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RHETORIC AND SITUATED POLITICAL CRITIQUE

The emergence of modern political theory in the seventeenth century marks a watershed moment in which new conceptions of human reason take center stage in theorizing the foundations and limits of political authority and community. This elevation of modern reason is widely seen as bringing about a break with the rhetorical tradition, inaugurating a supposed hostility between rhetoric and political theory that continues to resonate today. In this book, I challenge this assumed enmity between political theory and rhetoric through the unlikely figure of John Locke. Traditionally cast in a dual and decidedly modern role as rationalist in political theory and empiricist in philosophy, Locke is rarely seen as a friend to rhetoric. This opposition confirms latter-day assumptions about reason’s incompatibility with rhetoric that are familiar to late modern readers. By contrast, historians of rhetoric, philosophy, and science provide compelling reasons to reconsider this opposition in the early modern period, especially with regard to early empirical philosophers such as Locke. Locke’s relationship to the rhetorical tradition, as we will find, is better understood as one of debt and denial.¹ While Locke undoubtedly voiced criticisms of the power of eloquence to lead us astray, I contend that Locke draws on rhetoric in fundamental ways in both his philosophical and political writings. Specifically, his appropriation of elements of the rhetorical tradition is indispensable for his critical engagements with philosophical and political authority. Rhetoric offers Locke a productive and creative capacity that sustains his challenge to reigning doctrines of his day as well as his reimagining of social and political membership. Locke’s debt to rhetoric undergirds his new vision of political community reliant upon an ongoing practice of critical judgment.

Rhetoric and Political Theory

The notion of the lasting significance of a momentous break in the early modern period between rhetoric and political theory is given particularly clear formulation by Bryan Garsten in Saving Persuasion. Garsten identifies a “rhetoric against rhetoric” in the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant that inaugurated a powerful legacy of suspicion and distrust of rhetoric in political theory. Juxtaposing the treatment of rhetoric and politics by Aristotle and Cicero with the work of these early modern critics, he shows how a particular modern distrust of rhetoric is inextricably tied to a suspicion of persuasion and political judgment more generally. The lasting effects of this hostility between rhetoric and political theory persist today—most notably, for Garsten, among those theorists who seek to ground democratic deliberation and authority in rational rather than persuasive discourse. By contrast, Garsten seeks to revalue political judgment that appeals to arguments and audiences located on the contingent terrain of politics, and for this he turns to the insights of the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, in this tradition, is not restricted to “merely” eloquent speech; rather, it involves a mode of action and interaction of situated political actors and spectators seeking influence and appealing to one another’s judgment. Moreover, we find that the status of rhetoric is a central question for the practice and theory of politics. This was clearly the case for early modern theorists, and it should be recognized as such by political theorists today.

Saving Persuasion rightly invites us to see rhetoric as centrally important for political thought, but its definition of rhetoric as “speech designed to persuade” puts significant limits on this relationship.² To conceive of rhetoric in terms of persuasion is an important corrective to political theories that assert the need for an external point or prior agreement from which to assess social and political arrangements. Appealing to judgment from “within our existing opinions” recalls political theory to the finite terrain of politics, marked indelibly by disagreement between diverse opinions and beliefs of passionate actors.³ Working with such a narrow definition, however, cuts short the political possibilities and projects that rhetoric might sustain. In particular, a politics of persuasion cannot account for the possibility that existing opinions and beliefs, serving as the grounds of judgment, may prove inadequate to current and emerging political conditions. A political community may find existing categories inadequate because of unpredictable events or the contingent consequences of human action, such as the novelty that characterizes both political freedom as well as the rise of totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt reminds us.⁴ A political community, or some part of it, may need to challenge common opinions and beliefs because they are inadequate to their claims of freedom or justice. A rhetoric identified only with persuasion among existing opinions cannot provide the basis for this indispensable form of critical judgment.

How do political communities generate such new categories for challenging social and political arrangements? If they come from within established norms and practices, how can they achieve critical purchase on the status quo? These questions invite many to assert that claims to freedom and justice require a position external to politics, detached from customary practices and prejudices. Such an external position can be found in Rawls’s original position as well as in Habermasian arguably quasi-transcendental norms arising from, but ultimately transcending, specific historical and cultural locations. In their seeking universality, it is precisely their ultimate detachment from particular social and political contexts that is a necessary condition of their normative purchase.⁵ Rhetoric and imagination may even be brought into the service of this desired detachment in the form of thought experiments and exemplary rhetorical cultures. Yet the goal of such an external standpoint toward politics, whatever its debts to rhetoric and imagination (avowed or not), posits a fundamental distrust of the political judgment of the people.⁶ The idea of a view from nowhere, the Archimedean point, signals a flight from politics in general and democracy in particular. It is only through politics that relations of justice and the conditions of freedom are secured in practice, that is, as lived experience.

