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SIDNEY AND LOCKE - Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698]

Edition used:

Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1996).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


SIDNEY AND LOCKE

John Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government at the same time Sidney was working on the Discourses. Since Locke’s book is much better known today, it is worth comparing to Sidney’s.

While some scholars have assigned Locke to an emerging bourgeois or liberal tradition of natural rights, especially property rights, Sidney is said to belong to a supposed tradition of “classical republicanism” stemming from Machiavelli and ultimately the ancients. But other scholars have noted that Sidney does not fit this paradigm very well.10 Sidney is as much a natural rights and contract man as Locke. Both advocate government by elected representatives.11 Both maintain that natural liberty is governed by the natural law. Both argue for limited government and the people’s right to revolution. Both are spirited proponents of liberty. Sidney and Locke are “republicans” as well as “liberals.”

Notwithstanding these similarities, there are differences, and they are important. Sidney proves to be closer to the Greek and Roman classics than Locke is. It is characteristic that Sidney quotes frequently from the ancients while Locke hardly ever does. But the ancients were not “classical republicans” in a Machiavellian sense. Their political thought always began or ended with the individual human being, not in the sense of an isolated unit, but as a being oriented by human nature to a life in accord with reason. What follow are particular illustrations of this broad difference between Sidney and Locke.

While both men agree that government should be based on consent, Sidney also insists that superior men ought to rule, and he defends popular government for placing such men in power. In this he follows Plato and Aristotle, for whom excellence is a title to rule. Locke generally denies the right of virtue to govern.

Similarly, political liberty in Locke is merely a “fence” (Locke’s term) protecting a man’s life, liberty, and property. Sidney’s broader conception includes the classical view of liberty as freedom from domination by one’s passions. Accordingly, one purpose of government for Sidney, as it was for the ancients, is to foster virtue and suppress vice. It was not for Locke.

Characteristically, Sidney never calls the pre-civil state the “state of nature” as Locke does even when it degenerates into a state of war. Lockean man exists naturally in this state, which is one of poverty, danger, and insecurity. He becomes political by escaping nature, not by following it. Reason, for Locke, is the device by which man escapes and conquers nature, by constructing government and by engaging in capitalist industry. For Sidney, man’s nature is reason, as he constantly repeats. Sidney calls the Hobbesian state of nature—the war of all against all— “epidemical madness,” which men would fall into only if God abandoned the world (I.17). Man is born free, but Sidney does not think it natural for man to live without law. Without using Aristotle’s formula, Sidney continues to think of man as a political and rational animal by nature.

Sidney’s law of nature goes beyond the conditions of self-preservation and includes the several virtues that the rational life comprises. This conception continues the natural law tradition stemming from the ancients. However, Locke’s doctrine of natural law breaks with the tradition in its being grounded in the individual’s fundamental right to life and liberty. In Locke’s moral universe the center is no longer man’s end, but man or man’s freedom. In this he follows Hobbes.12

The two men view commerce quite differently. For Locke, commerce is a principal means by which man escapes the privation that unimproved nature condemns him to. Sidney too praises wealth as an end of statesmanship, but only because of its contribution to a nation’s fighting strength (a consideration similar to Hamilton’s in Federalist 11); moneymaking he otherwise rejects as corrupting (II.22, 23).

Sidney never questions the right of the father to rule in the family. But Locke speaks of honoring, not obeying, the father and mother. Civil society for Sidney is still an association of fathers as heads of families (II.4). Locke’s more radical individualism throws into question the traditional family, which is based on the different purposes, by nature, of male and female.

In sum, Locke’s thought, although expressed with great caution, rests on premises more radically modern than Sidney’s. Locke’s republicanism ultimately stands on a view of human nature that doubts or denies the older view that man is oriented by nature to a life of decency and reason. Sidney’s republicanism still adheres to a view of life that is recognizably at home within the ancient and medieval tradition of political philosophy.

[10]Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 212; and Houston, Algernon Sidney, Introduction. The leading proponent of the “classical republican” thesis is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[11]This is sometimes denied, but Locke, Second Treatise, ch. 11 (end), affirms not only “no taxation without representation,” but implies “no legislation without representation” (since “property” in Locke’s view comprises life and liberty). Not one of America’s founders doubted that Locke was a republican.

[12]This point is controversial. The strongest argument on its behalf is that of Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 202–251, and in What Is Political Philosophy? (New York: Free Press, 1959), ch. 8. For the opposing view, see John W. Yolton, “Locke on the Law of Nature,”Philosophical Review 67 (1958), pp. 477–498.