Like Gaul, John Locke has been (more or less neatly) divided into three parts, and so there have been three disjunctive texts to study, and three disjunctive “Lockes” to consider. Philosophers have focused on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; political theorists have treasured the second of the Two Treatises of Government; and the distinctively unloved of the first of the Two Treatises has been taken up by historians and feminists. Irritatingly, all three appeared in the same year, 1689, and so the usual strategies of periodization (early/middle/late) could not be easily applied in order to explain away any textual discrepancies or substantive differences. Nonetheless, scholars of each text have filled this gap to a certain extent by undertaking thorough research into the timing and circumstances, the authorial intensions, and the network audiences of the three works. Still there was a puzzle. Were there really three Lockes? A personality split three ways? Surely not, and as Torrey Shanks informs us in this sparkling study, scholars have constructed various overarching presumptions and commitments to resolve the issue. These have been chiefly Christianity (of some sort) and political commitments (to antityrannical institutions), which have been referenced at length in order to tell us “who Locke (really) is” and what makes him tick, albeit in such an apparently inconsistent manner.
In Authority Figures, Shanks has managed to resolve these puzzles in quite a new way, and in doing so her work speaks to all of the aforementioned constituencies. Moreover, to do this she moves smoothly through all three texts, negotiates the relevant authorities and established views along the way, and manages to wrap it all up in 121 pages, which is an astonishing achievement. Moreover, as I shall detail, her argumentative thesis presents innovations in philosophy, with implications for politics, that reach well beyond the microcosmic concerns of Locke scholars. This is because Locke is the author of what is probably the most successful political tract of all time (the second of the Two Treatises). His egalitarian thinking, paraphrased quotations, and republican ideals have been foundational for constitutional democracies worldwide since the (English) Bill of Rights of 1689, and so any substantial revision to present assumptions concerning his thought (on any subject) and his reputation (not always positive) will have repercussions.
To do the apparently impossible, Shanks has successfully mobilized a number of important and, in some cases, counterintuitive insights. At the outset, she questions the bedrock assumptions of “British empiricism” (of which Locke is taken, in An Essay, to be a major founder). The presumption is that Locke is committed to an ontology dividing the material world from ideas, such that sensory experience provides the only, if imperfect, linkage between the two. This means that very much ratiocination, never mind interpretive conceptualization, is suspect, given his bedrock materialism in the New Science (pp. 38–41). Moreover, Locke is also known to have had harsh words for any form of rhetoric or language of “fancy,” rather than hard-core (though unfortunately not hard-wired), factual reflection of material realities in the mind. Undaunted, Shanks revisits Locke’s texts in very close readings that overturn all this quite decisively (p. 22).
While rhetoric has featured of late as a method in political theory (see James Martin, Politics and Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction [2013]), and emotion has long been a philosophical topic, Shanks very carefully uses Locke’s texts to analyze his use of language, persuasion, embodiment, and judgment, where these concerns meet up. This exercise involves taking on board Locke’s (often quoted) hostility to rhetoric and persuasive “figuration,” and his skepticism regarding language and material certainty. But Shanks still turns conventional views inside out (pp. 19, 27–29). In her account, Locke emerges not so much as nervously equivocal as comfortably settled within communicative practices of contingency, uncertainty, and persuasive—even repetitive—argumentation. In short, in all three texts he is an advocate for reasonable—if uncertain and contingent—“good” judgment, while admitting—and even celebrating—fleeting ideas and imprecise memory (pp. 11, 23, 93).
Comfortably settled does not mean locked in certainty, however; it means addressing uncertainty in ways that reduce it, hence, the well-known institutional emphasis on republican decision making, rather than “divine right” and nonconstitutional monarchical rule. The latter in Locke’s day was typically backed up by justificatory stories, tropes, invocations, and any number of overly and—as Locke repetitiously shows—tendentiously incurious historical and biblical references. What were formerly flaws and hesitancies, concessions and tangents, in Locke’s three texts now become, in Shanks’s estimation, explorations of the individual—social nexus through which judgments are made, circulated, enforced, and revised. Indeed, Locke’s relentless repetitions (especially in the little-read first of the Two Treatises) illustrate her philosophical point, namely, that individual judgments, however apposite to the situation and well founded in experience, count for little unless they are repeated, resignified, figurated, and generally drummed into people’s heads (pp. 102–9). However, Shanks’s analysis connects this stylistic mode not just to historical context, and also to political rhetoric, but more excitingly to a substantial thesis in philosophy.
Shanks’s thesis is that far from separating ideas from things, language from materiality, reason from emotion, philosophers should—via Locke—see and accept a seamless transcendence of these supposed dichotomies. In other words, language is material, embodiment is consciousness, emotion is a force, judgment arrives with experience, and meaning-making is social (pp. 3, 45–54, 61–65, 100–111). This rather telegraphic account does little justice to the elegance of Shanks’s formulations, in which academic novelty clashes pleasantly with intuitive agreement, at least in my case. Readers will want to judge all this for themselves, especially those, such as myself, who did not quite see this coming, and who feature in Shanks’s well-judged and deftly detailed critiques.
My only criticism of Authority Figures is that it is too short by half. In further chapters, Shanks could have shown us what we have gained by refiguring Locke. Philosophers concerned with emotion tend to come from the phenomenological tradition, and see embodiment as conscious, but not strictly “material” (see, for example, Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Humanism [2007]). The “new materialists” see lots of activity in things, but do not address consciousness very directly (see, for example, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things [2010]). Some feminist antipatriarchalists are quick to unpack Locke’s egalitarianism as residually sexist, but then rely on a gendered sex-binary more rigid than the one Locke actually operates with (see, for example, Nancy Hirschmann and Kirstie McClure, eds., Feminist Interpretations of John Locke [2007]). Liberal egalitarians see Locke backtracking on his claims, rather than appreciating his efforts to demonstrate that principled judgments emerge contingently in power-loaded confrontations (see, for example, Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality [2002]). But then perhaps a study along the philosophical lines indicated by Shanks, but independent of the focus on Locke—major philosopher and political theorist that he is—could be the next book.
