent is not, on reflection, self-evident at all. Whatis striking about express consent is that it too is largely tacit, and that it too hasat least as much to do with obligations as with rights. Only at the moment offoundation is express consent a clearly overt and explicit act of agreement.Thereafter, the express consent which alone makes a man a member of

society, and by which he takes on its obligations, also consists largely ofmoments when people give consent without imagining that they do so. Much of Lockes argument has to do with demonstrating that consent existswhere it is not apparent in particular, when a young man comes of age andtakes on the responsibilities of membership in political society, coming into hisrights and the enjoyment of his fathers possessions on the same terms as hisFather did:

24 Lockes strategy of argumentation may be different from that of Cromwells party filling inthe loopholes, as it were but in relation to this part of the Putney Debates, he seems to be lesson the Leveller side than on Cromwells.

25 Ashcraft,Lockes Two Treatises, p. 176.

668 E.M. WOOD



13/33

And thus the Consent of Free-men, born under Government, which onlymakes them Members of it, being given separately in their turns, as eachcomes to be of Age, and not in a multitude together; People take no noticeof it, and thinking it not done at all, or not necessary, conclude they are

naturally Subjects as they are Men.26

Locke intends this argument to demonstrate, against Filmer, that the passageof rights and responsibilities from father to son is not an expression of

patriarchal authority. No man can, by any prior agreement, bind his childrenor Posterity without their own consent. But this does not alter the fact thatLocke has found another way of binding sons to the compacts of their fathers,simply by claiming that they have indeed themselves consented, even whilethinking it not done at all.27

This argument is, to be sure, double-edged. Its primary purpose is to attackFilmers absolutist claims by demonstrating that, where Filmer sees patriarchalauthority there is, on the contrary, individual consent. Locke is simply tryingto correct misapprehensions derived from deceptive appearances. Even wherethe son appears to be taking on the commitments of his father, he has in factassumed them in his own right; even when people are obliged to adhere to theconditions of a prior agreement in which they played no part, they cannot beconstrued as being bound without their own consent; even where there appearsto be no consent, there is in fact consent. This certainly has the effect of refutingFilmers assumptions about the origins and legitimacy of absolute monarchy,

but it has no democratic implications. If anything, since the conditions ofconsent can so easily be met, it invites the most undemocratic assumptionsallowable within the framework of a limited, constitutional government. Theanti-absolutist and the anti-democratic are two sides of the same coin.


27

Express consent is sometimes identified with oaths and other explicit declarations of allegiance,and some of the controversy surrounding Lockes views on the franchise has to do with who is ina position to take a public oath of this kind. So an argument like that of C.B. Macpherson, who, inThe Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke(Oxford, 1962), insists thatLocke meant to exclude the propertyless on the grounds that they could not give express consent,can be countered simply by pointing out that poor men could in various circumstances be requiredto take oaths for example, as soldiers and sailors and can therefore be regarded as having, in

principle or hypothetically, given express consent. Locke refers to oaths in the Second Treatise,62, simply in order to demonstrate that even commonwealths, by requiring no oaths of any kind

before a man has reached the age of reason, acknowledge that there is a time when Menare tobegin to act like Free Men, which means that there is no incompatability between natural freedom

and subjection to parents (ibid., 61). None of this changes the fact that no explicit act of consentis actually required to subject men to the obligations of political society, nor does it imply that anysuch explicit act even when it is real and not simply hypothetical carries with it the right tovote. It may be worth adding that even Hobbes argued that patriarchal authority was based onconsent, which did not, in his mind, preclude the most unconditional absolutism (Hobbes,

Leviathan, Part II, ch. xx).




14/33

It is worth noting that the same considerations apply to a passage, much citedby advocates of the democratic Locke, in which he seems to identify Consentof the People with Consent of Fathers of Families.28Hughes, for example,regards this as proof positive that Locke had in mind not a narrow but a

democratically inclusive definition of the People. Since the crucial issue here,however, is not so much who constitutes the People as what rights they have,whoever they are, we can leave aside the ambiguities that remain in the categoryFathers of Families (what, for instance, about the servant, the wage-labourerwho, Locke tells us, by entering the wage contract puts himself into the Familyof his Master?29), and consider the questions that remain even if we give thecategory the widest latitude. The relevant passage occurs in yet another attempt to refute the absolutistassumptions of Filmer. Locke suggests that Filmer, in his account of Nimrod

