John Locke

Economist and Social Scientist

Karen Iversen Vaughn

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226051178
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist Karen Iversen Vaughn presents a comprehensive treatment of Locke's important position in the development of eighteenth century economic thought.

ONE

Introduction

BIOGRAPHY

John Locke was born in Somerset in 1632 to a moderately well-off family of the minor gentry.¹ His grandfather had been a successful clothier and his father a less successful lawyer. There were two children in the family of which John was the elder. Very little is known of Locke’s early childhood other than his own word that his father was strict and remote when he was a child but gradually became more accessible as he got older. Among the more important facts that we do know is that Locke’s family were Puritans and that his father fought with the parliamentary army during the Revolution from 1642 to its ultimate victory in 1649. Locke’s Puritan background is important primarily because his father, as a result of his service to Cromwell’s army, was able to secure for his son the best education England had to offer at that time. After the triumph of Cromwell, Westminster School, one of the most famous and influential public schools in England, fell under the control of the Long Parliament, and it was there that the young Locke, at the age of fifteen, began his formal education.

Formal is a more than usually descriptive word for the kind of education being meted out at Westminster in 1647. The school was then headed by the famous Richard Busby, a staunch Royalist who still somehow managed to keep both his position and his integrity throughout the days of the Commonwealth. Busby’s idea of a sound education was to provide his charges with thorough training in Latin and Greek with a smattering of Hebrew and Arabic thrown in for good measure. During his five-year stay at Westminster, Locke certainly became proficient in the technique of translating into and out of and composing poetry in the classical languages, if nothing else. Very little time was allocated for anything but study and prayer, and Locke’s estimation of this kind of schooling is well illustrated by his later recommendation of a private tutor for all but the most recalcitrant of children.

The real advantage of going to Westminster was that its scholars might try for a place at Christ Church, Oxford, or Trinity College, Cambridge. Locke chose, successfully, to try for the former, and in the autumn of 1652 he entered Oxford, where he remained for the next fifteen years, growing from a sheltered Christ Church scholar of twenty to a fellow and man in search of the larger world at thirty-five. During these fifteen years Locke studied and wrote, but never published a word, and indeed was totally unknown except for his own varied circle of friends. Yet these fifteen years were essential to the formation of his thought and to his future work. It was during this time that he encountered two of the three major influences on his later thoughts on economics.

The Oxford that Locke found when he entered in 1652, decimated as it was by the effects of the Civil War, was far different from the prestigious institution of modern times. During the war it had been a Royalist stronghold, housing the king and queen and their retinue of courtiers and cavaliers as well as most of the royal army. The university had been called on again and again to give support to the king in the form of both money and men, and by the end of hostilities its academic aims had been so totally superseded by the requirements of war that there hardly remained a university at all. The colleges were utterly impoverished and almost devoid of students, the residence halls left in a universal state of disrepair by the soldiers and courtiers who had occupied them and the books of some libraries stolen: education was at a standstill.

This shocking condition was not to last long, however, and when Oxford fell to the parliamentary armies in 1648, the Puritans lost little time in purging the faculty of its Royalist sympathizers and instituting some badly needed reforms. Unfortunately, the zeal of the reformers outweighed their educational insight, and instead of instituting academic reforms, long overdue at even prerevolutionary Oxford, they concentrated exclusively on reforms of conduct. They closed the alehouses, increased church attendance, and tried to lure back the students and faculty by producing order where the war had left chaos. But even these unimaginative changes were enough to make Oxford once more into an educational institution, and if the Cromwellians did nothing to revise the out-of-date curriculum, H. R. Fox-Bourne points out that they at least had the virtue of recognizing their ignorance in educational matters.² They tried to restore to Oxford the best that they knew, the tradition of medieval Scholasticism that had existed there prior to the Civil War. To this end they employed the most competent non-Royalist scholars they could find to run the university. So it happened that the curriculum that Locke followed during his undergraduate years at Oxford was in form very much like that which he had followed during his five years at Westminster: Greek and Latin and some Hebrew, lectures in logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Aristotle was still the Philosopher, in diluted medieval form, and the principal method of demonstrating academic achievement was the public disputation, attendance at which was required of all undergraduates.

