| That political liberalism is in trouble is an opinion commonly held among contemporary academic observers. That liberalism is always in trouble, or that its troubles are inherent in its first principles, is an almost equally common opinion. Those who wish to preserve or enlarge the benefits of liberal practice commonly find themselves compelled, therefore, to undertake a wide-ranging search either for alternative first principles or for an argument to satisfy us that we do not need a foundational argument to have the liberal practice that we desire. Hence recent scholarship recommends to us, among other models, a liberal Aristotle, a liberal St. Thomas, a liberal Nietzsche. I do not ridicule such efforts, although I find in them varying degrees of plausibility. Some seem to me persuasive and salutary. Nonetheless, they remind me in general of Montesquieu's observation concerning Harrington, who "built Chalcedon with the coast of Byzantium before his eyes." Liberals may be justifiably proud of their mistrust of the love of one's own, but they should also be alert to the possibility that the object of their search may lie, after all, very close to home. |
| Home, for liberalism as I understand it, is located foremost in the political philosophy of John Locke. To many, this location only confirms the difficulty. For until recently, the field of Locke scholarship, notable for its lack of consensus and even acrimony, displayed a relatively broad consensus on the bottom line in the denial that Locke could meaningfully assist present-day liberals in addressing the deep questions that trouble them. According to the relatively long-standing, general scholarly division, Locke was either irrelevant to us or all too relevant. Readers of this literature confronted two very different Lockes, or perhaps one Locke living a double life: the Locke of the Cambridge school (Locke by day, as I like to think of him), well-meaning and pious but also timebound and theoretically somewhat befuddled, versus the Straussian Locke (Locke by night), philosophi- |
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