Extending this critique further, we must keep in mind that insofar as such an external position is linked to abstract universalism, aspiring to detachment from particular political conditions limits the normative value of the plurality and material differences that condition and constitute political life.⁷ Abstract universal norms often have been credited with delegitimating practices emphasizing class-, sex-, or race-based distinctions. Through their abstract and universal character, however, the validity of such norms is achieved by virtue of a perceived break with the embodied, socioeconomic, and cultural particularities of social and political life. So generating new categories for judgment, in this vein, also requires a flight from the plural and material conditions of political life. For this reason, situated political critique—that is, critique for which the contingent and particular relations and practices of politics are both condition and object—poses what appears to be a dilemma: how can we gain critical purchase on our social and political arrangements if our criteria are generated from within those practices? How, in other words, can political critique be enacted from within the field of politics without reproducing the status quo?

The politics of persuasion cannot respond to this problem of situated critique. It cannot respond because judgment appealing to existing opinions alone does not account for the emergence of new ways of understanding existing social and political practices or ways of envisioning how they might be otherwise. That is not to say, however, that there are no other resources in the rhetorical tradition or early modern political thought for considering this important problem of situated political critique in a new way.

Beyond Persuasion

Looking to the rhetorical tradition, we find a more capacious understanding of rhetoric that goes beyond the dignity of persuasion. Such conceptions of rhetoric, as we will see, offer rich resources that sustain political critique. Where conceiving of rhetoric as “mere” persuasion has long been a hallmark of philosophy’s valorization of reason alone, Ernesto Grassi’s account of the rhetorical tradition redirects our attention to a much more productive and theoretically significant role, also originating with Cicero. Conceived of as an imaginative language, rhetoric in Grassi’s understanding reaches far beyond its instrumental uses to encompass the creation of new meaning.⁸ Such new meaning is not created in a vacuum but, rather, works creatively from within particular social and linguistic practices. In this way, rhetoric uniquely offers the capacity to develop new ways of thinking in response to contingent and novel circumstances and the changing needs of human life. Rhetoric provides indispensable resources for critique situated on the finite terrain of politics.

Insofar as we conceive of philosophy as proceeding by the force of logic to the exclusion or subordination of rhetoric and its play of imagination on the passions, our thought remains tethered to the first principles from which deduction follows. From where do we get the original insight into such first principles and what is the source for new models of thought? How, in other words, could we proceed beyond mere repetition with deduction alone? The discovery of the conditions of rational thought, Grassi argues, lies not in logic but in the imaginative power of figural language to generate new ways of ordering and presenting images on which speech that is both reasonable and effective depends. Metaphor and analogy are essential for generating new images and frameworks out of familiar terms. Such figural language entails a borrowing, or transfer, of familiar words into unfamiliar relation. to produce new meanings. It is, in other words, to discover or invent a new relation, not derived from fact or through logic, but by virtue of the ingenious activity of the speaker. This capacity of ingenium, a distinctive human ability for making meaning, works by joining the diverse and disparate. It “reveals something ‘new’ . . . something ‘unexpected’ and ‘astonishing’ by uncovering the ‘similar in the unsimilar, i.e. what cannot be deduced rationally.’”⁹ Understood this way, rhetoric does not simply adorn or destabilize philosophy’s reasoned arguments; rather, it makes possible the production of new spaces for arguments and shared meaning.¹⁰ As Grassi writes, “Insofar as metaphor has its root in the analogy between different things and makes this analogy immediately spring into ‘sight,’ it makes a fundamental contribution to the structure of our world.”¹¹ To critically orient ourselves to the situated world of politics, rather than idealizing detachment, requires the creative power of rhetoric, unleashed through metaphor. Rhetoric as imaginative language is indispensable for envisioning our social and political arrangements in new and different ways.

To consider rhetoric as an indispensable capacity for critique then requires a shift in perspective from philosophical tradition. Always situated and dialogic, rhetoric presumes a particular audience, a relation between speaker and audience(s), located in a specific time and place.¹² The appeal to audience (or readers) may be explicit in the text or it may come by implication through the repetition of a familiar image or idiom. In both cases, the text marks its position within relations between speaker and audience. This situation invites us to read in new ways, even philosophical texts, attentive to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia.¹³ To tend to this plurality of modes of speech within a text is to be aware that words and phrases, idioms and images, are not always deployed to produce and reproduce meaning in the same ways. Instead, we must tend to the moments when meanings are pluralized and decentered, following the play of style and argument and attuned to the possibility of language being deployed in new ways or even turned against itself, as in parody or satire. The presence of multiple and varied modes and forms of address does not necessarily mean that rhetoric has overtaken philosophy, undermining rational thought.¹⁴ On the contrary, stylistic and figural invention, framed by the text’s appeals to readers, can be recognized as contributing essentially to philosophical and political arguments themselves. Dialogic and heteroglossic dimensions of the text may challenge norms of philosophy’s monologic forms of address. They can also, however, reveal the essential and transformative role of imaginative and inventive language in launching new modes of judgment and critique that lie at the heart of the philosophical enterprise.