From all the evidence available, it appears that Locke had a low opinion of his undergraduate education. He thought that the technique of formal disputation turned a man into “an insignificant wrangler, opinionated in discourse,” and that the Aristotelian philosophy he was taught was “perplexed with obscure terms and useless questions,”³ and anything but conducive to the increase in learning. He was impatient with the emasculated Aristotelianism that formed the staple of his intellectual diet, and it was only his study of geometry in his third year that brought forth any favorable words from him concerning his Oxford education.

In spite of his dissatisfaction with the state of learning at Oxford, however, he did well enough to be awarded his bachelor of arts in 1656 and his master of arts three years later. In the same year he was elected a senior student of Christ Church, and in 1660 he took the position of lecturer in Greek and tutor to approximately ten students at a time. Although he disapproved of the medieval Aristotelianism upon which he had to lecture, he did find Aristotle’s metaphysics and natural philosophy more to his liking. He supplemented his regular reading with study of the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, and later in life he expressed his belief that “No man can pass for a scholar that is ignorant of the Greek tongue . . . because amongst the Grecians is to be found the original, as it were the foundations of all that learning which we have in this part of the world.”⁴ This intimate knowledge of the writings of Aristotle and their medieval interpretations, along with his enthusiasm for the Politics and Ethics, was to have profound effects on his future philosophy and social thought. W. Von Leyden has noted the Aristotelian notions and direct quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics in Locke’s early Essays on the Law of Nature and has concluded, “it was the original text, not the Aristotle of the Schoolmen, that interested him.”⁵ J. W. Gough has traced some of Locke’s political ideas to Aristotelian distinctions (although via a long line of Roman and Scholastic writers),⁶ and several people have mentioned casually the apparently direct influence of Aristotle on Locke’s economic theories.⁷ Even in his epistemology, it is likely that his extensive reading of Aristotle was a major influence on his work, although Locke claims his greatest debt was to Descartes and would have denied this Aristotelian influence emphatically.

In 1663, Locke was elected censor of moral philosophy for Christ Church. Part of the duties of this annually elected office was to deliver a series of lectures, and Locke chose the topic “The Law of Nature.” Although he never published these lectures, he retained them in his possession and revised them extensively until about 1665, after which he never bothered with them again. In spite of this apparent neglect, Von Leyden contends that these natural law writings became a premise upon which Locke built many of his later theories and over a period of forty years “provided Locke with topics and inspiration which he turned to account in the building of his philosophy.”⁸ To a certain extent this also applies to the building of his economic theory.

At the time of Locke’s election as censor of moral philosophy, he had a fundamental decision to make concerning his future at Oxford. Of the sixty senior studentships open at Christ Church, fifty-five were designated for the clergy, two were in law, two were in medicine, and one was in moral philosophy. For a time Locke contemplated taking holy orders to secure a permanent place at Oxford, but he could never quite bring himself to do so. Finally, in 1663, he decided to abandon any pretense of preparing to enter the clergy and instead decided to try for one of the studentships in medicine. It might seem arbitrary for a lecturer in Greek suddenly to decide to study medicine, but in fact the decision was based on an interest in the subject which Locke had been cultivating for several years.

In Locke’s day, medicine was still being taught out of the works of Galen, Hippocrates, and Aristotle, and a student received a degree by being proficient in these ancient classics rather than as a result of any familiarity with practical healing methods. Bacon’s experimental method was becoming more and more accepted, however, and was being applied to the study of medicine by men such as John Wilkins, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, who came to Oxford with the parliamentary leader; Thomas Wallis, a practicing physician; Ralph Bathurst; and Thomas Goddard, warden of Merton College. These devoted empiricists, along with several others, including Sir William Petty who had by the time of Locke’s arrival already left Oxford, formed a club devoted to the pursuit of experimental philosophy which met regularly in Wilkins’s rooms to provide discussion of the members’ work. This group later grew into the Royal Society and accepted John Locke as one of its earliest and most respected members.⁹

Locke was introduced to the work of these advocates of experimental science early in his Oxford career by his friend Richard Lower, a young medical student who had himself already made several discoveries about the feasibility of blood transfusions and the role of the heart in the circulation of the blood. It did not take long for the interests of the young John Locke to be sparked by this radical new experimental approach to learning. The dreary drills of Westminster and the artificial disputations which formed the basis of his education at Oxford seemed stale and unexciting by comparison. He became an enthusiastic advocate of empirical methods, and as early as 1652, his first year at Oxford, he began to keep a medical notebook in which he wrote down new remedies and bits of information on illness that came to his attention. He kept some kind of medical record for the rest of his life.

