BUSIE HEAD LIBERALISM  By  Steven Michael Smallpage                  A DISSERTATION  Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  Political ScienceDoctor of Philosophy  2016     ABSTRACT  BUSIE HEAD LIBERALISM  By  Steven Michael Smallpage  Contemporary liberal theory has left us unable to generally understand and respond to the rise of political forces like populism, right-wing authoritarianism, and charismatic demagogues. I argue that the dangerousness of these movements is amplified by the inability of our liberal thinking to more coherent story of our political life. I find this in John Locin his Second Treatise, Essay and Conduct, and head only once in the Second Treatise (and not again), I argue that understanding the role and character of the busie head is paramount for us to understand a liberalism that does not lapse into  for liberalism. Locke makes a distinction in politics between the more theoretical and formalistic in which Locke says we ought to follow the teaching of books Rhetoric. My the tutor is to his pupil, and without the busie head liberalism cannot survive. The busie head (just like the tutor) must persuade her audience not by rational demonstrations, but through the fear and suspicion. From my perspective, then, Locke cannot holdas we do todaythat fear is bad, but, rather, that fear has its benefit when rightly used.    iii             This dissertation is dedicated to Beverly Boche.   iv  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS    The following dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinary help and support of my family and friends. My time at Michigan State University was filled with colleagues that have helped me tremendously in this project, and have given me an enthusiasm for political science. I would like to thank my committee members who have guided me in various ways in various stages throughout my graduate career. I would like to especially thank Professor Steven J. Kautz for his truly constructive criticism.   Of course, my friends and fellow graduate students also deserve my acknowledgment. In particular, Adam M. Enders, who has helped me focus and yet broaden my appreciation for political science and the study of political phenomena. Robert N. Lupton has also encouraged me throughout my time in East Lansing, and that cannot go unnoticed. More generally, the other political theory students who I have had the pleasure of meeting while at Michigan State also deserve mention as being good colleagues and friends when needed.  Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends who I know vicariously felt the highs and lows of graduate life with me. My mom, dad, and sister were always there for me during this project, and their support was incalculable. Hopefully, this dissertation can serve as a token of my appreciation, though it certainly will not cover my debt to you.   This project literally would not have been possible without the support of Melinda C. Hall, who is forever lodged in my heart. Her love was my only star and compass. The rest of our lives   Of course, even with guidance, there are still errors in this document, and they are mine.      v  TABLE OF CONTENTS   INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 DISSERTATION OUTLINE ................................................................................................... 19  OLITICS OF TRUST ................................................................... 24 TRUST AS RELIANCE ........................................................................................................... 27 TRUST AS BASIC TRUST ..................................................................................................... 45 LIBERAL POLITICAL TRUST .............................................................................................. 58 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 80  CHAPTER 2: CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF ONTOLOGY ............................................................................................................................... 91 F LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ....................................................... 94 CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISMRAWLS .................................................................... 101 PIERRE MANENT AND DEMOCRACY ............................................................................ 122 AGONISTIC DEMOCRACY: HEGEMONY, CONTESTATION, AND POPULISM ....... 128 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 156  CHAPTER 3: BUSIE HEAD LIBERALISM......................................................................... 161 JOHN LOCKE AND THE ONTOLOGY OF FLUX ............................................................. 161 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 208  CHAPTER 4: DEFENDING THE NORMATIVE EXTRALEGAL MODEL ................... 216 NORMATIVE EXTRA-LEGALISM..................................................................................... 225 THE PROBLEM OF JUDGEMENT ...................................................................................... 234 S TWO CRITICISMS ............................................................. 244 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 261  IBERAL POLITICS OF FEAR ................................................ 268 POLITICAL JUDGMENT A ....................................... 273 UNEASINESS AND THE RATIONALITY OF FEAR ........................................................ 290 THE RIGHT TO ALTERATION ........................................................................................... 309 LIBERALISM OF RIGHTS AND THE LIBERALISM OF FEAR ...................................... 318 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 322  CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 332  BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 340    1  INTRODUCTION   We do not know how to be afraid. This statement should not be read as moral failing on our part, as in: we should be more courageous but we fail to be so. Instead, this is a statement that know how to be afraid because we do not know what fear is good for. Our public philosophy today blinds us to the possibility that fear is a thing that could be good for us.  A public philosophy is a set of ideas that are most prevalent in our normal everyday lives. positions, and it is most explicitly seen in a series of well-worn phrases that present themselves as academic philosophy and the less it is questioned or criticized. Obviously, a public philosophy can be enforced dogmatically and powerfully by those with public power, and this certainly happens our public philosophy operates in a far subtler way: it does not reveal its own power as an assertion of power, but it wins the argument by effectively foreclosing any real alternative perspectives to ideas that we need to organize the world around us.  So, what is our public political  version of rule de facto: either it was the inevitable conclusion to a larger historical process, or it is the reigning regime because it won by force (possibly even by divine decree, since God usually sanctions the victors). Liberal democracy stands abov2  for its legitimacynature, history, force, or religion. We liberals have nothing to fear because our way of life is the right one, so we ought to be confident. But, we are not confident. Liberal democracy today is in trouble: it is attacked from all ideological directionsand liberalism is seemingly unable to muster within its own ranks an effort to defend itself from these criticisms.  The main aim of my dissertation project is to defend liberal democracy, not by critiquing its opponents, but by reevaluating our own public philosophy of liberal democracythe story we tell ourselves about what it means to be a liberademocracy is an achievement of judgment, prudence, and activity. In particular, I claim that liberal democracy is won in its engagement with and not avoidance of fear. We do have things to fear, and that should not make us second-guess our convictions in liberalism, but strengthen them. Fear is good for us. So, let us begin from the beginning: we no longer know what fear is good for. We only idea, to be afraid is the thing that should be fearedfear or being afraid is not only unnecessary for liberal democracy, but it is perhaps its greatest enemy. To our modern ear, how absurd is the  destructive force within our liberalism today. This is confirmed in numerous media outlets, political commentaries, and even academic writing.1 seemingly overwhelm our reason, where fear erodes our trust in one another, making us all even more anxious and fearful. The politics of fear is a seeming vicious circle that spins itself out of 3  control. The assumption is that, insofar as our liberal democracy is one of trust and reason, fear must be considered public enemy number onethe thing we should truly be afraid of: we do have nothing to fear but fear itself. The point of liberal democracy, then, is to eliminate fear and make room for reason, trust, and good will among all of mankind. On some level, we have good reason to believe that fear is the most dangerous thing to our way of life, because we understand our lives as those for which fear should be avoided. It is a major plank in our public philosophy. Where fear is, trust and reason cannot be, and, since liberal democracy is predicated on trust and reason, where fear is, liberal democracy cannot be. How can trust and fear coexist? Is fear not precisely the negation of trust, and trust the eradication of fear? To fear, we could say, is to distrust, to trust is to not be afraid, to be at peace and to be secure. Fear is a feeling of insecurity, and trust is precisely the sense of security. One need not fear a bridge that has reliably carried the load all these yearsdge, and set across it without fear. On this level, then, it seems clear: we have good reason to believe that fear is the most dangerous thing for our way of life because, fear is opposed to trust, and our politics is based on trust, and therefore fear is antithetical to our livelihood almost by definition. One could say that, if nothing else, liberalism is predicated on the elimination of fear. So, to what end does fear lead us? Nowhere we would like to go, it seems. So, we do not know how to be afraid because we believe fear to be a thing we ought not engage with but that thing we ought to eliminate from our livesfear is corrosive. Indeed, we have no problem seeing our illiberal enemies as those who are either afraid or prone to being afraid, or those who phrase from John Locke 4  (Second Treatise 230), who seek only to exploit fear to cause harm or revolution, to change or alter our way of lifepresumably, for the worse. We not only fear those people who are afraid because they make us uneasy, but, by extension, we are afraid of those who make others afraid. We have a phobophobiaa fear of fear. Fear is destabilizing, and its power rests in using the passions to anshould be institutionalized, since they are a harm to themselves and especially to others.  Let me pause here to recount the initial question and event that sparked my interest that eventually became this dissertation project. Over the course of my first winter break in graduate school in 2011-this: conspiracy theorists are dangerous because they hold a set of dangerous beliefs or psychological procimpervious to countervailing evidence, (dis)confirmation bias, a radical distrust of authority, and an unwillingness to engage with mainstream political practiceslike voting, donating, etc. After reading these papers, it struck me that if this set of psychological processes is what defines wildly more a matter of a handful of decades. Indeed, even a cursory reading of prevailing theories of mass public opinion and voting behavior confirms the prevalence of motivated reasoning as the primary psychological process of American partisanship today. However, though we generally now 5  ready psychopathology, instead of notingas I saw thenn applied to not only was a set of psychological principles that ultimately centered around motivated reasoning and distrust or suspicion of authority, then I wondered who a conspiracy theoristnot who was.  dangerous to liberal society. Readings of and discussions with other scholars confirmed that fear and conspiracy thinking is seemingly inherently dangerous. The argument was always put forward to me in the following form: Americans believe conspiracies; therefore, America is in danger. The unargued and often implicit premise was precisely the one I wanted to make explicit and demanded an argument for: conspiracy thinking is dangerous. Is conspiracy thinking dangerous? Is believing in any 2 In particular, does the liberal democracy? In order to answer these questions, I set out to explore the precise nature of conspiracy thinking and then to evaluate its relationship to liberal democracy to see the extent to which they really are mutually exclusive, as our public philosophy presents so vividly to anyone who asks.  It has been four years since I set out to examine (and hopefully confirm) my intuition that the wrong diagnosis of our ills, i.e., marginal phenomenon and a dangerous phenomenon. My trajectory split into two distinct but related strands in these years: empirical and normative. First, I set out (with the help of an receptive 6  and impressively capable set of fellow graduate students), to investigate the empirical nature of 3 Rather than discussing particular conspiracy theories, we argued that the proper way to understand what is at stake when we talk about conspiracy theories and those who believe in them is not the particular content of such a conspiracy, but the psychologindividual sets upon understanding various events and agents in an otherwise chaotic political t and individualistic skepticismI discuss it at length in chapter 5. The empirical studies that we conducted confirmed my own suspicion that the psychological processes and the interpretive lens are not the hallmarks of only the marginalized, alienated, and disenfranchised among the American mass public. Instead, suspicion floats in all of our minds, waiting, it seems, to be called upon. Second, I needed to address the normative side of the problem of fear and conspiracy thinking. This theoretical concern is the backbone of this dissertation. If we follow the original narratives used to explain conspiracy thinking, we are pushed into two mutually exclusive positions. On the one hand, if we hold that conspiracy thinking is the irrational thinking of the marginalized, alienated, and disenfranchised, then the rise of suspicion in the mass American public is a sign of the overall marginalization, alienation, and feelings of disenfranchisement democracy is radically thrown into doubt. We are living in the end times. On the other hand, if we hold that conspiracy thinking is not necessarily antithetical to liberal democracy, then we would need to reevaluate the unargued yet oft-repeated assertion that fear and suspicion are detrimental 7  to our liberal politics of trust. This second option, is the center claim of my dis when, as I think, these are perhaps the two most common feelings we have? If these common feelings or passions are antithetical to liberalism, then, how can liberalism survive if its rests on a necessarily alienating height above our most common lived experiences? For an answer to this question, I needed to return to the nature and origin of our public philosophy, which I understood at the time to be found in the work of John Locke.  I should be clear: at the outset of my inquiry, I wanted to mount a critical reading of Lockean liberalism, since, as is well-have come to see it in our everyday discourse, sets itself up as the diametric opposite of fear or anxiety, which suggested to me in the beginning of my inquiry that Locke was the heart of the alienating disease we still feel today. Indeed, I found early allies in my view that Locke was 4 Fear, it seemed, was good, though precisely not seemingly posits that there are metaphysical doctrines that can guarantee our rights and liberties, and that, if we just came to the proper understanding of these rights and obligations, we could construct a set of principles of justice that would (with the help of carefully constructed institutions) make it so we need not ever worry or be anxious again. This is the caricature of the 8  one  So, I recognized that I was set against the contemporary liberal public philosophy because it sets out to be expressly opposed to fear, and, since fear and anxiety are fundamental passions and feeling of our lives, we must reject contemporary liberal public philosophy for being wildly  of lifeconflict, us/them distinctions, and affect(and indeed intentionunderstanding in thought and word what is happening to us in our experiences and practices. In camera obscura metaphor, ideal theory liberalism presents to us a world in speech and thought completely inverted from how we actually live and how we actually feel. To whatever extent we already feel alienated in the world, when we try to express this alienation in word and thought within the vocabulary of ideal theory liberalism, we are unable to do so, furthering and deepening our original sense of alienation. This amplification of alienation happens because the way we live and the feelings we have are not adequately captured in the ways we talk and think about ourselves.  is9  what is really thereunderstood to be critique is a more focused criticism of ideal theory liberalism gaining considerable traction today. The general drift of that work is that liberal democracy, premised on a faulty ontology or it is bound up in a self-contradiction. For example, liberalism is premised upon the ontological fact of pluralism in political lifepeople are directed toward different ends, and therefore uniting them a clumsy phrase, and this means that the world we live in will always fall short of any attempt or however trivial it might first seem to be, is the following: ideal theory liberalism, particularly that assertion of flux or pluralism that they set out to grapple with in the first place. If liberalism cannot properly ground itself in a reality of flux, and that we assume reality really is in flux, then ideal theory liberalism is its own worst enemy. Before turning to my own take on Locke and the outline of the chapters in this dissertation, let me reiterate the following point: questions of ontology are not trivial or merely academic matters that only infcontemporary liberalism today is playing out in front of us in real time: the rise of Donald Trump precisely that these problems of how we talk about and think about ourselves as liberals plays out 10  unargued assumption at the heart of ideal theory liberalism: that affective group identities are bad for liberal democracy. I will take it as an animating assumption that how we think and talk about politics is fundamentally determined by our beliefs about politics, and our political life strives to both match our words and speech-images with our practices and our practices strive to mirror our words and representations. Therefore, political life is determined fundamentally by our beliefs about politics and our role in the political world around us. I already outlined the unargued and questionable premise that fear is bad, and I now turn to another unargued and questionable premise grounded in our public philosophy today: the fear of affective group or collective identities, and the fear of conflict that goes along with these affective group or collective identities. Again, the familiar affective identities, and this puts America in danger. This, of course, is true if and only if affective group identities are dangerous to Americahere, understood as the paradigm of modern liberal group identities are identitiidentity is an identity that an individual has with a larger entity, drawn largely on affective or emotional bonds with that group or entity. To say these identities are dangerous to liberal is about affective group identities, and, so, to deny these any place within our understanding of liberal democracy is to not only make our political lives wholly apolitical, but in this apolitical rendering of reality actually amplifies our sense of alienation. Our words and thoughts do not match our experience. 11  There is certainly a danger to the clash between affective group identities, and this is what (democrats), and liberty (liberals).5 This is the view of flux that is at the heart of classical liberalism. Contemporary ideal theory, however, begins with the recognition that flux and pluralism in this sense is a matter of fact, but then goes out of its way to deny it or displace it from our consciousness and our vocabulary. We must recover the view that political life is based upon conflict. The problem with contemporary liberalism, stemming from the assumption that suspicion and fear are antithetical to liberal democracy, is that conflict stems from fear, and therefore conflict, too, should be eradicated. Liberalism is often understood to be the political doctrine of public peace, and so it would make sense on some level to eliminate both conflict and the thing that gives rise to it (fear, affect, and collective identities). This means, however, that political liberalism must deny seemingly fundamental facts of our lived experience. For this reason, then, as I have already indicated, ideal theory liberalism itself creates, among other things, alienation and feelings of anxiety. The way we talk about politics, the way we think about politics in contemporary liberal discourse is as if the flux of natural conflict can be avoided, ignored, or m is that it produces a new level of anxiety and fear that is wholly different and dangerous to liberal democracy, all of which could be avoided if we at least started from the ground of our everyday livesin the emotions, passions, group identities, etc.  In this dissertation, I engage the work of neo-Marxist philosophers Chantal Mouffe and throughout the worldincluding the Occupy Movement here in the United States and the Podemos 12  in Spain. For Mouffe, it is the failure of contemporary liberalism to take seriously the fact of conflict and the need for collective identities that lead to the rise of a particularly new form of fundamentalism and illiberal political movements, growing everywhere in the world today. In trying to avoid conflict, ideal theorists like Rawls set up a rigid liberalism that rests on a hard moral grounds, and thereby make any political conflict a moral cohoping to establish political life on the more solid grounds of moral certainty and moral king it no longer about power and political identities, but moral principles that do not rely on political power non-interference, where reasonable people can be reasonablerational, free, equal, and individual. For Mouffe, the vacuum in our public lives where collective political identities have now been rendered dangerous is precisely the royal road that various nationalistic and right wing authoritarians wilis due to the public philosophy that wants to make politics a question of individual morality or economic appropriation, hoping to eradicate conflict by displacing and repressing itall the while making us completely unable to understand or engage with it. As I was writing this dissertation, and as I am now writing this introduction, the rise of Trump in American and the success of the Leave campaign in Britain has reaffirmed the need for successand, indeed, many counted him out in the Republican primaries precisely because he 13  was so explicitly nationalism is in him giving voice to an contemporary political discourse. The us/them message is powerful not only among the marginalized (who often use it as a coping mechanism to deal with their persecution), but has gained widespread appeal because, second, it is tied explicitly to the rejection supposedly at the heart of our politics6 In order to understand the rise of Trump, we need to look past his explicit racism, sexism, logic is to anchor discourse in an us/them distinction, and to tie together various identities under a cursory we liberals are more and more fixated on pathologizing and declaring abnormality as the root cause of the rise of Trump, rather than deal with the unpleasant truth that perhaps our way of talking and thinking about political life is too narrow and alienating. The power of words and names and labels is conveniently forgotten by ideal theory liberals when they fail to understand what damage is done by calling someone a not believe as she believes.7 For the vast majority of people, it matters what we call things. Think, non-trivial way what we call things, what we call the perpetrator. To ignore this subtlety, as many liberals today do, is simply to further ignore that words and the act of naming are expressions of 14  people. and, in to suspicion, posedly moral high-ground that is mind among the liberals I know is: what explains the rise of Trump? In other words: how could this happen? It happened because we made it, because our notion of liberalismthe story we tell ourselves about our political life and the political world around usis so alienating that it produces its own demise: right-wing authoritarianism that seeks only one thingvolk.  Britain has shown us the true power of right-wing authoritarianism as it unfolds as a response to the public philosophy of ideal theory liberalism. those in the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), headed by Nigel Farage.8 The problems unveiled by UKIP were similar to those that Trump has revealed and exploited in the United States: a growing on overriding suspicion that things were not simply what they seem and becoming more and more unalterable by the UK publicthey were being put under the absolute and arbitrary thumb of 15  bureaucrats in Brussels.9 At the center of the Leave campaign is the loss of an identity, of an affective, collective identity, and the focused anger and frustration at those who eliminated the space to even construct or think of that identity. The public philosophy that held passions like fear ic. well-adjusted, became simultaneously the most explicitly enforced distinctions in our political discourse and the things continually under-defined and eventually obscured.  The Leave campaign surprised the world by winning the vote, thereby mandating Britain to start working on its exit from the European Union. Leading up to the vote, David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister, backed Remain, and hopedindeed, promised his Party and the worldLeave campaign. He resigned immediately after the Leave vote was confirmed victorious. He had staked everything on the people being reasonable. From the radical democratic perspective, there is nothing more dangerous to liberal democracy than precisely this blind faith in the power of 10 The difference is that Mouffe is more aware of the power of passion over reason, and recognizes that the true force in our political livesat least in its most fundamental formis that of a desire for a collective, affective identity, which is roundly denied by contemporary liberalism. Though she had reservations about voting for Remain, and could understand precisely the logic of the Leave campaign, Mouffe would have nevertheless 16  voted to Remain. In the interview, she makes clear that, for her, the choice was between remaining in a liberal international arrangement that she spent her entire career resisting, or to leave on the grounds of nationalistic, right-wing fervor. She would choose the lesser evil of the former over the latter. But, we need not go to the neo-Marxists for thacross the English Channel. Pierre Manent is a French political philosopher who, though has said nothing yet about Brexit specifically, is hypercritical of the public philosophy that underwrites the EU. Takininsofar as he rejects precisely the apolitical nature of the EU. The EU is apolitical because it makes political life nothing but a voluntary mishmash of private moralities or private economic eradicated in the EU. For Britain, Manent would sympathize with the Leave campaign because it was at least an attempt to articulate an affective, collective identity worth fighting for: nationalistic critique of ideal theory liberalism is not home to simple democratic radicals.  All of this suggests two things that I take to be central premises of this dissertation project: contemporary ideal theory liberalism must be rejected on the basis of its faulty political ontology; and, liberalism must construct a meaningful, affective collective identityif it does not want to be swallowed up by right-wing authoritarian forces of its own creation. To assess how liberalism can accommodate a non-idealist ontology and affective, collective identities, I must turn back to the work of John Locke, to the original articulation of liberal democracy out of an illiberal world. As I said above, the project originally started out as a 17  critique of Locke for originating the ideal theory liberalism of rights that has now given rise to destructive fundamentalisms and fanaticism. But, as I read Locke, I became aware that underneath the familiar institutional doctrines of separation of powers and a written constitution, and underneath his insistence on a metaphysical certainty, there lay a much more dynamic ontology of flux. So, in turning to Locke, it was no longer to criticize him for holding seemingly implausible expectations of political life, but to understand how he set out to form liberal democracy in a world where certainty and moral demonstrations were presumed to be possible, where innate ideas were not controversial. In short, when I read Locke, I recognized that the problem was not him but in  o as to tell us a more coherent story of our political life that still makes it possible for us to be liberals. I find this Second Treatise, Essay and Conduct, education. Though he mentions the busie head only once in the Second Treatise (and not again), I argue that understanding the role and character of the busie head is paramount for us to understand a liberalism that does not lapse into an ideal theory.  Locke makes a distinction in politics between the more theoretical and formalistic teachings about the naturRhetoric. My argument about the  like the tutor is to his pupil, and without the busie head liberalism cannot survive. The busie head (just like the tutor) 18  must persuade her audience not by rational demonstrations, but through the fear and suspicion. From my perspective, then, Locke cannot holdas we do todaythat fear is bad, but, rather, that fear has its benefit, when rightly used. The problem today, then, is not as I had imagined it in the beginning of this project years agothat we are Lockeansinstead, I now diagnose us as not Lockean enough.  In turning back to Locke, I do so not simply to explore his thought but to bring his thought part of that will come across in my presentation of Lstarting from what is often understood to be on the margins. In other words, I take the seemingly radical or negle While I think this is certainly helpful in correcting some visions of Locke that still survive, I do   model or figure we need in a healthy liberalism. This means that fear is not something we can do without, but, cultivate and, under certain circumstances, deploy for the sake of liberal democracy. Moreover, this also means that conflict and collective identitiesthe things we fear because they bring fearneed not be so feared, but can prove indispensable for the formation and defense of that minimally, Locke is not imally, that the vision of liberalism.  19  DISSERTATION OUTLINE  undready, willing, and able to engage the people in such terms for the defense of liberalism. In this chapter, I outline two major philosophical views of trustestablished where we have no reason to fear one another because we live in a structured perspective makes trust much more normative: it is about duties and affective care toward others, not instrumentally rational utility calculations. I argue that Locke relies on both aspects of trust, since his view is a developmental model of trust: we first find ourselves in a basic trust relationship, and then infuse a reliance view of trust in that basic relationship. At the center of the developmental -father. In this act of betrayal, the people are pushed out of the basic trust relationship and into the suspicious instrumental reasoning perspective of reliance trust. The point, however, is not to forget that at its core trust must still have an affective or communal component, though significantly less than the demands placed on individuals within the traditional family. In this way, Locke sets out the uniquely liberal  trust between the parent child, and the reliance trust between the master and slave, are rejected. Instead, Locke says that the proper political relationship will emerge between the affective and instrumental types of trust. 20  I argue that the upshot of this perspective on trust has three parts, which I discuss in the a kind of reciprocal trust relationship as the legitimating force behind liberal political life only makes sense in a world where trust is the thing most needful: in a world of uncertainty and flux. Since we do not have readily accepted foundations in nature or religion, and we resist the tyrannical foundation of brute force, the only option available to us is our historical and customary understood as predicated on a foundational ontologynot an ontology of flux. I explore the ontology of liberal democracy, showing that liberalismwritingsrests on an ontology of flux.  In particular, in the second chapter, I outline the prevailing views of the ontological questions facing both liberalism and democracyargue in this chapter that contemporary liberalism has failed to incorporate democracy in a healthy way, because contemporary liberal theorists rely too heavily on a reliance view of trust, and therefore legal institutions and not popular virtue. Popular virtue, indeed, is now considered the he people is to rely on something less foundational than the law. In the third chapter, I argue that Lockean liberalism is very much capable of blending together the two regimes of liberalism and democracy, often understood to be antithetical to one another. This entails that liberalism, properly understood, which thinking. 21  Second, in the fourth chapter, I argue that the politics of trust is only indirectly related to simply rest on reliance but on a concern for character and community, which diminishes the of legal institutionalism because it upholds a certain view of trusttrust as reliancethat Locke only instrumentally relies upon in his constitutionalism, but the priority of the law can often harm constitutionalism. It can harm constitutionalism not only by only presenting one aspect of trust as the definition of trust, but it can also cover over the complicated and dynamic tension needed between the people and the governors over what one should do with the political power. The question of what one should do with political power is not simply a legal question, but it is a question of much larger importone of virtue and vice, which Locke says is properly the realm -practical critique. Theoretically, it is alleged that the extra-legal model is insufficiently grounded in a political ontology (here understood precisely as the ontology of flux), because it is largely drawn from the work of Locke (presumably a liberal foundationalist). I deny this allegation. Practically, the extra-legal model does not adequately allow for sound judgment to arise in the people, and so it would seem that liberal constitutionalism is in trouble insofar as it does rest on the judgment of the people to rise against the prerogative. I respond to this objection, first, by arguing that liberal constitutionalism is not for creating a countervailing judgment on legal grounds, but for guiding the people in their collective judgment on social grounds; second, this criticism does not sufficiently accept the role of the busie head or guide of the people.  22  reason and almost naïve basic or affective trust presents us with a clear example of what fear or suspicion is good for in a liberal democracy: living in a free and equal polity that secures that freedom through individual self-government. In particular, this is achieved in resisting the natural tendency of the people to conflate the relationship between the magistrate and subject with the relationship between parent and child or master and slave. For Locke, we should emphasize fear not to make people obey the sovereign (as Hobbes argued), but because it is the precondition for the emergence of an individuated self. The ground of liberal self-government is a proper engagement with fear, both of other citizens but especially of centralized governing power. The end of this fear, however, is not to overturn the regime, but to protect the people and ourselves from our natural tendency to welcome over-reaches by the sovereign, and the natural tendency of turbulent spirit that sows doubt and fear not to necessarily cause a revolution, but to correctly guide constitutionalism, and this makes the guide of that judgmentthe busie headindispensable for liberalism rests on a healthy dose of fear and suspicion, and a set of individuals who are ready, willing, and able to engage the people in such terms for the defense of liberalism.        23  1 The Huffington Post, includes numerous articles from many writers all arguing that fear produces the worst in our politics, and that it is exploited by the worst of our politicians (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/politics-of-fear/). Academics, within a democracy, in particular we need only look at the landmark text by prominent Marxist and critical theorist, Theodore Adorno and his colleagues in The Authoritarian Personality, Oxford: Harpers 1950. The message is simple: to be afraid is to be irrational; there is no rationality in fear. 2 See Hoftstadter, Richard The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Vintage Books, 2008 [1964]; and Pigden, Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 4:2 2007, 219-232. Hofstadter is oftegoes so far as to argue that one simply cannot itself is filled with examples of actual conspiracies, anyway. So, to claim that thinking like a conspiracy theorist is the authorities.  3 We have a number of papers under review at the moment, but I especially refer the reader to the following Thinking in the American unpublished 2016; Enders, Adam, Steven Smallpage, and Robert Lupton, unpublished 2016.  4  chapter 5. 5 For a typology of the various mixes of liberalism, republicanism, and democracy, as well as for a review of this literature, see Kautz, Steven J. Liberalism and Community, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. 6 After writing this introdusection on Trump that makes similar points to what I am outlining here (Fish, Stanley, Winning Arguments, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), The book is dedicated to thing as a non- 7  Symbolic Interaction 30:2 2007, 127-has been deployed more often today, in the age of partisan polarization, which is curious because one would imagine that precisely at this moment where the parties are understood to be so opposed to one another as to be vivid in the eyes of the American voter, rather than call one another by their parprecise empirical character of this in the mass public, but my guess would be the following. In an age of difference, where political disagreement has moved to a more antagonistic realm (i.e., no longer simply about partisan identity outgroup. The more Republicans reveal to me their reasoning for being a Republican, the more I associate their  8 For an academic perspective on the United Kingdom Independence Party, see: Tournier-Journal of Common Market Studies, 53:1, 2015 140-156. 9 For more on the rise of UKIP from the perspective of someone within UKIP, see: Etheridge, Bill The Rise of UKIP, Bretwalda Books, 2014. Etheridge, who has recently announced his candidacy to replace Farage, argues in this book that the rise of UKIP is due to an explicit rejection of the left-right ideological spectrum that animated Tories and Labour, instead focusing on an us/them identity that is thoroughly anti-establishment.  10 June 2016. Web. 27 June 2016: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2732-a-salutary-shock-chantal-mouffe-on-brexit-and-the-spanish-elections                                                    24  OLITICS OF TRUST  In the contemporary literature on trust, there are largely two competing notions of trust, and these two nreason).1  ow in greater detail, because I want to political thinking about 17th century England tell us today? John Dunn, who wrote a famous essay fixation on the centrality of trust to modern political life that makes him relevant to us today (Dunn 1990; cf. Casson 2011; Ward 2010).2 Since modern political life is a politics of trust, and Locke is the first to articulate the importance of trust for politics, it would in fact be natural to start with . However, this may well simply mean that we should begin with end with themwe have presumably advanced well beyond Locke in our understanding of trust. Part of my intention in this chapter is to illustrate that much of twork is a necessary correctiveboth academically and politically.   The main intention in this chapter is to illustrate the concept of political trust that I see underwriting Lockean liberal constitutionalism. The fixation on institutionalism, legal formalism, the threat of demagogues, and charismatic leaders I argue, are a failure of correctly understanding the nature of liberal political trust. It is not enough to simply say that liberal constitutionalism rests as clear as one can beon what that trust entails. I argue in 25  this chapter trust is neither a wholly distrusting, instrumentalism, nor is it a naïve, natural or familial trust. Locke goes to great lengths to suggest that this suspicious type of trust can properly ground his liberal constitutionalism. The extent to which liberal constitutionalism is convincing rests,  The following chapter is divided into four I outline the predominant view of trust as mere reliability. This notion of trust stems largely from the work of Thomas Hobbes who presents the problem in familiar game-theoretic terms: I cannot trust another without external coercion to guarantee fidelity to the contract. This type of trust has the political consequence of a liberal absolutism, where the subjects understand that the rights and obligations they enjoy in civil society are a function of quiet obedience to the sovereign power, who must have absolute control to secure the conditions of cooperation. In the second section, I outline the alternative view of trust that is prevalent in the contemporary literature on the  (the primary model of the Hobbesian reliance view), and instead argues that the parent-child relationship is more akin to what really amounts to trust. Trust, on this view, is aresisted the conflation of the trust relationship between parent-child with the political relationship between magistrate and subject. In the third section of this chapter, the either/or character of the predominant views of trust must be overcome in order for us to understand the nature of liberal trust as Locke has it in his political writings.  The liberal trust I outline here is properly a pbetrayal, where the basic trust of the family is betrayed, and therefore limits are placed on the 26  Hobwhen we are thrown into this world in families, communities, etc. For Locke, then, where the contemporary views of trust have entrenched themselves into two of trust is a judicious mixture of the two, aimed at fostering the proper trust relationship: political power can only legitimately rest in the subject-magistrate relationship, not the relationship between master and servant or the relationship between parent and child. This reflective or mature political has at its core a level of suspicion: trust cannot be something unreflectively given, and therefore some contemporary models which outline this suspicious trust. In the concluding section of this chapter, I argue that the type of trust that Locke places at the core of his liberal constitutionalism is one that has anxiety (uneasiness), fear, and suspicion as necessary psychological preconditions.   constitutionalism must have an active, suspicious factor that counteracts the natural trust of the  busie headto question and to contest authorityis not simply a revolutionary, marginal, or infrequently called-upon role in liberal constitutionalism. On the contrary, I conclude that liberal constitutionalism must always rely on the busie head to guide and navigate the people away from either competing alternatives of trustthe reliance or basic trust relationshipswhich both have absolutist political consequences. Because a particular type of trust is needed for liberal constitutionalism to resist absolutism, the suspicious busie head is indispensable.  27  TRUST AS RELIANCE  Any sharp definition of trust is particularly difficult to trace, largely because common usage ewhich, to borrow a phrasemeans that, insofar as I achieve a definition for the word trust, it is neighborhood that trust resides is somewhere between reliance on the one hand and basic trust on the other, as I will discuss below.  overcome the state of nature and consent to the social contract, but the state of nature is precisely the place where such trust cannot obtain. The question then arises: How can we trust anyone? This is a fundamental problem for political philosophy, particularly those that maintain expressly or tacitly a Hobbesian contractarian approach?3 expectation of reliability (1994, chapters 10 and 14).4 Trust or reliability is wholly missing within the state of nature for Hobbes (ibid. chapter 13). As any game theorist will tell you, the short term benefits of defecting will normally always trump any long term motivations to cooperate. Reason here is missing or rather mute: long term cooperation is good for everyone on the whole, but not level calculus is to introduce external coercive punishments that alter the payoffs, promoting cooperation and diminishing defection (Lagerspetz 2015, 27).  Only with known, absolute, and certain external coercion is the Hobbesian state of nature gins his analysis of human 28  psychology by anchoring the most pressing power in fear. Specifically, for Hobbes, we fear each other in the state of nature because we are free and equal to each other, and there is a natural tendency toward domination in the huin their natural equality, partly in their willingness to hurt each other. Hence we cannot expect security -26). For Hobbes, our natural freedom and equality in the state of nature make it possible for us to do harm to one another indiscriminately, but does not guarantee that we will. However, other structural aspects of the state of nature conspire against us to force our hand. First, some of us are ambitious, which makes us motivated by the view that we deserve more because we are superior to others (though this is denied by Hobbes in the state of nature)(1994, 26). Disagreement, Hobbes says, further amplifies our potential to harm each other, since disagreement and doubt placed against us strikes at the root of our conviction that we are superior (1994, 26). Second, aside from the ambitious of vainglory and its sensitivities, we are pressed into conflict due to scarcitydue to our desire for one and the same thing (1994, 27). In this conflict the justice of the state of nature is revealed: might makes irreconcilable and existential (1994, 28-29).  that one party will do an action and the other party will do another. The temporal aspect of the action of the subject is obedience, conditional on the act of the sovereign to create the conditions of security missing in the state of rely on each other to fulfill our contracts and agresecurity requires the elimination of fear between subjects29  m and they are a danger to themselves and others.  actions but of their opinions too, since those guide their actions. So, for Hobbes, we must eliminate all stan(1994, 79). The sovereign, in order to maintain peace, which is understood to be security through individual (1994, 83). For Hobbes, absolute power should not spark fear among the subjectsthough he admits it inevitably will. Instead, of fearing absolute power we should recognize that it is perhaps absolute power is an inevitable part of any regime available to us that is capable of claiming our obedience, even if the sovereign himself is corrupt: One cannot deny that a prince sometimes may have a mind to act wickedly. But suppose you had not given him absolute power but enough power to defend you from injury by others, which you must do if you wish for your own security, do you not still have all the same things to fear? For he who has enough strength to protect everybody, has enough to oppress everybody. There is no hardship here, beyond the fact that human affairs can never be without some inconvenience. And this inconvenience itself arises from the citizens, not from the power of government. For if men could rule themselves by individual self-government, that is, if they could live according to the natural laws, there would be absolutely no need of a commonwealth, nor to be kept in check by a   For Hobbes, the fear between individualsthe distrust between subjectsis so pervasive that it should not only be understood as the basis of our political problem and therefore the justification of the sovereign in the first place. People are quarrelsome and ambitious and distrustful of each other, which makes life unbearable without some stronger power to guide us away from our fearful for which security and peace are the most important things and the most needful things, yet we are 30  ourselves the cause of the fears that give rise to the tumultuous state of war of all against all, then what we need is a power capable of overpowering all of us so as not to spread and act on destabilizing fear. Absolute power is justified on the grounds that there is no hope for individual self-government and that the people are incapable of being counted on to act for their collective good.    view that individual distrust and fear are the stumbling blocks to our peace, security, and liberty. Liberty, for Hobbes, is explicitly the which they caindicate what is acceptable and unacceptable, the payoffs and penalties associated with any action, in our political system, because without the political systemwithout the sovereign to command and enforce the laws, we would be thrown back into our distrustful and fearful state of nature.   On this view, attending to contracts, however, is not a moral concern but a purely prudential calculation of interest for both parties (Lagerspetz 2015, 28). Political or collective life is only possible with reliable enforcement of punishments against defecting, and only under these (institutional) conditions can I, as an individual, trust another to do as they say they will. Trust here is nothing more than reliability, and reason is merely instrumental calculation of interest given the potential payoffs in any given (yet stable) environment. If we hold that human beings can, in fact, do otherwise, then the problem of reliability (and therefore trust) will always be present. In fact, trust and uncertainty seem to be contradictory, as as if one were certain (though one really is not) 31  (Lagerspetz 2015, 29). This view of trust, though, never really escapes the Hobbesian system: trust is now just faith or non-rational (ibid., 30-36). The argument here is that reason is just a calculation of probabilities given a set of possible outcomes, not in setting up the conditions for assigning those outcomes. In other words, one of the flaws in the game theoretic model is precisely that cooperation is assumed as a possibility, rather than as precisely the thing that needs explaining (ibid., 36). This view of Hobbesian trust is individualistic, rationalistic, and wholly instrumentalist. The goal is to establish institutional environments that make certain the potential outcomes, rendering (Lagerspetz 2015, 38-39). Trust is not a normative concept, since it is exclusively concerned with utility maximization and fulfilling already-crystalized interests. The tension is precisely the things that emerge only internally and independent of others. In other words, the concept of trust (Lagerspetz 2015, 41). For example, the famous tit-for-tat strategy that starts with cooperating in , while extremely successful in winning the most utility for both parties over repeated trials, is little more than assuming the conclusion: cooperation is better than defection, therefore if we assume cooperation, this is the best strategy. This is a closed deductive system that tells us nothing that we already did not know (Lagerspetz (31-37). Instead of investigating the nature of trust, Hobbes starts from a narrow vision of it as reliability and then makes the reasonable choice of cooperation not the rational strategy but one of many possible strategies, and, indeed, perhaps the worst strategy if you are dealing with someone who thinks 32  instrumentally like you do! Reliance makes sense in a world of distrustful, individualistsmaybe not even humans.  But, what happens if the hyper-rationalist and individualistic assumptions that underwrite sociality and lighten the mechanical human psychology a bit, the demand for an all-powerful, external Leviathan diminishes significantly (2015, 29). The sociality and non-mechanical  of nature, the whole edifice of the Leviathan begins to breakdown: if people are collective power needed to keep us from distrusting, fearing, and eventually killing each other is significantly weakened. Trust softens the importance of reliability, but at the expense of introducing more moral or normative concerns to the discussion. In other words, if we start from the position that individuals are willing to cooperate even in the realm of possible betrayal, what The question is no longer simply how to alleviate risk (though, of course this will always be an important aspect of trust), which is a central question to the instrumentalist reason at the heart of -theoretic approach, but what ought we do? This moves trust from merely a psychological expectation of reliability, to a normative question of potentially robust rights, duties, and obligations between individuals. Second Treatise Leviathan (Dunn 1988, Laslett 2003). The comore friends than enemies. Hobbes and Locke, as I indicated above, are modern political thinkers, 33  and therefore share much common ground. For example, as is commonly known, Hobbes and Locke have a distinctly liberal and democratic tone: both reject the classical view of human beings toward a more robust virtuous, happy life; and, finally, they both begin from the individual and people. We can clearly see the shared liberal and democratic foundations: individualism, natural rights against the community, and democratic consent of the governed.  In fact, in the 1660s, Locke held the view that the sovereign should have absolute power over things that did not explicitly go against divine decree (Dunn 1988). This absolutist view, as found in his Two Tracts, was written in a time where religious upheaval had destabilizing political consequences, and follows much of the Hobbesian spirit. Though in the Two Tracts Locke does not begin from the premise of a state of nature where all human beings are free and equalas Hobbes does in his Leviathan and Locke later will do in his Two TreatisesLocke nevertheless holds an absolutist position where, in order to retain peace and stability, individuals should wholly give up their private judgments and should trust that the sovereign will make the world a First Tract, I hope I shall deserve no more blame than he that takes arms only to keep the peace and draws his 6). Locke is clearly siding with the magistrate against those who dispute about the limits, ends, and nature of sovereignty. Indeed, Locke goes so far as to say that his wish is to suppress discussion, not exacerbate it. The effect of discussion and debate is only to erode authority: I could heartily wish that all disputes of this nature would cease, that men would rather be content to enjoy the freedom they have, than by such questions increase at once their own suspicions and 34  ith desire of search and satisfaction being understood usually rather to speak [of] discontents and doubts, and increase the one rather than remove the other (1997, 6).  Discussion serves only to give voice to discontent and sow the seeds of doubt. Discontent and doubt are antithetical to sovereign authority.  First Tract, he argues that this is akin to being sovereign authority (1997, 7). Private judgments stem from discontent and usually the ambitious -p discussing things because it leads either to tyranny or anarchy, for when any private opinion wins the day tyranny is bound to spring up, and where there is no clear winner, all authority is dissolved into anarchy. The best government is the stable one, and arbitrary power is necessary because individuals are distrustful, ambitious, and quarrelsome, and the people are too willing to follow suit. Much like Hobbes, Locke repeats the need for an absolute and arbitrary power due to the freedom and equality of individuals: That supposing man naturally owner of an entire liberty, and such master of himself as to owe no government that every particular man must unavoidably part with this right to his liberty and entrust that magistrate with as full a power all over all his actions as he himself hath, it being otherwise impossible that anyone should be subject to the commands of another who retains the free disposure of himself, and is mater of an equal liberty (1997, 11).  perhaps too crudely putthat the absolute power of the sovereign arises from the need to overcome our own natural equality and liberty in the state of nature. For Locke, once we begin from the natural equality and liberty we have to all things, in order to 35  trust Locke will later deploy in his Second Treatise. Instead, we should recognize it as a giving up unconditionally our power to resist or alter the government. Entrust here means simply to deposit or forfeit our liberty and equality, not engage in a reciprocal relationship.  In order to get a bearing on this sense of trust, let Second Tract. Locke repeats and bolsters his rhetoric against private opinion, which he believes now to be a false 55). These ideas of liberty and conscience, unbridled by authority, become the ideoespecially on is so central to the later Second Treatise that it is shocking to read how vehemently Locke rails against these ideas here in the Second Tract. The conclusion of the Second Tract reveals just how far Locke goes down the absolutist path: the magistrate ought not be resisted at allof the magistrate whatever, whether just or unjust, nor, on any ground whatsoever may a private d if the matter is unlawful -to resist or alter the government is denied even in the cases where the sovereign ought to take care of the public good of his citizens but does not. For Locke and Hobbes, the maltreatment of the people by the sovereign is a matter between him and his God.5 Of course, if the body politic 36  atrophies, then the sovereign head, too, will perish. So, there is a self-interest in the sovereign to take care of his people.  To end the problem of private and religious pluralism that is contaminating the public realm and sowing disquieting seeds of dissent, Locke argues that the political power should take precedence over the religious power, and therefore the discretionary power of the sovereign to guarantee peace and stability should be univocal and absolute. The message is clear: certainty in political life is the thing most needed, and it can only be guaranteed through external coercive force. Underwriting this absolutism is the Hobbesian view of trustthe psychological fabric that holds society togetheras simply a question of interest maximization. The interest in question is private, and the point of cooperation is individual gainnothing more. To secure cooperation in a world of private actors who are motivated simply by individual subjective (and independent) interests, trust must be guaranteed by a coercive external force. This external coercive force is in control of the public space that by reliable threats of force for defection. The interest of the people should wholly be relegated to private concerns, therefore leaving the public space a realm of sovereign exception by necessity. Here trust is not affective but coldly instrumental: if peace and security are the ends of legitimate power, then the power to legislate that end is only ever the power that must be forfeited to the sovereign, who remains above the law precisely to wield the power needed to enforce the law among subjects. Since there can be no affective or basic trust that can guarantee cooperation in the state of nature, it is reasonable for subjects to forfeit their political power to the sovereign to secure their private ends at a public cost.  37  Two Tracts holds this Hobbesian view.6 The public realm is a realm of exception from the law, and is arbitrary. There is no avenue of resistance, since the people have no public identityuse the absolute, discretionary power to stabilize the public sphere by being the sole voice of goal of the government in light of this vision. Locke says that it would be great if people were so educated as to not try to do more than one can, to not push harder against authority than one should, but most people are too driven to topple governments based on their own private judgments of what is right and wrong. This drive is either naturally in people, so as to be an inextricable part of our psychology or instinctsor it is a product of a poor education in the consequences of actions, a poor education of our situation in the world. Since Locke takes the position that this is akin more to our instinct than our education, then, because the people are fickle and stupid, the only alternative open to us is obedience to an authority capable of ruling with the rod and capable of using whatever is needed to stabilize the ignorant and ambitious masses. Trust between magistrate and subject is not reciprocal, but ends up being a one-sided oath: I will obey. Of course, there is a small caveat or condition to this obedience: I will obey so long as you make me secure. The open ended nature of what it means to be secure, however, is troubling such that whatever is conducive to our stability demands obedience. The thing most conducive to our security is the absolute and arbitrary power of the sovereign. Second, the potential for fear has not been removed but only delegitimizeddiscussion is only to voice doubt and discontent. This, second point is not troubling for the absolutist, but it should strike the non-absolutist as quite 38  obtains. The need to counter the anarchic forces presumed always present at all times justifies the  trust as reliance view, left only here, makes the public space a completely amoral or non-normative place: I obey you so long as you make the trains run on time.  Though there is much shared between them, it is nevertheless important to draw out their differences because Hobbes and (the later) Locke arrive at nearly opposite conclusions about the reciprocity between the governed and the governor: Hobbes produces a liberal absolutism, while Locke arrives at a liberal constitutionalism (Kleinerman 2009). Therefore, getting straight the seemingly narrow, yet precise difference between Hobbes and Locke has considerable political consequences. In the following section I argue that, while Locke does succeed in arguing on nstitutionalism is more likely to lead us to security than absolutism, Locke also disagrees with the Hobbesian view of trust as simply reliability. Instead, I argue, Locke is indeed concerned with the intentions of the actors who have been entrusted with tjustification for revolution is not simply any mismanagement of public affairs, which presumably carries with it the consequence of unreliability, but, rather, the design or intention of the governor to properly care for our public good. This makes the trust relationship between subject and magistrate more mature, reciprocal, and more normative: we should all be in discussion over how we go about securing our peace his premises of reliance, but that simple reliance is not the be-all-end-all of our trust relationship between subject and magistrate.   39  The problem that Hobbes presents to us is that the logic of security that he deploys pushes the subjects in an apolitical direction. Political questions are no longer about the end of public life and political power (eliminating fear and securing a reliable environment), but simply the means absolutism is a powerful means for securing this peace, from the perspective of security, we ought to perhaps welcome itor, at least, seriously consider it. Absolutism seems more and more reasonable, in fact, precisely because it does have an energy and decisiveness that allows it to adequately meet the flux of human affairs that the clumsier parliamentary framework cannot reliably respond. Liberalism that aims at security, understood as eliminating fear, distrust, and unpredictability, can establish security, reliability, and an environment of predictable expectations pretty well with an absolute sovereign. The sovereign can be arbitrary, too, if we understand of the judgment of the sovereign. From the image of liberalism as simply aiming for reliability or reliance, we can not only see how absolutism is not only not incompatible but perhaps is inevitable. Indeed, the more that liberalism succeedseven when functioning through a web of institutional mechanismsthe more that the relationship between individuals and government as reliance prepares the people to accept absolutism.  afraid or distrustful of individuals but the government itself. In other words, if it is the plurality of voices in the state of nature that is causing a cacophony, then a univocal power is the only remedy to the state of nature.7 For Locke, at least in this view, the rule of law that emerges in civil society is not one that constrains the behavior of the sovereign to his subjects but only constrains the actions of the subjects themselves:  40  For if it be asked, what Security, what Fence is there in such a State, against the Violence and Oppression of this Absolute Ruler? The very Question can scarce be born. They are ready to tell you, that it deserves Death only to ask after Safety. Between Subject and Subject, they will grant, there must be Measures, Laws, and Judges, for their mutual Peace and Security: But as for the Ruler, he ought to be Absolute, and is above all such Circumstances: because he has Power to do more hurt and wrong, tis right when he does it. To ask how you may be guarded from harm, or injury on that side where the strongest hand is to do it, is presently the Voice of Faction and Rebellion. As if when Men quitting the State of Nature entered into Society, they agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of Law, but that he should still retain all the Liberty of the State of Nature, increased with Power, and made licentious by Impunity. This is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions. (ST 93)  The point of contention between Locke and Hobbes is that Locke holds out the possibility of taming the cacophony or at least living within it, and therefore does not quickly equate the state of nature with the state of war. For Locke, pluralism is not itself dangerousor, rather, pluralism does not necessarily demand absolutism. The instrumental reason that underwrites the Hobbesian individual in the state of nature amounts, for Locke, to an absurdity: in order to escape the arbitrary power in the state of nature, we would agree to a much more concentrated and nevertheless arbitrary power in political society (Simmons 1993).   