as the founder of monarchy, has caught himself in a bind. The one thing thisexample cannot demonstrate is the very thing Filmer wants to prove: that menare naturally unfree, government originates in patriarchal right, and royal poweris absolute. Having suggested usurpation or election as alternatives to directinheritance as a means of acquiring regal authority, Filmer traps himself in acontradiction. He concedes that Nimrod extended his patriarchal power beyondhis own family by violently usurping the powers of other Fathers of Families.But since not all these many Fathers could have been Adams heirs, they musthave possessed their own patriarchal authority by nature rather than inheritance

which, on Filmers own account, leaves him with usurpation or election asthe only means by which their authority could have been ceded to Nimrod.According to Filmer himself, argues Locke with heavy irony, monarchy wasapparently founded either by Tyranny and Usurpation, or Election and Consentof Fathers of Families, which will differ very little from the Consent of thePeople; so perhaps men are, after all, naturally free and legitimate governmentis founded on consent. Lockes object is to expose the contradictions in Filmers attempt to deriveabsolute royal power from patriarchal right; but this does not preclude Locke

himself from arguing that men who are naturally free can establish andconsent to whatever form of government they think fit, monarchical orotherwise, elected or not.30Even if the example of Nimrod is not just another

28 Locke, Two Treatises, I, 148, cited by Hughes in Locke, p. 427.


30 At first, this included even unconditional monarchy (Two Treatises, II, 11012); but after theGolden Age (111), men had to restrain government by law. Lockes political theory in generalimplies no more than that men can never be construed as forfeiting the right to limit government

in this way. The above summary of the Nimrod example should make it clear that the oppositionof tyranny and usurpation to election and consent does not, as Ashcraft suggests (Lockes TwoTreatises, p. 212), represent Lockes account of the clear alternatives between Filmer and himself(see Two Treatises, I, 134, for a passage quoted by Locke in which Filmer suggests Usurpationor Election as alternatives to inheritance); nor, although election certainly bespeaks consent, isthere anything here to suggest that it is the only, or even the predominant, form of consent.

670 E.M. WOOD



15/33

case of invisible consent, in which what looks like a usurpation may have beenan act of consent, it still tells us less, not more, about the political rights ofFathers of Families whether broadly or narrowly conceived than whatis already implied in Lockes theory as a whole: that (after the Golden Age)

no government which is not subject to the rule of law can be construed as basedon consent, and that men are entitled to live under a constitutional authority,not under an unlawful personal rule. Beyond the act of foundation, then, consent is as likely as not to be tacit, evenwhen it is express. Men are obliged to adhere to the conditions of the societyof which they are members. They become members by express consent. Theygive express consent merely by coming of age. The idea of express consent doesnot reinstate the connection between obligation and suffrage severed by thenotion of tacit consent. Its purpose is, above all, to establish the limits of the

original act of consent which rules out royal absolutism, but implies nothingmore democratic than that.

Parliament, Representation and Legislative Power

What implications does this have for the role of Parliament and the parliamen-tary franchise? Does Locke say anything, in his remarks on representative andlegislative bodies, that obliges us to set aside what has been said so far abouthis doctrine of consent, and to replace or supplement it with the view that, after

the original foundation of the commonwealth, consent notably to taxation is present only when there exists a legislative assembly elected by ademocratic franchise? There are several passages in the Second Treatisewhere Locke speaks ofconsent as given by legislative or representative bodies chosen or appointed

by the People. None of these, however, settles the issue in favour of a widefranchise. Quite apart from the still unresolved question of who constitutes thePeople, there remain other at best ambiguities. For example, whenLocke speaks of choosing a legislative power, he often has in mind not the

election of particular members of Parliament but the original act which estab-lishes theformof the legislative. So, in 134, he writes:

ThisLegislativeis unalterable in the hands where the Community haveonce placed it; nor can any Edict of any Body else, in what Form soeverconceived, or by what Power soever backed, have the force and obligationof a Law, which has not its Sanction from that Legislative, which the

publick has chosen and appointed. For without this the Law could nothave that, which is absolutely necessary to its being aLaw, the consentof the Society, over whom no Body can have a power to make Laws, but

by their own consent, and by Authority received from them.

