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Locke's Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2013

John Baltes
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Abstract

Some Thoughts Concerning Education offers the theory of governance the Two Treatises lack. Education is the key to Lockean politics: self-government and public order require virtuous citizens, and these citizens, as Locke suggested in the Essay and explains in the Education, are made rather than found, constructed from the ground up by discipline. Through early and careful practices of education, they are enmeshed in a net of habit and custom that naturalizes the moral commitments they are taught, rendering the process, and the artifice, invisible. Locke entangles his subjects in an architecture of power of which they become the bearers, thereby providing the foundation for public order and limited government. Locke's disciplinary liberalism allows us to better appreciate late modern subjectivity as an achievement, rather than a given of political life, albeit an achievement that involves some uncomfortable compromises and a willingness to accept, if not laud, our disciplinary commitments.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , Spring 2013 , pp. 173 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2013 

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References

1 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Woolhouse, Roger (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 4.16, 19–20Google Scholar. Future citations to Locke's Essay will take the form (book.chapter.paragraph). See also his On the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Grant, Ruth W. and Tarcov, Nathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), §§3–6, 12–14, 41Google Scholar. A detailed discussion of this problem and a gesture in the direction of its solution are offered by Tully, James, “Governing Conduct: Locke on the reform of thought and behaviour,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179–241CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tully's approach, to which I am deeply indebted, hears Locke as the voice of a disciplinary solution. Inverting Nietzsche's claim that secular and sacred punishment gave rise to the conscience in early modernity, and thus to a being permitted to promise, Tully emphasizes Locke's assault on the conscience as both “too radical and too submissive” and his adoption of habit and discipline to guide and correct conduct.

2 Recent scholarship has paid greater attention to Locke's disciplinary commitments in no small part because of Tully's work. Nevertheless, Tully does not provide a detailed account of Locke's disciplinary method, nor have subsequent scholars attended to his method or its result in sufficient detail. See especially Button, Mark, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Hirschmann, Nancy J., Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Ivison, Duncan, The Self at Liberty: Political Argument and the Arts of Government (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Hindess, Barry, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Malden: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar; and Mehta, Uday S., The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. It has long been recognized that Locke's plan for education aimed to cultivate a taste for reason and reflection, fashioning better citizens in this sense. See, for instance, Neill, Alex, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989): 225–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dunn, John, “‘Bright Enough for All Our Purposes’: John Locke's Conception of a Civilized Society,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 43, no. 2 (1989): 133–53Google Scholar; and Tarcov, Nathan, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar for paradigmatic treatments of this view of Lockean education.

3 See Reiman, Jeffrey, “Toward a Secular Lockean Liberalism,” Review of Politics 67, no. 3 (2005): 473–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for paradigmatic approaches to a secular (or at least partly so), rational account of Locke's subjects as self-governors. I do not doubt that this is an element of the Lockean subject; the question, as I pose it, is a matter of emphasis and degree.

4 A thorough account of Locke's advice for the education of the poor is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say, however, that even a cursory glance at his plan for poor reform indicates that it will be decidedly more brutal and involve the organs of the state directly, rather than relying on the family. See Bourne, H. R. F., The Life of John Locke (Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1969), 2:379–85Google Scholar.

5 Dunn, “Bright Enough,” 137.

6 I use the masculine pronoun in deference to Locke, whose subject is figured primarily as male. I see no reason why these techniques must respect gender, though his emphasis on the masculine certainly tells in historical context. I say “primarily” because, as is widely recognized, Locke's thinking of gender is complex and often contradictory; at the very least, he vacillates. Consider that he problematizes paternal power by reminding his readers of the (nominally) equal title of the mother, before returning to the demeaning “paternal” (Second Treatise, §52, in Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993])Google Scholar. Consider as well that Locke assigns equal title to Adam and Eve, granting them coextensive dominion (First Treatise, §30, in Two Treatises, ed. Laslett). One must be mindful too of his praise for Damaris Cudworth Masham, the woman who perhaps most influenced Locke's appreciation of equality; see his letter to Philippus Van Limborch, 13 March 1691, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. De Beer, E. S. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Finally, one must weigh his letter to Mary Clarke, the corecipient of his original counsel in the Education, in which Locke writes, “[as] I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating … to truth, virtue and obedience, I think well to have no thing altered in it from what [is writ for the son]” (Locke to Mary Clarke, 28 January / 7 February 1685, in Correspondence). His satisfaction with the system and substance of her education suggests at the very least that women are not sufficiently inferior to require a separate education, and it opens the possibility that Locke felt women may be the equals of men in potential, potential unrealized through their unequal education and experience. This is not to suggest that Locke sees women as the political equals of men; quite the contrary. It is because this is not a serious question in his England that he can discuss this matter as he does; see Boucher, Joanne, “Male Power and Contract Theory: Hobbes and Locke in Carol Pateman's The Sexual Contract,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 36, no. 1 (2003): 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Butler, Melissa, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (1978): 135–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more robust discussion of these issues, see Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory and Hirschmann, Nancy J. and McClure, Kirstie M., eds., Feminist Interpretations of John Locke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

