Ellen Meiksins Wood - Locke Against Democracy Consent Representation and Suffrage in Two Treatises

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:
CONSENT, REPRESENTATION AND SUFFRAGE IN THE

TWO TREATISES
Ellen Meiksins Wood*
Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a

while we had John Locke, the bourgeois thinker.1 Now we seem to be in a
Locke-as-radical-democrat phase. Locke-the-bourgeois had problems of its
own, but a radically democratic Locke not just the old Locke as liberal
democrat but Locke as quasi-Leveller strains the interpretative imagination
more than most; yet in recent years, several different kinds of argument have
been advanced in support of it, both textual and contextual.
The most effective argument has proceeded by situating Locke in the context
of radical Whig politics in the 1670s and 80s, the struggles over religious
toleration and the royal succession, in particular the Exclusion Crisis of
167981.2 This contextual argument has been accompanied by various textual
interpretations having to do with Lockes conceptions of property, consent,
representation, the right of revolution and natural law. Among other things,
these are supposed to show that while Locke had nothing explicit to say about
the extent of the franchise, the weight of evidence suggests that he would have
supported a fairly wide franchise, perhaps even something like the (almost)
manhood suffrage advocated by the Levellers (at least according to some, and
probably the most convincing, interpretations of their ideas3). Most recently, in
these pages, Martin Hughes, building on the work of James Tully and Richard
* I would like to thank my colleague, George Comninel, for several discussions which helped me
a great deal in clarifying my thoughts about Lockes doctrine of consent, and Neal Wood for his
comments and suggestions.
1
Neal Wood discusses some of the confusions surrounding the interpretation of Locke as a
bourgeois theorist, especially those arising from the tendency to identify capitalism with the
bourgeoisie, an urban class of merchants and industrialists, at the expense of the agrarian
capitalism which was evolving in Lockes day, in Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 1520.
2
Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government (Princeton,
1986). Ashcraft provides a more detailed textual analysis in Lockes Two Treatises of Government
(London, 1987). For more philosophical arguments in support of an egalitarian Locke, especially
in relation to his views on natural law, see James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and
his Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980).
See in particular Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Political Theory of the Levellers: Putney, Property
and Professor Macpherson, Political Studies, 24, no. 4 (December 1976), pp. 397422.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIII. No. 4. Winter 1992

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
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E.M. WOOD
Ashcraft in particular, has pushed the argument as far as it can probably go.4 His
argument on taxation and suffrage has provided a motivation here for a wider
exploration of Lockes views on representation, consent and the franchise.
I
Consent and Representation
Some Preliminary Observations on the Context of Lockes Thought
The argument that follows here will be largely concerned with interpreting the
text of Lockes Two Treatises and especially his theories of consent, representation and property, as they affect the question of the franchise. The object
is not to replace a contextual with a purely textual reading. If anything, an
understanding of the texts could benefit from an expansion of the relevant
context, beyond the largely episodic focus of Richard Ashcrafts Revolutionary
Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government. It is, for example, very
difficult to appreciate the political role of someone like Lockes mentor,
Shaftesbury, without understanding the conditions of English agrarian capitalism, the configuration of property relations and the economic practices associated with it.5 But for the limited purposes of the present argument, we can take
as given Ashcrafts account of Lockes association with radicals in the political
4
Martin Hughes, Locke on Taxation and Suffrage, History of Political Thought, XI (1990),
pp. 42342.
The term agrarian capitalism has been used to describe the distinctive system of social property
relations in early modern England, increasingly characterized by the so-called triad of landlord,
capitalist tenant and wage-labourer. English tenants on economic leases were uniquely subject to
the imperatives of the market, to competitive pressures which compelled them to increase productivity by innovation, specialization and accumulation. Since many landlords derived their wealth
from this kind of economic rent, they too had incentives to encourage improvement, in a manner
quite unlike the traditional rentier. These distinctive agrarian relations had set in train a dynamic
of self-sustaining economic growth (which made possible the development of industrial capitalism)
with no historical precedent, and there was nothing quite comparable to it elsewhere in Europe.
This, incidentally, also puts in question the argument, advanced by several commentators, that
the relevant category in dealing with Locke is not capitalism but mercantilism. To many
historians, mercantilism is in any case a dubious category; but to treat it, especially in the English
context, as some kind of mid-point between feudalism and capitalism is especially problematic. If
mercantilism is a meaningful category at all, as an economic system distinct from both feudalism
and capitalism, then it applies to a case like France where it is associated with absolutism, which
has its own distinctive economic logic based not simply on the states interference in and regulation
of trade but on the function of the state as an instrument of appropriation, a form of politically
constituted property, through (among other things) the tax/office nexus. In England, a very different
economic logic is already in play in the relevant period, the role of the state notwithstanding. This
may not be full-blown capitalism. It certainly is not modern industrial capitalism. But it is an
economy with a new and distinctive systemic logic which justifies the by now conventional
designation, agrarian capitalism. For a discussion of the distinctive property relations of agrarian
capitalism in early modern England in contrast to other European countries, see Robert Brenner,
The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure
and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge, 1985), especially pp. 299317. See also Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism.
659
struggles of the 1670s and 80s. We can also accept that some of Lockes
political theory can be read in the context of the Exclusion Crisis. It need only
be demonstrated, as a preface to considering his political ideas, that Lockes
active association with the radical Whig politics of his day is compatible with
a reading of his political theory as undemocratic.
Richard Ashcrafts contextual argument is based on a detailed account of
Shaftesburys and Lockes active association with radical politics in the 1670s
and 80s. Although he is careful not to make excessive claims about Shaftesburys political commitments on the basis of his tactical alliance with political
radicals, the implication throughout his book is that, at least in Lockes case,
such an association bespeaks a fundamental sympathy with them. Indeed,
without that assumption, however convincing Ashcrafts evidence of Lockes
association with radicals may be, the force of his contextual argument in
supporting the contention that Locke himself was a political radical would be
considerably weakened. Martin Hughes, drawing on Ashcraft, makes the case
unambiguously. Faced with evidence that Locke and his mentor Shaftesbury
might have been inclined towards a restricted franchise, Hughes suggests that
any concessions made by them on questions like the franchise were simply a
matter of expediency. [N]o explanation for Lockes association with the
radicals is available other than a degree of sympathy on his part with their
ideas.6 Any departure from these sympathies must, then, be attributed to the
tactical requirements of appeasing conservative allies.
But another explanation is indeed available, an explanation no more speculative than the assumption that association testifies to sympathy, an explanation
far more consistent with everything we know about Shaftesburys career and,
as will be argued here, with Lockes political ideas.7 Shaftesburys Whigs were
not the first non-democratic forces in England willing to risk an alliance (which
they later abandoned or betrayed) especially with London radicals for the
purpose of mobilizing a popular force against the Crown.8 A characteristic
pattern of mobilization and exploitation of the multitude, followed by reversion
to the principles of oligarchy at moments of aristocratic ascendancy, can be
traced from before the Civil War (and as one of its immediate causes) through
the crises of the 1680s and beyond, to the manipulation of the crowd and popular riots by aristocratic opponents of various administrations throughout the
eighteenth century.
Hughes, Locke, p. 431.
For a discussion of Shaftesburys career and its relation to Lockes political theory, see David
McNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First
Whigs, History of Political Thought, X (1989), especially pp. 1825.
The repeated pattern of alliances between the propertied classes and radicals in seventeenthcentury England is discussed in the Postscript to Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution:
Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and Londons Overseas Traders, 15501653 (Cambridge
and Princeton, 1992).
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E.M. WOOD
Indeed, there were what might be called deep structural reasons for this
repetitive pattern in English political history. The English ruling class, more
than any other in Europe at that time, as the most completely demilitarized
aristocracy and in the most centralized state in Europe, was obliged to seek
alternatives to the private armies of traditional aristocracies to support its
rebellions against the Crown. Some aristocrats were more cautious than others,
especially after the experience of the Civil War; but Shaftesburys readiness to
take this dangerous route was not inconsistent with the undemocratic bent
displayed, both early and late in his career, in everything from his earlier
defences of the House of Lords to the later proposals for reform of the franchise
commonly attributed to him.9
The Context Continued: The Question of the Franchise
Manipulation of the franchise was one of the principal means of establishing
tactical alliances. Here, for example, is how one historian has summarized the
period between the Civil War and the Exclusion Crisis, starting with the gentrys
efforts to expand the electorate in franchise disputes in 16401:
Whether obstructing a suspected threat from the Crown at a national level,
or for their own local advantage, they [the gentry in their collective
political capacity in the House] were prepared to employ the commons
for their own ends. In this, they acted in much the same way as they did
in the other main field where the commons were able to express themselves, in riots. There too, the gentry were prepared to encourage the
commons to act in order to resist Crown exploitation, in the Fens and the
South-West, and equally they often stirred up popular action against local
gentry rivals. But the decisive factor here is the strength of the relative
threats. Before the war, the propertied classes, with occasional exceptions, do not seem to have been excessively frightened of the threat from
below, whereas there was often considerable disquiet about the activities
of the Crown. The events of the years 164260 reversed that estimate,
and a toughening of the attitude of the gentry became visible . . . and the
Cavalier Parliament proceeded to overturn previous expansionist principles on the franchise . . . The horrors of the revolutionary decades were
only overlooked when in the Exclusion Crisis at the end of Charles IIs
reign the danger from above once again appeared to outweigh that from
below and the Commons returned, if briefly, to their pre-war position of
espousing the rights of the meaner sort in order to defend their own
9
Shaftesbury proposed to eliminate anomalies, to enfranchise newer corporations and disenfranchise rotten boroughs, thus extending the franchise as it were horizontally, while rendering it less
socially democratic by setting a fairly high property qualification for the Parliamentary franchise
(200) and introducing new, very high, property qualifications (10,000) for membership in
Parliament. See David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford, 2nd edn., 1956), Vol. 2,
pp. 4812.
661
liberties and privileges. The commons were in effect being politically