This passage suggests that consent is present not when the legislative hasbeen democratically elected but simply when the legislative power continuesto reside in the kind of person or institution in which it has been vested by the




16/33

community. Significantly, it is at this point that Locke introduces the quotationfrom Hooker, to explain what is meant by their own consent the consentat the first which establishes the authority that binds men thereafter, in theabsence of a similarly universal agreement to revoke it.

Thus far, then, the condition that the legislative power be the one chosen andappointed by the publick means nothing more than that the chosen institutionis still in place, and that every member of Society can be construed as havingconsented to it. Lockes object here is simply to limit the rights of the Crownto interfere with the established form of the legislative. At best, there is a

presumption in favour of the existing arrangements in England, with its mixedconstitution represented by the Crown in Parliament, an arrangement whichthe King is illegally trying to breach.31

It is also clear that a fairly wide variety of legislative forms is compatible

with Lockes theory of consent. For instance, the legislative power may or maynot reside in a representative body. A law is still a law, and binding, when it is

promulgated by some other kind of legislative power, even when it resides ina monarch, if that is where the community has vested it, and subject to theconditions of the original agreement, which above all requires that all areequally subject to the law, including those who legislate. Nor is such a law anyless based on consent than one enacted by a representative body.

31 Some other passages in which Locke refers to the choice, election or appointment by the peopleof legislative bodies are equally inconclusive: e.g. 140 of the Second Treatiseis at best ambiguousin its reference to Representatives chosen by the people, as to whether this applies to the actualelection of representatives or the original choice of the form of the representative; 141 fairly clearlyrefers to the choice of the Form of the Commonwealth and its legislative power. (I will touchupon the very significant usages in 216 later.) In 142, Locke refers to deputies from time to timechosen, which implies election; but since the sentence in which this phrase appears concerns (andapparently acknowledges as legitimate) cases in which the People have not [emphasis added]reservd any part of the Legislative to Deputies, to be from time to time chosen by themselves, itcan hardly be used as evidence that Locke had in mind only elected legislative bodies. Much the

same is true of 154 and 157. I discuss this point further in what follows. Ashcraft cites fivepassages from the Second Treatisewhich purport to demonstrate that a well-ordered common-wealth is, by definition, one in which the lawmaking power is in the hands of an electedrepresentative assembly: 143, 153, 159, 213, 222 (Ashcraft,Revolutionary Politics, p. 221 andnote 163). In fact, not one of these passages does so. The first three at most have to do with thedesirability of collective legislative bodies which, because they need not be always in being (asthe executive power must), will disperse when their legislative work is done and are more likely to

be subject to their own laws. It is the separability of the legislative from the executive function, thesporadic nature of the lawmaking power and therefore the greater likelihood that legislators willsubmit to their own laws which makes this arrangement desirable, without any reference to theelective or representative character of such bodies. 213 merely describes a form of government in

which the legislative power resides in three distinct Persons, a monarch, an assembly and anelected representative body, for the purpose of explaining in the following paragraph in whatcircumstances such a government might be described as illegitimately changed. 222 describes theconditions in which a legislative body itself can be said to have forfeited its power by a breach oftrust, and those in which the supreme Executor (in this case, clearly James II) has illegitimatelyinterfered with the legislative, specifically an elected one.

672 E.M. WOOD



17/33

The conditions of taxation may be more stringent than those for other kindsof enactment by a legislative power. But, while the legislative power cannotraise taxes without eliciting the consent of the people, such consent can bedeemed to be present in something well short of a democratic polity. For

example, Locke describes cases in which the legislative power does not residein deputies.32The situation he describes, where theLegislativeis always in

being, or at least where the People have not reservd any part of the Legislativeto Deputies, to be chosen from time to time by themselves, fits the case ofFrance, where legislative power resides in a single person, the king (andtherefore is always in being, while not having been chosen this time, in thesense of elected), but where the king is expected to seek consent to taxationfrom the assembled Estates (not legislative but representative bodies, and basedon a system of corporate representation we would certainly not recognize as

democratic). We cannot even be sure that representatives must be elected at all. The Kinghimself may be representative of the Commonwealth, as long as he acts not

by his own private will but according to the publick Will, that is, accordingto the conditions of the original agreement, which requires him, like his subjects,to act in accordance with the law.33Peter Laslett, in his notes to this passage,remarks that Representative and Representation are used in the techni-cal Hobbesian sense here . . . though to antithetical purposes.34This is true, butonly up to a point. Locke certainly intends this passage as a limitation, not an