Reconceiving Early Modern Rhetoric and Philosophy

Those who recount the seventeenth century as the end of the rhetorical tradition and the twin rise of the modern state and science are not without reason. Nowhere does the break seem clearer than in the philosophical and scientific innovations of the Royal Society, as recorded in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. The Royal Society counted among its members Locke, Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Dryden, Isaac Newton, and others who, in Sprat’s words, “have indeavor’d to separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetoric, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables.”¹⁵ They professed “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.”¹⁶ Contrasted with the “Artifice, Humors, and Passions of Sects,” Sprat presents the emerging natural philosophy, with its plain style, as conducive to political stability and religious moderation.¹⁷ We need think only of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in which a new science of politics draws upon mathematical reasoning and institutes sovereign control over linguistic creativity and interpretation, to see how closely interwoven with politics these developments in science, philosophy, and language were.

Locke enjoys a central role in these momentous changes and it takes no stretch of imagination to associate him with the “rhetoric against rhetoric.” He is aligned with the Royal Society, in tension with older traditions of Aristotelianism and humanism, on the one hand, and new, nonconformist religious sects, on the other. In contrast to Hobbes, however, Locke’s New Science is that the early English empirical scientists. Locke does not write extensively on rhetoric per se, but when he does, there is little doubt that he too harbors suspicions of the capacity of language to create confusion in the human understanding and conflict in social and political life. In his best-known passage on rhetoric, Locke speaks with great consternation of the relationship of rhetoric to passions, and to judgment, while advocating for order and clarity in speech. If we are to “speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore, however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided” (3.10.34).¹⁸ Rhetoric matters for Locke here, insofar as it raises the power of the passions to overwhelm judgment. It raises, in other words, a fundamental concern for his philosophy.

Not surprisingly, then, figural language comes under his critical gaze in several texts, especially those concerned with the cultivation and conduct of the human understanding, including but not limited to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He speaks of rhetoric at times in a pejorative manner, casting it in feminine form, “the fair Sex” (3.10.34), and emphasizing its ornamental role of language: “Nor do I deny, that those Words, and the like, are to have their place in the common use of Languages, that have made them currant. It looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by: and Philosophy, it self, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it appears in publick, must have so much Complacency, as to be cloathed in the ordinary Fashion and Language of the Country, so far as it can consist with Truth and Perspicuity” (2.21.20). He positions judgment as “a way of proceeding quite contrary to Metaphor and Allusion, wherein for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of Wit, which strikes so lively on the Fancy, and therefor so acceptable to all People” (2.11.2). The beauty of such figural language requires “no labour of thought, to examine what Truth or Reason there is in it,” Locke complains, thereby building his reputation as hostile not only to rhetoric but also to aesthetics more generally. In Of the Conduct of the Understanding, written for possible inclusion in the Essay, he recognizes the need for figural language but seems to reserve only a secondary place for it: “Figured and metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more abstruse and unfamiliar ideas which the mind is not yet thoroughly accustomed to; but then they must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have, not to paint to us those which we yet have not. Such borrowed and allusive ideas may follow real and solid truth, to set it off when found, but must by no means be set in its place and taken for it.”¹⁹ In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which sets out a plan for cultivating reason in young gentlemen, he argues that right reasoning “does not consist in talking in mode and figure itself” and seeks to excise from the curriculum the “art and formality of disputing” as well as formal rules of rhetoric.²⁰ In the educational writings, as in philosophy, the call for clarity in speech rings throughout, as does the concern that the persuasive power of language carries the potential to undermine proper modes of conduct of the understanding (STCE, §189). For “[t]he Mind without looking any farther, rests satisfied with the agreeableness of the Picture, and the gayety of the Fancy: And it is a kind of an affront to go about to examine it, by the severe Rules of Truth, and good Reason” (2.11.2).

Representing an extreme case of rhetoric as a challenge to reason is the case of enthusiasts, where the effects are felt in moral and political matters. Enthusiasm, Locke argues, entails the replacement of reason with fancy, or imagination, when authority is granted on the basis of passion rather than evidence. For those moved by such inwardly felt religious passions, according to Locke, “Reason is lost upon them, they are above it: they see the Light infused into their Understandings, and cannot be mistaken; ’tis clear and visible there, like the Light of bright Sunshine, shews it self, and needs no other Proof, but its own Evidence: they feel the Hand of GOD moving them within, and the impulses of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel” (4.19.8). What they see and feel, however, is not sensory experience, but metaphor and simile, Locke argues: “[T]hey are sure, because they are sure: and their Perswasions are right, only because they are strong in them. For, when what they say is strip’d of the Metaphor of seeing and feeling, this is all it amounts to: and yet these Similes so impose on them, that they serve them for certainty in themselves, and demonstration to others” (4.19.9). In enthusiasm, rhetorical figure and imagination undermine cautious judgment based on evidence.

What reason is there to suspect that anything more is needed to explain this apparent break between Locke’s philosophy and rhetoric, in keeping with the tenor of his times? There are clues even in these few passages that something more complicated is going on. First, in rejecting disputation and the formal rules of rhetoric in education, Locke rejects only certain institutionalized practices and objects of the rhetorical tradition while reinforcing the importance of writing and speaking well. Where handbooks of rhetoric fall short, examples of eloquent and effective speech are much more powerful. A favored example for speech and letters is none other than Cicero (STCE, §189). Second, figures such as metaphor and simile maintain at least some useful, if conscribed, role in communicating ideas, even, or rather especially, the ineffable concepts of philosophy. This suggests the possibility that reason alone may not be sufficient in all cases. Finally, when Locke turns a critical eye on rhetoric, his concerns are often rooted in questions of authority and practices of judgment. Establishing authority and making judgments are hardly removed from the traditional terrain of rhetoric. Locke’s concerns about rhetoric are motivated by the very issues that the rhetorical tradition put at the center: questions of authority and judgment.