exploited by the gentry in parliament.10
After 1689, Whig Parliaments decided time and time again in favour of a
narrow franchise.11
This history provides the context in which the Exclusion elections, which
play such a central role in Ashcrafts argument, must be seen. Ashcraft argues
that the failure of the Whigs to pursue franchise reform (and, by extension,
Lockes failure explicitly to advocate a democratic reform of the franchise) does
not signify a lack of commitment to a fairly wide suffrage. Their silence can be
explained by the simple fact that the franchise was already widely exercised in
the seventeenth century. Indeed, the late seventeenth century was a high-water
mark of democratic participation, not achieved again until the mid-nineteenth
century.12
But while the franchise in the seventeenth century may have been unusually
wide, it was not uniformly so. As we have seen, it was certainly not so consistent
and uncontested that no systematic comment was necessary from Whig
politicians or from Locke. If their silence tells us anything, it may simply be
that they subscribed to the opportunistic manipulation of the electorate
described by Derek Hirst, that their preferred position was a narrower franchise,
closer to the undemocratic end of the existing spectrum of opinion, and that
they favoured an extended franchise only in moments of crisis when tactical
considerations required them to exploit the commons for their immediate
political purposes. Nor was Shaftesburys strategy during the Exclusion Crisis
inconsistent with the narrower franchise advocated in the proposal for franchise
reform attributed to him or, after his death, by victorious Whig regimes once
their revolutionary objectives had been realized.
10
Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting under the Early Stuarts
(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 1912. Ashcraft seems to ignore the fluctuations described here by Hirst.
So, for example, in a paragraph devoted to how widespread the practice of voting was in the
seventeenth century, he lists various towns in which a fairly wide franchise existed, as if these
conditions applied to the seventeenth century in general, citing Hirst as confirmation (Revolutionary
Politics, p. 148). Yet Hirsts list refers specifically to 1641, a high point in the cycles he describes,
after the Long Parliament had extended the franchise to an unusual degree and before the
contractions introduced soon thereafter, not to mention the restrictions reimposed (after a brief
reversion in 1659) at the Restoration. Cromwell, for example, set a high property qualification
200 in real or personal property which meant that the franchise, while in some respects fairly
distributed, according to J.H. Plumb, was less, far less, generously interpreted than before the civil
war, keeping it firmly in the hands of the propertied classes (J.H. Plumb, The Growth of the
Electorate in England from 16001715, Past and Present, 45 (1969), p. 108). The wide franchise
proposed by the Levellers, of course, made both Cromwell and Ireton wince with horror (ibid.,
p. 107). In the spectrum from Cromwell to the Levellers (even at their most pragmatically
conservative moments), Shaftesburys 200 franchise puts him squarely on Cromwells side.
11
J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 16751725 (Harmondsworth, 1969),
p. 102.
12
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 166.

662
E.M. WOOD
Another point must be made here about the electoral alliance at the core of
Ashcrafts argument. He suggests that Lockes theory of property can be
situated in the context of Whig electoral strategy in the Exclusion elections. In
their effort to sustain an alliance between the country gentry on the one hand
(while driving a wedge between them and the larger landed aristocracy) and on
the other hand the urban radicals, the Whigs were obliged both to satisfy the
more democratic aspirations of the latter while disavowing levelling tendencies in order to reassure the former; and in this delicate balancing act, the
question of property naturally loomed large.
Ashcraft treats the chapter on property in the Second Treatise as one of the
most radical critiques of the landowning aristocracy produced during the last
half of the seventeenth century.13 In the context of electoral politics, this
critique, based on Lockes advocacy of industry and improvement, can,
argues Ashcraft, be construed as an appeal to the industrious sections of the
nation: merchants, tradesmen, artisans and shopkeepers, as well as yeoman
farmers and the gentry, as opposed to the idle, luxurious, and useless large
landowners who allowed their property to go to waste.14 While Ashcraft
qualifies his remarks about Lockes attack on the landed aristocracy by pointing
out that it applies only to the idle and useless members of that class, his
analysis is clearly predicated on a more or less systematic division between a
(largely?) useless aristocracy and a generally industrious class of small
landowners, the latter constituting a more natural constituency for the Whigs if
only the smaller gentry could be alienated from the aristocracy, as well as from
the Crown and the Anglican Church.15
Yet this picture of English society in the late seventeenth century, and of the
social divisions which the Whigs sought to exploit, is misleading from the start.
It seems to be based less on the evidence of English history than on the
conventional opposition between a passive, parasitic aristocracy and a forwardlooking, productive bourgeoisie. No such schema, even if the bourgeoisie is
supplemented by an industrious rural class of small proprietors, can do justice
to the realities of English agrarian capitalism. The culture of improvement
was already well established among large sections of the landed aristocracy.
Shaftesbury, the model Whig aristocrat, was himself a landowner of this kind.
It is not at all clear that industry in this sense was better represented among
the smaller gentry than in the larger aristocracy; and the pressures on yeomentenants to improve typically came from such landlords. In fact, if the very
existence of smaller proprietors was, as Ashcraft points out, threatened by large
landowners, then it was in large part because those landowners were engaged
in improvement, whether on their own or through their tenants, by means,
among other things, of enclosure and engrossment and by making less productive properties economically unviable in a competitive setting. Nor, for that
13
Ibid., p. 273.
14
Ibid., p. 244.
15
Ibid., p. 243.
663
matter, were landed aristocrats less productive and industrious than the large
old company merchants of London, who had so often supported the Crown
against Parliament.16 In the context of Englands growing agrarian capitalism,
there is nothing in Lockes chapter on property that could not represent the
interests of a great improving landlord like Shaftesbury, and there is nothing
in it that bespeaks a brief for small proprietors and labourers against the landed
aristocracy.
There will be more in what follows about Lockes theory of property, his
commitment to improvement and industry. For the moment, the point is
simply this: nothing in Whig electoral politics during the Exclusion Crisis nor
in the political alliance with radical elements precludes a fundamental preference for a restricted franchise. Shaftesburys political career as a whole, together
with his known and explicit convictions, argues in favour of such a preference,
and the following discussion is intended to demonstrate that Lockes political
theory is, at minimum, consistent with it too. On the connection between
Lockes political associations and his sympathies, it would be just as plausible
to reverse Hughes argument: if there is anything in Shaftesburys political
practice or in Lockes political theory that suggests an opening towards democracy (and it will be argued in what follows that there is very little of that in the
Two Treatises), it is this, and not more conservative positions, that represents
a tactical concession.
Lockes Doctrine of Consent
In the end, everything depends on what Locke means by consent and what
conditions must be met to satisfy the requirements of government by consent.
Who gives consent and how, and, in particular, does it imply the right to vote?
Interpretations of Lockes doctrine have been legion, and it is unlikely that any
interpretation will ever dispose of all the ambiguities and inconsistencies in his
vague and unsystematic references to consent, tacit and express. The
argument that follows, while it cannot pretend to tie up all the loose ends, is
based on the conviction that Locke-the-radical-democrat is even more untidy.
One point needs to be stressed at the outset. The notion of consent has
historically been so capacious that it has been able to accommodate everything
from absolutism to democracy. At one extreme, there have been doctrines of
consent that subject every individual, without condition, to some notional
original founding agreement on behalf of a mystical community to which he
(always he), like all generations before and after him, belongs. This kind of
doctrine is completely compatible with absolutism.
At the other extreme there is a democratic doctrine which denies that any
individual can be bound by any prior agreement, made on his behalf as part of
a corpus mysticum, and that he must have the right to give his own active and
continuing consent to the acts of government, in the form of the franchise.
Between these extremes lie doctrines in which the original act of consent is
16
See Brenner, Merchants, passim.

664
E.M. WOOD
conditional, in the sense that powers originally alienated may be reclaimed in

moments of crisis and tyrannical power. In such doctrines, the notion of consent
implies a right of resistance but has no bearing on the right to vote. Typically
(as in the case of the French monarchomach tracts) the right, indeed the duty,
of resistance belongs not to individual citizens but to corporate bodies, officers
and lesser magistrates: nobles, municipal officials, councils and estates.
Anti-absolutist such doctrines certainly are, but not particularly democratic,
having more to do with defending the independent powers of aristocrats and
municipal notables against a centralizing monarchy than with the extension of
political rights to the common people.
It was in England that such corporate conceptions of the polity had been, by
Lockes time, most powerfully challenged and that a completely new conception of individual and continuous consent had emerged, notably in Leveller
ideas advanced during the Civil War. With this new doctrine on the table,
advocates of less democratic forms in England were obliged to conduct their
arguments on a different terrain. Even a defender of absolutism like Hobbes felt
compelled in the Leviathan to construct his case on the basis of the doctrine of
consent in its most radical form. It no longer seemed adequate to invoke a corpus
mysticum on whose behalf political powers had been unconditionally alienated.
An airtight case for absolutism could be constructed only by demonstrating
that every individual had actually consented to or authorized it.17
In Lockes time a very wide spectrum of ideas on consent was on display.
Among the most important, certainly for Locke, is that of Richard Hooker, who
conjures up some kind of mystical community to which every individual
belongs and whose prior act of submission is binding on future generations. In
a passage quoted approvingly by Locke, which Hughes cites as evidence of
Lockes democratic inclinations, Hooker writes:
For any prince or potentate to exercise [the power of making laws] not
by commission from God or else by authority derived at the first from
their consent upon whose persons they impose laws is no better than
tyranny . . . And to be commanded we do consent when that Society,
whereof we be a part, hath at any time before consented, without revoking
the same after by the like universal agreement.18
In the course of the same passage (in words not quoted by Locke, though
their fundamental meaning is contained in the passage which he does quote, to
the effect that we do consent when that Society, whereof we be a part, hath at
any time before consented . . .), Hooker writes:
17
David Wootton has given a persuasive explanation of Hobbess theory of authorization as a

response to radical conceptions of consent in his Introduction to Divine Right and Democracy
(Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 567.
18
Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I (1594), Ch. x, section 9, quoted by Locke in a note to
Second Treatise, para. 134. Hughes slightly abbreviate[s] Lockes quotation from Hooker, leaving
out the rather significant sentence which explains that we consent when that Society, whereof we
be a part, hath at any time before consented. Hughes, Locke, p. 437 and note 40.
665
Wherefore as any mans deed past is good as long as himself continueth;

so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence
standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because
corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and
they in their successors do live still.
And in the preceding paragraph:
As in parliaments, councils, and the like assemblies, although we be not
personally ourselves present, nothwithstanding our assent is by reason of
other agents there in our behalf. And what we do by others, no reason but
that it should stand as our deed, no less effectually to bind us than if
ourselves had done it in person. In many things assent is given, they that
give it not imagining they do so, because the manner of their assenting is
not apparent.
Hookers intention may not have been to defend royal absolutism at least,
he was opposed to rule by the arbitrary will of one man, without known laws
but his notion of consent is perfectly compatible with absolute monarchy.
His first example of cases in which men give consent not imagining they do
so is precisely this: when an absolute monarch commandeth his subjects that
which seemeth good in his own discretion, hath not his edict the force of law
whether they approve or dislike it?19 The other two major forms of consent
available to Locke were Hobbess theory of authorization in defence of
absolutism, and the Levellers democratic theory which tended to associate
consent with the franchise.
Where, then, did Locke situate himself on this spectrum? Hughes, and other
defenders of the radical Locke like Ashcraft and Tully, would place him at, or
close to, the Leveller pole. But two points in particular argue against this
interpretation: first, that Locke associates himself with Hookers doctrine of the
corpus mysticum; and second, that his theory of tacit consent breaks the
connection which the Levellers had established between the obligation to obey
government and the right of consent in the form of the franchise.
Let us take these two points in turn. There can be no doubt that Lockes
invocation of Hooker is significant. Any interpretation of his theory of consent
must take into account the fact that he aligns himself with that part of Hookers
doctrine which stipulates that to be commanded we do consent when that
Society, whereof we be a part, hath at any time before consented, without
revoking the same after by the like agreement. This conception of consent is,
on the face of it, undemocratic in its presumption that an individual can be
construed as having consented without giving any overt sign of agreement and
that he can be bound by agreements in which he played no part. Indeed, there
is no reason why even an open objection could not be construed as consent (as
Hookers remarks on absolute monarchy suggest), as long as the objector
remains part of that Society which has previously consented, and in the
19
Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I, Ch. x, section 9.

