Political Studies (1984), XXXII, 55-67

The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s

Political Philosophy*
ZVESPER
JOHN
University of East Anglia

This paper argues that the interpretation of Locke’s doctrine of political consent is
best built on ground between and above the extremes of voluntarism (deriving
legitimacy from the form of actual consent) and utilitarianism (basing legitimacy on
the proper end of hypothetical consent). Locke’s characteristic combination of
voluntarism and utilitarian considerations is illustrated by looking at his thoughts
on religious toleration and property. Finally, some of the outstanding difficulties in
Locke’s account of consent are reviewed in the light of these reflections on the
intention of his doctrine.

John Locke is generally regarded as a ‘classic consent theorist’ even though his
account of what constitutes consent and what is implied by consent is held
almost universally to be less than satisfactory. Even sympathetic commen-
tators complain that Locke is vague and contradictory on this subject, and
critics of liberal theory here find Locke (and liberalism) guilty at best of a
logical flaw and at worst of a fraudulent attempt to hide the illegitimate power
of the liberal state behind a cloud of deceitful rhetoric. Without dismissing the
existence of rhetorical purposes in Locke’s doctrine of consent, or solving all
of the puzzles of that doctrine and removing all of its vagueness, Locke’s
doctrine can be understood more clearly than many of his admirers and critics
have understood it, if more attention is paid to the supporting role which it
plays to the larger purposes of his political philosophy.
Interpretations of the importance of consent in Locke’s political thought
tend to form a bimodal distribution. One group of interpreters stress Locke’s
voluntarism, and argue that Locke intended that consent should play a
decisive role in the determination of legitimate political authority and
obligation. The most thoughtful members of this group find themselves
confronted with certain difficulties which lead them to conclude that Locke
failed to understand the meaning of consent, or to establish the connection
between consent and government. Not that these failures diminished the
influence of Locke’s writings. Only 50 years after the publication of Locke’s
Two Treatises of Government, David Hume, the leading member of this

* This paper has benefited from the discussion of an earlier version of it during the session on
John Locke at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association at Canterbury in April
1982. Particularly helpful were the comments of the Chairman of that session, Professor Geraint
Parry.
0032-3217/84/01/0055-13/$03.00 0 1984 PoliticalStudies
56 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy
group, found it necessary to take issue not only with Locke but with a whole
‘party’ of philosophers who founded ‘our fashionable system of politics’ on
their ‘creed’:
All men, say they, are born free and equal: Government and superiority can
only be established by consent: the consent of men, in establishing govern-
ment, imposes on them a new obligation, unknown to the laws of nature.
Men, therefore, are bound to obey their magistrates, only because they
promise it; and if they had not given their word, either expressly or tacitly,
to preserve allegiance, it would never have become part of their moral duty.
Against this reasoning Hume objected that consent even when tacit must be
consciously willed, and such consent, he asserted, is not prominent in the
consciousness of citizens: ‘were you to ask the far greatest part of the nation,
whether they had ever consented to the authority of their rulers, or promis’d to
obey them, they wou’d be inclin’d to think very strangely of you . . .’. In any
case, Hume argued, the obligation attaching to promises is itself an invention,
rather than a natural source of political authority, and political authority is
more plausibly based therefore on human conventions that grow up to serve
the natural human interest ‘in the security and protection, which we enjoy in
political society, and which we can never attain, when perfectly free and
independent’. Hume’s conservative utilitarian departures from Locke share
many assumptions about Locke’s thoughts on consent with radical critics of
Locke and liberalism. Carole Pateman’s recent analysis of The Problem of
Political Obligation, for example, arguing in favour of participatory
democracy, places Locke at the head of those liberals who wish (but ultimately
fail) to derive obligation from the ‘self-assumed’ commitments of individuals.2
A. John Simmons, from still another (‘philosophical anarchist’) point of view,
also writes of Locke’s ‘radical individualism and voluntarism’, and
‘preference for individual commitment over . . . benefits or protection of
interests’ . 3
The ease with which this first group of interpretations of Locke transform
themselves into questioning of Locke’s logic or good faith have tempted
several commentators towards the other mode of interpretation. This
alternative is exemplified by Hannah Pitkin’s essay on ‘Obligation and
Consent’, which concludes that, for all his talk about consent, Locke’s
position is more utilitarian than voluntaristic, so that ‘your obligation depends
not on whether you have consented but on whether the government is such that
you ought to consent to Consent operates only in a hypothetical or

