This volume provides the occasion to reacquaint ourselves with the John Locke “we hardly new” after several decades of feminist analysis and critique. Some of its readers will not be so surprised to greet an early liberal social contract theorist for whom gender plays a significant, if ambiguous, role in political life. Yet this general recognition—that gender is an immensely important category in Locke's political thought and that Locke himself is a central and hotly contested figure in feminist political thought—is due in no small part to the pioneering works of some of the scholars featured in this collection.
Three of those seminal essays, which first appeared in 1978 and 1979, have been reprinted in this volume: Mary Lyndon Shanley's “Marriage Contract and the Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought”; Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman's “‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism”; and Melissa Butler's “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke's Attack on Patriarchy.” Revisiting these earlier engagements with Locke's political writings provides its own opportunity for reacquaintance: with the first feminist readings of Locke and other “canonical” figures in the history of political thought, with the political and theoretical agenda set by feminists of the Second Wave, and with the feminism we hardly remember.
These now “classic” essays are followed by retrospective reflections from their original authors, each considering how subsequent research and scholarship over the past thirty years have affected her earlier views on Locke, gender, and feminism. Pateman's afterword to the jointly authored “Mere Auxiliaries” focuses, in particular, on those salad days of feminist consciousness raising. The brief eulogy she offers for her collaborator and comrade Brennan extends to a lost historical moment, as well. More than any of the others, this afterword carries the distinct tone of sorrow, a lament for the passing of a historical epoch and a mourning for the premature death of a dear friend. Also included in this volume are selections from Teresa Brennan's posthumously published, Globalization and Its Terrors (2002). Here, the reader can appreciate the fecundity of those first attempts to grapple with Locke's social contract and the liberal tradition he inaugurated. Shanley's afterword is an especially sensitive reconsideration of her earlier arguments about marriage and the social contract, some she now finds “problematic” or at least misguided, while others remain still generally compelling. Butler's afterword is the least illuminating of the three, if only because it provides a general restatement of the conclusions she arrived at three decades prior, with little, if any, revision.
As Nancy Hirschmann and Kirstie McClure indicate in their excellent introductory essay, the book aspires to reread the “canon” of Western philosophy on multiple levels and in a variety of registers. They identify three, in particular, and I have focused thus far on the most literal rereading that the book facilitates. Furthermore, many of the essays featured in this collection turn to those neglected texts in Locke's corpus, including his writings on religion and Scripture, the Poor Law, monetary currency and exchange, education, and pregnancy, in order to deepen and complicate our engagement with his best-known works, The Two Treatises of Government. In attending to some of these less frequented treasures in Locke's oeuvre, these essays prompt a reconsideration of what we thought we had learned about women, gender, and the family from the Treatises.
Jeremy Waldron focuses on Locke's scriptual commentary to gloss some of the fundamental “inconsistencies” in the defense of equality against Sir Robert Filmer. Waldron concludes, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Lockean liberalism can indeed be salvaged from these unfortunate lapses in an otherwise coherent antipatriarchal position and that his egalitarianism lies at the radical center of liberal feminism. Gordon Schochet and Hirschmann offer more critical perspectives of Locke's apparent contradictions, though neither dispenses with the general liberal framework he proffers. Hirschmann's analysis of the “Essay on the Poor Law” treats class and gender as “intersectional” categories in Locke's political thought and develops this intersectionality in the service of a more robustly egalitarian liberal feminism. Schochet revisits Locke's critique of Filmer's patriarchalism, admitting its “silences” about the status of the family and women's role in the household, while also insisting that the contemporary struggle for gender equality cannot do without the “conception of rights” introduced in early modern political thought.
Terrell Carver, focusing on the question of masculinity and complicating the gender binaries through which mainstream liberalism and liberal feminism have been constructed, is substantially less sympathetic to Locke's “apparently de-gendered” narrative in the Two Treatises: “Turning the ‘gender lens’ onto men as masculinities exposes crucial points at which residual patriarchy subverts egalitarian principles by deploying narratives of dominant masculinities in order to subordinate some men to other men, and women to men generally” (p. 210). For Joanne Wright, Locke's midwifery notes confirm that his “real interest in the family is as a site for the proper breeding of children” and that the contractual language employed in response to Filmer pertains to political relationships exclusively. Precisely because the ideas of freedom and equality implied in the language of the social contract had not been extended to the private realm, Locke could fall back on customary assumptions about the family without recourse to sentimental rhetoric. For Wright, Locke's emphasis on parental duty presupposes a “traditionally hierarchical, aristocratic familial configuration founded upon the assumption of natural differences between the sexes” (p. 234).
In the last several decades, Locke has been hailed as a “proto-feminist” and decried as a “crypto-patriarchalist.” As its finest moments, this collection facilitates more nuanced and complicated engagements with his writings than these designations would seem to allow. The book's penultimate chapters are arguably its best in this regard. Carol Pech's psychoanalytic reading of Locke's writings on money and coinage offers an elegant interpretation of the “fetishistic fixation” on silver in an increasingly abstract and fluid system of exchange. His fetishism, for Pech, betrays the deep political and epistemological anxieties engendered by an ascending symbolic order of economic signification, which severs the link between currency and natural materials. Her analysis speaks, in particular, to Locke's tendency to ascribe to currency the “unruly fluidity that was also relied on during the early modern period to characterize the disorder (e.g., cultural, linguistic) frequently ascribed to women” but also, more generally, to the gendered quality of capitalist economic discourses and modern semiotics of exchange (p. 284).
Linda Zerilli, too, examines language, signification, and the power of words in Locke's political philosophy. While his writings serve for many of his readers as “monuments to rational speech and to a subject that searches for knowledge of things as they really are,” Zerilli aims to tell a different story, one that highlights the limitations of reason and rational speech in the arbitration and settlement of our intractable political and philosophical disagreements (p. 298). In an astute reading of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Zerilli attends to Locke's own rhetorical figures and devices (the social contract being the most powerful and enduring among them) to affirm the irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity of our linguistic practices. Political theory might search for “rational foundations” for political freedom and equality, but this search is itself the work of passion and desire. Hence, political theory “cannot do without rhetoric”—a lesson learned from none other than the figure of John Locke.
While the Essay Concerning Human Understanding confirms that Locke was both an adept and accomplished philosopher, his political writings have secured his enduring legacy in the canon. Rereading Locke provides the opportunity, then, to recenter the distinctly political questions and controversies in the Western philosophical canon, while bringing gender to bear on them. That all of the contributors to the collection are themselves political theorists is no doubt significant, both in terms of the contents of the book and in terms of Locke's distinct voice and legacy in the history of philosophy. Yet this fact also points to the only real weakness I can identify with this collection, namely, its relatively narrow focus on the methodological tools, theoretical frameworks, and interpretive practices of political theorists in particular. Had it included works by scholars disciplined in other paradigms—with their own set of interpretive methods, their own analytical foci, and their own theoretical lexicon—a very different Locke might have appeared in these pages. This, I would suggest, is the Locke we still do not know.