There are deeper reasons to question the epic tale of rupture between philosophy, science, and rhetoric in the seventeenth century in general, and in Locke’s work in particular. Large-scale transformations such as these are rarely so sudden or discrete. Rather, rhetoric, philosophy, and science come together in unexpected ways in this creative period of transformation, challenging us to conceive of these relationships in fuller and more nuanced ways. While the phrase “the rhetoric against rhetoric” acknowledges that the castigation of rhetoric does not necessarily signal its exile, the phrase resists the richer and more nuanced meanings afforded by the rhetorical tradition. Interpreters of Hobbes, for example, have closely examined his shifting and complex engagements with rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition to find resources well beyond the negative and instrumental uses highlighted by Garsten and others. As Victoria Kahn shows, Hobbes’s claims against rhetoric must be understood as unfolding within a sophisticated rhetorical engagement between author and reader, in which the reader’s assent is solicited from the outset to an analogy between the self and the text’s presentation of a new political subjectivity. Leviathan’s social contract, in which interpretive as well as political power are granted to the sovereign, is premised on a prior linguistic agreement: a metaphoric contract concerning the mode of reading both self and text. Moreover, it is precisely Hobbes’s concerns with humans in a materialist world, as embodied and imaginative creatures driven by passions, that makes rhetoric dangerous but also indispensable.²¹ This is not to ignore Hobbes’s challenge to authoritative ideas and texts of the rhetorical tradition or his wariness of the individual capacity for judgment. Rather it is a signal that rhetoric was not so easily dispensed with by early modern thinkers, despite their criticisms. This is especially the case for those theorists, like Hobbes as well as Locke, who sought to legitimate and challenge claims to authority in new ways.

Closer examination of Sprat and the New Scientists also reveals that rhetoric both sustained the claims of the New Science as well as serving as object of attack. As they challenged traditional modes of epistemic credibility, natural scientists needed to garner authority for their new modes of philosophical and scientific claim-making. Early empirical scientists rejected the principle of authority of Aristotelianism and humanism in exchange for their own claims to knowledge based in experience. Brian Vickers shows how the attacks on rhetoric represented by Sprat’s History do not mark such a profound break between a victorious antirhetoric camp against a losing rhetorical tradition or sect.²² Rather, a seemingly generalized hostility to rhetoric can indicate not so much an epistemological commitment as a commonplace of contentious political arguments. The New Scientists “were not against language, or rhetoric, or the imagination. They were against their opponents’ misuse of them—or, perhaps more simply, they were against their opponents.”²³ Making accusations of the abuse of rhetoric in these highly charged political and philosophical debates is not the same as rejecting rhetoric, certainly not in practice, but not even necessarily in principle.

Language was a deep concern for the New Science and drove linguistic innovation in a number of disparate directions, including in Bacon’s advocacy of analogy and aphorism as well as John Wilkins’s universal language.²⁴ Sprat’s insistence on a plain style, like Locke’s call for order and clarity is not a rejection of rhetoric as such, but a call for one rhetorical style over another.²⁵ The innovations in natural science also led New Scientists to turn to nature as an abundant source for new analogies, spurring on “a free use of rhetoric, both of figures . . . and tropes (especially metaphor).”²⁶ While Sprat cautions against “Rhetorical Flourishes” in Royal Society reports, he writes that the language of the New Science must “represent Truth, cloth’d with Bodies; and to bring Knowledg back again to our very Senses, from whence it was at first deriv’d to our understandings.”²⁷ In other words, Sprat calls upon the language to make vivid its experimental findings, recalling the rhetorical tradition’s notion of enargeia.²⁸ While accusations of the abuse of rhetoric intensified, style and figure remained integral to the philosophical pursuits of the New Science, not as mere ornament but in the creation of new methods for asserting and assessing truth claims.

These more nuanced and complex accounts of rhetoric in the work of Hobbes and the New Science signal the inadequacy of “the rhetoric against rhetoric” to capture the relation of rhetoric to these philosophical, scientific, and political transformations. Locke, however, differs in significant ways from both Hobbes and Sprat. Sprat rightly does not enjoy the philosophical significance of Locke or Hobbes and Sprat’s History is guided by practical goals of generating support for the Royal Society from church and state. Hobbes takes on (in both senses of the phrase) the rhetorical tradition in more obvious and extended ways than does Locke. Moreover, Hobbes launched a powerful critique of prevailing political assumptions, but he actively sought to obstruct such a critical sensibility in individuals. In substance and in style, examining the role of rhetoric in Locke’s philosophical and political thought poses a different set of challenges and possibilities. His engagement with rhetoric is less obvious, to begin with. However, his particular interest in resistance to authority makes his work an even more important site in which to consider the relationship of rhetoric to political critique. To do so is to consider political critique not only as practiced by the theorist but also as theorized as a capacity of the individual and the political community.