1 D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 111, ii, 8-9. The argument is repeated in Hume’s
Essays, ‘Of the Original Contract’. See also John Plamenatz, Man and Society ( 2 vols.) (London,
Longman, 1963). I, ch. 6.
2 Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Chichester, John Wiley, 1979), ch. 4.
3 A. J. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1979), pp. 69, 86 (original emphasis).
4 H. Pitkin, ‘Obligation and Consent, II’, American PoliricalScienceReview, 60 (1966), 39; see
also Jules Steinberg, Locke, Rousseau, and the Idea of Consenf (Westport, Conn., Greenwood
Press, 1978), pp. 53-4, 61-8, 135; J. W. Gough, John Locke’s Political Philosophy (2nd edn.)
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 74-9; Albert Weale, ‘Consent’, Political Studies, 26 (1978),
65-77; and John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1969). p. 143.
 JOHN ZVESPER 57

metaphorical way, to explain or to symbolize the rationality of obeying a

legitimate government. Political legitimacy derives not from the origins of a
government or from how it is constituted but from what it does-in other
words, from its utility.
This second mode of interpretation does capture the spirit of the intention
of Locke’s doctrine better than the first. After all, Locke was not concerned
primarily with the problem of finding a rationale for political obligation, but
with disputing the rationales that were offered and widely accepted in
seventeenth-century Europe. As John Dunn notes: ‘The problem as Locke sees
it is not that men are not prone to accept legitimate hierarchies, but that they
are all too prone to accept illegitimate ones’.5 This observation also suggests a
liberal, Lockian response to Hume’s conservative position, as well as to the
radical Rousseauian position which depends, like Hume’s, on the cultivation
of a community’s moral sense through the historical development of its
conventions. For without establishing a Lockian ‘creed’, what is to ensure that
the ‘time and custom’ which Hume says ‘give authority to all governments’
will favour free government? Or, in Rousseau’s terms, what can ensure that
the general will will prevail, making it reasonable for one to alienate
unreservedly one’s natural rights?6
Not only does the utilitarian interpretation of Locke do more justice to
Locke’s primary concern to defeat the claims of his illiberal rivals, it is also
closer to the burden of his own positive teaching. Locke was not a radical
voluntarist, if this means that he preferred ‘individual commitment’ to
‘benefits or protection of interests’. In Locke’s polemical context, equality,
consent, voluntarism, and individual commitment could mean (as in Hooker)
Christian dedication to charitable consideration of others as oneself, the
golden rule, which Locke replaces with a hypothetical rule of not harming
others;’ or (as in Hobbes) utilitarian abdication of individual judgement of
utility, which abdication Locke considered to be counterproductive. Locke
had good reason to avoid placing too much weight on the practice or the
theory of consent and, to the extent that he depended on it, he subordinated it
to utilitarian principles by making it support only the kind of political
arrangements which he thought would be most beneficial to his contempor-
aries.
It may be objected with some justice that the utilitarian interpretation
overcorrects the voluntarist interpretation and places too little weight on
consent. Consent is subordinated by Locke to other considerations, but it still
plays a prominent supporting role. Pateman rejects Pitkin’s theory of

J. Dunn, ‘Consent in the Political Thought of John Locke’, Historical Journal, 10 (1967), 181
n. 116; cf. Locke, Two Treatises, 11,223.
6 Hume, Treatise, 111, ii, 10; Rousseau, Social Contract, I, vi; 11, vii; Pateman, Problem of
Political Obligation, pp, 150-6, 165, 176-1.
7 Hocker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I, viii, p. 7 (quoted by Locke, Two Treatises,
11, p. 5; his substitute follows in 11, 6; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968),
pp. 190, 318; and C. E. Vaughan (ed.), Rousseau, Second Discourse, Political Writings (2 vols.),
(Oxford, Blackwell, 1962), I, p. 163); x, 4 (consent is not incompatible with ‘a kind of natural right
in the noble, wise, and virtuous, to govern . . .’. a passage which Locke omits to quote when he
cites this section of Hooker’s work in the Two Treatises). Locke’s own doctrine of consent was
used to support non-Lockian political arguments: Jeffrey M. Nelson, ‘Unlocking Locke’s Legacy:
A Comment’, PoliticalStudies, 21 (1978), 106-7.
58 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy

hypothetical consent because it seems too empty: ‘Surely . . . the whole point
about consent theory is that it offers a possible criterion by which a legitimate
form of government can be recognized, namely one to which actual consent
has been given and continues to be given. . .’.8 Locke would have disagreed
with the second half of this statement; as we have seen, he knew that actual
consent could be and had been given to various kinds of illegitimate govern-
ment. However, he would have agreed that consent was a possible criterion
and-when properly understood-the only criterion of legitimate government.
But consent properly understood meant consent of men whose reasoning was
unclouded by false consciousness, reasoning in other words which was en-
lightened about man’s natural rights. Only enlightened consent produces the
benefits that Locke wants. By paying attention to the limits imposed by Locke
on the meaning of true consent we can begin to see some middle ground between
the two modes of interpretation.
Locke tries to build utility into consent by establishing that certain things
simply cannot be consented to, and by reflecting on the implications of these
impossibilities. The most important natural limitation on consent, both
absolutely and in relation to Locke’s historical context, is that it cannot
commit to civil government the ‘salvation of souls’. Locke reaches this
conclusion by arguing that ‘no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the
dictates of another’. For ‘such is the nature of the understanding, that it
cannot be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward force’. Therefore
the political ‘care of souls’ through compulsory religious beliefs or ceremonies
cannot ‘be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the p e ~ p l e ’ The
. ~ major
premise of Locke’s case for religious toleration is that consent cannot be
given to an action which is by nature impossible. In this most important
area of policy, which engaged Locke’s energies throughout his career,
government by consent is not merely formal or empty or voluntaristic;
it determines directly the substance of policy and therefore the utility of
government. When men are persuaded by writers like Locke that ‘consent’ to
fundamentally intolerant regimes is not possible, they have to adopt the policy

