I tend to approach philosophy theologically, and so it is not surprising that I am drawn to Augustine. His was the greatest attempt in late antiquity and perhaps of any time thereafter to find in the greatest philosopher of antiquity, Plato, a theologian manqué. But I was not able to appreciate the ingenuity and profundity of Augustine's Platonism until I was able to appreciate Platonism. For that I have to thank Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, whose portraits of Plato in The Sovereignty of Good and The Fragility of Goodness respectively converted me to Platonic philosophy. Murdoch is a fellow Platonist but not a fellow theist; Nussbaum is neither Platonist nor theist. I doubt whether either philosopher would find the Platonism I ascribe to Augustine very congenial. Anyone familiar with their works will nevertheless recognize their pervasive influence on what I have written.

Augustine's Platonism led me to consider in particular his conception of will. The theme of willing and limits to willing runs throughout his writings, not as a constant fixed by a set of definitions, but as an increasingly intricate web of connections between knowledge, virtue, grace, and the philosophical quest for happiness. In my attempt to reconstruct this web and display its marvelous coherence, I found it impossible to maintain a sharp distinction between interpretation and reconstruction.

In De Trinitate Augustine observes that “all who are happy have what they want.” Even so, he continues, “not all who have what they want are for that reason happy.” We can be wretched in one of two ways. We can either lack what we want or we can have what we ought not to have wanted. His two conditions for happiness, then, are that we have what we want and that we want nothing inappropriate or evil. Modern habits of thought might incline us to take the former condition as establishing the context for the latter, in which case having to limit our desires would diminish our prospects for having all that we want. But Augustine would have us reverse our perspective. Consider the desires that those tutored in wisdom would have, and then impose the condition that for happiness, they must be able to attain all they desire. Underlying his characterization of happiness is his assumption that we could never be happy and vicious. Happiness coincides with virtue. For purposes of clarity, I will refer to virtue-based happiness as beatitude.

It may strike us as arbitrary to restrict happiness to beatitude. Individuals do, after all, seem to find happiness in a multitude of satisfactions, not all of which are virtuous or honorable. To prejudice happiness in favor of virtuous pursuits is simply to confuse happiness with virtue.

After Augustine's vain efforts in De libero arbitrio to establish a foothold for the voluntary in the natural order, the fate of the voluntary/natural distinction in his thought hangs on whether he can bring human willing down to earth. To be more precise, he must do what the classicist Albrecht Dihle credits him for having done: that is, develop some conception of the will (voluntas) that no longer presupposes classical psychology's distinction between the rational decisions of the mind and the irrational impulses of the emotions or appetites. Were he to integrate cognitive and affective sources of motivation into his conception of willing, Augustine would potentially have the resources for explaining how a vicious volition could be other than an inexplicable aberration of rational agency and how a virtuous volition could be other than an insubstantial shade of some mind's perception of order.

Augustine's first decisive steps towards articulating this new conception were taken, curiously enough, during the hiatus between the composition of the first book and a half of De libero arbitrio in Rome in late 388 and the completion of the rest of the work in Hippo Regius sometime before the end of 395, not long before his ascent to the episcopate. His intervening writings continue to pursue anti-Manichaean themes, especially the theme of sin as a voluntary act of will, though the polemical intent of the discussions is generally more explicit than it had been in De libero arbitrio.

Towards the end of his life, Augustine sent forth a pair of treatises on grace in response to the written appeals of two lay admirers of his theology, Prosper and Hilary. These men had voiced their concern to him that groups of monks in southern Gaul, Marseilles in particular, were attempting to secure places for human initiative inside the formidable edifice of predestinarian theology. Without wishing to be grouped with the discredited Pelagians, the monks nevertheless hoped to find some alternative to what they understood to be Augustinian fatalism, or theology which seemed to deny human beings any say over whether they would join and persevere in the company of the saints. Augustine's response to these fifth-column Pelagians, who would come to be known (misleadingly) as semi-Pelagians, took the form of the two aforementioned treatises, De praedestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiae, finished and delivered sometime near the end of 429. These works, though enshrined in Augustine's corpus of writings against Pelagians, have not been favored by contemporary admirers of his theology, who tend to see in them the rigidity and exasperation of an old man worn out by continual challenges to his most deeply held views. John Burnaby catches the mood of the scholarship when he states, perhaps harshly, that “nearly all that Augustine wrote after his seventieth year is the work of a man whose energy has burnt itself out, whose love has grown cold.”

Augustine looked for wisdom beyond what he could find in the pagan philosophy of antiquity, whose principal luminaries have given philosophy its venerable, if remote, parentage. When seen through the prism of his theology of grace, this parentage is difficult for us to make out, for it has been transfigured by interests that seem alien to its origins. We are less sure of Augustine's midwifery in philosophy than we are of his paternity in theology. For the young man who read Cicero's Hortensius and burned with enthusiasm for philosophy defended, as an old bishop, a wisdom remarkably different from the one Cicero sought to impart to Latin culture. Augustine's break with ancient philosophy earned him his undisputed place at the foundations of medieval theology and culture, but it also roused the suspicion that his rejection of classical learning in favor of the revealed order of Scripture indicated a break from philosophy itself.

There have been few willing to accept Augustine's development of his doctrine of sin and grace as commensurable with the philosophical investigations of the pagan schools of antiquity. The various schools that come under fire in De civitate Dei – the Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Skeptics (novi Academici) – all depend on reason for illumination. Augustine, for his part, darkens reason with sin and insists on tying the human quest for knowledge to the influence of divine power upon human willing.