666
E.M. WOOD
absence of any universal consent to revoke the original agreement. This is

consistent with the most undemocratic ideas of virtual representation (about
which more later) and argues strongly against the association of representation
with the franchise.
Locke, however, was clearly not prepared to countenance absolute monarchy.
He therefore was obliged to consider more closely the terms of the original
agreement which were to remain binding on future generations, and to attach
conditions to it that would preclude absolute power in a way that Hooker had
failed to do. Furthermore, in the wake of the Levellers, Locke like Hobbes
felt compelled to proceed not simply from the corpus mysticum but also from
a notion of individual consent. In the conditions of post-revolutionary England,
it was no longer enough, as it had been for the Huguenots in France, to assert
the corporate privileges and independent powers of the ruling classes against
the Crown. In any case, Locke clearly saw the advantages of individual consent
in challenging the claims of the monarchy, and especially in defending the more
radical Whig position which was prepared to situate the right of resistance not
simply in Parliament but in some broader and more socially inclusive category
of People outside Parliament.20
So Locke set himself a double task: to devise a theory that would unequivocally rule out royal absolutism but to do so in a way that would foreclose
more democratic options, a theory of individual consent that would make the
strongest case for the right of resistance without carrying the dangers which
others notably Filmer, but also Cromwell and Ireton in the Putney Debates
had warned against in their responses to radical doctrines.21
Here a distinction must be made between Lockes conception of consent as
it relates to the origins of civil society, and his views on consent as it relates to
the ongoing legitimacy of government and the obligation of people to obey it.
No conclusions about the latter can be safely drawn from the former. It is the
first question that concerns Locke in his effort to rule out absolutism. The
express consent which individuals gave in the original act of foundation, the
consent at the first from which the authority of government ultimately derives,
was not an agreement to just any kind of government. This doctrine of consent
is meant to establish what it is that any individual, in future generations, can be
construed as having consented to; and there are limits. It is this that distinguishes
Locke most clearly from Hobbes.
But beyond that, Locke seems not at all keen to assert the right of individuals
to renew the legitimacy of government and their obligation to obey by giving
or withholding their active and continuing consent, except in the
20
This point is discussed in Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 305 ff. Other, less radical
interpretations of Lockes views on the right of resistance are possible; but my argument does not
depend on denying him a fairly radical position on this, since the right of resistance need not have
implications for more normal political rights like the franchise. More on this later.
21
See McNally, Locke, Levellers and Liberty, for a discussion of other aspects of Lockes attempt
to deprive radical ideas of their most dangerously democratic consequences, especially in his theory
of property.
667
ambiguous sense that they can be construed as having consented without

knowing it. The original act of consent, as Locke formulates it, makes it
necessary for him to insist that nothing but express consent can make a man a
member of civil society; but express consent after the original act the
consent whereby men, as they come of age, become members of an already
existing society and accept its laws and institutions tends to be of the kind
where the manner of their assenting, to quote Hooker again, is not apparent.
In fact, Locke attacks the right of active individual consent from two
directions, by invoking Hookers notion of corporate consent and by proposing
a theory of individual consent according to which individuals can take upon
themselves the obligation to obey merely by giving tacit consent, the kind of
consent anyone gives by his mere presence in the commonwealth.22 This means
that the conditions of individual consent could be met by virtual representation.
The importance of Lockes concept of tacit consent should not be underestimated. It may never be possible to establish precisely what Locke intended
by introducing this ambiguous idea (whether, for example, it was meant to apply
specifically to foreigners23), but it has one very unambiguous consequence: in
sharp contrast to radical ideas which associated the obligation to obey with the
right to vote, Lockes theory neatly severs the connection.
The significance of his argument can be assessed by placing it against the
background of the Putney Debates in which the Levellers advanced their
argument for a more democratic franchise. It should be emphasized that, in the
debate between the Army radicals and the grandees, notably in the person of
Ireton, both sides proceeded on the assumption that consent had to do with the
franchise or, at any rate, Ireton chose to challenge the radicals on their own
terms for the purposes of this debate. His response to the Leveller demand for
a more democratic franchise, which they made on the grounds that people could
not be obliged to obey a government to which they had not themselves
consented, was not to maintain that people had somehow consented without
imagining they had done so. Nor did Ireton invoke some notion of prior consent
on behalf of a notional community. He simply insisted that people could, indeed,
be obligated to obey a government to which they had not given consent as,
for example, we expect anyone to do who breathes the air or travels the
highways of our commonwealth. It must surely be significant that Locke, citing
the very same example, argues that such people actually have consented. His
22
23
Locke, Two Treatises, II, 119.
Ashcraft suggests that tacit consent does not refer solely to foreigners, and that the distinction
between tacit and express consent cannot be reduced to any simple dichotomy, viz., landowners
v. non-landowners, property-owners v. propertyless, native-born v. aliens (Ashcraft, Lockes Two
Treatises, p. 195, note 27). I agree; but, since I have a different conception of what constitutes
membership in political society, I would attach less importance than does Ashcraft to the
absoluteness of the association of express consent with the individuals person and not with property
ownership of any type. For Ashcraft, this association apparently implies that, since the propertyless
man is capable of the express consent that makes him a member, he may have full political rights,
including the franchise. For me, the rights of membership stop short of the right to vote.
668
E.M. WOOD
criteria of consent are clearly a good deal less stringent than Iretons in the
latters opposition to the Levellers. In one clean operation, the connection
between consent and the franchise, assumed by both Ireton and the Levellers,
has been decisively broken. It must be emphasized again that Locke achieves
this effect not by invoking some mystical community but by attributing consent
to individuals.24
Richard Ashcraft has argued that Locke never dissociated himself from the
radical implications which Filmer (and, we might add, Cromwell and Ireton)
attributed to radical arguments from natural rights and consent. Filmer had
warned that any invocation of such ideas would carry the consequence of giving
political power to the proletarian rabble. Locke, argues Ashcraft, far from
disclaiming these radical consequences, almost flaunts the language of natural
rights and consent in the Second Treatise in the face of Filmers challenge on
the question of suffrage, and thus the silence of his reply to Filmer is
endowed with considerable political significance.25
It is worth observing that even Hobbes flaunts the language of natural rights
and consent in his defence of absolutism. But, in any case, is Locke really
silent, and does he really fail to disclaim the democratic consequences of
Leveller ideas on the franchise? The concept of tacit consent is enough by itself
to dissociate Locke from Leveller ideas, simply by admitting a type of consent
that carries the obligation to obey without the right to vote. The argument here
is not, like C.B. Macphersons, that the distinction between tacit and express
consent corresponds to a distinction between those who have full rights of
citizenship, notably the franchise, and those who do not. The point is rather that
Lockes idea of tacit consent dissociates consent from the franchise altogether.
Nor does the idea of express consent improve matters. Indeed, the difference
between tacit and express consent is not, on reflection, self-evident at all. What
is striking about express consent is that it too is largely tacit, and that it too has
at least as much to do with obligations as with rights. Only at the moment of
foundation is express consent a clearly overt and explicit act of agreement.
Thereafter, the express consent which alone makes a man a member of
society, and by which he takes on its obligations, also consists largely of
moments when people give consent without imagining that they do so.
Much of Lockes argument has to do with demonstrating that consent exists
where it is not apparent in particular, when a young man comes of age and
takes on the responsibilities of membership in political society, coming into his
rights and the enjoyment of his fathers possessions on the same terms as his
Father did:
24
Lockes strategy of argumentation may be different from that of Cromwells party filling in
the loopholes, as it were but in relation to this part of the Putney Debates, he seems to be less
on the Leveller side than on Cromwells.
25
Ashcraft, Lockes Two Treatises, p. 176.