In light of these challenges, it is not surprising that the attention given to Locke’s relationship to rhetoric, albeit limited, primarily focuses on his comments in the Essay and usually arises as a question for philosophy rather than for politics, though one more often raised by literary scholars than by philosophers. Locke’s claim that knowledge comes from experience in the Essay is taken as the basis for an apparent hostility to rhetoric cast as a wayward and disruptive influence on the understanding. These positions, furthermore, have been construed as evidence of his “apparent indifference, and presumed hostility, towards the realm of the aesthetic,” discouraging further inquiry into his rhetorical engagements.²⁹

An important exception to this is Paul de Man’s essay “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in which he opens the question of rhetoric in Locke’s Essay in new ways by pointing to the abundance of figural language, including metaphor, personification, and catachresis, in the writing of this supposed enemy of the aesthetic. Locke’s theory of language, he argues, cannot constrain itself to a basis in unmediated sensory perception but, rather, is enacted as a theory of tropes.³⁰ For de Man recognition of the figural character of Lockean language attests to the failure of his philosophical project to free the rational subject from the influence of rhetoric. Locke, on this reading, is still understood as hostile to rhetoric and the aesthetic more generally even as the evidence of a more complicated relation of rhetoric to his philosophy mounts.³¹

My central claim in this book is not simply that Locke’s writings have a rhetorical character, or that, by necessity, no text can evade its rhetorical dimensions. While such claims are important, my contention is that Locke’s use of rhetoric is not an accidental lapse but rather is constitutive of his theory and practice of critique. To consider the productive role of rhetoric in philosophy, in general, requires that we read a theorist like Locke in unaccustomed ways, but we can and should do more. We must read Locke, in particular, with attention to his style as a matter of philosophical interest, not just as a counterpart or competitor to his theoretical argument. Put somewhat differently, I contend that it is inadequate to read Locke’s philosophical and political texts without a consideration of how his style indispensably contributes to the arguments therein. As I will argue, Locke’s central focus on experience in his Essay requires the capacity for invention to generate critical purchase on individual, philosophical, social, and political norms and practices. Both experience and invention, as we will see, are necessary for Locke’s conception of moral, natural, and political philosophy.

Rhetoric and Locke’s Political Theory

If Locke’s philosophy is seen as hostile to rhetoric, his political thought appears to take no note of it whatsoever. There are at least two reasons for this perception. First, the political concepts for which Locke is best known—the state of nature, social contract, and natural rights—evidence his interest in a critical vantage point that looks beyond existing social and political institutions and practices, in order to open them to revision. Insofar as these concepts are seen in terms of a retreat from the historical, customary, and affective relations that give shape to particular political communities, Locke’s thought is then construed, by critics and admirers alike, as rationalist and ahistorical. This is not only to suggest that Locke is taken as a theorist for whom reason is an important capacity of the individual but also, and much more strongly, to associate him with rationalism, broadly construed.

To say that Locke has been associated with rationalism, in a broad sense, is not to ignore his identification with the empiricist tradition. Rather, the Lockean subject, cast as the “man of reason,” is premised on the valorization of reason as the sole faculty of critique.³² The term man of reason also indicates detachment from embodied social differences of class, gender, and race as well as the social and psychological effects of passions, imagination, and language. This is particularly resonant when Locke is taken up, as he so often is, as a founding figure of the liberal tradition. His seminal place in the empiricist tradition of philosophy does not necessarily diminish this image of reason’s operating independently of other faculties, such as imagination or language, and without social or material influence, whether corporeal, historical, or economic. Such an appeal to a position external to politics and society can be construed as a source of unyielding rigor for criticism of established practices and norms. For others, such detachment sustains only certain claims to political critique and resistance while maintaining blindness to other forms of inequality and subjection, especially those attached to social and economic status.³³ While there is considerable disagreement on the merits of such an external standpoint for critique, these different interpretations concur in their perception of Locke’s political thought as one of rationalist detachment. Such an elevation of reason alone seems perfectly concordant with the exclusion or subordination of rhetoric.

Second, Locke’s major texts, both political and philosophical, have often struck readers as discontinuous, repetitive, and plagued by inconsistency. Indeed, we might expect a theorist with Locke’s reputation to offer more straightforward, concise, and consistent philosophical treatments. Yet among Locke’s major works we find the long, rambling, and circular manner of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as well as the First Treatise, widely reputed more for its redundant, long-winded, and polemical attacks than for its theoretical merit.³⁴ Even the Second Treatise requires careful partitioning out of certain chapters to preserve the brief, conceptual framework from the unruly examples and arguments that seem to undermine the abstract rationality of the social contract. There is something that does not seem to sit right between the style and the substance of Locke’s thought.