8 ‘Political Obligation and Conceptual Analysis’, Political Studies, 21 (1973), 209. In fact,
Pitkin’s interpretation is not as extreme as Pateman here suggests; the sentence she quotes from
Pitkin’s article to the effect that hypothetical consent could be given to a racist or other tyrannical
regime is clearly part of Pitkin’s summary of an account of consent which ‘is not Locke’s real
position’. ‘Obligation and Consent, l’, American Political Science Review, 59 (1965), 995.
Although she does not specify the details of natural constraints on Lockian consent, she does
notice them. So does Pateman, in The Problem of Political Obligation, but she thinks of Locke’s
natural law as an external restraint rather than as an internal constraint on consent (p. 71).
9 A Letter Concerning Toleration, in The Works of John Locke (10 vols) (London, 1823), VI,
pp. 10-11; see also A SecondLetter Concerning Toleration, Works, VI, pp. 68, 121; and A Third
Letter f o r Toleration, Works, VI, pp. 224-5. The argument first appears in this form in Locke’s
writings in an unpublished ‘Essay Concerning Toleration’ of 1667, which also shows that Locke is
not interested in returning from a Christian to a classical position on the scope of political
authority: ‘could public societies well subsist, or men enjoy peace or safety’, without ‘the
countenancing of virtue’, the practice of virtue could and should be left ‘entirely to the discretion
and consciences’ of the people. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (2 vols.) (London,
1876), I , pp. 176-7, 181-3. (Relative indifference to forms of government follows from this
principled indifference to ends; Geraint Parry, John Locke, (London, Allen & Unwin, 1978), pp.
110-11, 125.)
 JOHN ZVESPER 59
of toleration if they wish to maintain their loyalty to the principle of govern-
ment by consent.
Locke was not always a partisan of the policy of toleration of a variety of
religious practices. In unpublished writings immediately after the Restoration,
he made a case in favour of civil authority over outward forms of religious
worship. But in these writings he already held that religious belief could not be
coerced, and that toleration was therefore necessary here. Consent could not
be consent to religious tyranny.IOLocke also indicated that he supported civil
authority over outward forms of worship rather sadly. If only ‘men would
suffer one another to go to heaven every one in his own way’, toleration in this
sphere ‘might promote a quiet in the world’, but such toleration ‘is like to
produce far different effects among a people’ for whom ‘the doctrine of peace
and charity’ has been perverted ‘into a perpetual foundation of war and
contention’. Locke already joins the liberal battle against the controversial
politics arising from a perverted mixture of religious and secular matters. He
takes up arms ‘only to keep the peace and draws his sword in the same side
with the magistrate, with a design to suppress, not begin a quarrel’.” When
Locke did judge it possible to make a successful case for toleration of
practices, he did so by emphasizing the impossibility of coercing beliefs,
because he now concluded from this that it was impossible for men to consent
to government for the purpose of saving souls. He then clearly maintained that
secular purposes were the only ends which consent could delegate to govern-
ment. Even in his more advanced liberal writings, Locke (in agreement with
the policies of the Revolution settlement) did not argue for toleration in all
cases. Locke never proposed a libertarian ‘wall of separation’ between church
and state. Just as his argument for legislative supremacy gives way to a
recognition of the necessity and prudence of allowing executive prerogative,
his case for religious toleration was always subject to qualification by the
recognition that even the limited civil government that he favoured cannot
afford to be indifferent to the beliefs and practices of the religions that
flourish in the society that it governs.I2 But intolerance or qualifications to
tolerance always had to be justified as means to secular ends, rather than as
ends in themselves-that is, as legitimate government by divine right. When
Locke thought about government by consent (a question he had conceded
rather than explored in his unpublished writings), he found that it was