669
And thus the Consent of Free-men, born under Government, which only
makes them Members of it, being given separately in their turns, as each
comes to be of Age, and not in a multitude together; People take no notice
of it, and thinking it not done at all, or not necessary, conclude they are
naturally Subjects as they are Men.26
Locke intends this argument to demonstrate, against Filmer, that the passage
of rights and responsibilities from father to son is not an expression of
patriarchal authority. No man can, by any prior agreement, bind his children
or Posterity without their own consent. But this does not alter the fact that
Locke has found another way of binding sons to the compacts of their fathers,
simply by claiming that they have indeed themselves consented, even while
thinking it not done at all.27
This argument is, to be sure, double-edged. Its primary purpose is to attack
Filmers absolutist claims by demonstrating that, where Filmer sees patriarchal
authority there is, on the contrary, individual consent. Locke is simply trying
to correct misapprehensions derived from deceptive appearances. Even where
the son appears to be taking on the commitments of his father, he has in fact
assumed them in his own right; even when people are obliged to adhere to the
conditions of a prior agreement in which they played no part, they cannot be
construed as being bound without their own consent; even where there appears
to be no consent, there is in fact consent. This certainly has the effect of refuting
Filmers assumptions about the origins and legitimacy of absolute monarchy,
but it has no democratic implications. If anything, since the conditions of
consent can so easily be met, it invites the most undemocratic assumptions
allowable within the framework of a limited, constitutional government. The
anti-absolutist and the anti-democratic are two sides of the same coin.
26
27
Express consent is sometimes identified with oaths and other explicit declarations of allegiance,
and some of the controversy surrounding Lockes views on the franchise has to do with who is in
a position to take a public oath of this kind. So an argument like that of C.B. Macpherson, who, in
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), insists that
Locke meant to exclude the propertyless on the grounds that they could not give express consent,
can be countered simply by pointing out that poor men could in various circumstances be required
to take oaths for example, as soldiers and sailors and can therefore be regarded as having, in
principle or hypothetically, given express consent. Locke refers to oaths in the Second Treatise,
62, simply in order to demonstrate that even commonwealths, by requiring no oaths of any kind
before a man has reached the age of reason, acknowledge that there is a time when Men are to
begin to act like Free Men, which means that there is no incompatability between natural freedom
and subjection to parents (ibid., 61). None of this changes the fact that no explicit act of consent
is actually required to subject men to the obligations of political society, nor does it imply that any
such explicit act even when it is real and not simply hypothetical carries with it the right to
vote. It may be worth adding that even Hobbes argued that patriarchal authority was based on
consent, which did not, in his mind, preclude the most unconditional absolutism (Hobbes,
Leviathan, Part II, ch. xx).
670
E.M. WOOD
It is worth noting that the same considerations apply to a passage, much cited
by advocates of the democratic Locke, in which he seems to identify Consent
of the People with Consent of Fathers of Families.28 Hughes, for example,
regards this as proof positive that Locke had in mind not a narrow but a
democratically inclusive definition of the People. Since the crucial issue here,
however, is not so much who constitutes the People as what rights they have,
whoever they are, we can leave aside the ambiguities that remain in the category
Fathers of Families (what, for instance, about the servant, the wage-labourer
who, Locke tells us, by entering the wage contract puts himself into the Family
of his Master?29), and consider the questions that remain even if we give the
category the widest latitude.
The relevant passage occurs in yet another attempt to refute the absolutist
assumptions of Filmer. Locke suggests that Filmer, in his account of Nimrod
as the founder of monarchy, has caught himself in a bind. The one thing this
example cannot demonstrate is the very thing Filmer wants to prove: that men
are naturally unfree, government originates in patriarchal right, and royal power
is absolute. Having suggested usurpation or election as alternatives to direct
inheritance as a means of acquiring regal authority, Filmer traps himself in a
contradiction. He concedes that Nimrod extended his patriarchal power beyond
his own family by violently usurping the powers of other Fathers of Families.
But since not all these many Fathers could have been Adams heirs, they must
have possessed their own patriarchal authority by nature rather than inheritance
which, on Filmers own account, leaves him with usurpation or election as
the only means by which their authority could have been ceded to Nimrod.
According to Filmer himself, argues Locke with heavy irony, monarchy was
apparently founded either by Tyranny and Usurpation, or Election and Consent
of Fathers of Families, which will differ very little from the Consent of the
People; so perhaps men are, after all, naturally free and legitimate government
is founded on consent.
Lockes object is to expose the contradictions in Filmers attempt to derive
absolute royal power from patriarchal right; but this does not preclude Locke
himself from arguing that men who are naturally free can establish and
consent to whatever form of government they think fit, monarchical or
otherwise, elected or not.30 Even if the example of Nimrod is not just another
28
Locke, Two Treatises, I, 148, cited by Hughes in Locke, p. 427.
29
30
At first, this included even unconditional monarchy (Two Treatises, II, 11012); but after the
Golden Age (111), men had to restrain government by law. Lockes political theory in general
implies no more than that men can never be construed as forfeiting the right to limit government
in this way. The above summary of the Nimrod example should make it clear that the opposition
of tyranny and usurpation to election and consent does not, as Ashcraft suggests (Lockes Two
Treatises, p. 212), represent Lockes account of the clear alternatives between Filmer and himself
(see Two Treatises, I, 134, for a passage quoted by Locke in which Filmer suggests Usurpation
or Election as alternatives to inheritance); nor, although election certainly bespeaks consent, is
there anything here to suggest that it is the only, or even the predominant, form of consent.
671
case of invisible consent, in which what looks like a usurpation may have been
an act of consent, it still tells us less, not more, about the political rights of
Fathers of Families whether broadly or narrowly conceived than what
is already implied in Lockes theory as a whole: that (after the Golden Age)
no government which is not subject to the rule of law can be construed as based
on consent, and that men are entitled to live under a constitutional authority,
not under an unlawful personal rule.
Beyond the act of foundation, then, consent is as likely as not to be tacit, even
when it is express. Men are obliged to adhere to the conditions of the society
of which they are members. They become members by express consent. They
give express consent merely by coming of age. The idea of express consent does
not reinstate the connection between obligation and suffrage severed by the
notion of tacit consent. Its purpose is, above all, to establish the limits of the
original act of consent which rules out royal absolutism, but implies nothing
more democratic than that.
Parliament, Representation and Legislative Power
What implications does this have for the role of Parliament and the parliamentary franchise? Does Locke say anything, in his remarks on representative and
legislative bodies, that obliges us to set aside what has been said so far about
his doctrine of consent, and to replace or supplement it with the view that, after
the original foundation of the commonwealth, consent notably to taxation
is present only when there exists a legislative assembly elected by a
democratic franchise?
There are several passages in the Second Treatise where Locke speaks of
consent as given by legislative or representative bodies chosen or appointed
by the People. None of these, however, settles the issue in favour of a wide
franchise. Quite apart from the still unresolved question of who constitutes the
People, there remain other at best ambiguities. For example, when
Locke speaks of choosing a legislative power, he often has in mind not the
election of particular members of Parliament but the original act which establishes the form of the legislative. So, in 134, he writes:
This Legislative is unalterable in the hands where the Community have
once placed it; nor can any Edict of any Body else, in what Form soever
conceived, or by what Power soever backed, have the force and obligation
of a Law, which has not its Sanction from that Legislative, which the
publick has chosen and appointed. For without this the Law could not
have that, which is absolutely necessary to its being a Law, the consent
of the Society, over whom no Body can have a power to make Laws, but
by their own consent, and by Authority received from them.
This passage suggests that consent is present not when the legislative has
been democratically elected but simply when the legislative power continues
to reside in the kind of person or institution in which it has been vested by the
672
E.M. WOOD
community. Significantly, it is at this point that Locke introduces the quotation

from Hooker, to explain what is meant by their own consent the consent
at the first which establishes the authority that binds men thereafter, in the
absence of a similarly universal agreement to revoke it.
Thus far, then, the condition that the legislative power be the one chosen and
appointed by the publick means nothing more than that the chosen institution
is still in place, and that every member of Society can be construed as having
consented to it. Lockes object here is simply to limit the rights of the Crown
to interfere with the established form of the legislative. At best, there is a
presumption in favour of the existing arrangements in England, with its mixed
constitution represented by the Crown in Parliament, an arrangement which
the King is illegally trying to breach.31
It is also clear that a fairly wide variety of legislative forms is compatible
with Lockes theory of consent. For instance, the legislative power may or may
not reside in a representative body. A law is still a law, and binding, when it is
promulgated by some other kind of legislative power, even when it resides in
a monarch, if that is where the community has vested it, and subject to the
conditions of the original agreement, which above all requires that all are
equally subject to the law, including those who legislate. Nor is such a law any
less based on consent than one enacted by a representative body.
31
Some other passages in which Locke refers to the choice, election or appointment by the people
of legislative bodies are equally inconclusive: e.g. 140 of the Second Treatise is at best ambiguous
in its reference to Representatives chosen by the people, as to whether this applies to the actual
election of representatives or the original choice of the form of the representative; 141 fairly clearly
refers to the choice of the Form of the Commonwealth and its legislative power. (I will touch
upon the very significant usages in 216 later.) In 142, Locke refers to deputies from time to time
chosen, which implies election; but since the sentence in which this phrase appears concerns (and
apparently acknowledges as legitimate) cases in which the People have not [emphasis added]
reservd any part of the Legislative to Deputies, to be from time to time chosen by themselves, it
can hardly be used as evidence that Locke had in mind only elected legislative bodies. Much the
same is true of 154 and 157. I discuss this point further in what follows. Ashcraft cites five
passages from the Second Treatise which purport to demonstrate that a well-ordered commonwealth is, by definition, one in which the lawmaking power is in the hands of an elected
representative assembly: 143, 153, 159, 213, 222 (Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 221 and
note 163). In fact, not one of these passages does so. The first three at most have to do with the
desirability of collective legislative bodies which, because they need not be always in being (as
the executive power must), will disperse when their legislative work is done and are more likely to
be subject to their own laws. It is the separability of the legislative from the executive function, the
sporadic nature of the lawmaking power and therefore the greater likelihood that legislators will
submit to their own laws which makes this arrangement desirable, without any reference to the
elective or representative character of such bodies. 213 merely describes a form of government in
which the legislative power resides in three distinct Persons, a monarch, an assembly and an
elected representative body, for the purpose of explaining in the following paragraph in what
circumstances such a government might be described as illegitimately changed. 222 describes the
conditions in which a legislative body itself can be said to have forfeited its power by a breach of
trust, and those in which the supreme Executor (in this case, clearly James II) has illegitimately
interfered with the legislative, specifically an elected one.
673
The conditions of taxation may be more stringent than those for other kinds
of enactment by a legislative power. But, while the legislative power cannot
raise taxes without eliciting the consent of the people, such consent can be
deemed to be present in something well short of a democratic polity. For
example, Locke describes cases in which the legislative power does not reside
in deputies.32 The situation he describes, where the Legislative is always in
being, or at least where the People have not reservd any part of the Legislative
to Deputies, to be chosen from time to time by themselves, fits the case of
France, where legislative power resides in a single person, the king (and
therefore is always in being, while not having been chosen this time, in the
sense of elected), but where the king is expected to seek consent to taxation
from the assembled Estates (not legislative but representative bodies, and based
on a system of corporate representation we would certainly not recognize as
democratic).
We cannot even be sure that representatives must be elected at all. The King
himself may be representative of the Commonwealth, as long as he acts not
by his own private will but according to the publick Will, that is, according
to the conditions of the original agreement, which requires him, like his subjects,
to act in accordance with the law.33 Peter Laslett, in his notes to this passage,
remarks that Representative and Representation are used in the technical Hobbesian sense here . . . though to antithetical purposes.34 This is true, but
only up to a point. Locke certainly intends this passage as a limitation, not an
authorization, of monarchical power, and in that sense his purposes are antithetical to Hobbess. At the same time, it also tells us something about the
latitude of Lockes conception of representation, which does not require the
actuality of election.
Lockes preference is certainly for a collective legislative body. When
legislative power resides in collective bodies call them Senate, Parliament,
or what you please35 there is a greater likelihood that legislators themselves
will be subject to the law; and only then are people likely to feel secure in their
property and to think themselves safely in civil society. But with his permissive
definitions of consent and representation, Lockes requirements for such a
collective legislature, and perhaps even for a representative parliament, could
be met without a democratic franchise or indeed, like the Roman Senate, without
election at all. It must also be said that, even if we interpret Locke as saying
that the right to free elections is a condition of legitimate government, we have
still to establish what this implies for the voting rights of any individual or class
of individuals.
32
33
Ibid., 151.
34
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1990), p. 368n.
35

