The American Revolution changed the world.. One of the individuals who contributed to this epic event was 17th century political theorist John Locke. Locke is still credited for framing the ideas that men have Natural Rights and that these inviolable rights include Life, Liberty, and Property.
Born in England in 1632, Locke lived through two civil wars in which Parliamentarian armies forced England’s authoritarian Stuart monarchs to obey England’s common law. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke presented the political argument for majoritarian government and arguably opened the modern political age in which government by the will of the people replaced government by hereditary hierarchy.
While it is commonly believed that Locke named “Life, Liberty, and Property” as inherent individual rights, he never said this. Sam Adams did! In his “Report of the Committee of Correspondence,” which he submitted to the Boston Town Meeting on 20 November 1772, Adams said:
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
In fact, Locke’s idea was entirely different. Locke agreed with Thomas Hobbes who defined natural right as “the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature.” Hobbes went on to explain that natural right is governed by natural law which is Moral Law. For Hobbes natural law was “the Law of the Gospel.” Locke showed that he accepted this by observing in Paragraph 6 of his Second Treatise that “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
The truth beyond the common knowledge is that “Life, Liberty, and Property,” taken together, were the common good Locke claimed individuals would enjoy if they contracted one with another and abides together in peace according to the terms of their “social contract.” Political philosophers and commentators since Locke have mostly repeated Adams while ignoring Locke on these seminal points. Because they have regularly made this mistake, Locke’s Second Treatise tends to be remembered for concepts of Natural Law and Natural Rights that were Sam Adams’s rather than Locke’s. In reality, Locke’s treatise was an argument for majoritarian government, not individual rights.
Influence on Colonial Minds
Sam Adams was the driving force behind the “patriotic movement,” which he conceptualized, organized, and directed between 1764 and 1772. During these years, patriots used the maxim “no taxation without representation.” Embedded in this powerful phrase were the ideas that the King’s American subjects had the same constitutional rights as their cousins in England and that Parliament should recognize them and treat American colonials accordingly.
As it happens, Sam Adams was also the foremost Locke scholar in the American colonies, having received a Masters degree from Harvard College in 1743 for a thesis in which he presented his analysis of Locke’s “Right of Resisting.” Having studied Locke’s Second Treatise, he was familiar with Locke’s social contract. He was also prepared to modify Locke’s concept of the common good to fit the new political initiative he unveiled in 1772. By then, he had decided that the King’s American colonies should have their own governments and make their own laws. It was therefore pointless to criticize Parliament for abusing of the constitutional rights of the King George III’s American subjects.
Instead, in 1772, Adams began laying the foundations for a new political movement. He did this by unveiling a new political logic based on Natural Law and the inherent rights of mankind. His report to the Boston Town Meeting on 20 November 1772 contained the key idea that “Life, Liberty, and Property” are the inviolable rights of every man.
In the months after that, he transformed Locke’s Right of Resisting into what is known today as “the Right to Revolution.” Patriotic scribes eagerly invoked this right to justify American independence. Thomas Jefferson made himself a national hero and a social visionary by incorporating it into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson knew so little about it that in the letter he wrote to a Henry Lee in1825 he denied that he had copied Sam Adams’s faux Lockean Right to Revolution from Locke’s Second Treatise.
Locke’s Social Contract
Locke based his argument for majoritarian government on the idea that at some imaginary moment in time, men abandoned the executive powers they exercised in the dangerous state of nature, being their inherent right to preserve themselves by all means available, and agreed amongst themselves to abide together under the terms of their “social contract.” America’s patriots said little about this Lockean fiction because it was tangential to the rights and grievances which formed the backbone of the patriotic movement. The same was not the case for Sam Adams’s faux Lockean Right to Revolution, which justified political independence.
America’s Rebels
The insurgent who orchestrated the American Revolution, men like Sam and John Adams, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee, were more than Lockean “malcontents”. They risked their lives, their liberty, and their estates to create a new nation whose laws would one day be based on “the will of the people.” They changed the world when they won to War for American Independence.
John Locke’s Legacy
Was John Locke a guiding light for the insurgents who orchestrated the American Revolution? Remember: the concepts of Natural Law and Natural Right did not become central to the patriotic cause until its leaders began laying the groundwork for political independence in 1773. Nor were the concepts they invoked, including the so-called Right to Revolution, Locke’s. They resembled his ideas, but they were actually created by Sam Adams. This in mind, when we ask whether John Locke was a guiding light for America’s patriots, the best answer is: It depends on what you mean.
James C Thompson’s “The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People“ is groundbreaking, offering a new perspective on the American Revolution. The book provides a new take on history, emphasizing the importance of intellectual exchanges in shaping our present.
