John Locke\'s Understanding of Freedom and Equality

¶ … John Locke's understanding of freedom and equality is the essential basis of any happy and prosperous society." How would the following individuals react to this quote: Rousseau, King Louis the Fourteenth, and Napoleon

Rousseau

Rousseau is most famous for saying that "Man was/is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." (Social Contract, Vol. IV, p. 131 in Ashcraft, 22). We are born good but are essentially not free since we are forced to live in a pretentious society with conventions and masquerade. The most liberated and content people, according to Rousseau, were primitive people since they had no manmade convictions and social niceties to bind them.

Locke's account of the social republic was one of people freely choosing to segregate in bands and create rules for their protection. These obligations are willingly entered into and represent bonds of natural law where people choose a ruler to impose and maintain order and where citizens choose to impose a shared system of rights to life, liberty and property. To Rousseau, however, this mass web of social structure only spoiled individuals of their essential naturalness and goodness and confined them in a cell that was not of their choosing. Society is an invention that only stunts and warps our development.

Contrary to the popular notion which saw primitive people as 'savages' and modern people as 'advanced' and civilized, Rousseau opined that it was the primitive people who actually were enabled to be most natural and, therefore, 'themselves' whilst we, moderns, are imprisoned by the need to conform to a social pressure and a host of confining and person-eroding laws.

Natural man is isolated, timid, peaceful, mute, and without need or desire to occupy himself with conflict. It is only the angst and unnaturalness of human society that fosters unease, aggression, ambition, and war. Social society - the prisons that man have erected for themselves -- cause man to fight one against the other, to distrust one another, and to become transformed from naturally innocent and good people to conniving, scheming monsters.

Humans do have free will. It is this that enabled them to choose and to make the progression from the primitive state of the 'uncivilized' man to the civilized nation with its morass of conventions. Humans can also use this free will to reason. Humans are, therefore, partially free. Of themselves, and in themselves, they have this scintilla of freedom in the shape of freewill. They have, however, placed themselves within a society that enslaves their faculties and bodies to laws and dominion that is not of their choosing.

King Louis the Fourteenth

For King Louis, people were certainly not equal nor would he have upheld Locke's insistence that the king was not divinely chosen. Louis the fourteenth was the Sun King, the beloved, he believed, of God and chosen by Him to rule His people. The people were his playthings, his toys, there to do his bidding and serve as his minions. Louis's attention, in fact, was not focused on the people; it was focused on himself and, as far as his people went the only others deserving of his attention were those in his immediate circle: the aristocracy and possibly the clergy, namely the upper two tiers. The mass of the nation, the peasantry and common folk were forgotten. Locke's political writings and opinions on freedom therefore would have been absurd to His Highness.

In The Second Treatise of Government, Locke argues that it is the people who choose the government and monarchy not vice versa. This too would have repelled Louis. The people transfer some of their rights to a political government, whilst retaining others. To Louis, however, the people owed him all their rights. Louis was a despotic monarch.

People, before forming a government, were in a convivial state of mutual love and equality. It was this mutual love that caused them to agree to band together and establish a ruler to protect and guide them. The worthy ruler, therefore, would be someone who would feel himself beholden to the people, who would be humble whilst powerful, and reject tyrannical means. Louis would scoff all of this. To Locke, in fact, Louis would have been the perfect example of an illegitimate slave master since legitimate slavery was an important concept in Locke's conception of freedom. Illegitimate slavery consisted in the notion where one possessed absolute or despotic power over another without just cause. Ipso facto, under Louis XIV, people were not free and the king tyrannized his subjects. Louis would have disagreed.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Bonaparte was a convivial monarch who espoused equality but, in reality, practiced dictatorship. He made a show of consulting 'the people' and having them form the laws, but, in reality, it was Bonaparte's word that passed as Law. Far better than Louis XIV in that he at least mouthed allegiance to equality and did not enslave the people, he was still, however, not Locke's ideal monarch in that he saw a huge gap between himself and the people.

Napoleon's character was perplexing: a dictator on the one hand, and, therefore, a despot in Locke's opinion, he did, however, espouse the triple Revolutionary motif of "Liberty, Equality, a and Fraternity." Whether he practiced it is dubious.