674
E.M. WOOD
Representation and the Right to Vote

This is what Martin Hughes purports to do. He sets out to demonstrate that
Locke was, by the standards of his contemporaries, a radical democrat and
not an apologist for class rule, specifically for a property-based oligarchy
supported by a formal denial of the right of suffrage to the poor.36 His argument
hinges on Lockes views, especially in 158 of the Second Treatise, concerning
the franchise for areas or constituencies in a truly representative parliament.37
A truly representative Parliament, argues Hughes, would more equitably reflect
the distribution of taxation and, by extension, of population, among areas. He
then proceeds from the representation of areas to the franchise for individuals,
via the contention that the poor paid considerable sums in tax in Lockes time
and that his demand for parliamentary consent to taxation entailed the right of
suffrage for the poor. These arguments are supported by various subsidiary
points concerning Lockes views on enclosure and improvement, on the rights
of the poor, and on the creation of wealth by labour.
The critical problem, as Hughes conceives it, is to establish an association
between taxation and the individual franchise, first by establishing a connection
between taxation and the representation of areas, hinted at in 158 of the Second
Treatise, and then by moving from the representation of areas to an association
between tax-paying and representation of people. The association between
taxpaying and parliamentary representation for areas, he maintains, gives rise
to a second association, this time between taxpaying and voting in parliamentary
elections by individuals.38
But there remains an even more fundamental connection to be made, a
connection that Hughes clearly takes as given and on which his whole case rests
but which he makes no effort to establish. Hughes takes for granted that there
is a direct connection between consent and representation, on the one hand, and
the right to vote, on the other. There was, however, no necessary presumption,
in Lockes day or indeed long thereafter, that the right to be represented implied
the right to vote. That the connection remained to be firmly established nearly
a century later is illustrated by the debate over the Stamp Act, in which the
official argument against the colonial claim of no taxation without representation was that inhabitants of the American colonies were represented, just
as were voteless copy-holders at home or residents of disfranchised boroughs
like Manchester and Birmingham.
At best, 158 of the Second Treatise provides evidence that Locke favoured
the elimination of anomalies like a voteless Manchester and a rotten borough
like Old Sarum. But favouring the representation of a borough excluded from
the franchise only because it had not been legally incorporated by some
specified date in the distant past is a very different thing from advocating a
completely new kind of association between representation and the right to vote.
36
37
Ibid.
38
Ibid., p. 432.
675
Even if replacing Old Sarum with Manchester involved a new conception of

the relation between population and representation, this would by no means
entail anything like the qualitatively different principle that would be involved
in the enfranchisement of the copy-holder or the propertyless poor. Nothing in
158 or anywhere else demonstrates that Locke had in mind this kind of
principle. As Hughes proceeds from the representation of areas to election by
individuals, he assumes that only two moves are required: first, from taxation
to representation, and then from areas to individuals. But this entails an elision
from representation to election, without justifying the move from the enfranchisement of corporations to the enfranchisement of individuals. The argument,
in short, depends on assuming the very thing that needs to be demonstrated.
Let us grant that Locke favoured a reform of the franchise which would more
accurately reflect the contribution in taxes afforded to the public by various
areas or constituencies. That seems to be the implication of 158 (though it
needs to be stressed that nothing in this much-debated passage tells us anything
about the rights of individuals or, indeed, of social classes as distinct from
areas, constituencies or corporations). Let us grant that Locke wanted more
populated areas to be more represented (though it is not at all clear why this
has democratic implications: could not densely populated areas hitherto denied
the franchise be granted representation while Old Sarum lost its representative but still on the basis of an undemocratic franchise? Why, indeed,
not distribute the vote more equitably among areas and corporations, according
to population, while instituting an even less democratic franchise than before?
This would have been, as we have seen, precisely the effect of the proposals for
reform of the franchise attributed to Shaftesbury. Lockes oblique statements
about the franchise, with their implication that anomalies should be corrected,
could easily be accommodated by these undemocratic proposals).
Let us grant that the poor paid substantial taxes (though this is far more
problematic than Hughes allows: for example, at least in the eighteenth century,
two-thirds of the inhabitants of London were too poor to pay taxes39). Let us
even grant that the poor, according to Locke, have the right to be represented
in a way that can be construed as giving their consent to taxation, and that this
means that individuals have the right to be represented. Everything then depends
on what it means to be represented and what it means to give individual consent.
39
See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1991), p. 78. The reference here is clearly to direct taxes. The excise was, of course, a
different matter. But insofar as there existed any connection between taxation and the franchise in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, it always had reference to forms of taxation related
to property, such as rates in the scot and lot borough franchise. It would take a good deal more
argument than is offered by Hughes to demonstrate that Locke was proposing not just an extension
of the vote to all payers of property taxes but a wholly new conception of taxation, according to
which indirect taxes like customs and excise were to be treated as equivalent to direct taxes on
property. Nevertheless, my argument does not depend on the exclusion of the poor from taxation,
since there is a more fundamental issue at stake concerning any relation between taxation and the
individuals right to vote.
676
E.M. WOOD
We have already considered Lockes permissive definition of individual

consent. What, then, about his theory of representation? Hughes argument
depends upon attributing to Locke the most radical kind of actual
representation, according to which every section of the population which
Hughes at this point in his argument evidently identifies with class, while Locke
apparently has in mind only geographic area or corporation40 has a right to
be distinctly represented and to vote. But there is nothing in Lockes writings
to suggest that he held any such view. If anything, he may have espoused a
notion of virtual representation as restrictive as any then available. That this is
so is suggested by the passages from Richard Hooker quoted earlier.41
The implications of this quotation for Lockes concept of consent are, as we
have seen, considerable. These passages about the immortality of
corporations, the presence of our assent in parliaments, the giving of consent
without imagining that we do so, and so on also constitute one of the two
most important and uncompromising statements of the principle of virtual
representation available in Lockes day. It is on just such a conception of society
as an immortal corporation that Edmund Burke later based his theory of virtual
representation, and the same notional community evidently underlies Hookers
conception of representation. This idea is enough to break any direct connection
between corporate and individual enfranchisement.
In his comments on the nature of representation, Hooker is stating much the
same principle invoked by Sir Thomas Smith in his account of parliamentary
representation and consent:
For everie Englishman is entended to bee there present, either in person
or by procuration and attornies, of what preheminence, state, dignitie, or
qualitie soever he be, from the Prince (be he King or Queene) to the lowest
person of Englande. And the consent of the Parliament is taken to be
everie mans consent.42
Smith then goes on to describe the election of Parliament by gentlemen and
yeomen, according to the traditional forty-shilling freehold franchise, without
seeing any incompatibility between this restricted franchise and the presence
in Parliament of everie [individual] Englishman, including the lowest
person. What might make such a conception plausible is, again, the assumption
that landlord and poor man are united in a single community. The poor man,
then, is represented even as an individual in Parliament and is understood to
have given consent, without the right to vote. Smiths understanding of what it
means to be present in Parliament belongs to the same tradition as Hookers
contention that we can give our consent not imagining that we do so, in such a
way that the manner of our assent is not apparent. If Lockes quotation from
40
41
See above, pp. 89 and notes 18 and 19.
42
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), p. 79.
677
Hooker, associating himself with the latters doctrine of consent, proves anything, it argues much more strongly against than for any democratic tendencies.
Having established that Locke believes in some proportionality between
tax-paying and representation, Hughes goes on to argue that, if Locke also
regarded highly taxed and highly populated areas as one and the same, he was
drawing an essentially democratic connection between representation and
population. But even if this were so, it would hardly get us past the starting gate
if we could not assume a direct connection between representation and the right
to vote. The move from representation of areas to representation of individuals
cannot advance the issue very far if the individual right to be represented is
compatible with virtual representation.
II
Property and Political Being
Lockes Theory of Property
Can the argument for a (more or less) democratic Locke be approached from a
different angle, by demonstrating that Lockes theory of property and wealth
precludes the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy? Two
kinds of arguments have been made along these lines. The first advanced in
various ways by Hughes and Tully not only suggests that Locke objected to
the concentration of political power but associates that objection with an
opposition to the concentration of property. Although Ashcraft goes some
distance in this direction, he is, at least sometimes, more cautious about
attributing to Locke a social as well as a political egalitarianism. For him, the
second argument (not neglected by Hughes or Tully either) seems to carry more
weight, namely that poverty or propertylessness was not for Locke grounds for
depriving a man of a political personality or membership in political society.
Hughes has added a new dimension to this argument by claiming that the
labouring poor are the ultimate taxpayers and hence the possessors of all
political rights attached to the payment of taxes.
It remains to be seen what it means for Locke to possess a political personality
or to be a member of political society, and we will return to that point in a
moment. First, something needs to be said about Lockes theory of property
and his views on accumulation and the concentration of wealth.
Let us start with Lockes strictures against greed. If greed is an evil, Hughes
observes, accumulation of large estates without regard to the good of the
community is an evil.43 It follows then, he argues, that the concentration of
power which permits such accumulation must be an evil too. But much depends
on what constitutes greed, what represents an illegitimate concentration of
property and what is meant by the good of the community. It should be said,
first, that strictures against greed were commonplace. They were, after all, part
43