10 Philip Abrams (ed.), Two Tracts on Government (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1967), pp. 127-8, 188-9,214-15.
11 Two Tracts, pp. 160-1,118-19. It is easy to overestimate Locke’s early conservatism. Maurice
Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, Longman, 1957), chides Fox Bourne for dating
Locke’s liberalism from as early as 1660, partly because he thinks Fox Bourne failed to take note
of what Abrarns has called Locke’s Two Tracts on Government. However, Fox Bourne did notice
the argument of those writings, but saw that it was not inconsistent with liberal, latitudinarian
expectations in the early days of the reign of Charles 11. Fox Bourne also reminds us that toleration
was at first a partisan religious slogan, and not a non-partisan liberal policy. Fox Bourne, L y e of
John Locke, I, pp. 154-6, 73, 160-70; see also Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., ‘Party Government and
the Settlement of 1688’, American Political ScienceReview, 58 (1964), 935-43.
12 Two Treatises, 11, 147, 158-68. Perhaps it is because liberalism in the twentieth century is
often indifferent or hostile to religion that Locke’s combination of liberalism and reasonable
religion tends to be reduced by interpreters either to liberalism without religion or to religion
without liberalism.
60 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy
impossible for such government to be primarily intended as an aid to eternal
salvation, however much it might have to superintend or to interfere with
activities directed to that end.
Locke also attempts to restrict consent to useful ends in his discussion of
property. Just as his thoughts on religion deny that consent can result in civil
government for the salvation of souls, his basic thought on property is an
argument against the power of consent. His so-called labour theory of value is
a polemic against the belief that consent first produces property: not human
agreement or convention but human labour is the source of the extension of
property from separate human bodies to separate material possessions. With
civilization come ‘positive Laws to determine Property’; ‘consent’ replaces
labouring in the legal determination of ownership. But labour remains the
efficient source of ‘the value of things we enjoy in this World . . .’. Consent
can establish rules ‘for the Regulating . . . of Property’, but consent at no
stage of human development can produce the material wealth which makes
such regulation necessary. Apart from the consent needed for the convention
of money, which encourages painstaking industry by making very large
individual wealth possible, the most that consent can do even for the salvation
of men’s bodies is to follow Locke’s suggestion that material wealth be
increased by means of political arrangements which recognize the contribution
that ‘Industrious and Rational’ appropriators make to ‘the common stock of
mankind’.13
Of course, Locke’s argument in his Treatises on Government is that his
suggested political arrangements are not merely advisable, but that they are the
only ones to which it is naturally possible for men to consent. The salvation of
men’s bodies as the end of government is dictated by the natural or divine law,
the ‘first and strongest desire God Planted in Men, and wrought into the very
Principles of their Nature being that of Self-preservation . . .’. ‘God and
Nature never allowing a Man so to abandon himself, as to neglect his own
preservation’, and therefore ‘it being out of a Man’s power so to submit
himself to another, as to give him a liberty to destroy hirn’,l4 it is
impossible for men to consent to join a political community for any other
reason than ‘for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst
another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security
against any that are not of it’. It is only when men ‘so’ consent that they make
a body politic. Is Locke thus applies to non-economistic politics the
impossibility argument which he had already applied to religiously intolerant
politics. In his published writings on toleration he makes these applications
mutually reinforcing. Natural human ‘pains and industry’ must be encouraged
by the conventions of politics: ‘the pravity of mankind being such, that they
had rather injuriously prey upon the fruits of other men’s labours than take
13 Two Treatises, 11, 3,25-51, 139 (original emphasis).
14 Two Treatises, I, 88; 11, 168 (see also 6, 23, 135). It is not clear, however, that suicide is not
permitted (and it is, of course, obviously possible), since ‘every Man has a Property in his own
Person’. (11, 27, original emphasis; and see Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’, John Locke, Two
Treafisesof Government (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963). p. 114). Perhaps Locke
means that the exception ‘some nobler use, than its bare Preservation’ (11, 6), applies to self-
preservation, ‘nobler use’ meaning ‘comfortable, safe, and peacable living’ (11, 9 9 , as opposed in
particular to ‘the hardship of. . . Slavery’ (II,23).
15 Two Treatises, 1I,95 (original emphasis).
 JOHN ZVESPER 61

pains to provide for themselves; the necessity of preserving men in the

possession of what honest industry has already acquired, and also of
preserving their liberty and strength, whereby they may acquire what they
farther want’ of ‘the things that contribute to the comforts and happiness of
this life’, is the only rational incentive for ‘men to enter into society with one
another’. Therefore, it is not possible for political society to originate in men’s
consent based on their concern for the salvation of their souls,i6 even if it were
possible for political society to do anything to promote that salvation. Locke’s
politico-economic consent supports his politico-theological consent. The
converse also holds. Intolerance ‘has produced all the bustles and wars, that
have been in the Christian world, on account of religion’, whereas toleration
encourages civil magistrates to ‘direct all their counsels and endeavours to
promote universally the civil welfare of all . . .’, and gives men greater
opportunity to carry on their industrious ‘ernpl~yment’.~~
Many commentators on Locke have tried to tie down and to criticize his
account of consent by concentrating on the question of the economic status of
political consenters. Do the propertied classes have some special role in the
process of consent? This question seems less basic for Locke than it is for these
commentators. Locke seems to be more concerned with the human, that is,
the rational status of consenters than with their social status. The important
thing to ensure is that consenters, whatever their other attributes, be
enlightened and rational.
Rousseau and other radical critics of Locke’s account of consent to politico-
economic conventions complain that the supposedly rational consent to
government was a conscious fraud perpetrated by the rich, which ‘destroyed
natural freedom irretrievably, established forever the law of property and
inequality . . . and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected
the whole human race to work, servitude, and misery’.’* But Locke argued
that both rich and poor, and both industrious and lazy, benefit from this
consent because (as Rousseau recognizes) the lazy become less inactive, and (as
Locke emphasizes) the poor are less poor absolutely, after the establishment of
a proper political economy than before: ‘a King of large fruitful Territory’ in a
primitive nation ‘feeds, lodges and is clad worse than a day Labourer’ in a
country governed in Locke’s manner.I9 The economic conditions of a perfect
Lockian country in one sense would return men to that happy primitive state
in which they had no reason to ‘think themselves injured’ by someone else’s
industrious and rational appropriation, because these conditions would
transcend those wherein one man’s gain must be ‘somebody else’s loss’.2oThe