But how far does this fear of the government get us, if we are still animated by the overarching desire to live in a place without fear, where stability and reliability are set at a premium? The elimination of fear and the promotion of security need not necessarily lead us to absolutism, but the complicated machinery that Locke will later propose does not guarantee that we have transcended the siren call of absolutism, either. For Locke, stability and reliability can be One could presume that, once the proper variables are in place and correctly weighted, the turbulent forces of the people and their private judgments will not disturb the functioning of our of the communitymodern constitutionalism cannot wholly exorcize the 41  natural tendency toward liberal absolutism. The natural drift is due to popular judgment being incapable of seemingly judging against this prerogative since the only criteria is presumably the ability to maintain the public peace. The prerogative power does not get questioned if it makes us prosperous and our world more reliable, and if fear between subjects is not a pressing concern. The more people are content, by whatever means, the less they are willing to check the prerogative power. People are not willing to take to the streets if they are prospering and content. The more successful the liberal conabsolutism, the more it clears the ground for the reemergence of absolutism. This is the paradox facing liberal constitutionalism.  So, where did all of this go wrong? From my perspective this paradox is animated by the narrow view of trust as mere reliability or reliance, further defined as the elimination of fear, particularly between subjects. The problem of popular apathy and the aim to eliminate fear go hand in hand: if fear is the original spring of reason, then the elimination of that fear, or the attempt to blur it into the background of our lives, serves only to loosen the tension and awareness of human agency. Security cannot be defined simply as the elimination of fear, and trust cannot simply be rendered mere reliability, since these are the two missteps that make it so that absolutism can simply weight in the shadows of even the best designed liberal constitutionalism. The whole project of securing peace cannot be abandoned, either, of course, but those lines need to be redrawn. Trust is then something more than reliability: a reasonable or suspicious disposition that is grounded on and aims for self-government and not merely the elimination of fear. Liberal constitutionalism and republicanism cannot be broken ap-government. 42  As individuals, we are guided by our consciences and our reason (ST 8). However, while Locke will clearly argue that the state of nature is not equivalent to the state of war, he nevertheless reveals difficulties in his own distinction between the two states. According to Locke, human beings are bad judges in our own cases (and those of our friends), which is to say that our private jui.e., war and destruction (ST 13).8 I focus here on the epistemological difficulties of the state of nature rather than the material chaos that tends to follow a more familiar, Hobbesian sense of the state of nature doctrine, because Locke makes clear that individuals are not supposed to give up wholly their own judgment or autLeviathan, an absolute and arbitrary sovereign. The question posed to Locke is that, since the state of nature is an inconvenience, why would an individual not consent to follow someone who could restore stability and reliability? Hobbes makes this point, and further argues that the only way to remedy the war of all against all is if the sovereign is not constrained by the people who have consented to his rule. But this may be a conflation of epistemological confusion and material chaos and destructionwhich is why as simply an expression of his bourgeois sentiments: if the state of nature begins as merely an epistemological confusion, then there may be a potential remedy for itcode for education toward reason and more on erecting an absolute and arbitrary power that can secure reliable conditions.9  43  Leviathan largely because it makes the social world more stable: the sovereign guarantees a power sufficient to mete out the punishments attached to the laws of the country (both dictated by the sovereign), and the individual citizen is able to plan accordingly. For Locke, this is a wholly illegitimate type of government that participates in this type of reasoning.10 The argument for absolute monarchs, borrowing largely from Hobbes, amounts to this: for the sake of stability and protection, I agree to follow the dictates of an individual (sovereign) understood now as having absolute and arbitrary power over me, and, since the rest of the individuals in the state of nature (excluding, of course, the sovereign) have decided to do so, too, there can be peace.  Locke makes clear that consent (ST 13). At bottom, trust is a moral relationship and not something that is simply a product al premises: we are not asocial, i.e. distrustful agentsat least not in the beginning (Essay 3.1.1).11 If Locke held onto individualism, he would arrive at the Hobbesian paradox. So, rather than try to solve a seemingly unsolvable puzzlewhich Locke points out is unsolvable because it is likely confusedLocke makes people social creatures, but not political animals. We are social creatures for two reasons. First, theoretically, Locke says that we have the twin obligations to care for of the state of nature, Locke has a very robust understanding of the development of human communities, and at the center of this development is the emergence of individualism out of affective social relationsmost notably, the family. For Locke, trust is akin to care, which makes it a function not only of the particular actions conducive to that care but also the intentions of the caregivers.  44  influence on his later doctrine of legitimate resistance. What matters for us, Locke says, is the intentions of others, which indicates both an other-directedness, and a view that contrary to the hypothetical state of nature, human beingsthough rational, free, and equal in the abstractnevertheless enter this world radically dependent and vulnerable. Indeed, it is precisely the intention ). For Locke, by speech or deed, an individual has declared himself no longer part of our communityin the nature do not have the right to punish   would not obtain: both are dangerous to me because they both present a level of uncertainty that supposedly is unbearable. The state of war, however, does not come about through any simple -17). The intention or the design is the most important aspect of determining when one has been betrayed, when one has the power to resist, and therefore, when trust has been broken. not merely reliability but a betrayal on a moral or normative level. 45  Secondly, I answer, such Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in publick affairs. Great Mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient Laws, and all the slips of humane frailty will be born by the people, without mutiny or murmur (ST 225).  For Locke, the point is not simply that people want reliable government. If this were the case, then the absolute sovereign. If the sovereign cannot reliably make people secure, then obedience will dwindle and another power will inevitably arise, bringing the needed security with the newfound power. Instead, Locke is well aware that people are willing to take on numerous inconviences for another reason that transcends reliability. For Locke, the breach of trust is not tied to reliability but the intentions of the governor.   Therefore, trust must be something more than mere reliance and reliability for fulfilling consequentialist, is now moving past simple consequences and into the realm of intentions. The goodness of the action is no longer if it simply produced a good outcome, but if the action was spurred from the of trust that is distinctly normative or moral. Trust here is normative or moral since it has a claim bjective interest. But, this requires something more than mere reliability.  TRUST AS BASIC TRUST  model (though, of course, it shares a great deal with it). Now I turn to the competing vision of trust which generally sets itself up as that which is wholly against any instrumental reasoning among 46  from the paradigmatic relationship of vulnerability and dependency found explicitly in family relationships between parent and child. I turn to this model not because I think this is where  trust so from the normative aspect of trust (focusing too -contradiction, is simply too naïve and places too much emphasis on the pre-reflective, affective aspect of trust. The point, as I said in the beginning, is to aim in between these two views of trust. A more robust sense of trust is limited to interpersonal relationships between at least two human beings. There is trust between A and B with regard to X. As Lagerspetz says,  But there seems to be something missing from this [reliance] account of trust. If we construct trust exclusively as a result of inductive reasoning, it will be nothing more than the kind of reliance we can have on machines or on natural phenomena. The regtrust that the squirrel will show up again. But it does not establish trust between me and the squirrel. For instance, there is no room for the notion of breach of trust. I can, of course be disappointed when the squirrel one day, contrary to my expectations, does not show up in its habitual place. However, the squirrel would not have broken my trust. (Lagerspetz 1992, 4)  A more complete sense of trust requires a relationship between individuals. This is revealed, according to Lagerspetz, when the trust relation is in fact defeatedwhen the expectation is not met. On the reliance account, I may be disappointed but not betrayedbreaches of promise, involve more than just an inconsisten1992, 5). A sense of betrayal reveals that mere reliance does not capture the full sense of trust. Instead, trust must rest on a non-trivial (but, as we will see, not dominating) sense of affective n the trustor and the trustee (Lagerspetz 1992). This shared life is what I call  47   On the simplest level, community is derived from the Latin communis and refers to something that is common or shared between individuals. The communal aspect of trust is wholly missing from the instrumentalist reliance account. But, as Lagerspetz and others argue, trust itselfeven on the instrumentalist accountrelies on a sense of community, often implicit, in every interaction, and especially in the trust-relation. Following Wittgenstein, the trust relationship that elevates the communal can be clearly seen in the familial relationship between child and word and deed. The emergence of doubt and uncertainty can only happen after the child has trusted in the parent.  How does this affect the instrumentalist view? From the perspective of this familial or affective trust relation, the instrumentalist or self-interested trust relation is wrongly emphasizing the subject-oriented rational calculus of decision making, thereby undercutting the extent to which trust can be recognized in the first place as the glue or background shared between agents A and B. In other words, the shared backgroundthe communisis not a product of self-interested, rational calculation, but the affective conditions by which self-interested, rational calculation can even occur. The community constitutes the trust between A and B, and betrayal is a sign of more than simply individualistic disappointment but a sign of something losta loss of an identity, a shared orientation to the world. As Locke will later say, the aggressor who puts us in a state of war with each other quits their humanity, which is a statement I take to be indicative of something more than mere disappointment. -B with valued thing C. For Baier, though, as we shall see, contrary to the reliance and purely affective alternatives, the key concern 48  is the dynamic relationship between A and B in the constitutive care of Ca relation Baier calls  If we try to distinguish different forms of trust by the different valued goods we confidently allow another to have some control over, we are following Locke in analyzing trusting on the model of en-trusting. Thus, there will be an answer not just to the question, Whom do you trust? but to the question, What do you trust to them?what good is it that they are in a position to take from you, or to injure? Accepting such an analysis, taking trust to be a three-place predicate (A trusts B with valued thing C) will involve some distortion and regimentation of some cases, where we may have to strain to discern any definite candidate for C, but I think it will prove more of a help than a hindrance. (1986, 236)  Following Locke, Baier claims that trust entails a familiar three-part equation, but that the three parts as a whole produce a set of unique and qualifying questions about the extent and agent of trust. Put differently, trust is rightly for Baier (and Locke) a question of constraint or qualified power. Trust, then, istructural aspect of any trust relation is vulnerability. Vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnus, condition for the emergence of trust, since it would make no sense to trust someone in a position  B vulnerability need not be total or even substantialsituationbut, it must be something that B (or at least on  Vulnerability is here not merely risk, since to define vulnerability as merely risk is to begin 49  rely where we no longer tmoral or normative concernit is breaking a normin the way that reliability is merely a disappointment. The example Baier But, what happens when he sleeps in one day and does not cross the same time? Is that neighbor to feel betrayed by Kant? Does it matter if we imagine that the neighbor, that day, had set a roast to be done at the time that Kant would walk by the window. Kant is late, and the roast is ruined. Would this relationship between Kant and the neighbor be anything other than mere reliance? The fact that the neighbor could not sensibly feel betrayed but only disappointed (in himself for relying on Kant that day), tells us that it is only reliance and a not more normative sense of trust at stake here. For Baier, the point is that trust properly understood entails a dependence on the action but, more importantly, the good will of the trusted toward me (ibid).  I should note here the extent to which I accept B ccepted vulnerabilitymissing in the contract model, though it certainly may be underemphasized. The relationship between reason and a non-rational basic trust need not be antithetical, as Baier suggests. Indeed, the sharp distinction is considerably softened even on her own account. For Baier, accepted vulnerability is precisely the fact that, in the act of trusting, I am accepting the 50  the absence of good grounds for expecting their ill will or indifference. Trust, then, on this first possible but not expected ill will (or lack of accepting rather than negating the vulnerability that attaches to any trust relation, Baier argues that we should move away from more recognizably the site of vulnerability, trust, and dependency that is not strictly self-interested (1986, 241; Lagerspetz 2015, 48-49).12 However, while Baier suggests that we should move away from the contract model and return to a more affective trust relationship, there seems to be no real reathat both reveals itself to be too historical and concrete rather than theoretical is a mark in favor of her position. Her view, though she consciously disavows it, is very Lockean.  Once we move away from the contract as the paradigmatic case, we see how quickly vulnerability, trust, and dependence come to the fore. For most people, the first and primary relationship between child/parent is an example of trust that does not easily fit the mold of a contract either insofar as each party is simply cooperating to maximize independently contrived utilities, nor are they equal to one another in terms of dependency and power (Baier 1986, 245). who remember what it was like to be a dependent child, or know what it is like to be a parent, or to have a dependent parent, an old or handicapped relative, friend, or neighbor will find it implausible to treat such relations as simply cases of comembership in the kingdom of ends, in the 51  given temporary conditions of one- assumes equality and freedom of individuals, who exist wholly outside of a context of dependence, and therefore make the mistake of enshrining that type of trust the paradigmatic case. Trust is not about managing risk between equal players in a game to best maximize individual interest. Instead, trust is the non-self-interested acceptance of vulnerability of care, and most importantly the dependency on good will (Baier 1986, 251).  At the core of even the paradigmatic contract, trust is the unspoken expectation of good 251.). There is always a degree of uncertainty and vulnerability in the trust relationship, for Baier, because the trust relationship is a three-part statement: A trusts B with the care of C (Baier 1986, 236). Here the care of C is important, since what it means for A to trust B is that B has discretionary power over C:  When we are trusted, we are relied upon to realize what it is for whose care we have some discretionary responsibility, and normal people can pick up the cues that indicate the limits of what is entrusted. (Baier 1986, 236)  The discretionary power over C is a fundamental condition of every aspect of trust, even that of the social contract. To trust B with the care of C is to put yourself in a position of inescapable vulnerability to be harmed (as well as benefited). The main thing, as Baier repeatedly states, is that the dependence on the good willnot simply in doing some action, but in the care of Cis something that cannot be avoided but is often ignored in contemporary views of trust that focus on the paradigmatic case of a contract of independent equals.  risk and risk-management are central to trust, instead replacing interest with vulnerability and care. 52  Rather than a hyper-rationalistic or individualist conception of trust, Baier outlines a conception a child is not reflexively aware of the reasons to trust or not trust her mother.   For Lagerspetz, trust is truly a basic trusta trust that does -72). To take precautions against the potential harm the other may cause you is to close off oneself from the other by both taking a view of the other as someone who could betray (which is to take a third person perspective), and to therefore act in a way that distances oneself from the other. -disappearedin the moment of betrayal (95). The phenomenon of dys-appearance is most clearly seen when thinking about times one is sick and when one is healthy: what it means and feels like to be healthy is clearly revealed only when I am ill. So, too, trust is revealed in the act of betrayal. This leads Lagerspetz to usual trust background is missing. Imagine a friend and I were sitting at a crowded coffee shop one afternoon. I have a backpack with valuables in it sitting next to my chair. I say that I am going Lagerspetz here wants to say is that I have given voice to trust precisely because I am not sure that we are in a familiar trust environment, i.e., trust is already missing. To see this clearly, compare  trust 53  at worst harmful to the trust relationship (Lagerspetz 2015, 100). Basic trust for Lagerspetz is a fundamentally affective, pre-reflective first person perspective that does not readily admit the possibility of betrayal. The paradigmatic example of this view of basic trust is the parent-child relationshipthe intimate, vulnerable, trust between family members is not instrumental nor is it individualistic. Family is the foundation of basic trust. Since at least 1659, Locke had recognized the importance of trust in guiding human affairs. molded up between custom and interest, the two luminaries of the world, the only lights they walk relations are usually the products of either custom or interesti.e., either someor the crystalized interests of others. This dependence on trust pushes individuals away from the realm of knowledge and into the realm of opinionThe dependence on trust and the need to trust others, however, is not a wholly irrational thing, though it does question fundamentally both the claim that human beings can obtain knowledge (and not mere opinion) (Casson 2011), and individual epistemic autonomy (Zagzebski 2014). The latter issue is at the heart of the debate between Locke and Sir Robert Filmer on the status of natural freedom and the political power and right of fatherhood. I will leave the epistemological discussion pter. Here I will focus on alternative to Hobbesian trust is seemingly the relationship between child and parent, the core of  Locke follows contemporary philosophers of trust in rejecting the cold, instrumental view of trust as mere reliance. For Dunn, Locke recognizes the inherently moral and normative aspect of 54  trust, and the extent to which trust is seemingly a non-rational thing: perfect knowledge is not available, so knowledge as solid demonstrative and deductive proofs are not possible for us in the human realm (Casson 2011). Since we cannot have this level of certainty, and trust in the Hobbesian sense is rational reliability, then we cannot have rational reliability, and therefore trust is nonrational. Since we live in a world of only opinion, trust is less and less simply a subjective estimation of a possible outcome or event, and more and more a deeper expression of something nonrationala deeper recognition of vulnerability and dependence. The moral (non-instrumental) sense of trust can be seen when it is not obtained: we feel betrayed, and not merely disappointed.  The most obvious alternative to the reliance view of trust above. Here, the most important aspect of the relationship is not individual interest but affective care. If we remember that trust is ultimately a question of what one has good reason to do, the basic trust relationship of parent-child puts much of the authority to act in the parent. The good reason to act is, ideally, the care of the child, which is determined by the discretionary power of parenthood. The parent is the decider. The utter dependency of the child on the parent makes the care for the child a squarely asymmetrical one. Moreover, the child is not simply a bundle of ready-made or self-authored interests, and so the trust that exists between the parent and child is not one that is rational. There is no reflective space or distance between the child and the parent: the child From the perspective of basic trust, the familial relationship completely reorders the agency of the reliance model. But, as Locke will point out, basic trust still accepts the same absolutist political conclusion as the reliance model. The parent has sole discretionary and absolute power over the child, and the good reason for this to be the case is simply the natural dependence of children on their parents. The basic model of trust posits that human beings are not born free. 55  As many scholars have pointed out, Locke recognizes precisely the authoritarian consequences of the basic trust relationship. Dunn, for example, says that the basic trust relationship, in making clear the utter dependence we have on others in practically all aspect of our lives, has made it seem all-too-reasonable that we would accept political power of almost any variety, if it can promise safety and security (1988). Basic trust would make it impossible to attempt to curtail political authority, since this would entail curtailing parental authority, which is a near absurdity since the dependency and vulnerabilitythe asymmetrical power relationshipbetween child and parent is a natural one. The child, on this mistaken view, would have good reason to understand the natural hierarchy and asymmetry between subject and magistrate, since the child and the parent are not naturally equal. Tarcov, has examined the nature of this affective relationship between parent and child, and concludes that it is perhaps the single most destructive force facing liberalism, largely because Lockean liberalism does have to rely on a normative conception of trust, and recognize that the parent does (1984). Though Tarcov and Dunn believe that basic trust can be defeated, the point here is simply that, for Locke, separating political power from the family analogy (while avoiding hyper-individualism) is a constant political project for liberal constitutionalism. The natural tendency to constitutionalism must fundamentally admit  Rather than mere reliability, Locke argues that legitimate use of political power rests on the intentions of the governoror the person with political power (ST 16). For Locke, non-dominationunderstood as living under non-arbitrary power, and the protection of property (robustly understood)are necessary goods for all human beings who are in the state of nature, free and equal (ST 23, 26, and 27).13 Legitimate power recognizes these goods as non-negotiable. 56  Political power used without the intentions of good will, those that are dominating, constitute a state of war (ST 19). By separating the state of nature from the state of war, Locke makes clear that mere reliability is not something that individuals can legitimately consent to, since it would not demand that the governor rule with good will. As we saw, Locke divides the state of nature from the state of war to introduce a moral concern to government. This moral concern for the actions of the other put obligations on both the governor and the governed. The care for children by parents is an appealing alternative, according to Locke. Rather than focusing on mere reliability, the affective care that is missing in the Leviathan is present in the relationship between parent and child. In fact, Locke says, parents have a duty to care for their th of his charged with the duty to care for the childto nourish and educateand this could seemingly give the parent a title to rule (ST 65, 69). This is a confusion, though, Locke argues, of the right of the parent to govern the child (during childhood) and the lifelong honor that the child owes to the parent (upon a successful education) (ST 67, 68). For Locke, it is the belief that the child always remains undwrongly conclude that the parent-child relationship analogous to the governed-governor relation. This is not merely a conceptual confusion, but a sociological or historical one: Locke admits that government commonly began in the family, and the father ruled as a monarch (ST 105). For Locke, this is a delicate matter since, properly speaking, the father ruled on trust:  He was the fittest to be trusted; paternal affection secured their property, and interest under his care, and the custom of obeying him, in their childhood, made it easier to submit to him, rather 57  than any other. If therefore they must have one to rule them, as Government is hardly to be avoided amongst men who live together; who so likely to be the man, as he that was their common father; unless negligence, cruelty, or any other defect of mind, or body made him unfit for it? (ST 105)  The conflation of the political power with the parent-child relationship is actually amplified by the concept of basic trust: the children trust their parents wholly. How could they do otherwise? Monarchy is indeed a suitable form of government, and it seems to have been precisely the product of consent and trust. The discretionary power that is vested in the father while the child is still   According to Locke, the monarchy of the father rests in a moment in time when political nalogously, like a child ruled by the care of the father for a particular time and for particular ends, so, too, is political society governed by the care of the monarch for a particular time and for particular ends (ST 107, 110). The precise end of these early monarchies is almost exclusively protecting the community from withoutagainst foreign invasion. Moreover, Locke notes, the existence of monarchical fathers who rule mainly by discretion, while based on trust, is primarily secured by affection. The Golden Age did not face the problem of tyrannybad fathers who are cruel or negligent (ST 111). Indeed, for Locke, it is only after the threat (or awareness) of potential tyranny that the political society curtail the discretion of the monarch. The political battle, as stated here, is one between a people who now want to constrain and curtail the discretionary power of the magistrate (presumably through institutions), and the magistrate who wants to stretch the use of the prerogative. For Locke, it is because we can no longer trust so simply the power of the prerogative that the Golden Age is far behind us  natural history of monarchy. Locke has argued that the conflation of the familial relationship 58  between father/child and the political relationship between magistrate/subject is present in the Golden Age of human society, and this means that the rule of the father is predicated on consent altogether that the children consented to the political rule of the father (ST 113-All Men, say they, are born under Government, and therefore they cannot be at liberty to make a new one. Everyone is born a subject to his Father, or his Prince, and is therefore under the perpetual type of Suand therefore cannot be free. And this Authority of Parents, he calls Royal Authority, Fatherly Authority, Right of Fatherhoodfree and equal, which is brought about only in educationa duty supposedly given to parents, that terminates when the child and father understand themselves as equals (ST 59). The belief that parent/child relationship terminates when the child becomes free and equal, is not guaranteed in a world where individuals could be bad judges in their own cases (particularly parents who never want their children to leave the house). The conflation of political power with familial rule will rest on the emergence of something that jars the individual out of the familial molda different, non- here is a historical one, and therefore a contingent one. Basic trust must be admitted but eventually overcomethere must be a development, an education, a maturity.  LIBERAL POLITICAL TRUST  The two types of trust outlined above emphasize two different aspects of the potential relationship between A and B with respect to C. The reliance account emphasizes the rational or 59  cognitive component of an individual subject toward another agent (human or non-human), for the sole purpose of alleviating uncertainty, maximizing predictive outcomes. Trust on this view is make possible an environment conducive to inductive inferences. The alternative view is the familial basic trust relation, and it emphasizes the affective and interpersonal human relationship, because it ultimately is about the shared horizon or community between agents. Trust is a relationship that is not instrumental to but constitutive of subjectivity. The individual cannot meaningfully transcend the subject positiona child in a parent-child relationship, for examplesince to do so would point beyond a shared horizon that constitutes precisely the parent-child relationship. So, too, the reliance account takes for granted the shared horizon that makes even the most contractual or mechanical trust possible (one must know what it means to be a buyer and what it means to be a seller, before even the most consensual transaction). ption of trust is vulnerability, mutual recognition, and the ontological fact of uncertainty since the governor could always do otherwise with the entrusted r as a trust relationship between the governed and the governor. Seeing politics as a matter of trust points to the near absurdity of conceiving it, as Filmer does, as an illiberal relationship. But, so, too, does it seem absurd to believe that the trust between governor and governed can be merely Leviathan. In the following section, I will focus Second Treatise: chapter 15.  60  the laws, however well devised. Instead, the best hope of liberal constitutionalism is to recognize not only the necessity of a discretionary power in the hands of the executive, but also the necessity to resist that power if needed. I will return to this idea in more detail in the following chapters of this dissertasquarely on the prerogative power as vested in the executive. The problem for liberal constitutionalism, then, is not the existence of a discretionary power, but the way we conceive of that discretionary power. In chapter 15, immediately following the discussion of the prerogative, Locke feels it necessary to return to the opening assertion of his Second Treatise. In the opening lines of the Second Treatise, Locke says that we too often misunderstand and conflate the political power into other relationships, most notably domestic oneslike parent-child, husband-wife, master-servant (Chapter 1). The point of the Second Treatise, Locke tells us, is to separate these particuthe citizen, properly arises. In chapter 15, Locke makes explicit the differences between these different conceptions of the origin of political power. Locke compares three conceptions of political power: the paternal/parental, the political, and the despotic. For Locke, the properly liberal constitutional ground can only be the political relationship, which means he must reject the other two alternatives.  It is obvdiscretionary power granted to parents to order and guide the child to recognize his own freedom, the inherent vulnerability and contingency of the child arriving at this state of rationalitynot because of a lack of capacity, but because of a 61  to get the child to exercise these capacities. The ground of this parental authority is not consent, but benefit of their children during their minority, to supply their want of ability, and understanding not truly political, because it does not have room for consent. It is prior to consentonly after the parents have made the child free and rational, can consent be possible, but this would be precisely g implication: individualismfreedom, equality, and rationalitymust be something that looks beyond the familial and affectual when it conceptualizes proper political trust. This individualism cannot emerge naturallyi.e., without education and intervention. And, since we are born within families, this is the proper end of parental power: to make us rationalto make us leave the family.  But, if the familial does not reach the truly politicalbecause political power is derived from consent it requires some space for individualismthe despotic goes far beyond what is reasonable. Here despotic power is not political in the proper sense because it is avowedly of the rule of force, the despot is properly seen as the aggressor that renders the state of nature into a state of war. To quote Locke: For having quitted reason, which God has given to be the rule between man and man, and the common bond whereby humankind is united into one fellowship and society; and having renounced the way of peace, which that teaches, and made use of the force of war to compass his unjust ends upon another, where he has no right, and so revolting from his own kind to that of beasts by making force which is theirs, to be his rule of right, he renders himself likely to be destroyed by the injured person and the rest of mankind, that will join with him in the execution 62  of justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute with whom mankind can have neither society or security. (ST 172)  It is important here that Locke marks out that, even outside the family, there must be a community for individuals as individuals. This is a moral community, too, which is revealed precisely in the act of bhas totally given up any notion of sociality between him and others. The family has been transcended, but so too has any concern for anyone else. Locke is warning us that, in rejecting the familial, we ought not lose our humanitywhich would be something like a radical distrust and doubt of all social connection as valuable, and thereby rendering ourselves ruled not by reason but only by bare interest or simply force. We must be able to recognize that, in rejecting the familial, our individualism cannotthough it potentially couldlead us to renounce our common affective bond to a   So, we arrive at the legitimate ground of political power: consent, agreement, assent, or simply trust. Where parenthood and nature did not reach consent (because it terminates precisely at the moment when consent is possible), and where despotism is power without right (since it is amoral and wholly self-interested), political trust for Locke must be some mean between these two extremes of nature and force (ST 173). Political trust is possible only by denying the power of nature and renouncing the desire for force, establishing a tenuous but normative and moral commitment to other individuals, treating them as free and equal. This liberal consent is decidedly a back-and-forth (ST 4). The back-and-forth aspect of reciprocity is an expression that expresses that at one moment one agent may be more powerful than another, only to have the power switch sides in another. Reciprocity is dynamic, like an entertaining game of evenly matched opponents in a tug-of-63  center of political trust is that politics is dynamic, always moving between agentsfor example, between individual and community, or between legislative and executive. The way to understand reciprocity in a trust relation is that, first, there is an accepted vulnerability when A trusts B, giving B discretionary power over the care of C; but, this discretionary power to care for C is not wholly outside the purview of A. Instead, the care of C is in a way open to negotiation, an ongoing deliberative process between A and B. This is not to say that A and B are equal in the everyday care of C, but it must remain a possibility that A and B are in a dialogical relationship. The possibility of dialogue necessitates freedom and equality among participants. Dialogue is not possible in either the familial or the despotic case, a clear sign that they are not reciprocal. The question, then, is how does this liberal trust emerge? Here, we turn to history and educationa history of betrayal and an education in suspicion. Basic trust is nonrational and primaryit is basic and it is a function of the dependency within the family between the child and the parent relationship. Trust is nevertheless the helplessness, and responsibility between peoplethat what it means to be a human being is that one has standing as a thing that is mutually constituted in a world of trust relationships (Bernstein 2011). While trust is first seen in the healthy parent-child relationship (where the child is brought to recognize itself as a thing that will be a member of an interdependent trust relationship between members of a community), trust is not properly speaking this basic, natural, or essentially affective love between parent and childbut this basic, natural, or essentially affective love is the necessary starting point of a more robust or mature trust. Trust is re 64  of a fall from the natural trust relation, but not a total distrustwhich would be akin to the mentality of the Hobbesian subject in a state of warbut to some intermediate space between a wholly disenchanted distrust and a blind or naïve affectionate basic trust. This space between distrust and basic trust is what I f the subject from basic or affective trust, not in order to remain forever outside or at a distance from others, but to provide psychological or cognitive space for a more reflective or reasonable trust to take hold. This view of suspicion, relies on a certain vision of basic trust and its relation to reason, which I will examine in this section of the chapter.  since distrust suggests too much of the negative power of reasondistrust is properly the lack of reflective orientation, which counters the unreflective and affective nature of basic trust. Since human beings, for Bernstein, are more animated by pain than pleasure, the reflective nature of suspicion emerges in the failure of trust to obtain, in the event of betrayal. Reason or doubt, suspicion or skepticism, is not a natural starting point for human beings, since we are often in a familial relationship of basic trust. However, suspicion or reason are naturally occurring moods or modes insofar as they naturally emerge out is subject to rational correction and modification, but not to rational installation; reason is the 65  capable of reason, though our condition within the family at first presents an obstacle to our development into rational creatures.   on the contrary, as a primary orientation, trust is best conceived of as a primitive and original relation to the other, how others first appear to us, and hence part of the original physiognomy of  temporal claim about the development of human psychology. Basic trust is in the orientation in the beginning, but it will eventually be a shaken. Since the basic trust will inevitably be betrayedeither accidentally or intentionallythe development out of affective trust is the route of providing justification. Affective or basic trust can only gesture toward the freedom and the product of justification and reason-giving, which is to say, through the power of reason. Trust that rests on justification is already a nonaffective or reflective and cognitive trust (Bernstein 2011, recedence over basic or infantile trust: to have in caregivers, and hence that trust is not an optional stance to the world but the attitudinal commitment In learning to distrust we are (forever) learning an adult, reflective form of trusting, to trust conditionally rather than unconditionally, and hence to moderate, qualify, segment, and localize infantsas an expression of love and affection and unconditional trustbut through the judicious mix of suspicion or distrust and reason, that contextualizes the affective trust relationship. Trust is  66   As Bernstein is presenting it here, we can understand trusta mix of trust and suspicionthrough an analogy with how contemporary analytic epistebe a product of doubt. Once we move beyond the view of knowledge as a statement of certainty about certain things that universally and inescapably are true always and foreverthe type of knowledge that Descartes sought, we longer have doubt about it. Knowledge, in other words, cannot make sense where there is never has been doubt, and where doubt can never return (Lagerspetz 2015). Similarly, the notion of mature trust only emerges in a world of suspicionone where original, basic trust has been betrayed. Mature trust makes sense only in the background of suspicion, the overcoming of suspicionwhich makes trust necessarily conditional, and always subject to revision. In this way trust is one that has been tempered by reason, which is to say has forever broken from being purely affective, subconscious, and unconditional. Trust is not certain, and we should never search for certain trustone that cannot be doubted. Suspicion, doubt, and skepticism are indispensable to the formation of mature or rational trust that emerges out of familial or basic trust. But, this means that mature trust must recognize itself as conditional, and give up the belief that trust is a question of uncritical certaintysomething that escapes suspicion. So far from being antithetical to it, suspicion is actually the background constitutive condition for rational trust.  The developmental storythe emergence of rational trust out of basic trustis the core of Here I follow a handful of scholars who have Second Treatise (Batz 1974; Grant 2012, 1987, 1988; Kleinerman 2008, 2009; Tarcov 1981, 1983, 1984). Political 67  trust only emerges in the history of betrayal. Many have commented that Locke is at great pains to show that freedom, equality, and rationality are conditions that belong to all human beings as a function of some derived innate natural right, as revealed through a hypothetical abstract state of nature (see Zuckert [2002] for a review of the debate). This is a dubious argument on numerous grounds: the state of nature is obviously not a historical condition of mankind, and as a hypothetical it seems to imply a doctrine of in (Waldron 1989). I will address these two points in the chapter on the prerogative power, because  Part of my response to this highly abstracted state of nature doctrine is, in fact, to point to it not as a deductive argument from first principles but as an inferential argument from historical conditions (which, makes it a fundamentally contingent argumentwhich I pick up in the chapter on similarly predicated on a developmental story. This has to be the case: we are born radically dependent beings, and this has important consequences. Chief among the consequences of our radical infantile dependency is the contingency of actualizing the freedom, equality, and reason promised by the law of nature. Locke would not write books on psychology, politics, and educationall of which have a decidedly voluntarist and provocative toneif he thought human beings would naturally achieve freedom, equality and rationality (Grant 2012). Challenging the a priori truth of the law of reason is not my target herejust that Locke recognizes that this law of -effective, or simply contingent. One of the reasons why the laws of nature are not consulted is precisely that children have a basic trust toward their parents that can spill over into political life. Here the trust relation never matures, and, given such a tight connection between the rule of the father and the rule of an absolute monarch, 68  there is a natural tendency to view sovereignty through the lens of basic trust. Locke, in other words, admits that strictly speaking though society ought to be based on a mature trustone that is reasonable and recognizes the freedom, equality, and rationality of othersit may be obscured or eradicated by the natural or basic trust. Here is the reason that Locke says people, even in civil power:  natural, familial, basic trust (ST 223).  The developmental story of basic trust being overcome by reason and suspicion is a necessary fact of the human condition since all people are indeed born, and not created like Adam. The developmental story also suggests the importance of history, since it is the historical fact of betrayal that is a precondition for the emergence of a rational trust. One fails to arrive at mature political trust by covering over the historical contingency of this emergence and that suspicion or distrust are indispensable to maintaining it once it miraculously has emerged. For  having got a preeminence amongst the rest, had this Deference paid to his Goodness and Virtue, as to a kind of Natural Authority, that the chief Rule, with Arbitration of their differences, by a tacit Consent devolved into his hands, without any other caution, but the assurance they had of his Uprightness and Wisdom: yet when time, giving Authority, and (as some Men would persuade us) Sacredness to Customs, which the negligent, and unforeseeing Innocence of the first Ages began, had brought in Successors of another Stamp, the People finding their Properties not secure under the Government, as then it was, (whereas Government has no other end but the preservation of Property) could never be safe nor at rest, nor think themselves in Civil Society, till the Legislature 94)  Though Locke makes clear that the precise content of the education that the father is supposed to secure for his child is supposed to guarantee that the child will come to recognize the role of his consent in grounding the political relationship that transcends the familial relationship, Locke 69  nevertheless holds that this type of education arises from history. More specifically, political history is one where the familial, affective trust relationship that tends to ground political power another notion of trust. This notion of trust, moreover, emerges only when the people understand themselves as people, which further entails a political conception of trust and consent as the motivating factors of legitimate government, and all of this presents itself only in the departure or disappointment from the affeFor Locke, then, there is a public or political education needed to jar many out of the natural sense much more complicated.  We typically think of trust and suspicion as antithetical to one another. However, in light of the forgoing remarks, we should be more precise as to which sense of trust we are discussing when we say that suspicion is antithetical to trust. I have argued above that, for Locke, liberal constitutionalism cannot survive on a type of reliance trust or on an affective basic trust. Instead, I have argued that trust for Locke must be a more mature or distanced trust, and this means that trust must have some degree of suspicion, here understood as a product of a third-person perspective that demands the relentless reminder that things could be otherwise. It is only on this suspicious groundthe sober recognition that things could be otherwisethat Locke builds liberal trust.  liberal trustthe narrative storyis still hotly debated. Lagerspetz takes exception to this developmental narrative of trust held by Baier and Bernstein. As we have seen, basic trust is cast 70  at least in the beginning of the developmental story, guarantees that society will function (Lrationalist-cum-posed, lest we fall into the Hobbesian picture of a distrustful war of all against all.   2015, 133-134). If trust is a basic, primordial disposition it must be nonrational since, to ask someone if they have good reason to trust something or someone would necessarily entail that the rational act of reason giving for trust is somehow antithetical to the affective, non-cognitive trust. Deliberation is impossible withifor trusting, the game is already over. I am already looking at the other with suspicion, perhaps in the same way as I would already consider her a liar if I thought reasons are needed for believing ois not basic trust, but some other middle ground between basic trust and pure distrust, which Lagerspetz seems to think is not possible. Or, at least, it is not the paradigm of basic trust.  The trust that Baier and Bernstein propose is one that begins with a recognition of the ontological insecurity, the radical vulnerability that reason and suspicion reveal against the background of basic trusthere understood as the illusionary ontological security blanket of roaches to basic trust have in common is a strong sense of the inherent vulnerability of the human condition, together with a conception of basic trust as a cognitive shield against the full implications of 71  -seems to be that basic trust is either due to an intellectual deficiency of some kind or else it is a form of self-deception. If we were fully rational thinkers we could only conclude by giving up the stance of [basic] trust; the only reason why we keep it is that doing otherwise would be psychologically -deception view, clinging to basic trust is a failure to properly gauge the vulnerability and uncertainty that is always already presentto deny this vulnerability and uncertainty is to fall back into an infantile trust that is comfortable precisely because it covers over the ontological fact of flux and uncertainty.   From the perspective of Baier and Bernstein, this escape from freedomfrom the recognition that we live in a world of uncertainty and vulnerability, and therefore we must be aware and vigilant, and the trust is conditionalis a failure to properly develop. For Lagerspetz, the problem here is the narrative of overcoming basic trust altogether, which means that Lagerspetz rejects the rationalist-cum-individualist presumption that reason is a skeptical or suspicious attitude that must always take the form -perspective is the one outside of the interactionthe third person observerwho, from this vantage point must necessarily conclude that any trust interaction must contain a level of risk. From the thiattitude of the individual in society is characterized as trustful. It is characterized with an allegedly objective general perspectivethe perspective from which the social world appears to be a very -person perspective is the perspective of reason, which necessarily dictates that any interaction of trust must admit a degree of vulnerability such that, trust is not the denial of risk, but an action taken in light of the vulnerability and risk inherent in the ontological fact of the world. The ontological fact of the 72  world being a place of uncertainty, risk, and vulnerability is guaranteed by the third-person perspective of reason.  Lagerspetz rejects the primacy of the third-person perspective, and in this rejection he follows many philosophersparticularly Wittgenstein. As we have seen, the third person perspective renders basic trust as something that needs to be overcome by suspicion and tempered model is that the third-therefore seen as always a possibility. If the third person perspective is denied, then the universal possibility of risk, and the demand for the priority of suspicion, will likewise be denied. Lagerspetz demarcates a difference between ethical and factual possibility where Baiethird-person perspective sees only ethical vulnerability. Lagerspetz sees only factual vulnerability: factual possibility is the first-rather than the ethical vulnerability which posits that vulnerability is always a possibility for anyone (and hence, everyone) (2015, 54-56). In the third-context-free probability that, strictly speaking, is not the perspective of the individuals in the and first person perspectives. From the fact that trust is internally related to betrayal she draws the illegitimate conclusion that the person who trusts must suspect betrayal. But while it is trust that an observer typically would not describe a relationship as one of trust unless he or she can imagine a risk of some kind in connection with it, it does not follow that I must believe I am taking a risk whperspectives does not simply overstate the case of the likelihood of betrayal, but rather it reorients our whole thinking about the nature of trust as a thing that must always contain risk. Basic trust 73  (the kind that Baier and Bernstein hold as that which denies the possibility of risk, vulnerability, and uncertainty) must be avoided and transcended, but this is to deny the first-person perspective, which necessarily does entail a trust that never raises the possibility of risk. Baier and Bernstein prioritize the third-person perspective over the first-person perspective, while Lagerspetz denies the third-person perspective and argues that the first-person perspective (tthe only way to conceptualize trust.  rationalist-cum-individualist perspective, reason is a monitor of trusta suspicion that guards against trust slipping back into the basic, unreflective trust. For Lagerspetz, reason is simply not the antithesis of trust, as it is for Baier and Bernstein. Reason, understood as a context-free perspective of the third-person observer who sees that all possible interaction of trust must entail some form of riskiness, must be replaced with a notion of reason that can emerge within trust and not from without reason is akin to paranoiaa groundless, universal suspicion or doubt. This type of reason or suspicious doubt can certainly emerge on the first-person perspective, but it does so only within a social contextwhat it is reasonable to doubt. The social contextone already predicated on first-person trustdelineates what can and cannot be reasonably doubted. This is why questions of trust is not universally given but socially constructed by contextbut the realm of the social, the community, the shared background.  An example will help illuminate this point about the relation of reasonableness and paranoia. Imagine two friends are dining at a restaurant. One friend voices the belief that the food 74  could be poisoned. What could the other friend say to this? Perhaps the friend would respond by  the friend wants to help rhappen  The difference between the suspicious friend and the non-suspicious friend is precisely that the suspicious friend is conflating the third-person with the first-person perspective: because it is possible for anyone, it is possible for me, too. The non-suspicious friend is not here trying to trying to move the suspicious friend from a third person perspective to a first person one  it is true it is not a possibility that the food is poisoned. The suspicious friend says that there is always a possibility of being poisoned, whereas the second friend would simply deny that possibility as a precisely because he holds the third-person perspectiveand to do so would be unreasonable precisely because it has departed from the social context that must ground all of notions of possibility, probability, and therefore reason.  trust75  pereason may indeed raise questions about why one trusts something or someone, but these doubts or suspicions emerge only if we consider things as possible within a social context, not outside of reasonable questions, arguments, and suggestions. These are ideas embedded in our lives with people. Whether it is reasonable of me to expect those in my vicinity to try to harm me is something I will have to address in sito, not in vitro perspective of the ethical vulnerability has been supplanted by a personal perspective of what it is reasonable for me to doubt or suspect. There is no outside perspective of reason. The debate over basic trust has revealed a deep divide in the contemporary literature on the nature of trust, one that follows a deeper debate about the status of reason, suspicion and trust. On the one hand, Baier and Bernstein have argued that basic trust is a primordial or innate or natural disposition, but that this type of trust is insufficient and must be overcome and made into a more i.e., trust monitored by reason. On the other hand, Lagerspetz follows many postmodern critics of the rationalist p-person perspectivea question not of reason but of reasonableness, understood as a realm dictated by the is between reason and reasonableness, the possibility of a meaningful third-person perspective or simply the recognition that there is only the first-person perspective of basic trust. 76  I argue that this tension can be reconciled by moving to the distinctly political context. It is the political context that, as I argue, reveals the need for a trust that does conflate the third and only that, when it comes to political trust, Baier and Bernstein are on firm footing. In other words, and in another place, one could argue that Baier and Bernstein are wrong in their arguments about the nature of basic trust. The point here, however, is that when it comes to political trusttrust in distinctly political contextsing that John Lockea social contract theorist par excellenceshares her conception of the vulnerabilities inherent in that precisely the social contract theory covers over the intricacies and subtleties of trust. Be this as it may, I suggest that the way to begin seeing politics as precisely the context where the first and third person perspective conflate is by recognizing that politics is properly the ongoing negotiations about what is reasonablei.e., what counts as paranoia or madness and what does not. This helps illuminate the dynamic relationship between the first and third person perspectives, an interplay that best captures political trust. Let upoisoned food. As we saw in that original example, the third person perspective was seen as decidedly paranoid: just because there is a possibility out there, does not mean that it is possible for you. The diner who was anxiously pondering whether his food was poisoned did so for no particular reason, other than it is possible that the cook could poison his foodwhich is to reveal 77  that the inner-working of the third person perspective is inherently paranoid. For Lagerspetz, the point is that what is reasonable in this case is not reason, understood as the third-person perspective, but doubt that is contingent on the context. The context, in other words, grounds the distinction between reasonable/paranoid. Therefore, context-free suspicion is actually a detriment to trust, since it always casts it in a light of suspicious possibilitieseven if these possibilities are not in fact the case.  But, if the context shifts, how does this demarcation between paranoid suspicion and trust move with it? Consider the more political context. Lagerspetz gives an alternative scenario, which I will further modify. Imagine that one of the two diners is a journalist working for a newspaper that supports the political opposition to the leader in an autocratic regime. One of the diners expresses the opinion that the food may be poisoned. Is this a reasonable suspicion now? If the reporter voices it, then we could say that perhaps this matches with his first person perspective: it is possible for him to be poisoned by the cook (who could be connected in some way to the autocratic regime). If the reporter expresses this opinion, and if the friend agrees, are they both paranoid? Or are they reasonably aware of the possibility of being poisonedi.e., it is a possibility for them.  But, more interestingly, let us imagine that it is the friend who first brings up the question of poisoned food. On what grounds does the friend bring up the possibility of poisoned food? Not from his first person experiencewhy would he have to worry about poisoned food? Perhaps he should be cautious because the food may be poisoned. So, imagine now that the journalist shrugs off the comment, and says that he is not worried78  comment, and maybe he thinks the reporter is too trusting or too naïve. Where is the possibility in g that it may be possible that the food is poisoned, but he does that by appealing to a third person perspective. Would we say that if the friend pushed the issue that he is being unreasonable? Paranoid? Or, would we think that the political journalist with publicly avowed opposition to an autocratic regime should be more aware and less naïve?  The point here is that, even if we follow Lagerspetz, the standard of reasonableness is not itself immune to the third person perspectiveand, indeed, at least in political contexts, may welcome it. There is no ability for Lagerspetz to resist the charge that his concept of trustby making it wholly a function of the first person perspectivehas inoculated basic trust from any suspicion, by making it indistinguishable from naivety.  The debate is now how to navigate between trust and suspicion, and, at least when it comes to the political context, the interplay between trust and suspicion is often covered over. Political trust is the messy interplay between the third and first person perspectives, which means it is a debate about what is reasonable to do, and this entails holding both the suspicious perspective of reason and the naive perspective of basic trust. Too quickly, we hold that trust/suspicion are antithetical, and this is because, from the perspective of a hyper rationalistic perspective (one that Leviathan) reason is the suspicious distrust of otherstrust is a vulnerability that is liable to get you killed or taken advantage of in the state of nature; or, from the perspective of basic trust, trust cannot transcend the first person perspective, and reason and suspicion are antithetical third person perspectives. For Locke, Baier, and Bernstein, the simple 79  dichotomy between suspicion/trust must be overcome before we can properly understand the nature of (liberal) political trust.  I will make more explicit this notion of political trust by focusing on what Locke calls Some Thoughts on Education, written in the later part of his life. Worldly virtue Worldly wisdom, Locke says is something that cannot be easily learnedthough histories help Locke is unusually explicit and longwinded when describing the particular characteristics of tor. But, his thoroughness is appreciated, because it is here that Locke is most explicit about the constitutive role suspicion has in creating the proper type of trustthe trust befitting a liberal education in freedom. Suspicionhere, understood as the sober recognition that things could be otherwise, that appearances are not what they seemis essential and the key ingredient in formulating sound judgment. Besides being well-bred, the tutor should know the world well: the ways, the humors, the follies, the cheats, the faults of the age he has fallen into and particularly of the country he lives in. These he should be able to show to his pupil as he finds him capable, teach him skill in men and their manners, pull off the mask which their several callings and pretenses cover them with, and make his pupil discern what lies at the bottom under such appearances that he may not, as inexperienced young men are apt to do if they are unwarned, take one thing for another, judge by the outside, and give himself up to show and the insinuation of a fair carriage or an obliging application; a governor should teach his scholar to guess at and beware of the designs of men he has to do with neither with too much suspicion nor too much confidence, but as the young man is by nature most inclined to either side to rectify him and bend him the other way. He should accustom him to make as much as is possible a true judgment of men by those marks inside, which often shows itself in little things, especially when they are not on parade and upon their guard. He should acquaint him with the true state of the world and dispose him to think no man better or worse, wiser or foolisher, than he really is (Locke 1996, 66-67).   80  tional system negotiates how much suspicion one should suspicion, but, in fact, the two are intimately connected: the one helps produce the other. The proper liberal trustnot excluding the one for the other.   