678
E.M. WOOD
of the rhetorical baggage of conventional Christian morality, common to rich

and poor alike. But more important is the fact that the burden of Lockes whole
argument on property and improvement is to identify accumulation not with
greed but with benefit to the community, to the extent that it increases
productivity and, with it, general prosperity. If accumulation has the effect of
dis- possessing some, it may nevertheless, by encouraging improvement, add
to the material welfare of all. Even the propertyless servant in a community
enjoying the benefits of improvement (and enclosure) is better off than the
possessor of unimproved land, provided he has the freedom to exchange his
labour-power for a wage.
There can be little doubt that for Locke some degree of concentration of
property is not only permissible but desirable, and that this degree of
concentration is at least sufficient to create a sizeable propertyless class, the
servants whose labour is appropriated by masters. Just how permissive Lockes
views on property are is illustrated by the famous turfs passage, which asserts
that the Turfs my Servant has cut . . . become my Property.44 This passage
plays no part in Hughes argument, but the first and most obvious point about
it is that it speaks volumes about Lockes views on, among other things, the
distribution of property. At the very least, it compels us to set aside any
assumption that a mans right to property is directly proportional to his own
expenditure of labour, and that Lockes conception of that right places strict
limits on accumulation.
In England, property was concentrated in the hands of landlords, with land
worked by tenants, to an exceptional degree. The resulting agrarian triad
(which already dominated those sections of the southern English countryside
that Locke knew best) the triad of landlord, capitalist tenant and wagelabourer had created the most productive agriculture. The English experience
in contrast, say, to the peasant-dominated agriculture of France seemed
to demonstrate a clear connection between productivity, national prosperity and
the concentration of land. Locke clearly took the triad (and the distribution of
property on which it was based) for granted as the basis of agrarian production,
the source of improvement and Englands prosperity; and his theory of
property gives us no reason to question the connection between the public good
and the concentration of land ownership in the English manner.45
44
45
For a discussion of Lockes views on the social relations of English agricultural production and
his association with the doctrine of improvement, especially his tendency to take for granted the
triadic structure of landlord, tenant and wage-labourer, see Wood, John Locke and Agrarian
Capitalism, especially (on the triad) pp. 405. As Wood points out, the triad appears in both Some
of the Consequences That Are Likely to Follow upon Lessening of Interest to 4 Percent, written in
1668, and the later expansion of that work, written in 1690 or 1691 and published in 1692 as Some
Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money.
Hughes cites Some Considerations in support of a rather curious argument: Locke remarks that
labourers at the time of his writing had what Hughes calls economic power because of a strong
demand for labour. This, argues Hughes, lets us eliminate the supposition that Locke thought the
agrarian capitalists had achieved and needed to achieve if there was to be improvement of
679
But there is more to say about the turfs passage. Much has been written
about it in connection with Lockes attitude towards wage-labour. Yet there is
one fundamental point the significance of which is commonly neglected. What
is significant here is that the Turfs my Servant has cut become my property
in exactly the same way and to the same degree as the Ore I have diggd (or
the Grass my Horse has bit). As long as labour is expended to improve the
land and add to the wealth of the community, it matters not whether that labour
effectively belongs to the labourer himself or to the master who employs it and
puts it to work. In other words, the masters productive use of property, which
entails the appropriation of anothers labour, is treated as equivalent to the
servants activity of labour itself.
When Locke speaks of labour as an entitlement to property, then, he has in
mind above all improvement and the productive use of property. The idea of
productive property, the conflation of labour with the productive utilization of
property, more than anything else places him on the side of an emerging
capitalism. This is so not just because the turfs passage is an accurate
description of the relation between employer and employee in a capitalist
wage-relationship, insofar as it recognizes that the purchase of the servants
labour-power gives the master title to anything the servant produces during the
period stipulated by the wage-contract. (As description, this much would be
perfectly acceptable to, say, Karl Marx.) More important is Lockes treatment
of the appropriation of anothers labour as equivalent to labour itself (this
conflation would certainly not be part of Marxs account), and the normative
consequences that flow from this.
It is profoundly significant that, in Lockes conceptual framework, labour
and industry can be ascribed to an improving landlord or to a capitalist tenant
who employs labour as much as to the servant whose labour he appropriates,
and that the virtue of industriousness attaches to the productive use of property
even more than to the activity of labour itself. This is an idea that makes sense
only in the context of capitalist property relations and the specific focus on
productivity demanded by a system in which accumulation is enhanced not so
much by direct coercion as by increasing the productivity of labour in response
to competitive pressures. Lockes adherence to such a conceptual framework,
as description and as normative standard, sets him apart from both traditional
rentier ideologies which would attach no virtue to labour or productivity, and
from the democratic currents of the seventeenth century which would reject his
mode of understanding the appropriation of anothers labour.
agriculture unchecked and consistent power over the labourers (Hughes, Locke, p. 439). He
seems to regard this as critical to his democratic interpretation of 158 of the Second Treatise. Yet
it is an odd conception of power that cannot distinguish between the kind of power which permits
a propertyless labourer, in a favourable market, to bargain for something better than the minimum
subsistence wage, and the kind of landlordly power that ensures the labourers propertylessness,
his status as a wage-labourer, while maintaining the concentration of land in the hands of landlords
and upholding the gross inequality of distribution that underlay the agrarian triad.
680
E.M. WOOD
The context in which Locke wrote his theory of property and especially his
remarks on improvement and enclosure is critically important and goes far
beyond the immediate politics of electoral strategy. From at least the early
seventeenth century, the reasons of improvement were acquiring legal status
as grounds for extinguishing customary use-rights in favour of exclusive private
property. Gatewards case [1607], and successive decisions in this spirit of
improvement , writes E.P. Thompson, drew an expert knife through the
carcass of custom, cutting off the use-right from the user . . . [i]t could leave
the landless commoner stripped of any rights if a case came to the courts, or at
the point of enclosure. In the late seventeenth century and certainly in the
eighteenth the courts increasingly defined (or assumed without argument) that
the lords waste or soil was his personal property, and treated the inconvenient
usages of custom which might restrict his full enjoyment of that property as
illegitimate obstructions to improvement.46 Increasingly, the law, interpreted
by judges who shared the mentalities of improving landlords, gave precedence
to the political economy of improvement over other reasons in law, other
claims to property rights.47
Against this background (not to mention a long history of conflicts over
enclosure, including a series of riots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries),
where the language of improvement and the practice of enclosure typically
operated in the interests of landlords, Ashcrafts interpretation of Lockes
chapter on property as an attack on the landed aristocracy (or some significant
part of it) seems unsustainable, while his description of Lockes comments on
enclosure as a radical endorsement of the claims of labor over those of land
ownership seems positively perverse.48 In support of this remarkable
46
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 1345.
47
Ibid., p. 137.
48
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 272. Here and in note 181, Ashcraft likens Lockes views
on property and enclosure to those of Winstanley and the Diggers. This is more than a little curious,
since Winstanley emphatically asserted common rights and communal property against individual
private property. The Diggers, while not trespassing on land already enclosed, were acting in
explicit opposition to enclosure. They were also claiming the right to cultivate common land on
grounds antithetical to Lockes arguments in favour of improvement. How should we compare
Lockes encomium to money and commerce as incentives to enclose and improve (which, as
Ashcraft says, was the primary and most socially beneficial function of money, ibid., p. 277),
his view that there would be little incentive in the absence of money and commerce (see, for
example, Second Treatise, 48), with Winstanleys passionate denunciation of buying and selling? Ashcraft also makes much of the distinction between different kinds of enclosure the
depopulating enclosure of land for the grazing of sheep, and the productive enclosure of land for
cultivation, which, he says, were undertaken by different classes of landowners (Ashcraft,
Revolutionary Politics, p. 279 note 199). Two things need to be said about this. First, a commoner
whose customary rights were being extinguished by enclosure might be less impressed by this
distinction, even if his loss of independent access to the means of subsistence might in the second
case be replaced by new opportunities for agricultural wage-labour. Second, the suggestion that
these forms of enclosure were associated with different kinds of landowners, the former with
aristocrats or large landlords, the latter with smaller landowners and especially yeomen, is
misleading. From the late sixteenth century, enclosure for cultivation (both of waste and open fields)
681
proposition, Ashcraft cites a passage in which Locke endorses enclosure even

to the point of arguing that if someone has already enclosed the land but allowed
it to remain uncultivated, then the land, not withstanding his enclosure, was
still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other .49
Yet this passage specifically and only concerns a very primitive condition in
which people still cultivated the earth without any fixed property in the ground
they made use of [emphasis in the original], before they incorporated, settled
themselves together, and built cities in other words, before land ownership
was even an issue. More particularly, it was a pre-monetary, pre-civil condition
in which what could not be immediately consumed was wasted, incapable of
producing wealth because there was no commerce. With the introduction of
money and commerce, the situation changed radically, creating wholly new
conditions, with wholly new incentives for enclosure and improvement, in
which the right of property was no longer bounded by the labourers
consumption and improvement was no longer confined to the labourers own
work. In the context of an advanced commercial society, it is hard to distinguish
Lockes argument from the defence of the landowners interests, his claim to
property and the exclusion of customary rights by reason of improvement.
Where, then, would Locke draw the line between acceptable and
unacceptable concentrations of land? How restrictive, for example, is his
concession that the legally protected rights of commoners to common land must
be respected?50 Even if we leave aside the kinds of coercion that were available
to larger landowners in relation to vulnerable poor men, which could compel
the latter to consent, this condition is not nearly as restrictive as Hughes seems
to think. There were, of course, already massive concentrations of land outside
the reach of communal rights, and there were also many cases in which common
rights on land already legally owned, often by a large landlord, existed by
custom but without unambiguous legal standing. The extinction of such
was becoming increasingly more profitable than enclosure for sheep-grazing, so that rents from
arable land were growing at a much faster rate than from pasture and meadow. Large landowners
were clearly the main beneficiaries of rising rents and had increasing incentives to engage in, or
encourage, enclosure for cultivation, or more productive use of already cultivated land. The
enterprising yeoman, incidentally, was typically a tenant of such a landlord, who imposed on him
the pressure to improve in order to meet the conditions of competitive economic rents.
49
50
Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 272, quoting Locke, Two Treatises, II, 38.
Hughes, Locke, p. 429. Hughes regards it as critically significant that Locke treated enclosure
not as a cause of depopulation and deserted villages but as the source of increasing population and
employment, as well as more goods produced and more taxes. If more populated areas were to be
more represented, then Lockes views on enclosure have democratic tendencies. This strikes me
as, to say the least, a non sequitur. If, for example, the number of representatives rises in proportion
to the increase in population, what is democratic about it? Could the ratio of representatives to
represented not remain the same? At any rate, I still fail to see why the view that there should be
some direct proportionality between the population of areas and their right to representation could
not be, as it was in Shaftesburys proposals, consistent with a franchise even more undemocratic
than the existing one.
682
E.M. WOOD
customary rights was, above all, what enclosure was about and the reason for
the conflicts it generated. There is nothing in the Second Treatise that would
tend towards the protection of these customary rights and a great deal, having
to do with the benefits of enclosure and its contribution to the wealth of the
community, that would argue in favour of their extinction, in the interests of
the commonwealth. In fact, as we have seen, it was precisely the kind of
argument from improvement employed by Locke that was increasingly being
used as a legal challenge to customary rights; and Lockes theory of property
would have made a very serviceable brief for the wave of Parliamentary
enclosures that was to be such a notable feature of the eighteenth century.
What about Lockes views on primogeniture? Hughes, together with Ashcraft
and Tully, attributes to Locke a strong repudiation of this practice, which
represents an attack on large aristocratic estates.51 The evidence for this, it is
argued, is to be found in those passages from the First Treatise in which Locke
argues against Filmers contention that the absolute power of the monarch
derives from the right of inheritance, traceable back to Adam.52 Locke counters
that none of Adams posterity could pretend to the whole Inheritance, or any
Sovereignty supposed to accompany it, since a Right of Inheritance gave every
one the rest, as well as any one, a Title to share in the Goods of his Father,
though they could distribute it as it best liked them.53
What is striking about this passage as a whole is not that it rejects the practice
of primogeniture which it does not but that it treats that practice as
consistent with the original right of all children to the inheritance of their father.
Lockes point is not that primogeniture is illegitimate or undesirable but rather
that it does not argue against that original right (a proposition essential to his
refutation of Filmers views on sovereignty). Primogeniture represents just one
of the possible modes of distribution established by custom and human law. If
anything, the variety of inheritance customs can be taken as evidence that the
original right of inheritance, which gave no exclusive rights to anyone,
permitted human communities to distribute property as they saw fit, and to
inscribe their practices in custom and positive law. Lockes argument has much
in common with Hookers observation that primogeniture exists by merely
human law and is not binding till such time as law hath passed amongst men
about it.54 Neither Hooker nor Locke took it upon himself to argue that the
51
Hughes, Locke, p. 433. Ashcraft describes the relevant passages in the First Treatise as a
direct and sustained attack on primogeniture (Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 283 note 207).
Neal Wood has already disposed of the contention that Locke rejected primogeniture, in Locke and
Agrarian Capitalism, pp. 7980.
52
Locke, Two Treatises, I, 84 ff.
53
Ibid., 91. This equal title is based on the right, by natural law, of every child to sustenance
from its parents; but this no more rules out primogeniture than it precludes the right of every man,
subject only to the laws and customs of his country (which in England include primogeniture), to
dispose of his (unentailed) property in any way he pleases (Two Treatises, II, 72, 116).
54
Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I, Ch. x, section 10.