Christian social morality and the best state

In the fifty years after its first publication in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia appeared in ten further Latin editions and in French, Dutch, English, German, and Italian translations. Widespread and profound as its influence was, its ambivalance generated both utopian and anti-utopian imitators. In other words, the spread of More's fictional device – the ‘discovery’ of an ideal society – was not always utopian in its political thought and the utopian impulse proper was not necessarily derived in the profoundest sense from the imitation of a model.

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of Plato and Plutarch stimulated the early modern ‘best state’ exercise and encouraged a debate on constitutions which replicated the seed-bed out of which the classical utopia had sprung (Logan 1983; Ferguson 1975, p. 28; Manuel and Manuel 1979, pp. 95–100). But some aspects of civic humanism and of Reformation thought endorsed and broadened the idea of social redemption through individual moral performance, typified for the late middle ages by the Mirror of Princes tradition (Skinner 1978, 1, pp. 126–35). Still others gradually excited a vast outpouring of millennial expectation, especially on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide. These two traditions of discourse about social idealisation – by individual moral effort or by a millennial and literal coup de grace – were quantitatively much more important in early modern Europe than the reemergent utopian mode which existed in dialogue with them. It is helpful, therefore, to distingish utopianism as a form of social idealisation.

Continuities with the medieval past are no less evident in the political ideas to which the Protestant Reformation gave rise than in the religious and theological commitments that characterised it. In both respects, however, it constituted also a striking break with the centuries preceding, and scholars have devoted an enormous amount of attention to wrestling with the problem of continuities and discontinuities. By a long-established route, the characteristic approach to Martin Luther's startling departures in word and deed from the norms of medieval orthodoxy and the dominant patterns of late medieval political thinking sets out from the decline of the later medieval papacy into legalism, fiscalism, confusion, and corruption. Encompassing the onset of the Great Schism in 1378, the emergence in the conciliar movement of a constitutionalist opposition to the jurisdictional claims of Rome and in the policies of European rulers of a set of comparable claims that overlapped and rivalled them, that approach moves on to the more radical challenges posed to the whole hierarchical order of the church by such heretics as the Waldensians, Wycliffites, and Hussites. It takes special note of the rise of the nominalist theology and of the retreat from the externals of religion reflected in the mysticism of Germany, the Netherlands, and England, as well as in the later flowering of the devotio moderna and the humanist philosophia Christi. And it terminates on the eve of Luther's great challenge with an emphasis on the deepening tension between the intense piety – ‘churchliness’ even – of the populace and the increasing calcification of the ecclesiastical establishment, and a concomitant emphasis on the growth of anti-clericalism (Moeller 1965, pp. 3–31, 1966, pp. 32–44).

Scholarship and power: a problematic partnership

In 1599 the Habsburg archduke and his Infanta came to the university of Louvain to hear a humanist teach. The outstanding local scholar Justus Lipsius proved more than equal to this challenging task, as he explained to a friend in a characteristically immodest letter:

The political ideas examined in this volume were generated in a period that requires its historians, in an especially marked degree, to ‘look before and after’. A watershed between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ European history has conventionally been located in the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth – the period which saw the final eclipse of the Byzantine Empire, the flowering of the humanist Renaissance, and the first stages of the Protestant Reformation. Yet the society of the three centuries following that period has increasingly been represented as a ‘world we have lost’ – a world essentially pre-modern because pre-industrial (at least in terms of what Marx called ‘machinofacture’) and pre-capitalist (if by ‘capitalist’ we mean to refer to a society having an urban proletariat as a major characteristic). Demographically, the population explosion accompanying the social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought into being mass societies of an unprecedented kind. In political terms, it is true, there may seem to be less reason to question the modernity of the period here under scrutiny. There is a genuine sense in which the ‘sovereign state’ – even if its lineaments are more clearly discernible in medieval Europe than has sometimes been supposed – took firmer shape in and after the sixteenth century. Yet even here the need to distinguish an ‘early modern’ from a later phase is evident. The European nation-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a very different entity from the typically dynastic states (or the surviving republics) of that Ancien Régime which was shaped in the period with which we are here concerned.

The political thought of John Locke is concerned with four problesms that every major political theorist faced in the seventeenth century. These are: a form of government that would not lead to oppression or civil war, an arrangement of religion wars, a set of applied arts of governing appropriate to the early modern mercantile states in a balance of power system, and the epistemic status of religious and political knowledge. This chapter is a survey of Locke’s response to the first two problems; sections i to vi consider the first and section vii the second (for an introduction to the latter two, see Tully 1988). Recent scholarship has shed indispendasble light on the political events and pamphlet literature in England which provided the immediate context of Locke’s writings on government and religion (Franklin 1978; Ashcraft 1980, 1986; Goldie 1980a, 1980b). In addition to this context, I will suggest, the political issues Locke confronted and the concepts he used were also part of a larger, European crisis in government and sustained theoretical reflection on it (Rabb 1975).

Government

The first problem is, what is government – its origin, extent, and end? It is classically posed in the subtitle of the Two Treatises of Government. Locke worked on this issue from the Two Tracts on Government (1660–1), to the Two Treatises (1681–9), moving from a solution of absolutism and unconditional obedience to one of popular sovereignty and the individual right of revolution. The question is not about the nature of the state as a form of power over and above rulers and ruled, although he was familiar with this reason of state way of conceptualising early modern politics and sought to undermine it (TT, I.ix.93, p. 248, II.xiv.163, p. 394).