Eric Mack's new study of Locke may be slim in size at one hundred and fifty-eight pages of text and notes, but it is thick in value and quality. It appears as the second volume of the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series, a setting that gives some hints about the character of the book. Mack himself is a well-known thinker of the libertarian persuasion and his reading of Locke emphasizes those themes that lead libertarians to look at Locke as one of their forefathers. This is not to say that Mack's is an ideology- or presupposition-driven study; on the contrary, he gives a careful, entirely plausible, mostly persuasive interpretation of Locke, grounded in Locke's texts and in a solid effort to think through the Lockean position. His is not a Locke only for libertarians.

Mack's book differs from the majority of the studies on the philosopher produced over the last half century in not being first and foremost a historical study. This is not to say that Mack completely ignores Locke's historical context or historical purposes, but that he treats Locke as a potentially live thinker, that is, as a philosopher who may well have the truth about morality and politics. Mack thus would disagree heartily with the provocative claim made by John Dunn, one of the preeminent Locke scholars of our era: “I simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything which Locke says about political matters.” Mack's study is accordingly less an attempt to get the historical Locke right, and more an effort to answer the question of whether Locke had the truth about politics. In method Mack appears almost a collaborator of Locke's. He attends closely to the text to see what in Locke's argument might be true. This leads him to dismiss some elements of Locke's text as inessential to his own main point, to flesh out and expand arguments he finds more promising, and in one case, on the question of consent, to decree Locke's argument a total failure and to substitute one of his own that he believes does the work Locke's consent argument is intended to do without falling into the errors of the latter.

Mack's approach, in other words, reflects his disciplinary origin in philosophy. Nonetheless, his differs from many other philosophic approaches. So, for example, although he reminds us in some places of Robert Nozick, he takes Locke's text far more seriously than Nozick does. Nozick makes what one might call a “Lockish” argument, touching down from time to time in Locke's text, but for the most part developing his own line of argument. Mack, as Lockean collaborator, instead develops a version of Locke's own argument. As Lockean collaborator Mack sorts through the various strands of argumentation Locke serves up and gives us his best account of what in them has merit or is needed for Locke's overall theory. This method leads him to dismiss many aspects of Locke's texts that have attracted great attention from other Locke scholars—most importantly, the alleged religious grounding of Locke's doctrine. Most contemporary scholars place Locke's religious views at the center of their reconstruction of the historical Locke. Dunn probably supplied the initial impetus when in 1969 he pronounced “the most important single novelty” in his study to be “the stress on the theoretical centrality of Locke's religious preoccupations.” That “stress” may have been a novelty in 1969 but it has become the orthodoxy of our day, as is visible in the recent work on Locke that has attracted most attention, Jeremy Waldron's God, Locke, and Equality, or in Paul Sigmund's survey of the entire ground of Locke scholarship in his recent Norton edition of Locke's political writings.

Dunn claimed, for example, that “an extremely high proportion of Locke's arguments [depend] for their intelligibility, let alone plausibility … on Locke's religious preoccupations.” Mack could not disagree more. Of course, he notices Locke's theological language, as in the “divine voluntarism” that he makes an essential part of his doctrine of natural law and the “divine workmanship” argument that he makes part of his case for natural rights. Of the former Mack concludes “that Locke has no good reason to appeal to … divine voluntarism within his theory of the law of nature” (34). As to the workmanship argument that Dunn did so much to bring to the fore of Locke studies, Mack finds that to be neither necessary nor sufficient to do the work that Locke attempted to have it do. Locke appealed early in the Second Treatise to the idea that “men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure” (II, 6). Dunn and many others after him found in this passage the ground of Lockean natural rights and the basis for Locke's firm rejection of absolutism, whether of the Filmerian or of the Hobbesian variety. If human beings belong to God they do not have enough power over themselves to give themselves and their rights completely to an earthly sovereign.

Mack thinks the workmanship argument fails, for, apart from the issue of how one could rationally establish its chief claims, “it does not at all advance the conclusion that individuals have rights against other individuals not to be destroyed or maimed or enslaved by them. For on the basis of this argument, the only agent whose rights are infringed when Tom destroys John is God” (41). The workmanship argument is a false move by Locke relative to his own intentions, for “the conclusion which Locke wants to reach is that each individual is a self-owner, hence, whenever an individual is destroyed … that individual is wronged by the destroyers” (41). If the workmanship argument does not get Locke to his own conclusions, that is no matter, claims Mack, for Locke has other arguments, what Mack calls the “false presumption” and the “like reason” arguments, which do. With his adumbration of these arguments in his second chapter Mack presents “Locke's key arguments within political theory” free from all “dependence on theological premises” (35). In doing so he distinguishes his Locke from most of the alternative versions in contemporary scholarship and herein lies the chief value of his book, for it is the apparent dependence on theological premises that makes Locke seem to have nothing to say to readers such as Dunn in 1969.

In giving us a Locke without theology, does Mack mean to give us Locke as he understood himself? Mack is not entirely clear on this point. Probably he would say that he is, at the end of the day, less interested in the historical Locke than in Locke as he could be and as he should have been, had he carried out his enterprise consistently with his own best philosophic insights.