“It is hard indeed to turn the Lockean doctrine into any kind of unqualified democratic theory.” (Mcpherson) Discuss. (1996)
The verdict sums up C. B. Macpherson‘s reading of John Locke in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962). Locke’s premises of equality, consent and majority rule sound democratic, but their operation is qualified by class: Locke founds constitutionalism for property-owners, not democracy. The charge largely holds, though the premises proved more democratic than their author.
Why Locke Looks Democratic
- Equality and consent. Men are by nature free, equal and independent, and none can be subjected to another’s political power without his own consent (§95).
- Majority rule. The body politic must move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority (§96). Willmoore Kendall (John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule, 1941) accordingly read Locke as a majority-rule democrat.
- Popular sovereignty. There remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative (§149).
- Reform. Locke attacked rotten boroughs, where scarce so much housing as a sheepcote returned as many members as a county (§157).
Macpherson’s Qualifications
- Differential rights and rationality. Locke’s labourers live hand to mouth and, as The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) puts it, the greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe. Labourers are in but not of civil society: subjects bound by tacit consent, while full membership rests on property.
- A safe majority. Against Kendall: majority rule threatened nothing because Locke’s majority was the propertied electorate of 1689, not all adults.
- Representation by contribution. Even the rotten-borough passage allots seats in proportion to the assistance which it affords to the public (§158), that is, by wealth and taxes, not by head.
- Property first. Once money dissolves the spoilage limit and wage labour makes the turfs my servant has cut the master’s (§28), unlimited accumulation is natural and the state guarantees unequal holdings.
- Wider exclusions. Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988) adds women left under conjugal power; James Tully adds dispossessed Amerindians.
The Counter-Readings
- Peter Laslett (critical edition, 1960) found no democrat but no class ideologue either: the Two Treatises is an Exclusion Crisis tract against arbitrary rule.
- Alan Ryan (“Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie”, 1965) notes that “property” includes lives, liberties and estates (§123), so the propertyless still have a stake.
- Richard Ashcraft (Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, 1986) ties Locke to radical Whigs and artisans; Jeremy Waldron (God, Locke, and Equality, 2002) finds a theologically grounded basic equality that democracy can claim.
- Reception. The American Declaration (1776) and later franchise movements turned his premises against property qualifications.
The Indian Illustration
The Government of India Act, 1935 tied the vote to property, tax and education: Lockean stakeholder logic. The Constituent Assembly adopted universal adult suffrage (Article 326), but B. R. Ambedkar warned on 25 November 1949 that one man one vote and one vote one value would coexist with gross economic inequality: Macpherson’s contradiction in Indian form.
Conclusion
Macpherson is right that Locke’s doctrine, as Locke held it, is liberal before it is democratic. He overstates in imputing capitalist design. The difficulty is real, not insuperable: democracy had to be drawn out of Locke’s equality against his class assumptions.