scholarly journals From Progressive Radicalism to Democratic Degeneration: The Trajectory of John Locke's Political Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
Sirvan Karimi
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Fundamental Function ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Organic Intellectual

As an organic intellectual of the emerging propertied class in 17th century England, John Locke has made an enduring contribution to the prevailing ideas shaping the socio-political order in Western societies and beyond. Through invoking the law of nature and natural rights which were nothing more than what he had abstracted from the socio-economic conditions of the seventeenth century and had projected back into the state of nature, Locke assiduously embarked on justifying the separation of civil society from the state, naturalizing  class inequalities identifying the preservation of property as the fundamental function of the state, and rationalizing the subordination of  propertyless classes to the emerging  liberal democratic political order geared to preserve the interests of economically hegemonic classes.

scholarly journals Thinking with John Locke about the nature of human rights: vietnamese and global perspectives

XLinguae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Hoa Thi Kim Do ◽  
Michal Valco
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Final Section ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Subject

Our paper explores important topics related to John Locke’s thoughts on human rights and their viability for our contemporary discourse on the subject. We begin by exploring Locke’s education and epistemological reflections as factors that influenced his political philosophy. Next, we examine Locke’s views on the ‘state of nature,’ ‘law of nature,’ and ‘natural rights’ and show how his ideas have recently been appropriated (or contested) by Vietnamese and Western scholars. In the final section, we offer a critical assessment of the viability for the contemporary discourse of Locke’s metaphysical presuppositions from which he derives his notions of ‘natural rights.’

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Exile of Political Theory: The Lost Homeland of Legitimation

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Simons
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
Implicit Definitions ◽  
Recurrent Theme

A sense of distance or exile is a recurrent theme of the literature in which the state of the political theory is either lamented or acclaimed. A review of these tales suggests that implicit definitions of the homeland of the sub-discipline as philosophical, practical or interpretive are inadequate, leading to mistaken diagnoses of the reasons for the ills or recovery of political philosophy. This paper argues that political theory has been exiled from its previous role or homeland of legitimation of political orders. Under contemporary conditions in the advanced liberal capitalist political order, in which a media-generated imagology of society as a communicative system fills the role of a legitimating discourse, political theory faces a legitimation crisis.

TOWARD A THEORY OF EMPIRICAL NATURAL RIGHTS

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hasnas
Keyword(s):  
John Locke ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Close Approximation ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Traditional Natural

Natural rights theorists such as John Locke and Robert Nozick provide arguments for limited government that are grounded on the individual's possession of natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Resting on natural rights, such arguments can be no more persuasive than the underlying arguments for the existence of such rights, which are notoriously weak. In this article, John Hasnas offers an alternative conception of natural rights, “empirical natural rights,” that are not beset by the objections typically raised against traditional natural rights. Empirical natural rights are rights that evolve in the state of nature rather than those that individuals are antecedently endowed with in that state. Professor Hasnas argues that empirical natural rights are true natural rights, that is, pre-political rights with natural grounds that can be possessed in the state of nature, and that, when taken together, they form a close approximation of the Lockean rights to life, liberty, and property. He furthers argues that empirical natural rights are normatively well-grounded because respecting them is productive of social peace, which possesses instrumental moral value regardless of one's conception inherent value. Professor Hasnas thus offers his conception of rights as solved problems as an alternative and potentially more secure footing for the traditional natural rights arguments for limited government associated with Locke and Nozick.

The Sovereignless State and Locke's Language of Obligation

2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Liberal Thought

Modern liberal states are founded on individual rights and popular sovereignty. These doctrines are conceptually and historically intertwined but are in theoretical and practical tension. Locke's political theory is a source for proponents of both doctrines, and the same tension that runs through modern liberal thought and practice can be found in his theory. Rather than define the state in terms of a single sovereign authority, Locke constructs a sovereignless commonwealth with several coexisting claimants to supreme authority. He rejects sovereignty as what unifies the state, and he wants to replace the discourse of sovereignty theory with a language of obligation that will help bind together the sovereignless state. This language permits its adherents to articulate the reasonable basis and limits of political power. An understanding of Locke's sovereignless state helps us better comprehend the tensions embodied in discourses about individual natural rights, popular sovereignty, and governmental authority heard in the liberal state.