7 This is Locke's term, borrowed from his Of the Conduct of the Understanding, §41. Locke here uses it derisively, describing the opponent with which the free mind must wrestle. This has led Button, for instance, to overemphasize the rational aspects of Locke's “transformative disciplines.” While it is certainly true that Locke wants his subjects to reason, as I argue below, this is only part of the story and perhaps not the principal plot.

8 By this I mean not that he strips the family of its power relations, but rather that as he defines political power, one cannot locate it domestically (Second Treatise, §3). For Locke, power is not exhausted by its political definition: “the Power of a Magistrate over a Subject, may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave” (Second Treatise, §2). Power is omnipresent, and not just an effect of Parliament and contract. Nevertheless, these apolitical forms of rule “all together came short of Political Society, as we shall see, if we consider the different Ends, Tyes, and Bounds of each of those” (Second Treatise, §77). This has profound consequences.

Magistrates have a right of making laws and judging offenses, offenses punishable by death in extreme cases. This right is both natural and contractarian: as servants of the public good, and of god's will that we thrive and prosper, magistrates judge and punish according to mutually agreed-upon standards, including positive and natural law (Second Treatise, §§6–12). Their fiduciary charge is to preserve property, defined expansively as life, liberty, and possession, by “employing the force of the Community” to execute these laws (Second Treatise, §§3, 6–7). This much is perfectly clear from reading the first few chapters of the Second Treatise. In contrast, the apolitical forms of power Locke lists do not share these “Ends, Tyes, and Bounds.” Parents have no such right of making laws with penalties of death, nor does their power originate in contract (at least prior to their children's maturity) (Second Treatise, §§65, 67, 69, 74). Marriage, like political society, is a contractual obligation, but no husband holds the power of life and death over his wife (Second Treatise, §§78, 81–86). Though masters have the power of life and death over their slaves, this can hardly be said to be to the benefit of the common good or for the purpose of preserving the property of the collective, if we include the slave among those defining this community (Second Treatise, §24). Furthermore, slavery is not truly contractual, being founding by a severe breach of the law of nature, though it is extended by agreement (Second Treatise, §23). Finally, servants, though contractually obligated to their masters, cannot be punished by them with death (Second Treatise, §24).

Locke's point is quite clear: the models of society and the household, the models of patriarchal rule familiar since at least Sophocles and Aristotle, are not political, though they are ineluctably relations of power. They do not, he insists, share the “Ends, Tyes, or Bounds” of politics, nor can they be used as models for political rule. Political power is a special case arising from a very particular form of contract, a case limited by the special conditions of consent and the natural law. See A. Simmons, John, “Locke's State of Nature,” Political Theory 17, no. 3 (1989): 449–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 72, though I am not certain that I agree with his interpretation vis-à-vis separation of powers. Indeed, Locke does not draw such a distinction in his plan to reform poor relief, wherein the children of wayward parents, children as young as three, are to be commended to a working school, established by the state, to habituate them to hard work through careful education.

9 In what follows, references to the Education are by section number in Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Grant, Ruth and Tarcov, Nathan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996)Google Scholar.

10 As Hirschmann observes, “In contrast to the peaceful and rational creatures with which Locke populates the state of nature in the Second Treatise, Locke here [in the Education] suggests that children (and other human beings in the ‘natural’ state) seek primarily to satisfy their desires” (Gender, Class, and Freedom, 90). See also Dunn, “Bright Enough,” where he insists that “controlling human conduct, for Locke, is a formidable enterprise, for individuals as much as rulers, because of the violent natural impulses of the flesh” (141). Moreover, he makes an even stronger claim in this vein: “these violent, natural impulses pos[e] the more elaborate and menacing challenge to the prospects for an enlightened civilization” (144). Finally, Hindess notes that for Locke, “the requisite habits will not be acquired simply as a matter of course” (Discourses of Power, 129).

