Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie, ed. Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall

Abstract

Few modern scholars deserve a Festschrift more than Mark Goldie. As the fifteen-page bibliography of his writings makes clear, his contribution to Restoration and eighteenth-century studies has been immense, and also highly varied. Although perhaps best known as a commentator on Locke, his work has also touched on Restoration clergymen and informers, the politics of office-holding, the Scottish Enlightenment, theories of religious intolerance, James Harrington, and even the architecture of Churchill College, Cambridge. It seems fitting that someone who has enjoyed a number of fruitful publishing collaborations with colleagues should be celebrated by a volume edited by no fewer than four of his former students, one of whom—Justin Champion—sadly died very shortly after the book’s appearance. Together they provide an eighteen-page introductory tribute discussing the honorand’s role as writer, teacher and mentor. But there seems to be little place for mere sentiment in the pitiless modern world of academic publishing. Is the book worth acquiring and reading in and of itself? The answer is a firm ‘yes’, partly because of the quality of the team of contributors that has been assembled—mostly Goldie’s own former students. More important is the fact that two clusters of essays offer riches for significant groups of scholars: those who are interested in John Locke, and those working on the intellectual culture of pre-modern Scotland. Sami Savonius-Wroth’s discussion of corruption makes a strong case for Locke’s main concern being the future of European civilisation, which was to be safeguarded by pursuing ‘a particular regenerative enterprise’ (p. 144). An appropriately educated ruling class would be ‘galvanised by revelation’ to persevere ‘in the constant struggle to reorder the psyche to a more rational, chastened and regulated, a less erratic and desire-driven, mode of life’ (p. 158). Delphine Soulard’s study of literary journals published in the Dutch Republic demonstrates the extent to which Locke’s ideas were received by Francophone readers. Jean Le Clerc in particular was ‘instrumental in erecting Locke as the epitome of toleration, truth and liberty’ (p. 217)—findings framed to complement Goldie’s own work on Locke’s wider reception in the anglophone world. Geoff Kemp fruitfully links together Locke’s time as a censor at Christ Church in 1664 and his writings against censorship in the 1690s. These are connected and understood through classical understandings of the role of censors in supervising and promoting the character and virtue of the people. Locke was against legislation censoring the press both because it was ‘ecclesiastical’ in its function, designed to shield ‘mother church’, and due to his loathing of the monopolistic oppression perpetrated against scholars by the Stationers’ Company (pp. 173, 176). For his part, John Marshall offers a timely piece linking together support for slavery overseas and forced labour at home in the context of the difficult economic circumstances of the 1690s. Locke’s position on the Board of Trade included support for the expansion of slavery in the Caribbean; his writings in the 1690s recommended ‘suppression’ of ‘begging drones’ who live ‘unnecessarily upon other people’s labour’ and ‘pretend they cannot get work’ (p. 194). Such an outlook fed into the expansion of workhouses in the capital.