Sovereignty and the Separation of Powers in John Locke

Abstract

Locke's conceptualization of sovereignty and its uses, combining theological, social, and political perspectives, testifies to his intellectual profundity that was spurred by his endeavour to re-traditionalize a changing world. First, by relying on the traditional, personalistic notion of polity, Locke developed a concept of sovereignty that bore the same sense of authority as the “right of commanding” attributable only to real persons. Second, he managed to reconcile the unitary nature of sovereignty with the plurality of its uses, mainly through a conception of the dual, vertical separation of functions, which implied degrees rather than kinds of sovereignty. While absolute sovereignty belongs to God, Locke argued, relative sovereignty, separated into “potential” and “actual” sovereignty, is vested in the community on the grounds of the Edenic testament with God. The community, established by a fundamental, single contract, is divided into “society”—to fulfil the function of legislation, which signifies the potential sovereignty of the community, so as to cultivate common law, and into “government”—to undertake the execution, which signifies the actual sovereignty of the king, of common law so as to procure common wealth.

Notes

1. William Graham, English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine (London: E. Arnold, 1899), 50.

2. Leo Strauss indicated the ways Hobbes departed from the Aristotelian vision in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), viii, 33, 79, 133, 136, 139, 166.

3. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44.

4. John Dunn speaks of the significance of his new approach to Locke as follows: “The most important single novelty in the account is probably the stress on the theoretical centrality of Locke's religious preoccupations throughout the work. Many elements of the interpretation have been perceived by others at some point.” John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xi, xii.

5. Winthrop S. Hudson, “John Locke, Heir of Puritan Political Theorists,” in Calvinism And The Political Order, Essays Prepared For The Woodrow Wilson Lectureship of The National Presbyterian Center, Washington, DC, ed. George L. Hunt (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1965), 108–29, 210–13; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in Its Intellectual Setting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kim Ian Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, IA: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004); Joanne E. Tetlow, The Theological Context of John Locke's Political Thought (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 2006); Waldron, God, Locke and Equality.

6. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor, 1965, 310, 318, 351 (hereafter cited in the text as TTG). On Locke's considerable intellectual debt to Hooker, see Alexander S. Rosenthal, Crown under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism (Lanham, KY: Lexington, 2008), 143–306, esp. 233–35.

7. On the “truly traditional” and “retraditional,” by which we here characterize Locke's thought, see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 219. According to Geertz, in truly political systems the participants act as men of untaught feelings. But when its credentials come into question, the search for constructing arguments for tradition flourishes: “To the degree that such appeals are successful they bring, not a return to naïve traditionalism, but ideological retraditionalization.”

8. Glenn A. Moots, “Locke Ascending,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40.3 (Spring 2007): 482–86; Alex Scott Tuckness, “The Coherence of a Mind: John Locke and the Law of Nature,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 37.1 (January 1999): 73–90.

9. C. B. Macpherson, “The Social Bearing of Locke's Political Theory,” The Western Political Quarterly 7.1 (March 1954): 1–22; Eva J. Ross “The Social Theory of Jean Bodin,” The American Catholic Sociological Review 7.4 (December 1946): 267–72.

10. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, 2d ed. (1922; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

11. Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Political Thought of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Also, Stuart Sim and David Walker, The Discourse of Sovereignty, Hobbes To Fielding: The State of Nature and the Nature of the State (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003).

12. Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).

13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York: Pocket Books, 1967), 93.

14. Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law, trans. Thomas Nugent (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty, 2006), 92–103.

15. J. R. Milton, “Locke, Medicine and the Mechanical Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9.2 (June 2001): 221–43.

16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 107, 222.

17. Spiros Zodhiates, ed., The Complete WordStudy Dictionary: New Testament (Chattanooga, TN: AMG, 1992), 911.

18. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury, 1975). 16.

19. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003).

20. John Wiedhofft Gough, The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957); Harro Hopfl and Martyn P. Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in Political Thought,” The American Historical Review 84.4 (October 1979): 919–44; Daniel J. Elazar, “The Political Theory of Covenant: Biblical Origins and Modern Developments,” Publius 10.4 (Autumn 1980): 3–30.

21. Francis Oakley, “Legitimation by Consent: The Question of Medieval Roots,” Viator 14 (1983): 335.

22. Daniel Engster, Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 4–12, 158.

23. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).

24. Hobbes, Leviathan, 237.

25. Michael J. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: The Papal Monarchy with Augustinus Triumphus and the Publicists Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

26. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “On the Impersonality of the Modern State: A Comment on Machiavelli's Use of Stato,” The American Political Science Review 77.4 (December 1983): 849–57; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7.1 (March 1999): 1–29.

27. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 93.

28. Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, 127.

29. Anne H. Soukhanov, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 3d ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 2121.

30. Herbert H. Rowen, “‘L’Etat c’est a Moi’: Louis XIV and the State,” French Historical Studies 2.1 (Spring 1961): 83–98.

31. Léon Duguit, “The Law and the State,” Harvard Law Review 31.1 (November 1917): 1–185.

32. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty, 1998), 16.

33. Martin H. Redish and Elizabeth J. Cisar, “‘If Angels Were to Govern’: The Need for Pragmatic Formalism in Separation of Powers Theory,” Duke Law Journal 41.3 (December 1991): 449–506.

34. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 138.

35. Laslett, Locke, TTG, 411.

36. See, Brian Tierney, “Medieval Rights and Powers: On a Recent Interpretation,” History of Political Thought 21.2 (2000): 327–38; also Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 18.

37. John P. Humphrey, “The Theory of the Separation of Functions,” The University of Toronto Law Journal 6.2 (1946): 331–60; Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 16.

38. James T. Brand, “Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers,” Oregon Law Review 12.3 (April 1933): 175–200; Laurence Claus, “Montesquieu's Mistakes and the True Meaning of Separation,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 25.3 (2005): 419–51.

39. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 93.

40. Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law, 310.

41. Rosenthal, Crown under Law, 110, 220.

42. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 30.

43. See also Walton H. Hamilton, “Property—According to Locke,” The Yale Law Journal 41.6 (April 1932): 867.

44. Elmer T. Gelinas, “Ius and Lex in Thomas Aquinas,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 15 (Fall 1970): 155–56.

45. Peter Manicas, “Two Concepts of Justice,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4.2 (August 1977): 99–121; William Mathie, “Political and Distributive Justice in the Political Science of Aristotle,” The Review of Politics 49.1 (Winter 1987): 59–84.

46. Suri Ratnapala, “John Locke's Doctrine of the Separation of Powers: A Re-evaluation,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 38 (1993): 189–220; Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 33.

47. John Wiedhofft Gough, John Locke's Political Philosophy: Eight Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 96.

48. Ratnapala, “John Locke's Doctrine of the Separation of Powers,” 197.

49. For elaboration on this, see Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, 148–56; Pasquale Pasquino, “Locke on King's Prerogative,” Political Theory 26.2 (April 1998): 198–208; and Clement Fatovic, “Constitutionalism and Contingency: Locke's Theory of Prerogative,” History of Political Thought 25.2 (Summer 2004)): 276–97.

50. For elaboration on this, see David McCabe, “John Locke and the Argument against Strict Separation,” The Review of Politics 59.2 (Spring 1997): 233–58; and Ratnapala, “John Locke's Doctrine of the Separation of Powers.”

51. Ratnapala, “John Locke's Doctrine of the Separation of Powers,” 202, 205.

52. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 33–34.

53. Also Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 34.

54. Ratnapala, “John Locke's Doctrine of the Separation of Powers,” 204–5.