In this section, we can clearly see that Locke is fully aware that a proper liberal education is one that requires a considerable degree of suspicions and of our own. Suspicion is the worldly wisdom that we have fallen into a world where we must pull the masks off the pretenses and feigned designs of others, who often hide behind false claims of trust and expertise, in order to arrive at a clear judgment about the bottom of their intentionsto have the proper disposition of confidence or suspicion toward the other. Locke is also clear that, usually, children have a natural tendency to trust, which makes suspicion all the more pressing. This reason, or suspicion. It is the standing order to always have a critical distancenot to necessarily distrust, but to properly trust. It is because suspicion and trust are so important to Lockean liberal constitutionalism that worldly wisdom gets such extended treatment. Liberal constitutionalism requires a suspicious trust, and this is something that must be at the core of our education to jostle us out of our natural tendencies to trust, which are residues from the familial or basic trust. CONCLUSION  Political trust is complicated, and it is difficult to define. This is unfortunate because it presents an added layer of difficulty for liberal constitutionalism, since liberal constitutionalism rests on securing and maintaining political trust. As I have shown in this chapter, the trust that underwrites liberal constitutionalism is not any type of trust, but a trust of a particular kind: a 81  rational or suspicious trust. This is the type of trust that Locke sets at the center of his politics. Not only is this understanding of political trust itself particularly novel in terms of contemporary understandings of the pmeasured reflection on the types of trust that fail to be suitable grounds for a liberal politicsthe radical distrust of Hobbesian rationalism, and the affective and familial basic trust of Filmer. These two types of trust are still present today, though perhaps more sophisticated. However, as I have shown, Locke helps see past these alternative types of trust, and sets out to outline the type of trust he does rely on for his liberal constitutionalism.   Liberal political trust is a suspicious or rational trust. Suspicion and reason are intertwined with one another because they emerge in the third person perspective. This third person perspective cannot be automatically assumed from the beginningbecause then it would amount to a type of trust that would make it reasonable to submit to any institutional arrangement that would make long term cooperation possible, even if this meant signing up for an absolutist regime (in fact, absolutism is the only regime that is capable of securing trust must not go that far. But it must still differentiate itself from the more affective and familial trustbasic trust. Here the danger is that the first person perspective, while helpful in curtailing radical third person perspective suspicion, it cannot be simply a willful ignorance or naivety, as it essentially is. Here, too, absolutism is likely, since the communitythe social contextgoverns almost completely in the first person perspective. Without critical psychological distance, there is r doubted. So, here again, a very tenuous position, indeed.  82   famois a politics of trust, but that the trust as Locke understands it is one of suspicion, too.  The theme of suspicion, in fact, is not a theme alien to Lockethough it has not properly characterized his denies innate knowledge, and, in fact, recognizes that most knowledge claims are opinions often inherited and taken on trust, the proper posture we should have toward our own understanding is skeptical suspicion. In fact, claims of knowledge are often the most impressive way to gain political control, since Locke both recognizes that our understanding needs to be carefully cultivated and that trust is the basis of much of our knowledge. Locke is a very suspicious person. to help illuminate his liberal politics have not elevated the important role suspicion plays in his politics of trust (Nacol 2011). In this section, by way of conclusion, I want to outline briefly a set of political consequences for liberal constitutionalism that I draw from my long discussion of the nature of trust. First, the fact of vulnerability and uncertainty cannot be denied: political life takes place in a world of flux (ST 157, Conduct 30). This is an ontological facta first principle about the nature cal thinking. Without this foundational claim, Lockean liberalism would be either irrelevant or insufficientwhat good is trust in a world of certainty? In other words, because the world is in flux, trust is the most important political bond in society. Trust is the key political relationship. However simple this sounds, as I show in another chapter, it is precisely this political ontology which is denied by the paradigm of contemporary liberalism, and it is the road that contemporary critics of liberalism are happy to frequently travel. 83  The main point I want to make here, however is this: since the world is in motion, since it is in flux, true knowledgecertaintyis not available to us, so we must fundamentally trust each other, and, given that we are in political society, we have no choice but to be in a trust relationship with political powerthe power over life and death (ST 159). The importance of trustthe interpretive relationship between what it is reasonable for the people and the sovereign to dodiminishes proportionately the importance of institutions, the rule of law, as a thing that can effectively govern. This is not to say that institutions are worthless, but that their value lies in precisely maintaining and encouraging the proper trust relationshipnot in overcoming the need for trust, which could only lead to disaster. There must always be political trust between the people and the sovereignunderstood as precisely the person entrusted with the political power, that has the authority to correct or go against the laws where flux has rendered them incapable of fulfilling the end of society (ST 159). By placing trust at the center of liberal constitutionalism, Locke has, paradoxically it may seem, pushed our focus away from institutionalism and toward the political culture and psychological features of the people. At the center of liberal constitutionalism, then, is not a gold equation of institutional constraint, but the interpretive relationship between the people and the prerogativea judgment of trust. vulnerabilitythe recognition of the possibility of betrayal cannot be denied. The possibility of betrayal is the key difference between the first and third person perspectives, as we saw in the sections on Lagerspetz and Baier and Bernstein. Locke recognizes that the distinction between suspicion and trust, or paranoid and reasonable, is an ongoing negotiation. This open-endedness is something that also suspicion is particularly important given the natural tendency for the people to think in the first 84  personi.e., naively about their relationship to political power. The line between sanity/madness is not stagnant nor is it determined in natureit is a specific social construct that reflects a specific social context. This cannot be denied. However, the question of what it is reasonable to believe is one that must always remain open. Of course, practically speaking, decisions made will always (albeit temporarily) close the question of what is and what is not reasonable, but it would be wrong to say that this is a function of anything other than an expression of power. Trust further emphasizes that the answer to what is reasonable cannot simply be drawn from the legal, but that it is at least always in some way an expression of the socialthe shared horizon, individually interpreted at times (Grant 2012). As Grant points out, Locke is especially aware of the power of contrary to our capacity to reason (2012). Indeed, the sufficiently overcome such that we can exercise our rationality, which inevitably goes against custom. As Grant says,  The power of reputation remains unchanged: social disapproval is a powerful force in suppressing belief and behavior even when its target is irrational belief and behavior. Or consider the problematic transition from childhood to adulthood. Children begin by submitting to the authority of their parents, but they must later become adults who can govern themselves according to reason. As children, we develop habits of submission. We acquire opinions and beliefs initially through hen they become adults? (2012, 625).  reasonablenessbetween the first and third person perspectives. But, the third person perspective is a hard won victory, and it is perhaps bittersweet. The social is a world of customs that must be thing is for certain, what Locke is constantly belittling is the legal, which is the realm of the municipal laws 85  the individual while in civil society, and, as we shall precisely that he connects the individual injustices into a larger fabric that comes to be a reflection are always opposed to one another, but merely that the political line of what is reasonable is a question ultimately decided by political powereither the one authorized to the sovereign, or the one exercised by the people. This is to take place largely in the social, where the question will always be one of a shared negotiation between first and third person perspectives. Third, aside from the ontology of flux and the importance of the social over the legal, nship of liberalism and fear be reevaluated. As I have already indicated, there is a simple view that trust/suspicion is a diametrically opposed dichotomy. This Locke rejects. The third person perspective that prioritizes the potential possibility of vulnebasic trust, first person perspective. If you think fear is ultimately tied to a suspicion that something is always possible, then fear, suspicion, and reason all would be rejected from the basic trust perspective. But, this just further tightens the point that fear (like reason and suspicion) is central to the ethical basis of liberal constitutionalismboth the anxious security of individual rights and the tempered trust that must occasionally be relied upon in contests between the people and the liberal subject, far from being a weakness to liberal constitutionalism is in fact its ground (Mehta 1992; Terchek 1997). The constitutive role of suspicion in a mature trust is through an education in fear and anxiety or uneasiness.  86  As I will argue in the final chapter, though the groundwork here is substantial, liberal constitutionalism (tyand therefore not mutually exclusive froma liberalism of fear. In other words, Lockean liberalism is not a product cal and contingent empirical facts about the human conditionparticularly moments of betrayal. These moments of betrayal, for Locke, not only suggest that politics is ultimately about trust but that this trust is always already something that human beings strive for as social creatures. The developmental story of moving from childhood to adulthood, from a familial trust to a mature trust, is repeated by Locke in the political history of mankindfrom father-monarchs to a republic of brothers. The sociality of human beingsthat betrayal is a feeling for ussuggests that trust is more than mere reliance, and therefore that the state of nature is not simply a state of war because we do have a certain sociality in us. The developmental story, then, is not merely an added genuinely hold a type of political trust that rests between familial basic trust and Hobbesian rationalist distrust. Fear, then, plays an instrumental role in the beginning of developmentfor both society and the individualin moving out of basic trust and into a more mature trust, monitored by reason. Where there is no fear, there is no constitutionalism.  Finally, the discussion of trust and suspicion in liberal constitutionalism highlights two aspectsthe inherent danger at the center of liberal constitutionalism, and the new role of statesmanship in correcting and monitoring this danger. First, the danger uniquely facing liberal constitutionalism is the precariousness of the political trust relationship as a judicious mixture of (basic) trust and (rational) suspicion. This mixture is the key ingredient of liberal constitutionalism, but it is also its rarest and most fragile. As I will show in another chapter, contemporary liberal 87  theory often ignores trust altogetherand where it does mention it, it is of the Hobbesian kind. It ignores trust because, ultimately, it denies the ontological fact of trust: flux. By denying flux, trust seems to be an afterthought of institutionalisma momentary lapse in institutional efficacy reveals the importance of trust. Trust is radically undertheorized and underspecified in liberal theory. This is surprising considering the emphasis Locke places on trust (and suspicion) in grounding his liberal constitutionalism. The failure to adequately account for trust is a (valid) weakness in liberal theory today, and it is one that is continuously poked by critics of liberalism. So, the first problem facing liberal theory today is that it does not recognize that it has a problem with trust. I show in the next chapter that it does.  constitutionalism illuminates builds off the first: once we recognize the problem of trust, we must then outline ways to promote, cultivate, and activate it (when necessary). This means that there is a central role for judgment in liberal constitutionalism, and with judgment comes an expanded role for statesmanship. Since politics is not about knowledge, it must rely on judgment (and opinion), and more precisely liberal constitutional politics rests on judgments of liberal democratic statesmen who properly understand the dangers facing liberal constitutionalism. This statesmanship does not seek the great politics of old (Kautz 1995), but it must still produce collective identitiesmoreover, must not shy away from producing anxiety or uneasiness, suspicion, or fear in the peoplebecause, often this is the only remedy to their natural tendency to trust too much and too quickly. Obviously, there will always be a possibility of too much suspicion or fear or anxiety, but my argument is that suspicion, fear, and anxiety must nevertheless not only be present in a healthy liberal constitutional political culture, but that it may be the job of liberal democratic statesmen to 88  artificially instill it (Kautz 1995; Tarcov 1981). As I will argue in the last chapter of this dissertation, the proper liberal subjectone keenly aware of the precariousness of liberal trust, and capable of doing something about itthe liberal guide for an often too-trusting public.                      89  1 My discussion of political trust will revolve around normative political philosophy. For a range of views in empirical political science and sociology, see Hetherington 1998, 2004; Warren 1999. 2 In particular, Dunn defines political trustwhich he thinks Locke is the first modern to fully appreciate, in the t particular human beings have good reason to do, and because what they do have good reason to do depends directly and profoundly on how far they can and should trust and rely on one another, I take the central issue in political philosophy (properly so ca279). 3 more detail in this chapter.  4 As Lagerspetz notes, trust-as-reliance is an important aspect of trust since it provides a realm of predictabilityeven if it is drawn from ascribed or earned trust (2015). However, reliability is valuable to individuals (and society) insofar that it provides certainty, which makes it valuable only instrumentally. On this view of trust-as-reliability, the value of trust is that it produces a level of epistemic predictability. The world needs a certain level of predictability, and, certain-plan requires knowing the likelihood of certain events occurring. Though trust-as-reliability can be understood as Harré explained, both a product of ascribed or earned trust, there is a sense that Lagerspetz is right that reliability is ultimately tied to a posteriori, inductive or earned trust. Reliability is important epistemicallyas a background condition for individuals to have a certain level of consistency, predictability, and expectation regarding some event of interest. From this perspective, without even this level of reliability, I have nothing: I cannot even reasonably derive meaning from empirical regularities. On the political level, as we shall see, in a world where such uncertainty exists, I may well trust in another precisely because they promise to make the trains run on timei.e. to make the world intelligible in terms of instrumental predictability. 5 Of course, one immediate response to this is that if the sovereign is so bad at his job of maintaining peace that his people are no longer secure, then he has lost the only right to govern that he held: protection. The failure to keep people secure is the common good that the sovereigneven the absolute and the arbitraryought to pursue. How these absolute and arbitrary sovereigns go about securing the people is left unsaid, which makes this liberal absolutist argument either negligent in not revealing its own moral commitments or it is completely amoral in allowing any means justify the one end of security.  6 Though, it should be noted that he does depart somewhat from this cold instrumental reason in his Letter on Toleration, written just after the Two Tractsbut well before the Two Treatises. According to Dunn, in the Letter on Toleration, Locke softens the finality of the decision to forfeit power to an absolute sovereign, and will eventually elevated to counteract or constrain the sovereign power, if only minimally. Locke protects the private life of the subject on two grounds. First, that the end of political power is not concerned with the content of private life choices, but simply public actions. Theologically, Locke now admits that the salvation of the soul is a relationship building off of this first reason, Locke argues that the end of political power does not extend to the private sphere completely because, in a non-trivial way, it is impossible to command belief. Locke recognizes that on the one hand, theological doctrine (precisely the Protestantism he will vigorously defend in later life) is an intimate relationship between believer and God, which makes the sovereign powerless here; and, on the other hand, psychologically the naked decrees. It should be noted, though, that even though Locke softens certain aspects of his early absolutism, it is nevertheless an absolutism: political power is discretionary power. Locke does note though, that the end of power can provide a constraint to poweri.e., power is limited by its rightful end. This will be the avenue he capitalizes on in the Two Treatises. trust relationship of Hobbesian reliance necessarily of the subjects, but does not limit political power as being anything but the discretionary whim of the sovereign. 7 The move to voices, while intended largely metaphorically, nevertheless does suggest that political power and the (2009) book on Hobbes and his philosophy of language, where he makes the connection between political power and voice explicit, and argues that Hobbes (and I will say Locke, too) did imagine the state of nature as something like a cacophony that needed a maestro to direct the plurality of voices.  8 Though, of course, later in the Second Treatise Locke does indicate that the state of nature does involve more than mere inconveniences.                                                  90                                                                                                                                                               9 That Locke and Hobbes are identical, and that Locke is simply more willing to water-a view argued for by Strauss (1953).  10 As we shall see in the last chapter of this dissertation, Locke says that the only legitimate regime is the one based on right and not through de facto possession of the throne, or through divine right (which is the same as holding the throne de facto). The legitimacy of the regime is located in the simple yet powerful assertion that it remain alterable by the people, which is expressly denied in both divine right and the logic of the Leviathan. This is certainly a tall order for legitimacy, see Waldron 1989. 11 Locke, Essay. I quote it by book, chapter, paragraph. 12 dealings with (and so were then minimally influenced by) women. With a few significant exceptions (Hume, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Sidgwick, and maybe Bradley) they were a collection of gays, clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors. It should not surprise us, then, that particularly in the modern period they managed to relegate to the mental background the web of trust tying most moral agents to one another, and to focus their philosophical attention so single-mindedly on cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers, say, the members of an all-male club, with membership rules and rules for dealing with rule breakers and where the form of cooperation was restricted to ensuring that each member could read his Times in peace and have no one step on his -248). Since Baier explicitly mentions Locke throughout the paper, certainly he is included in this batch of great modern moral philosophers on trust. While I cannot make much of the others so accused, my project is explicitly to rescue Locke from the charge that he was solely concerned with trust as she has  13 hen it will look like both a reliance trust in constraining the actions of others for the sake of the individual, but, so, too, it will look like a an affective community of individuals who are reliable and constrained because they have a deeper commitment to the care of both themselves and others.    91  CHAPTER 2: CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF ONTOLOGY   theory of liberal constitutionalism. Let us leave aside the particular notion of trust for now. Instead, democracy rests on yet another paradox that seems to be a contradiction in need of resolution into one of its two constituent parts: liberalism and democracy. This argument is put forward forcefully by Carl Schmitt, who puts individualistic distrust at the center of liberalism and communal or basic trust at the heart of democracy.1 Liberalism is distrustful and always necessarily in tension with and seeks to eradicate the trustful democratic elements. There is nothing more dangerous in the trust among the people can only lead to disaster. It is a fundamental distrust that drives liberalism in constructing the frustrating mechanisms of parliament. Democracy also pushes against liberalism, by proclaiming a fundamental identitya basic trust between every member of societyit is the vox populi, which wants to be the basis of government. Popular sovereignty is dangerous for liberalism. Liberalism defends the individual, while democracy champions the community. We have moved quickly from a concern for trust directly (which I will recover in the next chapter), and now moved to thgiven priority. The ontological differences between liberalism and democracy map on nicely with the distinction that Locke draws between competing notions of trustthat of a trust-as-mere-reliance, which has its basis in power, its archetype being the master/servant family reorders the individual not as an individual but as a member, which is to take the archetype 92  of the political relation as that of parent/child. For Locke, both of these themselves are incapable of being the proper political relationship, and, if these alternative relationships are ultimately tied to comphowever, we must first carefully examine the ontological grounds that give rise to the un-Lockean alternatives.   explicitly about trust real. For Schmitt, liberalism denies what is real or necessary. This focus on ontology is helpful for my purposes s on a (democracy) whereas the other is anti-political (liberalism). For Schmitt, the political is a particular relationship between us/them, and this identity grounds the state and gives substance to the nationto a democracy. For Schmitt, democracy must be homogenous, which would be like a community that is defined by basic trust. The political critique is then a democratic critique of liberalism because liberalism is distrustfulit denies the us/them identity. In this section, the point is clear: Schmitt argues that the paradox of liberal-democracy is actually a pressing contradiction in terms that demands a resolution. From this Schmittian perspective, liberal-democracy is impossible.  resentation of liberal democracy here. In part 2, 93  I outline the work of John Rawls. Rawls explicitly set out to address the tension between liberal he has convinced others that liberal democracy is not only viable but morally just. In this part, I also outline the alternative liberal perspective of Pierre Manent, who sets out to address the tension between liberalism and democracyassuming, as Schmitt does, that the march of democracy has liberalism collapses into a liberal absolutism and culminates in a sense of trust as that of mere reliancelike slaves to a master, or passengers to a captain. Rawls, insofar as he is able to respond to Schmitt, saves liberalism only by radically denying democracy. I also show how Manent is actually a radical democrat who rejects liberalism, and therefore falls into a view of trust as basic trusta homogenous community of members. Having drawn out the absolutist consequences of failing to properly understand the importance of a particular sense of trust, these liberals have failed to defend   In the --Marxist philosophers Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. In this section of the chapter, I work through their concepts of criticisms. However, at the conclusion of this chapter, I raise the question: while it is clear that most contemporary liberalism is incapable of responding to the Schmittian criticism, can classical -of Mouffe and Laclau? To address these questions, I turn to the thought of John Locke, who hasas we have seen in the previous chapter94  to outline some of the major strands of the contemporary literature on liberal theory, and motivate the ontological critique of contemporary liberalism.  F LIBERAL DEMOCRACY  Carl Schmitt was the self-proclaimed jurist of the Nazi regime, joining the party in 1933 when Hitler officially dissolved the Weimar Republic. Aside from his dubious political opportunism, Schmitt was a decisive, almost surgical critic of liberal-democracy. I turn to Schmitt because his legacy has effectively shaped contemporary debates about contemporary liberalismon both the ideological right and the left. Therefore, in order to gain some clarity about the  In the following section, I will outline his critique of liberalism, drawing from two of his most famous works: The Concept of the Political and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.2 In critique of liberal democracy; second, I will address the soundness of this criticism by recasting it criticism of liberal democracy is that it seemingly oscillates between two mutually exclusive poles: on the one hand, liberalism argues for a trust as reliancegiven that we should distrust otherswhile democracy argues for a more affective, basic trust of the communitysince we should understand seemingly two separate and mutually exclusive aims. As I will address in the next chapter, getting clear on the type of trust relationship that liberal democracy or liberal constitutionalism demands is important both in order to defend it and to properly critique it.  95  Carl Schmitt draws heavily from the work of Thomas Hobbes.3 Indeed, Schmitt often understood himself as the 21st century Hobbes, as he was the champion of thperspective.4 one independent of other domains like aesthetics, religion, morality, ethics, and economics. The political is the existential antagonism between friend and enemy (Concept of the Political, [CP] 26). These other domains of ethics and economics and the like may well participate in achieving existential antagonism between friend and enemy, but this would mean that these domains have become political. The religious, for example, can become community become the basis of war and conflict. For Schmitt, this marks the political as a realm distinctly of potential or actual conflict (CP 33).   Schmitt famously argued that the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.5 Understood properly, the basis of the state rests on the political, which is not one of many associations but the superior domainthe domain of life and death, of friend and enemy. The fact of conflict or the always real possibility of war indicates the presence of the political, which in turn entails the priority of the state as the thing that operates wholly within the political domain. Where there is no possibility for conflict, there is no need or possibility for the state. The state unifies the people along the lines of friend/enemy or us/them (CP 46), and so without the state theinstability, flux, and conflict (CP 46). Where there is conflict, where the political is brought to the fore, the legal is silent. The political views the law, then, only as command, which Schmitt takes Leviathan: the basis of the law is the decision of the sovereign that the law should 96  apply, which is to say that the basis of the law is an authority outside of itselfthe political. Schmitt is drawing directly from Hobbes: And first, it is manifest that law in general is not counsel, but command; nor a command of any man to any man, but only of him whose command is addressed to one formerly obliged to obey him (Leviathan, 26.2).6  The law, then, is ultimately derived not from truth but from authorityauctoritas non veritas.7 The fact of conflict, of the political, makes the justification of the state one of protection which demands obedience (CP 52). The relationship between the sovereign and the law is command, and the relationship between sovereign and subject is protection and obedience. For Schmitt, the state must be strong, and it must be univocal: the commands of the sovereign must be obeyed, as dissent is dangerous because it challenges the ability for the state to adequately respond to the fact of the politicalFor Schmitt, the political and realist perspective holds the view that all individuals are understood trusted, and are weak. This grounds his view of the ontological fact of the political: we will always be thrown into a world where conflict is a live possibility because of the pluralism and cacophony of voices that claim power. For Schmitt, the political is a necessary opposition and antagonism between friend and enemy. But, it is precisely this that is denied when one claims the possibility of a global, moral communitythe concept of a moral community that escapes the political cannot be the basis of the state, since the state presupposes the political distinctions between us/them, friend/enemy. The state demands exclusion, but the concept of humanity denies it. A political thought based on the concept of a moral human community that transcends the boundaries of the political is not, Schmitt would say, 97  Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, apolitical thinking is not without dire consequences. oncept of the politicalthe constitutive exclusionary distinction between friend/enemyrejected constitutionalism and argued famously for an absolutism.8 Insofar as Schmitt follows Hobbes, we should expect Schmitt to do the same. For Hobbes, the pluralism of religious sects and creeds had radically destabilized Europe, and plunged England into a civil war. Pluralism, for Hobbes, was a fact that must be admitted as always possible but nevertheless overcome. It is overcome by establishing a univocal sovereign who is absolute because any limitations to his authority would constrain his ability to meet the existential threats that potentially face us at all times. Again, protection demands obligation, so, insofar as the individual can be protected better nt of an absolute sovereign that can guarantee protection.9   Schmitt recognizes that the political fact of always possible conflict has not been overcome, and is a part of the human condition. To his horror, then, he sees this pluralism embraced. Embracing pluralism is only weakening the political, because embracing pluralism is only possible in the denial of that pluralism as irreconcilable. This denial is only possible if one has either become ignorant of the state of the world, or if one has been educated into a system of politics that that he wants to dismiss and replace.  10 His illiberalism is easy to 98  character must be carefully understood. For Schmitt, remember, the concept of the state is tied to the concept of the political (us/them), which rests in the principle that not only are equals equal but that unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires therefore, first homogeneity and secondif the need ariseselimination or Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, [CPD] 9). Democracy rests on the political, if one understands that one should treat friends equally and enemies unequally. So, for Schmitt, there is a tight equivalence between democracy and the political: they both are e return to the deflation of the law entailed by the the will of friends, of the with the law, or the animating principles of justice within the state. The law is the command of the people. Democracy is inherently political.  interpretation of liberal democracy. For Schmitt, liberal democracy is a contradiction in terms: liberalism denies the political, while democracy necessarily affirms and is constituted by the political, so liberalism denies democracy (and democracy conversely denies liberalism) (CPD 2-3). How is liberalism apolitical or anti-guaranteed through a particular set of principles and procedures of checks and balances, openness, and discussion. These are the key principles of liberalism: openness and discussion, which Schmitt 99  says is only to be bought at the expense of denying the inevitability of decisionliberalism is the differences between individuals can be overcome in the final recognitithese principles produce an institutional system of mechanical procedures of checks and balances and the separation of powers, the rule of law, and individualism. For Schmitt, all of these are premised on the metaphysical system that fundamentally denies the ontological fact of flux or the political  dangerous and obsolete. Historically, Schmitt says, the march of equality has revealed the connection between liberalism and democracy to be contingent and ultimately an unnecessary one: democracy and liberalism were able to form a political friendship in opposition to monarchical absolutism, but with the death of the enemy the relationship dissolves (CPD 17, 23). Theoretically, liberalism and democracy are even more antagonistic to one another: democracy relies on a people, politically constituted against others, while liberalism must admit a moral community that does not draw the antagonistic political boundaries (CPD 10-11). Insofar as liberalism denies the distinctions between peoples, it denies the political. For Schmitt, this denial is not an actual achievement of a particularly heroically impossible deed, but an achievement of self-forgetting: the political is self-imposed: we have denied the independence of the political domain, hoping to sublimate it into one of the othersethics or economics. Liberalism is simply a displacement of the political. This displacement can only be done or hoped successful if the individual is understood as a plurality of identities instead of one political identification (CPD 40-41, 44). In 100  other words, the only way that liberalism can succeed is if it attempts to reconstitute the human being as one that is no longer a member of a communitya peoplebut a member of a cosmopolitan community that transcends all communities (CPD 44). This all leads to a certain notion of trust. The liberal individual is a metaphysical construct, and this individual is held by liberalism to take precedence over any other particular political identification. Only in this way can liberalism hope to neutralize the politicaldisplacing it into s terminus a quoterminus ad quemand the end of political life (CPD 70). The liberal indivwhich makes the principles of openness and discussion primary: to reveal and possibly resist political power. And, not only are these liberal individuals distrustful, but liberalism holds that individuals can act against the statethe individual can retract consent when it no longer themselves as the beginning and the end, the only way they can believe that they can be protected without a sovereign power with sufficient (read: absolute) political power is to deny a priori that Hobbesianism, the liberal denies that life outside of the state would be nasty, brutish, and short. This faith in the apolitical nature of the world is naïve and dangerous, Schmitt says, since it denies  iberalism is clear: find a new intellectual foundationone that does or fall to the march of democracy, be it fascism of communism. Schmitt does not believe that such an intellectual 101  enterprise is possible, and so liberalism must be discarded. We live in the world where individuals are now coming to understand themselves as peoples and not as one among humanity. CONTEMPORARY LIBERALISMRAWLS   The political thought of John Rawls needs no introduction: his work has defined the field of mainstream political philosophy for over 40 years.11 In this section, I will not attempt to I attempt to present the equally expansive critiques of his thought, penned by communitarians, republicans, anarchists, and libertarians.12 I will refer to secondary sources where appropriate for my focused needs, as the circumstances arise. My particular focus will be in RawlA Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism: his metaphysical individualism concepts broadly speaking in sections 2.1 and 2.2, respectively. In the conclusion of this section (2.3), I argue that Rawls fails to address the political therefore not only rightly is criticized for being radically apolitical, and therefore naïve and potentially dangerous (which I draw out in detail below), but he should be criticized even by constitutionalismwhich, I have argued rests on viable and meaningful contestationtheory of justice amounts to a defense of stability first and foremost, and this itself has radical consequences for political life. For Rawls, stability is guaranteed by making justice a moral concern. This moralizing of politics makes dissent and contest not only a moral battle (one between 102  good and evil) but it denies, at the crucial moment, even the right to contestation in the name of pluralism that gives rise to liberalism in the first place. As we shall see, these contradictions and troubling consequences need not bury liberalismcontrary to the claims of Schmitt and other radical illiberalsbut only extend to the type of ideal liberalism that Rawls puts forward. This ideal type of liberalism, Rawls himself admits, is an attempt to overcome a messier, more political liberalismmodus vivdendi liberalism), which I will expound in the next chapter. was not animated by the radical political critique that Schmitt set against his own liberal constitutionalism in Weimar Germany. Rawls could conceivably be more concerned with outlining a theory of justice for liberals, by a staunch liberal, and so it would be wide of the mark to think that Rawls would try to mount a rejoinder to anti-liberals in the first place. However, while Rawls certainly had multiple intentions in laying down his political liberalism, one particular intention was to respond to the crisis of parliamentary democracy in Weimar Germany. In this way, Rawls is presenting his work as a potential response to Schmittor, at least, reflections on the nature of liberalism in light of the collapse of the interwar period. In Political Liberalism (cited in text as PL), he explains the historical motivations of his work: If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered democratic society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will reflect that knowledge. A cause of the its constitution or were willing to cooperate to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible. Its time had past. The regime fell to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments from 1930 to 1932. When these were increasingly weakened by 103  their lack of popular support, President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such support and whom conservatives thought they could control. (PL, lix-lx)  Here Rawls wants to reinvigorate and stabilize liberal democracy, since he sees precisely that liberal democracy must be defended from dangerous elements outside by providing a new way to believe in libeWeimar Germany may happen in the United Statesnamely, people believe that liberal democracy is not possible, that it cannot be defended from the illiberal alternatives. Once this is clear to whom he is responding: Schmitt.  For Rawls, liberal democracy must be defended not through institutional mechanisms but through providing convincing arguments about the grounds of liberalism: it has to engage with how we should think about politics. Rawls begins his account of liberalism by admitting the fact bsolute depth of we will discuss in detail below and and the history of liberalism is an attempt to negotiate antagonism, particularly early modern liberalism that dealt with warring religious sects and grounded which means it takes seriously irreconcilable conflict, and therefore does seem uniquely  critique of liberalism. Schmitt claims that on the historical fact of irreconcilable antagonism. 104  Let us turn, then, to some of the intricate parts of Rcriticisms that he himself attempts to address in Political Liberalism.13 The original position is a thought experiment that strives to reveal to us the intuitive sense of justice that we all share: liberal notions of freedom and equality (PL 22, Theory of Justice [cited in text as TJ] sections 3 and 4). terms of social cooperation are conceived as agreed to by those engaged in it, that is by free and by understanding ourselves as free and equal. This would be to understand ourselves as individuals firstas individuals who are free and equal as all other individuals who are themselves free and equal as individuals. If Rawls left it here, we may object to the peculiar starting spot, but we would not depart much from the original insight of irreconcilable conflicthow could there not be conflict in a world of free and equal individuals understood as free and equal only insofar as they we free and equal? One way out of this situation, though difficult but not impossible, is to arrive at an agreement among individual parties to ease us out of such radical and potentially antagonistic pluralism. Society would be founded on an agreement that never forgets the fact of radical pluralism or the potential of conflictwill discuss in the next chapter, this would make the basis of liberal politics a modus vivendi.  For Rawls, the modus vivendi, however, is itself unstable and contingent.14 We must, Rawls will argue, try to find something more stableescape the potential prejudices that would guide us to a modus vivendi and not something more stable. The idea is that a modus vivendi is the only agreement that can occur when the parties have some knowledge of their relative advantages and disadvantages over and against the others. If 105  these advantages and disadvantages are not bracketed or constrained, then they will inevitably be crystallized in recognized shared self-understanding as free and equal and that we recognize the other as free and equal, but also that the parties to the political agreement will not know their own standing within the society they create.  For Rawls, only under these conditions can we guarantee that the agreement will be purged of the random noise of a tradition, a history, or a familywhich all must be understood as more or less obstacles to our intuitive understanding of justicebecause they represent contingent domains and relations of power or influence. We must purge these identities and relations when we think about justice because these relations potentially destabilize the agreement. The reason the original position must abstract from and not be affected by the contingencies of the social world is that the conditions for a fair agreement on the principles of political justice between free and equal persons must eliminate the bargaining advantages that inevitably arise within the background institutions of any society from cumulative social, historical, and natural tendencies. These contingent advantages and accidental influences from the past should not affect an agreement on the principles that are to regulate the institutions of the basic structure itself from the present into the future. (PL 23)   position to fully extract out any and all already existing conditions of any already existing society. For Rawls, the way to proceed can only be in understood as the site of contingency and accidentsince the true perspective of the human being must be just that we are free and equal as free and equal individuals who only have freedom and equality as individuals who understand just that they are free and equal as individuals. This is the highly  106  Rawls has no problem with this description of the human being, and, further, sees no ignorance, to mention one prominent feature of that position, has no specific metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the does have to note that, while not prior the veil of ignorance has certain aspects that are given priority.  What does Rawls prioritize in the original position? The veil of ignorance does necessarily prioritize some features of the self: the self is not to be understood as historically bound or culturally embedded but abstract. Since the human being in the original position and under the veil of ignorance is only a thing that is free and equal to all other things free and equal, Rawls can only point to the rational facultiesthe things that recognize ourselves and others as free and equal. The two facultiesare first, that we understand ourselves and others as to cooperate with another who has a rational sense of the good (PL 19). The political identity of turn to discussing this point in the next section below. Now, however, it is enough to say that  save if it arises 107  out of the contingent and historical flux of lifethen Rawls may indeed not be normatively giving a certain conception of the human being priorityhold political power. This would mean that Rawls would be making a descriptive statement about cept of reasonableness (which rests at the center of our political lives) something contingently derived. should ground our politics on a certain conception of the reasonable, which should be shorn of all historical contingency, and therefore we should deductionsomething prior metaphysical register, and his concept of justice is fullyeven if unwillinglycommitted to a  The charge of metaphysical transcendentalism was widely levelled against Rawls by his so called A Theory of Justice, Rawls sought a conception of justice wholly devoid of historical and social contextit began from uch with real, existing human beings. If it begins by departing from the human condition, one could argue, how can it tell us anything important about how we should live in this worldespecially about our sense of justice, something inextricably linked to our human condition and our social and historical context? Rather than trying to establish what individuals would agree to in a context-free environment, communitarians argued ng point our context and situation, a limited view of what we can do here and now.  108  A Theory of Justice were addressed by Rawls in his book Political Liberalism. Political Liberalism is an attempt to address and remedy the problems of his ideal theorizing in A Theory of Justice. Rawls tells us that Political Liberalism A Theory of Justice. By contextualizing A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism placed the theoretical ground not in the structure of reality (like a natural scientist would attempt to do), but in our reality as a 21st A Theory of Justice that tried to deduce the necessary structural aspects of our political life as such; in Political Liberalism, structural aspects of our political life in the here and now. By making this shift in focus, Rawls hoped to respond to many of his critics by acknowledging from the beginning that he was going to start from our shared, historical context, not against it.  The methodological shift in focusing on context does entail a more substantive shift. Rawls is no longer is going to discuss the principles of justice, since we can now assume them as largely there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly  explicit now. over the inherent flux in our political and social traditions. Since Rawls is no longer uniquely focused on outlining the principles of justice109  to eand therefore will try to find a solid ground elsewhere. He will find it in his concept of an . The problem, as I see it, is A Theory of Justice to his later Political Liberalism. In this section, I will defend this by showing the absolutist tendenciePolitical Liberalism, and, in the following sections, by showing that his concern for foundation stability indeed underwrites his A Theory of Justice, oundational stability, and uncover an alternative liberalism that allows for a contested yet stable polity. of liberal justice in A Theory of Justice as the foundational stabilizing element of society. Rawls recognized that he cannot simply assert the rational character of the human being as he did in A Theory of Justice, since it would either have to admit to being so abstract as to be practically useless for us in this world, or, since Rawls obviously did think his theory was useful, it must entail both of this problems.15 The overlapping consensus posits that there exist reasonable and consensus of the reasonable or rational doctrinesthough the principles itself, Rawls assures us, do not themselves entail any specific doctrine (PL 144). However, in order for there to be an reasonable pluralreasonable yet seemingly conflicting comprehensive doctrines, and therefore is not necessarily 110  derived from already existing comprehensive doctrines, Rawls begins with his feet firmly planted on the principles that are shared by all other reasonable comprehensive doctrines, though they disagree on many other things. For Rawls, the principles of freedom and equality and the interpretations of these principles are the basis of the overlapping consensus. All reasonable doctrines hold to shared interpretations of these principles (and not merely the principles themselves). Liberal political theoretically analyzing our historical, contingent, political traditions. For Rawls, the stability of the regime is guaranteed not by an appeal to any single comprehensive doctrine, but by the political principles that float behind and within all reasonable comprehensive doctrines in the overlapping consensus.  ct in A Theory of Justice has changed in Political Liberalism. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls set out to establish a set of principles of justice that would be true for all rational agents, with the right rational capacities, regardless of historical context. In Political Liberalism, Rawls shifts from this context-free rational deduction to ideal theorizing from within a shared historical context. Since we can assume that our society has a functioning theory of justice already, the job Rawls sets for himself in Political Liberalism is to make clear the overlapping consensus of our theory of justice, thereby providing us with a stable which is to say not on the ground of power and interest but principles, ethics, and morality (PL  111  structure of our political lives (PL 244). Rawls must reject modus vivendi liberalism on the grounds that it defends liberalism for the wrong reasons. Instead, liberalism must rest on an unobjectionable and unalterable foundation. This is what Rawls means reasonable comprehensive doctrines. A Theory of Justice was to deduce the structure of political justice from context-free reason. In Political Liberalism his method is to derive it from the context of comprehensive doctrines. The procedure, even in this first Rawls recognizes that social life is pluralist: there are many competing and seemingly exclusive comprehensive doctrines of religion and philosophy and morality. On the other hand, Rawls must immediately presume a deeper order to this pluralism if he wants to have theoretical stability of an  parties (as the modus vivendi model would allow). Rawls must shift from simple pluralism to reasonable Political Liberalism 16This distinction already reveals the extent to which Rawls has to truncate or narrow the dynamic realm of contested values within the social world. The overlapping consensus that underwrites reasonable pluralism needs to exclude other Only if the grounds of exclusion have moved from the political (power and interest) to the comprehensive doctrine is to reveal the extent to which one is not only outside the contemporary 112  framework of society. The historical and political contingencies of our political and social lives consensus of reasonable pluralism. not rely on a comprehensive doctrine of morality (which he eis that we need to look underneath the name, and see how his conception of justice operates. I argue that it operates like a comprehensive moral doctrine, not that it is one. The overlapping doctrines: to reject the principles revealed in the overlapping consensus is to reject the overlapping consensus for Rawls. There is, I beoverlapping consensus: the legitimacy of the overlapping consensus rests on its adherence to the principles of justice he outlined in A Theory of Justice, and not in the actual agreement between parties. In other words, Rawls the overlapping consensus is legitimate because it adheres to the principles of justice. There is no dynamic, reciprocal relationship between our social and political lives and the principles of justice. The overlapping consensus is stable because it rests not on the agreement between parties, but because all the parties (if they are reasonable) already agree because their comprehensive doctrines contain the principles of liberal political justice. Contrary s, the abstract formalism that haunted his A Theory of Justice still animate his Political Liberalism by having an overlapping consensus that tells us who is or is not reasonable insofar as they allow for the liberal principles of justice in the first place.  but against the way he arrives at them and the priority he bestows upon them for stabilizing our 113  Political Liberalism is not justice but stability. I do not reject the derived from an overlapping consensus rather than political, prudential agreement between parties. The overthat something must go beyond our prudential, political agreements of power and interestbetrays the historical and contextual facts that he supposedly wanted to begin from in Political Liberalism.  of the contingency of political foundations and of the constitutive character of social reality. Rawls hoped to transform a theory that was previously abstract and unconnected to human reality by founding it unambiguously on the existing institutions, structures, and assumptions of liberal democracy. Unfortunately, in his desire to establish unambiguous foundations, Rawls reified this context arbitrarily, adopting a particular point in time with limited perspectives and possibilities as the universal standard against which the justice of society will be evaluated forever. Taking a particular interpretation of a particular context and making it unchallengeable (at least within the the face of ambiguity (Wigenbach 2011, 177).  Even though Rawls admits this particular historical arrangement is contingent in the beginning of Political Liberalism, his ideal theorizing method necessarily makes the historical, dynamic, and contingency inherent in our political traditions become static, rigid, and non-reciprocal. Rawls inadvertently lays out in his Political Liberalism a false dichotomy between an uncontestable stability or a contestable, dynamic anarchy and chaos. I reject this false dichotomy.  We should not reject liberalism, but only the view that liberalism can be won on these uncontested ground of an overlapping consensus. Instead, we should revisit the view of liberalism as a modus vivendi, not only because it is perhaps truer to our historical reality, but because I believe it can win even on the ground of being more stable. We, of course, need not fully dismiss he does provide us with clarity about our liberal commitments in our particular moment. But, we should avoid his attempt to make this particular articulation of 114  liberal justice the be-all-end-stability only emerged in his Political Liberalism, and overlapping consensus.  individualistic grounds, but only that these grounds are being continually assumed and enshrined in an ever- respond to the Schmittian challenge of defending liberalism in a world that does not presuppose liberalism as true, where liberalism is not taken for granted. Rawls, though seemingly recognizing this problem, nevertheless only presents compelling arguments to the already converted, which was precisely the problem in Weimar: liberals and illiberals were completely talking past each other, and, when push came to shove, there were more illiberals than liberals, so the liberal constitutionalism collapsed. In lRawlsin order to defend liberalismlife, leaving only a liberalism that is stable because everyone was always already a liberal.  Rawls, of course, would never call himself a liberal absolutist, but he also said he was not liberal premise of individualism that, in large part due to this individualism, gives rise to a need for a coercive state apparatus that enforces and commandspolices. The most visible liberal absolutist is Thomas Hobbes, as the image of the leviathan is almost synonymous with the notion following way. First, human beings should understand themselves as things that exist outside of a community and outside of a state, where there are no effective constraints. These individuals 115  recognize themselves and others as free and equal by virtue of their shared statelessness. However, now left to their own devices, individuals are inevitably drawn into conflict with one another, and because it produces security in the world wholly lacking in peace. The legitimacy and the relationship between the individual and the sovereign is grounded on protection and obedience. e state of nature, just individual utility-maximizers who seek only stability and peace. The image of utility-A Theory of Justice. Indeed, the book has many diagrams of cost-y of justice is a posits that individuals are moral, which one would assume would lead to them being in some sense ing. This means that, for Rawls, one of the most pressing questions is to solve the collective action problem at the heart of a social contract theory: why would an individual agree to the conditions of the contract in a world without enforced outcomes? In fact, for Rawls, one of the most important aspects of the rule of law is not its expression as a moral conceptthat all are to be understood as free and equalbut its crude mechanical coercive  211). The coercive use of force is used to secure individual fidelity to contracts, and this alone would justify the sovereign, Rawls Hobbesian (TJ 211). The full Hobbesian character of this statement about coercive power can be liberative 116  rational calculus all liberal citizens should engage in, according to Rawls, is to gauge all actions relative to the potential loss of liberty (utility) if there were no sovereign. This argument toward stability is classic Hobbesianism.17 It is not by accident, then, that economic models and rational choice play an important part fundamental stability of institutional payouts is explicitly invoke by Rawls, who correctly -end of liberal government is to secure the conditions under which one can pursue some rational ctive sovereign, or even the general belief in his  The problem here, for Rawls, is that the individualistic and rational choice perspective only obtainsas Hobbes himself admitsin a trust-free environment. These individuals in a stateless (TJ 457-458). To care for another would be to bring in a socialitya mutual trustthat is lacking le enterprise of solving a collective action problem of competing private individuals: trust makes the desire to cooperate something that need not be externally coerced. Rawls, however, refers to precisely this sociality and draws this exact consequence (TJ 303-305). Rawls makes clear that the two moral powers of the rational individual overcomes the Hobbesian paradigm (TJ 305). The act of promising, Rawls says, is powerful enough to overcome the collective action problem because there is a shared moral background that is presupposedbecause the individual is ultimately not an individual but a member of a community (TJ 305).  117  So, we see that Rawls now has two competing perspectives: that of the individual in the original position, shorn of his membership in any community, guided by only his moral powers that seek to maximize his rational plan of a good life, and, that of the individual nevertheless tied to a moral community that produces cooperation. While these two positions seem counter to one another, I will show that they are in fact one in the same: Rawls has replaced the Leviathan with a moral community, thereby replacing one absolutism for another. This is because at the center of section that Rawls will, at the end of the day, even elevate stability over justice, cementing his absolutism. Rawls argues that stability is won not, as Hobbes saw, in the state but in the morality revealed in the original position (TJ 435). The liberalism Rawls now presents is stable because all individuals hold the same moral powers, and therefore the same rational principles of justice. As Rawls writes,  As I remarked earlier, Hobbes connected the question of stability with that of political obligation. One may think of the Hobbesian sovereign as a mechanism added to a system of cooperation which of instability. Now it is evident how relations of friendship and mutual trust, and the public knowledge of a common and normally effective sense of justice, bring about the same result. (TJ 435)  jhas not challenged the absolutist notion that stability ought to be central to our political community. It is on the basis of stability that Hobbes was able to move from individualism to absolutism, and it is becoming clear that this is the path Rawls is on, too.   A Theory of Justice where I argue he makes clear that he has elevated stability over justice, thereby following 118  wholly the Hobbesian paradigm of liberal absolutism. The first example is drawn from his discussion of civil disobedience in a near-perfect society. I will argue that, as is the case with all l justice denies at the crucial moment the right to dissent or resist injustice.  Rawls is a staunch defender of majority rule because, in a well-ordered or near-perfect society, it would be a reflection of the moral community, which means the two principles and the two moral powers are properly grounding political life (TJ 312-313). Where there is a majority there is necessarily a minority. For Rawls, the minorityinsofar as they follow their reasonhe section on disobedience, as opposed to A Theory of Justice, Rawls makes explicit reference  by the  defects of real life. This can only mean that we have a duty to obey on some other principle than even the principle of justice, ideally defined. As Rawls contiat least, there is normally a duty (and for some an obligation) to comply with unjust laws provided injustice they are willing to take on, the amount of injustice they are willing to suffer, not to be 119  exceeded by some unmarked threshold. The precise line is itself not a product of justice, since presumably the search for justice is the animating concern for politics in the first place. So, what principle draws the line between accepting and rejecting unjust laws? In other words, we now see the duty of civility to be an obligation to not revolt and resist the state, which is now admittedly he extent to civil disobedience can be engaged in without leading to a breakdown in the respect for the law and the constitution, thereby setting in motion calculation about the utility gained by resistingeven on the grounds of justice shared by the community as dictated by the overlapping consensusand the utility potentially lost to all if the to have the minorities toppling the system (TJ 328). The point is not that the principles of justice are contested (which Rawls has not room for since the principles are a product of morality), but that these principles have not obtained and we seemingly have a desire to install them, regardless of the utility of doing so. But, it is precisely this claim of justice to be actual that Rawls will resist, and he does so not on moral or just grounds, but only on the grounds of utility and stability. Dissent, if it is even possible, should be a coordinated enterprise among all reasonable minorities facing an injustice, and aimed at not fixing a gross structural injustice but to receive some form of incomplete justice within the already established system. Stability is more important than justice. precisely how his absolutism is connected to his notion of trust. In the later sections of A Theory of Justice, Rawls discusses some of the particular institutional consequences of his principles of justice. One, which I will focus on here, is that the virtue of self-governmentso important for 120  some liberalsis something that has little intrinsic value. Rawls reveals that, completely consistent with the sense of liberal justice as he understands it, there may be an argument for e vote (TJ 203-204).18 Coupled with his view of majority rule, this inevitably amounts to the rule of the few, which may strike us as odd given the intuition in the original position is that we are free and equal. The idea of plural voting is inherently unequalas Rawls points out, following John Stuart Mill, plural voting rests equality central to our own liberal original position is, as we move into political society, radically (TJ 203). The claim to rule is not, it seems, truly consent or agreementas it is for liberal constitutionalistsbut a superior claim of knowledge or, in this case, expertise in the principles of justice. We are naturally unequal in this knowledge, and this lack ought to be reflected in our -is not essential to liberal justice (TJ 205): following the same principles of justice, as understood by the moral community that does not allow for dissent, we ought to just let the experts handle question of administration. And, since it is a question of administration, there is little reason for individuals to be actively involved, much like passengers on a ship do not sail the boat. Government is assumed to aim at the common good, that is, at maintaining conditions and holds, and some men can be identified as having superior wisdom and judgment, others are willing to trust them and to concede to their opinion a greater weight. The passengers on a ship are willing to let the captain steer the course, since they believe that he is more knowledgeable and wishes to arrive safely as much as they do. There is both an identity of interests and a noticeably greater skill and judgment in realizing it. Now the ship of state is in some ways analogous to a ship at sea; and to the extent that is so, the political liberties are indeed subordinated to other freedoms, that, so to say, define the intrinsic good of the passengers. (TJ 205)  121  Once we assume that the government is indeed directed toward the common good of all, which we have to understand here as something that can be attained without certain political liberties, we should be happy with the goods that belong to passengers on a ship: presumably private, comfortable accommodations. In this ideal theory, we have arrived at the bald confession that political activity is as absurd as a bunch of passengers trying to claim to steer the ship, when a seemingly ready, willing, and able ship captain with superior knowledge is available. Rawls and ruled is by the ability of the sovereign to protect us from harmto guide the ship of state ably through choppy waters. Though Hobbes does not claim that the ability of the Leviathan is due to  For Rawls, liberal justice leads to an asymmetrical, non-reciprocal relationship between magistrate and subject, between passenger and captain, and this is to repeat the absolutist position. What could trust look like here other than strict obedience? Rawls has assumed or abstracted away all politically relevant questions about the intentions and actions of the captain, things that Locke, as I will describe below, is keenly aware of when constructing his liberal constitutionalism. Where there is no viable space for trust, there is no viable claim of liberal constitutionalism.  