16 Letter, Works, VI, p. 42; Second Letter, Works, VI, pp. 116-22; Third Letter, Works, VI,
p. 212.
17 Letter, Works, VI, pp. 53-4,42.
18 SecondDiscourse, Political Writings, I, p. 181.
19 Two Treatises, 11, 41; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, Blackwell,
1974), p. 177. Locke’s ‘baseline’, as Nozick suggests, ‘needs more detailed investigation’. See also
Robert Paul Wolff, ‘A Refutation of Rawls’ Theorem’, Journal of Philosophy, 63 (1966), 185-6.
For later use of Locke’s argument, see e.g. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Introduction and
Book I, ch. 1 (Everyman’s Library edition, E. Rhys (ed.), (London, 1920). pp. 2, 10).
20 Two Treatises, II,36; W . von Leyden (ed. and trans.), Essays on the Law of Nature (Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1954), VIII, p. 213.
62 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy
consent to money, and the unequal possessions that follow, would be rational
for all. Locke’s government by consent is designed to help all men ‘acquire
what they may farther want’ of life’s material comforts. It is unfair to
complain that Locke’s politico-economic consent is conservatively biased in
favour of static ‘property relationships’, and that the rich necessarily ‘gain
more from the exchange than the propertyless’,21 for it can reasonably be
expected that the latter will be more encouraged and more able to become
propertied after this consent occurs. That is why Rousseau justly complains
about the ‘misery’ of ‘the whole human race’ being condemned to ‘work’. The
most promising way to refute Locke’s account of the constraints on consent is
not to argue that it is implausible because it results in material injustice (unless
one is prepared to argue that the poorest workers in developed economies are
not materially wealthier than the richest primitives), but to argue, with
Rousseau, that Locke’s material salvation may require the abandonment of
the salvation of souls, and moreover that this may undermine the political
community which Locke assumes is possible to maintain mainly on individual-
istic grounds.22Pursuit of this line of reasoning may lead one to conclude that
it is unjust even to tempt men with the possibility of consenting to conditions
which promise as much material benefit as Locke’s political society, the
temptation putting them in a state of mind comparable to Don Juan’s
paramour: ‘A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering “I will
ne’er consent”-consented’. Even if the experience consented to does not live
up to expectations, it is difficult to recover lost innocence.
It is also possible to criticize Locke’s argument by saying that it proves too
much. If it is impossible to consent except on the basis of one’s own
understanding, it may be impossible to consent at all. Perhaps Locke has
misunderstood the nature of human understanding and therefore of consent
based on understanding. Locke assumes that enlightened reflection on natural
rights is possible and normal for consenting citizens. But what if political life
necessarily takes place in the darkness of some kind of Socratic cave? Is Locke
not being rather utopian in his assumption that sufficient light can be brought
into the cave to enable men to arrange their affairs so reasonably? Is false
consciousness not endemic to politics? If it’is, then one can argue either that
no political consent would be wholly reasonable, or that any consensual
arrangement is legitimate, as long as procedures ensure that a general will
guides the arrangement. Rousseau again emerges as one of Locke’s most
trenchant critics, for he makes both arguments. A man like Rousseau himself, an
apolitical, solitary dreamer, makes no political or even family commitments,
since these necessarily involve the surrender of autonomy. The citizens of the
Social Contract go to the other extreme, alienating themselves in order to be
truly political animals. It can be reasonably maintained that Lockian attempts
to avoid these extremes underestimate the social character of human
consciousness, or in other words the extent to which human understanding and
consent already imply surrender of autonomy. If Locke’s individualistic
epistemology is questioned, his individualistic politics become questionable as
well.
* I Pateman, Problem, pp. 68, 74, 78; cf. M. Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke
(London, Allen &Unwin, 1968), pp. 164, 192.
22 See the suggestive remarks of Pateman, Problem, pp. 165-7, 177.
 JOHN ZVESPER 63
Locke’s response to such criticism might well begin by complaining that we
have exaggerated or at least misunderstood his individualism. Locke
recognizes that politics is a social affair. For example, in the concluding
chapter of the Second Treatise,he defends himself from the possible objection
that his doctrines will produce frequent popular rebellions, by maintaining
that ‘the People . . . are more disposed to suffer, than right themselves by
Resistance’, and that they are not to be moved to resist merely by ‘examples of
particular Injustice, or oppression of here and there an unfortunate Man . . .’.
Only a collective suspicion of collectively oppressive government leads to mass
resistance and the reconstitution of government. Not intricate moral or legal
reasoning but mass and rather rough perception is the engine of popular
resistance. Locke might also remind us that he greatly appreciated the ‘law of
opinion or reputation’ among men in society, by which are established social
definitions of virtue and vice. These definitions, established by ‘tacit consent’,
are very powerful. While men frequently overlook the sanctions of both
divine and civil laws, ‘no man escapes the punishment of their censure and
dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the company he keeps
and would recommend himself to’. Social and political life-as opposed to the
life of solitude, which ‘many men have sought and been reconciled to’-takes
place, if not in a cave, at least within a particular country’s own characteristic
version of ‘the great variety of opinions concerning moral rules which are to be
found amongst men, according to the different sorts of happiness they have a
prospect of, or propose to them~elves’.~~ Locke’s Thoughts Concerning
Education show that he was ready to use this social tyranny of opinion and
reputation in the education of good citizens. However, although Locke might
escape the charge that his epistemology and politics were as sociologically
innocent as they may seem, he would not avoid but (as has been noted above)
would rather insist upon distancing himself from the tendency to displace
nature and reason by convention or tradition in politics. And this insistence
does seem to require that independent judgement based on the nature of things
rather than mere intersubjective agreement must be a real possibility, at least
for those like Locke who teach the people when to be suspicious and who
educate the educators. So Locke’s insistence on the possibility of enlightened
politics leaves him open to the charge that he was in this way too optimistic.
In Locke’s thinking, then, the limits on the power of consent produce a
negative laissez-faire religious policy, and a positive encourager-faire
economic policy. But in both cases Locke argues in favour of a useful policy
by reflecting on the limits of human will-power. The power of consent is
limited by a law of nature in a physical (and therefore divine) as well as a moral
sense. For this reason it is somewhat misleading to search for ‘an equilibrium
between consent and natural law in Locke’s political Locke’s
reflections on the nature of consent reveal intrinsic physical restraints, which
are part of the laws of its nature. This allows him to use consent itself to

