Selected Correspondence by John Locke

Abstract

95 meant there was only one head or face, the sovereign’s. Those many heads, looking out from the body, away from the sovereign , each having a view of its own, are potential insurgents. Especially valuable are Mr. Malcolm’s accounts of Hobbes’s reception in Europe, how Hobbes was read, and Hobbes’s view of international relations. He opposes the simplified realist view in favor of a more complexone, suggesting that Hobbes indeed envisages the possibility of an international system. Questions that Mr. Malcolm tantalizes the reader by not raising include how Hobbes’s contemporaries failed to address the analogy between original sin and Hobbesian human nature; why Behemoth was refused publication; whether Hobbes’s view of the corporeality of the soul and his antipathy toviolenceareconnected . It is disconcerting to find that Hobbes’s student William Cavendish is ‘‘only a few years younger than Hobbes,’’ but dies in 1628 ‘‘attheageof 43,’’having somehow become at the time of his death three years older than Hobbes, aged forty in 1628. Illustrations are not listed in the front matter or keyed in the text, so the reader may finish the essay on Leviathan ’s title-pages before seeing them, since the illustrations end the essay. Mr. Malcolm seems to have taken seriously Diderot’s stirring preference for Hobbes over Locke (albeit the Hobbes of the Elements of Law, not Leviathan): ‘‘This is a book to read and comment on all one’s life.’’ As would be expected from so distinguished a Hobbesian, these Aspects, like their subject, serve enlightenment. Regina Janes Skidmore College JOHN LOCKE. Selected Correspondence, ed. Mark Goldie. Oxford: Oxford, 2002. Pp. xxxvi ⫹ 378. £35. In 1689, when Locke returned to England from exile in Holland, he was fiftysix years of age and almost entirely unpublished and unknown. Had Locke been required to publish early in order to secure tenure, it is possible that we should not now be discussing him. His ideas germinated slowly; his drafts were frequently revised; he released them to the press only after much reflection and sometimes anonymously. He was ‘‘known’’ for only the last fifteen years of his life. Because Locke ventured late into publishing , his correspondence is of more than ordinary interest. From Esmond de Beer’s eight-volume edition of the Correspondence (1976–1989), Mr. Goldie gathers 244 (7%) of the 3,637 surviving letters written by and to Locke.Theeditor has made sensitive abridgments so that little of substance is lost from the letters . Happily, he has retained de Beer’s numbering so that full texts may easilybe found. The letters run from May 1652 to October 1704—that is, from the Puritan Revolution to the beginnings of the English Enlightenment. Newton and Boyle are among the correspondents represented , as are Locke’s publishers, the stewards of his estate, the children of his friends, and assorted politicians, divines, and deists. Edward Clarke and PeterKing are well represented; so too, Damaris Masham, Le Clerc, Limborch, and Molyneux . Mr. Goldie passes over Locke the bibliophile and Locke the biblical exegete . He has also spared us ‘‘many hundreds of letters which are by turns mundane , arcane, mercenary, dutiful,gossipy, fractious, or fawning.’’ Something of the flavor of the letters may be gleaned from the following snippet . John Strachey advises Locke not to take holy orders: ‘‘This is such a trade as may be tooke to at any time and as longe 96 as there are dunces in the world a man of parts . . . need want noe preferment.’’Toleration , Calvinism, and free will are discussed with Limborch; the distinctionbetween the natural and the divine law, with Tyrrell. A number of philosophical topics are reviewed with Molyneux, while publishers are denounced for issuing poor editions of Locke’s works at inflatedprices . The stir caused by The Reasonableness of Christianity is covered. Locke is also revealed as one who could be crochety , sympathetic, angry, gentle. His interests were so wide that there is a certain consolation in Mr. Goldie’s observation that Locke had deficiency in music, drama , and the visual arts. ‘‘Locke’s credit today,’’Mr. Goldieobserves , ‘‘stands low among postmodern and postcolonial doubters of the Enlightenment ‘project.’’’ Some who have not bowed the knee...