11 Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 210–11.

12 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)Google Scholar, 200. See also Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 175. Tarcov recognizes that Locke will employ observation as a technique of discipline, but does not draw the connections I suggest. It is also important to note that Locke does not demand literal isolation; he discusses the difference “between two or three pupils in the same house and three- or fourscore boys lodged up and down” (Education, §70). Presumably then, siblings may be educated together.

13 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 172.

16 Again, this discipline is not a perfect analog for Bentham's Panopticism; Locke's subjects are not consistently uncertain about being watched, nor is the character of the watcher insignificant. Nevertheless, Locke does suggest observing them when they are unaware to ensure that habit “takes,” missing Bentham's careful mark to be sure. See Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 175, and Locke, Education, §125: “To be clear in this point, the observation must be made when you are out of the way and he not so much as under the restraint of a suspicion that anybody has an eye upon him. In those seasons of perfect freedom, let somebody you can trust mark how he spends his time.”

17 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 173; 191.

18 This plastic subject Charles Taylor describes as “punctual”: “The subject who can take this kind of radical stance of disengagement to himself or herself with a view to remaking, is what I want to call the ‘punctual’ self. To take this stance is to identify oneself with the power to objectify and remake, and by this act to distance oneself from all the particular features which are the objects of potential change. What we are is essentially none of the latter, but what finds itself capable of fixing them and working on them. This is what the image of the point is meant to convey, drawing on the geometrical term: the real self is ‘extensionless’; it is nowhere but in this power to fix things as objects” (Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 171–72Google Scholar). This is also why I take Tully to spend the energy he does examining this question. See his Approach, 295–98. Since what one relishes is subject to habit, one can be taught to desire those things that reason commends, just as one can be trained to choose the “higher” good over the immediate good of some sensory pleasure, or as Dunn puts it, “to distinguish real from imaginary happiness” (“Bright Enough,” 136). The ability to deliberate and make this choice is liberty for Locke. I am not persuaded that this self is quite as “punctual” as Taylor insists.

19 Rapaczynski, Andrzej, Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 144–45Google Scholar.

20 Carrig, Joseph, “Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education: The Assent to Locke,” Review of Politics 63, no. 1 (2001): 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For this reason, it is safe to send a young adult abroad to experience travel, but not a child or adolescent (Education, §§70 and 212). He despairs of sending children to travel when still unfinished by discipline. “But to put them out of their parents' view at a great distance under a governor, when they think themselves too much men to be governed by others, and yet have not prudence and experience enough to govern themselves, what is it but to expose them to all the greatest dangers of their whole life when they have the least fence and guard against them?” (§212). “A young man, before he leaves the shelter of his father's house and the guard of a tutor, should be fortified with resolution and made acquainted with men to secure his virtue” (§70).

22 Tully, “Governing Conduct,” 221.

23 Ibid., 222.

24 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Curley, Edwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 15 (§4).

25 Ivison, The Self at Liberty, 2–3, 34–37, and Hindess, Discourses of Power, 124–25.

26 Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship, 145.

27 Ibid.

28 Hirschmann is concerned that this approach, which Mehta shares (at least in part), oversimplifies Lockean education (Gender, Class, and Freedom, 113). My point is not that the ordinary subjects of education are neglected, but rather that mathematics and language promise nothing about citizenship: they make one capable of geometry and Latin, not virtue. Thus character education is Locke's primary concern, though he is not unconcerned with the standard curriculum: one must be vigorously about one's vocation, after all.

29 Mehta, The Anxiety of Freedom, 170.

30 Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom, 79–80.

31 Carrig, “Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education,” 73.

32 Ibid., 75. See also Neill, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education.”

33 Button, Contract, Cutlure, and Citizenship, 151; Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom, 79–80; and Mehta, The Anxiety of Freedom, 123.

34 Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom, 89.

35 Steven Forde makes an argument parallel to this, namely, that Locke does not expect everyone to reason through the principles grounding liberalism, but rather to hold these principles as true without demonstration. See Forde, “What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?,” Review of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 232–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Connolly, William, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 176.

37 See Stephen White's “very rough characterization” of the modern subject in “After Critique: Affirming Subjectivity in Contemporary Political Theory,” European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2 (2003): 209–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his discussion of the “Teflon” subject in his Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4Google Scholar.