Abstract
Blumenberg’s metaphorology traces a crucial shift from the passively received truth of the pre-modern conception to the voluntarist methodical-technical solicitation of truth in the modern. Modern truth is wrested from nature by homo faber and knowledge assumes the character of labour: methods are needed to produce truths, and produced truth is legitimately one’s own. Taking possession—claiming one’s propriety—is foundational to modern truth. Labour becomes the property-founding act with respect to truth first, and to natural right second. Conjoining the approaches of Blumenberg and Voegelin unveils Locke’s political-economic ideology as a class-motivated mythology that justifies resource expropriation to effect the passage from a “state of nature” to a state of civilization. The power of Lockean mythology is manifest globally in post-colonial capitalist imperialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 23–25, 21.
- 2.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans., and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 16.
- 3.
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 32 n. 1. The successive quotations are all from this seminal footnote.
- 4.
Horace, Satires, 2.2.129–30, quoted in Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 152.
- 5.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed., with an introduction and notes by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 298 (§43).
- 6.
Locke, Two Treatises, 287–288 (§27).
- 7.
Eric Voegelin to Leo Strauss, Letter 41 (April 20, 1953) and Letter 42 (April 15, 1953, never sent), in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 93, 96, 95.
- 8.
Ibid., 95–96, 93.
- 9.
Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, Letter 43 (April 29, 1953), in Faith and Political Philosophy, 97–8. The spur of this exchange is that Voegelin is awaiting publication of Strauss’ book on natural right, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), based on his Walgreen Foundation lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in October 1949. Years later, in a 1971 preface to the same book, he refers readers to his updated views on modern natural right in “On the Basis of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy” and “Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Right,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959).
- 10.
Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775); excerpts are republished on “Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page”: https://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html
- 11.
Theresa Richardson, “John Locke and the Myth of Race in America: Demythologizing the Paradoxes of the Enlightenment as Visited in the Present,” Philosophical Studies in Education 42 (2011), 110.
- 12.
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002), 28, 29.
- 13.
Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–91, 110–111, 115; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), 129; John Quiggin, “John Locke Against Freedom,” Jacobin magazine, June 28, 2015: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/; Goodchild, Religion and Capitalism, 33–34.
- 14.
Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review (October 2017): 1038–78.
- 15.
Brad Hinshelwood, “The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (August 2013): 562–90; David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602–27; Judith Whitehead, “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42, no. 1 (February 2012): 1–21; Vicki Hsueh, “Unsettling Colonies: Locke, ‘Atlantis’ and New World Knowledges,” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 259–319; Robbie Shilliam, “Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy,” New Political Economy 17 (2012): 591–609.
- 16.
Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Mitja Durnik, “Property Rights as a ‘Consequence’ of Economic System: The Case of John Locke and Canadian Aboriginals,” Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (January 2008): 53–90; Judith Whitehead, “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation,” Economic & Political Weekly, December 11, 2010; Onur Ulas Ince, “Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulation for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property,” The Review of Politics 73, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 29–54; Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise,” The Journal of Politics 69, no. 3 (August 2007): 760–69.
- 17.
Bhikhu Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,” in Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed, 1995), 88.
- 18.
Judith Whitehead, “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42, no. 1 (February 2012): 1–21.
- 19.
Whitehead, “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape,” 2. Here she cites Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).
- 20.
Vicki Hsueh, “Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 193–214.
- 21.
Klausen, “Room Enough.”
- 22.
Umut Özsu, “Grabbing Land Legally: A Marxist Analysis,” Leiden Journal of International Law (2019), 5. This article addresses how land and resource grabbing (including coercion of human resources) is the real core of capital accumulation, and how it has been ongoing from Locke’s era to our own, continuing apace internationally today. See also Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 23.
David J. Seipp, “The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law,” Law and History Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 30, 29.
- 24.
Vincenzo Ruggiero models for us how not to mince words in The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological Analysis of Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 2013). Chapter 2 of this book centres on Locke, “Humans and Venison,” 7–22.
- 25.
See also LMA, 171: “That such an idea of the absolute and its transcendence could achieve such a sustained influence on Scholasticism can only be understood as the repression of the humanistic element of the Christian tradition by its theological ‘rigor.’ Only when the indifference of divinity toward man had been thought through to the end was theology’s immanent logic satisfied.”
- 26.
It merits noting that J.N. Figgis attributes the rise of contract theory to the self-assertion (to borrow Blumenberg’s term) of the Teutonic element, keenly interested in security and freedom, as against the Latin and civilian element, loyal to the view that all political power comes from above, as in the divine-right patriarchal theory of Robert Filmer. Figgis goes so far as to declare the monarchomachian treatise Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1576) a document of the Whig revolution avant la lettre: “It is no anachronism to say that this treatise is very Whig, if by Whig be understood that body of opinion that is expressed in Locke and reflected in the Revolution settlement” (John Neville Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625, with introduction by Garrett Mattingly [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960], 182–183, 178).
- 27.
Philip Goodchild, The Theology of Money (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 19.
- 28.
Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922; New York: Penguin, 1980), 192–3. Disclaimer: It is not my intention to insult or offend any English man or woman in citing this quotation; the overstated opinion expressed is Tawney’s, not mine.
- 29.
Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926; Boston: Beacon, 1957), 10.
- 30.
Here I allude to Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth , ironically but not facetiously; far rather, I intend to affirm that Blumenberg’s scrutiny of myth and metaphor is on the money.
- 31.
Hannah Arendt, “Imperialism,” part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), 143, 149. Her extended analysis of the unlimited drive to capital accumulation, especially 142–157, is acutely pertinent to the present chapter: “Wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier”, and anyone could belong to this class “who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption” (145). Arendt’s intensive focus falls not on Locke but on Hobbes, reminding us that both figures need to be rethought together in a less sanitizing perspective. For even though Hobbes is widely regarded as an “ugly fellow”, he too has been sanitized by the view that he embraced the absolutism of the sovereign out of a dread of social-political chaos, rather than that he sought the right to deny loyalty to any commonwealth, as Arendt argues, retaining the freedom to dissolve it by declaring (in his perception) a “state of war”. The very conception of his commonwealth includes its dissolution, as Hobbes does “not even want to succeed in incorporating [the individual] definitely into a political community” but rather seeks to lose the bonds of and obligations to any community (140).
- 32.
Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 2 vols., trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 1:88.
- 33.
Arendt, “Imperialism,” 146, 137.
- 34.
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 20.
- 35.
Blumenberg, Paradigms, 21–22.
- 36.
Ibid., 15.
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McCullough, L. (2020). Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin. In: Bielik-Robson, A., Whistler, D. (eds) Interrogating Modernity. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_5
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