First, I wanted to make clear that Rawls does not, contrary to his stated intention, mount an adequate rtice is not even always lurking in the shadows of any liberal thinking that begins with a brute individualism. Rawls, 122  of course, does not advocate as bluntly for a Hobbesian Leviathan, though the image of the captain and his passengers should make it clear that liberal absolutism need not follow the 16th century r failing regime. In turning to Rawls, the important point is that the public philosophy that comes out of his A Theory of Justice and his Political Liberalism is perhaps as dangerous as it is naïve, or, rather, it is dangerous precisely because of its apolitical naivety. attempted to move past the modus vivendi by moralizing the liberal theory of justice.19 The point is not that liberals need to be amoral, but that their prudence must always recognize that we always are in a non-ideal world-begin with the premise that justice in this world can only be that which we liberals would tolerate, and then come to recognize that very few places in the world come close to living up to this sense of justice, we are pushed into two seemingly immoderate conclusions: either we begin the submit to patently unjust laws. Perhaps this is a false choice, but if it is, it has to be because of how we started thinking about politics in the first place. There will always be a place for the ideal theorizing, but the pressing concern is to address the political question facing liberalism: how do we avoid the march of absolutismliberal or illiberal? PIERRE MANENT AND DEMOCRACY of democracy, through two lenses. To anticipate the conclusion, first, I will read him as a radical democrat on the ideological right. Pierre Manent is not often understood to be a philosophical 123  call Manent a radical democrathimself sets out to criin terms of political trustsomething he says little about explicitly, but becomes immediately apparent upon closer examination. From my perspective, Manent is not a defender of liberalism, since he denies the importance of consent, humanity, and individualismall things of paramount importance to any liberalism. However, as I noted above, Manent is often understood as a liberal who is attacking democracy. I argue the oppositefoliberalism and democracyManent is a democrat who rejects liberalism. Accordingly, in order Democracy Without Nations (cited in text as DWN).   As he usually does, Manent follows Tocqueville in seeing our age as the latest articulation of the nearly endless march of democracy, of equality (DWN 11).20 For Manent, we are now  an idea that is also a sentiment and even a passion: the idea that the inclusivity, overcoming constitutive differencestic age is therefore an ever-increasing sameness, enveloping the whole world(DWN 8).   The march of equality, as Manent understands it, is the march of unification under the equalized and thoroughly apolitical b124  (DWN 11-16). The slow destruction of the nation is due to the intellectual history of liberalism (the title of another book by Manent). According to Manent, liberalism gave the individual rights against the community, and constraining politics and the functions of the state to enforcing and respecting those rights claims. These rights claims were immediately put to use through artificially -state emerges from the liberal tradition, but it is used and then abandoned by the democratic process. First, Manent argues, liberalism pushed for politics to be redrawn between the people and the government, softening the pathos of distance between them erstood as a equality, once this equality of conditions has been achieved, we can move from laws to mores. Finally, contemporary democracy is now fully against the state, since it is ultimately a reminder of a condition of differenceeven in its slight elevation of representatives over the represented (DWN 18).   For Manent, democracy holds up the dream of a stateless and nationless society, where  revealed the existence of another wall: the mutual impenetrability of human communities, despite the ever-n a position of global unity, 125    Our political reality today is that communities are not so quickly equalized, and difference communities are dense, compact, hard to penetrate; each one is endowed with a distinctive argument: a political community deserving of the name is not something so easily moved, nor is it something so easily entered into or even understood from the outside. Difference here is a hard thing, both in substance and in form. It is rigid because it carries with it something that cannot be so easily diluted, softened, or molded willy-nilly. The community is not merely an aggregate of communities take hold of their members at a level so deep that even the powerful instruments and contagious pleasures of modern life are unato the democrat, is soft, a contagious pleasure, blurry, sprawling, undefined, and fleeting. No argument is made that this is what humanity is for the democrat, but only that it is something that    is his basis for rejecting the liberal project? From the basis of the community and the classical understanding of the human being as a thing that must beand is only intelligible asa member of a community, as citizens first. Here he follows Aristotle and demands that the liberal project be rejected as a politics of decisively non-as a free and rational being cannot fulfill himself except in a political community, with all the 126  consequences (not all of them pleasant) that this entaito think differentlyit is not simply or always a question of obeying or disobeying morality! More precisely, the requisite morality is simply that of recognizing political reality, which means the objective charact  For Manent, then, the liberal confusion and the erosion of the nation and the state is due to our departing from a sense that the community is the anchor of our worldview, of our way of life. For liberals, the moral and political community must on some non-trivial sense be grounded in the eaning, and moreover are not possible, except politics just covers over the fact that, as a political community (which requires some contrast-class  For Manent, this insight is drawn from classical political philosophy, which denies the initial break of liberal thought in the seventeeoperatesor, as we should be clear, the liberal hope for humanity is a paradox, and a dangerous one since it creates a void within the hearts of everyone, as we are all Aristotelian rational animals who need community. For Manent, we need to talk more about how we identify with the community, and not about our individual identities (DWN 80-identification in community is a recognition and reorientation of the individual not as an individual but as a citizen. So, to speak of identities is the opposite of identification: we see ourselves as 127  individuals who can pick up or put down particular group attachments, citizenships, etc. For Manent, this is the heart of the problem: the liberal (democratic) individual is an individual first, which denigrates the importance of the community. We must take Manent seriously when he turns and to produce his conditions of existence, he is not the sovereig(DWN 83). There is something pushing against the humannaturewhich demands to be heard, and, if ignored, produces radical instability and danger for all human beings. The basis of political legitimacy, then, is not liberal consent, but a deeper telos of human fulfillment. We must reorient our lives around the idea of identification-with the community, because it is only there that we can feel truly at home.     For my purposes, Manent represents an ideological right or conservative critique of liberalism.21 Indeed, I would categorize his critique, following Schmitt, as a right or conservative democratic critique of liberalism.  We can typically understand liberalism to be comprised of three notions: a moral or ethical concern for not the most important identity that we have as individuals. Schmitt and Manent both see these propositions as central to liberalism. And they both reject them. Both Manent and Schmitt hold community as a way of life that is irreducibly one of difference, and to cover this up is a de-Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Finally, we -state as more than merely an instrumental apparatus for dispersing and defending individual rights.  128  The difference between Schmitt and Manent, insofar as there is one, rests in the following. of liberalism: is the rejection of liberalism that it no longer allows for a reliable sovereign (a neo-Hobbesian argument); or is it the more ancient or illiberal position of the democratic community as being primary (a neo-Aristotelian rejection of individualism)?22 For Schmitt, depending on the target, it is both. However, for Manent, it is clearly the latter. Manent rests on thoroughly illiberal ontological grounds: human beings are by nature political. This demands that any healthy community recognizes that the relationship between the governed and the governing, or the citizen and the government, is one of identification and not identity. For Manent, we should see the liberal project as being too distrustful, too individualistic.23  the so important for a liberal constitutionalismare effectively jettisoned. Insofar as it even makes sense to talk about trust, one dualistic trust (something akin to citizenship within a political system, Manent has a very peculiarly premodern notion of citizenship: full devotion to the common good.24 This is a radical critique of liberalism because it explicitly rejects almost all of the uniquely liberal aspects of political lifeindividualism, consent, and trust. Instead, Manent follows right-leaning thinkers like Schmitt in rejecting liberalism precisely on democratic grounds: the us/them logic underwriting any meaningful political  AGONISTIC DEMOCRACY: HEGEMONY, CONTESTATION, AND POPULISM   So far, we see that Schmitt has revealed that liberalism and democracy have two opposing 129  nction conflict that radically challenges any hopeful or ideal notion of a universal consensus, the  democracy rests on two different the view that there can be direct access to the truth and that this will win the day; democrats believe that such foundationalism is hopelessly naïve, and that politics is a game of power, flux, and the two warring vocabularies, grammars, or logics that underwrite both.  Rawls sought out to address precisely this sort of ontological criticism of liberal democracy. By starting from intractable antagonism, he hoped to reveal the royal road to liberalism that could persuade even the most illiberal democrat. I have outlined his view above. He does not allow for flux, contestation, or dissent at all. He quickly demands a clear demarcation between reasonable to all (who are reasonable because they are liberal). In short, he does not adequately of liberalism. I showed, however, that, while Manent is keenly aware of the ontological or realist critique of liberal democracy, he does not actually resist it but adopts it. In other words, Manent gical critique of liberalism has not yet been overcome. I turn now to two neo-claim to save liberal democracy from the Schmittian critique: Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. I do so, not simply to pile more criticism upon contemporary liberalism, but to reveal that liberal 130  democracy can be saved, though we have to alter some fundamental propositions floating behind liberal theory about the nature of liberalism. In particular, if we are to follow Mouffe and Laclau, we must uncontingency. Below I will outline their positions. I conclude this chapter by asking if it is indeed possible to have a liberalism based on flux or contingency. In order to answer this, in the next chapter I turn to the work of Locke because, as outlined in the previous chapter, he at least presents his liberalism as a function of a trust that is premised on some sort of contingency or flux.   Drawing from the work of John Rawls, contemporary mainstream liberal political theory ontological or metaphysical claims of truth, and this entails numerous philosophical debates about epistemological concerns about how we can know these metaphysical first principles, and then to derive the political institutions and social relations we should accept based upon these epistemologically justified first principles. Ideal theorizing, then, starts (as I will show below) from if it is not grounded on one of the foundational metaphysical principles like nature, reason, or evolutionary biology. Politics must, from the perspective of ideal theory, rest on an ultimate principle or foundation.   metaphysical search for demonstrably certain principles that can ground our politics. The realist --d first premise since, in order to mount an argument a first unargued premise is presupposed as the necessary precondition of an argument. 131  So, the basis of politics is not as the idealist would argue a product of foundations but simply power or interest. The task, then, for political theory is not to establish proper foundations, but to -foundational. The difference between the -- Anti-Foundationalism and Post-Foundationalism Anti-foundationalists, like Martin Heidegger, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derridato name only the most famous contemporaries of this positionset out to expose the foundational claims many make in arguing from ideal theory.25 They do so in order to liberate themselves from the oppressive foundationalism, since, for the anti-foundationalist, all foundationalist claims are themselves contingent, and, as contingent, they are illegitimately exclusive. According to Derrida, center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics like the history Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presenceeidos, arche, telos, Energeia, ousai (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth. Quoted from Bernstein (1992, 175).  Or, as Rorty says:  The quickest way of expressing this commonality is to say that philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault, are antidualists. This does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a flux continually changing relations. (1999, 47) For the anti-foundationalist, foundations are to be unmasked and overcome. Anti-foundationalists seek to expose and reject foundations, hoping to be in a liberated, unconstrained space of expression and creativityonce the oppressive foundations have been removed. 132   Post-foundationalists do not seek to merely expose or unmask the contingency at the center of all foundationalist claims, but, they seek to reform these foundations. The difference between the anti-foundationalists and the post-foundationalists is the recognition of the latter that foundational claims will always be important for political lifethe relationships between individuals, giving substantive content to the form. As one commentator put it what came to be called post-foundationalism should not be confused with anti-foundationalism. What distinguishes the former from the latter is that it does not assume the absence of any ground; what it assumes is the absence of an ultimate ground, since it is only on the basis of such absence that grounds, in the plural, are possible. The problem is therefore posed not in terms of no foundations (the logic of all-or-nothing), but in terms of contingent foundations. Hence post-foundationalism does not stop after having assumed the absence of final ground and so it does not turn into anti-foundationalist nihilism, existentialism or [radical] pluralism, all of which assume the absence of any ground and would result in complete meaninglessness, absolute freedom or total autonomy. Nor does it turn into a sort of post-modern pluralism for which all meta-narratives have equally melted into air, for what is still accepted by post-foundationalism is the necessity for some ground. (Wigenbach 2011, 8)  The post-foundationalist perspective is subtler than the anti-foundationalist position. Just as the anti-foundationalist, the post-foundationalist argues that foundationalist claims are exclusive and potentially oppressive since there is no ultimate ground, but does not have to admit the anti-foundationalist conclusion that there is no ground at all. The post-foundationalist does admit that there is a ground, but that this ground is contingently articulated. What the post-foundationalist deniesagainst the anti-foundationalist positionis that there is no emancipated non-foundational space available to us, as the anti--the anti-foundationalists (Wigenbach 2011). For the post-foundationalist, we should be honest about political life: while we must live within a foundationalist environment (what would it look like not to?), this does not make the foundations truly foundationalthe basis of any foundational claim in a society is not 133  -foundationalism emphasizes the contingency of all articulated foundations, denying their ontological or metaphysical truth, and instead refocuses our attention on power. Political life is about power, not foundational ontological first principles.  This last point needs to be emphasized. As opposed to the anti-foundational perspective, the post-foundationalist argues not that there are no fundamental truths in the worldwhich is exactly what the anti- and post- designatebut that these foundational truths cannot be the ground of political life. In politics, these foundational truths do not obtain. Politics, for the post-foundationalist, is one of consentunderstood as an agreement not guaranteed by metaphysical first principles that make such an agreement inevitable. Political life is fundamentally determined by flux or radical, irreconcilable pluralism. In this world, consent is a modus vivendia tenuous, fragile, agreement that nevertheless has authority given by those parties included in the ceasefire. The post-e sober recognition of the real possibility or actual existence of conflict due to conflicting conceptions of justice and the good. Ideal theory, by grounding politics in a first principle that cannot be denied, denies then the legitimacy of dissent and conflict. What is there to fight about, if the truth has already been revealed? In a world of demonstrable first -foundationalism, however, embraces the contingenpolitical life, but, only as an authority that is potentially always under revision. Any particular articulation from consent is never wholly unobjectionable, since it is not ontologically or metaphysically guaranteed, and the claim from consent is itself an expression of power (though, -foundationalist perspective, unlike that 134  of ideal theory, power is at the center of political life not ontological or metaphysical first principles.26 One may always object to such abstract thinking along the following lines: how, exactly, can one claim there are no foundations without having to admit that this statement of l claim? Is this not a contradiction? For the anti-For the post-foundationalist, too, is there not a foundational claim about the contingency and flux of the worlives? For the anti-foundationalists, these criticisms may be aptand, these are criticisms levelled against anti-foundationalists by both the ideal theorists and post-foundationalists alike. My focus is not on anti-foundationalism, but post-foundationalism, so I will leave these criticisms sitting for the anti-foundationalist. For the post-foundationalist, these criticisms start with the presumption that to deny the foundations in the political world is equivalent to denying them in entirely. The post-reality does not existneed not be central to the claim of the political. The flux of political life is guaranteed by the nature of political life almost descriptively speaking: conflict and the possibility of conflict are our reality. But, perhaps, further, the claim the post-foundationalist makes ino direct correspondence between those and the social world: truth and reality in the social world are constructed through language, not the things themselves. The way we talk about thingsthe words themselvesguaranteed. Again, to be clear, the post-foundationalist simply needs to say that, strictly speaking, 135  conflict and its potentiality are facts of our lives, and these will always push against the direct social and political lives.   The post foundationalist perspective, then, does not necessarily deny the possibility of a foundationsthe line that ideal theory demands be more than contingent. The foundation in social and political life, according to the post-foundationalist, is consensus or consent. Remember this is precisely the foundation that is ultimately denied by ideal theory liberalism, since it seeks a foundation that is more than contingent, but inevitable. Power in politics is denied also by the ideal theorist. From the post-foundationalist perspective, denying political power is not to negate it but to hide its influence. Once unmasked, politics becomes less the inevitable outcome of our natural or rational selves, but an expression of power or interest. Political power always sets itself up as foundationalpressions are common refrains, and they present political power as precisely not power, principle. Power has the natural tendency to present itself apoliticallyas something uncontestable. Contestation, then, is important not merely for reforming the political spacepresent a competing set of interpretationsbut is the precondition for the emergence of the political space itself. If contestation is denied, it is because power has been equated with an either as a first moral principle or the command of a leader. -contemporary liberal theory are Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Together, the two wrote an immensely important work on radical democracyHegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a 136  Radical Democratic Politics, originally published in 1985that has influenced many later continental political theorists.27 This original strand of work drew from post- or neo-Marxist ideas, dynamics of the Cold War (1985, viii). Their argument, put simply, was to focus on the which is to render it contingent, instead of taking the categories and relations of power (as Marxists so often did with economic concepts of class) as fixed (1985, x).  of discourse in analyzing politics, which had been already occurring in other intellectual circles: This is the point at which, for our analysis, a notion of the social conceived as a discursive spacethat is, making possible relations of representation strictly unthinkable within a physicalist or naturalistic paradigmbecomes of paramount importance. In other works, we have shown that intellectual currents of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy, phenomenology, and structuralism. In these three the century started with an illusion of immediacy, of a non-discursively mediated access to the things themselvesthe referent, the phenomenon of the sign, respectively. In all three, however, this illusion of immediacy dissolved at some point, and had to be replaced by one form or another of discursive mediation. (1985, xi).  For Mouffe and Laclau, they inaugurated the post-foundationalist perspective in contemporary  discuss these concepts and the implications of these concepts below in more detail. I want to stress here, only that the post-work, and that this is intimately tied to many of the strands of anti-foundationalist thinking, though  137  In this early work on hegemony and radical democracy, there is no reference to Carl Schmitt. Instead, the influence of Carl Schmitt was felt much later, as Mouffe and Laclau (but tant in the era of the Cold War, but it took on a particular need after the fall of the Soviet Union. It should not be surprising, then, to find that -democracy was picked up in post-1992: The Return of the Political (1993), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (1996), The Democratic Paradox (2000), On the Political (2005), and Agonistics (2013).28 Given their pressing concern for hegemonic power, they follow Schmitt in his diagnosis of liberal-democracy is essentially a contradiction in terms, Mouffe says in her influential The Democratic Paradox,  A central argument in this book is that it is vital for democratic politics to understand that liberal democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible in the last instance and that there is no way in which they could be perfectly reconciled. (2000, 5)   At the heart of liberal-democracy is a contradiction: a logic of liberalism which excludes the logic of democracy, and a logic of democracy that excludes the logic of liberalism. If liberalism and name of one or the other. This conceptual understanding of the contradiction between the two logics, which I will discuss in more detail below, is not benign to everyday political life, according to Mouffe. Contemporary politics aims at the one thing denied: consensus between the two warring logics of liberal-democracy. When politicians and the public understand the goal of politics to be a perfect reconciliation, frustration and disappointment are necessarily outcomes. In the popular political psyche, the goal of liberal-democracy is not only peace, but also quiet: political antagonisms 138  between individuals and groups are not to be tolerated. For Mouffe, this consensual view of liberal-democracy necessarily entails that political strife is not only a sign of an unhealthy politics, but, in fact, eradicating antagonisms is what it means to make liberal-democracy healthy. For Mouffe, we must recognize that liberal-democracy requires a certain level of contestation between the two logics of liberalism and democracy, and that this must distinctly political space must always be left open. If that space is closed, as we will see, then the political contestation takes on a particularly moral or economic character, which actually threatens the whole of liberal-democracy as a regime. For Mouffe, liberal-determines who is to rule, the rights and duties of the citizens and the governors. Rather than relationships of citizen or subject and governor or magistrate are construed. That is to say, what we should examine is the way that we tell the story of the relationship between governed and governor. In this way, the liberal-or ways of seeing and articulating the relationship between citizens and other citizens, and citizens and governors. On the one hand, liberalism articulates the order in terms of the rule of law, humanity, and the separation of power; on the other hand, democracy articulates the symbolic political order in terms of popular sovereigntyunderstood here as a particular articulation of an liberalism pushes against democracy since it demands that the difference at the heart of a 139  needs to be eradicated. Public life on this liberal view is, then, a discourse or logic of essential similarityhumanitythat aims at consensus, and therefore, all disagreement is considered o be a direct correspondence between perception or idea and the thing-itself. In other words, there is an ability to ground the consensus, to uncover the essential unifying feature of all humanity, to dissolve all particular difference as merely accidentalperspective, liberalism understood in this way denies the very thing that it first assumed: real pluralism. In denying this pluralism, it actually moves from liberalism to absolutism. This is why  Following Schmitt, Mouffe holds that democracy and liberalism are two contradictory fundamental equality between ruler and ruled. But, this homogeneity is drawn from an is constituted, then, politically and this is to say that it is a defined by an identity that has a hard distinction but seeks to overcome the political identification altogether. Humanity has no contrast class. insofar as they are individuals and share in a shared rationality, and not due to their particular memberships in various communities (2000, 39). From this perspective, Rawls is clearly a  140  Democracy is inherently political, since politics entails distinctions between peoples and groups (Mouffe 2000, 18). Humanity and liberalism soften these distinctions. Citizenship is a primary concern for democrats precisely because of the concern for the political distinction between us/them (ibid, 36-37). Democracy is ultimately tied to popular sovereigntythe will of the people, or citizensand this can only be drawn from actual political distinctions (ibid. 38-39). Liberalism and humanity then resist these notions of citizenship derived from the political, arguing that the rights and obligations we have are primarily the product of some more universaland therefore apoliticalnotion (ibid, 49-53).  From this brief analysis, we can see what Mouffe is here driving at: the war between the two logics of liberal-democracy is familiarly told as the tension between liberalism and its focus on institutions, against the messier and rambunctious populism that seeks to overturn or overstep them, of populism and democracy are all directly opposed to populist demands, and indeed is constructed in order to frustrate or at least temper the episodic and fickle will of the democratic legitimacy of these liberal-democratic institutions themselves rest on some non-trivial concession to popular sovereigntyan expression of the people. Indeed, the ground of the liberal institutionalism is none other than the very populism it seeks to constrain or tame. For Mouffe, with this, we have arrived at a clear view of the paradox at the center of liberal-democracy: an apolitical liberal logic of inclusion, and the political democratic logic of exclusion. The resolution of the liberal-democratic paradox, however, often looks like an attempt to further disenfranchise and alienate the peopleto set up a liberal institutionalism on some other ground than consent of the democratic people. For Mouffe, this is exactly what Rawls has tried to 141  do (2000, 17-35). The basis of political liberalism is no longer the contingent assent of the people, but the universal truth of the principles of justice derived from the rational faculties of an abstract mind. This liberal resolution to the paradox between liberalism and democracy can only prove to further alienate dissent, which spurs potentially more raresolution of the paradox, Mouffe notes, is the one Schmitt himself chooses: give up liberal constitutionalism and let popular sovereignty reign. Of course, shorn of the liberal constitutional prejudices against centralized power, the full democratic position would have to admit that majority rule may be replaced by a set of those with the knowledge of the popular will. The numerical majority could be replaced by the qualitative minority. Let us remember how Rawls set out in his Political Liberalism: to build a liberalism from tof antagonism and to aim at a universal rational consensus(2000, 22). We can see clearly that eradicating the political and establishing a universal one supposedly guaranteed through intricate procedural and institutional mechanismsis more than an attempt to arrive at peace and security. The Rawlsian liberal project seeks to secure peace and stability through making politics in moral discourseto make reasonable and unreasonable both the basis of political rights one of 142  moral capacityontological commitmentitself unarguedis it possible that Rawls can feel confident in his direct access to the thing in itself, an understanding of political truths that is not influenced by the simply suggests that individuals have failed to grasp the truths of liberal justice. Mouffe is not persuaded by this argument, nor does she feel any one else not already committed to liberalism among reasonable persons who, by definition, are persons who accept the principles of political Where there is no dissent, there is no antagonism, and with no antagonism there is no distinctly political groundjust repeated the apolitical liberalism that left liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic without any defenses, and without any allies discord of almost any kind is legitimate if and only if it exists in the private sphere, but all discord or dissent in public life is generally illegitimate because it is destabilizing. I outlined some of this down into the private sphereof what particular rational plan for the good life one wants to maximizethereby eliminaview, to establish in the public sphere a type of consensus grounded on Reason (with its two sides: the rational and the reasonable). This is a consensus that it would be illegitimate to put into question once it has been reached, and the only possibility of destabilization would be from an attack from 143  the outside by unreasonable forceindividual idiosyncratic factors that disrupt seemingly reasonable and rational calculations. a truth that is universal, atemporal, and capable of certain knowledge by anyone with the proper moral and there are knowable certainties about political morals. -ordered society is a society from which basis of political justice, all constitutive deliberation and all legitimacy to dissent have been -democratic principles, but while defending different interpretations of what liberty and equality The flux of interpretations within the private sphere about public life, the real antagonisms present even in political society, is denied any real standing. For Rawls, according to Mouffe, liberal justice is so thickly tied to the moral that politics is replaced with administration. The moral element produces an all-or-nothing logic that itself closes all connection to the political and say that Rawls is able to save liberalism at the expense of jettisoning all aspects of democracy. Rawls, too, thinks liberal-democracy is a contradiction in terms. 144  As we saw, the problem today is that Rawlsian liberalism has become predominant, and -democratic paradox by pulling the liberal thread is pervasive. This is dangerous, and it must be resisted. It is here that Mouffe presents  It is a mistake, Mouffe argues, to try to resolve the paradox of liberal democracy at all. Though Mouffe is certainly a Schmittian, she ultimately rejects his radical democratic conclusion. Instead of resolving the conflict, Mouffe argues that the truly political solution to the paradox is seen as a locus of a tension that instills a very important dynamic, which is constitutive of the specificity of liberal democracy as a contradictory logics at the heart of liberal-this contradiction demands either a liberal or democratic resolution. Mouffe reasons that, if held in a constitutive tension, democracy and liberalism provide what each other lacks and what the other denies. Democracy provides the logic of substantive inclusion, while liberalism provides a way to soften the corresponding substantive exclusion.  Contrary to other projects of radical or participatory democracy informed by a rationalistic framework, radical and plural democracy rejects the very possibility of a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument where a non-coercive consensus is a conceptual impossibility, it does not put in jeopardy the democratic ideal, as some would argue. On the contrary, it protects pluralist democracy against any attempts at closure. Indeed, such a rejection constitutes an important guarantee that the dynamics of the democratic process will be kept alive. Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires us to bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation. (2000, 33)  The result is certainly messy, but it is not incoherent nor is it impossible. What is incoherent and dangerous is trying to pull either thread to resolve the tension one way or the other. The desire to resolve the tension, then, is the true problem facing liberal democracy today, which Mouffe argues 145  is simply the view that we cannot live in a conflictual, messy, or adversarial environmentthat politics is not fit for us.  For Mouffe, we must begin from the ontology of flux, which is simply the forceful recognition tin tenants of this kind of which entail that things could not be otherwise (2013, 3). This is an ontological presupposition. eral rationalism is that it deploys a logic of the social based on an of mainstream Mouffe, both strands either view individuals as merely utility maximizers (aggregative) or as s politics economics, while the latter makes it a matter of morality. Both must be rejected as insufficiently aware of the affective, populist necessities of properly maintaining the balance between democracy and liberalism.  itique of liberalism must be carefully defined and traced. She certainly denies the theoretical and conceptual grounding of contemporary liberalism, radical democratas are both Manent and Schmitt. But, her radical critique should not be overblown: she is actually setting out to defend liberal--democratic institutions should not be taken for granted: it is always necessary to fortify and defend as suchthe logic of humanity, individualism, and the rule 146  of lawshould be dismissed. Instead, what should be denied is a liberalism drawn from the shallow grounds of a defunct ontologyliberalism must be understood as a choice, a product of consent, and therefore of power, which makes it a radically contingent enterprise. Liberalism must always remember its political ground of flux: it could always be otherwise. By moving liberalism Mouffe is making liberalism self-reflective of its own grounds and revealing the path necessary to -absolutist way. Mouffe is also making clear that, in order to properly defend and fortify liberalism, we must first soberly recognize the ever-growing illiberal tendencies of the -7). The right wing authoritarianism of today is not a naturally occurring articulation of a primitive democratic or republican partisanship, but a peculiar consequence of the neutralization of politics caused by contemporary liberalism. Injecting democratic dissent, contestation or, as Mouffe calls it -of the constitutive liberal-the core of liberal-democracy, then, not to produce a radical democracy but to bolster the agonistic element within the tension between liberalism and democracy in order to save the liberal-democratic regime. Far from being a critic of liberal-democracy, Mouffe seeks to defend it. But, this means she must don the radical democratic critique. 147  Here we must shift gears. Mouffe does rely on a more nuanced view of democracy that is not simply an unbridled crowd. For this, we turn to the work she wrote with Ernesto LaclauHegemony and Socialist StrategyOn Populist Reason.29 As we have seen, -Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was to engage with the paradox of liberal democracy, and to articulate and defend it on the same political grounds that Schmitt attempted to dismantle it (and that Rawls failed to adequately address). While Mouffe was doing this, Laclau was focusing on the inner workings of a hegemonic or discursive politicswhat he the emergence of the counter-30 In the following section, I will briand the counter-hegemonic power. Put simply, we can see a bit better the division of labor between Mouffe and Laclau: Mouffe set out to talk about the particular regime of liberal democracy, while Laclau is talking about the general on hegemony and populism, we will have the conceptual tools necessary to truly understand  as not an alternative to liberal-democracy, but the needed democratic (or populist) correction to an absolutist liberalism, securing the liberal-democratic regime itself. For Laclau, the problem defining populism is a function of the perspective of rational pathological dissatisfaction. But, this is just to suggest thatcontrary to the view of it being without substanceit is in fact the empirical ground of wapprehensible in political action from its dichotomous opposite: a populism concerned as irrational 148  and undefinamake it unfit for being a characteristic of populism but, instead, a characteristic of reason. To put it another way, as we will see below, Laclau is leaning on the view that language is a series of words that themselves only have meaning in contrast to other words and concepts. Therefore, if this will always confirm that populism is literally synonymous with the irrational, abnormal, or madness.   This entails understanding where the rational perspective went wrong. For Laclau, the rationalist perspective went wrong in misunderstanding the nature of the political world, or, as we have come to understand it, rational theory started from faulty ontological assumptions. For Laclau, we must restart our investigation of populism from a proper understanding of political life as that of flux. But, this changes, then, the nature or priority of populism and its oppositeliberalism: That is: instead of precise institutional determination, we should start asking ourselves a different and more basic quence of social reality itself than a clumsy political and ideological operation, a performative act endowed with a rationality of its ownthat is to say, in some situations, vagueness is a precondition to constructing relevant political meanings? (2007, 17-18)   For Laclau, once we understand the political world as a realm of flux, then the priority of populism emerges. Instead of a perspective of tight concepts, perhaps legal and institutional, political life emerges vague, blurry, and undetermined. Therefore, the logic or rationality of populism is 149  coherent otherwise independent and incoherent parts. It is from the social, understood as vague or in flux, that politics emergesnot top-down from a perspective outside of our lived experiences. The performative aspect of populism is a direct consequence of the concand the nature of language. For Laclau, there is no direct correspondence between signified and signifierbetween the word and the image (2007, 22). The long tradition in psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of language has come to the recognition that there is no direct relationship between the words we have and use and the supposed reality or things they are meant s the ever expanding arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and braham Lincoln, we can suggest that there is a tight correspondence between the name and the man who lived. We could, on this descriptivist account, seemingly come up with the cluster of descriptions that properly delimit where Abraham Lincoln begins and where it ends.   The intuition that our words have clear descriptionsthat there is a tight correspondence between the words and the things that they refer tois incorrect. As soon as we sit down to mark out definitive boundaries of a given word, we are imm-their shared descriptive featuresthe descriptivists are doing is to establish a fixed correlation between signifier and signified; while 150  the anti-descriptivist approach involves emancipating the signifier from any enthrallment to the  Laclau is an anti-descriptivist. The relationship between the words we use and the things to which they refer are notoriously blurrybut this does not make words and speech meaningless. In fact, for Laclau, when we talk about the ontology of flux or post foundationalism, what we are ultimately referring to is precisely the fact that naming or anti-h would necessarily be permanent) from a series of images connotatively associated with it, for the associative networks are an integral part see now why populism takes on such an elevated position: it is the articulation or performative act of naming otherwise unconnected things into a signifier.  Any productive role of populism is often denied by the rational theory perspective. Here, populism is irrational cwhere some sort of animalistic regression to the mean intellect occurss rationality, at worst it completely annihilates it. But, this view of populism-as-irrational-crowd rests on what we have already denied At this point in the argument, it should be clear that the whole discourse of crowd behavior had come to depend so much on drawing a clear line of demarcation between the normal and the pathological that it was in an increasingly ancillary position vis-à-vis medical scienceespecially  151    From the perspective of Laclau, that Rawls ultimately psycho-pathologizes dissent is unsurprisingit was expected. It is expected because the whole liberal rationalism rests on a claim s is granted, the medicalization or psychologizing of dissent is inevitable. But, again, this is due  Let us now continue bringing the philosophy of language into political theory. As we have seen, the common understanding of language is that it is a set of words that have no intrinsic or fixed meaning, and therefore the meaning is often relational: a discourse is what establishes the identities of concepts and names through their negative relations (2007, 68-69). Or, following something is what it is only differencethe identity of a thing is always made up of what it is not or what it negates. We have always constitutive of each identity as the antagonists. However, we must be aware of a particular anchors the whole. As we saw in the beginning, the uniquely post-foundationalist perspective is keenly aware that first, actual foundations are forever elusive, but, secondly, all political societies assert as a matter of practice a center. The foundationalist thinkers say that there is definitively an anchor that positively connects the signs or signifiers with the signifiedthat our words are directly correlated with the things themselves. But, even insofar as our political world is calls it (2000).31 The center will always itself have a difference that it constitutes itself against 152  (Laclau 2007, 70). This articulation of the political center is itself, however, contingent though authoritative. Indeed, its articulation is precisely an act of authority or performative power: it is the foundational act of constituting the network of signs as relevant. For Laclau (and Mouffe) this  Where there is a hegemon, there must be an excluded identity. This is the set of identities or relations that are not brought under the hegemonic relations. For Laclau, the counter-hegemonic nd that eventually becomes a claim of recognition (ibid.). The claim of recognition is to be included or to reform the hegemonic power relations such that inclusion is possible. The identity of the counter-identities as each particular claim or demand is generalized and universalized from the particular claim of any one individual or identity to a several and eventually a bloc. Here we can point to the refer? Ultimately, it refers to the equivalent identities that have been subsumed under it, all united illustrative example. For Laclau (and Mouffe) the fate of liberal democracy rests on recognizing  itical power 153  holds it under the principle that it is giving voice to the whole It is in this realistic perspective that politics emerges as a series of power relations that all compete for a hegemonic prioritywhich alwarecognize the political foundations of political life, but we also recognize the ontology of flux that underwrites the whole enterprise. This is seen most clearly in the power of naming within a language understood as a set of differential identities that require a performative articulation to center them. Naming is that powerperhaps the political power. Finally, the most important thing contemporary liberal theorisposition of an obedient passenger on a ship, Laclau and Mouffe make it clear that dissent and contestation are necessary for the survival of liberal democracy. Self-government and activitymaking claims and demands, constructing identitiesare the ingredients for a healthy liberal-democracy. critique of liberalism. decision, takes on a hegemonic formbetween identities, and who is included within which identity. For example, what counts as reasonable or unreasonable, and who is capable of carrying one or the other identity. This is a debate about the relationships between us that define usbetween master/slave, parent/child, and 154  magistrate/subject. The hegemonic nature of political power is inevitable in any political society. Foundational claimsthe existence of a hegemonare unavoidable. But, this does not mean that it ought not be resisted, nor that it should operate as if it is not a contingent articulation. For the post-foundationalist, there must always be contention and contest to keep open the view of power as contingent, as premised on consent, as non-foundational, all things that power itself seeks to cover over and negate. The defining feature of post-itical field in the post-foundationalist perspective, then, is populated on the one hand by the hegemon that, as the articulation of the distinctions and boundaries of identitiesand therefore the rights, obligations, and duties of various personsis contingent but strives to negate that fact; and, on the other hand, a counter-hegemonic articulation. The counter-hegemonic power will, as I show in the next chapter, be the demos, and something that is itself contingent-which conflates it with the more partisan demos. I will here not differentiate the two, as I will do so only in the next chapter, so I will refer to the people and democracy interchangeably, until noted otherwise. The act of decisionthe hegemonic articulationis always necessary in political life, but it pushes against the openness of democracy, ending the debate of conflicting interpretations. The people are not constituted by a social contract in the most literal sensesince this would entail foundationalism. Instead, the people itself is a continually shifting entity, often unmolded and 155  inoperative in everyday political life. Therefore, any articulation of the people will always be itself contingent and explicitly in opposition to the hegemonic articulation. The nature of the liberal  -foundational political theory. As we have said, post--critique of liberalism. Agonistic democracy is counterhegemonic force constitutive relationship that must never attempt a reconciliation or a final solutioneither in the name of the hegemon or in the people. Violence is therefore always possible, since reconciliation or final articulations are seen as inevitable or desired. For example, the liberal hegemonic view of a universal consensus meant to specifically curtail the democratic element (which is its natural enemy) must participate in violence as it approaches absolutism. It must police the moral consensus, and this means eradicating disdemocratic impulse to unify and exclude as a community against the liberal machinery of discussion and compromisean all-can only succeed through violence: it must exterminate the notion of a liberal humanity, leaving only the crystalized notion of us versus thema tyranny of the community over both the individual and other communities. The threat of tyranny or absolutism is always a possibility, and agonistic democracy strives to keep both poles within a manageable orbit.   156  CONCLUSION   distrust and a politics of trust, seems to be an inescapable one: either we posit the basis of our politics on individuals who are distrustful individuals and then accept the liberal absolutism that follows, or we believe there to be a fundamental teleological trust community and accept politics e are not idle positions, either: they are still being presented as viable alternatives todaybut under the guise of defending liberal democracy.  Rawls sets out to defend liberal democracy, but falls almost completely into a Hobbesian liberal absolutismhe presents the political relationship as that between a passenger on a ship and the more expert captain. There is no self-having to essentially forfeit ourselves to the overlapping consensuswhich is the nonnegotiable (Second Treatise 169-174). And, if it is force, then why would the individual subject agree to the sovereign in the first place? Rawls can only seemingly suggest that the alternative is a state of flux, uncertainty, and potential dangera state of nature. But, even this view of the state of nature would be insufficient: it would have to be the Hobbesian state of war, and we would have to be so radically distrustful that any security is better than nothing. Manent sets out to defend liberal democracy (or at least just liberalism), but falls into a radical democratic perspective of a wholly encompassing (teleological) community. Manent repeats the view that essentially we are not born Manent is drawn not based on individuals or consentwhich he roundly deniesbut that of 157  ly point out that Manent has conflated the political with the   Both Rawls and Manent failed to save liberal democracy. In large part, their failure is due to their ontologous sections, I have tried to emphasize the aspects of their work that do really seem to align with liberalism (perhaps over democracy). The main point is not to show their commitment to liberal democracywhich is seemingly explicit at times, and will be the subject of the next chapterbut how the successful -liberalism -foundationalist agonistic  important since his classical liberalism is, as I argued in the previous chapter, a politics of trust, -foundationalists have presented it. This is the argument of the next chapter.      158     1 est of the dissertation) that properly speaking, liberalism does not rest on distrust but suspicion, and that trust should not be confused with basic trust or reliance. picion or suspiciousness, and trust and basic trust/reliance, synonymously throughout this chapter. Of course, where it is important for my argument to differentiate suspicion from distrust, I will mark it out explicitly.  2 Concept of the Political will be abbreviated in in-text citations as simply (CP) followed by Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy will be abbreviated in in-text citations as simply (CPD) followed by a page number. References A Theory of Justice will be abbreviated in in-Political Liberalism will be abbreviated in in-text citations as (PL) followed by page number. Finally, citaDemocracy Without Nations will be abbreviated in in-text citations as (DWN) followed by page number. The editions for the texts can be found in the bibliography. 3 Schmitt and Hobbes. Schmitt makes constant reference to Hobbes in all of his works, but Hobbes is the center of The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol.  Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Political Theory 22:4 (1994), 619-652; and John P. McCormick, Against Politics as Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1999). 4 the Hobbesian of the 20th MARS/Social Though & Research, 20:1-2, (1997), 5-28. 5 It is in this statement that Leo Strauss would try to show how Schmitt, rather than trying to transcend liberalism,  6 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, edited with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1994. 7 Liberalism, chapter 5. 8 direct gift or an irreversible grant, and which license the ruler to override all human laws in what he believes to be d Humanitas 9:1 (1996), 6-34.  9 Leviathan, chapter 13.  10 See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 11 Ethics 113:2 (2003), 367-390. 12 too long to list. However, I suggest Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals & Communitarians: Second Edition, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), and Chandran Kukathas and Phillip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics. Stanford: Stanford University Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1989; and Ronald Beiner Liberalism? University of California Press, 1995.  13 Mulhall and Adam SThe Cambridge Companion to Rawl edited by Samuel Freeman, Cambrdige: Cambrdige University Press 2003) point out, Rawls himself eventually concedes that his conception of the self needs to be revised. On the one hand, the hypothetical position of taking a step back cannot guarantee that we should see moral intuitions that are not immediately those of our communityand to deny this would have to be giving priority to something other than the phenomenology of our everyday lives. On the other                                                  159                                                                                                                                                               hand, Rawls must admit too that the ends for which we move are inextricably bound up in social life. We are not  14 I will turn to this in detail in the following chapter. 15 Political Theory 36:2 (2008), 239-271. 16 I will discuss below the work of Chantal Mouffe, which forcefully makes this point. However, see: Roberto The Journal of Politics 58:1 (1996), 1-24. 17 A Theory of Justice and his Political Liberalism, see: Brian  Ethics 104:4 (1995), 874-915; and Alexander Kaufman, The Journal of Politics 71:2 (2009), 533-543. The preoccupation Rawls had with the question of stability is not confined to his later Political Liberalism, but was at the center of his original theory in A Theory of Justice. 18 Ethics 92:1 (1981), 57-creates a contradiction with his thoroughgoing equality. -The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, edited by Steven Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. For Lovett, Rawls is at the end of the liberal neutrality principle which, coupled with the principle of non-interference, has greatly diminished any value to the principle of self-government, opting instead for a more institutionalist perspective that can provide the mechanisms and objectivity necessary to stay true to non-interference and neutrality. As I will show in the next chapter, liberalism need not jettison the principle of self-government (which does imply, however, diminishing the importance of institutionalism and the rule of law).   19 I return to and expand on this point in the next chapter. 20 See Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (1996).  21 The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 401-422. 22 ique of Liberalism, Part 3. There McCormick rightly argues that Schmitt never was able to fully transcend the Weberian categories of modernitythe bureaucratic harismatic tribalism. from a hyper-Leviathan), or it is guaranteed by the march of democratic spirit, which is just the resurgence of a distinctly neglected or repressed irrational tendency of peoples coming to conscious self-real challenges to our understanding of liberal democracy anyway.  23 On these two pointst that Manent is a neo-Matter with Liberalism?, chapter 2. 24 One would wonder how far this is from the more democratic-republicanism of Rousseau and other radicals. On the distinction between liberals, republicans, and democrats (and the various derivatives, see Kautz, Liberalism and Community, 111-An Intellectual History of Liberalism.  25 On Heidegger, see his Being and Time, edited and translated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of Martin Heidegger: Basic Writing edited by David Heidegger and the Tradition. Heidegger and Modern Philosophy edited by Michael Murray, New Haven: Yale University -foundationalism more generally, see his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; and his Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989; and his Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books 1999. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005; and --Political Horizon of The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. 160                                                                                                                                                               clearly against foundational metaphysicsand, largely, this is due to a shTwilight of the Idols). See: Nietzsche, Friedrich The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kauffman, New York: Penguin Books, 1985.  26 From the post-foundationalist perspective, while political life is ultimately about power via consent, this does not change the fact that there may indeed be ontological truths. On the one hand, one could say that this is simply an agnostic or skeptical position brought from private life to public life. In this way, it would suggest that the post-foundationalist position is itself contingent. Though I deal with a version of this point above, this does suggest a certain sense in whichregardless of the possible claim of logical contradictionpolitical life must take on a more detail. On the other hand, one could say that this proves only that the battlefield is open for interpretation, and, therefore, in the post-foundationalist view, politics is precisely about interpretations of potential first principles duking it out, though potentially never ultimately winning. This entails that, far from denying the importance of first principles and the political interpretations of these principles, the post-foundationalist recognizes that it is precisely the irreconcilable difference between competing interpretations that constitutes politics. As I show below, the need of politicsagainst partisans of the left and the right. It is the political character of liberalism that the post-foundationalist perspective shows us as missing in the ideal theory versions written about in the numerous Rawlsian circles. 27 Mouffe, Chantal and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York: Verso Books, 1985. 28 Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. New York: Verso Books, 1995. Mouffe, Chantal. Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. New York: Verso Books, 1999. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso Books, 2000. Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. New York: Routledge, 2005. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics. number. 29 Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso Books, 2007. Laclau has expanded on his work on the The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. New York: Verso Books, 2014.  30 understand that antagonism has two modes: logical contradiction (A and not-(2014, 102-103). For Laclau (and, presumably for Mouffe, too) the foundational metaphysics of contemporary liberalism ultimately understands antagonism (to the extent it does at all) as a form of logical contradictionwhich pluralism: our pluralism can be understood as a failure to accurately perceive our always already liberal principles onism of A and B, since expressions of metaphysical deductions but power (cf. Mouffe 2005, 18-26). For Laclau, and his turn to populism, is to try to understand what it could possibly mean (and how it could possibly come about) that we have an antagonism between A and B that does not simply repeat the dialectical opposition of A and not-A (2014, 139-179). 31 Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. New York: Verso 2000.   161  CHAPTER 3: BUSIE HEAD LIBERALISM   The following chapter is comprised of two parts. In the first part I outline the importance a mix of empiricism and nominalismis thoroughly for contestation and populism from post-foundationalist, I explore if classical liberalismdrawn thought not only can accommodate these, but actually relies upon them, and even provides us with a name for the parti-ogative powers, central to Lockean liberal constitutionalism (Chapter 4), and, finally, provides a primer for understanding  JOHN LOCKE AND THE ONTOLOGY OF FLUX   Human beings often want to know the truth.1 many ages since; and it being that which all mankind either do, or pretend to search after, it cannot but be worth our while to examine wherein it consists, and so acquaint ourselves with the nature of it, as that seeks the truthor at least pretend to do so. If we start here, our intuitions about the truth tell us something else about the character of truth, which helps us guide our search by helping us figure out what it is we are even looking for in our inquiry into the truth. In particular, we often assume 162  accessible to usto our understanding, even if it requires some severe level of cultivation of the mind on our part. We assume that, armed with this unchanging, yet accessible truth that we can properly ground our understandingsthat only then can we really begin to understand or have real knowledge.2 In other words, we assume that understanding begins and ends with the truth, understood as something solid, certain, and unchanging and it is on this firm ground of the truth itional understanding of what knowledge means, and, while it has a certain commonsense appeal, it will eventually be rejected by Locke. proposition or belief is needed to secure the connection between our particular belief system and 3 There have been many types of foundationalismsnature, historical spirit, and revelation immediately come to mindthat all promise to be the cornerstone of our belief systems that guarantees that we have something more than mere opinion. Upon this firm foundation, we can build a solid web of propositions and beliefs about the world that are not subject for foundation: doubt everything until you come across something that cannot be doubtedfor Descartes, the famous cogito ergo sum conclusion, his method of radical skepticism and doubt in order to find some foundation has largely determined the methodology of modern epistemology. To resist a thoroughgoing skepticism of all things, one imagines that the only way out must be a ground that escapes all doubt, is available to us, not particsciencia instead of mere opinio, is a scholastic or classical metaphysical distinctionone that perhaps matches our commonsense or natural notions of truth.4 163   We should be surprised, tsearching for foundations.5 Locke is the first great British empiricist, and he is a nominalist, which, I will argue in this section, place him not in an anti-foundational camp, but in a post-foundational position. Locke does not have time for radical skepticism:  When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success: and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing anything; or, on the other side, question everything and disclaim all knowledge, because somethings are not to be undeOur business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. (Essay 1.1.6.)6  For Locke, he takes for granted that there are things that are knowable, and things that are not. This disqualifies him from the radical methodological skepticism of Descartes because he already aim is knowledge may be knowable to some lucky few, but the vast majority of people exist in a space that does not affirm or deny any particular foundationalism.7   Locke from the senses and everyday experiences and observations, which he claims that there is literally nform us right, concerning the existence of those objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded confidence: for I think nobody can, in earnest, be so skeptical, as to be uncertain of the existence of those things 1.3). For Locke, our senses and our experiences form the solid base from which we can move forward. We should be clear here on  how is shifting: he is not engagingand indeed immediately foreclosesany discussion about radical doubt of our sense. This is not because he has established that sense-experience is the foundation, 164  but that our everyday lives and therefore our conduct and existencethe things that actually concern usdemand no more than our senses. For Locke, our sensphilosophical or abstract notion of foundations to some other standard beyond the certainty that  faculties being suited not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple; but to the preservation of us, in whom they are; and accommodated to the use of life; they serve to our purpose well enough, if they will but give us certain notice of those things, which are convenient or inconvenient Essay 4. 