public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of
the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the
social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
Rousseau's idea was cardinal.
Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the
justification in theory of a revolution which had already been
accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was
by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a
speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written
gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation
which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not
the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the
corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those
concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is
there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its
principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had
any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being
only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in
the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218]
It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have
assented to the proposition that the people--and did Locke mean by the
people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over
twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?--could by any expression
of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or
put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But
Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse
a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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