I began this book by addressing the theme of inclusion and exclusion in John Locke's political theory – in particular his views about the contemporary exclusion of women from politics and social power. I mentioned Locke's attack on Robert Filmer's excision of “mothers” in his account of the significance of the Fifth Commandment, and Locke's failure to subscribe to the explicit position of his friend James Tyrrell that “women are commonly unfit for civil business.” Still, it appeared that Locke was not consistent on the application of basic equality to women; his position seems to have been one of clear philosophical commitment to equality tarnished by a theoretically unmotivated presumption in favor of wives' being subordinate to their husbands. As I said in Chapter 2, I don't think this turned Locke's theory into well-worked-out patriarchalism disguised beneath a liberal egalitarian veneer; it still seemed to strike many of his contemporaries as more rather than less egalitarian than one would expect to find in the late seventeenth century.

Since then we have pursued the theme of inclusion more generally, considering not just the case of women, but the whole basis of Locke's egalitarianism in politics, religion, and morality, and especially what I called in Chapter 4 his democratic conception of the human intellect – his notion that the capacity for responsible participation in the moral and political realm is available on much the same basis as Christian faith is available.