3 - All at Sea: Locke’s Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought

Summary

Abstract

Although the concept of pirates as hostes humani generis appears to be axiomatic, it is argued in this chapter that piracy elicited more ambiguous responses from philosophers and lawyers in late seventeenth-century Britain. Pirates were merely one among a pantheon of archetypal enemies of good order. By examining references to piracy in the work of the English political philosopher John Locke in particular, it is argued here that pirates vied with tyrants for the title of “common enemy of all humankind.” Locke's prevarications were mirrored by continuing doubts and legal debates about who the hostis humani generis really was.

Keywords: hostis humani generis, law, political philosophy, John Locke, tyrants, sovereignty

Introduction

Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates (1724) has long intrigued scholars, not least for its ambivalent tone towards its eponymous subjects – the “pyrates.” With both shocked outrage and breathless fascination, the book presented brief biographies of maritime violence and plunder, embellished and invented from the life stories some of the most notorious of Europe's pirate captains. The General History confirmed the figure of the “pyrate” very much as Cicero had defined it in the first century BCE, as the common enemy of all humankind. Yet, the implication of Johnson's text was that the “pyrate” could not literally be a hostis humani generis because an “enemy” was one who lived within a domain constituted by sovereign law. Hence, the “pyrate” could not be an “enemy” because they placed themselves outside of any sphere of sovereignty whatsoever. In the words of the “Abstract of the Civil Law and Statute Law now in Force, in Relation to Pyracy,” included towards the end of the book:

Though Pyrates are called common Enemies, yet they are properly not to be term’d so. He is only to honour’d with that Name, says Cicero, who hath a Commonwealth, a Court, a Treasury, Consent and Concord of Citizens, and some Way, if Occasion be, of Peace and League: But when they have reduced themselves into a Government or State, as those of Algier, Sally, Tripoly, Tunis, and the like, they then are allowed the Solemnities of War, and the rights of Legation.

The hostis humani generis subsisting fitfully on the cruel seas beyond the reach of law was a fiction of territorial sovereignty.