11.8) Locke begins with sense experience not because it is true (understood as the conclusion of a Cartesian radical skepticism) but because it will serve us well moving forward. not long have to be (Education section 94).   connection does not approach the kind of philosophical certainty that we have come to expect. that he denies as a matter of course the existence of a direct connection between our ideas and the worldand empiricism provide a coherent way to understand the ontology of flux that he sees as constituting the things that matter to usincluding our social and political lives. His empiricism and nominalism also help reveal the particular need for consent and trust, which, if not for the ontology of flux, would be generally meaningless or redundant. The ontology of flux is -liberalism much closer to one another than would first appear. Indeed, it is through this post-165  foundationalism that both contemporary critics of liberalism and the classical liberalism derived of liberal democracy.  metaof what to the opening arguments of this section. It was assumed that human beings are largely directed toward some aspect of the truth, which we saw brought with it a slew of other assumptions about other words, we assume that the truth is unchanging, universal, or certain. This is already to be really there, or, what is it really? The truthis ticular. (namely, that we exist in a world where things that are abstract universals exist [and are knowable]). The commonsense view we outlined above also carried a further assumption: something is true the more it approaches the abstract and the universali.e., the less it is particular the abstract and universal as opposed to the concrete and particular.8   Though this brief discussion of ontology may seem perhaps too technical and itself abstract, we should be aware that this does have practical, political consequence. Indeed, as I have made clear, this ontological ground is precisely where Schmitt levels his critique of liberal democracyabout what is there in the political world. For Schmitt, liberalism promotes a certain ontology and democracy another, and these are not compatible: liberalism promotes an ontology 166  where it promises that the abstract universal of the truth about politicsabout justicecan be completely known and applied; while, democracy, denies any ground outside of the particular will of the peoplea political identity (us/them) that denies precisely a world of meaningful abstract uncertainty, or antagonism.   Let us also not forget that Rawls sought to respond to Schmitt on this ontological ground of flux and antagonism. However, Rawls fails to do more than explicate a liberal system of justice that is predicated on the same abstract universalist ontological ground that Schmitt says is therewith democracy) if it is to remain coherent. Rawls, we will have to say, in deed and not in word agrees with Schmitt: liberalism and democracy are incompatible. Nor should we forget order to respond to the political ontological critique levelled by Schmitt, Manent accepts that liberalism and Manent to reconcile the contradiction between these antagonistic ontologies, he actually adopts the democratic perspective against liberalism. Manent valorizes the nation of the nation-state, and laments the loss of precisely a meaningful us/them relationship that pushes against the universal and absdefender of liberalism, but a radical democratagain, in deed though maybe not in word. The point is clear, in order to respond to the political critique of Schmitt, we must try to ground a  167   not be denied in the social and political world: Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state. Thus people, riches, trade, power, change their stations; flourishing cities come to ruin, and prove in time, neglected desolate corners, whilst unfrequented places grow into populous countries, filled with wealth and inhabitants. (Second Treatise 157)  For Locke, the world is in flux, which we will understand here as being in motionflux being derived from the Latin trade, power, richesand the immaterial conditions that grow up around themwhat Locke will call in that is in flux. On the simplest level, political and social life can only be groundedto the extent that it can beon a shifting terrain.   But, for Locke, flux is more than a trivial statement about the march of time in political life. On the one hand, political flux here extends deeper into the fabric of realitythere is no calm elevated position. For Locke, there is only always flux in political life, and to reach beyond that for something else is to be confused. This psychological confusion, however, is not itself of flux in our lives. On the other hand, flux extends deeper into the fabric of our own consciousness: Conduct 30). Here, Locke indicates that flux is internal, and something that cannot possibly be benign. The flux of our thought-life demands a certain recognition that there is no inevitable endno natural tendencyprovide them, or because they were covered over by faulty education. However, for Locke, the 168  fact of our psychological flux makes political flux and the general sense of confusion and disorder more and more a fact of what it means to be a human being in the world.  9 and draws from the flux in our consciousness that, without intervention (education or guidance), human beings are indeedlike their thoughts more generallyConduct 45). Not only human beings can either be a truly rational or perfectly beastly. Thus far can the busie mind of man carry him to a brutality below the level of beasts, when he quits reason, which places him almost equal to angels. Nor could it be otherwise in a creature, whose thoughts are more than the sands, and wider than the ocean, where fancy and passion must needs run him into strange courses, if reason, which is his only star and compass, be not that he steers by. First Treatise, 57  Though Locke here seemingly a distinction that I will discuss briefly below, but especially in chapter 5my point here is that Locke is very much aware that flux is a fundamental aspect of the human mind, and, therefore, the human condition. If flux exists in this world, it primarily exists within the human mind. Nor is this to say that flux is only a problem of the busie mind, or that the problem of the busie mind is not a political problem: the busie mind of man guarantees the political flux of pluralism and antagonism. For Locke, then, flux is the only ground we can safely build upon, 169  unless we want to deny a fundamental feature of the human condition ring to a state that holds central the flow or motion of the social and political world and is at the center of what it means to be a human being. For Lockeand as we shall see with contemporary political theoristsin all sorts of ways. In the material realm of time and history, where there is no discernable pattern to the rise and fall of cities and countries, to the fact of war and conflict among people, and the sense of accidents and general uncertainty of life. And, as we have seen above, in the immaterial domain, too, flux is ever-present. For Locke, our human consciousnessthe thing that will is itself a battleground of warring ideas. Flux is central to the busie minds of human beings. Not only, however, is it in our minds, but it is also in our languagewhich I will discuss below.   All of this is to show that Locke is keenly aware of the role of flux in the structure of reality. I will now turn to addressing more directly the question: how does of liberal democracy? This is an important question precisely because the ontological critique levelled by Schmitt denies the possibility of flux and liberal democracy. The ineradicable conflict between individuals necessarily leads to a political life of flux, which liberalism strives to suppress ow Locke and Schmitt agree: flux is central to political lifequestion, then, is how can Locke hope to build liberal democracy on this political ontology of flux?   170  Essay 4.20.4). We he held central that the notion that all of our ideasthe stuff of our understandinghappens through our senses and our experience. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; How come it be furnished? Whence comes it by the vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? When has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Essay 2.1.2  For Locke, the roots of our ideas are our experiences, observations, and senses.10 Locke is able to elevate the importancethe priority of experiencebecause he has radically deflated (and will Essay 1.4.25). Though I need not retrace this well-s: confusion over the role of socialization in the production of knowledge and our ideas (Essay 1.4.7-9).11  For Locke, then, the danger of innate ideas takes on a specifically political color: innate ideas are those ideas or propositions that are held up tabove and beyond rational examination (Essay 1.3.25). This is not something that guarantees their truth, but only their power as something that will be taken as an unexamined authority. For Locke socialization, that, upon reflection in adulthood, one does not know why one believes certain things -24).12 Though we may disagree with Locke on the basis that his view of experience and observation tell him thatseeing children grow up into adulthood 171  believing the things told to them as children are innate ideas do not, therefore, exist, we cannot deny the phenomenon as Locke describes it. In other words, perhaps Locke here has gone too far in his criticism, or extended the conclusion farther than his evidence will allow, but this is to diffeliberalism is that, even if there are abstract general ideas, they are not innate but hard fought in the choppy seas of the busie mind. The struggle, however, is part the limits of our reason and the dominating powers that try to overcompensate for these limits.  Essay 1.4.23. 24; 2.12.2; 2.22.9; 2.30.2; 3.3.10, 14; 3.6.11; 3.9.7; 4.6.3, 5, 9, 11). However, in principle available to us through experience and observation, nevertheless are mediated (and therefore potentially obfuscated) by our languageour words. This problem is at the center of Essay, as he announces in the epistle dedicatory of that work: I shall always have the satisfaction to have aimed sincerely at truth and usefulness, though in one of the meanest ways. The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters, as the great  Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain; it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree, that philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit, or uncapable to be brought into well-bred company, and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning, and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade, either those who speak, or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge.  Chief among the problems facing the development of the experimental science being developed by the members of the Royal Society is languagespecifically, the nature of words. To the 172  problem of language and the abuse of words, Locke devotes an entire book of the Essay, and, indeed, given this note to the reader, we would not be too far amiss to understand this book to be of the highest importance. To get clear our understanding, we must recognize the limits of our understanding, and one of the limits to even seeing the limit to our understanding is language itself.   The problem with language, Locke says, is simply that it makes us think that we know too much and, paradoxically, too little. It presents a false dichotomysimilar to the one of traditional ontology presented abovethat either we have knowledge of the real things themselves (which devalues the role of words altogether) or, if one says words are important in constituting knowledge, then it assumes that we cannot have knowledge of the things themselves at all. We oscillate between two extremesa naïve realism or rationalism, that assumes a direct correspondence between our ideas and the things themselves, or a radical skepticism that denies any knowledge or certainty because words are disconnected from the reality of the world. For Locke, the problem is that we either assume a direct correspondence or foundation between our ideas and the world, or we fall into a radical skepticism that doubts everything. The course is to navigate between these two extremes of assumed order and assumed chaos. But, this requires a thorough analysis of the relation of language or words to our (limits of) understanding. Locke is an empiricist, which means he begins with the premise that all knowledge is drawn particular and concrete (simple) ideas. This is what we would call Nominalism is the view that all there is are particular, concrete things, and that the categories and sorts of things into more general or abstract groups is not a reflection of the categories and sorts in the world, but a function of the mind. Nominalism, then, inverts the traditional ontological priority 173  particular, not the abstract or general. For Locke, the universal and abstract do not reveal Essay 3.3.1). Abstract and universal ideas or words are, then, the combination of some set of particulars, which makes them meaningful, but does not secure them as hav To return to general words, it is plain, by what has been said that General and Universal belong not to the real existence of things, but are inventions and creatures of the understanding, made for it by its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas. (Essay 3.3.11)  is general and abstractoften understood not to refer to any particular cat (that it provides a ke sense of the word, that the word has a meaning or a definition, that facilitates clear communication between speaker and audience. merely entailed in the definition alone. For example, one could imagine that, collecting all the cats in the universe, and cataloging them, we could, as Aristotle had tried to do, come to some general aspect that each particular cat more or less participates ina genus.13 Once we have this genus, we would assume is elevation of the general and abstract as more real than the concrete and particular that Locke denies.   no truths, no solid ground upon which to build our  174  (Essay 3.3.15-understand that the general word we name an object is a seemingly arbitrary connection between objects and their qualities (which we observe as simple sense experience).14 General words are the experiences) are not passively received through the senses. The qualities we assign to thingsthe are themselves functions of our understanding and suggest a Essay, ing insofar as it is connected to a web of other words and signs and significations, all of which we impose on the object to better communicate our ideas with others (Essay 3.3.18).15 ce it Judgment is central to our understanding, not as simply the product of a well-rounded understanding, but as the precondition for it. Judgment, however, well informed in the busie mind, a definition.  This does not mean that the words we use are necessarily unstable and therefore not solid understanding of language and the nature of words makes the world and our understandings capable of stability, provided that we consent to standing definitions of general words (Essay 3.2.8):  175  Words by long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connection between them. But that they signify fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be the signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does. And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word: which was as much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound should be a sign of, in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It is true, common use by a tacit consent appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly: and let me te the same ideas in the hearer, which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly.   In a story of the all-powerful Roman emperor Augustus, Locke makes clear that the words we use actually provides a limit, a stabilizing limit to power. The point Locke makes is captured nicely in thought reasonable that words, which ought to be conformed to things, should be so too; I mean in their signiEssay  Since the world is particular, it is therefore prone to fluxour words do not trace the things as they arebuAt the heart of flux, we can have stability, though on different ground. Stability is in words, not the world: That such abstract ideas with names to them as we have been speaking of, are essences, may further appear by what we are told concerning essences, viz. that they are ingenerable, and incorruptible. Which cannot be true of the real constitutions of things, which begin and perish with them. All things that exist, besides their Author, are all liable to change, especially those things we are acquainted with, and have ranked into bands, under distinct names, or ensigns. Thus that which was grass is tomorrow the flesh of a sheep, and within a few days after, becomes a part of a man: in all which, and the like changes, it is evident their real essence, i.e., that constitution, whereon the properties of these several things depended, is destroyed and perishes with them. But essences being taken for ideas, established in the mind, with names annexed to them, they are supposed to remain steadily the same, whatever mutations the particular substances are liable to.   176  If we are honest with ourselves, the world as we see it and feel it is inescapably one of fluxof motion. To say tor real essences of things, is simply too much for Locke to admit. Here, Locke makes clear the massive burden that one would have to shoulder to claim that we can have such knowledge.  names of thingsif properly established through consent (tacit or explicit) and historical useare more stable than any claim to the know the real constitution or the real essence of things. In fact, Locke goes even further and denies that even if we knew the real essences of things, this knowledge would only be of the particular. The only way out, Locke says, is to claim that your sense and experience do not ground your knowledge, which is to then claim some other standardperhaps revelationwhich, names of things, which are necessarily contingent on the definitions of words and names. But, for Locke, this does not cause instability but actually reinforces the stability and necessity for of language and seek to establish a foundational correspondence between the world and their own words (Essay 3.9.21). This is to set claim to knowledge and certainty (Essay 4.19). This, for Locke, is the product of an attempt to do away with the whole edifice of reason and sense-experience, the whole notion of community and inexpressiblerevelation. But, this is not the work of divine revelation but confusion (and perhaps helplessness). The search for certainty in as a constitutive mediaorld (Essay 3.9.21). Our words constitute 177  our understanding, and they are the ground of all claims to certain knowledgewhich, though it does not relate   to foundational metaphysics or formal ontology is an act of reversal, not necessarily a denial. He does allow for the occasional intuition of real essences by those that are particularly in tune. However, the general thrust of his empiricism and nominalism is to shift of innate ideas is premised on a thoroughgoing empiricism and nominalism, all of which point to the public declaration of wordsespecially abstract and general wordsas grounded on the studied (Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman), which would reveal something about the natural history of the words necessity and reason have sought fit to consecrate in our community (Essay 3.2.8; 3.3.3). Stability is not in our private judgments, but in our language, which is necessarily lodged in the community. For Locke, the core of our language is for the direction of communication with others, for the sake of our own wellbeing and theirs, and, while it provides a stable space upon which we can constrsubmerged in a web of relations that render us incapable of independent thinking (Essay 3.1.1). For Locke, while we necessarily find ourselves within an already constituted space of communal meaningsince our words are usually learned first, and then the ideas afterward (Essay 3.5.15)we nevertheless retain the power of judgment and naming by matter of course (3.6.44-51). For Locke, we are radically always individualsour sense-experience is the basis of our ideasbut, if we wish to be a part of a community, we adopt a way of speakingspecifically, the names of more general terms. This 178  does not mean, again, however, that reform or revision of these general terms are impossible, but only difficult since, as it happens, the community itself may not recognize that these ideas are not  reason, Locke is well aware that revising language is not so simple a matter of proposing a new definition. It has the potential impact of altering our way of life, of the implicit or hidden power structures that guide our understanding:  This is evidently the case of all children and young folk; and custom, a greater power than nature, seldom failing to make them worship for divine what she hath inured them to bow their minds, and submit their understandings to; it is no wonder that grown men, either perplexed in the necessary affairs of life, or hot in the pursuit of pleasures, should not seriously sit down to examine their own tenets; especially when one of their principles is, that principles ought not to be questioned. And had men leisure, parts, and will, who is there almost that dare shake the foundations of all his past thoughts and actions, and endure to bring upon himself the shame of having been a long time wholly in mistake and error? who is there hardy enough to contend with the reproach which is everywhere prepared for those who dare venture to dissent from the received opinions of their country or party? And where is the man to be found that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of whimsical, skeptical, or atheist, which he is sure to meet with, who does in the least scruple any of the common opinions? And he will be much more afraid to question those principles, when he shall think them, as most men do, the standards set up by God in his mind, to be the rule and touchstone of all other opinions. And what can hinder him from thinking them sacred, when he finds them the earliest of all his own thoughts, and the most reverenced by others?  because it punctures the very beliefs. This is to suggest that society (and therefore we) should always be based on some sort of foundationthings. For Locke, as we have seen, this is an impossibility. This is not a benign impossibility, either, since it produces two dangerous types of people: those that unreflectively submit to authority; and those who revolt against authority for wholly idioIf we live under the ontological regime of traditional metaphysics, we should be afraid of 179   because, without that certainty or reliability we have nothing. And, if we live under a political regime that does admit of iduals who are too afraid to resist, and those individuals who have rebelled absolutely? For Locke, it is precisely this ontological presumption that we can have some direct access to the truth that is destabilizing and dangerousnot his empiricism or nominalism (which, we can now understand as politically motivated).   or, the thingswe are left with an ontology of flux that demands both individualism and social trust. It is precisely because Locke inverts classical ontologyby making our certain knowledge at best of particularsthat trust emerges as the thing most needful for human beings. As I indicated before, trust has no place in a world without flux. Trust is also the core political concept of liberal passages about trust in the Essay as this will illuminate how Locke takes trust to be an active element of virtuous self-government, instead of the passive acceptance of or blind faith in authority.16 Insofar as one can say that the Second Treatise of Government places trust at the center of liberal democracy, one can say that in the Essay Concerning the Human Understanding Locke tries to marginalize it in our lives. The problem, of course, is that Locke recognizes the danger of the submissive, unreflective acceptance of an authoritative 180  claim or commandwhich he thinks is completely damaging both politically (as he says in the Second Treatise) and personally (which is the focus here in the Essay).  There is scarce any one so floating and superficial in his understanding, who hath not some reverenced propositions, which are to him the principles on which he bottoms his reasonings; and by which he judgeth of truth and falsehood, right and wrong: which some, wanting skill and leisure, and others the inclination, and some being taught, that they ought not to examine; there are few to be found who are not exposed by their ignorance, laziness, education, or precipitancy, to take them upon trust. Essay 1.3.24  Here Locke says that the vast majority of us are in a position where, upon self-examination, we hold a set of beliefs that, if pressed, we would have to admit are believed because of some other reason than our own due examination. In other words, for Locke, we all do in fact want some rudder by which we can steer our thoughts, but these positions and beliefs are frequently the which is to say, we accept based on trust. Locke is explicitly contrasting due-examination with basic trust, which we would have to consider one normatively better: it is better for us to have opinions examined than accepted on trust. This particular conclusion, while partially correct, will need to be carefully examined throughout the rest of the Essay.   We have seen that Locke is explicitly contrasting self-examination with trust: to self-examine our beliefs is to not accept them on trust. Locke now makes clear that trust, as he is  be adequate grounds for our beliefs.  The great difference that is to be found in the notions of mankind is from the different use they put their faculties to; whilst some (and those the most) taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of assent, by lazily enslaving their minds to the dictates and dominion of others in doctrines, which it is their duty carefully to examine, and not blindly, with an implicit faith, to swallow. 1.4.22  n faculties, and therefore must be rejected. Our faculties demand self-examinationreasoningand this is seemingly 181   So far, we have seen  view of trust and the even more intense command that we have a duty to resist and reject trust. For Locke, so far, we see that trust should be rejected like slavery should be rejected by a free people. Trust is enslavement, it seems. But, while there seems 17 ons that also lead to people being submissive and too trusting: This being once received, it eased the lazy from the pains of search, and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning all that was once styled innate. And it was of no small advantage to those who their followers upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them off from the use of their own reason and judgment, and put them on believing and taking them upon trust, without farther examination: in which posture of blind credulity, they might be more easily governed by, and made useful to, some sort of men, who had the skill and office to principle and guide them. Essay 1.4.24  Of course, there are always going to be people who perhaps do not want to know (which is part of t people trusting too quickly and inappropriately specifically, of domination of the leader (teacher) over the follower (student). The doctrine of innate ideas is particularly dangerous because it keeps the asymmetrical relationship between master/follower imply This clearly is an education systemwhatever its actual truth (which, of course Locke doubts)182  that is radically dangerous to the principle of self-government or self-examination, so important for Locke. The doctrine of innate ideaswhich is related to traditional metaphysicsis a some sort of men, who had the skconception of citizenship drawn from this perspective is precisely that of blind trust (what I have nnate ideas and its traditional metaphysics is the core corruption. We now can see clearly that trusta blind trust akin to faithis completely antithetical to the epistemic self-government that Locke demands. From these passages, we might come to the conclusion that we should be simply distrusting, self-interested doubters. Rational examination must entail the full exposure and critical review of all of our positions, no? We would need to expose all of our beliefs to radical doubt, in the hopes of finding something more certain that we he makes clear that even this radically skeptical ego is not possibleor, rather, not that it is not possible, but that the certainty sought after in the skeptical reduction is not attainable.   And if he be one who takes his opinions upon trust, how can we imagine that he should renounce those tenets which time and custom have so settled in his mind, that he thinks them self-evident, and of an unquestionable certainty; or which he takes to be impressions he has received from God himself, or from men sent by him? How can we expect, I say, that opinions thus settled should be given up to the arguments or authority of a stranger, or adversary? especially if there be any suspicion of interest or design, as there never fails to be, where men find themselves ill-treated? We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information; and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable, that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs. For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or lieving, without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves, than constrain others.  Essay 4.16.4  183  For Locke, we must be wary of trust being too uncritical, but we must also recognize that radical doubt does not get us certainty. What we have, then, in this passage is the mix of tolerance, moderation, reflective self-government, and social civility. All of these distinctly liberal notions arise not by eliminating or overcoming flux comes in when we recognize that, while blindly trusting in another is not enough, radical individual doubt does not get us certainty. We must, then, stop the search for certainty, and only thenwhen can we start down the road to the familiar liberal virtues.  To be clear: while it seems that trust means only blind trust or faith in the beginning of the Essay, which Locke rejects, trust becomes both more self-aware and needful by the end of the Essay. In other words, once we have eliminated the searchthe desirefor certain knowledge, we must necessarily do two things: trust others, but trust carefully. It would be a mistake to think soberly recognize we cannot have the certainty that we thought we needed, we have two choices: either we can quietly escape this newfound responsibility and freedom, and fall into a blind, lazy or assent (though not uncritically). The space between blind trust and radical doubt or distrust is  Modus Vivendi Liberalism 184  In a set of posthumously published lectures on the history of political philosophy, John Rawls concluded his section on there is the later liberalism of Mill and Kant (Lectures 155). Rawls says that his own conception political thought is necessarily an apology for the class state. Rawls argues that the flexibility of distribution of the powers and advantages of each party in the social contract influence the likelihood that the government will be a class state, a mix or some other frame. So, Rawls says, we have rescued Locke from the critique that he was merely a capitalist apologist.  of Lockean liberalism: it is historically contingent, prone to disturbances of real life, and influenced by power advantages of interests (Lectures 155). For Rawls, one of the distinguishing features of his later   When people agree to the social compact he [Locke] views them as individuals who know their particular social and economic interests as well as their position and status in society. This means that the justifications citizens give to one another in arriving at the social compact take these interests into account. (Lectures 155)  Uknow our situations and we advocate for our interests. Indeed, our public reasonthe justifications we give for our public positionsis intimately tied to interest. Moreover, the interest and 185  consequences. For Locke, politics is always inextricably bound up with interest. Rawls denies this.  Rawls argues that, if the social contract is about compromising known interests, then there will be a degree of contingency and instabilityimperfectionat the center of the liberal social contract, since every articulation of that agreement will itself be contingent on historical power distributions among the parties in the socavoid, but it also raises the question of whether the constitutional settlement should not be reconsidere(lectures Rawls, contingency and uncertaintyfluxought to be avoided, not embraced. As I have shown that the basic freedoms and opportunities of a constitutional regime should be fixed far more solidly than that, and not to be subject to such Lectures 155). We now see two things known individuals; and, second, that the ideal constitutional regime is unchangeable. The thing s supposedly more solid and that is incapable of change would be a universal, transcendent principle of justice, drawn not on interest but morality. Rawls is now solidly in the naïve rationalist ontology where he is assuming a foundation that can anchor our political world. For Locke, Rawls recognizes, there is no need to go this route: what we have is agreement, and 186  ccepts and embraces the pluralism or flux that exists in everyday life, while Rawls denies it.   Rawls turns away from Locke because Locke does not rest on the rationalist ontology that Rawls thinks is needed. Rawls also turns away from Locke because he believes that our Lectures 155). Here Rawls defends his rejection , historically, our time is not his. Rawls follows   But, are ot and provide noticeable lack of religious and secular toleration? Has the threat of absolutism and tyranny been eradicated? How are our questions new, and how are our answers going to be different?  Perhaps Rawls would respond simply by pointing out that our problem today is not the establishment of liberalism, but its recovery and defense. Locke was writing in a time when liberalism was a new possibility, and so had the offensive advantage. More importantly, Locke had the benefit of the doubt. Today, where liberalism was established and has since atrophied, we must answer the question: how can we believe again? For Rawls writing in after the disastrous collapse of Weimar Germany, this surely may be what he had in mind. But, even if we admit the fine distinction between being on the offensive and being on the defensive, why would we need to ave attributed to Rawls 187  here is that the establishment, recovery, and defense of liberalism are all different questions with different answers. Perhaps to defend liberalism we must recover it, which is to say we must return to its establishment and look aglike a modus vivendia peace treaty.  citizenship in liberalism and in democracies, which are directly related to their traditional ontologies. One way to see the status of (or lack thereof) trust in their theories. Trust and self-elaborate below). By raising the question about trust in their respective political theories, we can see both the ontological assumptions that underpin their work, and the character (liberal or otherwise) of citizenship. In the previous chapter, I highlighted this by focusing on Rasubstantive trust, who adopts a purely reliance view of trust (where the individual liberal subject theory, I uncovered a return to basic trust or blind faith in the communitythe premodern 18 The produce the space for a type of mature trust that does not itself fall into either an absolutist liberalism or an absolutist illiberalism. To better understand this, vision of liberal democratic citizenship, let us return to the work alternative visions of citizenship. For Mouffe,  we should not accept a false dichotomy between individual liberty and rights on the one hand and civic activity and political community on the other. Our only choice is not one between an aggregate of individuals without common public concern and a pre-modern community organized 188  around a single substantive idea of the common good. Envisioning the modern democratic political community outside of this dichotomy is the critical challenge. (230-231)  The way to ensure a healthy synthesis between a crude liberalism drawn from a reliance view of trust and an overbearing communitarian view of basic trust is to promote a mature trust, which navigates between these two notions. For Mouffe, this is not necessarily a question of trust (though she would not object to this conceptual scheme), but one of faulty conceptions of citizenship. The naïve liberal view produces only individuals, and so public concern and community are alien to their all-encompassing self-interest. The communitarian view responds by pulling the individual into the community, making the individual a citizen and not an individual. The problem is conceptualizing the proper type of citizenship that can incorporate both individualism and a to put trust at the center of our politicsit is the best fence against these two deviations.  nd, then, we must also reject the claim of a community premised on a single vision of the common give up the hope of achieving a substantive common political good. With no certainty, there can be no legitimate vision that demands unquestioned obedience. So far, Mouffe has outlined a seemingly very liberal synthesis. But, her third step is that we must blunt these liberal concessions. While there is no longer a single pre-modern concern for the common good, there is no singular the rest of mankind, but the democratic impulse for a community (even if not directed toward a single political good) cannot be denied. Fourth, we must keep in mind that, since there are no direct 189  claims to certainty, and therefore flux, whatever political community does arise is not one directed toward any one particular goal but possibly many. What this concern for a public good (and not the public good) entails is that the individual cannot be simply disconnected from public lifethe individual must come to recognize their self-interest (still of fundamental importance) is nevertheless inextricably tied to the community in not merely instrumental ways. Here Mouffe avoid servitude that would render its exercise impossible, we must cultivate civic virtues and not mean that the public good is simply one, but only that the public is a concern for the individual. For Mouffe, in other words, the liberal concern for liberty cannot be at the expense of a principle of self-government, which makes liberalism much closer to republican and democratic politics than is often understood. The public good, to be clear, is not a singular thing. Instead, for Mouffe, it is a set of principlesfreedom and equalitywhich constitute our liberal-multiplying the ends of common political life, Mouffe extends the burden of liberal-democratic citizenship. Not only is liberty now tied to public life, the concern of politics is to reconcileor attempt tothe dueling principles of liberty and equality. For Mouffe, citizenship is now in line t implies seeing citizenship not as a legal status but as a form of (231). One major weakness of naïve liberalism is to envision the individual as enshrined in a stable legal casing that grants and protects the legal status of the individual (as an individual), but in return demands passivity, neutrality, and non-interference. These rest on the largely institutional 190  or mechanical solutions of expertsparticularly lawyers and judgesto navigate the political terrain of liberty and equality. Self-government in this liberalism has been utterly forgotten (or rendered dangerous). To get it back, but without forcing it to be in service of any one vision of the common good, Mouffe here lets the political domain be itself the battleground of interpretations of liberty and equalitythat is to say, she largely makes the otherwise suppressed (though still political) agonism between liberty and equality hidden in the courtrooms a matter of public interpretation. This is obviously altering citizenship from a crude individualistic utility calculus to a self--since it must promote some ways of life and exclude others, though this need not eliminate the notion of tolerancecertainly not the kind of tolerance Locke presented above.  Liberal democracy is now grounded in the conflict of interpretations. Politics is now social relations and actual ways of lifethat are nevertheless drawn together along the principles of liberty and equality.19 l be made within political or public life. This will further challenge the liberal notion of a lubricated politics of compromise and negotiations of small, largely material interest. The agonistic battle over liberty and equality is still liberal insofar as consent, compromise, civility, and negotiation are the stuff of politics, but this is all done along ethico-political principles and not trade ledgers. Liberalism holds on to an apolitical notion of politics if it cannot recognize the possibility that rights will not gradually be granted (or domination retracted). Therefore, the only avenue available to the apolitical liberal is a democratic revolution that will be seen as a wild disruption of the 191  current distribution of rights, obligations, and duties. Liberalism cannot forget that, even while  20 ll parties, and this and small parties are themselves in a temporary truce. This does not render the liberal-democratic solution here unstable, since the is no outside that would allow us to compare liberal-democracy to some other liberal-democracy, but only to some form of absolutism, which, as we have seen, is only concerned with stability however gained. The solution to liberal-democracy is to internalize the antagonistic relationships between the parties, recognizing that the peace treaty will only ever be fragile and under constant negotiation. For many liberals, it would strike one as odd to talk about liberal partisans. Liberalism is an active liberal citizen that does have something like a liberal partisanship. So, in this section, I want to explore the mechanics of how a liberal partisanship can emergewhat others will call a hich largely focuses democracy much closer than is typically understood.  A collective identity can be created even within a largely individualistic liberal populous if we understand that the identity to be created is not simply an aggregation of particular individual 192  e people, as Mouffe has already argued, is drawn along the frontier of liberty and equalitythe two largely liberal values. At the heart of liberal democracy is the agonistic back-and-forth between two (or more) competing interpretations of liberalism and allowsindeed, demandspolitical identifications. As any particular individual claim of injusticebecomes a more solid and general claim, the more and more it becomes an articulation or interpretation of equality or liberty, which makes it more and more a collective identity as more and more individuals recognize inal. Elaborating and expanding the principles of liberty and equality within the liberal framework, renders naturally antagonistic partisans mere adversaries. Understood in this way, the affective and partisan attachments to liberty and equality do notso long as each principle never wins over the other, but they remain in contestendanger liberal democracy. In fact, again following a republican line of thought, it is precisely this active contestation within the citizenry that could in fact stabilize the regime, so long as they remain adversaries and not real enemies.21   taken for granted, as it is often forgotten in contemporary liberalism. On the one hand, the stark individualistic tendencies in naïve liberalism make public life seem desolate, and therefore renders politics apolitical: a haggle between two vendors. This is largely due to the recognition that politics and political identities are the site of very dangerous passions, which, in order to avoid such raucous instability, we should try to diminish public life and politics as much as possible. On the other hand, liberalism, if it is honest, often relies on a collective identityto not only provide the original ground of all legitimate (liberal) government, but to possibly be the last 193  defender of constitutionalism itself. But, if we understand politics as merely a coordinating game of individual interests, we have to admit that a collective identity that can be trusted with the care of liberal constitutionalism itself is impossible to fathom, because it would require both an inflation of the importance of public life (though, of course, not over private life), and it would suggest that affective identificationpartisanshipis not beneath liberal rationalism. In other words, liberal require a robust (though unique) citizenship with its attendant civic virtues. All of which, we will discuss below. to adequatelon a naïve rationalist ontology, but the precise ontology of flux that Schmitt relies upon in his  must, however, acknowledge which is here understood as the home of the us/them, political relationshipelements that underwrite liberal democracy. This is captured in the concept of the ich is political power.22   The original antagonism of the us/them relationship is brought into the center of liberal democracy, where on the one hand the political terrain has been altered (but not eradicated), between dueling interpretations of liberalism and equality. Remaining within this liberal or religion) to political adversaries. In this way, liberalism has not conceded anything more than it had to, since the things it held that largely opposed democratic politics of this kind were things 194  that it need not claim. The original antagonism is a liberal compromise between naturally antagonistic parties to play bes not necessarily emerge, but only partisans.  Of course, if we leave it here, one could immediately object to this solution on the grounds that it suggests that these partisan antagonists must really have baccepted so quickly the liberal relegation of antagonistic politics to adversarial politics. In other words, as has been levelled against Mouffe and Laclau, have we not just assumed the same reasonableness that Rawls assumed 23 For Mouffe and Laclau, we must interpretations of liberty and equality that must always be active and ongoing. For Mouffe and Laclau, the real solution is to alter the symbolic understanding of liberalism to be itself a political the subject and the magistrate. The symbolic spacewhat is then both liberal (insofar as it is uniquely concerned with separating the political relationship out of the pre-modern vision of the father-child, and avoids the contemporary liberal absolutist position of master-servantas outlined in chapter 2), and democratic (insofar as this relationship is precisely a political identification of us versus them that can become an existential conflict, to follow rtant for the safety of the regime (which must fight against any power that seeks to displace the particular symbolic space of political power resting in the subject-magistrate relation), but it is important theoretically or pedagogically for the sake of t 195  to a 24 agonistic relationship it has with a power that seeks to disrupt the symbolic space of governed and is a chain of equivalence along the demand for the symbolic space to be constituted in such a wayfor whatever reason.25 The power that must be resisted (which unites natural political antagonistsdemocrats, republicans, and liberals) is that power which seeks to do away with politics itselfto do away with the contestation and flux of political life. Liberal democracy holds open the possibility for an agonistic politics on two levels, incorporating insofar as it shows us what liberalism cannot be. As I have presented it, liberal constitutionalism must not forget the ontological grounds of as Schmitt makes clear in his critique. Liberalismcomprised of a healthy respect for individual rights, the doctrine of separated powers, and the rule of lawtoward peace (Kautz 1995). Peace is central because of the natural flux of political life where natural antagonistic partisansdemocrats, who argue for equality; republicans, who argue for virtue. Liberalism, in a passionate communitylike the democratic egalitarians or the virtuous republicansbut supposedly are the group of individuals who have cool, calm reason and argue for liberty. This message does not win much on such simple rational grounds. Democrats demand equality over liberty, because liberty is seen to be a source of inequality; republicans demand virtue over liberty, 196  because liberty is seen to be a source of (private) vice. For the liberal, we must reject both democracy and republicanism for their lack of self-restraint and moderationi.e., for being too deflate the passions behind partisanship, thereby rendering the original flux a thing that can be   One way to disarm these naturally warring passions would be to exorcise them completely from human nature. By denying them, we can hope to secure a liberal peace because we would understand the human being to be a thing fundamentally devoid of natural passionswhich would be like imagining the human being as a thing incapable of envy, and therefore designing an entire political system where envy is not possible for human beings.26 Political life in this liberal view would be less about passions and partisan identities, and more about questions of administration: since we all are all now assumed to be reasonable, justice is now a logistical question. This is a the natural political passions, not actually engage or remove them, but only makes us blind to the real political differences between people who would not b is the common trope among many detractors of liberalism.27 Rather than take seriously the political flux naïve heories about justice and the common good. In other words, this vision of liberalism on the one hand recognizes the pluralism of political life, but then, on the other hand, says that there is nevertheless a rational common ground that unites the whole group around guaranteed principles of demonstrable political justice. But, even if we grant this unlikely abstract common ground, the naïve rationalist cannot call this common ground a he core of their vision 197  of human agencyliberalism: well-ordered society; unlike the liberalisms of Kant or Mill, it is not itself a comprehensive doctrine but rather applies the principle of toleration to philosophy itself. There is no liberal community but many different reasons) rules of public reason and principles of justice suitable for a democratic society of free and equal persons. (1995, 178)  By holding on to such a strict individualism, the naïve liberal is put into a tight spot: flux is a recognitior group but the spirit of all individually. But this truncation of the political flux in the beginning ideal theory of liberalism but renders it ineffectivewho would be convinced by this argument, that is not already counted among t Political Liberalism positioneven this surely presupposes more exists. But who needs to persuade these people to be tolerant and liberal? A truly political liberalism must recognize the intractability of certain naturally intolerant partisan opinions, civility with good (concrete) reasons that manifestly answer potent natural passions (fear of death,   Liberalism cannot be defended on the naïve rationalist grounds as Rawls presents them because it does not even come close to responding to the original and animating premise of liberalism in the first place: the ontology of flux, or the antagonistic nature of political life. What good is liberalism if there is no original antagonism to search for peace? In order to meet the natural antagonism between partisans, which is largely fueled by passionseither for virtue or equalityliberalism hich is to say in the passions.  198  fear, love, desire. To respond politically, liberalism must make its case on these grounds first, then on the more elevated planewhen it has the attention of the passionate partisanscan cool, calm reason take over as guide. This move is contingent and messy. This small move to ground liberalism in the passions, has radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of liberalism. Liberalism is usually understood to seek peace, which we assume to be stable. But, this new version of liberalism, while still searching for peace, admits that going down to the level of the passions means embracing (not overcoming or ignoring) political flux. But, as Kautz notes, this is not a defect of classical liberalism, but perhaps its redeeming virtuemoderation even in the stability of peace:  Classical liberalism seeks a more modest, yet still reto seek peace together so that we will not discover war as we go our separate ways. That is the least that might be expected from reasonable human beings: but it is also, perhaps, the most. (179).  Contrary to the naïve rationalistwho now is naïve precisely because they overvalue the role of reason in political lifesimultaneously grounds liberalism in the more passionate or partisan realm, but also alters its own self-understanding of the limits of peace: perhaps the only viable peace is one that does not seek a more solid ground than it can reasonably reach for (as Rawls did when he wanted to make political justice a function of certain moral principles). For the classical liberal, we must ultimately even moderate our own expectations of peace. Perhaps the best is a modus vivendi, a public philosophy that is more a ceasefire or cautious peace treaty.  modus vivendi liberalism of Mouffe and Kautz casts liberalism properly on political grounds, and recognizes that even for the 199  liberal passion and community are needed in more than simply instrumental ways for self-interested individuals. For Mouffe, who follows generally the republican tradition, liberal -instrumental demand for ethico-political principles of liberty and equality to ground our political life. For Mouffe (and Laclau), as we have seen, liberal democracy in other words requires a more than shallow understanding of citizenship, and, as Kautz makes clear, this entails a non-instrumental We must be clear on these liberal virtues and the nature of liberal democratic citizenship in order to fully appreciate classical liberalism.  properly understand liberalism we cannot lose sight of this ontological fact of political life. Classical liberalism also recognizes the importance of a political community that is capable of engaging the political passions of the antagonistic adversariesthe democrats and republicans. Not only will the community be an affective bond among citizensunlike the highly abstract but it will also demand of its members a certain set of virtues. For Kautz, virtue is a disposition or a habit that can effectively govern the passions, perhaps through virtue is reason, which sets out to properly sort our passions, and to restrain or moderate our behavior accordingly. Reason must understand its own limits in ordering our passion, thoughit cannot eradicate our passions but must always be a vigilant guidefor both the individual and the 200   by whicscience of politics: separation of powers, bicameralism, an independent judiciary, representation, the extended sphere. (116)  There is no doubt that there is an institutionalist or proceduralist element in classical liberalism, even understood as a modus vivendi: we agree that these institutions are important for maintaining (and monitoring) the peace, however won. But, the core of the political liberal community is not the virtues of procedural institutions, but the education in virtue understood minimally as that of self-government. The virtue of self-government is the glue that originally bonds the community then comes to recognize institutions as important for maintaining and monitoring the peace treaty. Self-missing even in the accounts of classical liberals who focus too much on the institutional aspects of liberal democracy. From what we have seen in Mouffe and Laclau, the institutions and proceduresis often the site of hegemonic power that seeks to exclude the possibility of agonistic politics, understood as the contestation of collective identitieseven when the game has been drawn between liberty and equality (Mouffe 2000, 2005, 2013; Laclau 2014). The constitutive rulesthe specific procedures of who has what office and howbut on its constituent rulesthe substantive identity that grounds enter of liberal democracy201  precisely what many contemporary liberals do when thinking about the nature of liberalism. The  way of life,modus vivendi of self-then Second Treatise 132, 133 in particular). If one conflates these steps, one necessarily conflates the legal and the social Prioritizing the legal over the social (or conflating them) is to put too much faith in the legal frameworks to mete out justice and to guard the conditions of the peace treaty. The core of liberal communityis the principle of self-government, not the procedures and institutional doctrines of the separation of powers, or the rule of law. While these are no doubt helpful, they are ins virtues, as well as interests against the possible violators of the so-called peace treatyOne cannot simply rely on liberal institutions to preserve the peace. (1995, 182).  The last line is the most important: institutions are not enough, Yet, they take up a considerable amount of our time. At the center of political liberalism, properly committed to an ontology of institutions cannot be relied upon, we have nothing left but our own self-government. Virtue saves liberal democracy. Trust, here, is not to be understood as basic or blind trust, but it is an active, 202  suspicious trust. It is a trust that recognizes the need for trust and consent, but also sober enough to see that trust is always a tenuous matter. The particular brand of citizenship that liberalism here creates isas we saw with Mouffe-regarding as well as social the false dichotomy of a citizenship that has at its core a blind trust in the community or a radical distrust of all everyone. Here, we have explicitly the formula: trust, but verify. This peculiar, paradoxical type of trust is most needful for a liberal democracy that is properly grounded in an ontology of flux. This of course moderates the presumption that liberalism can ever be more stable st liberal citizena virtuous liberal partisan  Essay where he says that, given our place in a world of flux, we should not quietly or naively seek certainty nor should we radically further alienate ourselves by radically doubting everything. Instead, Locke trust, but verify. Loc-foundational ontology has immediate political consequences: self-government and suspicion.  But, one may wonder where self-Second Treatise. As I mentioned above, the main thrust of that treatise on liberal constitutionalism is, in fact, seemingly the opposite: a politics of trust. As I outlined in the previous chapters, and in the last section of part one of this chapter, however, this is not a naïve or basic trust, but one that comes about only after we have recognized the flux of life, and the demand to be responsible and self-Second Treatise? 203   Second Treatise 230). Now that we understand that Locke as a post-foundationalist thinker, we should recognize the importance of power, contestation, and consent for both a healthy liberal democracy and a virtuous liberal democratic citizen. I will have much more to say about the precise psychological features of the Lockean suspicious guide that is supposed to adequately temauthority, thereby exercising the virtues of self-government and the performative aspect of Locke understands it is not possible without a citizenry of busie heads.  Second Treatise 230). This fact alone has probably contributed to the busie head being largely ignored in liberal theory. The busie head, which we should be keen Second Treatise in full: Nor let anyone say, that mischief can arise from hence, as often as it shall please a busy head, or turbulent spirit, to desire the alteration of the government. It is true, such men may stir, whenever they please; but it will be only to their own just ruin and perdition: for till the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of the rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the greater part, the people, who are more disposed to suffer than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. The examples of particular injustice or oppression, of here and there an unfortunate man, moves them not. But if they universally have a persuasion, grounded upon manifest evidence, that designs are carrying on against their liberties, and the general course and tendency of things cannot but give them strong suspicions of the evil intention of their governors, who is to be blamed for it? Who can help it, if they, who might avoid it, bring themselves into this suspicion? Are the people to be blamed, if they have the sense of rational creatures, and can think of things no otherwise than as they find and feel them? And is it not rather their fault, who put things into such a posture, that they would not have them thought to be as they are? I grant, that the pride, ambition, and turbulency of private men, have sometimes caused great disorders in commonwealths, and factions have been wantonness, and a desire to cast off the lawful authority of their rulers, or in the rulers insolence, 204  and endeavors to get and exercise an arbitrary power over their people; whether oppression, or disobedience, gave the first rise to the disorder; I leave it to impartial history to determine. This I am sure, whoever, either ruler or subject, by force goes about to invade the rights of either prince or people, and lays the foundation for overturning the constitution and frame of any just government; is highly guilty of the greatest crime, I think, a man is capable of; being to answer for all those mischiefs of blood, rapine, and desolation, which the breaking to pieces of governments bring on a country. And he who does it, is justly to be esteemed the common enemy and pest of mankind, and is to be treated accordingly. Second Treatise 230.  Unlike in the Essay where Locke says we should busie ourselves, the first reading of this passage would suggest that the busie head is an almost contemptable figure  doctrine of political resistance. As Locke says in this passage, when injustice has become visible to the peoplesuch that they cannot but otherwise trust what they see and feelthe moral obviously counting on the general conservative nature of the pe not a general phenomenon. When this evidence has been presented to the people, when the case  of evil intention importantly, who is to be blamedLocke asksfor this potential situation? Here, Locke must be said to side with the people against the sovereign, because it is probably truly the case that the sovereign is a tyrant if the otherwise subservient people have united and resisted. Of course, this is an empirical question of historical record if the people really are so conservative, but Locke seems relatively positive that it is the case. 205   want to quickly point out that there are two familiar processes happening in the background of this passage that should vindicate the busie head: the primacy of suspicion against a basic trust; and the establishment of a chain of equivalences along the lines of resisting arbitrary power and injustice. Both of these are a product of the seemingly dismissed busie heads, and without this work by the busie head, liberal democracy would collapse.   The busie head is a turbulent spirit, and the first to call for the alteration of government. This would make the busie head something akin to an alarmist. Obviously, even Locke admits that thifact, Locke points out in this passage that the people are so conservative and are too trusting. This is similar to the problem in the Essay: people too quickly take on the opinions of others, they trust too quickly, and this is dangerous according to Locke. Epistemic self-government demands that we busy ourselves with the information about things that matter, so that we can adequately judge or assent. Without critical examination, our assent is slavish. The chief struggle for Locke was to get people to adequately doubt authorities, but not to go so far into radically alienating ourselves in a thoroughgoing skepticism about all things. For Locke, it is a hard fought battle to create the critical space to even doubt authorities. The busie head, then, as an agent of suspicion, cannot be rejected on those grounds alone. The busie head is also, as the agent of suspicion, presumably not attempting to usurp power himselfLocke gives no indication of this in the passage abovebut only seeks to overturn what is considered an unjust government or constitution. Again, there are reasons to reject the busie head which I will discuss in the next section, but providing evidence of an injustice is not one of them. Nor, to be more clear, is the simple act of political suspicion or 206  doubting authority. The point is that trust is actually dangerous if it remains the kind of basic trust that Locke here ascribes to the mass public, and therefore a suspicious guide is needed to defend liberalism.  