Locke's Political Legacy

Locke’s political legacy is contested. It is contested not least because his identity as a political thinker is contested. In the portrait gallery of history, Locke is a man who has worn many faces. In the writings of historians, philosophers, and political theorists, these faces still remain discrete—so many masks. As John Dunn observes, no simple story will draw them together or fit them to the single man whose refracted image they all must be. This chapter endeavours to make sense of the man and the image together. It draws attention to some of the roles in which Locke was cast by posterity—maker of modernity, avatar of Enlightenment, ideologist-in-chief of a rising capitalist class, Whig apologist, Christian virtuoso, harbinger of a secular future, the father of liberalism, and, even now, America’s philosopher—and of the legacies he bequeathed to posterity in his turn in these roles. At the same time, it looks through the layers of discoloured varnish, dirt and overpainting that distort and stultify the image to recover something of the living man behind the image and the portions of his legacy that are as yet unclaimed, not least those which give a central place and significance to churches in his vision of a well-ordered society. It does so while recognising the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of seeing Locke as he really was except, so to speak, through the lenses of our own cameras.