683
English custom, or any laws that might make it binding, were in violation of
nature, reason or divine law. It is not Lockes purpose to evaluate the relative
merits of these various practices, but only to demonstrate that the custom of
primogeniture does not exist by natural or divine right and that its existence
cannot be construed as proof of Filmers case for absolute sovereignty. In places
where primogeniture is well established in custom and law (as it is in England),
he suggests, there is likely to exist a misapprehension that political power,
together with property, descends from a single original source by divine right.55
His sole purpose is to refute this mistaken presumption.
Who is the Ultimate Tax-Payer?
It still remains to be asked whether, even granted Lockes acceptance of gross
property differentials, poverty or propertylessness constitutes grounds for depriving a man of political rights more specifically, the right to vote. Here,
Hughes argument on taxation adds a new dimension to the case for Locke as
democrat. It should by now be clear that, unless Hughes can demonstrate rather
than merely assume a connection between taxation, representation and the right
to vote something that he has not yet done much of what he has to say
about taxation of the poor is beside the point. Yet it is still worth considering
his concluding argument, aiming to show that Locke held a theory of taxation
which could not support the idea that the poor might be legitimately excluded
from taxation as the price for excluding them from political power.56
This argument rests on the consequences which follow from Lockes
conviction that it is labour that creates value. Such a theory, argues Hughes,
implies that, since it is the labourer who creates all wealth, he, and not the
landowner, is the ultimate taxpayer. Lockes theory of labour, Hughes maintains, makes labourers into real taxpayers who need representatives in parliament.57
Leaving aside the question-begging assumptions about the meaning of
representation, let us examine the other premises of this argument. One critical
factor that must be set aside to sustain Hughes proposition is the turfs passage.
For if it is possible to attribute labour to the master who employs it, we cannot
safely draw any conclusions from Lockes theory of labour about the
contribution of the labourer to the creation of value. Part of the problem may
be that Hughes sees only the landowner and the wage-labourer, when for Locke
there are typically three parties to the production of wealth on the land: the
landowner, the (capitalist) tenant and the wage-labourer. In this triad, the tenant
is typically the master who directly appropriates the servants labour. It is this
tenant whose productive utilization of land creates wealth and to whom the
virtues of industry accrue. So perhaps he is the ultimate tax-payer.
55
Locke, Two Treatises, I, 91.
56
57
Ibid., p. 441.
684
E.M. WOOD
Yet there may still be grounds for regarding the landowner at least, the
improving landlord, if not the old-fashioned rentier as the ultimate taxpayer
after all. In fact, Locke unequivocally says as much:
It is in vain, in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the public
charge of government on any thing else; there at last it will terminate. The
merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the labourer cannot, and
therefore the landowner must: and whether he were best do it, by laying
it directly where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the
sinking of his rents, which when they are once fallen, every one knows
are not easily raised again, let him consider.58
Locke advocates the land tax, as against the excise, on the grounds that a tax
on land is less burdensome to the landowner than a tax on commodities.59 The
excise would have the effect of reducing the landowners rents, because it would
raise prices for basic commodities, especially those bought by the servants of
his tenant. The tenant would be obliged to pay higher wages, and lower rents,
to provide for his wage-labourers subsistence. The land tax, while paid directly
on the land, will ultimately cost the landowner less, in large part because it is
easier and cheaper to collect.
In one way or another, the agrarian triad plays havoc with Hughes argument.
In Lockes formulation, it is not at all clear to whom we should attribute the
labour which creates value. If improvement or the productive use of property
is the critical variable, then the tenant-employer, and indeed the improving
landlord (not merely for owning but rather for improving land), could claim a
share in the production of value. If Lockes labourer cannot, as he says, pay tax,
while the landowner (according to Lockes explicit formulation) ultimately
absorbs all the costs of taxation, there is very little left of the labourer as ultimate
taxpayer.
Nor can Lockes formulation be dismissed as merely rhetorical, on the
grounds that he is making a tactical case for a system of taxation which is really
less in the interests of the landowner than in those of the labouring poor. Hughes
suggests that Locke was actually urging rich landowners to accept a greater
burden of taxation, while he took the side of the poor on the question of the
excise tax. This was not, Hughes insists, the political position of an apologist
for agrarian capital, hostile to the poor.60 But Lockes position on the relative
merits of land tax and excise was not so far from the position of the landed
aristocracy itself. The landed classes in England long disliked the excise, in
58
Locke, Some Considerations, in The Works of John Locke (London, 9th edn., 1794), Vol. 4,
p. 60.
59
60
Ibid., pp. 579.
Hughes, Locke, p. 442. It should be added that Locke never demonstrated any sympathy for
the poor, either in his writings or in his personal life. See Wood, John Locke and Agrarian
Capitalism, pp. 735, 789, 1069.
685
large part because of its association with royal absolutism. At the same time,
they were ready in Lockes day to vote in Parliament to tax their own land
as, for example, they did in enacting a Land Tax in the 1690s recognizing
that the administration of such a tax was much more directly under their own
control, both through Parliament and through their local powers, which gave
them a central role in tax assessment.61 There is nothing in Lockes remarks on
taxation that could not have served as a brief for the landed interest.
Locke and the Rights of the Poor
We now arrive at a critical question. Let us suppose the worst that Lockes
civil society contains many poor and propertyless people, a substantial number
relying on wage-labour for their livelihood. Do they have any political rights?
More particularly, what does it mean to have political rights, to possess a
political personality, to be a member of political society? Hughes has a tendency
to lump together several distinct kinds of rights: the right to be governed by
law, the right of resistance, the right to vote. For example, in support of his
claims about the franchise, he invokes Lockes principle that there be one law
for the Favourite at Court, and the Country Man at Plough.62 But what more
is this than a commitment to a constitutional order, in which everyone, ruler
and subject alike, is subject to the law? A commitment to the rule of law has
never by itself been incompatible with very inegalitarian and undemocratic
assumptions; indeed, it has often buttressed such assumptions. What makes
Lockes proposition democratic, rather than simply anti-absolutist?
Hughes argues too that, since Locke grants everyone a right of resistance in
moments of crisis, that right must include the everyday rights of constitutional
politics. It is, Hughes maintains, absurd to give people the right to resist
violently when evils have been carried to extremes and yet to deny them access
to constitutional politics, which they would naturally use to prevent any
government from going to those extremes.63 It may indeed be absurd, but this
is precisely what was meant by traditional doctrines of resistance, which granted
the right, in extremis, to recover powers conditionally alienated in the original
act (real or notional) of founding a legitimate political authority. Such a limited
right of resistance would not be out of keeping with the idea of consent which
appears in Lockes quotation from Hooker.
But even if it were true that a right of resistance must entail access to
constitutional politics, we need to know more about what counts as such
access if we are to accept that this entails the right to vote. In the Putney
Debates, for example, the argument of the Army grandees against the Leveller
franchise was precisely that the poor had gained quite enough without the
61
For a discussion of the land tax and the excise, and the attitude of the English aristocracy towards
them, see Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe (London, 1991), p. 127.
62
Locke, Two Treatises, II, 142. Cited in Hughes, Locke, p. 435.
63