In response to such impressions, interpreters have long organized his work and ideas along dichotomies of rationalist and empiricist, theoretical and polemical, fact and fiction in order to make sense of these problems of style and logic.³⁵ The most famous, but hardly the last, of such claims is Peter Laslett’s depiction of Locke as “perhaps the least consistent of all the great philosophers” for the incompatibility of his appeals to natural law in the Two Treatises and his thoroughgoing critique of innate ideas in the Essay.³⁶ Declaring that his thought is riven helps to make sense of our exasperation as readers as well as our philosophical disappointments. Moreover, such partitioning relieves late modern readers of the interpretive dilemmas of Lockean writing that evidently plague us.

It is not the goal of this book to heal such divisions and recover a unitary Locke. Rather, I question the widespread sense that Locke’s repetitions and discontinuities mark a failure of both rhetoric and philosophy, that they pose a problem in need of a solution. Locke’s thought may be riven; indeed, it may be fractured into an even greater plurality than Laslett and others have suspected. That does not mean it must conform to familiar dichotomous lines that separate philosophy from rhetoric, experience from reason, and matter from language.³⁷ On the contrary, Locke’s repetitions and discontinuities signal a question of style—that is to say, of rhetoric—that too often goes unasked, most of all with regard to his political writings. To engage rather than partition out, or make exception of, these repetitions and discontinuities requires that we inquire anew into the relationship of philosophy to rhetoric in Locke’s thought. Locke’s reputation as a theorist of a masterful rationality and abstract individualism stands uneasily alongside the style of his texts. It is this uneasiness that invites my inquiry.

To consider the role of rhetoric in Locke’s work is to challenge some of our most familiar images of the thinker, not least in his capacity as political theorist. Where a rhetorical stance suggests a writer engaged with particular audiences, Locke is traditionally praised as well as castigated for looking beyond the particular polity to abstract states of nature and social compacts. Contextualist readers of Locke have shown the way in which his writings can be understood as interventions in specific political controversies, such as the Exclusion Crisis. They have shown the way in which Locke, even in his most abstract utterances, engages in and contends with particular debates and vocabularies of his time and place, whether acknowledged by the author or not.³⁸ While they are enriching, particularly for their challenge to all-too-familiar depictions of Locke as a precociously secular, liberal, individualist thinker, such accounts deemphasize the plural and disruptive uses of language that rhetoric enables. It is worth noting, however, that historically inflected interpretations of Locke reveal him to have been deeply engaged with matters of the pulpit and the political stage. From his early education and academic appointment as a lecturer in rhetoric to his later political and religious concerns, Locke was immersed in contexts in which rhetoric was of supreme importance.³⁹ Why then do we not consider more seriously and more often the role of rhetoric in Locke’s political theory?

Situating Political Critique

Locke’s famous claim in the Essay that all knowledge comes from experience places him as a founding figure in the empiricist tradition, in which experience operates as a firm foundation for rational thought that is external to human cognition, concepts, and normative frameworks. Caught up with such a “myth of the given,” Locke’s thought has long been criticized for its naive faith in unmediated sense perception and the way it obscures the need for normative concepts and language to make experience meaningful. This is not the only way to understand Lockean experience, however. Theorists and historians of literature and rhetoric as well as of science have greatly expanded our understanding of the relation of rhetoric to experience in the early modern period. In ways that both challenge and extend de Man’s insights, they show that despite well-known attacks on rhetoric, proponents of the New Science developed a new relation to rhetoric rather than fully abandoning it. The valuing of experience itself is shared by both the rhetorical tradition and the natural philosophy that interested Locke, troubling their opposition. To be sure, the concept of experience underwent significant transformation in this period, but it can also be seen as common, if contested, ground for these two supposedly antithetical traditions. Moreover, Locke’s Essay plays an important role in this period of transformation.

I approach Locke’s claim to experience through the early modern revival of Epicurean materialism, which emphasizes a chastened practice of probable judgment based on persuasive evidence and testimony rather than on certain foundations. While a number of scholars have noted in Locke’s thought the influence of Pierre Gassendi, the philosopher of early modern Epicureanism, rarely have they considered how this might require us to reconsider the traditional assumption of Locke’s hostility to rhetoric.⁴⁰ More than just an epistemology, Epicurean materialism involved “an entire symbolic cultural mode,” requiring rhetoric no less than epistemology.⁴¹ Rhetoric, in other words, is not unequivocally excluded by the major scientific and philosophical shifts of the seventeenth century. In more subtle forms, it was essential for challenging and asserting authority, both epistemic and social, in new ways. Read through the empiricist tradition and its critics, Lockean experience remains captured within a stark opposition between mind and world, self and others. With Epicurean materialism, it becomes possible to see how the claim to experience acquires meaning and critical force only when it is combined with the inventive capacities of rhetoric. Recognizing the importance of this Epicurean materialist background rightly trains our attention on the importance of experience for Lockean judgment, but without losing sight of the indispensable role of rhetorical invention as a capacity for gaining critical purchase on existing norms and practices.

