America's Philosopher

John Locke in American Intellectual Life

Claire Rydell Arcenas

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226820415
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

America's Philosophe r examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history. The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas's new book tells the story of Americans' longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker's ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.The first book to detail Locke's trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America's Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke's often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

1

Locke’s Legacy in Early America

John Locke’s debut in America was a minor disaster. In 1700, William Penn, proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony, ordered a shipment from the London booksellers Awnsham and John Churchill.1 Among the 125 titles that arrived in Philadelphia, then a provincial outpost on the west bank of the Delaware River, John Locke was the author most represented; nearly a quarter of the books were written by him.2 They included An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c., three letters on toleration, three essays on the reasonableness of Christianity, three responses to criticism of the Essay, and the Two Treatises of Government.3

Once the books arrived in Philadelphia, Penn’s agent and secretary, James Logan, was tasked with their sale. Unfortunately for Logan, however, buyers proved scarce. Two years later, he reported to Penn that “many of y^e Books” remained “unsold.”4 In 1706, he was forced to write the Churchills to “request [their] further Patience” regarding payment for the books’ sale.5 After nearly a decade, many of the books were still without buyers, leaving Logan exasperated and Penn in debt.6 Locke’s story in America, it seems, was off to an inauspicious start.

But it was just beginning. Locke’s writings would soon be well known throughout the North American colonies. Indeed, several—especially his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education—would become some of the most important books in early America.7 What is more, eighteenth-century men and women would come to celebrate Locke, follow his example, and invoke his authority in ways quite unimaginable to us today. The following chapter explains how and why this came to be.

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Who was Locke to early Americans? One answer is that Locke meant different things to different people—that engagement with Locke was multifaceted and diverse.8 Locke had something to say about practically everything, and early Americans listened. Indeed, they used Locke and his writings to think about issues relating to education, knowledge acquisition, religion, money, civil government, childrearing, community improvement, old age, and friendship—to name just a few. Consequently, it would be possible to write many different histories of Locke’s influence during this period. One can imagine, for example, histories of Locke’s influence on currency debates in Massachusetts in the 1730s, politics in Maryland in the 1740s, or education in Pennsylvania in the 1750s.9

But focusing on the diversity of Americans’ engagement with Locke obscures a more important truth—that the ultimate source of Locke’s authority in all of the aforementioned areas was the same: namely, his status as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his reputation as a man of good character, and his crucial role as a guide, model, and moral exemplar—an immediate and pervasive presence in people’s daily lives, who taught them how to rear children, study scripture, and pursue a variety of other activities related to improving both themselves and their communities.

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In the early 1740s, South Carolinian Eliza Lucas was a tenacious, determined young woman. Tasked with managing her family’s expansive Wappoo Plantation and its enslaved residents when she was not yet seventeen years old, Eliza quickly became an expert in cultivating both rice and, after much experimentation, indigo. Afforded the luxury of a home library, she woke up before five o’clock most mornings to read and study, a habit that served her well. When she died in 1793, Eliza was remembered for her “understanding” and “uncommon strength of memory.”10

These observations should not surprise us. Eliza, after all, knew her Locke. In 1741, her friend, and eventual husband, Charles Pinckney, recommended that she read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Charles’s suggestion proved timely. With Locke’s Essay in hand, Eliza embarked on a period of dogged self-reflection. After a particularly fun-filled visit to nearby Charleston—“the Metropolis . . . a neat pretty place,” as she described it—Eliza found herself down in spirits, a change in mood she attributed to “that giddy gayety and want of reflection w^ch I contracted when in town.” In search of answers that might explain and improve her sorry state of mind, Eliza observed, “I was forced to consult M^r. Lock over and over to see wherein personal Identity consisted and if I was the very same self.”11 From book 2, chapter 27, section 19 of the Essay, Eliza gleaned that “personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance” but rather “in the Identity of consciousness.”12 Consulting Locke on this matter made her confident of his relevance for further self-improvement. “In truth,” she explained to a correspondent, “I understand enough of him to be quite charmed.” “I rec[k]on,” she continued, “it will take me five months reading before I have done with him.”13

Charles and Eliza’s shared engagement with Locke’s Essay in the early 1740s is, in many respects, unremarkable. The Essay was, far and away, Locke’s most popular and influential work in early America.14 And as Eliza’s experience reveals, it made a deep impression on its readers. From the Essay, they learned that people were born without innate ideas and that they acquired knowledge about themselves and the world around them from a combination of sensation and reflection. They learned of the humbling difficulties associated with putting their ideas into words—that is, of the shortcomings of language for conveying meaning. And they learned, to use Locke’s own words, that people “are fitted for moral Knowledge, and natural Improvements” and that “Morality is the proper Science, and Business of Mankind.”15

However many months she spent with the Essay, Eliza’s devotion to Locke was only just beginning. Sometime around 1742, she read the second part of Samuel Richardson’s popular epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which endorsed—explicitly, in over a hundred pages of references—Locke’s approach to pedagogy and childrearing.16 When she first read Pamela, Eliza was unmarried with no children of her own, so it is not surprising that aspects of Pamela’s apparent vanity made more of an impression than the novel’s retelling of Locke’s emphasis on, for example, the importance of teaching young children self-sufficiency. Before long, however, Eliza seems to have decided that Locke’s educational recommendations demanded not only careful investigation but also scrupulous implementation.

