These more nuanced and complex accounts of rhetoric in the work of Hobbes and the New Science signal the inadequacy of “the rhetoric against rhetoric” to capture the relation of rhetoric to these philosophical, scientific, and political transformations. Locke, however, differs in significant ways from both Hobbes and Sprat. Sprat rightly does not enjoy the philosophical significance of Locke or Hobbes and Sprat’s History is guided by practical goals of generating support for the Royal Society from church and state. Hobbes takes on (in both senses of the phrase) the rhetorical tradition in more obvious and extended ways than does Locke. Moreover, Hobbes launched a powerful critique of prevailing political assumptions, but he actively sought to obstruct such a critical sensibility in individuals. In substance and in style, examining the role of rhetoric in Locke’s philosophical and political thought poses a different set of challenges and possibilities. His engagement with rhetoric is less obvious, to begin with. However, his particular interest in resistance to authority makes his work an even more important site in which to consider the relationship of rhetoric to political critique. To do so is to consider political critique not only as practiced by the theorist but also as theorized as a capacity of the individual and the political community.
In light of these challenges, it is not surprising that the attention given to Locke’s relationship to rhetoric, albeit limited, primarily focuses on his comments in the Essay and usually arises as a question for philosophy rather than for politics, though one more often raised by literary scholars than by philosophers. Locke’s claim that knowledge comes from experience in the Essay is taken as the basis for an apparent hostility to rhetoric cast as a wayward and disruptive influence on the understanding. These positions, furthermore, have been construed as evidence of his “apparent indifference, and presumed hostility, towards the realm of the aesthetic,” discouraging further inquiry into his rhetorical engagements.29
An important exception to this is Paul de Man’s essay “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in which he opens the question of rhetoric in Locke’s Essay in new ways by pointing to the abundance of figural language, including metaphor, personification, and catachresis, in the writing of this supposed enemy of the aesthetic. Locke’s theory of language, he argues, cannot constrain itself to a basis in unmediated sensory perception but, rather, is enacted as a theory of tropes.30 For de Man recognition of the figural character of Lockean language attests to the failure of his philosophical project to free the rational subject from the influence of rhetoric. Locke, on this reading, is still understood as hostile to rhetoric and the aesthetic more generally even as the evidence of a more complicated relation of rhetoric to his philosophy mounts.31
My central claim in this book is not simply that Locke’s writings have a rhetorical character, or that, by necessity, no text can evade its rhetorical dimensions. While such claims are important, my contention is that Locke’s use of rhetoric is not an accidental lapse but rather is constitutive of his theory and practice of critique. To consider the productive role of rhetoric in philosophy, in general, requires that we read a theorist like Locke in unaccustomed ways, but we can and should do more. We must read Locke, in particular, with attention to his style as a matter of philosophical interest, not just as a counterpart or competitor to his theoretical argument. Put somewhat differently, I contend that it is inadequate to read Locke’s philosophical and political texts without a consideration of how his style indispensably contributes to the arguments therein. As I will argue, Locke’s central focus on experience in his Essay requires the capacity for invention to generate critical purchase on individual, philosophical, social, and political norms and practices. Both experience and invention, as we will see, are necessary for Locke’s conception of moral, natural, and political philosophy.
Rhetoric and Locke’s Political Theory
If Locke’s philosophy is seen as hostile to rhetoric, his political thought appears to take no note of it whatsoever. There are at least two reasons for this perception. First, the political concepts for which Locke is best known—the state of nature, social contract, and natural rights—evidence his interest in a critical vantage point that looks beyond existing social and political institutions and practices, in order to open them to revision. Insofar as these concepts are seen in terms of a retreat from the historical, customary, and affective relations that give shape to particular political communities, Locke’s thought is then construed, by critics and admirers alike, as rationalist and ahistorical. This is not only to suggest that Locke is taken as a theorist for whom reason is an important capacity of the individual but also, and much more strongly, to associate him with rationalism, broadly construed.
To say that Locke has been associated with rationalism, in a broad sense, is not to ignore his identification with the empiricist tradition. Rather, the Lockean subject, cast as the “man of reason,” is premised on the valorization of reason as the sole faculty of critique.32 The term man of reason also indicates detachment from embodied social differences of class, gender, and race as well as the social and psychological effects of passions, imagination, and language. This is particularly resonant when Locke is taken up, as he so often is, as a founding figure of the liberal tradition. His seminal place in the empiricist tradition of philosophy does not necessarily diminish this image of reason’s operating independently of other faculties, such as imagination or language, and without social or material influence, whether corporeal, historical, or economic. Such an appeal to a position external to politics and society can be construed as a source of unyielding rigor for criticism of established practices and norms. For others, such detachment sustains only certain claims to political critique and resistance while maintaining blindness to other forms of inequality and subjection, especially those attached to social and economic status.33 While there is considerable disagreement on the merits of such an external standpoint for critique, these different interpretations concur in their perception of Locke’s political thought as one of rationalist detachment. Such an elevation of reason alone seems perfectly concordant with the exclusion or subordination of rhetoric.
Second, Locke’s major texts, both political and philosophical, have often struck readers as discontinuous, repetitive, and plagued by inconsistency. Indeed, we might expect a theorist with Locke’s reputation to offer more straightforward, concise, and consistent philosophical treatments. Yet among Locke’s major works we find the long, rambling, and circular manner of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as well as the First Treatise, widely reputed more for its redundant, long-winded, and polemical attacks than for its theoretical merit.34 Even the Second Treatise requires careful partitioning out of certain chapters to preserve the brief, conceptual framework from the unruly examples and arguments that seem to undermine the abstract rationality of the social contract. There is something that does not seem to sit right between the style and the substance of Locke’s thought.
In response to such impressions, interpreters have long organized his work and ideas along dichotomies of rationalist and empiricist, theoretical and polemical, fact and fiction in order to make sense of these problems of style and logic.35 The most famous, but hardly the last, of such claims is Peter Laslett’s depiction of Locke as “perhaps the least consistent of all the great philosophers” for the incompatibility of his appeals to natural law in the Two Treatises and his thoroughgoing critique of innate ideas in the Essay.36 Declaring that his thought is riven helps to make sense of our exasperation as readers as well as our philosophical disappointments. Moreover, such partitioning relieves late modern readers of the interpretive dilemmas of Lockean writing that evidently plague us.
It is not the goal of this book to heal such divisions and recover a unitary Locke. Rather, I question the widespread sense that Locke’s repetitions and discontinuities mark a failure of both rhetoric and philosophy, that they pose a problem in need of a solution. Locke’s thought may be riven; indeed, it may be fractured into an even greater plurality than Laslett and others have suspected. That does not mean it must