While suspicion is obviously important for Locke, and the busie head is certainly an agent of suspicion, we should be clear that Locke does not therefore endorse just any busie head. That would be very imprudent. Instead, Locke suggests something like a formula. If the injustice of any single individual is raised, and if it remains an isolated incident, then it is justly ignored by the mass public. However, if the particular claims are no longer understood to be simply particular things, then the busie heads ought not to be ignored. The demand, then, on the busie head is indeed to busy oneself with gathering evidence of particular injustices that are not themselves mere isolated incidents. What this looks like in particular, we cannot hope to know a priori. However, that the busie head is the one who should establish a chain of equivalence between the particular injustices of particular individuals, is very important for a liberal democracy. It is only through this chain of equivalence that brings together the evidence of the particulars and makes it seem like a general phenomenon, and this general set of injustices, Locke says, cannot but persuade the people of the designs and intentions of the governor to be something that ought to be resisted. The busie hea chain of equivalence not on any particular material demand, but on injustice in a more general sense, i.e., due to arbitrary power or tyrannical designs. The particular substance of the injustice is dropped, and the case is made general that the trust has been broken between the government and the governed. The People do not emerge because of some particular, partisan interest but a more general, trans-partisan co207  which we have seen to be so important in a more mature liberalism, is not possible without some figure like the busie head.  s being drawn from a post-foundationalist and political ontology, two things become clear. First, the political critique set busie head liberalism is thoroughly grounded in a political ontology, it pushes against much of the tendencies and assumptions of contemporary liberalism. Contemporary liberalism is premised on a faulty ontology, Locke would say, and this makes it apolitical in a decisively inadequate way. In fact, in the critique of contemporary liberalism, Lockean liberalism actually shares significant common ground with supposedly radical democrats can see the importance of establishing an internal political agonistic relationship between political identities drawn to conflicting interpretations of liberty and equality. This is important, too, for classical liberalism if it wants to be serious about its commitment to being (no more than) a peace treaty among naturally warring partisans. Moreover, as we saw with Laclau, the formation of these political identities are important, since the affective party attachments to liberty and equality need to draw a political us/them relationship against each other. The democratic political us/them relationship cannot be exorcized from liberal democracyand Locke would presumably agree.  Locke would certainly agree when the agonistic or contentious us-them relationship needs e trusting and lazy mass public. And it is here that we may show just how deeply committed : 208  the symbolic order (what Mouffe calls a regime) in liberalism, according to Locke, is the subject/magistrate relation. This largely symbolic relation must be kept separate from at least two other alternativesthe child/parent and the servant/master relations.  political relation that does not fall into either of the two alternatives. Mouffe and Laclau accept precisely this symbolic ordering of the regime when they set out the two principles as liberty and equality, and when Mouffe defends a sense of citizenship that does not look like the radically distrustful and individualistic ego of liberal absolutists like Hobbes and Rawls, nor does she accept the vision of a servile citizen in a premodern society (like that of the basic trust relationship of the child/father, Aristotle, or Manent). She (and Laclau) sides squarely with the liberal symbolic regime as Locke (and other classical liberals) understand it. The truly political liberalism, then, is not simply as Mouffe and Laclau understand it as conflicting public identities with competing 28 power rests in the symbolic relationship between subject/magistrate (one based on consent and trust), against the liberal absolutist and premodern alternatives. On this political ground, Mouffe, Laclau, Kautz, and Locke agree. CONCLUSION    of liberalism, and still the ground of the most famous contemporary articulation of political liberalism nominalism, showing that it is precisely because of the ontological flux that the concepts of consent 209  and trust take on a particularly important meaning in our lives. For Locke, we strive to have the virtues of reflection and examinationof epistemic self-governmentbut, also, a sober recognition of the limits of our understanding. We ought not trust too quickly, but we should not doubt radically. For Locke, we need to be busy in the examination of the things that matter most to us, and happy in our ignorance of those that we neither care about nor can know completely anyway. Stability and peace can be won, but only on these educated virtues of the liberal public.   In the second part of this chapter, I outlined how the forgoing discussion of political collective identities, and explicitly a contest about power. Drawing from Laclau, we see that the liberal prejudice against affective partisanship must be abandoned. Liberalism is now in need of must incorporate contestation not only within itselfbetween partisans for liberty and equality, as Mouffe helps us seeld and master/servant). In this way, liberalism is completely political: it has a community, an us/them potential. The basis of consent and trust are still there, of course, but they are not anchored in demonstrable metaphysical truths but the contingent power relationsliberal democracy must be secured. This seemingly political relationship now at the heart of liberalism, does not alter the insight that it can only emerge as a peace treaty. In light of this, we liberal partisansthat, at times, needs to defend or enforce the treaty. Liberal democracy, then, requires a more robust understanding of the virtues of liberal citizenship, which are often dismissed in contemporary liberal theory. Contemporary liberal theory often emphasizes the institutional aspects of liberal democracy and not the behavioral or virtuous 210  demands placed on the public. This is to grossly inflate the importance of the letter of the peace treaty at the expense of diminishing the spirit of liberalism. But, the crisis of liberal democracy is precisely the decline in the spirit of liberal democracy. To recover the spirit, we must first push away the confusions, and chief among them has been a faulty traditional or naïve ontological foundationalism.   I concpolitical  at the expense of the calmer institutional mechanics of liberal constitutionalism. I turn briefly to Second Treatise -Here, I showed that his post-foundational ontology produces a need for suspicion where a public is too trusting, and therefore is in need of a suspicious guide for the people. The busie head therefore plays a radically important function in liberal democracy: establishing the chain of equivalences among the people. The chain is not simply grounded in any particular material or partisan demand, but in the ethico-political principles of self-government and escaping cruelty.29 It is this particular fixation on escaping cruelty and arbitrary domination that can unite even adversarial partisans against the usurpation of political power. Tliberal democracy, and it is brought out by the agonistic work of the busie head. Without the busie head, liberal democracy cannot survive.  -legal character of the prerogative, and the corresponding need to have an extra-ontological critique that suggests that the demarcation between the legal and the social is not 211  ly particular psychological aspects of liberal political subjectivitynamely, fear, anxiety, and suspicionall of which are now not accidental or unfortunate byproducts of liberalism, but necessary components.                   212  1 ill one central to current literature on the notion of epistemic trust, the nature and philosophy of testimony, and political philosophy broadly understood. For a review of the contemporary work on the relationship between the traditional view of seeking the truth and epistemology, see Zagzebski, Linda T. Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy. Oxford: Oxford However, it is important here to note that she still finds both the traditional notion of truth as a central feature of epistemology, and, therewith, the work of John Locke as foundational for contemporary epistemology. 2 In the beginning of the Essay, Locke seems to philosophy of language, empiricism, and nominalism, and I will address it later in chapter 5 where I discuss the recent work by Casson (2011).  3 Although he is a militant anti-analytic philosophy is nevertheless important. Therefore, much of the folPhilosophy and Social Hope, New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 4 igins of the distinction between sciencia/opinion. 5 Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, New York: Routledge, 1991), and even the anti-essentialists who also Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998). The point is that Ayers and Rorty place Locke as a foundationalist or essentialist within the dichotomous space of foundationalist/anti-foundationalist. This dichotomous space has come under attack, as I have briefly shown in the previous chapter. Instead, as I will attempt own nominalism, but, of course, for the moderate Locke, this does not mean that he is abandoning essentialism of any kind for anti-essentialism (whatever that could mean), but wants to posit a space between these two positions. The overall argument of this chapter is that, while Locke is successful in finding a space between these two positions, the thrust of his argument is ultimately not drawn from metaphysics or ontological deductions, but the sober reflection of the necessities and demands of political life. In other words, contrary to the majority of ology is inherently politically-motivated, and the adequacy of his theory should be judged according to these explicitly political ends.  6 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which I refer to in-text as simply Essay followed by book number, chapter number, and section number. The edition I use, for the sake of clarity of prose is: John Locke, The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, (London: Rivington, 1824 12th ed.). 6/23/2016.http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1725, specifically volumes 1 and 2 which contain the unabridged version of the four books of the Essay. 7 that he exists, and that he is something. He that can doubt, whether he be anything or no, I speak not to; no more than I would argue with pure nothing, or endeavor to convince non-entity, that it were something. If anyone pretends to be so skeptical, as to deny his own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible) let him for me enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger, or some other pain, convince him of the contrary. This then, I think, I make take for a truth, which ev things are not either known or unknown, but known or unknown relative to some other things known or unknown.  8 presented in the Republic 508a-510a. Plato makes clear that the concrete and particular are in no way the things of knowledge or certainty, but only those that are non-material (abstract) and non-particular (universal)are the true grounds of knowledge. 9 Essay 1.1.4; 2.1.2; 4.16.4; Conduct 13, 45; First Treatise 58; Second Treatise 230; Education 74, 76, 118, 129, 152.  10 The passage quoteknow it today: tabula rasa (Essay 2.1.2). This is as famous as it is a controversial doctrine, and I will briefly make clear what Locke is here saying about the nature of the mind. First, we should make clear that Locke is not claiming (at least right now) that human beings as such have no naturewhich, we will see in his discussion of abstract                                                  213                                                                                                                                                               general ideas, would be akin to say that human beings have no definitioenying something called human nature, we should be clear on what grounds he does retain such a notion. Third, the main point of this passage refers explicitly to the realm of thoughtto our understandingto our consciousness. Locke here is very much a realist in the following sense: we often behave according to our thoughts, and our thoughts are not static or guaranteed by innate principles, so, then, our minds are both a field with no inscription (a blank slate) and a field that has considerable malleability. Does this mean that human nature as such is malleable? No, again, as we will see, Locke saves the concept of human nature as a certain notion (but only by making a hard distinction between the nominal and the real).  11 To even put it this waywritings that Mehta is very much keen on exposing (see Mehta, Udah The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 12 A recurring theme throughout the Essay child reveals to us what the understanding looks like before it is tainted and encumbered by our meddling. This is not the product of experience or our senses, but that of power: tender mind from all impression and notion of spirits and goblins, or any fearful apprehensions in the dark. This he will be in danger of from the indiscretion of servants, whose usual method is to awe children, and keep them in subjection, by telling them of raw-head and bloody-bones, and such other names, as carry with them the ideas of something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be afraid of, when alone, especially in tSome Thoughts on Education, section 138; cf. section 191). For Locke, it is clear that there is always power in the construction of our understanding, and we should be vigilant that it is not to be further sanctified by the word  13  As wgenus is just a category scheme that we impose on the objectsEssay 3.3.10-16). 14 peaking. Of course, to a nominalist, the connection between word and object is precisely not t the function of judgment (where arbitrary is derived from arbiter place on the facultwill use it throughout the Essay. The specific centrality of judgment will be discussed in Chapter 5.  15 The Cambridge Companion to Locke edited by Vere Chappell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 115-145 for a review of the landmarks in the literature, and case that Locke is perhaps using a threefold distinctionthe real constitution, the real essence, and the nominal essence of a thing. This would perhaps make Locke much more radical, since, the point is that even the real essences are fundamentally products of a categorical system that must, by necessity, not be a function of any sense experience. Sense experience, in other words, reveals to us only the totality of a particular object, not, as Locke wants to claim, the primary (real) and secondary qualities, which is a distinction of categorization and not sense experience.  16 On the centrality of self-Natural Right and History 3; Zuckert, Launching Liberalism chapter 7, particularly 193-197. The all-too familiar equation of freedom Areopagitica), was put forward most militantly by Jean--Paul Existentialism is a Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), see particularly 22-28 on the first principle of existentialism: subjectivity and choice. For Strauss, the march of modernity (one could say from Milton to Sartre) is the ever-Thoughts on Machiavelli Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, particularly the end of chapter 4). The existentialist theme of freedom of choice was a distinctly modern emergence, and, as we saw with Manent, one that has far from gained universal assent. The point here is that, taking self-government seriously entails a proto-existentialist position where choice and the will are central, not because it is a revolt against God, but because it seeks to establish responsibility and  sense if consciousness made or chosen, and not naturally arising. The distinctly modern position is, 214                                                                                                                                                               then, to put it sharper: Again, we should not understand this as an attempt to do away with morality, but only an a priori morality thatsince it is not strictly a choicedoes not make room for responsibility, self-government. Locke, in rejecting the doctrine of innate ideas, is a proto-existentialist in this sense.  17 apology for economic and capitalist elites, see: McPherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 [1962]. The distinction argues that there is a egalitarianism, see: Strauss, Leo Natural Right and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Both of these positions want to make more central a division that, while may exist now, need not exist essentially. In other words, Locke is at pains even in these passages to suggest that, first, laziness is a product of environment (working conditions and lack of leisure) and, second, a lack of proper educationthat does not do away with laziness but encourages it with the doctrine of innate ideas. To want to make this distinction more than a descriptive statement confuse what Locke is doing here: cataloging the obstacles to exercising our self-mastery of our understanding. There is little reason to think that this is not possible for more than a simple minority or elite section of the adult population. 18 Politics (Book 5). Here Aristotle is keenly aware that trust is important for conspiracies that aim to topple tyranny. The tyrant, then, should seek to promote fearful distrust among the people to stop conspiracies against his rule. From this, we can understand perhaps a bit better (though without the epistemological a mobilizing and anti-authoritarian or anti-tyrannical power. Trust is not explicitly the basis of the legitimate regime, for Aristotle, but this is not to say that Aristotle has nothing to say about the political effectiveness for trust in the revolutionary contexta lesson, Locke surely well understood by the time he wrote his Second Treatise.  19 The political values of liberty and equality have a long empirical history, see: Rokeach, Milton The Nature of Human Values, New York: Free Press, 1973. 20 See Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America translated with an introduction by Delba Winthrop and Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; cited as Part, Book, Chapter, I.2.2.  21 but as adversaries whose ideas must be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put i 22 As we have already seen in the previous chapter, Mouffe and Laclau are particularly clear on this point: the problem is a lack of resistance or counter-hegemonic space allowed within the legalistic or hyper-institutional liberalism of Rawls, for example. For classical liberals like Kautz and Kleinerman, the political space must always be open, tooseparated constitutional powers). To believe that this contestation is not needed, or, more precisely, that this contestation can be avoided and is unhealthy, is to be lulled into a rather naïve and dangerous slumber. 23 There many criticisms of Mouffe and Laclau; for a review of this literature, see Wigenbach, Ed Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy: Post-Foundationalism and Political Liberalism, Burlington: Ashgate Publishers 2011; and Norval, Aletta J. Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. As Wigenbach points out, much of the criticism levelled against Mouffe and criticism is simply one of clarity and the age-for this criticism of their work. On the other hand, and far more interesting in my opinion, is the work from the committed intellectual and radical left. Here, to name only a few, are Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, who both have Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, New York: rticular universal altogether, since the Zizek holds true to the dogmatic notion of class as the material ground upon which all particulars form. For Laclau (and Mouffe) these alternatives are to push, however paradoxical it sounds, hegemony (a post-foundational concept) back into the essentialist/anti-essentialist or foundationalist/anti-foundationalist dichotomy.   215                                                                                                                                                               24 This distinction is made in KautThe Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism edited by Steven J. Kautz, Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 30-49; and in KleinThe Supreme Court and the Idea of Constitutionalism edited by Steven J. Kautz, Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, 235-254. This distinction will be discussed in much more - 25 If we understand the natural political antagonisms as those between liberal (who argue for liberty or freedom), democrats (who argue for equality), and republicans (who argue for virtue), we can see how a chain of equivalence is possible if it is negatively definedif the demand is for the remedy of some injustice, most particularly the demand for non-domination, which is allied to self-government (which we now have wedded to liberalism). This is the way that the symbolic space can be won without claiming that all of the antagonists have suddenly come to see the light of reasonable liberalism. See Kautz, 1995; Mouffe 2005. 26 Rawls explicitly does this in the original position.  27 -Liberalism Reconsidered, edited by Douglas MacLean and Claudia Mills, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenhead 1983. 28 (because this would be to grant a more traditionally liberal ground than he would like to admit), his appeal to demand does not escape this consequence, either. Indeed, it seems as if Laclau does rely on some notion of a free-market that will be able to collect and organize the demands, which is to bring in a much more fundamental (neo)liberal ontology than he is CR: The Centennial Review, 10:2 Fall 2010, 151-Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, New York: Verso Books, 2000, 90-response can be found in both his essays in the edited volume with Zizek and Butler (2000), and in his most recent work on the rhetorical foundations of society (2014). In this last book, Laclau correctly notes that his concept of while Laclau is certainly wedded to the notion that the demand first arises as a request within a given hegemonic space, the demand takes on a more critical and anti-institutional form the more and more a request becomes a claim, and this eventually becomes a deseemingly what is implied in the critiques by Berlanga and Zizek (and Butler). The emergence of a truly revolutionary identityis not a given but a product or construction of social agency (2014, 148-151). does individuale place have argued above, this is because Laclau is Mouffe; a regime that is ordered around protecting and maintaining the political power within the subject/magistrate relation (and not elsewhere).  29 This particular notion of cruelty at the heart of liberalism will be discussed in significantly more detail in the final chapter.   216  CHAPTER 4: DEFENDING THE NORMATIVE EXTRALEGAL MODEL  In the following chapter, I will present a particular theoretical model of the prerogative power in liberalism. In the first section, I will briefly outline the gravity of the prerogative power, and the danger it poses to liberal constitutionalism. In second section, I focus on the extra-legal model, and John Locke. Though it has a largely institutional focus, I recast it to emphasize what I take to be -legal response to the prerogative power: cultivating the right sense of political trust within the people. In the third section, having outlined the extra-legal model, I turn to a recent critique penned by Leonard Feldman. In my view, Feldman is correct in pointing out the shifting grounds of public judgment, so central to the extra-legal model. Feldman makes clear that the extra-legal model must commit to a set of ontological propositions that are not often explicitand potentially repulsiveto some of the theorists of the extra-legal model. And, on a more practical level, the extra-legal model must fully recognize the near-impossibility of public judgment doing what it is held responsible for in the extra-legal model.  In the fourth section the ontological which Feldman suggests Lockean politics cannot seemingly accommodate, I find conclusive Essay, which I then argue underwrites precisely the political power so central in the Second Treatise. So, insofar as Feldman critiques the Lockean model for not being aware of political flux, I show this critique to be unfounded. Moreover, I argue that Feldman has grossly misunderstood the nature of the prerogative power in Locke, and subsequently the demands of political judgment by the public. Simply put, he gives ontological 217  priority to the legal context where he should have merely given epistemic authority. In other words, the power of the people to judge (and the ultimate standards by which they do it) are not the legal, though, of course, the legal context is helpful in discerning (and demonstrating) the intentions behind the use of the prerogative power.  As for the practical critique that popular political judgement will not be capable of fulfilling the demands of the extra-legal model, I counter with two arguments. First, if the reliance on public judgment must be rendered impossible because it is not reliable in guaranteeing the foreclosed certainty that not only runs counter to his own view of a political ontology of flux (a self-contradiction), but also is not representative of the normative extra-legal model. Second, if t requires a degree of political awareness or knowledge not common among the mass public, then I not ontological, it is merely practical and epistemological. However, on the level of epistemology, Locke can rely on the actions of the busie head to both guide public opinion through the many layers of the legal context when judging any particular instance of the prerogative, and promote a level of general agitation or uneasiness that halts the natural complacency of a liberal public. As I argue in the next chapter, the real demand, then, that Locke places on the people is that they be receptive to the claims of the busie head. In section 5, the conclusion to this chapter, I argue that the problem of political judgment, then, while a perennial problem for is not an insurmountable problem. The real problem facing liberal constitutionalism is that we too often believe that the public is incapable of judgment. By 218  at all, we ultimately reject liberalism constitutionalism consciously or unconsciously.1 To properly constitutionalismthe only alternative to liberal absolutism. In the section below, I follow many contemporary liberal theorists in arguing that the nature As I will explain below, one of the most important issues facing liberal constitutionalism is the challenge not from illiberal or non-liberal critics, but from liberal absolutism. The argument from liberal absolutism rests on a claim about the political reality of liberalisma political ontology of flux. From this political fact of flux, liberal absolutists claim that constitutionalism cannot properly emerge.  Liberal constitutionalism seemingly rests on the claim that political power should not be univocal, and that it should be filtered and constrained through the rule of law. The absolutist claims that this image of liberalism is faulty because it effectively denies the politics of pluralism and flux it started from. Liberal constitutionalism is seemingly stuck in a self-contradiction with its own liberal premises. In particular, the claim that political power can wholly be encapsulated within the law and institutions either denies or covers over the real battlefield: the ability for liberal constitutionalism to control or curtail the extra-legal political power that will always be necessary for the survival of the liberal polity in a political world of flux. Therefore, the real problem facing liberal constitutionalism is its inability to come to grips with its own reliance on extra-legal political power. In the following chapter I will attempt to ground liberal constitutionalism on the 219  ontology of flux, and show how it can successfully resist the liberal absolutist alternative while also resist the slide into illiberal political arguments.  Political liberalism demands a society that is governed by the lawPolitical power is legitimate when it stems from the standing laws, established, hopefully, through proper procedures and aim toward the good of the community and not the good of only a part of society. Regardless of the normative goodness of the laws, liberalism rests on the firm ground that what is a legitimate use of political power must come from a law. Of course, power legitimated through the law is different than saying political power is end of a liberal society is peace, and it is hoped that such a public peace can be guaranteed through eace, however, is not strictly the law but the extra-legal power that animates the law. In other words, the sovereign power is the basis of the law, since it is the sovereign who decides when the rule of law applies and when it does not. In deciding the exception to the law, real political power emerges: the rule of law is an instrument of sovereign power, not a constraint.  This absolutist argument rests on a certain political ontologya first order claim about the nature and reality of the political world. The political ontology that liberal absolutism rests on is 2 Flux and uncertainty are facts of the political world because, once one admits that individuals are the center of analysisthe fact of pluralism makes certain a degree of chaos. For Hobbes and his absolutist followers, the pluralism in the state of nature guarantees the chaos of the state of war: the state of nature is the state of war (cf. Leviathan, chapter 13, Schmitt 2007). On the grounds of individualism, pluralism, uncertainty, and flux, society emerges with the singular focus of 220  guaranteeing public peace and stability (Rawls 2005). It would be too quick to say that chaos is overcome by the stabilizing nature of a shared, known, and standing law. Indeed, for Hobbes, the stabilizing nature of the law is due to the absolute, dare say arbitrary, political power of the Leviathan that floats always behind the rule of law.  Centralized, unhindered, and univocal political power is the true basis of liberal public peace, and it would be a categorical confusion to equate this with the law. The law is a product of the political power, not a container of it. The sovereign exercises its power through the law, which makes the law an instrument that necessarily has no critical edge. Indeed, to demand that the law curtail political power is, from the liberal absolutist position, to destabilize the political -legal power that guarantees the power of the law in the first place. To negate the importance of the political powerto believe that the law could do what the sovereign canis to negate the political ontological foundations of liberalism: flux and uncertainty. In other words, in calling for the rule of law to constrain political power, an alternative political ontology is assumed: rather than uncertainty and flux, the political world is wholly-knowable, rational, and certain. On these alternative ontological grounds, then, the law can reign supreme since there is no need for extra-legal action. In effect, this denies the primary importance of individual pluralism, perhaps making this a strictly illiberal political ontology.  At any rate, liberal absolutism begins and ends with a political power that must be univocal in resisting the political reality of uncertainty and flux. Accordingly, it must deny the independent power of the rule of law (since it is a product of sovereign power). The law cannot curtail the sovereign. In light of the tight logic of liberal absolutism, it is seemingly difficult to see howby political power cannot be restrained by anything, and certainly not by the rule of law. Liberal 221  commitment to political liberalismspecifically here, understood as individualism and pluralism. The chief architect of liberal constitutionalism is John Locke (Kleinerman 2009).  individual-level focus, and that, given this individualism, that there is legitimate pluralism in ends. Indeed, as I will show below, Locke explicitly anchors his liberal constitutionalism in the political Second Treatise section [ST] 157, Nacol 2011). In this way, Locke does not attempt to critique Hobbes on non-liberal groundsfor example, by denying individualism and legitimate pluralism. The problem facing liberal constitutionalism is not its commitment to liberalism, but its commitment to securing liberalism through other means than political absolutism. The concern facing liberal constitutionalism is not to account for its commitment to liberal individualism (though such criticisms do apply).3 Instead, the simpler objectionand therefore the more devastating oneis that liberal constitutionalism cannot resist the siren song of liberal absolutism. In other words, if liberal constitutionalism claims to secure liberalism by appealing to institutions, it sorely misses the objection raised by Hobbesian liberal absolutism. Institutions are surely indispensable for practical liberal politics, but they cannot reach out and curtail the potentially necessary extra- st square up against what he calls in liberal constitutionalism (Fatovic 2004).4 Put simply, Locke defines the prerogative power as 222  the ability to go beyond the law, but it necessarily can even go against it, in the name of the public good. In other words, political power exercised in the name of the public good can in fact be legitimate, even when the laws are against the action.  Whyquately trace the public good. If the laws could simply trace the public good, extra-legal political power would be in fact illegal political power. Instead, as Locke makes clear here, political life cannot escape a  the prerogative is based on the frank recognition that when it comes to first principles about the nature of political reality it is ineradicably one of flux. Since we begin and always remain in a world of flux, extra-legal political power (the prerogative) will always be a structural fact of our politics. To deny this, Locke would say, is to deny political reality. Constitutionalism, however, intimates the priority of the law over choiceor, to use 5 But, if the power of the law is necessarily inadequate, then what is the purpose of the constitution at all? How does it relate to the prerogative power? In the recent literature on the nature of the prerogative power and liberal constitutionalism, there are largely two positions: constitutionalists and extra-constitutionalist.  For some, the prerogative power is not a power that exists outside of the constitutional systemit is not fundamentally an extra-constitutional power (Arato 2006; Feldman 2008; 223  Scheuerman 2006; Zuckerman 2006).6 The argument for these constitutionalists runs as follows. Drawing from a longstanding republican tradition, there has been the recognition that in times of emergency the rule of law may need to be suspended. Indeed, classical republicans held a certain type of dualist approach to the rule of law where there were essentially two laws: the rule of law for normal everyday political life, and a law that guided action in the state of exception (Feldman 2008, 550-551). Here, the presumption was that institutional procedures would carefully guide the extra-legal claims of the one law over another, and that the decision making process would able to adapt the law to a world of flux.  Picking up this institutional perspective are those that hold that, rather than relying on two competing types of law (which is itself prone to destabilizing conflict), the prerogative or extra-constitutional power can be wholly couched within the constitutional system. For these scholars, the role of the independent judiciary should effectively evaluate prerogative claims after the fact (Cole 2003; Kostal 2005).7 Here, the claim is that, while the prerogative power is necessarily a power that can go against the law in a particular instance, this is extra-legal power is simultaneously granted this power from the constitutional structure, and the consequences of the prerogative can be evaluated under the rubric of the law.  Similar to this last constitutionalist position, there is another way to ground the prerogative within the constitutional structure. The previous perspective put the whole of the prerogative within the constitutional structure, arguing that its origin of power stems from the constitution itself and, therefore, is beholden to the law. However, it could be possible to argue that the prerogative is a constituted power, but it need not be evaluated in within the constitutional structure. In other words, there is a sense that the prerogative power can be understood as a constituted powersomething that is afforded its legitimacy from the constitution itselfbut the 224  precise application and potential consequences of the prerogative cannot be retroactively brought under the gaze of the law. As Feldman pointedly remarks, this constitutionalist perspective - position is almost explicitly a Hobbesian liberal absolutist one, which makes renders it incoherent as a model of liberal constitutionalism. The last model, and the one I will spend considerable time describing and defending in this -Tushnet 2005).8 thought, and it is, I argue, the only one that can properly meet the ontological criticism from the liberal absolutism camp. Though I will go into considerable detail below, the general argument of this model is as follows. The prerogative power is not properly a constituted powerits basis rests in a pre-political, or simply extra-legal state. In this way, the prerogative, while recognized within the -legal character of the prerogative power. The prerogative should always rest outside the constitutional structure, since any attempt to naturalize it would mirror the previous -, the normative extra-legal model argues that the only way to resist the prerogative power is to counter it with another extra-legal power: the democratic public or the people. Here, when properly understood, liberal constitutionalism is not simply an attempt to foster contestation within a constitutional system (though this is an important instrumental virtue of the liberal polity), but to promote contestation between extra-legal forces: the people and the prerogative. It is only on the ground of the contestation between these extra-legal forces, I argue, that liberal constitutionalism can survive.  225  The rest of this chapter will outline the extra-constitutional model. In particular, I focus on the public trust component of the model. I then present a criticism of this model, that levels two charges. First, it argues that liberal constitutionalism still fails to live up to the political ontological commitments of liberalism, and therefore runs the risk of falling into incoherence or, worse, liberal absolutism. The second aspect of the criticism is that it demands too much of the democratic peoplei.e., it is not even theoretically feasible. In the last section of this chapter, I respond to both charges, and, in so doing, fill in aspects of liberal constitutionalism that have gone either under-theorized or ignored by even its staunchest defenders. NORMATIVE EXTRA-LEGALISM  One of the most prominent articulations of the normative extra-legal model is found in ing section, I will carefully trace his argument, paying particular attention to the role of political trust and the democratic public. just one part of Klein-legal model, I lay the groundwork for my own project of putting ontology, trust, and the busie head at the center of liberal constitutionalism.  the classical tradition in focusing not on thconstitutionalism rests on this modern break, one that shifts the question from one about ultimate how 226  to arrive at peace. But, as Kleinerman points out, the modern search for stability and public peace need not be a liberal constitutionalism but, indeed, a liberal absolutism Leviathan.  Once we have abstracted out the question of happiness or properly human ends, we are left with the technical question of how best to secure public peace, and the obvious first answer is founder of the modern approach to politics is, instead, an absolutist who insists both that the people the single sovereign authority as a threat to public peace. As Kleinerman eloquently puts it: The preeminence of peace forecloses the political contestation that would arise if there is anything other than one absolute answer to all political questions. Unitary sovereigns are always right not because they are any more special than anyone else but because they have to be always right, else peace to the exclusion of all other political goods (2009, 245-246).   stability, and the hegemonic power relationship imbedded in the sovereign decision. This means -foreclosed nature of the sovereignof who ultimately decides, a question that Locke is intimately concerned with. If there is a question about who decides, there is a degree of inherent political contestation that chips away at the absolute characternot of the decision as such how the peace will be maintaineda political question. 227   To establish a true liberal constitutionalism, Hobbesian liberal absolutism must be rejected.  Though, of course, it should not be completely rejected. Hobbesian liberal absolutism cannot be rejected on the grounds of its liberalism, i.e. its focus on individuals and individual rights, a view of human nature that necessarily avoids dthe animating justification for government. In true liberal fashion, liberalism must still hold that the chief p, beginning with Locke, does jettison, though, its fixation on stability as only possible through a unitary sovereign. A unitary sovereign, as pictured by Hobbes, is necessarily one that cannot be resistedsince that and this Locke rejects on (republican) grounds of non-domination.9 arbitrariness, both at the hands of others and 246). Strictly speaking, constitutionalism is precisely the recognition of the power of lawit is important to start from liberal grounds of seeking peace, this peace cannot be guaranteed in an absolutist regime like that of the Leviathan. This peace can only be guaranteed by the law, which constrains political power.  For Kleinerman, however, there are two fundamental issues that threaten the liberal the law must itself allow for a 228  notion of trustone that, paradoxically, can undermine liberal constitutionalism. The first problem that Kleinerman outlines is simply the fact that the contingencies cannot be accounted for in the  merely at the needs the prerogative exception to the law from time to time. The point is clear: since liberal constitutionalism must admit a potential need for discretionary power, this recognition necessarily to bracket and constrain that discretionary power. Contrary to certain perspectives, institutionalism constitutional authority seems, in part, motivated by the realization that the institutional separation of powers Madison envisions in Federalist 134). The point is that the prerogative power cannot be wholly contained even in the most carefully constructed constitutional system, and therefore the people in some form must always be the final arbiter.   Liberal constitutionalism, then, is not about constructing the institutional mechanisms that help eliminate the need for the prerogative or discretionary political power, since it is something that cannot be eliminated. Institutions, then, are important not because they help to truly constrain political power but in that they help guide the judgement of the people. This brings us to the second, and deepest issue with liberal constitutionalism, according to Kleinerman: there is a seeming 229  ereasons for public policy. The end of our liberal government is not to make us happy, but to make us safe and at public peace. This demarcation of the public and the private relegates questions of the good life to private matters, leaving public policy essentially mechanical questionsthe logistics of how to secure the public good of peace. For Kleinerman, a successful liberalism itself poses a problem for liberal constitutionalism, insofar as it rests on some more-than-trivial public private goods, leaving the mechanical questions of politics to the mechanics in chargeparadoxically pushes individuals more and more into the private realm, leaving the public realm less and less political but increasingly unilateral and absolute. Liberal constitutionalism requires the judgement of the people about the public good, something that they are seemingly unable to do.  For my purKleinerman, the problem that Locke realized is thatput baldlythe people trust too easily. of apathy in the mass public when it comes to adequately judging and trusting the sovereign: Very few [people] insist on fixing their own car because they are too proud to let someone else do it for them. They only insist if they do not trust their mechanics. Although Locke cultivates a spirit of distrust in the people, most give up that distrust when they meet a very nice and dependable mechanic. apolitical by the limited ends of modern government. The people would, it seems, prefer to hand over rule to a mechanic they trust than to bother insisting on ruling themselves. This problem is 230  deeper insofar as the mechanic can effect justice and preserve security in a way that the laws, given -247)  For Kleinerman, the real danger facing liberal constitutionalism is that the people do not properly trust the government as they should. Instead, the people are too willing to give up their ability to govern themselvesunderstood here minimally as the power to judgeand therefore enter into a particularly unreflective or uncritical or simply naïve trust relationship with the government. I have characterized this particular understanding of trust as the basic trust relationship I outlined in chapter 1. Put simply, the fear here is that the individual has given up any demand for a reciprocal relationship necessarily implies that there is no concrete, political resistance or checks to the claim of the magistrate to use the prerogative power. This particular regression into this basic trust relationship is not simply a product of individual ignorance, but structural necessity: there is a certain sense in which discretionary power is needed, even in a well laid out constitutionalism. regime. Here, we arrive at the paradoxical position that it is political trustthe concept so important in distinguishing liberal constitutionalism from liberal absolutismthat is now seen to be dangerous to liberal constitutionalism because it does not actually provide a clear path to distinguish constitutionalism from absolutism. Like liberal constitutionalism, it seems as if liberal absolutism draws its power from a particular kind of trust between subject and magistrate, as well.  Liberal constitutionalism and liberal absolutism could be distinguished from one another insofar as liberal constitutionalism advocated multiple sovereigliberal absolutism relied on a unilateral sovereign power whose command foreclosed discussionpower that can legitimately (i.e. concretely and not merely legally) oppose or resist the sovereign 231  command. As we have seen, Kleinerman is aware that institutional remedies must ultimately fail to constrain the sovereign, if only because the law itself must in a non-trivial sense allow for some o, rather than a strict institutional remedy, -constitutionalism, since the people are typically bad judges. In particular, the people are seemingly determine who to trust is all too limited; they trust appearances without bothering to probe enough discretionary power is structurally necessary for a functioning liberal polity, it seems almost inevitable that constitutionalism will collapse into absolutismpolitics will be replaced with police.   The only solution seemingly open to liberal constitutionalism is to revisit and clarify the itical psychology. As Kleinerman argues, -too-willing acceptance of prerogative requires a constitutional order that makes it suspect else the constitutional order will be overrun. If the people were less willing to accept the -like prinecessity of prerogative or punishing the exercise of prerogative unjustly. Because they tend to accept it, the constitutional order must create conditions under which they will view it with suspicion. In other words, their apolitical tendencies must be corrected by a demand that they become political by participating in the constitutional politics of judging necessity. (2009, 247)  First, let us make clear where the defense of liberal constitutionalism must be mounted. Contrary to many contemporary liberals, constitutionalism cannot be defended by elaborating more and 232  more institutional rules, codes, or regulations of the prerogative power. The discretionary power is a structural necessity of political life, and therefore must be accepted within liberal constitutionalism if it is to have any grounding in political reality. So, turning away from institutionalism, the battlefield of liberal constitutionalism is in establishing the proper sense of trusti.e., in mass political psychology. How we think about politics affects how we behave, what we do in the political world. As has already been made clear, there is a natural tendency within liberalism to think that politics ought tdisengagedyet seemingly content and comfortableliberal citizenry dangerous to liberal constitutionalism. The people are supposed to judge, and the major element of that judgment consists in knowing who to judge (and that one is supposed to judge). The people are willing to which, again, is to say that they trust too quickly. Second, since the battlefield is in mass political psychologycounteracting the natural way in which we engage with the (liberal) political worldwe must consciously create a  Though this is seemingly what Kleinerman is suggesting, I will complete the argument for him: in order to defend liberal constitutionalism, we must have a culture of suspicion, and this suspicion is a healthy sign of liberal constitutionalism. In this light, the talk of institutional mechanism and constitutional structure is important but for reasons not typically recognized: they help spread suspicion. In the penultimate paragraph of his book, Kleinerman returns to Constitution and the separatio248). This institutional solution, however, should not be understood as solving the problem through the law, since the law cannot properly constrain the extra-legal prerogative power. This is 233  an institutional solution to the problem of the prerogative only insofar as it attempts to challenge the unilateral claim of political power, thereby introducing contestation among competing einerman states,  Although political order remains fundamentally committed to the Hobbesian goal of peace, it reintroduces the possibility of real political contestation over the means of achieving peace. Moreover, the separation of powers creates three different branches that represent different aspects of what we mean by peace. (2009, 248)  For Kleinerman, the institutional solution of the separation of powers and a written constitution on.  Kleinerman joins ranks with many other recent constitutional thinkers who take political contestation seriously.10 This defense of liberal constitutionalism and the tripartite constitutional structure, again, does not solve the problem of the prerogative, so much as it allows political space for contestation that can tame the princely prerogative. pointing out that institutional arrangements like the separation of powers and a written constitution are not sufficientthough necessaryfor the survival of liberal constitutionalism. These institutions create a space for real political opposition, though, they do not themselves guarantee real political opposition. The most this institutional perspective can hope for is establishing unitary absolute sovereign. Each of the three branches ought to aim at a piece of the public political goodsomething that even liberalism must nevertheless admit existswhich consists of three parts: defense of individual rights, care for public peace, and national self-preservation. These three parts of the liberal public good, being lodged into each of the three branches of governmentthe judiciary, legislative, and executive, respectivelyare to compete over the boundaries of political power, the discretionary prerogative. And, it is precisely this contestation that forms perhaps the most important liberal political good:  234  There is and must be, of course, contestation over the boundaries of these functions. Bit this contestation should be, in itself, viewed as a political good rather than as an evil that should be corrected by final pronouncements. The contestation over political authority corrects the Hobbesian tendency in modern liberalism to avoid politics entirely. (2009, 248)  Liberal constitutionalism requires institutionalized political contestation so as to displace the natural tendency of political power to foreclose the political deliberation of the common good, eliminating politics and returning to an unchallengeable, absolute unitary police authority. But, it is important to remember that, even though the institutional doctrines of liberal constitutionalismparticularly the separation of powers and a written constitutionare important for maintaining liberal peace that still holds a place for politics, the real defense of liberal constitutionalism rests dency of liberalism that Hobbes counts on is that people tend to give up their power to experts, or that they public peace can only be guaranteed througauthority. The true danger to liberal constitutionalism is a failure of the people (and their intellectual and political representatives) to properly judge their relationship to political power.  THE PROBLEM OF JUDGEMENT   defense of liberal constitutionalism cannot rest on a notion of getting the institutional arrangements not simply legal but extra-legal. And, following Kleinerman and others, this extra-legal model of constraining executive or discretionary power must rest on another extra-legal powerthe people. Second Treatise that, first, the people must always be understood as having the power to decide the various aspects of the 235  benefit of the doubt in their judgments against the sovereign. However, this extra-legal model leans, then, ultimately on the power of the people is difficult if not impossible for them to do reliably. The paradox at the heart of liberal constitutionalism is that it must rely on something that it recognizes it cannot simply rely upon: the people being able to judge correctly the necessity of prerogative power.  The paradox of relying on public judgment that is seemingly necessarily unstable or exemplified by will outline his criticism of the normative extra-legal model. As my explication above made clear, there is no doubt that political judgment is a central concern for the normative extra-legal model. This could entail that liberal constitutionalism is seemingly set up to fail, even on its own terms: liberal self-government is impossible.  liberal self-government (that, if liberalism is successful it makes its people apathetic, rendering it a self-undermining force) but deepening it. For Feldman, the paradox of judgment at the heart of the normative extra-legal model is not merely a practical concern (though, it is obviously that, too), but an ontological problem that cannot be so easily dismissed by normative extra-legal theorists. Put simply, the normative extra-legal model relies on casting the public power of political judgment as a natural power. If it were simply or ultimately a natural power, there would be hope that the people would be able to judge it reasonably well. If it is a natural power, then it is a capacity that exists in the people, and, so, judgment is really a matter of simple guidance and education, not of experiment and invention. However, as Feldman argues, the power of judgment is not simply 236  natural but also legal, and this makes the judgment of the people nearly impossiblesince there are too many layers to any particular judgment. Judgment is not something that can be relied upon as an extra-legal power, since judgment itself seemingly relies on the legal and not the natural, understood here as the extra-legal ground upon which the Lockean extra-legal model is built. In the following section, I will spend considerable time outlining both the deeper ontological critique to each. -However, he points out that the how the people judge ha11 For Feldman, -certain emergency measures wthese measures (2008, 551). The powers of the prerogative are and should remain extra-constitutional, and therefore we should resist codifying the measures of necessity into our Constitution: Extra-legal powers cannot be effectively controlled by courts or by constitutional or statutory provisions that seek to regulate and limit the state of exception. Indeed, judges may do more harm than goodnot just accepting the suspension of legality by writing it into law as well. (2008, 552).  For Feldman, without the courts or the legislature to constrain the prerogative there remains only one option: the public. The key is to understand how individuals judge the prerogative, how many steps there are in forming that judgment, and what the obstacles are to rendering the correct judgment. 237   Rather than the typical two-power view of the relationship between the extra-constitutional prerogative and the extra-constitutional judgment of the people, Feldman posits a three-way -law), executive discretion (including prerogative), and popular judgment (including the right to resist tyranny) exist in a permanent conto Feldman, we have to understand that the prerogative and the people judge from two moments: the extra-constitutional and the constitutional. In other words, this requires that we reinterpret the n-natural or constituted power. natural power is not to assert that it has a constitutional foundation. Rather, I suggest that Lockean prerogative is best viadmits is that his view of the prerogative must entail that it is not a natural power, which would deny that it is something that is prior to the foundation of the constitution. But, as the quotation also says, it is a constituted power that, nevertheless, is not strictly speaking constituted. one that occurs at a kind of threshold where constitutionality and extra-constitutionality not only -constitutional, or, rather, the claim that there can be simply a strict separation between the two, suggests that political judgment must always have both elements of the natural and the political. d extra-constitutional makes 238  the practical reliance on public judgment that much more difficult: the people, untaught, are woefully incapable of rising to the task of resisting the prerogative. Indeed, the almost cognitive limitations and burdens placed on mixed with their already affective or natural tendency to uncritically follow the executiverenders liberal constitutionalism, as presented in the normative extra-legal model, a utopian fantasy.  For Feldman, if the prerogative is a natural power, it must have a natural opposing force to constrain it. If, however, it is a constituted power it requires a countervailing constitutional power. Rather than these two clear-cut options, Feldman has suggested that the nature of the prerogative is somehow both natural and constituted. Now, it is clear that for Locke the prerogative is literally a constituted power insofar as the government is itself constituted by the people, and the prerogative rests with (or is entrusted to) the government. Indeed, Locke is even more specific: the executive is given the prerogative power. However, this does not mean that the prerogative power is itself a constituted, i.e. non-as a transformation of some natural prerogative. It is a natural power that is given in trust to the , and the inability for there to be a world that has every contingency legislated beforehand (ST 157). Therefore, we -constituted fact of the prerogative power.   tears down a neighboring one to prevent the fire from spreadingan example in the Second Treatise. Locke claims that the individual who tore down the house, while doing something 239  prerog-legal action and the way that the prerogative is to be judged: 1. -legal action  Government judgment: maintain law (criminal conviction) or take extra-legal action (pardon). 2. -legal action  Community judgment: maintain law (passivity/obedience) or take extra-legal action (condemnation and revolution). (2008, 561)  For Feldman, the case as presented by Locke would suggest that the same individual-level extra--legal action has similar consequence from whether it was fulfilled by that extra-legal action or not, and the judgment is squarely on those grounds. However, for Feldman, these two sets of consequences are not equivalent:  while there appears to be equivalence between government extra-legalism and community extra-legalism, notice that the two dyads are not entirely symmetrical: When the government validates extra-legal citizen action it does so by taking action that is itself outside of law. When the citizenry validates extra-legal governmental action it does so by refusing to take any extra-legal action. And, -legality and punishes that individual for an illegal action, it acts by enforcing existing law. By contrast, -legally, through violent resistance (561).   From this asymmetry, Feldman concluthe Second Treatise that the people are generally apathetic or welcoming of a king who goes against tthere is an interpretive difference between how the government sees its people and their individual s how its government 240  against the law, the act itself is immediately seen to be illegal and carries with it a set punishment. The executive has the option to validate or invalidate this particular claim to use the prerogative, and therefore his options are: either to allow, and therefore pardon, the extralegal action, or, to deny, and therefore, punish the extralegal action. If the government allows this action, it appeals to something beyond the law (since tearing down someone's house is illegal). However, if the government invalidates this appeal, then the executive applies the act under the rubric of the lawforgoing any particular use of the prerogative, allowing the act to be judged according to the standing laws.   The way the community judges the extra-legal actions of the government is different. The -legal or prerogative power. If the community judges the extra-legal actions of the government valid, then it simply does nothing. However, if the community judges the extra-legal actions of the government to be invalid, then it begins the process of resistance. While the cases of the community and the government may seem symmetrical insofar as the community judges the government, and the government the actions of the individuals within that community, Feldman correctly highlights that this symmetry is quite misleading. The government acts only to excuse or validate the actions of individuals, to opt-out of applying the rubric of the law to a particular case, while the people act only to invalidate invalidates the actions of individuals through inactivity, allowing the law to be applied, and the community is inactive when it validates  241  This asymmetrical difference between community and government troubles the all-too-clean division between those who hold that the community can simply judge the governor, and that the natural power of the prerogative is not simply identical between the community and the government. In other words, popular judgment of the prerogative seems to be predicated on more than just the natural or pre-now it must be filtered through the constitutional questions of legality, necessity, and alternatives. The ontological character of the prerogative power has a direct influence on the practical estimation of the simple feasibility of the normative extra-legal model, i.e. of (Lockean) liberal constitutionalism. questions that give rise tjudge?  For Feldman, we judge from a social world, a shared horizon that is established by our laws and norms. Therefore, we judge from, at most, an equally natural and non-natural standard (2008, 562--constitutional either; it is imbued with law because it is exercised in anticipation of the judgment of the people who are mixed natural and non-Lockean compact, and the second stage of the contract establishes the shared framework that authorizes all government action. Whatever the natural power of the prerogative, the most important aspect of the prerogative is the one that 242  emerges through the constitutional systemi.e., in relationship with the law. The law is central to political judgement, which makes any judgement about the prerogative multilayeredi.e., both natural and unnatural.  According to Feldman, in order for the people to judge the prerogative they must make a citizens are now required to judge between legitimate (but extra-legal) prerogative and illegitimate, extra-legal tyranny. In other words, the mere fact of state action outside of or even contrary to law requires individuals to be well-versed in the law of the land. However, in trying to move the focus of attention from legitimate/illegitimate he must underemphasize the distinction between prerogative/tyranny, i.e. the distinction that Locke actually discusses. If the distinction between prerogative/tyranny can be made without appeal to the civil laws of the land, then there is no reason nderwriting the judgment of the people: Given that prerogative power seems to derive from natural law or our natural right to execute the law of nature, why should the preexisting constitutional order be required for judgment? After all, to judge whether or not such prerogative has been rightly exercised means judging whether this natural law has been followed or violated, and this judgment, it could be argued we can make as prepolitical persons, without attention to the particular political context we inhabit, with only a much more general norm of the good of the community (566-567).  Though Feldman clearly presents a theoretical objection (one I will defend later), he dismisses it with a practical objection: the problem of competing interpretations: However, for the congruence of an exercise of prerogative with the law of nature to be the only question raised, two highly implausible conditions have to be met: 1. Rulers would always publicly declare the extra-legal nature of an exercise of prerogative power instead of claiming the legitimacy of positive law. 243  2. No disagreements would exist in the polity about the meaning and application of positive laws; the only disagreements (say, between a ruler and the people) would concern whether an extra-legal action served   Put simply, while these are clearly two conditions that are seemingly prior to the judgment of the prerogative as prerogative/tyranny, they are in no way objections to the power and basis of the of/in violation of the law? In other words, did the ruler act legally or illegally--legal action was necessary for that either happen simultaneously or prior to the judgment of the goodness of the use of prerogative ledge, not only of a specific legal context, but also of the specific practical, empirical context in which power is moral of the story is simple: there are a number of problems facing the normative extra-legalist unlikely to garner such a consensus (570).   