authorization, of monarchical power, and in that sense his purposes are anti-thetical to Hobbess. At the same time, it also tells us something about thelatitude of Lockes conception of representation, which does not require theactualityof election. Lockes preference is certainly for a collective legislative body. Whenlegislative power resides in collective bodies call them Senate, Parliament,or what you please35 there is a greater likelihood that legislators themselveswill be subject to the law; and only then are people likely to feel secure in their

property and to think themselves safely in civil society. But with his permissive

definitions of consent and representation, Lockes requirements for such acollective legislature, and perhaps even for a representative parliament, could

be met without a democratic franchise or indeed, like the Roman Senate, withoutelection at all. It must also be said that, even if we interpret Locke as sayingthat the right to free elections is a condition of legitimate government, we havestill to establish what this implies for the voting rights of any individual or classof individuals.


33Ibid., 151.

34 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1990), p. 368n.





18/33

Representation and the Right to Vote

This is what Martin Hughes purports to do. He sets out to demonstrate thatLocke was, by the standards of his contemporaries, a radical democrat andnot an apologist for class rule, specifically for a property-based oligarchysupported by a formal denial of the right of suffrage to the poor.36His argumenthinges on Lockes views, especially in 158 of the Second Treatise, concerningthe franchise for areas or constituencies in a truly representative parliament.37

A truly representative Parliament, argues Hughes, would more equitably reflectthe distribution of taxation and, by extension, of population, among areas. Hethen proceeds from the representation of areas to the franchise for individuals,via the contention that the poor paid considerable sums in tax in Lockes timeand that his demand for parliamentary consent to taxation entailed the right ofsuffrage for the poor. These arguments are supported by various subsidiary

points concerning Lockes views on enclosure and improvement, on the rightsof the poor, and on the creation of wealth by labour. The critical problem, as Hughes conceives it, is to establish an association

between taxation and the individual franchise, first by establishing a connectionbetween taxation and the representation of areas, hinted at in 158 of the SecondTreatise, and then by moving from the representation of areas to an association

between tax-paying and representation of people. The association betweentaxpaying and parliamentary representation for areas, he maintains, gives riseto a second association, this time between taxpaying and voting in parliamentaryelections by individuals.38

But there remains an even more fundamental connection to be made, aconnection that Hughes clearly takes as given and on which his whole case rests

but which he makes no effort to establish. Hughes takes for granted that thereis a direct connection between consent and representation, on the one hand, andthe right to vote, on the other. There was, however, no necessary presumption,in Lockes day or indeed long thereafter, that the right to be represented impliedthe right to vote. That the connection remained to be firmly established nearlya century later is illustrated by the debate over the Stamp Act, in which theofficial argument against the colonial claim of no taxation without repre-sentation was that inhabitants of the American colonies wererepresented, justas were voteless copy-holders at home or residents of disfranchised boroughslike Manchester and Birmingham. At best, 158 of the Second Treatiseprovides evidence that Locke favouredthe elimination of anomalies like a voteless Manchester and a rotten boroughlike Old Sarum. But favouring the representation of a borough excluded fromthe franchise only because it had not been legally incorporated by somespecified date in the distant past is a very different thing from advocating acompletely new kind of association between representation and the right to vote.


37Ibid. 38Ibid., p. 432.

674 E.M. WOOD



19/33

Even if replacing Old Sarum with Manchester involved a new conception ofthe relation between population and representation, this would by no meansentail anything like the qualitatively different principle that would be involvedin the enfranchisement of the copy-holder or the propertyless poor. Nothing in

158 or anywhere else demonstrates that Locke had in mind this kind ofprinciple. As Hughes proceeds from the representation of areas to election byindividuals, he assumes that only two moves are required: first, from taxationto representation, and then from areas to individuals. But this entails an elisionfrom representation to election, without justifying the move from the enfran-chisement of corporations to the enfranchisement of individuals. The argument,in short, depends on assuming the very thing that needs to be demonstrated. Let us grant that Locke favoured a reform of the franchise which would moreaccurately reflect the contribution in taxes afforded to the public by various

areas or constituencies. That seems to be the implication of 158 (though itneeds to be stressed that nothing in this much-debated passage tells us anythingabout the rights of individuals or, indeed, of social classes as distinct fromareas, constituencies or corporations). Let us grant that Locke wanted more