In 1746, now married to the man who had introduced her to Locke, Eliza gave birth to a baby boy. And when the time came to raise her son, Eliza knew one thing for certain: she would “teach him according to M^r. Locks method.”17 This method, explained in Locke’s popular Some Thoughts Concerning Education and grounded in his theory of human understanding and dismissal of long-standing beliefs regarding the innate sinfulness of children, transformed childrearing practices on both sides of the Atlantic.18 Locke’s approach made—or, at least, was intended to make—learning how to read and write more enjoyable. He pushed back against the “ordinary Road of the Horn-Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible” in which learning was incentivized by a child’s fear of punishment. Instead, he advocated for making learning seem “another sort of Play or Recreation.”19

Eliza was an eager and enthusiastic adopter of Locke’s recommendations. She “carefully studied” Some Thoughts Concerning Education and from it concluded that it was best for her baby boy “to play him self into learning,” as Locke advised.20 Unfortunately, however, she was missing one key piece of the puzzle: the right sort of toy to facilitate this sort of learning-through-play. Lacking options at home, but determined to do as Locke directed, she dashed off a request to an English friend for an ivory ball with lettered sides such as the philosopher described.21 By any measure, Eliza’s efforts to follow Locke were successful. Before he was two years old, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—later a Revolutionary leader, signer of the Constitution, and two-time presidential candidate—was learning to read and spell, whether he liked it or not, thanks to his mother and Locke.22

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Not two years after John Locke died in Essex, England, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A self-described “bookish” boy, Franklin first encountered Locke in the 1720s, when he read the Essay as a teenage apprentice to his older brother, the Boston printer James Franklin.23 Perhaps James had brought Locke’s Essay back with him from London, where he had been working, or perhaps young Ben himself found it on the shelves of a Boston bookseller.24

Locke’s Essay had an immediate and profound influence on Franklin.25 It formed the basis of his resolution, at age twenty, to reform his life according to a plan “for regulating my future Conduct in Life,” which included commitments to be frugal, sincere, industrious, and honest.26 Several years later, these resolutions became Franklin’s now-famous “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” which included precepts along the lines of “eat not to Dulness.”27 In his Essay, Locke emphasized the importance of tackling pain, unease, and unhappiness through action, especially habitual action.28 Here and elsewhere, Locke set Franklin on the path of cultivating—or, at least, extolling the benefits of cultivating—strong habits of moderation, even self-denial, to achieve virtue.29 It seems fitting then that once he had established himself as a bookseller in Philadelphia, Franklin sold copies of “Lock of Human Understanding”;30 that his Poor Richard’s Almanack was advertised as containing references to “Locke, the famous John, Esq”;31 and that the catalog Franklin printed for the Library Company of Philadelphia called attention to Locke’s Essay with the notation “esteemed the best Book of Logick in the World.”32

More than just motivating Franklin’s personal pursuit of self-responsibility, however, Locke provided guidance on public pursuits as well. These included, for example, his Philadelphia association, the Junto, founded in 1727. Franklin scoured Locke’s “Rules of a Society, which met once a Week for their Improvement in useful Knowledge, and for the Promoting of Truth and Christian Charity” for guidance on a proper format for the Junto. Like Locke’s proposed society, the Junto met weekly on Friday evenings, and its meetings were structured around debating and discussing questions of interest. In sizing up prospective society members, Franklin required answers to four questions:

1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? –Answer. I have not. 2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? –Answ. I do. 3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? –Ans. No. 4. Do you love truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? –Answ. Yes.33

These queries mirrored Locke’s almost exactly.34

Following Locke, Franklin envisioned the Junto as a space for ensuring the “mutual Improvement” of its members and their community through charitable projects such as a volunteer fire station and a library.35 Rather characteristically, Franklin did not acknowledge the source of his idea for the Junto, but he was certainly familiar with “R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1  Locke’s Legacy in Early America
• 2  Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras
• 3  Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States
• 4  Locke Becomes Historical
• 5  Making Locke Relevant
• 6  Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition
• 7  Lockean “-isms”
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index