Locke’s Ciceronian Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-186
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Law Of Nature

This chapter considers how John Locke reunites the two strands of Ciceronian thought from the seventeenth century. Locke returns to Cicero’s original formulation of natural law republicanism and innovates on it. He derives from Cicero’s natural law a set of natural rights, corresponding to the duties Cicero claimed were imposed by natural law. Locke’s law of nature is a barely modified version of Ciceronian natural law, but his conception of natural rights allows him to solve a number of theoretical problems posed by Cicero’s construal of the issue. Locke also offers a solution to the puzzle of how a doctrine of natural law could meet the standard of skeptical epistemology.

scholarly journals Thomas Hobbes: Liberal illiberal

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Legal Authority

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) has often been regarded as a very illiberal thinker —a defender of ‘despotism’ and an advocate of the principle that ‘might is right’. While those accusations are false, it is true that there are distinctly illiberal elements in his thinking. These include absolutism, authoritarianism, anti-constitutionalism and a hostility to democracy. Yet his political theory also contains some of the most important building-blocks of modern liberal thinking about the state and its citizens: the crucial role of consent; natural rights; egalitarianism; the idea of the state as a device to protect people against oppressors; the homogeneity of legal authority within the state; the concept of the state as a public realm; and the idea that the sovereign acts publicly—above all, through law. (These last three points are preconditions of a Rechtsstaat.) And whilst Hobbes denies that people are ruled by a constitution, his theory does acknowledge the need for rule through a constitution.

The Precariat: This Middle Class is Broken, Bring Us Another

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Capital ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
State Interventions ◽  
New Social Order

Despite all the revolutionary expectations attached to the precariat, an objective examination of the discourse about it reveals something that looks less like capitalism’s potential gravedigger and more like a potential savior of the liberal-democratic political order. Therefore, one should view the precariat not as the successor to the industrial proletariat, but rather as the heir to the middle class. It actually is in part the former middle class, whose typical position in the 1990s and early 2000s had already became vulnerable and unstable. The preсariat is not a revolutionary class. Even those who sympathize with it do not describe it as a class capable of organizing a new social order. It is instead the disadvantaged class, the victim of global processes, the “multitude,” and a heterogeneous conglomeration of afflicted minorities (that nevertheless compete among themselves). It would seem that from the 20th century on the ruling bureaucracy of bourgeois states has needed the existence of a massive stabilizing class as a support for its political domination. The middle class served in this capacity at first, but it would subsequently give way to the precariat. The same hopes that were previously invested in the construct of the middle class were then transferred to the precariat. The precariat also arouses the same concerns as the middle class: just as the middle class in some cases paved the way for Fascism, the precariat is susceptible to the promises of modern right-wing radicals. However, if the precariat’s basic demands are satisfied, it can become a new pillar stabilizing liberal-democratic political regimes. At the same time, it will be even more dependent on the state than the previous middle class. The ideological tendencies of this class may lean politically both toward right- and left-populism. In any case, appeals for state interventions in granting political capital to certain groups in the precariat will play a major role.

Liberalism and Religion

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Sikka
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Legal Provisions ◽  
Cultural Racism ◽  
Religious Establishment

There are many versions of liberalism, but it would be uncontroversial to say that they agree in placing a premium on individual liberty. As a political paradigm, liberalism is committed to protecting the freedom of persons to live and think as they choose without interference from the state, provided they do no harm to others. This fundamental commitment underlies the classical liberal arguments for religious liberty and toleration articulated by John Locke and J. S. Mill. It forms the basis for legal provisions guaranteeing freedom of religious belief, worship, and expression in liberal democratic nations, as well as the principle of non-establishment, which prohibits the state from favoring any religion or from favoring religion over nonbelief. The formulation of these two principles, religious freedom and nonestablishment, requires that the spheres of the secular and the sacred be distinguished in order to institute a particular relation between them. Questions have been raised about the validity and universality of this distinction, as well as its implications for the place of religion within political life. In contemporary political theory, the topic of public reason has been especially prominent, the point of contention being whether and how religious discourse may be allowed in political reasoning. Balancing religious freedom against other fundamental liberal rights poses another difficulty in cases where the beliefs and practices of religious individuals and communities come into conflict with general laws or compromise equality, another central liberal value. Sometimes social and political judgments about such cases seem to apply a double standard to the religious practices of certain minorities, moreover, and to reflect an element of cultural racism. This is arguably true of attitudes and decisions in Western countries regarding the hijab and other types of veils worn by Muslim women. Applying liberal principles for regulating religion in a fashion that is genuinely neutral and impartial remains a challenge. Indeed, some argue that there is no way of defining “religion” for the requisite purposes without privileging certain forms of it. If so, liberal efforts to protect religious freedom may end up enforcing varieties of religious establishment.

The State, Modernity, and the Fate of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germaine A. Hoston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Laissez Faire

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

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