populated areas to be more represented (though it is not at all clear why thishas democratic implications: could not densely populated areas hitherto deniedthe franchise be granted representation while Old Sarum lost its repre-sentative but still on the basis of an undemocratic franchise? Why, indeed,not distribute the vote more equitably among areas and corporations, according

to population, while instituting an even less democratic franchise than before?This would have been, as we have seen, precisely the effect of the proposals forreform of the franchise attributed to Shaftesbury. Lockes oblique statementsabout the franchise, with their implication that anomalies should be corrected,could easily be accommodated by these undemocratic proposals). Let us grant that the poor paid substantial taxes (though this is far more

problematic than Hughes allows: for example, at least in the eighteenth century,two-thirds of the inhabitants of London were too poor to pay taxes39). Let useven grant that the poor, according to Locke, have the right to be represented

in a way that can be construed as giving their consent to taxation, andthat thismeans that individualshave the right to be represented. Everything then dependson what it means to be represented and what it means to give individual consent.

39 See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century(London, 1991), p. 78. The reference here is clearly to direct taxes. The excise was, of course, adifferent matter. But insofar as there existed any connection between taxation and the franchise inseventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, it always had reference to forms of taxation relatedto property, such as rates in the scot and lot borough franchise. It would take a good deal more

argument than is offered by Hughes to demonstrate that Locke was proposing not just an extensionof the vote to all payers of property taxes but a wholly new conception of taxation, according towhich indirect taxes like customs and excise were to be treated as equivalent to direct taxes on

property. Nevertheless, my argument does not depend on the exclusion of the poor from taxation,since there is a more fundamental issue at stake concerning anyrelation between taxation and theindividuals right to vote.




20/33

We have already considered Lockes permissive definition of individualconsent. What, then, about his theory of representation? Hughes argumentdepends upon attributing to Locke the most radical kind of actualrepresentation, according to which every section of the population which

Hughes at this point in his argument evidently identifies with class, while Lockeapparently has in mind only geographic area or corporation40 has a right to

be distinctly represented andto vote. But there is nothing in Lockes writingsto suggest that he held any such view. If anything, he may have espoused anotion of virtualrepresentation as restrictive as any then available. That this isso is suggested by the passages from Richard Hooker quoted earlier.41

The implications of this quotation for Lockes concept of consent are, as wehave seen, considerable. These passages about the immortality ofcorporations, the presence of our assent in parliaments, the giving of consent

without imagining that we do so, and so on also constitute one of the twomost important and uncompromising statements of the principle of virtualrepresentation available in Lockes day. It is on just such a conception of societyas an immortal corporation that Edmund Burke later based his theory of virtualrepresentation, and the same notional community evidently underlies Hookersconception of representation. This idea is enough to break any direct connection

between corporate and individual enfranchisement. In his comments on the nature of representation, Hooker is stating much thesame principle invoked by Sir Thomas Smith in his account of parliamentary

representation and consent:

For everie Englishman is entended to bee there present, either in personor by procuration and attornies, of what preheminence, state, dignitie, orqualitie soever he be, from the Prince (be he King or Queene) to the lowest

person of Englande. And the consent of the Parliament is taken to beeverie mans consent.42

Smith then goes on to describe the election of Parliament by gentlemen andyeomen, according to the traditional forty-shilling freehold franchise, without

seeing any incompatibility between this restricted franchise and the presencein Parliament of everie [individual] Englishman, including the lowest

person. What might make such a conception plausible is, again, the assumptionthat landlord and poor man are united in a single community. The poor man,then, is represented even as an individual in Parliament and is understood tohave given consent, without the right to vote. Smiths understanding of what itmeans to be present in Parliament belongs to the same tradition as Hookerscontention that we can give our consent not imagining that we do so, in such away that the manner of our assent is not apparent. If Lockes quotation from


41 See above, pp. 89 and notes 18 and 19.

42 Sir Thomas Smith,De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 79.

676 E.M. WOOD



21/33

Hooker, associating himself with the latters doctrine of consent, proves any-thing, it argues much more strongly againstthan for any democratic tendencies. Having established that Locke believes in some proportionality betweentax-paying and representation, Hughes goes on to argue that, if Locke also

regarded highly taxed and highly populated areas as one and the same, he wasdrawing an essentially democratic connection between representation and

population. But even if this were so, it would hardly get us past the starting gateif we could not assume a direct connection between representation and the rightto vote. The move from representation of areas to representation of individualscannot advance the issue very far if the individual right to be represented iscompatible with virtual representation.