l necessarily withhold explicitly mentioning that they use the prerogative power, a certain type of forensic psychology is needed to even uncover if the prerogative event has even occurred. Simply, we must now have justification for even claiming if the prerogative occurred. Second, even assuming the explicit claim of the prerogative power by the governor, there still would be secondary interpretive questions that need to be answered and justified before the final judgment could be rendered. What 244  Feldman here is pointing to, though he does not say so explicitly, is the emergence of a constitutional contestation. The ultimate goal of the people is to render informed consent or active judgment as to the goodness or adequacy of the prerogative power. The user of the prerogative power, though, is seemingly trying to cover over the use of the prerogative power altogether (Tarcov 1981; Huntington 1982). Political power will necessarily try to hide, while the people are supposed to try to uncover. The problem, as Feldman is well aware (and so, too, is Locke) is that governor. The epistemological issueshow do I know, or am I justified to believe in, xare too insurmountable for the mass public to follow. Liberal constitutionalism seems unable to defend itself as a viable alternative to liberal absolutism.  RESPONSE TO FELDMAN  If the normative extra-legal model is to be defended, it must argue for the naturalness of the prerogative power, and it must also meet the charge of what to do with the legalism that often overlays that natural prerogative power. In the following sections, I will attempt to show that the nature of the prerogative power through a reading Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In so doing, I hope to establish that, at least for Locke, the foremost question that is on the minds of the people is the question of prerogative or tyranny (virtuous or viciousness), not legitimate or illegitimate. The former distinction stems from a different standard of judgment than the latter. The latter is from the standard of civil law, the former from the standard of virtue and vice. These standards are not discussed explicitly in the Second Treatise, though they are discussed in the Essay. In another paper I will meet the practical criticisms.  In order for us to answer the question of how individuals are to judge human actionsthe pressing question from our introductionwe must first understand the character and general 245  Essay begins with the 12 As Laslett pointed out, this doctrine itself had considerable political consequences since it truths, only what our socialization and experience have taught us from a very early age. The entire Essay is predicated on the position that our ideas are a product of our empirical world around us, and the voluntary associations and combinations of our experiences we make up in our minds. In Essay has a thoroughly political basis. In what follows I will outline briefly s), examine the three laws or standards by which we are to judge these actions, and the consequence of this for human sociality or political simultaneously the innovators of their moral ideas (complex modes), there is a tendency to see them as wholly individualistic. However, Locke makes very clear that this is not the case, and, indeed, that most people, most of the time, are constrained by a certain natural sociality that comes through the use of languagethe law of opinion. It is the law of opinion that Locke grounds in our natural self, and makes central to our judgment about politicswhen the question arises between the people and their governors.  Since Locke denies innate or natural ideas, the Essay must explain how and where our many ideas arise in our minds. Since our focus is on political ideas and notions, we will focus only on these categories of ideas. Our notions of moral and political matters fall under the categories of from sense-experience. A complex idea or mode is made up of a number of simple ideas. Since 246  can be confused if it is not made up of the right ideas, the right number of ideas, if it is organized incorrectly, and especially if we use the word attached to that idea inconsistently (2.29.7-11). Why is there so much confusion? For Locke, confusion is a real and pervasive problem since complex nd united under one  Secondly, Mixed Modes and Relations, having no other reality but what they have in the Minds of Men, there is nothing more requires to those kinds of Ideas, to make them real, but that they be so framed, that there be a possibility of existing conformable to them. (2.30.3)  Simple ideas, however, are real and so we have things that exist in physical reality. A stone may have a color, a taste, a texture thatwhile we may all call it something differentnevertheless rock natural, real (2.30.1). With complex ideas, though, since they are voluntarily made and joined in our mind, they exist only in our mind and not in nature. Yet, even though they do not exist naturally, i.e. have no archetype in the empirical world, they can still exist in the world, but the archetypethe modelis simply the idea itself.   While our ideas may be voluntarily constituted, they are not simply arbitrary: ideas do have natural connection, Locke means that, once an idea is constituted in the mind, another necessary iconnection, it has only the connection that is natural not any specific content. Other ideas have a ly assigned and separable from the object to the father of a 247  have with other ideas and the world around us. A moral relation is one that either is in agreement or disagreement with a given standard or rule. For our purposes, it is in this last relation that most of our argument is based.  For politics, there are two important aspects to understanding how ideas are related to one another and to the world around us. First, since there is no strict correspondence between our complex ideas and the empirical world, our ideas have various relationships between each other. The empirical world, in other words, is constantly a work of interpretation and negotiation. But, while ideas are not directly connected to the world, they have a sort of logic in their relationships. For example, there is a necessary difference between the idea of king and the idea of father, a relationship that Locke makes explicit in his First Treatise and in the beginning of the Second Treatise (ST1). Second, since there is no correspondence between our ideas and the world around usbut only categories of relationships between ideasLockean politics becomes the negotiation between what is contained in these ideas and relationships. In other words, not only what ideas are related to what other ideas, but what constituted our complex ideas, i.e. what do we mean by father or king, takes on a clearly political and psychological significance.   goodness of fit is to a set standard of judgment. How we judge the actions of another or even ourselves not only has to be properly characterized through the criteria of the complex moral idea, judging, according to Locke, are divine, civil, and opinion. These three standards help individuals 248  not only define and clarify their moral ideas, but they also help determine the actual morality of the action to which they have denominated a moral word.   The three stanLaws carry with them a consequence, which is either reward or punishment. Divine law carries the punishment of sin, the reward of duty; civil law that of criminal or innocent; the law of opinion, virtue and vice. These rewards and punishments are categories that often carry material consequencedeath, money, eternal damnation, etc. However, it is important to remember that a moral idea is not only the actual content of the idea but the relative relationship to a given standard or law.   content of the moral idea and its actual morality: Thus the taking from another what is his, without his knowledge or allowance, is properly called Stealing: but that Name, being commonly understood to signify also the moral pravity of the action, and to denote its contriety to the Law, men are apt to condemn, whatever they hear called Stealing, as an ill action, disagreeing with the rule of Right. And yet the private taking away his sword from a Mad man, to prevent his doing Mischief, though it be properly denominated Stealing, as the name of such a Mixed Mode; yet when compared to the Law of God; and considered in its relation to that supreme Rule, it is no sin or Transgression, though the Name Stealing ordinarily carries such an intimation with it. (2.28.16)  important to take into account the specific instance of that action. For Locke, the most difficult obstacle to overcome when talking about moral ideas is that people often confuse the word and the idea as not being relative to a given rule. In other words, because some action has been called or   Moral actions are moral insofar as they fit the complex idea that is denominated by that moral notion, and insofar as they are in accordance with a specified rule or standard of right and 249  wrong, i.e. whether the action is in agreement or disagreement to a specific law. Therefore, correct judgment in moral actions requires a stated and explicit law or standard to establish the rightness or wrongness of an action, as well as whether that action fits the description of a given moral name. Human actions, when with their various ends, Objects, manners and Circumstances, they are framed into distinct complex Ideas, are, as has been shown, so many mixed modes, a great part whereof have Names annexed to them. But this is not all that concerns our Actions; it is not enough to know what Names belong to such and such combinations of Ideas. We have a farther and greater Concernment, and that is, to know whether such Actions so made up, are morally good, or bad. (2.28.4)  In order to judge accurately, our moral notions must not only be correctly arranged into the right sets of ideas and words, but we must have a well-defined rule to which we can refer the goodness or badness of that action. If we do not have both, we are unable to judge accurately: for, if we are confused in our ideas, we know not what name to apply and what rule to follow; if we do not know the standard, we do not know the morality of the action, however well we may understand the ideas that went into that complex idea. As we have already stated, the standards by which we judge the goodness or badness are properly called laws. Laws are directed at uncovering and providing guidance to our concepts that we apply to understand human action. Laws not only provide the categories of right and wrong, they also define the complex ideas themselves. Since human beings can voluntarily create their own complex ideas and mixed modes, it is very unlikely that any two individuals have the same complex ideas or mixed modes. Moreover, since we can create our own ideas, we can name these ideas of human behavior as we please. This means that in our communication, when I use certain words to refer to certain actions the audience is usually unable to follow my language. What one would call justice another may call liberality, and what one considers right, another may consider wrong. Since our ideas are ours and ours alone, communication becomes impossible without a supervening factor: laws. Laws capture certain ideas and attach them to names, and punishment 250  and rewards are thereby established. What laws mean can be changed, since language changes, but they are the bedrock of our moral discourse: For it is evident that in the beginning of languages and Societies of Men, several of those complex ideas, which were consequent to the Constitution established amongst them, must needs have been in the minds of Men, before they existed anywhere else; and that many names that stood for each complex Ideas were in use, and so those ideas framed, before the combinations they stood for existed. (2.22.2)  The beginning of society is the beginning of language, which happens when individuals come together to establish laws that carry names, punishments and rewards, and the definitions of those ideas that are to be combined into the moral terms. Society arises on the back of its language, since -5).  That society should arise with the invention of language is, for Locke, an aspect of our following: God having designed Man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with Language, which was to be the Great Instrument and common Tye of Society. (3.1.1)  The beginning of society rests on language, as it is the common tie of society, which brings all individuals together. Individuals, moreover, though individual nevertheless have more than an s. Language is the medium of that social inclination. It is through language that individuals express themselves to others, and it is through language that an individual comes to understand the intentions of others. As Locke later writes: The Comfort and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereby those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. (3.2.1).  Individuals are drawn to language because they are sociable by nature. They form society to better understand themselves and others through clear communication. Clear communication, especially 251  of the actions of oneself and others, requires laws, which define through the names of categories of punishment and reward the meanings of moral words, the consequences of human actions.  From the view of the Essay, Locke is not a defender of the solely atomistic individualist approach to politics, because he not only posits that human beings are social, but because his whole philosophy of mind and language rests on the fundamental premise that individuals need to express themselves to others, the need to understand the actions of others and how their actions will be inindividual is still the unit of analysis.13 There are no innate ideas or universal truths, which means that individuals must construct their moral notions and complex ideas in their own minds. The community may be a teleological construct, but it requires that individuals can somehow bridge their subjective notions of right and wrong to inter-subjective notions. Inter-subjective notions of right and wrong are instituted through laws. However, in the beginning of societies, there were ords stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that a given word has a specified meaning, and that words is in constant use so as not to cause confusion, there is little hope that individuals will be able to communicate clearly with one another. Without clear communication, without laws, there can be no advantage of society.  The Essay paints a pSecond Treatise. Where individuals are scattered and unable to clearly communicate, where there are no state of nature. Since there are no natural moral notions, no natural law, we start off in the state of nature 252  with only our moral conscience, our own set of complex ideas to guide us. Again, to anticipate the conclusion, the state of nature understood from a psychological perspective does not disappear once society is formed or even when the government is formed. Instead, it sits solidly in the background as a standard by which individuals can judge society and government. The Essay, in other words, conclusively states that the prerogative power, which I will now outline as the power of naming, is a natural power. It exists prior to the formation of society, and, strictly speaking, even within society but outside of the civil law. In the previous section I of human action, as well as define the different complex ideas by giving ideas stable names and definitions. For Locke, man is a social animal that needs society and language. The problem of language is a fundamental problem of society. In the Essay, society and the problem of Second Treatise, however, Locke begins at the beginning with Essay and the Second Treatise obscures the relationship that language has to politics, and, as I will now show, the true nature of the prerogative power. Much has been written on the relationship between the law of nature and the state of nature Second Treatise.14 As is well known, Locke gives each individual in the state of nature the duty and the power to execute the law of nature. Many scholars have attempted to reconcile the seeming contraction between the supposedly universal or innate quality of the law of nature  have seen, is premised on denying this possibility. Others have sought to determine what kind of constraint the law of nature can have in 253  Instead, I will fo-of the state of nature, which get carried over into civil society. The individual in the state of nature, following the psychology Locke laid out in the Essay suggests that the power to name and un-name is identical to the legislative and executive powers in the state of nature and in civil society. The prerogative power is the power of naming and un-naming in the particular circumstances what has been established in general, by This is a considerable power politically since the power by necessity, according to the psychological system Locke has outlined in his Essay, and this extends from the state of nature and into civil society.   To begin, Locke presents the origin of society and government as one that stems from a state of nature.15 In that state of nature, Locke claims every individual has the duty to protect all of mankind and, as a consequence, himself.16 If individuals put themselves in positions where they are actively harming another, they are no longer a part of the community. What Locke means here is individuals in the state of nature have formed a set of criteria about what it means to partake in and lions, which are threatening and, most importantly non-human (ST 11, 16). A threat requires punishment, which is determined by the individual, and extends only so far as retribution and restraint permitand these are, of course, determined by that individual.17  In the state of nature, then, we not only have the legislative power, the executive power, but most importantly the prerogative power. The legislative power is the power to name a given action that one perceives occurring in the world as a moral action that either requires punishment or reward (ST 151-152). Not only that, but the legislative power also determines the extent of the 254  punishment or reward. The executive power is the power to literally execute the punishment or reward. In the state of nature,18 determined as morally wrong, they must also determine its actual morality by referencing some standard. Since there is no civil law in the state of nature, there can only be the divine law or the law of opinion to appeal to.19  and it is the conscience which is operant in the state of nature when dealing with punishment and reward (ST 8). The prerogative power, which I have defined as naming in the particular what has already been named in general, does so not on the grounds of civil law, but on raise the question of legality in the state of nature to judge the actions of others, since there is no civil law, but, instead they measure the actions of others from the standard of their opinion, or conscience, which tells them what actions are virtuous or viciousunderstood to be what is good for society or the community, the public good of mankind.  The prerogative power is the political equivalent to the process of naming moral actions, Essay. The approach I suggest to reading the state of nature is a hermeneutical one: one where individuals are not only capable but must necessarily determine the meaning of the actions of others. By hermeneutical, I mean simply to uncover and ascribe meaning to actions. war is a state of enmity and destruction; And therefore declaring by Word or Action, not a passionate or hasty, but a sedate settled Design, war with him against whom he has state of war is recognizable only if one understands what a sedate and settled design or an intention to do harm means. The state of nature and the state of war are separated only by how a given 255  individual judges and understands to help reveal the intentions of others through the establishment of a standard to help regulate how individuals interpret the world around them (Casson 2011; Kleinerman 2009; Tarcov 1981). The state of nature and the state of war, in other words, are not historical state of mankind but psychological states of the mind. Since there are no innate ideas nor does anyone have the power Superior on Earth, with Authority to judgeruled by a given community and its lawsi.e. to adopt their language and categories of thinking, the hermeneutical lens of the standing laws (ST 19, 21).20 Put simply, all we have is our  which we use to judge the actions of others, to uncover their intentions, however, in society, this conscience becomes a much more social tie (Casson 2011). According to Locke, the power to judge by our consciences is given up in some significant way when the laws of that country (ST 129). The laws will determine what we had only subjectively determined in the state of nature: what actions are moral by delineating what actions will be called legal or illegal, lawful or unlawful. But this is not to suggest that the civil law is the only operant standard for judging moral actions in a constituted society. In fact, Locke explicitly states that the people still judge by their consciences, which forms public opinion in society: For though men uniting into politick society, have resigned up to the publick the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow-citizen, any farther than the law of that country directs: yet they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approaching or disapproving of the actions of those whom they live amongst, and converse with: And by this approbation and dislike they establish amongst themselves, what they call Vertue and Vice. (2.28.10)  Though individuals give up their force to the political societywhich uses that force to dictate and execute the lawsthey do not give up the power to think an action virtuous or vicious. This 256  may seem like a trivial point, but it is a point that carries considerable political consequence when discussing the nature and limits of the prerogative. By virtue and vice, Locke means an action that discgenerally. In fact, though they be bad judges in their own cases, they are good judges in the cases of others:  Nay, even those men whose practice was otherwise, failed not to give their Approbation right, few being depraved to that degree, as not to condemn, at least in others, the faults they themselves were guilty of: whereby even in the corruption of manners, the true Boundaries of the Law of Nature, which ought to be the Rule of Vertue and Vice, were pretty well maintained (2.28.11).   e governed by the opinions of that establish the rule of virtue and vice. The law of nature, which dictates that one act with the advantage of society and oneself as its end is meted out by the law of opinion which determines if the action was virtuous or vicious. The prerogative power, as we shall see below, insofar as it names and un-names, acts in accordance with the standard not of civil law but in light of the law of nature, now understood to be the law of opinion, the standard of virtue and vice.21  As we have already stated above with the example of stealing, the action is moral not only insofar as the idea of that action is constituted properly in the mind of the individual, but it must n action that aims for the advantage of the community is, if legislated by the legislature and revealed by the word of God, in accordance avoid sin, it wouas we shall see below in the example of the burning house) is that sometimes these three standards 257  come into conflict with one another: to steal is certainly unlawful, but to steal a sword from a madman intent of causing harm is a virtuous action. The application of a standard to a given action apply a given moral standard to a moral action. Since a moral action is relative to the standard to which it is appliedand since there are multiple standards that one can apply an action-the standard by which to judge the morality of that action. This is the power of the prerogative.  Second Treatise. to discretion, for the publick good, goes against necessity for such a powernment. This argument, as it stands, may not be as convincing as Locke hopes it to befor, is it not possible to legislate the exception, or at least legislate for the exception? This objection misses the larger ontological claim Locke is making. Read it in light of only the Second Treatise, it may be possible expect the possibility that one can legislate for the exception. However, in light of the Essay, this possibility disappears. Laws themselves are only as helpful to the government insofar as the world remains as it was when the law was established. A law is not only rendered obsolete in light of a crisis, the nature of the times may render the law obsolete, too. If a law has been rendered obsolete by the nature of the times, the prerogative can go against that law in the name of the public good. A law, the standard of civil law, is a general and static definition of the category of lawful and 258  unlawful actions. As general words with static definitions, when words and peoples changeas Locke says they do (cf. Essay 2.22.7; 3.3.19)so too does society and its needs. The prerogative is a corrective force, when it acts to reflect that change in society (ST 155-158). Put simply, if it is done correctly, the prerogative corrects the laws in application by not judgingor un-namingfrom the standard of civil law, i.e. by what is lawful or unlawful, but from the deeper standard of virtue and vice, public opinion, the law of nature.  Let us turn to the example at the beginning of the chapter on prerogative. Note the words that Locke uses in this example, and how the quoted text from the Essay helps reveal the meaning of this example: Many things there are, which the Law can by no means provide for, and those must necessarily be left to the discretion of him, that has the Executive Power in the hands, to be ordered by him. As Cases give way to the Executive Power, as rather to this Fundamental Law of Nature and Government, viz. That as much as may be, all members of society are to be preserved. For since many accidents may happen, wherein a strict and rigid determination of the laws may do harm; (as xt to it is burning) and a man may come sometimes within reach of the Law, which makes no distinction of Persons, by cases, to mitigate the severity of the law, and pardon Offenders: For the end of Government being the preservation of all, as much as may be, even the guilty are to be spared, where it can prove no prejudice to the innocent. (ST 159)  The prerogative power determines which standard to apply to a given situation or action. A man tearing down a house in an emergency clearly broke the law, and is therefore a criminal who did an unlawful action. But, just as in the case of stealing in the Essay, if it was for the right reasonthe advantage of all or as many as possible, or done for the right endit is also a virtuous action. Therefore, by appealing to the standard of opinion and the law of nature, the executive can use the . The prerogative -naming the individual a criminal. However, it is important to recognize that even the prerogative power 259  itself must be directed toward some other standard than the legal, which is often made only to the law of opinion, according to Locke. The shared horizon is not strictly that of the legal but, and even more primarily, that of the virtuous or public goodthe law of opinion.   For Feldman, this story hides an asymmetrical relationship between the people who judge the use of the prerogative power by an executive and the executive who judges individuals who there, but it is only due to the force the executive has over the individual. The executive has the power and authority of the civil law, whereas the individual does not. However, because Feldman does not trace the prerogative power to be a wholly natural power, which not only stems from the state of nature but continues to operate in civil society through the law of opinion, he believes that the prerogative used by the executive and the prerogative used by the individual differ qualitatively. Instead, they merely differ quantitativelywhich is why when enough people law of opinion is the shared horizon of both the people and their governors, and this is natural ground. This certainly does not do away with the more practical objection that Feldman levelsthat there are multiple interpretive layers (not merely public good or bust), and competing interpretations given the basis of the prerogative as a natural power of naming, something that is shared by all and therefore shares a ground that can constrain tpractical obstacles are real, but it is simply too much to say this is why Locke cannot rely on the people to be adequate judges tout court.  260   In summary, my argument essentially culminates in the following claim. Feldman is correct to realize that public judgment is paramount to the normative extra-legal model, and that the theoretical aspects of this judgment have been sorely missing. For Feldman, the nature of the prerogative is best seen through the way the public is meant to judge it, and the way we are to judge it, Feldman concludes, reveals that it is both a constituted power existing in a legal context and that it is a natural power that points beyond the legal context. In short, the ontological fact of the prerogative is that it is both natural and conventional.  Therefore, Feldman concludes, the judgment of the people must partake in both a natural sense of political morality and a conventional sense of legality. This dual nature of the prerogative puts degree to which the prerogative power can and does exist within the liminal space between natural and constituted power. By conflating thisor, rather, overstating the case that the prerogative does exist in this spaceFeldman stacks the deck against popular judgment. As I have shown, the prerogative power is a natural powerspecifically, the natural power of namingand this is carried over and placed within a legal context. However, there are many ways in which Locke legal but the law of opinion. This suggests that Feldman may be right that the character of the prerogative, when seeing it through the practical lens of popular judgment, looks as if it is both legal and natural, but this is only to further conflate the ontological and the epistemological aspects of judgment. In other words, Feldman incorrectly given ontological priority to the legal at the expense of the natural. For Locke, the legal is importantthe constitutional system is importantbut not as a replacement or as an equal alternative to virtuous action, but as a means through which we can see it properly. Discerning when to act is different than determining the origin of political power. 261  The prerogative power is thoroughly extra-legal, though we must recognize that, in order to properly judge it, we may need to filter the prerogative actions through a legal context. However, and origin of the prerogative power of naming. Instead, it should heighten our awareness that the battle within liberal constitutionalism will always be one between a force that wants to remain hidden and a force that strives to uncover it. This dynamic at the heart of liberal constitutionalism  CONCLUSION  It is commonly understood that Locke believes that the people are to judge when there is a is a real issue since it seems that, in order to judge properly, they will need substantial legal knowledge to even recognize if the use of prerogative is even illegal and, therefore, in need of judgment. This line of argumentation suffers from the simple fact that it does not consider that is outlined in the Essay and only hinted at in Second Treatise. In turning to the Essay, however, it is clear that there are three standards by which individuals can judge the morality of an action. Of these three, Locke only believes one is truly the most effective standard for guiding individual behavior and action: the standard or law of opinion and fashion. This standard legislates what is the closest standard to the law of nature, since Locke defines virtue as that which is most advantageous to all society, and the law of nature dictates the preservation and maintenance of the 262  public good. The prerogative power is the natural power of naming and unnaming an action, according to these standards, by which Locke means that a given action is only moral insofar as it is in agreement with one of these standards of right and wrong. In the Second Treatise, Locke seemingly only discusses the standard of civil law, which explains why many commentators misunderstand the nature and function of the prerogative power, when they claim that it is simply the power to go against the law. But, in light of the Essay, the prerogative power is constrained by the people because it draws from the standard that properly belongs to the people: the standard of opinion, of to trust.22  it helps us clarify a sense of liberal trust that can resist the push into a hyper-liberal formalism and pull away toward an illiberal communal identification. The purpose of this chapter was twofold. First, I explored the status of contestation or agonistic politics the ontological status of Lockean liberalism. Though it may seem odd to say, but it is precisely the ontological status of liberal constitutionalism that necessitates the contestation for liberal constpolitics: one that avoids the improper trust relationships seemingly natural to liberalism through    Locke relianalogue of the individual tutor that spread suspicion among the people (Second Treatise section 230). The busie head does the work that many have suggested the public cannot, but there is a sense in which Locke still requires judgment from the people. This judgment has a low threshold, though it is still very important. For Locke, the public should be sufficiently suspicious, and the 263  busie head isin the name of nurturing the proper trust relationshipexercising a sort of moderate political rhetoric in perhaps exaggerating the potential fear if the people are too naturally trusting (Kautz 1995). This grounding in suspicion need not be highly intellectual for it to be important for liberalism, as Feldman (2008) suggests, since Locke only requires from the mass public that they be receptive to the claims of the busie head against the claims of the prerogative (Locke 2005,  people, in other words, are capable of expressing a reflective trust relationand not their naturally unreflective trustthen there is hope that the liberal constitutionalism can rely on the people as judges (Tarcov 1981). The public must, however, undergo an education in fear akin to that between the tutor and the pupil in the Education.   This chapter concludes by arguing that, while it may seem like unstable ground, the extraconstitutional model is the accurate description of Lockean liberal politics. This does not mean, however, that liberal politics is always revolutionary, i.e. that it is wholly unstable. But my reading suggests that "normal" politics is a routinely anticipatory politics, premised on guiding popular suspicion, and therefore more conflictual and dynamic than liberalism is often understood to be (Tarcov 1981). The centerpiece of Lockean liberal constitutionalism is the political conflict between the busie head (on behalf of his suspicious liberal community) and their government. By bringing the contest and conflict into the fold of constitutionalism, Locke avoids the need for constant revolution without abandoning the continuous possibility of a civil war. This is strictly speaking the precise political relationship that radical democrats deny liberalism can maintain. I show that, not only can this potentially existential political struggle between two groups (the constitutionalism relies on this political contest. In order for it to be truly political, of course, it must be potentially existentially violent, but this does not mean that it inevitably will be. He is, 264  erman 2007, 2009; Mansfield 1989, 1991; Strauss 1958).   265   1 As I show in the other chapters of my dissertation, many supposedly liberal theorists, fearing the instability of judgment, flee into the workshop of institution buildinghoping that the right arrangement will eliminate the need for popular judgment. Others, realizing that liberalism demands popular judgment, leave liberalism altogether, signing up for less and less liberal democratic politics. If even the most educated and seemingly sympathetic liberals no longer believe in the people to self-govern, why should it be surprising that the people will no longer see themselves as being able to self-govern?     2 Leviathan as the prime example of the dangerousness of individualism and which I draw out in detail below. 3 icular articulation of the individual in his famous A Theory of Justice, many commentators have focused on the relatively shallow and abstract characterization of this individualistic psychology. The battle became more pronounced in the early 1990s, where the camps formed into two semi-coherent factions: the libertarians and the communitarians. For a review of this literature see (Mulhall and Swift 1992). My argument here is not with the particular notion of the content of this individual psychology (that they are squarely a-social creatures or utility/value maximizers), but only in the broadest sense that liberalism must squarely defend the individual who carries rights as an individual. The source and content of these rights, however, I am not here willing to determine and it in no way hinders my argument in doing so. 4 AJPS 48 no 3 2004. 5 A famous distinction that Aristotle draws between the rule of law and the rule of sovereign power in Book 3 of his Politics.  6 Emergency Constitution after Hamdan,Constellations 13 no 4 2006, 546-iolent Crises Always Yale Law Review 112 2003, 1011-Constellations 13 no 4 2006, 522-545. Journal of Political Philosophy 14 no 1 2006, 61-84;  7 Michigan Law Review 101 2003, 2565-2595; R W Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law, Oxford UP 2005. 8 Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Levinson, The Constitution in Wartime, ed. Mark Tushnet Duke UP 2005. 9 -Locke in more detail see: Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism, Chicago UP 1990; Paul A. Rahe, Cambridge UP 2006. 10 For a review of this exciting, expanding literature on liberal contestation see: Ed Wigenbach, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, New York: Routledge 2011. 11 -Political Theory, 550-577. 12 Immediately, it should strike the reader as absolutely contradictory that there are no innate ideas yet a natural law that is to guide our political judgments. This is a tension that has been adequately discussed, though it has not been tion any discussion of the inherent contradiction.  13 This does not necessarily demand a wholesale methodological individualism, which I will have discussed in the previous chapters on the politics of trust. 14 There have been various waves of scholarship on this topic, all with their own sets of questions. On the one hand, experiment. This gives rise to scholars who critique the content of the statinferences drawn when forming the social contract and powers of government (cf. Strauss 1956 Natural Right and History, C.B. MacPherson 1962, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism -sections of the Second Treatise, the interesting aspect of the state of nature is not its analytical                                                  266                                                                                                                                                               qualitiesi.e. what Locke actually wants to say about politicsso much as what how he argues for what he wants to say. In other words, while the first set of nature, the latter set of scholars have attempted to analyze the literary character of the Second Treatise, hoping to move past the seemingly sterile state of nature doctrine. My interpretation of the state of nature will depart from each of these approaches, but nevertheless synthesize them to some extent. Understood psychologically, the state of nature is not merely a thought experiment, but the way in which we as individuals do think about politics. Therefore, it does our own. This does not mean that mankind literally came together to form societies via a social contract, but leaves thought experiment and reality, it is not historical but always contemporary. Needless to say, considerable more needs to be written. 15 In the Second Treatise, Locke presents two origin stories for political society. The first is the state of nature, the and Lockean IndivSecond Treatise, I will note that no considerable work has been done that ties the political anthropology to the Essay. This is unfortunate since it may well be that there is a whole second teaching in the Essay that parallels the political teaching of the anthropology section.  16 The fundamental law of nature is always about the community above the individual in the Second Treatise. In the First Treatise, there is evidence that the individual comes first (FT 57-59), but not in the Second Treatise. Instead, the Second Treatise presents purely political thinking which is protect the species, you can protect yourself but no farther than is necessary (ST 120-123), is the general orientation of the argument of the Second Treatise. Not taking seriously the other-directedness of the Second Treatise leads many scholars to present Locke as a thoroughly individualistic thinker (see endnote 1 above). In a trivial sense, Locke is merely saying that an individuals as individual objects cannot be denied. However, as an individual, his sense of self arises out of language, out of a social need to express oneself to and understand another. The foregoing -10). 17  18 As Locke says later in the Second Treatise, the inability to mete out punishment is a considerable obstacle in the state of nature. In fact, the state of nature is radically unstable, as Locke notes (ST 13). There is considerable Natural Right and History). However, viewed in light of the Essay, while there may indeed be radical instability in the state of nature, the danger stems from a problem that has a rational solution: confusion caused by our subjective use of words and meanings. In fact, the difference between Locke and Hobbes could simply be stated as this: the thing that drives humans to violence in the state of nature is a misunderstanding due to language. The whole problem of politics is language. Liberal politics is the first to incorporate this insight by making it the bedrock of its conception of legitimate authority: authority that has to explain itself is a liberal authority, not simply because it demands accountability, but because it puts force into words which have a meaning only in the community, in the public good.  19 The relationship between the divine law and the law of opinion has not been adequately explored by the literature. There is a passage in the Essay where Locke explicitly links the law of opinion to the divine law. Read as a believer, Locke is arguing that true opinion is always divine. Read as an empiricist, Locke is arguing that all things that are virtuous are for the advantage of society, and these things are usually ascribed to God, since they are advantageous to mankind. This problem betown belief, which is not easy to remedy. In the body of the paper, I will not attempt an answer to this problem,  point of view of an empiricist or anthropologist is more convincing than reading him as a believer.  20 to the fact that different languageEssay 3.5.8). Since individuals cannot control what people think (but only what they outwardly express), there is no autsuggests that there are considerable implications for socialization processes in a community through education and the family. These processes become highly political since they establish ideas in the minds of children, and they dictate the language in which that child will come to think. It is not so much the ideas themselves but the way in 267                                                                                                                                                               which they are expressed, the words and the associations that are attached to them that take on considerable political consequence. See Essay 1.3.20-25. 21 Though many of us may be skeptical of the claim that opinion may have such a constraining effect on the e does not share in this skepticism about the power of opinion (Essay 2.28.12). In fact, according to Locke, the most effective social force is not God and the divine law nor is it the magistrate and the civil code, but the power of opinion and virtue and vice. This last power is pervasive and constrains all human actionsof the prerogative, because a king is no different than a common man (ST 6-8). 22 There are a number of implications that come from this interpretation of the prerogative power. The first is that trust it is nevertheless a trust that is itself based on suspicion. Indeed, the political problem of language is that one must adequately judge the trust is earned. One could characterize the general suspicion that Locke wants to spread throughout the liberal society as one that is oriented toward uncovering the intentions of the executive: finding the Leviathan in everyday    268  IBERAL POLITICS OF FEAR  Let us return to the criticism of ideal theory liberalism, especially those criticisms levelled Political Liberalism general thrust of the criticisms amounted to this: Rawls essentially stacks the deck in favor of his version of liberalism by assuming what he had set out to provethat his principles of justice and general vipeople believe reasonable things, and the principles of justice and other doctrines as laid out in Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice are reasonable, therefore reasonable people are reasonable in demanding his version of reasonable liberalism. The problem has never been to people that have now been shuffled to the dissenting masses who would disagree with his principles of justice (among other things)? On what grounds can liberals, democrats, and republicans all seemingly come to an understandinghow can we translate antagonism into agonism, existential enmity into beneficial rivalry? This is a particularly important set of questions, because it seems more and more every day that the translation process has failed us. Part of the problem, it is assumed, is the loss of a demonstrable golden line that can clearly demarcand unreasonable, then what do we have left but flux, contestation, and uncertainty? Is there no other alternative for our public philosophy than an infallible bottom that can guarantee we are always in the right? Where is liberal peace and stability in a world where we have blurred the lines between reasonable and unreasonable? 269  For Locke, as I will show below, we should be wary of any attempt to secure stability on presumed grounds of infallibilitysecured through truths divine, natural, or otherwise. We must always remain in possession of ourselves, as Locke would say, and this self-government is intimately tied up not with intellectual deductions of metaphysical substances, but judgments stemming from observation, experience, history, and the occasional good (ancient) book. We often assume that, in order to secure liberal peace, we must forfeit our private judgments altogether, but this would be too far a concession, as I have argued for Locke. To forfeit our judgements, our self-government, is but to fall into a master/slave relationship, which Locke just does not fathom as possible. Nor, too, does Locke imagine that we would be willing to surrender ourselves as fully determined beings, incapable of self-government, placed within an unalterable web of relations, mirroring the biological fact that one is never free from being a part of a family (however we may wish otherwise). Locke denies this relation, too. Political power certainly can rest in these other relations, but Locke claims they should not, and this is due to his opinion that liberty requires self-government, however messy. We give up our private judgments not wholly, but only so much as we need to get along. The line between reasonable and unreasonable, then, is the final and perhaps deepest level of contestation within Lockean liberalism. As we have seen throughout this dissertation, contestation and paradox run through almost every aspect of Lockean liberalism. On the most theoretical level, the tension is between three competing conceptions of the proper relationship of insufficient: first, the natural or familial notion of political power as that which mirrors the parent/child relationship, and second, the relationship between master/servant, which happens through force. Instead, Locke argued for a separate relationship between subject/magistrate, which 270  entails something like a mean between these two alternatives. In chapter 3 I showed how contemporary visions of liberalism and its alternatives largely mirror these more fundamental symbolic relationships of trust chapter the proper subject/magistrate relationonly obtains in a liberal democracy which is fundamentally at odds with itself: the logic of liberalism on the one hand pitted against the logic of democracy on the other. Here, the work of classical liberals meets contemporary radical (democratic) critiques of liberalism to show that contestation must be admitted because liberal democracy is at best a modus vivendi among liberals, democrats, and republicans. The point, however, is not to foreclose the area of contestation (as Rawls had  In chapter 5 I showed how this tension goes further into the political life of everyday liberal democracy, use of the prerogative power. By making this tension between the prerogative and the people central to his constitutionalism, Locke indicates that contestation is the mark of a healthy liberal democratic polity. The supposedly radical enmity between the warring alternatives can, when arbitrary power, be translated into a undemos. meaningful countervailing force. 271  the question is what it is or is not reasonable to be afraid of. The answer Locke generally answers as the greatest evil, which is arbitrary power. However, Locke leaves the precise character of this evil one of judgment, which cannotproperly speakingbe a claim to certainty, but only probable open.  I ground this interpretation of Lockean liberaliss epistemology and ontology discussed in the previous chapters support the following interpretation. In particular, my argument in this chapter is that Locke is consciously creating a liberal subjectivity that avoids the claims of certaintysciences or arts that pretend to more knowledge than is available to us. We must remember that Locke takes his bearings of knowledge by assessing what it is important for us to know given our concernments. The most important aspect of judgment, then, is establishing that which we are most concerned about. For Locke, though he certainly is committed formally to the view that that which concerns us is the greatest evil, he is quick to admit that any particular expression of this concern is a matter of private judgment. For Locke, though, this private judgment, if it is to gain public support, must remain within the realm of the probable.   Locke is committed to forcing us to fixate on that which makes us afraid. Why? The center of this chapter is uneasiness, and it is perhaps the most impressive uneasiness since it lays claim to a particularly important aspect of our lives: our ability to self-govern. Our actions are governed by our will, which is directed toward 272  happiness, and this is achieved through alleviating certain pressing uneasinesses. Since we are driven toward acting by uneasiness, coupled with a natural drive toward happiness, we can say that, for Locke, we are driven negatively: by the avoidance of the worst evils that press upon our awareness. Governing men in society, then, is chiefly concerned with guiding and navigating their fears. I argue that Locke does not feel fear is necessarily detrimental to our reasonour ability if we understand the nature of fear, and are properly prepared for it. I Rhetoric, which Locke says is the key text for understanding human naturean importRhetoric, Aristotle is chiefly concerned with establishing the proper relationship between the speaker and the audience, which entails both that the speaker be of the right kind and the audience be in the right mood to properly listen to the speaker. The core of the teaching, I argue, is twofold. First, fear is not antithetical to reason, as the phenomenology of fear brings forth the rational or deliberative faculty. Reason reveals itself in fear. Second, since the proper trust relationship is predicated on reason, then it is predicated, too, on a rational fear. These two points Locke explicitly relies upon in his own political teaching on the importance of judgment and the busie head.  The final sections of this chapter argues that we should not separate the liberalism of rights from the liberalism of fear. The liberalism of rights (the familiar set of constitutional doctrines like the separation of powers, civil liberties, etc.) must not wholly foreclose the discussion once and for all of what, specifically, we are to fear and how reasonable that fear is for us. To make this A Letter from a Person of Quality, where I argue that he is most like a do. This 273  reflective agency is grounded on our right to alter the government, by normal means and by revolutionary resistance. The awareness of this right to alteration is constantly covered over by power, which naturally tends toward eliminating precisely this political act of alteration. What we need to always recognize is the potential of an evil befalling us. However, this brings us to the tension about the status of possible fears brings us full circle with chapter 2: the first-person versus the third-person perspective about what is possible. The contestation between these two perspectives is perhaps the he should therefore leave it unresolvedsomething we would do well to remember today. Fear gives rise to deliberation about what possible evils can befall us, to reason about our agency, and these ultimately lead to the liberalism of rights. POLITICAL JUDGMENT   Judgment is ultimately tied to what Locke will the second (and perhaps more important) part of his division of politics. Judgment is at the center of the art of governing because these are intimately concerned with the ontology of flux or uncertainty. In the following section I will outline some recent developments in the study of judgment and liberal subjectivity, noting that Locke purposefully leaves unresolved what is or is not reasonable, but gives us the dictate that we should try to deliberate about them in a particular wayi.e., probabilistically. To govern people in society, then, we must always remain within the on governing men in society through the passion of fear. 274  reflection, and the intervention on naturally warring parties by instituting a modus vivendi peace treaty, means simply that liberal self-government is not inevitable. Today, liberal constitutionalism is taken for granted. The highly contingent but tenuous achievement of liberal constitutionalism or self-1 Today, while we debate about rights and duties we tend to do so on grounds taken for granted: abstract natural rights. This is typically called the whose thought I discuss in the conclusion of this chapter).2 There is no need to deny the existence of these natural rights, but only that the driving forcethe ethico-moral principles of liberalismare not some simple rational deduction from a faculty of the mind.3 Instead, as we have seen with Locke, liberalism properly understood comes from reflection of the precise contingency or flux that is denied by those who baldly assert that liberal constitutionalism is a natural regime founded on abstract principles of some kindof nature, human or otherwise. Again, to be clear: natural rights are not themselves dangerous to liberal self-government. However, I want to focus on the point that the danger to liberal constitutionalism as self-government is not natural rights but the claim that these are the inevitable principles or rights for human beings. This Locke denies. Human beings are not innately guided toward any one particular endand the end of peace is at best, while nice, but one end available, and seemingly the most passion-less alternative to the more engaging democratic or republican alternatives. This point of the non-teaching against innate ideas. Without innate id275  which Locke spends considerable time excavating. In the following chapter, I will outline some  piricism and nominalism, he cannot but conclude that individuals are radically free and equal in the almost trivial sense of being the legislator and executive of their own minds. Locke is both an epistemic egoist and egalitarian: individuals are autonomous as they are equal in their autonomy. From here, Locke lets us see that, given there are no innate ideas to guide our individualism and egalitarianism, we inevitably fill into some sort of conflict of flux.4 The flux in our minds translates to the flux in our relations with others. The institution of a community provides some sort of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world, but only on the level of norms5 This, though, is not a problem-free remedy. On the one haepistemic individualism, and, on the other hand, the institution of a communal standard creates another layer of potential conflict: fanaticism or traditionalism.6 When we move to the communal, we shift from strict epistemological individualism to a potentially overwhelming epistemic egalitarianism--in chapter 2. The remedy for Locke is not to take on a dogmatic charactereither in the form of radical distrust and skepticism stemming from our natural skepticism; nor should we be content Essay 4.19). For Locke, then, the only way outto the extent that there is a wayis the balance and tenuous modus vivendi between basic trust and radical skeptical distrust, which is to say the realm lace. Let us turn, then,  276  Locke scholars.7 The problem facing liberal constitutionalism can be further brought into focus, now: not only is liberalism often taken for granted when it should not be, the core of liberalismjudgmentis often denied by predominant theories of liberalism, which argue for institutional arrangements precisely to nullify and displace the contingency of judgment.8 The liberal constitutional doctrineslike the separation of powers, the rule of law, etc.are taken to be the best defense against illiberal tendencies, both at home and abroad. If the institutions can just be more and more refined, our liberties and our peace can be more and more secured. The security, it is assumed, is in a stability that avoids contingency and flux, contestation and dissent, and in particular the realm of judgment. If we leave things to judgment, it seems, we leave them to flux, uncertainty, and instability. As I have argued, the ontology of flux is not an argument against liberal constitutionalism and judgment, but an argument for it.  institutions and institutional principles. Instead, these institutions become important in guiding judgment not in replacing judgment. The vigilance of the people must always be encouraged, and ce. But, the suspicious even the constitutional arrangements-imposed self-and it is this paradox and unresolved tension, best encapsulated as the judgment between simple trust and radical suspicion that underwrites liberal constitutionalism. Given the centrality of judgment, then, we must never forget the need for guidance and education, which steer this popular expression of the people. We shoumoderate or otherwisewhich hold ultimate political judgment and legitimacy, according to Locke.9 Indeed, the desire for it to be otherwisefor the 277  people to not be the final arbiter of political poweris the most dangerous opinion in fashion the flux of judgment, supposedly grounded on natural, abstract and perhaps demonstrable moral truths.  olds to be the defining character of the human being, as we often understand that phrase, is denied by contemporary liberalism.10 liberalism is to assert some set of innate ideas or principles of justice. The principles, having been uncovered, then become the center of our institutionalism that has only as its goal the maintenance of these principles. Since this is not the proper function of institutions, and this failure to properly recognize the proper end of institutions is due to a lack of education as to the true foundation of liberal constitutionalism, there is a necessary emptiness to contemporary liberalism. The problem today, then, is our failure to properly understand liberal constitutionalism precisely because we deny flux and the need for judgment.  We can see our problem today as an undue emphasis on one of two aspects of liberalism, which Locke outlined in a small writing about the importance of reading for our education. Locke the other, the one containing the original of societies and the rise and extent of political power, the ounderstanding liberalism. Political liberalism has a more formal and abstract aspectwhich Locke points to his own Second Treatise as an example for study. This book opens with the famous state of nature doctrine, and the abstract law of nature that is the law of reason that guides human beings toward a happy consensual politics. Of course, 278  this is an exaggeration of the true layers in the teaching of the Second Treatise, but this exaggeration has an important pedagogical function: there is a certain edifice of certainty to  in human beings.11  Put simply, this teachingcannot be the whole of liberal politics. Instead, Locke makes clear that there is another aspect: the art of governing men in society. From this simple dichotomy, we ought to be aware that perhaps the flux that existed in the state of nature and was overcome by us moving into civil society is not so simply eliminated by the emergence of institutional constraintsknown and standing laws, impartial judges, etc.bconstitutionalism, as presented in his Second Treatise, by experience, history, and observationthose parts of our mind most closely aligned with Essay and the Conduct (and the Education)and this alone suggests a sense of priority within the liberal teaching. We should spend our time trying to figure out the art of governing men in society, which we largely do not political poweat the expense of the more pressing concernslike governing men in society. Further, while the typical abstract doctrines associated with the Second Treatise are presented with a certainty and finality, we can assume two things: first, that this is a rhetorical or pedagogical move by Locke; and, more importantly, second, that the art of government is 279  predicated on dealing with flux. common authority, and to guide the fanatics away from imposing their private judgments as public doctrines.  Both the skeptic and the fanatic, as we have seen, Locke diagnoses as the characteristic responses of fleeing from the realm of flux and uncertainty (and therefore trust and reason) and intthat nevertheless still upholds the claim that politics ought to be grounded on certain doctrines (though the skeptic does not have such certainty yet). This is a generally cowardly or timid position. On the other side, we have the fanatic, who is more than confident in their own opinion own liberalism is that the quietude of skepticism has rendered politics a space where the zealous and certain fanatics to seize control. Skepticism indeed legitimizes ambitious and radically enthusiastic politics. The realm of uncertainty or fluxthe natural opponent of the ambitiousis the realm of judgment, and this is denied by both natural partisans of certainty. The art of governing men, then, is intimately tied to establishing judgment, if only because men in society are often those who repeat the all-too-familiar claim that politics should be a realm of certain knowledge.  contemporary perspectives that focus only on the more formal aspects of liberal constitutionalism. As I have argued, however, by Second Treatise, certain set of civic virtues among the citizens. I have suggested that the core of the liberal civic 280  12 The liberal subject is, then, one capable of trustand indeed directed toward a particular socialitybut sufficiently capable of individual self-of certainty is displaced in this phraseand replaced with the realm of the uncertain, or as Locke concludes his Essay, 13 The liberal subject is that proper liberal trust is a function of probable judgment. If we are in a world of probable distinctly liberal virtues, as we have seen, arise noThe truth, moreover, is not a priori which is to say and our evidence should proportionately ground the strength and importance of our judgments.14 To deny flux, judgment, evidence, and probability is -government. Put simply, the true ground of our freedom and equality is that we must govern ourselves by our judgment, and that we are all thrown into the world of the probable, not the world of certainties. the formalistic or overly-legalistic Second Treatise we will take for granted things that Locke himself did not, and therefore perhaps miss the true ground of Lockean liberalism by focusing too exclusively on what is taken to be the most familiar and most essential liberal constitutional 281  doctrines: institutional arrangements of power or ambition that counteract power and ambition. straightforward:  individuals have interests, and these interests often conflict, so let us set out to construct a field of public space where the conflict between individuals will be nullified, and peace and stability will prevail. Put simply, individuals are free and equal, and this freedom and equality often leads to individual and equality, and curtail and punish the otherwise aggressive and harmful and abusive expressions of these rightsbut cannot guarantee. If only one could figure out the proper variables in the equations, the governmental institutions we could have our individual conflicts perfectly calibrated and peace hoped. driven by interest, free, equal, and rational. But, it is precisely this notion of the liberal individual that Locke strove to create, and struggled to articulate, not take for granted. The achievement of liberal constitutionalism is not to be found in the institutional equilibrium where interest counteracts interest, bit in the construction of the individual as the thing for which it has a recognizable interest. Liberal subjectivity is constructed through a much more involved process of education and guidance, and therefore cannot be so quickly assumed, and much less practically relied upon in the production of a stable politics. The first and perhaps most important teaching of 282  the most attention, and those that in fact ground the whole of Las truly adopt the doctrines of liberal constitutionalism.  