686
E.M. WOOD
suffrage by winning the right to be governed by a constitutional government

instead of by the arbitrary rule of one man. What evidence is there in Lockes
Treatises that he would make no such distinction between access to constitutional politics and the right to vote, or that the political rights shared by rich and
poor go beyond the right to live together under a lawful government with a
common judge to appeal to?
In fact, Cromwells example may be instructive for more reasons than one,
since he granted a socially inclusive right of revolution in the most dramatic
way, by mobilizing a popular army in the New Model, while explicitly denying
the franchise to many of its rank and file. Is it possible, again, that the radicalism
of Shaftesbury and Locke may have been closer to Cromwells than to that of
the Levellers?
At any rate, a man may have the right to be governed by a constitutional
authority under law, and even, perhaps, to be represented (at least virtually)
in Parliament without having the right to vote. This may, as we will see, be all
that is entailed for Locke by membership in political society. It is certainly
enough to endow a man with a political personality. That there may exist some
significant confusions about what this means is illustrated by yet another
argument advanced by Hughes about the status of wage-labourers. Hughes
apparently misunderstands the basis on which Neal Wood and others have
refus[ed] to accept that Locke opposed discrimination between rich and
poor.64 Hughes (like Tully) assumes that an argument like Woods depends on
attributing to Locke the view that a man forfeits his political personality when
he alienates his labour-power. The assumption seems to be that the lack of a
right to vote entails the lack of a political personality. He attributes to Wood
the view that, in Lockes political theory, the employer, in return for wages,
purchased the labourers entire political being, and that the alienation of labour
results in a kind of serfdom.65
But Wood does not, and need not, claim any such thing. There is a fundamental difference between serfdom and wage-labour which is decisive here.
The serf is subject to personal rule, to a personal subordination expressed in an
inferior juridical status. The wage-labourer is not. The difference between
wage-labour and serfdom is precisely that, while the latter depends on a relation
of juridical inequality and personal dependence, the former does not. Master
and servant, capitalist employer and wage-labourer, as parties to a contract, are
equal before the law, as well as juridically free. Even when the conditions of
the labour-market are so disadvantageous to labourers that their freedom of
movement is effectively denied, they remain juridically free and equal. The
wage-labourer can, then, be subject to an impersonal, constitutional authority
in the sense that the serf, by definition, cannot. Lockes views on master and
servant are not unambiguous, but he could, with absolute consistency and
without making any claims about the right to vote, maintain that the (adult male)
64
65
Ibid., pp. 4356.

687
wage-labourer is free and equal before the law, and that he possesses certain
constitutional rights or even a political personality.
What is Membership in Political Society?
If we cannot simply assume that a man without the franchise has alienated his
entire political being, what is entailed, for Locke, by membership in political
society and can a poor man possess it?
Richard Ashcraft has argued that the meanest man is, according to Locke,
part of the Legislative power of the community, which is to say that he is
a member of political society as Locke defines it.66 Whether or not this implies
that the meanest man must enjoy the Parliamentary franchise, the claim that
he is part of the legislative power is not supported by the evidence Ashcraft
himself adduces for it. Here is how his argument runs:
At the start of the chapter on the beginning of political societies, Locke
again repeats his premiss that men are by nature, all free, equal and
independent (II, 95), and that civil society is based upon the consent of
every individual (II, 96). By which means, Locke explains, every
single person became subject, equally with other the meanest man, to
those laws, which he himself, as part of the Legislative had established
(II, 94).67
Ashcraft here invokes the authority of Peter Laslett: As Laslett notes in a
comment on this passage, this certainly seems to imply that the meanest man,
which refers to the individuals lack of property, is part of the Legislative
power . . ..
Ashcraft evidently means us to understand that Locke is saying the following:
by means of individual consent, every man, including the meanest, becomes
part of the legislative power. But what do the relevant passages actually say?
The critical sentence, By which means every single person became subject,
equally with the meanest Men . . . (not, as Ashcraft quotes it here, the meanest
man), occurs not in Chapter VIII, Of the Beginning of Political Societies, but
in the preceding one and well before the quoted passage on consent. By which
means has, in fact, no reference at all to consent or the foundation of political
society on the consent of every individual. The passage has to do with the
process by which legislative power came to be placed in collective bodies, call
them Senate, Parliament, or what you please.68 The legislative here simply
refers to these bodies themselves. The next sentence, beginning with By which
means, explains that this is how i.e. by means of placing legislative power
66
Ashcraft, Lockes Two Treatises, p. 171.
67
Ibid.
68
Oddly, Ashcraft elsewhere (Revolutionary Politics, p. 221) quotes this passage correctly, simply
to illustrate Lockes preference for collective legislative bodies (or, again, as Ashcraft misleadingly
calls them, elected representative assemblies).
688
E.M. WOOD
in senates or parliaments everyone, including members of the legislative

bodies themselves, was subjected to the law, equally with other the meanest
Men. There is nothing here to suggest that the meanest Men are part of the
legislative. On the contrary, the point is that those who are those who actually
sit in the senate or parliament are no less subject to the laws they make
themselves than are those who are not members of parliament, even the meanest
men. Ashcrafts claim seems to be based on little more than a simple misreading
of this passage, a misreading not in fact shared by Laslett, who merely suggests
without saying anything about the poor mans part in the legislative that
the passage certainly implies that the meanest man has property and so a
political personality.69
What then does it mean, according to Locke, to possess a political personality or, more precisely, to be a member of political society? The only clear
references to membership in political society do not identify it with the right to
vote. Men are members of political society when they are united into one Body,
and have a common establishd Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority
to decide Controversies between them, and punish Offenders.70 In this sense,
the meanest man, whose property consists only of life and liberty but no
estate, can be said to be a member of society and to possess a political
69
Two Treatises, ed. Laslett, p. 330n. Locke makes the same point somewhat more clearly in 143.
He is here arguing that, while an executive power must be constantly in being, the Legislative need
not, and that there is less likelihood that those who make the laws will exempt themselves from
them if the power to legislate and to execute the law are not in the same hands. Therefore in well
orderd Commonwealths, where the good of the whole is so considered, as it ought, the Legislative
Power is put into the hands of divers Persons who duly Assembled, have by themselves, or jointly
with others, a Power to make Laws, which when they have done, being separated again, they are
themselves subject to the Laws, they have made; which is a new and near tie upon them, to take
care, that they make them for the publick good. Note, incidentally, that it is simply their own
subjection to the law, as distinct from accountability to an electorate, that prompts the Legislative
to make laws for the public good. At the same time, since the Legislative is only a Fiduciary Power
to act for certain ends (149), if it forfeits that trust its power reverts to the People. But even here
Lockes formulation suggests that he is not talking about some kind of regular accountability to an
electorate but rather the Peoples right, in extreme cases, to recover the powers conditionally
alienated in the original appointment of a Legislative power, that is, only when government has
been dissolved (211 ff. make it clear that the dissolution of government is not the regular
retirement of a Parliament which precedes an election, but an irregular interference with constitutional powers). Locke goes on, in 154 to 158, to discuss cases where the Legislative, or any part
of it [is] made up of Representatives chosen for that time by the People as is true of England;
but, again, this allows for cases in which the Legislative is not so constituted. In other words, the
legitimacy of a legislative power rests not on some universal principles of representation and
electoral accountability but on adherence to the forms agreed upon at the establishment of the
legislative and stipulated in the Original Constitution. (See also 213, where Locke remarks that
it is hard to apportion blame for the misuse of power without knowing the Form of Government
in which it happens.) This prohibits interference with established forms by any arbitrary power,
notably the monarch; but if Lockes basic principles can accommodate legislative powers that are
not elected at all, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they can accommodate legislative powers
elected by a restricted franchise.
70

689
personality even if he has no right to vote, as long as he is governed by a

constitutional authority subject to the rule of law and not just by personal rule.
The category of electors, those people in whom the community has vested
the right to select representatives, are another matter; and while Locke never
makes it clear who they are, he says nothing that would permit us to identify
them with the category members. All electors are certainly members, but
there is no reason to suppose that all members are electors. The frequent and
often ad hoc modifications of the franchise in seventeenth-century England
suggests that the category electors was conventionally fluid, while the members of political society from which they were drawn presumably remained
constant. The most we can safely say is that no prince can, by his arbitrary
power, alter the Electors, or the ways of election, which the society has
prescribed71 as both Charles II and James II had tried to do. For if others,
than those whom the Society has authorized thereunto, do chuse, or in another
way, than what the Society hath prescribed, those chosen are not the Legislative
appointed by the People. This sentence certainly places limits on the powers
of the Crown; but it also implies that the Electors authorized by the Society
may constitute a body less inclusive than the members of political society as a
whole, and also seems to confirm that a Legislative appointed by the People
may be something other than a Legislative actually elected by them.
All of this hardly gets us beyond Locke as an advocate of constitutional or
limited government, a believer in the traditional mixed constitution, albeit
in its most constitutional and parliamentary form. On the political spectrum
of his time and place, he can no doubt be counted among the less conservative
Whigs; but the case still remains to be made that he was anything remotely like
a radical democrat, even by the standards of his day.
Ellen Meiksins Wood
71
YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO
Ibid., 216.

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Ellen Meiksins Wood - Locke Against Democracy Consent Representation and Suffrage in Two Treatises

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LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

CONSENT, REPRESENTATION AND SUFFRAGE IN THE

Interpretation of the classics in political theory seems to go in waves. For a

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XIII. No. 4. Winter 1992

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Hughes, Locke, p. 431.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

liberties and privileges. The commons were in effect being politically

Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 166.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

See Brenner, Merchants, passim.

conditional, in the sense that powers originally alienated may be reclaimed in

David Wootton has given a persuasive explanation of Hobbess theory of authorization as a

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Wherefore as any mans deed past is good as long as himself continueth;

Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I, Ch. x, section 9.

absence of any universal consent to revoke the original agreement. This is

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

ambiguous sense that they can be construed as having consented without

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 119.

Ashcraft, Lockes Two Treatises, p. 176.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 117.

Locke, Two Treatises, I, 148, cited by Hughes in Locke, p. 427.

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 85.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

community. Significantly, it is at this point that Locke introduces the quotation

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 142.

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 94.

Representation and the Right to Vote

Hughes, Locke, p. 423.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Even if replacing Old Sarum with Manchester involved a new conception of

We have already considered Lockes permissive definition of individual

Hughes, Locke, p. 424.

See above, pp. 89 and notes 18 and 19.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Hughes, Locke, p. 437.

of the rhetorical baggage of conventional Christian morality, common to rich

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 28.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 1345.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

proposition, Ashcraft cites a passage in which Locke endorses enclosure even

Locke, Two Treatises, I, 84 ff.

Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, I, Ch. x, section 10.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Locke, Two Treatises, I, 91.

Hughes, Locke, p. 438.

Ibid., pp. 579.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 142. Cited in Hughes, Locke, p. 435.

Hughes, Locke, p. 434.

suffrage by winning the right to be governed by a constitutional government

Hughes, Locke, p. 435.

Ibid., pp. 4356.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

Ashcraft, Lockes Two Treatises, p. 171.

in senates or parliaments everyone, including members of the legislative

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 87.

LOCKE AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

personality even if he has no right to vote, as long as he is governed by a