II

Property and Political Being

Lockes Theory of Property

Can the argument for a (more or less) democratic Locke be approached from adifferent angle, by demonstrating that Lockes theory of property and wealth

precludes the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy? Twokinds of arguments have been made along these lines. The first advanced invarious ways by Hughes and Tully not only suggests that Locke objected tothe concentration of political power but associates that objection with anopposition to the concentration of property. Although Ashcraft goes somedistance in this direction, he is, at least sometimes, more cautious aboutattributing to Locke a social as well as a political egalitarianism. For him, thesecond argument (not neglected by Hughes or Tully either) seems to carry moreweight, namely that poverty or propertylessness was not for Locke grounds fordepriving a man of a political personality or membership in political society.Hughes has added a new dimension to this argument by claiming that thelabouring poor are the ultimate taxpayers and hence the possessors of all

political rights attached to the payment of taxes. It remains to be seen what it means for Locke to possess a political personalityor to be a member of political society, and we will return to that point in amoment. First, something needs to be said about Lockes theory of propertyand his views on accumulation and the concentration of wealth. Let us start with Lockes strictures against greed. If greed is an evil, Hughesobserves, accumulation of large estates without regard to the good of thecommunity is an evil.43 It follows then, he argues, that the concentration of

power which permits such accumulation must be an evil too. But much dependson what constitutes greed, what represents an illegitimate concentration of

property and what is meant by the good of the community. It should be said,first, that strictures against greed were commonplace. They were, after all, part





22/33

of the rhetorical baggage of conventional Christian morality, common to richand poor alike. But more important is the fact that the burden of Lockes wholeargument on property and improvement is to identify accumulation not withgreed but with benefit to the community, to the extent that it increases

productivity and, with it, general prosperity. If accumulation has the effect ofdis- possessing some, it may nevertheless, by encouraging improvement, addto the material welfare of all. Even the propertyless servant in a communityenjoying the benefits of improvement (and enclosure) is better off than the

possessor of unimproved land, provided he has the freedom to exchange hislabour-power for a wage. There can be little doubt that for Locke somedegree of concentration of

property is not only permissible but desirable, and that this degree ofconcentration is at least sufficient to create a sizeable propertyless class, the

servants whose labour is appropriated by masters. Just how permissive Lockesviews on property are is illustrated by the famous turfs passage, which assertsthat the Turfs my Servant has cut . . . become my Property.44This passage

plays no part in Hughes argument, but the first and most obvious point aboutit is that it speaks volumes about Lockes views on, among other things, thedistribution of property. At the very least, it compels us to set aside anyassumption that a mans right to property is directly proportional to his ownexpenditure of labour, and that Lockes conception of that right places strictlimits on accumulation.

In England, property was concentrated in the hands of landlords, with landworked by tenants, to an exceptional degree. The resulting agrarian triad(which already dominated those sections of the southern English countrysidethat Locke knew best) the triad of landlord, capitalist tenant and wage-labourer had created the most productive agriculture. The English experience

in contrast, say, to the peasant-dominated agriculture of France seemedto demonstrate a clear connection between productivity, national prosperity andthe concentration of land. Locke clearly took the triad (and the distribution of

property on which it was based) for granted as the basis of agrarian production,

the source of improvement and Englands prosperity; and his theory ofproperty gives us no reason to question the connection between the public goodand the concentration of land ownership in the English manner.45


45 For a discussion of Lockes views on the social relations of English agricultural production andhis association with the doctrine of improvement, especially his tendency to take for granted thetriadic structure of landlord, tenant and wage-labourer, see Wood, John Locke and AgrarianCapitalism, especially (on the triad) pp. 405. As Wood points out, the triad appears in both Someof the Consequences That Are Likely to Follow upon Lessening of Interest to 4 Percent, written in

1668, and the later expansion of that work, written in 1690 or 1691 and published in 1692 as SomeConsiderations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money.Hughes cites Some Considerationsin support of a rather curious argument: Locke remarks thatlabourers at the time of his writing had what Hughes calls economic power because of a strongdemand for labour. This, argues Hughes, lets us eliminate the supposition that Locke thought theagrarian capitalists had achieved and needed to achieve if there was to be improvement of