23 A n Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, ch. 3 and Book 11, ch. 28 (original
emphasis).
24 Patrick Riley, ‘On Finding an Equilibrium Between Consent and Natural Law in Locke’s
Political Philosophy’, Political Studies, 22 (1974). 432-52. Of course, I am not arguing that the
concept of natural law as a physical law is the only one which appears in Locke’s writings.
64 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy
establish certain useful restraints and constraints on consensual politics. He is
a voluntarist: ‘If you will say that commonwealths are not voluntary societies
constituted by men, and by men freely entered into, I shall desire you to prove
it’, he flatly challenges his But he is also a utilitarian: only usefully
effective willing is allowed to be consent.
As utility limits political consent, so does consent limit political utility, by
limiting the end of political society to that which first causes it to come into
being, rather than extending this end to a later and more aspiring cause.
Political society is not a classical society of societies, which relates the ends of
subordinate societies to some final end, the good life. There is no sense in
which all human activities and associations have the same end.26
There remain many difficulties in Locke’s reasoning about consent. Chief
among them is that it draws on him the necessity of explaining the apparent
success of many illiberal regimes, and the false consciousness so much in
evidence before men are enlightened by his doctrines. It is clear that Locke’s
descriptions and prescriptions depend on men’s consent based not on opinions
at which they always arrive, but on opinions which Locke, as a ‘Studier’ of the
‘Law of Nature’, prompts them to reach. Although it ‘seems monstrous’ that
men should ever base their consent on illiberal opinions, they have done so
with alarming frequency. How is it that human beings have so deviated from
the natural way that they have become ‘an Herd of inferior Creatures’, ‘so
void of Reason and brutish, as to enter into Society upon such Terms’?27
One answer suggested by Locke is that advanced civilizations no longer
possess in such a weighty degree the self-correcting mechanism of the less
advanced: ‘young Societies could not have subsisted . . . and the Prince and
the People had soon perished together’, if their government and consent had
not conformed to natural ends. But with economic progress comes the
possibility of viable political perversion. However, the same advance in
civilization which makes political perversion more possible also makes it more
possible (and more necessary) to correct the course of history by examining
‘the Original and Rights of Government . . .’.28 Man in ‘young’ societies is like
a child, who lacks ‘Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law he is to
govern himself by . . .’. As civilization progresses, the operation of the self-
enforcing mechanism in the law of nature and in the nature of consent depends

Third Letter, Works, VI, p. 212.

