Voegelin on John Locke
Voegelin and Pneumopathology
While Strauss’s and Macpherson’s arguments are both coherent and plausible, neither offers a deep or fully acceptable account of Locke’s moral priorities. Caution driven concealment explains little more than that the political circumstances affecting Locke were dangerous. Social assumptions explain the social circumstances during Locke’s lifetime. These explanations account for the issues with which Locke deals in his works – things like resistance, prerogative, and property rights – and why Locke chose to deal with these issues in a recondite manner, but they do not explain the character of a man that advocates Locke’s positions. Both Macpherson and Strauss, to some extent, excuse Locke’s writing style because of the circumstances entailing Locke’s life. One critical response to Strauss and Macpherson is that Locke’s manner of writing is more intimately connected with the moral disposition motivating his thought than either Macpherson or Strauss recognized.
Eric Voegelin accounts for this criticism, offering a third explanation for Locke’s writing style in a letter to Strauss: “The Locke piece interested me greatly. With regard to the general thesis – that Locke does not return to Hooker, but develops Hobbes further – I can on the basis of my own analyses heartily agree. The famous conflicts in Locke in fact do not exist. The Second Treatise does not base the theory of the right constitutional order upon some natural law but on a psychology of desire.”[i] Voegelin disagreed, however, with Strauss’s proposition that Locke’s philosophy was articulated in the manner it was as a consequence of caution:
“In the case of Locke, you wish to enrich your observations about the concealment of the actually intended theory on the part of the philosopher behind harmless-looking formulas. But is this case not after all different from that in your excellent studies, for example, on Arabic philosophers? In the one case, which I would call the legitimate one, a philosopher tries to hide his philosophizing against disturbance by the unqualified; in the other, in the case of Locke, a nonphilosopher, a political ideologue, tries to hide his dirty tricks against the attentiveness of the qualified. Isn’t that, which might appear as camouflage of a philosopher, the bad conscience of ‘modern’ man, who doesn’t quite dare to say outright what he intends to do, and thus therefore hides his nihilism, not only from others but also from himself, through the rich use of a conventional vocabulary.”[ii]
Voegelin, in a letter never sent and published posthumously, suggests an alternative interpretive framework for dealing with Locke. Voegelin corroborates Macpherson’s social assumption hypothesis, asserting that Locke’s writing was designed to assist the designs of:
“the politics of the Stuarts (Stafford and Laud) to protect the farmers of N. England and the slaves in Bermuda against extreme exploitation by the landlords and merchants, the attempts that were the material motive for revolt of the upper classes against Charles I. It is a brutal ideological construction to support the position of the English upper class, to which Locke belonged through his social relations.”[iii]
Social interests direct Locke’s philosophy to a radical and dangerous extent. As the sole inspiration of his ostensibly philosophical texts, partisan interest replaces philosophic inspiration.[iv] Voegelin consequently reads an inimical and non-philosophical manner of legitimating ideological motivations in the elusive manner with which Locke advocates his ideas. Locke attempts the “deliberate destruction of spiritual substance” through “verbal construction.”[v] Locke’s thought is not philosophical, in the sense that philosophical thought involves an open-minded spiritual questioning of the good; Locke’s thought is ideological, in the sense that ideological thought involves a closed-minded lurching for a particular goal that has been deemed good. Such lurching involves political systems or “verbal constructions” which facilitate the realization of the deemed good. Such lurching requires one to contemplate a matter from loaded assumptions which prevent one’s contemplation from being philosophic activity. This less-than-philosophic thought begins and ends from logical templates which encourage the outcome advocated by the thinker. Locke, being such a thinker, is not a philosopher from Voegelin’s perspective but instead “an ideological constructor, who brutally destroys every philosophical problem in order to justify the political status quo.”[vi] Voegelin consequently suggests an alternative conceptual apparatus for dealing with the ideological, and consequently corrupt, nature of Locke’s thought:
“it seems questionable to me, at least where it concerns Locke’s political work, whether it still falls within the area of philosophizing; and following from that, it seems questionable whether the substance of Locke’s political work becomes accessible by attending to the question of philosophical camouflage. Perhaps what is involved is a phenomenon of a completely different order; Locke was one of the first very great cases of spiritual pathology, whose adequate treatment would require a different conceptual apparatus.”[vii]
Elsewhere Voegelin writes:
“I say advisedly from a spiritual disturbance, not from a mental: Locke was not a clinical case, and his disease does not come under the categories of psychopathology. His is a case of spiritual disease in the sense of the Platonic nosos; it belongs in the pneumopathology of the seventeenth century of which Hobbes was the masterly diagnostician. In Locke the grim madness of Puritan acquisitiveness runs amuck. The fury of personal mysticism has simmered down. The elements of a moral public order that derive from biblical tradition have disappeared. A public morality based on belief in the substance of the nation is practically absent. What is left, as an unlovely residue, is the passion of property.”[viii]
A Brief Note on the Philosophy of Science
Richard Ashcraft’s excellent analysis of Locke’s writings develops the position that political theory “is a set of structured meanings that are understandable only in reference to a specified context, wherein the concepts, terminology, and even the internal structure of the theory itself are viewed in relation to a comprehensive ordering of the elements of social life.”[ix] This view, in his opinion, invalidates the traditional idea of political theory “as a body of scientific knowledge…regardless of when or where it was originally written.”[x] Thus a proper study of political theory will contain references to “newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, broadsides, and various literary forms (plays, novels, poetry). Political theory as a social language flows through all of these media.”[xi] It would be wrong, he contents, to provide any special preeminence to writers such as Plato, or Mill, without accounting for the specific social context in which their writings appeared.[xii] Ashcraft – a modern and a democrat – sees it as the crowning jewel of his work that “it democratizes the notion of political theory.”[xiii]
Ashcraft’s view on theory exemplifies what Voegelin understood to be the problem with Locke’s work: by placating the desires of the times within a society, one engages in the plight to build and shape social forces therein. One is doing political propaganda and not engaging in the more timeless activity of political philosophy as Plato or Aristotle would have understood the task – the asking of questions such as: where does this society fall in the manifold of regime types? Which factors therein make its citizens stronger or weaker? Which factors make them more virtuous or vicious?