678 E.M. WOOD



23/33

But there is more to say about the turfs passage. Much has been writtenabout it in connection with Lockes attitude towards wage-labour. Yet there isone fundamental point the significance of which is commonly neglected. Whatis significant here is that the Turfs my Servant has cut become my property

in exactly the same way and to the same degree as the Ore I have diggd (orthe Grass my Horse has bit). As long as labour is expended to improve theland and add to the wealth of the community, it matters not whether that laboureffectively belongs to the labourer himself or to the master who employs it and

puts it to work. In other words, the masters productive use of property, whichentails the appropriation of anothers labour, is treated as equivalent to theservants activity of labour itself. When Locke speaks of labour as an entitlement to property, then, he has inmind above all improvement and the productive use of property. The idea of

productiveproperty, the conflation of labour with the productive utilization ofproperty, more than anything else places him on the side of an emergingcapitalism. This is so not just because the turfs passage is an accuratedescription of the relation between employer and employee in a capitalistwage-relationship, insofar as it recognizes that the purchase of the servantslabour-power gives the master title to anything the servant produces during the

period stipulated by the wage-contract. (As description, this much would beperfectly acceptable to, say, Karl Marx.) More important is Lockes treatmentof the appropriation of anothers labour as equivalent to labour itself (this

conflation would certainly not be part of Marxs account), and the normativeconsequences that flow from this. It is profoundly significant that, in Lockes conceptual framework, labourand industry can be ascribed to an improving landlord or to a capitalist tenantwho employs labour as much as to the servant whose labour he appropriates,and that the virtue of industriousness attaches to the productive use of propertyeven more than to the activity of labour itself. This is an idea that makes senseonly in the context of capitalist property relations and the specific focus on

productivitydemanded by a system in which accumulation is enhanced not so

much by direct coercion as by increasing the productivity of labour in responseto competitive pressures. Lockes adherence to such a conceptual framework,as description and as normative standard, sets him apart from both traditionalrentier ideologies which would attach no virtue to labour or productivity, andfrom the democratic currents of the seventeenth century which would reject hismode of understanding the appropriation of anothers labour.

agriculture unchecked and consistent power over the labourers (Hughes, Locke, p. 439). He

seems to regard this as critical to his democratic interpretation of 158 of the Second Treatise. Yetit is an odd conception of power that cannot distinguish between the kind of power which permitsa propertyless labourer, in a favourable market, to bargain for something better than the minimumsubsistence wage, and the kind of landlordly power that ensures the labourers propertylessness,his status as a wage-labourer, while maintaining the concentration of land in the hands of landlordsand upholding the gross inequality of distribution that underlay the agrarian triad.




24/33

The context in which Locke wrote his theory of property and especially hisremarks on improvement and enclosure is critically important and goes far

beyond the immediate politics of electoral strategy. From at least the earlyseventeenth century, the reasons of improvement were acquiring legal status

as grounds for extinguishing customary use-rights in favour of exclusive privateproperty. Gatewards case [1607], and successive decisions in this spirit ofimprovement , writes E.P. Thompson, drew an expert knife through thecarcass of custom, cutting off the use-right from the user . . . [i]t could leavethe landless commoner stripped of any rights if a case came to the courts, or atthe point of enclosure. In the late seventeenth century and certainly in theeighteenth the courts increasingly defined (or assumed without argument) thatthe lords waste or soil was his personal property, and treated the inconvenientusages of custom which might restrict his full enjoyment of that property as

illegitimate obstructions to improvement.46Increasingly, the law, interpretedby judges who shared the mentalities of improving landlords, gave precedenceto the political economy of improvement over other reasons in law, otherclaims to property rights.47

Against this background (not to mention a long history of conflicts overenclosure, including a series of riots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries),where the language of improvement and the practice of enclosure typicallyoperated in the interests of landlords, Ashcrafts interpretation of Lockeschapter on property as an attack on the landed aristocracy (or some significant

part of it) seems unsustainable, while his description of Lockes comments onenclosure as a radical endorsement of the claims of labor over those of landownership seems positively perverse.48 In support of this remarkable

46 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common(London, 1991), pp. 1345.

47Ibid., p. 137.

