These compact and lucid books illuminate important seventeeth-century discussions of the limits of state power. Susanne Sreedhar's book succeeds in finding something original to say about a topic that has been thoroughly worked over, while Adam Wolfson's helps to clarify an episode that is still not sufficiently well known. Sreedhar's book draws out the implications of something that Hobbes made inadequately explicit, while Wolfson's concerns a debate that was conducted at enormous length by Locke and an adversary, but which is in need of succinct “explication.”
A received view is that Hobbes argued for absolute obedience to sovereigns, with the sole exception that one could refuse obedience in order to save one's life, on the grounds that the right to preserve one's life is something that one could never contract to give up. Other scholars, however—notably Jean Hampton—have argued that there are wider grounds of resistance in Hobbes's political theory, but that these undermine that theory's consistency and viability. Sreedhar rejects both the received view and the charge of inconsistency. The received view is wrong, she argues, because, in the first place, Hobbes allows that people may contract away their right to life, and that all Hobbes claims (and needs) is the view that one would not do so in a social contract, for one could not rely on others' doing so (p. 37). In the second place, it is wrong because Hobbes has a longer list of “resistance rights” that the social contract leaves intact: one has a right to refuse imprisonment, to join with others in resisting it, to refuse to punish close relatives, to refuse a military draft, and to refuse to incriminate oneself. As for Hampton's critique, Sreedhar deploys a view of legal authority developed by Joseph Raz: Legal authority necessarily excludes some reasons for disobedience, but does not necessarily exclude all reasons. Hobbes needs to exclude only those reasons that, if acted on, would undermine the exercise of sovereignty. He needs to exclude what may be called conscience-type reasons, or claims to substitute one's personal judgment for the sovereign's; he does not need to exclude what we may call security-type reasons, or claims based on fear for one's own safety.
How, though, do we get to a right of rebellion, which clearly does undermine the exercise of sovereignty? One avenue lies through the security rights of those who, having wrongly rebelled in the first place, can combine to protect themselves from punishment; another lies through the consideration that the obligation to obey depends on the sovereign's protective capacity and vanishes when a sovereign's capacity fails. “[I]f people are justified in continuing a rebellion out of regard for self-preservation, then there is no reason to think they are not justified in starting one for the same reason” (p. 141). If sovereigns conduct themselves as Hobbes recommends, security right–based rebellions are not much to be feared.
The “resistance rights” are, as Sreedhar fully acknowledges, of the somewhat peculiar Hobbesian variety: that is, freedoms that one cannot be blamed for exercising, rather than freedoms that anyone else has a reason to respect, let alone enforce (pp. 13–14). So from a conceptual point of view, it is not a problem to maintain both that subjects retain resistance rights in that sense and also that the sovereign enjoys the authority to overcome and punish resistance: The conflict, though potentially violent, is only practical. But I am not sure that all conceptual awkwardness has been overcome. Take, for example, the case of military service. In “A Review and a Conclusion,” appended to Leviathan, Hobbes maintained that if a subject failed to lend support to a sovereign in wartime, he would fall into a “manifest contradiction of himself,” for he would be failing to protect the power by which he was himself protected. If Hobbes intended this to be an appeal to moral consistency, then he would be saying in effect that the noncompliant subject would be morally blamable, and so could not be said to be exercising a non-blamable freedom (a right). On the other hand, if the noncompliant subject is blamable only if his own contribution is essential, whether or not he has a right depends on the decisions of others about compliance—an odd result, and also (conceptually and practically) unworkable in that the same consideration would recur with respect to each subject's decision. But Sreedhar does not claim to have wrapped up every loose end, only to have made Hobbes clearer than he was before, and in this, she has certainly succeeded.
Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Jonas Proast has no canonical status. It is only quite recently that the most basic facts of his biography have been unearthed. Yet Locke devoted over five hundred pages of rebuttal to Proast's critique of his Letter Concerning Toleration, and Wolfson is quite right to say that if we want to take the measure of Locke's defense of toleration, we have to look beyond the Letter and try to grasp what was going on in his lengthy defenses of it. Few readers will have the motivation to plough through the original texts, or perhaps even the abridged version that was published (in Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) almost simultaneously with Wolfson's book. Wolfson provides a clear, helpful, and accurate guide to what was going on in the protracted debate between Locke and his critic.
In the original Letter, Locke puts forward several arguments for toleration, among which is, famously, one that may be termed “the argument from belief,” an argument (quite unoriginal, one may note) to the effect that states cannot, by the use of coercion, induce changes in people's beliefs, so that persecution for belief is simply irrational. In his first critique of the Letter, Proast takes this to be Locke's only argument, and successfully shows that while coercion cannot directly change belief, coercion can be used to bring into play things that can (eventually) change belief, such as compulsory attendance at the state church. Since (as Wolfson shows) Locke does not resurrect the argument from belief in its original form, the subsequent debate between him and Proast—and also subsequent scholarship on the point—really turns on whether Locke has a more nuanced version to offer, or else other arguments of an independent kind.
Wolfson not only traces the course of the debate but also takes account of recent scholarship, and he fairly and accurately represents both. Three brief but richly detailed chapters take the reader through the key issues of political consent, the bases of belief, and the relation between faith and knowledge. In noting, as rather few commentators have done, that Locke accepted that we depend on trust and deference in adopting our beliefs, the argument undermines the common view that Locke's defense of toleration rested on a “protestant” idea of authenticity and personal struggle, a view that would of course seriously limit the potential appeal of his theory. Wolfson favors an alternative view, one in which the demand for uniformity in doctrine and practice is greatly relaxed, and in which dogmatic claims to truth are abandoned as untenable.
There can be no doubt that Locke entertained both aspects of that view. But is it one thing to show that he entertained them, another to show that they are basic to his political argument? Beyond a minimal core, Locke, it is true, saw varieties of doctrine and liturgy as matters of “indifference”—but his discussion of toleration depends on taking seriously the fact that they are not a matter of indifference to committed sectarians. (If everyone saw them as indifferent, after all, then the disagreements that concerned him would not arise.) Likewise, Locke attacked Proast's claim that doctrinal truth could be known. But whether it can be known or not, it remains a political fact that rulers who are authorized to impose doctrinal truth will impose what they take it to be—and that would remain a political fact even if, on a view-from-nowhere account, doctrinal truth could be known. Even after reading Wolfson's careful treatment, in the course of which he makes some telling points in favor of his view, one may still have queries about the claim that Locke's advocacy of toleration rested on a demand for a change in “religious worldview” (p. xv), defined in terms of attitudinal and epistemic change, as distinct from a recognition of the fact of pluralism, and of what it means for politics. In making a very important debate more accessible to readers, Wolfson's book will sharpen discussion of the basis and justification of a crucial political value.
Sreedhar ends by pointing out, interestingly, that Hobbes's resistance rights were more generous than those acknowledged by many contemporaries, and even than those defended by later liberals. It cannot be said, however, that Hobbes favored a right to religious freedom, the prime example of the (supposed) conscience-type right that would undermine political order. The sovereign may impose, and subjects must accept, religious uniformity, if that is what order (in the sovereign's judgment) requires. Locke himself had held exactly that view in 1660, arguing (in the work now known as the Two Tracts on Government) that political authority comprehended a power to establish religious observance. Why he abandoned that view for the idea of toleration is a key question, and reading the debate with Proast may suggest that foremost in his mind was his recognition that, given the deep nature of religious attachments, imposing conformity was far more likely to provoke rebellion than to foster order. As Wolfson notes (p. 36), the fear of heresy gives way to the fear of the damage caused by persecution. Both of the books under review lead us to think about that issue of political judgment, and about what it should mean for the justification of political authority. For Hobbes, political judgment acts as a prudential constraint on sovereign power, while for Locke, it acts as a limit to the powers that rulers should have in the first place.