25
Aristotle, Politics, 1252b, 30-1; Locke, Second Letter, Works, V1, pp. 117--20; Third Lerter,
26
Works, VI, p. 218. However, Locke does admit that primitive commonwealths can advance
legitimately from wartime compacts for mutual defence to more continuous associations with
more complete ‘temporal ends’. (SecondLetter,pp. 121-2; Third Letter, p. 225). See below, note
28.
27 Two Treatises, 11, 12, 163; Lerter, Works, VI, p. 9; cf. Richard Ashcraft, ‘Locke’s State of
Nature: Historical Fact or Moral Fiction?’ American Political Science Review, 62 (1968),
912-13; and Sterling Lamprecht, The Moral and Political Philosophy ofJohn Locke (New York,
Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 164.
28 Two Treatises, 11, 94, 101, 110-11, 124. (Princes are taught to have ‘separate Interests from
their People’, by ‘Ambition and Luxury’, ‘aided by Flattery’. In A Letter Concerning Toleration
[Works, VI, p. 541 Locke specifies that the flattery is that of ‘religious incendiaries’.) Locke
admits the possibility of ‘Original defects’ in a constitution, as well as ‘adventitious ones
introduced by time’. Thus, primitive defensive compacts (above, note 26) are allowed to evolve
into higher, Lockian forms-but no higher.
 JOHN ZVESPER 65

upon more enlightenment about that law and that nature in man, or at least in
a significant proportion of men. As knowledge of the law of nature spreads,
the execution of that law can be expected to depend less on the self-destruction
of its violators by their running into ‘Bogs’ and ‘Precipices’ from which it tries
to hedge them in.29The law of nature can become more completely a law of
self-preservation. In his discussion of early civil societies, Locke is concerned
to prove that even original paternal monarchy was not a dictate of nature, but
was based on consent and limited to certain ends.30 But he also suggests
somewhat contradictorily that ‘Original defects’ in constitutions are possible,31
and such defects become more probable when we remember that men in a state
of nature are ‘ignorant for want of study’ of the law of nature;32that in ‘the
first Ages’ men are uninstructed ‘in Forms of Government’, are illiterate, and
have a ‘negligent and unforeseeing I n n ~ c e n c e ’ ;and
~ ~ that these original
constitutions were often based on ‘tacit Consent’ (while only express consent
properly creates political bonds) and ‘Deference . . . as to a kind of Natural
Authority’ (which speaks a forgetfulness of human equality).34 Only more
detailed and express consent, informed by a more certain grasp of the law of
nature, can establish on firm foundations a trustworthy government after the
passing of the original age of few laws, ‘little Properties, and less Covetous-
nesd.35 In more developed societies, liberally-educated men must consent on
the basis of opinions approved by Locke as conformable to the laws of nature.
Like Karl Marx, Locke depends on the acceptance of his doctrines to establish
what he depicts as inevitable. Pre-Lockian tendencies for consenters to elevate
considerations of other worldly reward over and against those of preservation
in this world must dwindle. (As must those which so elevate worldly honour:
‘Who hath it? He that died 0’ Wednesday’.) Post-Lockian elevations of
voluntary commitment over utility would have to be resisted.
Both this theoretical difficulty in Locke’s account of the nature of political
consent, and his achievement nevertheless of much practical influence, can be
illustrated by glancing at a section of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia. Jefferson exercises his talent for succinct summary of Lockian
arguments:
our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have
submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could
not submit . . . The legitimate objects of government extend to such acts
only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to
say there are twenty gods, or n o god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks
my leg.
Although Jefferson says it is impossible for anyone to consent to religious
intolerance, the occasion for this repetition of Locke’s argument is Jefferson’s
complaint that Virginians ‘have been willing to remain’ under certain forms of

z9 Two Treatises,II,63, 57.

30 Two Treatises, II,75, 105-10.
31 Two Treutises, 11,223.
32 Two Treatises,11, 124.
33 Two Treatises, 11, 107, 101,94.
34 Two Treatises, II,94, 110, 122,4.
35 Two Treatises, 11, 7 5 , 107, 162.
66 The Utility of Consent in John Locke’s Political Philosophy
‘religious slavery’, imposed by the old common law and even ‘by our own acts
of assembly’. ‘The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations
of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of
the laws.’ A century after Locke had proved this to be an error, practices that
suggest otherwise persist, and it is necessary to combat the error with a dose of
truth. Jefferson thought this was even, or especially, the case with people who
were developing the economic consciousness prescribed by Locke:
the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are
honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be
going downhill . . . the people . . . will forget themselves, but in the sole
faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due
respect for their rights.
The acceptance of Locke’s doctrines on politico-economic consent may tend to
make men ‘careless’ about their politico-theological consent.36There may be a
practical incoherence in Locke’s doctrine of consent as well as theoretical
difficulty in maintaining that doctrine.
This survey of the middle ground which Locke tries to occupy between
voluntarism and utility also leaves untouched the tangled copse of problems
surrounding Locke’s account of the action of consent, in particular his
distinction between express and tacit consent. But perhaps we can now pick
our way through part of it without being badly scratched. It is usually argued
that the main problem in Locke’s account of consent is his use of the notion of
tacit consent, which seems like no consent at all. If it is right to interpret Locke
less in terms of moral voluntarism, then this problem may seem less worrying.
But if tacit consent becomes less troublesome, express consent, as Locke des-
cribes it, becomes more so. The question becomes not why Locke dared to speak
of tacit consent, but why he dared to speak of express consent. Locke seems
content with passive consent to enlightened policies and institutions, but insists
on express consent to membership in a political society.37Yet his account of
express consent is vague. John Dunn, trying to fathom what Locke means,
concludes that ‘Men must be supposed expressly to consent to their
nationality, their membership in a given society, by their settled disposition to
identify themselves as such . . . All this seems rather weak . . .’.3* In fact, as
Iain Hampsher-Monk has suggested,39it seems too strong in one way, because
it promotes express consent to the pervasive status of tacit consent; would
every member thus defined lose the right of emigration, as Locke says
expressly-consenting members do? In the light of Locke’s efforts to combine