48 Ashcraft,Revolutionary Politics, p. 272. Here and in note 181, Ashcraft likens Lockes viewson property and enclosure to those of Winstanley and the Diggers. This is more than a little curious,since Winstanley emphatically asserted common rights and communal property against individual

private property. The Diggers, while not trespassing on land already enclosed, were acting inexplicit oppositionto enclosure. They were also claiming the right to cultivate common land ongrounds antithetical to Lockes arguments in favour of improvement. How should we compareLockes encomium to money and commerce as incentives to enclose and improve (which, asAshcraft says, was the primary and most socially beneficial function of money, ibid., p. 277),his view that there would be little incentive in the absence of money and commerce (see, forexample, Second Treatise, 48), with Winstanleys passionate denunciation of buying and sell-ing? Ashcraft also makes much of the distinction between different kinds of enclosure thedepopulating enclosure of land for the grazing of sheep, and the productive enclosure of land forcultivation, which, he says, were undertaken by different classes of landowners (Ashcraft,

Revolutionary Politics, p. 279 note 199). Two things need to be said about this. First, a commoner

whose customary rights were being extinguished by enclosure might be less impressed by thisdistinction, even if his loss of independent access to the means of subsistence might in the secondcase be replaced by new opportunities for agricultural wage-labour. Second, the suggestion thatthese forms of enclosure were associated with different kinds of landowners, the former witharistocrats or large landlords, the latter with smaller landowners and especially yeomen, ismisleading. From the late sixteenth century, enclosure for cultivation (both of waste and open fields)

680 E.M. WOOD



25/33

proposition, Ashcraft cites a passage in which Locke endorses enclosure evento the point of arguing that if someone has already enclosed the land but allowedit to remain uncultivated, then the land, not withstanding his enclosure, wasstill to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other .49

Yet this passage specifically and only concerns a very primitive condition inwhich people still cultivated the earth without any fixed property in the groundthey made use of [emphasis in the original], before they incorporated, settledthemselves together, and built cities in other words, before land ownershipwas even an issue. More particularly, it was a pre-monetary, pre-civil conditionin which what could not be immediately consumed was wasted, incapable of

producing wealth because there was no commerce. With the introduction ofmoney and commerce, the situation changed radically, creating wholly newconditions, with wholly new incentives for enclosure and improvement, in

which the right of property was no longer bounded by the labourersconsumption and improvement was no longer confined to the labourers ownwork. In the context of an advanced commercial society, it is hard to distinguishLockes argument from the defence of the landowners interests, his claim to

property and the exclusion of customary rights by reason of improvement. Where, then, would Locke draw the line between acceptable andunacceptable concentrations of land? How restrictive, for example, is hisconcession that the legally protected rights of commoners to common land must

be respected?50Even if we leave aside the kinds of coercion that were available

to larger landowners in relation to vulnerable poor men, which could compelthe latter to consent, this condition is not nearly as restrictive as Hughes seemsto think. There were, of course, already massive concentrations of land outsidethe reach of communal rights, and there were also many cases in which commonrights on land already legally owned, often by a large landlord, existed bycustom but without unambiguous legal standing. The extinction of such

was becoming increasingly more profitable than enclosure for sheep-grazing, so that rents from

arable land were growing at a much faster rate than from pasture and meadow. Large landownerswere clearly the main beneficiaries of rising rents and had increasing incentives to engage in, orencourage, enclosure for cultivation, or more productive use of already cultivated land. Theenterprising yeoman, incidentally, was typically a tenant of such a landlord, who imposed on himthe pressure to improve in order to meet the conditions of competitive economic rents.

49 Ashcraft,Revolutionary Politics, p. 272, quoting Locke, Two Treatises, II, 38.

50 Hughes, Locke, p. 429. Hughes regards it as critically significant that Locke treated enclosurenot as a cause of depopulation and deserted villages but as the source of increasing population andemployment, as well as more goods produced and more taxes. If more populated areas were to bemore represented, then Lockes views on enclosure have democratic tendencies. This strikes me

as, to say the least, a non sequitur. If, for example, the number of representatives rises in proportionto the increase in population, what is democratic about it? Could the ratio of representatives torepresented not remain the same? At any rate, I still fail to see why the view that there should besome direct proportionality between the population of areas and their right to representation couldnot be, as it was in Shaftesburys proposals, consistent with a fra

Documents

Ellen Meiksins Wood_Locke Against Democracy Consent Representation and Suffrage in Two Treatises