There is an increasingly prevalent view among some contemporary Locke scholars that Locke's political philosophy is thoroughly subordinate to theological imperatives, centered on natural law. This article challenges this point of view by critically evaluating this interpretation of Locke as advanced by some of its leading proponents. This interpretation perceives natural law as the governing principle of Locke's political philosophy, and the primary source of transition and reconciliation within it. This article advances a very different reading of Locke's political philosophy, (...) perceiving within it competing imperatives that cannot be subsumed by natural law, and are, in some respects, at odds with it. In this way, the article shows how the “theological” interpretation of Locke's political philosophy, centred on natural law, fails to account for some of that philosophy's fundamental features, and is unable to explain some of its key outcomes, with the result that this interpretation falls short of its critical ambitions. (shrink)

Locke bases his moral and political philosophy on his doctrine of the ‘law of nature’. Scholars have debated the content and grounding of this law and its relationship to Christian theology. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s content are traceable to an unclear grammatical construction in a crucial passage of the Treatises of Government, which can be resolved by following out a related set of arguments in that work. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s grounding can then be (...) resolved by the hypothesis, strongly supported by textual evidence, that Locke relies tacitly on the reasoning of a parallel passage in Hobbes. Lockean natural law rests on neither atheistic nor specifically Christian premises but on a hypothetical natural theology. Locke’s conclusions from that natural theology represent an attempt to follow out Hobbesian logic while also tightening it up on one important point on which Hobbes himself appears to vacillate. (shrink)