It is not my intention to place Locke formally within the rhetorical tradition as a primary intellectual influence. Rather, with this expanded understanding of the importance of rhetoric to philosophy and to critique, we will be well positioned to consider in new ways Locke’s nuanced and conflicted relationship to rhetoric and its significance for his theory and practice of critique. To be sure, Locke criticizes eloquent speech. Looking beyond these charges of “mere” persuasion, however, opens up a variety of modes in which rhetoric can sustain theoretical and political argument: as figure and trope, satire and parody, exemplar and fable, and most of all, ingenious, inventive activity. Being attuned to the creative and theoretical contributions of these rhetorical gestures will generate new possibilities concerning the rhetorical and critical significance of particular figures of femininity and foreignness, recurring in Locke’s writings, that Locke’s admirers too often ignore and critics view solely as an impediment. At the center of those critical engagements with authority, we find Locke’s figures and tropes—his exemplary mothers, fathers, cannibals, and Indians—productive of new political meaning and possibilities out of particular images. The place of such imaginative language and unexpected stylizing within Locke’s theoretical writing will open up onto the role of inventive activity in giving meaning and force to his critique of philosophical and political authority.

In drawing attention to the importance of invention in Locke’s philosophical and political writings, I invoke the word, invention, for its capacity to bridge the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political realms in a manner appropriate to his wide-ranging modes of inquiry. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this word in rhetorical terms as indicating the finding or discovering of arguments and topics. In scientific terms, it refers, as is common today, to the creation of a new instrument or idea. In literature, music, and poetry, and even with regard to political institutions, invention can be used to speak of a fabrication or contrivance, that is, of the creative work of humans. The wide scope of invention bridges the realms of fiction and fact, aesthetic and rational, creation and discovery. It includes creation ex nihilo as well as the language of finding, which may refer to that lodged in the memory or hidden within nature. To speak of inventive activity is not necessarily to depart from reality, either into fantasy or to the Archimedean point. Nor is it necessarily to work reproductively with materials already given, whether natural, social, or human. Invention encompasses the distinctive human capacity to work creatively from a position situated in natural, social, historical, linguistic, and political contexts. That may involve radical creativity as well as simple recollection, or some combination of the two. It is precisely this resistance to the dichotomies of rationalist philosophy that enables us to envision our social and political practices in new ways, that is, to launch and sustain situated political critique.

As Grassi reminds us, for Cicero, such inventive activity was the means by which humans transformed the given world into a meaningful realm, a distinctive mode of work always situated within social and political relations.⁴² The rhetorical tradition thus recalls us to the originary role of inventive labor in making and transforming the world from within its particular shared practices and traditions, without necessarily reproducing them. Broadly speaking, Locke shares this Ciceronian interest in human labor enacted upon nature as an originary source for politics.⁴³ As we will see, for Locke, human workmanship extends also to the generation of words and ideas from experience. It is in Locke’s emphasis on human activity and judgment that we will discover the fundamental role of rhetoric. To identify such human activity with labor is not to exclude the role of invention. Rather, it is to recognize the productive and creative role of invention in the indispensable work of rhetoric.

Using Epicurean materialism as a vantage point on Locke’s thought, I offer a close examination of the two most significant works written by Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, to reveal the ways in which rhetoric and experience are essential to his critique of authority in philosophy and politics. In considering these two texts, we go to the source of Locke’s reputation for hostility to rhetoric and imagination and his reputation for both rationalism in politics and empiricism in philosophy. The choice of these two of Locke’s works should not be taken as a sign that they are the only texts that reveal the significance of rhetoric to critique or that they are the only ones carrying significance for political theory and philosophy. Quite to the contrary, Locke was a prolific writer, and I believe that the dynamics of rhetoric and experience in his thought echo throughout his writings in various and interesting ways. I have chosen these two for their outsized significance for scholars of political theory, philosophy, and literature. Further, they are particularly rich for their insights into Lockean critique because of the extended engagement with questions of judgment. For this reason, I begin my exploration of the inventive nature of Lockean critique with these two classics. Such a beginning should be understood as an invitation rather than a conclusion to the powerful work of rhetoric to be found elsewhere in Locke’s thought.

We begin, in Chapter 2, by revisiting Locke’s well-known claim to experience, as the basis for his long-standing reputation as an empiricist and by extension his hostility to rhetoric. Whereas this claim has traditionally been situated within a historical narrative that charts a sharp break in the seventeenth century, marking the decline of the rhetorical tradition and the rise of the New Science, I resituate Locke in a more nuanced and overlapping contact zone between rhetoric and science, or natural philosophy. Understanding Locke’s situation within the early modern revival of Epicurean materialism allows us to take his interest in experience seriously without rushing to attribute to him a naive and untenable foundationalism in unmediated sense perception. As we will see, two important implications follow from this shift. First, Locke’s notion of reason is rooted in probable judgment rather than certainty. This notion of judgment as a qualitative weighing of evidence and testimony places Locke at the intersection of rhetorical and legal tradition, on the one hand, and a new empirical science, on the other. Locke figures centrally in the reworking of experience from the realm of rhetoric and politics to a new philosophy with judgment at its center. Second, Epicurean materialism acknowledged the essential role of rhetoric, in contrast to the Cartesian and Spinozan hostility to language. Recognizing Locke’s Epicurean materialism opens up new ways of exploring a productive relationship between experience and rhetoric that are obscured by reading back into his work a latter-day empiricism. In examining the claim to experience through this lens, however, we gain a deeper sense of the challenges that Locke sets up for himself in grounding judgment in moral and natural philosophy, in experience.

