John Locke and Post-Revolutionary Politics: Electoral Reform and the Franchise*

Abstract

Our perception of John Locke's ideas and significance has undergone profound change in the last forty years. Once assumed to have been a justification of the revolution of 1688, his Two Treatises are now located amongst the radical Whig writings of the late 1670s or early 1680s.1 Alongside the redating there has been a fundamental re-evaluation of the work's impact. As Mark Goldie puts it, ‘where Locke was once assumed to be the ineluctable fountain of political wisdom, he has now come to have an elusive and fugitive presence’.2 John Kenyon, Martyn Thompson, Harry Dickinson, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock have all questioned or minimized the influence that Locke's political ideology had, both at the time of its publication and throughout much of the eighteenth century.3 The effect of marginalizing Locke's political discourse has changed our historical emphasis, so that Locke's political influence after the revolution of 1688 has appeared slight. Against this, however, something of a backlash has developed. Mark Goldie, Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith have all offered important evidence about the pre-revolution Locke and about the textual impact of his work;4 while Michael Zuckert's ‘new republicanism’ seeks to locate Locke much closer to the commonwealthsmen who influenced America.5 And it was long ago established that Locke and his friends, whom he called his ‘college’, played an active and highly visible role in lobbying, policy-development and drafting legislation in the 1690s.6 This article builds on the second of these interpretations, which resists attempts to marginalize Locke, and seeks to expand our understanding of that post-revolutionary activity.