Under the Influence:Hobbes and Locke Revisited

Recent historical work by Jeffrey Collins and others, fertilized by Felix Waldmann's rediscovery of a memoir that recalls the young Locke as an avid reader of Leviathan, has breathed new life into the old idea that the political argument of Locke's Two Treatises of Government was decisively influenced by Hobbes. That ideas was rejected in 1969 by John Dunn, who found the idea incredible on the grounds that the problem that concerned Hobbes---the construction of political society out of an ethical vacuum---was irrelevant to Locke's purposes. The segregation of Locke from Hobbes has been treated as emblematic of Cambridge contextualism ever since. This chapter revisits the question of influence and the character of the Cambridge method via its patrilineal ancester R. G. Collingwood. It argues that, given Hobbes's absolute presuppositions, his problem cannot have been what Dunn said it was. It proceeds to show that Hobbes’s ‘real’ problem was one to which the Two Treatises offered a conclusive Lockean answer. At the same time it vindicates Dunn's wider sense that Locke's text cannot be understood as a Hobbesian artefact by offering a new reading of its argument and structuring assumptions. Thus Dunn’s interpretation ‘becomes an element in the point of view from which the mind raises its next problem’ —a suitably Collingwoodian tribute to the continuing power of his scholarship.