Chapter 3 examines Locke’s negotiation of the problem of judgment that follows from his claim to experience. This chapter reveals most vividly Locke’s relationship of both debt and denial to the rhetorical tradition. Experience for Locke becomes the basis for reasonable judgment, but also a source of error, caused by imaginative and passionate excess. Locating this problem of judgment at the center of the Essay, I argue that Locke’s well-known anxiety about the passionate force of rhetoric is uneasily but significantly combined with his reappropriation of rhetoric for his critique of timeless, universal claims to truth. Whether in science, religion, or politics, we will see how, for Locke, even the most abstract and universal concepts emerge from particular experience. Sensory experience alone is not enough to give us the normative purchase or the passionate force needed for good judgment, however. So Locke turns to rhetoric—to analogies, metaphors, and personification—for the invention of his most cherished concepts out of ordinary experience. Rhetoric’s capacity to impart new meaning through vivid figures and tropes is essential to his account of concepts (both moral and scientific) and language. Locke, however, reassigns rhetorical capacities from the orator to the individual participant in ordinary speech. In a sense, he democratizes the inventive and forceful possibilities of rhetorical speech. I contend that Locke articulates a critical capacity, shared by all, to reinvent words and ideas, that is, to critically reinterpret human experience.

In chapters 4 and 5, I show how this novel account of Lockean critique transforms the meaning of Locke’s political thought. Chapter 4 takes a new look at the infamously repetitive refutation of patriarchal authority in the First Treatise. What has been dismissed as redundant preoccupation with minutiae is rather Locke’s transformation of a timeless political universal—that of patriarchalism. Identifying in Locke’s repetitions a rhetorical strategy, I draw out the deep affinities between the critical project of the Essay and the First Treatise, in that both seek to unseat claims to timeless universal truths. Locke unexpectedly emerges as a creative and forceful challenger not only to the political claims of patriarchalists but also to a larger symbolic order of interwoven images of familial and political authority. In tracing Locke’s use of feminine and foreign figures, we find that Lockean critique works because, not in spite of, the pluralization of meaning and the turning of language against itself. Such a thorough transformation of a symbolic political order could not be achieved by logic alone, and indeed, the force of Locke’s text is lost on those looking only for its logic. My emphasis on the formative role of rhetoric and experience reveals a creative strategy of reinventing the familiar terms of patriarchalist politics. With figure and trope, satire and parody, Locke turns the language of patriarchal order against itself. In other words, rhetoric sustains Locke’s devastating critique as it proceeds from within the very social and political discourse that he challenges.

In chapter 5, I take up the challenge of showing how Locke’s debt to rhetoric matters for his classic theory of consent and resistance in the Second Treatise. Does the rhetorical reinvention of experience that challenges claims to authority in the Essay and First Treatise contribute positively to Locke’s political vision? I argue that it must. The normative force of the Second Treatise depends upon the capacity to instill the conviction that political authority comes from acts of consent rather than the immemorial rule of father-kings. This counterintuitive task is not achieved through the mere assertion of a concept of consent. Rather, Locke seeks to shift the terms of familiar experience with his political anthropology, a series of examples and stories usually accorded secondary status. He recounts a familiar past of fatherlike kings as a story of consent. In recurring versions of this story, he presents this past from increasingly plural perspectives. Readers witness as Locke successively reconstructs their political past as tales of judgment based on experience and a recent, but reversible, loss of freedom. Through these successive recollections of the past, the anthropology reawakens dulled political sensibilities to a memory of freedom and the possibility of founding anew. The chapter offers a significant reversal of the received interpretation that the abstract and universal concepts alone provide the normative force of Lockean critique. Instead of breaking with the past, Locke reinvents contingent political experience to generate new horizons of political possibility. Lockean critique, in this way, emerges from the familiar ground of political experience to inventively reimagine the political past and present so as to generate futures that could be otherwise.

In the conclusion, we come back to Locke’s reputation for masterful reason and his association with what James Tully calls the “empire of uniformity” of modern constitutionalism.⁴⁴ The central place of rhetorical invention in Lockean critique, however, suggests a very different legacy for his thought. It is not a flight from the material and contingent conditions of political thought that Lockean critique requires; rather, Locke draws inventively from political experience to generate normative force. The past does not always obviously offer the resources for critical purchase on the present that we seek and that is why invention is essential for generating new critical vantage points. It is thus not detachment from our shared political situations, but rather an inventive relation to our past and present, that brings into sight possibilities for new political futures. Locke emerges as an exemplary political theorist for transcending the received opposition between rhetoric and philosophy and its problem of situated political critique. It is not hard to find more engaging writers than Locke, not to mention more powerful orators, poets, or preachers—it is not, in other words, his rhetoric alone that sets him apart. Rather, it is the way that he integrates rhetorical capacities into a newly articulated philosophical and political subject, bestowed with the capability and obligation of judgment. From this reinvention of rhetorical and philosophical tradition, Locke derives rich resources for thinking in new ways about democratic practices of critique, however much late modern democracy may exceed the limits of his own theoretical imagination.