The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture

Abstract

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. By Gillian Brown. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 237. $49.95.) Gillian Brown's brilliant extended essay on the complexities of Locke's doctrine of informed consent and its formative influence on the character and literature of early America rekindles the debate over the intellectual roots of American thought. Locke's prominent influence on the Founders, once a commonplace in American political thought, came under assault with Gordon Wood's emphasis on a more communitarian ideology in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787(1969). Bolstered by J.G.A. Pocock's magisterial work, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), a rash of studies located the American experience more in civic republicanism than in Lockean liberalism. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (1982), however, reasserted Locke's formative influence over late eighteenth-century thought through his sensationalist model of the human mind. He argued that Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) revolutionized the way parents and educators understood the relationships between familial relations, education, and the shaping of moral character. In turn, Locke's influence lay directly behind the developing British colonial rhetoric about proper patriarchy versus tyranny and about educating a citizenry for effective self-government. Gillian Brown, a professor of English at the University of Utah, engages the debate in much the same theoretical way as Fliegelman, and with equal brilliance. She places Locke's theories of learning, as well as his conviction of the potentiality and vulnerability of the child, squarely in the midst of revolutionary rhetoric and elaborates on how it served to provide political safeguards sought by critics of republican values. Reconfiguring the historiographical debate between Lockean liberalism and civic republicanism, Brown suggests numerous ways in which Locke's liberal vision of informed consent enforces and sustains (rather than competes with) an emerging republican synthesis. Her rereading of Locke clarifies . . . the citizen's continuous labor of crediting and discrediting ideas (8). She uses the tools of literary criticism to elucidate the ideology and reception of the literature that shaped the cultural face of the new nation: The New England Primer, children's fables, and novels. So effortlessly and articulately does Brown assert Locke's omniscient presence in the literature that she sets a high standard for the interdisciplinary work of cultural studies. The Consent of the Governed is composed of two complementary but separate arguments. The first half of the book explores the Lockean legacy as found in a variety of literatures for children, particularly The New England Primer and oft-told fables like Tom Thumb. Here she argues that Locke's principle of informed consent determined the shape and character of the didactic literature that made up the reading diet of colonial children. In addition, she effectively shows how children were expected to process and internalize the messages of this literature on their way to becoming good citizens of the new republic. The second part of the book uses early American novels to explore the difficulties and contradictions inherent in a theory of consensual politics: that is, how to deal with the possibilities of poor or destructive choices. Brown argues that John Locke's epistemology-that children's minds selected and ordered information received rather than being born knowing inherent truths-permeated the creation of most eighteenth-century literature for children. As the future citizens who would secure the success of the republican experiment, children had to be inculcated with civic virtues and be able to choose rightly from competing ideas. …