As I stated in the introduction to this work, a distinction between what Ashcraft has defined as “political theory” and what I refer to as “political philosophy” is necessary and warranted in an analysis of propagandist material such as Locke’s. If we understand theory as the plight to build ideological edifices which justify and sustain a political order, and if we also understand philosophy as the open-minded scientific analysis of all order, then this useful bifurcation will allow us to draw distinctions between those writings that are used to substantiate or create some social narrative, and those writings which scientifically seek to categorize societies based on their way of life. It is indeed for its ability to do not merely the first but also the second that Plato’s Apology and Republic remain the introductory pieces to the disciple of political science – for both call to question timeless truths and do not merely articulate a formula for Athenian life which is now completely useless to a modern removed by two and a half millennia from the social forces of 4th century BC Greece.
There is a place in our discipline for studies of both political philosophy and political theory. The latter is useful for pointing out the particular meanings of terms and arguments within a given society, as Aschraft’s study of Locke is useful for demonstrating that his narrative is explicitly designed to build an alliance of landed gentry and working-class Englishmen against the crown. But I argue against Ashcraft’s attack on philosophy. It has been a fundamental task since the beginning of political science to judge how well a given regime type may cultivate individuals to fulfill their potentials as human beings who are both maturely developed and happy. To develop the political theory of a society without also developing the political philosophy of a society is to leave the work of political science half done.
Voegelin and Pneumopathology Rejoined
Voegelin never carried out a full-bore analysis of Locke as an exemplar of “spiritual pathology” or “pneumopathology.”[xiv] Although his view of Locke is lucid and unambiguous – “when it comes to Locke, my heart runs over. He is for me one of the most repugnant, dirty, morally corrupt appearances in the history of humanity” – he did not thoroughly analyze Locke’s works. In fact, within the recent fascination with Locke in political theory circles, no thorough analysis of Locke’s work has been conducted which seeks to discover whether and to what extent Locke intentionally feigned works of political theory as political philosophy to provide a deeper sense of philosophical veracity than was warranted by the actual substance of his ideas. Fortunately, the concept of pneumopathology was explored by Voegelin in some depth, and has since been taken up by other scholars.[xv] This analysis will build upon existing but scant pneumopathology literature by undertaking a thorough examination of Locke’s writings and ideas in order to determine whether Locke may be appropriately characterized as an ideological constructor who also possesses the pneumopathological spiritual character.
Notes
[i] Emberley and Cooper, Faith and Political Philosophy, 92.
[ii] Ibid., 93.
[iii] Ibid., 95.
[iv] Richard Ashcraft has subsequently written an excellent analysis of the political motivations for Locke’s writings; his analysis is necessary for understanding the prolific extent to which Whig political exigencies color his writings. [Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government.” (Princeton: .Princeton University Press, 1986)].
[v] Emberley and Cooper, Faith and Political Philosophy, 95.
[vi] Ibid., 96.
[vii] Ibid., 96-97.
[viii] Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 25: History of Political Ideas volume VII: The New Order and Last Orientation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 151-152.
[ix] Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, 5.
[x] Ibid., 4.
[xi] Ibid., 7.
[xii] Ibid., 4.
[xiii] Ibid., 7.
[xiv] Voegelin’s writings on Locke are few, amounting to no more than a few pages in Emberley and Cooper, Faith and Political Philosophy, Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 24: History of Political Ideas volume VI: Revolution and the New Science. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998) and Voegelin, The Collected Works, Volume 25
[xv] e.g., Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2004), 76; Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 27; Barry Cooper, New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004).
The following text is excerpted from John Locke and the Uncivilized Society: Individualism and Resistance in America Today (Lexington Books, 2021).
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