36 Notes on the State of Virginia, XVII, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, M. D. Peterson
(ed.), (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 208-13; cf. pp. 251-3.
37 Two Treatises, 11, 122. As in Hobbes, consent is in one sense an abdication of the right to
participate in politics, but (like Spinoza) Locke favours institutions which require consultation and
some active consent, especially to policies which deprive citizens of property. See Aldo Tassi,
‘Two Notions of Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise’, The Locke Newsletter, No. 3 (Spring 1972),
26-31; cf. Dunn, ‘Consent’, p. 154.
38 Dunn, ‘Consent’, pp. 166-8; and Dunn, Political Thought, pp. 140-1.
39 Iain W. Hampsher-Monk, ‘Tacit Consent in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Journal
of theHistory ofideas, 40(1979), 136-7.
 JOHN ZVESPER 67
consent and utility, it would seem more consistent for him to urge a reduction
in the number of express consenters, or to argue that enlightened express
consent can entail no more obligation than tacit consent. A ‘positive
Engagement, and express Promise and Compact’ can make men ‘Subjects or
Members’ of a political society, Locke says, whereas tacit consent cannot. But
what enlightened man would consent to become a full member of a society, if
that means becoming ‘perpetually and indispensably obliged to be and remain
unalterably a Subject to it, and . . . never again in the liberty of the state of
Nature’ (unless the government dissolves itself or expels him)? Why would he
ever surrender his right to emigrate? Would a Lockian community ever have
‘perfect’ members, as opposed to individuals living like resident aliens, all
somewhat foreign and potentially hostile to each other?40Is not the fragility of
political community implied by this absence of strong membership part of the
facts of life in the theory and practice of Locke’s liberal society? Not only
must enlightened men wish to reserve their right to withdraw themselves and
their consent permanently from the society, they would also have to keep one
eye on the possibility of the occasional necessity of withdrawing temporarily,
in order to exercise for themselves the executive power of the law of nature.41
This may seem to make the social contract too contingent to bear any weight.
Still, that is precisely the point justly made by critics of Locke and liberalism,
at least since Rousseau.
Both this problem of consent to community membership and the difficulty
of restricting consent to enlightened policies make Locke’s doctrine of consent
theoretically unsettled and practically unsettling. This is compatible with the
observation that in Locke’s view, ‘legitimacy is no final and irrevocable
a~hievement’.~~ Locke’s doctrine of consent is not a solution but a perennial
source of the modern problem of political obligation and community. Perhaps
he thought that more happiness was available to men who adopted this
doctrine in spite of this fact, than to those who tried to find a formula that
would make political consent produce political perfection.

40 Two Treatises, 11, 119-21, 9. See the searching discussion in Seliger, Liberal Politics, pp.
267-83, where the prohibition on emigration is reversed-to mean that he who emigrates never
expressly consented in the first place-or is dismissed as one of Locke’s ‘ill-considered overstate-
ments’. (Presumably there would be good reasons to prohibit the emigration of certain political
officers, but Locke does not say that this is what he has in mind.) It seems fair to conclude chat
Locke’s assertion that ‘it is easy to discern who are, and who are not, in Political Society together’
(Two Treatises, 11, 87) is somewhat dubious.
41 Two Treatises, 11, 19, 87, 207. Henry Cecil’s story, ‘Portrait of a Judge’, shows how easy and
how fatal it can be to overlook the reservations built into Lockian abdication of the executive right
of nature, and to mistake respectability for softness.
42 Dunn, ‘Consent’, p. 182. (Locke’s doctrine of consent is therefore a means of avoiding
rather than of promoting the ‘reification’ of the state [Pateman, The Problem Political
Ob/igation, p. 61.) Rousseau complains that the persistence of the state of nature accompanies the
imperfect alienation of men who consent with Lockian reservations (Social Contract, I, vi).