Locke began studying medicine in his spare time while still an undergraduate and continued almost full time after receiving his master’s degree in 1658. His study was focused not on eventually entering into his own practice, but rather on the pursuit of medicine as experimental chemistry, the approach that was sanctioned by the experimental club. Locke’s enthusiasm for experimentation caused him to be drawn to the laboratory in the High Street presided over by Robert Boyle, the leader of the Oxford empiricists. Boyle, originally part of a London group dedicated to pursuing experimental science called the Invisible College, had taken up residence in Oxford in 1654, but probably did not meet Locke until 1660. It was not until 1664 that the two men became closely involved with one another, when Locke began to follow the experiments Boyle and his group were making to study the problem of human respiration. But the friendship must have grown quickly, for the following year, while Locke was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Brandenburg, the correspondence between the two men was the correspondence of two friends. The letters dealing mostly with chemical discoveries and metallurgic wonders reveal the closeness of their mutual interests, one of which was a common belief in alchemy, a belief with which Isaac Newton was to become increasingly impatient in later years.

Boyle, being older and more established than Locke, always dominated the relationship. It was Locke who aided Boyle with his experiments, and it was Locke who turned to Boyle for advice in scientific matters. Although Locke eventually became a good physician, Boyle was always the more creative scientist of the two, an evaluation with which Locke would have been the first to agree. Neither was Boyle’s influence limited to the scientific realm, since it was as a result of his association with Boyle that Locke first became interested in philosophy. In the seventeenth century, under the term “experimental philosophy,” science and philosophy were undivided; both aimed at discovering the truths of nature through the use of empirical methods. To the seventeenth century empiricists, the méthode of Descartes was particularly appealing, as was the Greek atomism that was being revived by Pierre Gassendi. It was Boyle who first introduced Locke to the works of these two philosophers as well as to his own corpuscular theory of matter which became the starting point for Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But even in this realm, Locke always acknowledged his debt to Boyle. It was only in the opinions of his contemporaries and those of future generations that Locke was considered to have far surpassed Boyle as a philosopher.

Boyle, being older and more established than Locke, always dominated the relationship. It was Locke who aided Boyle with his experiments, and it was Locke who turned to Boyle for advice in scientific matters. Although Locke eventually became a good physician, Boyle was always the more creative scientist of the two, an evaluation with which Locke would have been the first to agree. Neither was Boyle’s influence limited to the scientific realm, since it was as a result of his association with Boyle that Locke first became interested in philosophy. In the seventeenth century, under the term “experimental philosophy,” science and philosophy were undivided; both aimed at discovering the truths of nature through the use of empirical methods. To the seventeenth century empiricists, the méthode of Descartes was particularly appealing, as was the Greek atomism that was being revived by Pierre Gassendi. It was Boyle who first introduced Locke to the works of these two philosophers as well as to his own corpuscular theory of matter which became the starting point for Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding. But even in this realm, Locke always acknowledged his debt to Boyle. It was only in the opinions of his contemporaries and those of future generations that Locke was considered to have far surpassed Boyle as a philosopher.

Because of Locke’s independent study of medicine from 1658 on, he tried to get permission to take his bachelor’s and doctor’s degree in medicine at the same time rather than go through the formal preparations for both, which would have entailed several more years’ attendance at lectures and disputations. Although he got a recommendation from Clarendon, the vice-chancellor of the university, for the dispensation he desired, the medical faculty never approved it and finally Locke abandoned his attempt. Instead, he petitioned the king and was granted permission to retain his studentship without taking holy orders or applying himself to any particular field. Thus, even though he finally entered into private practice and made some reputation for himself as a physician, he never was awarded a doctorate in medicine from Oxford University. Yet it was in his capacity as a physician that he first met the man who was to shape the next twenty years of his life, Anthony Ashley Cooper (called “Ashley”), later the first earl of Shaftesbury.

In the summer of 1666, Ashley visited Oxford to drink some medical waters which John Locke secured for him at the request of David Thomas, a physician whom Locke was assisting at the time. Ashley and Locke seem to have developed an immediate rapport, and soon afterwards Locke was invited to join Ashley’s household in London as resident physician. Locke accepted the invitation and thus stepped into a world totally removed from his scholarly life at Oxford.

Ashley was a pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Theory of Value
• 3. The Wealth of the Nation
• 4. The Second Treatise of Government and the Foundation of Economic Society
• 5. John Locke, Social Scientist
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index