on to focus on the mind only guided by sense experience and langnot the typical institutionalism associated with liberal constitutionalism: If the problem to which Locke is responding is not solely nor even primarily one in which individuals manifest a tendency to invin the pursuit of their own interests, but rather one in which individuals display a lack of self-control and constancy, and as a result an episodic but nevertheless hazardous absence of moderation, then it is unlikely we can find these concerns addressed by focusing simply   The pressing concern for Locke is the constitution of a stable, moderate subject with some self-control. Part of this requires translating their otherwise unruly passions and imagination into meaningful expressions of interest. Only then does the institutionalism become important, but not a moment earlier because the individual (as an individual with meaningful interests) has not been established. Put another way, there is an uneasy and fragile connection between an individual t. The connection cannot be taken for granted, but must be the work of considerable education and guidance, which is to say of considerable 15 to which the state of naturewhere individuals understand themselves as individuals, free, equal, 283  and rationalcoming-to- More radically than suggested earlier, Lockean liberalism is very much a product of center of liberal constitutionalism. This education cannot remain neutral toward any particular end of human life, since it must wrestle out a particular normative conception of the human being as free, equal, and rational. The stability of liberal democracy rests on its ability to win this battle, to point: To summarize, my central claim is that for Locke the coherence and stability of his liberalism depend on its capacity to foster successfully a particular self-understanding in which individuals come to view themselves as individuals, and that such a self-understanding is heavily contingent on embedding individuals within liberal institutions, including, most centrally, liberal education. (Mehta 1992, 6).  l doctrines play an important role not in establishing the proper equilibrium of justice, but in so producing the interests and individuals themselves that need the counterbalancing mechanisms. Most important is education. This education is, then, not of any techne or expertise, but in the constitution of liberal subjectivity itself. How we ought to think about ourselves and the world around us becomes the animating question that Locke must set out to answer.  should guide our beliefswhat the norm of judgment ought to be.16 The historical origin of this Essay and especially his Conduct. For Locke, while it certainly will be important to establish the content of 284  those beliefs through raising the questions of how one is to think about things, and how one is to importantly, of his medical background.17 As a good iatrochemist, Locke recognized early in his studies that the only solid ground for our judgments and beliefs is observationthe surface of 18 From here, we come to recognize that the best we can do is gather evidence and impose categories to help us better understand a given phenomenon, never Then, we mark out and trace the effects for a given remedy, and note the results. The important thing is that Locke never attempts to overstep the clear boundary between our imposed classific-97). Locke, true to his larger philosophical commitments to empiricism and nominalism, cannot claim to form clear and distinct ideas about the natural essences of things, just like as a doctor he was not capable of knowing the precise cause of any disease. Instead, the knowledge he can have is of inference and probable causes. The point is not that Locke denies any actual first or natural causewhy would he?but to refocus our attention to the level of appearances and the realm of the probable.  This refocusing has a normative thrust: the radical skeptic and the zealous partisan are denied their claims of certainty.19 Once we are in the realm of probability, our individual judgment is no longer concerned with demonstrable proofs of natural kinds or first causes, but what we have -imposed categories. Obviously, Locke beings are naturally free, equal, and rational (a claim he must admit his ignorance as to its ultimate 285  truth), but the practical postulate or the nominal definition of the individual he will rely upon in quickly assumed to b  new.20 However, the general understanding of anxiety and its relationship to liberalism is almost ad hominempolitical liberalism, and that the point of political life is to separate the public from the private, saving public life from private intrusion (Terchek 1997, Wolin 2006).21 For Terchek (2007), anxiety molds his view of the nature of governmenthe is afraid of others intruding on the rights of the innocent. This, then, Terchek argues, is carried over into contemporary discussions repeat their initial anxiety themselves. This view of the liberal problem, of course, while importantlMehta suggested is not  is almost exclusively anxiety about the malleability of the busie mind. The problem is not that individuals have interests and that they potentially might invade one another, abusing their freedoms, but that they might not even come to recognize themselves as liberal subjects with interests and natural freedoms. Liberalism is tied to anxiety because its founders were anxious people, for whatever reason. Wolin (2006), also suggests that the problem is the malleability of the human mind, which is why which I will turn to in a later section of this chapter. 286  important psychology is to Lockanxiety for the liberal subject. Terchek and Mehta both ultimately argue that anxiety is a thing to be overcomeeradicated. For Terchek, once we have diagnosed the paranoia floating behind liberalism, we should be better able to move past it; for Mehta, the anxiety that Locke feels when mechanisms for solidifying and making stable the flux inherent in our psychologies. My point, however, has been the opposite: reveal the extent to which Locke sets out to make us more anxious, and to leave unresolved the tensions and paradoxes of the busie mind. To strive for a final solution to our natural uneasiness is to mischaracterize the liberal project altogether, to miss the extent to which Locke believes our individualism is predicated on uneasiness and its ability to present to us a world of possibility and agency through reflection and deliberation about the most pressing uneasinesses, i.e., our fears of evil. There is a certain sense that anxiety is not merely a description of what it means to be a human being, but a fundamentally normative assertion: this is what it should mean to be a person in this world. Holding out the unresolvable anxiety and uncertainty of human life is on the face of it not a comfortable one, if we understand comfort to be some form of stability and inactivity. For Locke, this is not what human beings are meant to beinactive. Human Education are naturally curious, and are only made these children toward the proper concerns of life: self-government (Education 118). This does not mean that the child or the adult individual should never be at rest, but that, for Locke, the nature of the human being is to be busy and ought to be so. If we return to the sentiment of trust that arises 287  concerns us: our life in this world. Life in this world is naturally one of flux, uneasiness, and fear. your concern otherworldly, and this is not where we should be concerned (Education 94).  This is a world of potential fear, and so we should be concerned with that which is most fearful. olved question at the center of the debate about political trust. Briefly to repeat the thrust of that - reasonable to always understand that betrayal is a possibility for everyone, and hence for me now when I trust someone with something. Trust happens within the realm of possible betrayalit is reasonable to always have some suspicion. The second perspective of trust denies precisely this mix of the possibility of betrayal and trust: it is not possible for me to be betrayed when I trust, here and now.   This is most explicitly brought out in the all-too-familiar conversation about what it is reasonable to fear. In the second chapter, I illustrated this by the story of two dinner guests, one who was an editor for an opposition newspaper in an autocratic regime, and another guest who was his friend who suggested the food may be poisoned by the chef (who is related to the autocratic ruler). The question I posed in that chapter was, who is right: the friend who has a list of seemingly good reasons to believe the food may be poisoned, or the editor who denies the possibility of being poisoned? To the modern (liberal) reader, this is perhaps too easy an example for us: intuitively, we believe the friend to have sufficient evidence to claim good reason for being anxious for his 288  from knowledge of other cases, historical or otherwiseabout the nature of autocratic regimes, their penchant for cruelty toward opposition, and so forth. History and observation naturally lead us to side with the friend over and against the editor. The editor, we can further assume, would have a ready response me to admit as possible, though increasingly unlikely. And, let us say that the food arrives and it is not poisoned. Would we then say that the friend was paranoid or mad, and that we should abandon though right, is nevertheless foolhardy or reckless? But, again, would not the editor respond that the friend is a coward? How should we go about resolving this dinner dispute? Obviously, the solution presented above was that we should just eat it and see what happens. This is not the most prudent way to proceed, though it is perhaps the most decisive: either you are or are not poisoned. The point, however, is this: certain knowledge for us in our daily lives is never so attainable, and whatever is generally available to us only happens largely after the factafter we have decided to act. So, what is to be done? For Locke, the solution is to establish obviously important what you believe, it is also equally important how you come to believe it. As Wolerstorff says,  We ought so to discipline ourselves that for those propositions of sufficient concernment to us, we hilosophy was, by inner intent, a public philosophy. His proposal was a proposal for the reform of the doxastic practices of all of us (1996, 148-149).  It should not strike us as accidental that the Conduct of the Understanding is the natural conclusion to his Essay: the point was no longer to understand ourselves as beings within a world of certainty, but to understand ourselves in a new world of probability and flux. Flux, probability, and 289  uncertainty coupled with uneasiness all make it so our beliefs and actions require due and thorough examination. Here we must recognize that we must be busy gathering evidence, deliberating, and of the matter is usually always outside our reach, and so we have only what is probable, our   Appealing to a privileged epistemological positionbe it through divine revelation or innate wisdom or intellectual apperceptionmust be dismissed not because they are false but no more concerned than the ancient skeptics to arise above doxa. Doxa is satisfactory for our life in the world; it is our God-given lot. But we must (1996, 225). The regulation of doxa22opinionhappens by establishing institutions that sculpt a precise epistemological character. The precise line between truth and falsity, however, cannot be attainedall we have is our judgment and the evidence. The regulation of doxa happens within the community, which is 23 The law of opinion or doxa is, according to Locke, the wellspring of the community, and it dispenses with praise and blame, which are to accompany virtuous and vicious actions. For legal sense, but it nevertheless has a more important role in guiding and constraining human behavior than even civil or divine law. This is largely due to the fact that people are more uneasy about the judgments of their peers, about praise and blame, being called virtuous or vicious, than following the dictates of civil or divine law. Human beings are not driven by the positive good, however great. People would rather be held in esteem according to doxa because that is where all of the social and political power properly is, anyway! 290  realm of uncertainty. For Locke, the consequence is obvious: human beings are now placed into a understood as a political consideration, more so than a strictly epistemological or metaphysical demonstration: Locke wants to bring individuals back down to earth, to recognize their responsibility for their beliefs, and ultimately to focus on their interests and concerns in this world.24 The move from certainty to uncertainty, then, perhaps strikes us as odd: how can Locke uneasiness and fear of our human condition? To what end can uneasiness and fear lead us? For rationality of fear. UNEASINESS AND THE RATIONALITY OF FEAR  physical history is therefore important insofar as it reveals the experiences and observations of previous should accompany the theoretical aspect of government. Locke makes clear that his Second Treatise should be treated as presenting the more theoretical aspect of government, and not it is not in the Second Treatise but in his Education (Tarcov 1999).25 While this certainly is true, 291  and I will explore a part of the Education below, I want to take a more (in)direct route: through Rhetoric . This section shows how, following Aristotle, Locke sees the importance of fear in providing the spark of reason, and, so, Locke must set out to give fear a central place in his politicsnot to make people scared and thereby escape their freedom, but to make them rational. We must learn how to be afraid. At the end said that this art is only gained through observation and experience and reading histories filled with reliable observers. But, at the end of the essay, Locke says that the key text for understanding Rhetoric: To fit gentlemen for the conduct of himself whether as a private man, or as interested in the government of his country, nothing can be more necessary, than the knowledge of men; which though it be to be had chiefly from experience, and next to that, from a judicious reading of history, yet there are books which of purpose treat of human nature, which help give an insight into it. Such are those which treat the passions and how they are moved, whereof Aristotle in his second book of Rhetoric has admirably treated, and that in a little impass. (Locke 1997, 354).26  Rhetoric is of particular importance for understanding fore knowing how to move the  Rhetoric, we should be clear that Locke himself did not merely leave the art of governing up to Aristotle or the historians, but wrote a to Locke, and is central to his Essay. 292  that changed drastically throughout his lifetime, and mapping this shift is important for specifically, for understanding the art of governing Essay Rhetoric, where it should m is properly grounded on fear and anxiety. Locke completed the first draft of his Essay in 1671, but he continued editing it and substantially revising it for nearly 18 years until it was finally published in 1689/1690. He released five more edited editions until his death in 1706, which indicates a continuing fascination with the saturated his other ideas about education, politics, and theology. The Essay had a monumental impact on the general trajectory of philosophy at home and abroad. In England, it set the tone for English empiricism and idealism by greatly influencing the work of David Hume and George Berkeley and Reid. Abroad, the book was translated in French by Pierre Coste,27 and became a cornerstone of continental enlightenment thought, influencing most major philosophers from Leibniz to Kant. The influence of the Essay, which at least explicitly is about the power of the ughts and reason, could be said to have far exceeded that Second Treatise, published anonymously around the same time as the Essay (Laslett 1988, 84).28  the destruction of innate ideas that had greater sway over the minds of the Enlightenment than his doctrines of natural rights and the state of nature. Of course, this point is often contested in Locke scholarship, including the view that the psychologicadestruction of innate ideas in the Essay ought to be differentiated from those political doctrines in the Second Treatise.29 Though I will not recount the various waves of the debate about the 293  relationship between the Essay and the Two Treatises, Essay is the ground for his political teaching in the Second Treatise. Essay and it is the proper ground seen Locke rely upon in his Second Treatise: the busie mind becomes the busie head. It is only from uneasiness understood properly as more tliberal constitutionalism begins to take root. Continuing what I argued in the second chapter, the doctrines of the Essay a politics of trust, is really a liberalism of fear, understood as one grounded on the politics of suspicion.30 The relationship between liberal constitutionalism and uneasiness or anxiety is not wholly  particularly Pascal and Montaignefrom grace, i.e. from our original sin.31 The notion of inquietude was picked up by Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws, where he placed it at the heart of the British political character. Though inquietude, Montesquieu argues, is perhaps not enough to secure political liberty, it is the ground upon which constitutionalism must nevertheless be built (Rahe 2009, 46-47). For example, the central constitutional doctrine of separated powers is justified only on the grounds that it gives the  In practice, then, it must be the separation of powers itself, the foundational law of the English Constitution, that translates the characteristic uneasiness of the English into a passion capable of setting their politic in motion. (Rahe 2009, 47)  294  The principle of uneasiness can be directedand indeed must be guidedby individuals and institutions. Institutions like the separation of powers give form to uneasiness. The justification of the core of British constitutionalism is that people are uneasy. Liberal constitutionalism, then, presupposes that the people are already in a state of uneasinessthat inquietude is a fact of our own self-understanding.32 For Locke, the concept of uneasiness is notas it will be for later liberalssomething to be eradicated, as if the only way to be free is to be free from all fear. Instead, within fear. While Locke does think that uneasiness is central to the human condition, he recognizes that this insight is often denied or does not properly obtain in the minds of many people.   Essay, recognition that individuals are not driven to act in accordance with the greatest good, but by the motivation of actions is not, as some would say, toward some great, positive notion of the good or of happiness, but to avoid the negative: pain and misery. Or, put perhaps more bluntly, we are not directed toward the good life so much as we are repulsed by the evilest evils. This distinction will prove to be decisive for Lockean liberalism.  Essay, when it comes to our understanding. First, power is particularly understood as an active faculty of the mind to sort, categorize, and order our ideas as they come to us from our passive sense-properly the source of most of our knowledge because it is the active agent that adds, subtracts, 295  Essay 2.11.5, 7; 2.13.3; 2.7.3). The second mode is that power is also the ability of the mind to control our actions and command our assent: we can suspend our judgment. This is Essay 2.21.29). The power to direct our actions, to exercise our will, is properly some action (Essay 2.21.21-power to actively guide our will is the prerogative of our freedom or liberty, properly understood.  For Locke, the question is, then: what motivates our beliefs and our behaviors? The will and the understanding. So, then, what ultimately determines the will and our understanding? To return to our Enquiry, what is it that determines the will in regard to our actions? And that upon second thoughts I can apt to imagine not, as is generally supposed, the greater good in view: but some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness man is at present under. (Essay 2.21.31)  Essay 2.21.29). Uneasiness is od Essay understood as always contaminated or related to the absence of something, misery or pain. Insofar as we are driven toward the alleviation of pain, we are aimed at fulfilling the absence of a good, which is to say that we are always uneasy.   The consequence of this is that human beings are driven by the negative and not the positive: we seek to avoid. The significance of this difference was one that Locke overlooked: It seems so established and settled a maxim by the general consent of all mankind, that Good, the greater good, determines the will, that I do not at all wonder, that when I first published my thoughts on this subject, I took it for granted. But yet upon a stricter inquiry, I am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not 296  determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionately to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it. (Essay 2.21.35)  Human beings are not moved by a clear vision of the greater good. The greater good does not itself uneasiness, which means that, if one wants for us to do goodto follow the path of the recognized greater goodone must as the greater good.   How does one influence the will? Uneasiness. The passions associated with uneasiness are Essay 2.21.39). These obviously are not the only passions, but Locke is careful to note (true to the aim of the art of governing) those passions which move human beings, i.e. Essay 2.21.39). These passions are those that most guide our actions in both speech and deed, in both our private contemplations and in our public deliberations with others. Here we see that Locke is not merely discussing, then, what is true for us and only us, but what is true for the individual and for the community of individuals. Put simply, Locke is referring to both psychology and rhetoric herethat which guides others in speech. The basis of our innate drive toward happiness is to squarely guide our own uneasiness toward that greater good, which is to say to make this uneasiness the most felt. This must be true, too, for guiding others as well through the use of speech. The power of judiciously using the power of certain passions to amplify and direct our uneasiness, is properly the art of governing both ourselves individually (in making our conduct fit with our own private lives) and governing ourselves in society. 297  According to Locke, we are the beings most moved by uneasiness, and not by the recognition of some positive good. Should we assume, then, that Locke is going to then say that we are unable to control our passions? Absolutely not. As we will see, Locke says that fear ought not to be taken as completely antithetical to reason; and, in fact, reason emerges out of fear.  Rhetoric.33 moved. Rhetoric. In this book, Aristotle is concerned with establishing the proper relationship between the speaker and the audience, which is to say political speech (1377b21-25). Political speech is often understood to be -30). However, it is in the second book that Aristotle makes clear that most people are not swayed by syllogisms, or are only rarely moved by them. The true ground of deliberation must first begin on the ground of the passions, and Aristotle says that this requires that the speaker both understand what is required of him and what he should know about his audience-6). If one is capable of embodying the characteristics needed to properly understand and speak to the people, what has important for a healthy democracy (1378a14-of the Rhetoric, we should take it as his indication that governing men in society is ultimately about knowing the passions and what moves them, and, most importantly, about establishing trust between the speaker and the audience. Since I have already indicated that fear plays an amazingly ter in Rhetoric. This then entails that, to properly establish trust between 298  the speaker or guide and the audience or the people, the speaker should be more than prepared to engage with fear.  In the following section, I will Rhetoric, liberal politics of trust, which, when properly understood, will be more than capable of engaging in speech that emphasizes the passion of fear.  Aristotle begins the second book of the Rhetoric by discussing the need for the speaker to  trust is obtained when two conditions are met: first, that the speaker presents himself as trustworthy, and second, that the is established when he can demonstrate or can properly claim to have the following three characteristics: good sense, excellence, and good will toward the audience (1378a7-phronesis (judgment) is a particularly important term in the Aristotelian lexicon, and here warête is the sum total of the moral virtues, and this is demanded of the speaker because it is important to not only have proper judgment about the things of the world, but to speak itwhich takes especially courage or fortitude. To not speak the truth, yet to be capable of properly seeing (or indeed possessing the eunoia is the clear recognition of what is of utmost concern for the good of the audience. 299  Aristotle says that the failure of good will is to finally give in to some other good than what is truly best for the audiencespecifically to flatter instead of guide or lead the audience. When the three are together in the same speaker, the emergence of trust between the audience and the speaker is possible. This trust is not simply affectual, though it does promote a certain closeness or friendship of good will, but it is primarily a trust that is ethical (ethos) and reasonable (logos).  Education.  The moral excellence of the tutor is a precondition for effective teaching, since the pupil will immediately follow his example in both speech and deed, so a slip in deed will quickly undo the virtues established only in speech (Education 89). So, then, we should expect that the tutor to have the very same excellences that will hopefully be given to the pupil through instruction.  Or can it be expected that he should be better bred, better skilled in the world, better principled in the grounds and foundations of true virtue and generosity, than his young tutor is? To form a young governor should himself be well-bred, understand the ways of carriage and measures of civility in all the variety of person, times, and places, and keep his pupil as much as his age requires, constantly to the observation of them. (Education 93)  The moral excellence of the tutor is required if the guide is to be believed and to be effective. Second, we should also expect that the tutor to have a general concernment for the care of the child. For Locke, this is to say that the tutor ought to set out to care for the child as an individual, as an individual who will be capable of self-government.  The great work of a governor is to fashion the carriage and form the mind, to settle in his pupil good habits and principles of virtue and wisdom, to give him by little and little a view of mankind, and work him into a love and imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy, and in the prosecution of it to give him vigor, activity, and industry. (Education 94)  Here the true end of the audience, the pupil, is to be capable of self-government.  Finally, we should note that Locke spends a considerable amount of time talking about the particular prudence or judgment that is required by the tutor300  phronesis. I have already mentioned this section of the Education in previous chapters, but I return from the tutor having the moral virtues-he should have considerable f the world, and about human beings. The tutor should have good judgment and should be capable of imparting this good what to fearto properly discern appearance and reality, which is the traditional definition of phronesis or judgment. Besides being well-bred, the tutor should know the world well: the ways, the humors, the follies, the cheats, the faults of the age he has fallen into and particularly of the country he lives in. These he should be able to show to his pupil as he finds him capable, teach him skill in men and their manners, pull of the mask which their several callings and pretenses cover them with, and make his pupil discern what lies at the bottom under such appearances that he may not, as inexperienced young men are apt to do it they are unwarned, take one thing for another, judge by the outside, and give himself up to show and the insinuation of a fair carriage or an obliging application; a governor should teach his scholar to guess at and beware of the designs of men he has to do with neither too much suspicion nor too much confidence, but as the young man is by nature most inclined to either side rectify him and bend him the other way. (Education 94)  The most important part of the education is to instill proper judgment, and this means mixing Aristotelian fashion, we must bend the student toward the other excess, hoping to land in in the to properly recognize the dangers that are always potentially upon us: that we are too quickly Education 301  speaker are repeated by Locke in his discussion of the pupil in his Education. In particular, however, Locke emphasizes the character of judgment or phronesis.  Rhetoric is to emphasize the particular moods or states of mind within the audience (1378a21-24). For Aristotle, trust obtains when the speaker has the three characteristicsgood sense or judgment, moral seriousness, and good willand when the audience and the speaker are in tune with one another. The bridge between the speaker and the audience happens through the passions, and it is here that deliberation first emerges. The goal of the speaker is to get the people to be in the right state of mind, to establish the right pathos for the ethos and logos to take root. The passions, then, are the base of the ethical and the rational, and so we must turn to the passions and, in particular, the most important passion: fear (1382a21-1383b111). Aristotle says that fear is the anticipation of some evil that is directed toward me, that is a concern for me at present (1382a22-29). And, since evil is to be avoided, fear is quickly the most powerful passion because it is intimately concerned with my concern and my end. I strive to avoid something that may befall me, and I am immediately drawn into the anticipation of this evil. Fear is not simply an unreflective responseit has a much deeper philosophical aspect: it reveals that I am a thing for which I am concerned for myself, and the concern is to avoid an evil, and I am sitting in anticipation of that evil (1383a4-12). My concernment, as Locke would call it, is revealed to me immediately in fear, and so, too, are a series of other insights: my agency and my individuality. It is me that is afraid, and it is me for which the evil is impending, and it is me for which this is a concern. The world, understood as the things for which I care, emerges in fear. For this reason, as we saw above, Locke is ready to say that fear can make us awareattentive, vigilant, and cautious.  302  possibility for them (1382b28-1383a6). awareness, but it limits our reason. If reason and ethicslogos and ethosemerge only out of pathos, and the most important pathos is fear, we must be wary of the foolhardy for they foreclose the fertile ground of ethos and pathos. Foolhardiness is mutually exclusive from the reasonable. impending evil (1383a7-8). It is only when we deny that evil its possibility or when we deny that possible evil its status as evil, that we fail to be aware of fear and we thereby lose our reason. Fear and only herethat the question of escape through deliberation reveals itself. Our reason is ultimately tied to maintaining our interest, our concernment. Confidence, properly won, is that recognition of the fearfulness of the properly fearful thing, not expanded or amplified by the cowardly imagination, or diminished or eradicated by the foolhardy and reckless. The proper recognition of that-which-is-fearful is the beginning of measured, moderate deliberation.34  Let us turn back to Locke. What is the most powerful passion that can be used in the governing of ourselves and others? For Locke, the passion is fear. Essay 2.20.10). Or, again, Locke as Locke says in his Educatione of evil is so natural to mankind that nobody, I think, can be without fear of it; fear being nothing but an uneasiness under the apprehension of that coming Education 115). Fear is natural, since we have the natural desire to avoid any evil that will likely befall us. Fear is intimately tied with judging the most important aspect of our lives: resisting and avoiding fear. This makes fear the most fundamental and most important uneasiness, and therefore a powerful tool for govern303  Education 115). The virtues associated with fear are courage and Education 115, 86). Fear is natural, and it is the passion associated with the virtues that guard and support the other virtues. we must say that fear does not necessarily cause lly, the precondition for the emergence of self-ownership, or self-government. Fortitude and courage are the first and most important virtues that protect the other virtues, and this is done by properly engaging with and not fleeing from fear.  To be clear, Locke is aware that fear is often understood to be one of the main obstacles to our liveswe willingly deviate from what we know or what we hold to be the good. But, this does not mean that we ought to be in a world simply without fear. Instead, Locke makes clear that we ought to guide our understanding to better engage with fear, rather than spending our time trying to eradicate it or wish it away. Fear properly understood is the recognition of an impending danger that does not  Fear was given us as a monitor to quicken our industry and keep us upon our guard against the approaches of evil; and therefore to have no apprehension of mischief at hand, not to make a just estimation of the danger, but heedlessly to run into it, be the hazard what it will, without considering of what use or consequence it may be, is not the resolution of a rational creature but brutish fury. (Education 115, 85)  The important distinction Locke places between rational creatures and brutes is the use of First Treatise 58). The difference between rational creatures and brutes is, then, the just estimation of what we ought to fear. Just as reason is a monitor to our trust, fear is a monitor to our lives. To deny fear is not the mark of rational creature, 304  but of a brute. Fear is important because it demands reflectioncareful examination, not simple denial or brash overcoming.  Aristotle turns from examining the passions individually to examining the passions -1390b10). At the center of these different characters is the various differences between trust and fear among the young, old, and middle-yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others too readily, because they have not -19). Aristotle continues that the youth are too quick because they have unearned confidencethey do not properly fear, and their frustrations with others come across as anger which blinds them, making them more confident. The elderly individuals have the They are cowardly, and are always anticipating danger; unlike that of the young, who are warm--31). The young are foolhardy, since they do not properly fear and trust too quickly, while the elderly are cowards, since they do not properly fear what ought to be feared and they do not trust at all. As is so often the case for Aristotle, the proper relation is the mean between these two extremes, which Aristotle calls here the character of those rashness, nor too much timidity, but the right amount of each. They neither trust everybody nor -34). The mean between trust and distrust like fear and confidence, are not dichotomies but a spectrum marked by two deviant and excessive ends. The aim is proper judgment of what is and what is not to be feared, the proper judgment of who to trust and distrust. This is properly the field of phronesis, practical wisdom. To simply 305  believe that trust and distrust, fear and confidence, are the only options available to us is to eliminate the plane of deliberationto raise the question of reflection: do I have good reason to trust or distrust, to be afraid or confident? This is the realm of reason, and it emerges properly from the passion of fear.  Locke outlines two approaches to fear, both of which he thinks are inappropriate: foolhardiness and cowardice (Education 115). The foolhardy assume wrongly that to be afraid is to be irrationalsince there is nothing to possibility of engaging with fear, and therewith of the emergence of the deliberative faculty. The coward sees fear everywhere, and cannot properly judge what should command our attention and what should not. Unlike the foolhardy, who denies fear altogether, the coward amplifies it, though too much as to cover over any actual deliberation. For Locke, reason begins by carefully engaging what is and what is not to be feared: Where danger is, a sense of danger so much fear as should keep or awake and excite our attention, industry, and vigor but not disturb the calm use of our reason nor hinder the execution of what it dictates. (Education 115)  Reason is not antithetical to all types of fear, and is indeed predicated on a certain type of measured fear.  Reason operates in due proportion with that with which we should be truly afraid. As we said above, foolhardiness goes too far in assuming that any recognition of danger of fear is to deny rationalitywhich amounts to the claim that where fear is reason cannot be. Locke outlined the opposite problem in cowardice. Here fear is admitted, but deliberation over what is to be feared does not emergewhich amounts to the claim that reason can only be possible where fear is not. The foolhardy mirrors the zealous enthusiast, who believes doubts and fears are a sign of weakness not reason; the coward mirrors the radical skeptic, who believes that reason is so swallowed up by 306  all the potential fears and doubts, that it may not even be possible. Like in the case with knowledge, so too with fear and reason Locke argues that both predominant positions play off of each other, oscillating between deviant extremes, never capable of understanding the middle road. Foolhardiness and cowardice are two deviant extreme responses to fear, and they come from a failure to properly understand the mutually constituting relationship between fear and reason. Fear, if properly governed, can bring us to focus, make us awake and industrious to the things that matter for usour interests and concernsand it can further provide us with the space upon which we can deliberate about what we ought to do. Rational fear puts us in a position where we can properly govern ourselves and others. Let us retthe ability to chooseto will or notand this is determined by the greatest uneasiness present upon us.35 In particular, fear is the uneasiness that brings to light an impending evil, and so it can quickly amplify the uneasiness we feel, making it more and more the center of our attention. The more afraid, the more it presses upon us, the more we feel a sense of dread or anxiety, and the more and more we bring ourselves to reflect upon possibilities. With fear comes the possibility of reflection, direction, and deliberation. If we are not careful, of course, fear may well swallow up our whole beingwe believe ourselves to be precisely the thing that has no other options, no ability to do otherwise, no ability to act thoughtlessly to flee fear in any way possible. Fear, then, also can cover over our reflectionmake us more determined than recognizably free. The key for Locke and Aristotle is not, then, to eliminate fear itself from our minds and our lives. On the one hand, neither Locke nor Aristotle simply believe that fear can be eliminated precisely because it is always a possibility of our existence with others: we can always be made fearful or afraid of another person. Since human beings are things that live together, and others can be the source of 307  fear, our being in this world is always potentially liable to fall into a state of fear. On the other hand, we should not strive to eliminate fear because it is the basis of our reason, it puts us in a state of reflection and deliberationprecisely with others, in escaping fear. Uneasiness, especially that stemming from fear, can bring us to a level of reflection that simply is not possible otherwise. Fear and uneasiness put us in a position of reflection and examination: There being in us a great many uneasinesses, always soliciting and ready to determine the will, it is natural, as I have said, that the greatest and most pressing should determine the will to the next action; and so it does for the most part, but not always. For the mind having in most cases, as is evidence in Experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after the another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others (Essay 2.21.47).  For Locke, the mind has the ability to suspend execution, to begin thoughtful examination and deliberate about good reasons for action. It is precisely uneasiness that gives rise to the need for our rational faculty of examination. The rational faculty can sort through considerations of action enough to find a measured response, to deliberate about what one ought to do. This is not to say that reason has properly eliminated uneasiness, or overcome uneasiness. Instead, we should be clear that reason emerges in the engagement with uneasiness in a certain way: courageously and with fortitude.  overwhelm the mind, rendering our faculty of judgment ineffective. Fearthe amplification of uneasinessindustry, and vigor but not disturb the calm use of our reason nor hinder our execution of what that Education 115). Contrary to our expectations, the education toward rational examinationrequires uneasiness. Locke makes clear that this may require a particular curriculum where uneasiness. The point is to live within fear and uneasiness, not escape it. 308  psychology was not lost on Montesquieu. As Rahnot ignore that this must be the first step to our political freedominquietude. The problem is apathy, and with apathy there is a failure to properly understand what should be feared, a deeper intellectual and moral failing. We do not know how to properly fear. If we assume that Locke held a similar view of political liberty as Montesquieu put it in his Spirit of the Laws, this has serious consequences for our liberal politics. For Montesquieu, The political liberty of the subject is a tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite that government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another (Book 9, chapter 6).   dication of fear simply, though it might be read that way. In other words, the tranquility of mind cannot be a passive, sedate, or empty of fear or uneasiness. If this were the meaning, the mind as Montesquieu here describes it would be the antithesis of tunderstood as a full negation of fear simply, we would have to say that Montesquieu has rendered the individual wholly individualwithout any sense of being with others. This Locke and Aristotle (and even Montesquieu) would deny as possible. Instead, we should recognize that the fear that Montesquieu is referring to in this famous passage is that fear that overrides reason, not all fear itself. There has to be a reasonable fear, which is to be distinguished from that fear that causes animosity or enmity between individuals. Reasonable fear can be directed or translated into something else than simply fear. It is this more reasonable fear that, while still a mark of uneasiness 309   government, particularly a  THE RIGHT TO ALTERATION  The general argument of this chapter has been that Locke has sought to change the way we think about ourselves as individuals. As we have seen, the general drift has been to exacerbate fear and uneasiness in our lives. This means that, going back to our brief discussion of the seemingly 36 The point of paranoiaor, what Locke will is not to make us cowardly, isolated, and timid, but to correct our natural ungrounded confidence. We must bend ourselves back the other way, from naïve or basic trust to a much more rational or suspicious trust, and that happens only through  It is often said that it is strange to see the extent to which Locke notes that the people are But, when it comes to both the Essay and his Second Treatise, we can see that Locke means that the people trust incorrectly and are too trusting in a certain naïve wayrequires that there be a proper guide to overcEducation where a tutor sets out to make his pupil aware of the worldto instill a Second Treatise and in his politics more generally does he rely on a guide310  come to see what is of most concern for them. The thing most concerning is self-preservation, and in particular, self-government, which, Locke will say is the ultimate right to alter our circumstances when needed. This last point is made in A Letter from a Person of Quality, which Locke wrote with the Earl of Shaftesbury. The purpose of this section is twofold: first, I want to show briefly the direct relationship between the metaphors and imagery of the Letter Second Treatise, cementing that these two works should be read largely together. Indeed, I argue that Locke makes clear in the Letter what he only vaguely references in the Second Treatise: the Letter is as an The second part of this section is to focus our attention on the singular great principle that Locke places at the heart of liberal constitutionalismthe right to alter the government. This is the final aspect of liberal constitutionalism that must adapt to the ontology of flux: the government itself is stable and just insofar as it remains forever open to alteration. For Locke, as I show briefly below, the unifying spirit of liberal constitutionalism is that all individuals of all natural partiesdemocrat and republicanwill come to be so afraid of potential tyranny, that they band together in the name of the right to alter the government, and the right to a competition to make the case to do so when needed.  Letter from a Person of Quality.  In response to a proposal to institute an oath of allegiance to the Crown that denied the Shaftesbury wrote a pamphlet that revealed the innerworkings and intentions of the Crown and those in Parliament influenced by the Church and the King. The hope, Locke thought, was that by 311  went into this particular event, which looked so unremarkable. Locke in his Letter is directly appealing to the public. The general intention behind the Letter, Second Treatise. Locke is a busie head. The end of the busie head is to constitute a people and to raise their awareness and knowledge of political life. 37 The point of such fear and suspicion is, then, not below the dignity of liberal democratic statesmen, but perhaps its most important ally and ground of the whole liberal constitutional project. Locke presents us not Second Treatise, but, he provides us with numerous writings that explain how the busie head should go about securing liberalism. The Letter is a clearly rhetorical document. Locke begins with a reference to a plot set in motion by the Church to demand an oath of allegiance. The imagery of this section of the Letter is nearly identical to a famous passage of the Second Treatise that I referenced in the previous chapter: the image of a passenger on a ship. I will quote both texts below. It was first hatched (as almost all the mischiefs of the world had hitherto been) amongst the great churchmen, and is a project several years standing, but found no ministers bold enough to go through with it, until these new ones, who, wanting a better bottom to support them, betook themselves wholly to this, which is no small undertaking, if you consider it in its whole extent. (1997, 361).  The point here is that the conspiracy against the people, stemming from a religious sect that is trying to usurp power, looks as if it might not exist, since it first may appear as different disjointed parts and false starts. For Locke, the point is to see that the events are all connected, and that the only reason that the plot had not further developed was due to a lack of resolve in the conspirators. This is recounted in the Second Treatise: 312  But if all the world shall observe Pretences of one kind, and Actions of another; Arts used to elude the Law, and the Trust of Prerogative (which is an Arbitrary Power in some things left in the ) employed contrary to the end, for which it was given: if the People shall find the Ministers, and subordinate Magistrates chosen suitable to such ends, and favored, or laid by proportionably, as they promote or oppose them: If they see several Experiments made of Arbitrary Power, and that Religion underhand favored (though publicly proclaimed against) which is readiest to introduce it, and the Operators in it supported, as much as may be; and when that cannot be done, yet approved still, and liked the better: if a long Train of Actings shew the Councils all tending that way, how can a Man any more hinder himself from being persuaded about how to save himself, than he could from believing the Captain of the Ship he was in, was carrying him, and the rest of the company to Algiers, when he found him always steering that Course, though cross Winds, Leaks in his Ship, and want of Men and Provisions did often force him to turn his Course another way for some time, which he steadily returned to again, as soon as the Wind, Weather, and other Circumstances would let him? (Second Treatise 210)  The Letter opens up by pointing out that the conspiracy by the churchmen and the Crown had only the conspiracy. The imagery between the Letter and that of the Second Treatise fit together nicely. In the Letter, then, we should say that Locke is revealing the tyrannical designs afoot. In the Second TreatiseSecond Treatise 230). In this section of the Second Treatise, Locke is defending the right of the busie head by be aware of their obligation to resist tyranny. The People, in other words, should always be vigilant or aware of the possibility of tyranny, even if it is not there. The Letter and the Second Treatise make clear that, not only should we be vigilant, but that we might also need to recognize that disparate events may in fact be connectedthe long train of actings need not be a fully linear development.   Locke is justified in writing his Letter if the busie head is not, in fact, dangerous to the health of a liberal democracy. Locke shows us, then, in both speech and deed that busie head 313  contestation is not detrmintal to liberal democracy, but in fact predicated on it. The Letter in -intentions of power, reveals the extent to which contestation and alteration are Locke, the point of the Letter is that political power will always gravitate toward absolutism, and, calls it, of the Letter is that political power will always lean toward absolutism because it will always want to cover its authority in doctrines like innate ideas or de jure divino (1997, 265). The true danger to liberal constitutionalism is that power which will claim to be unobjectionable. The attempt by the Crown to demand an oath of allegiance predicated on the inability to alter the government is the clearest sign of absolutism and tyranny, for Locke. It is the clearest example nly to eliminate self-government, and rational examination. Examination is important in the Letter because it establishes the intention behind actions, particularly those that seem remotely connected. That the end of this particular proposal was just an oath does not deter Letter is to establish the proper extent of fear we should have toward these actions by the churchmen and there is a specter haunting the commonwealth of England, and it is the influence of the Crown in Parliament, and this is the silent march of tyranny and arbitrary power, that remains largely hidden from the People. The Letter is properly the work of a Letter, needed because power always tries to hide.   The Letter shows us that the concern that should bottom our liberalism is properly that of self-preservation understood as the principle of non-domination, of resisting and avoiding arbitrary power. The goal of liberalism is self-government. That this entails that the government ought to 314  be held as a thing forever alterable, Locke makes clear in the Letter: the oath to outlaw alteration 38  Moreover, Locke makes the point that, strictly speaking, oaths are a very unreliable basis of power, and so, for the Crown to demand an oath it must be significantly more than what it seemed. For Locke, the consequence was more symbolica claim about the nature of the relationship between the governor and the governed (which I referred to in the second chapter): there ought not to be a reciprocal relation between the monarch and the people. For Locke, if a monarch has but only the where the king fears both God and the people (ibid., 76).39 -seemingly simple, was an assertion of arbitrary and absolute government. The oath, in denying the ability to alter the government, denied the right to resistthe right to self-defense. In the letter, the right to self-defense, alteration, or resistance, arInfallibility, Locke has already argued, cannot be admitted both in his epistemological doctrine and in his doxastic practices. It would be to place the legitimacy of rule on something other than the community of individuals, in something other than consenteither nature or, more likely, power. This would be to fundamentally alter the self-understanding of governor and governed as necessarily equal partners, as properly constituted as subject/magistrate, replacing it with either the parent/child or master/servant relation.   The ultimate defense of alteration is to see it as fundamentally the legislative function of societythe deliberative body. As Locke makes clear here,  315  For what is the business of parliaments, but the alteration, either by adding, or taking away, some part of the government, either in church or state? And every new act of parliament is an alteration, and what kind of government in church or state must that be, which I must swear upon no alteration of time, emergency of affairs, nor variation of human things, never to endeavor to alter? (ibid., 83)  -government is intimately tied to the legislative body of the government, and that the People must have properly the right to alter the laws. But, that denying the possibility of alteration is nothing more than a claim to power, absolute and arbitrary, because the ontological nature of the worldof fluxmakes alteration necessary. Letter here helps us see the extent to which the seemingly revolutionary character of the busie head is actually present in the everyday business of the legislative, since the right of resistance and the right of alteration are not distinguishable for Locke, the one belonging to the revolutionary busie head, the other to the legislator.   Finally, as Locke says in the Letter, the oath served a further rhetorical purpose of no small consequence: that alath is essentially caballing, then it is seemingly the work of usurpers and not legitimate. This takes considerable in counsels, or worse, that there should be so much pains taken by the court to debase and bring low the is that, when dissent is pathologized or delegitimized, it serves only to empower those who seek absolute and arbitrary power. The small oath, by the end of the Letter is made into the following interpretation of the actions of the Crown: 316  I shall conclude with what, upon the whole matter, is most worthy your consideration, that the the oath of   The embers of fear become even more explicit in the concluding lines, where Locke makes clear that what we are being told to give up is our ability to self-govern, to interpret and signify our own interest, and to be denied the ability to preserve ourselves. Nay, what is worse, they [the clergy] have trucked away the rights and liberties of the people, in this and all other countries, wherever they have had opportunity; that they might be owned by the contributed so much to put into his hands; and that priest and prince may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipped together as divine, in the same temple, by us poor lay-subjects; and that sense and reason, law, properties, rights, and liberties, shall be understood, as the oracles of those deities shall interpret, or give signification to them; and never be made use of in the world to oppose the absolute and free will of either of them. (ibid.)  Letter show just how dangerous even the smallest act by the government may be to us. The point is not to make us afraid and thoughtlessly revolt, nor to make in the things most concerning to us: our lives, liberties, and property. The vigilance required, however, requires commitmentresolve, fortitude, and courage. Our fear and uneasiness should direct us toward the reasonable position that, aside from our differences, we are all here and must always hold out that the government over us must remain alterable.    In 1690, Locke wrote a paper to his friend Edward Clarke, trying to give a rhetorical Letter 15 years later, Locke says that unity can be won without foundational agreement on principles, if people are just brthat the monarchy cannot be held de divino or de facto (which, for Locke are the same) but only by de jure or by right (1997, 317  307-311). For Locke, any commonwealth an survive more tumultuous political debates, as long as they do not fall strike at this root: that the government must always remain alterable: (1997, 312). In a political society that has seemingly forgotten its core commitment to rule by right and not by force or nature, where politics is grounded properly in a trust relationship that always has a reciprocal nature between governed and governor, partisan divisions will not dissolve society. However, in a society where doubts emerge as to the true ground of our politics, then Locke says:  We have a war upon our hands of no small weight. We have a potent and vigilant enemy at our doors, who has emissaries and zealous partisans enough to blow up any doubts and distrusts among us into disorder and confusion (1997, 312).  Second Treatise when discussing the state of nature (13). The problem of the state of nature is not simply that there is a plurality of opinions, which necessarily happen when everyone is a judge in their own cases, but when the doubts, fears, and anxieties become intentionally exacerbated by those who would want to wield absolute and arbitrary power. For Locke, this is not simply a statement about the general nature of mankind, like it is for Hobbes, but a consequence of an education that has not properly understood that we cannot have certain knowledge, which is the only way that one can ultimately establish rule de divino, and we ought not to accept the rule de facto, but only by rightwhich is tied to consent, agency, and judgment. People may be bad judges in their own cases for two reasons: error or domination. For Locke, we can live in a world with the former, but not the latter. Judgment, 40   318  LIBERALISM OF RIGHTS AND THE LIBERALISM OF FEAR   d.). For Shklar, liberalism is wholly negativei.e. directed toward alleviating or avoiding uneasiness than summum bonum  agents should strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum liberal political doctrines of toleration, constitutionalism, and the rule of law are grounded in the centrality of fearof physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in prevent is that which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police tics avoids cruelty (and the fear it causes) while not eliminating a certain kind of fear-of-cruelty that animates the whole enterprise.  For Shklar, it would not be an understatement to say that fear is a central and unavoidable aspect of our psychology. in which fear is healthya reasonable person is capable of being afraid. There is a sense, of course, in which fearing too much or too little is unreasonable, though fearing is not unnatural. The point 319  here, as Shklar suggests, is that liberalism is properly a politics that must first recognize the centrality and importance of fear for human beings, and, second, that it is therefore more important by others to kill and maim us, not the natural and healthy fear that merely warns us of avoidable healthy fear, rendering. We care about ourselves and others, we treat each other as things that we ought not be cruel toward, and therefore we invest in toleration and public constraint as necessarily political doctrines to curb crueltyabsolute and arbitrary power. For Shklar, fear extends beyond merely only for ourselv powerfully presented in his Leviathan. arbitrary (public) power. Because Shklar puts fear of unconstrained public authority at the heart of public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry can be descrLeviathan certainly begins from the premise of natural individual rights, and ten held -government (ibid.). The charge here is that liberalism is inescapably tied to 320  absolutism (cf. Strauss and MacPherson) (ibid.). Liberalism, if not properly grounded, seemingly has a natural tendency toward absolutism, Shklar concludes. As we have seen, the liberalism of fear is a liberalism that simultaneously aims at removing a certain kind of fearfear that stems from crueltybut is nevertheless grounded on the fact of fearthat one should one guise or another is dead begins with a sober view that cruelty is not something that can be easily (or perhaps wholly) eradicated. The real basis of liberalism is in the resistance of cruelty, a psychological alarmisma healthy fear. However, it would be too simplistic to suggest that liberalism is only concerned political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-of fear is ultimately concerned with power, and specifically asymmetrical power relations between the governed and the governor. For Shklar, rather than a perspective that is informed by a philosophical systemas natural rights theorists often engage inshe subscribes to a thoroughly historical accountply justified by every page of political history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly the recognition of the potentiality of cruelty, which is furnished by an avid reading of history.   concrete, 321  abuse of powOur supposed moral pluralism can be checked, not by the liberalism of rights and its deductions about the abstract and infallible cosmos, but by the simple phenomenological fact that fear is universally felt and avoided by all things, human and animal alike (1989, 29).   precludes him from being able to adequately appreciate the role of fear in our political lives. As Benhabib says, Shklar ultimately rejects Lockean liberalism precisely because she sees it as a 41 -Benhabib calls it (ibid.).42 This view of Locke, however, Shklar cannot reliably maintain: Locke is a problem for Shklar because he is seemingly both a theorist of the liberalism of rights and the liberalism of fear. For example, consider what was just said above about the centrality of asymmetrical power in the liberalism of fear with what Shklar says about Locke: What the liberalism of fear owes to Locke is also obvious: that the governments of this world with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted idence that we might develop in their agents must rest firmly on deep suspicion. Locke was not, and neither should his heirs be, in favor of weak governments that cannot frame or carry out public policies and decisions made in conformity to requirements of publicity, deliberation, and fair procedures. What is to be feared is every extralegal, secret, and unauthorized act by public agents and their deputies. And to prevent such conduct requires a constant division and subdivision of political power. The importance of voluntary associations from this perspective is not the satisfaction that their members may derive from joining in cooperative endeavors, but their ability to become significant units of social power and influence that can check, or at least alter, the assertions of other organized agents, both voluntary and governmental (1989, 30).  How is it that Locke cannot be counted as one of the founding members of the liberalism of fear, own ymmetrical relationship 322  between the people and power, the demand to trust but be suspicious, and the non-utilitarian justification of liberal constitutional doctrines and civil associations, all point to the conflation of the liberalism of fear with the liberalism of rights. This whole chapter can be said to be both the ts can see where the liberalism of fear and the liberalism of rights necessarily converge.  CONCLUSION  So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with a sense of Lockean liberalism as necessarily one that still retains its commitments to the liberalism of rights, though on much more solid and 01, 360).43 Since we cannot wish ourselves to dwell above the death and destruction that we know is always around us, we need to be clear-eyed in understanding the true ground of our liberalism, the ground that will be the most persuasive to even that unreasonable lot of democrats and republicans. Locke, insofar as he is not simply a liberalism of rights philosopher, but a liberalism of rights philosopher with his tragic, historical sense, cannot (and will not) attempt to legislate metaphysical principles as the only or even most effective means of governing men in society, contrary to the initial impressions of his Second Treatise. Instead, we should understand Locke as mounting a liberal politics of judgmentand this matches with even the most contemporary 44  So, what, then, can we say Locke demands of a liberal democratic people? What does he 45 I have made the argument in this chapter that Locke wants us to be properly afraid. Often we a323  certain or foundational. Instead, Locke wants to persuade us through a direct appeal to the emotion of fearto the sense, the sights and feelings, of being afraid. In this he follows Aristotle, who correctly understood that not only is a logical demonstration practically ineffective, but that reason and deliberation emerge out of being afraid. In this way, Locke can ground his liberalism in the passion of fear: we come to our properly see our concerns of self-government in the moment of fear.  So, what should we say that Locke wants us to know? Simply put, Locke wants us to know that things are not always what they seem, that suspiciousness is not antithetical to trust, and incidents seemingly far and remote, small and inconsequential may not be far or remote, small or inconsequential. The people ought to be predisposed to believe the busie head, to see the necessity of a guide that unmasks and makes clear what is otherwise hidden. The ghost of tyranny, then, will always be a necessary device to stoke the fears of a too-trusting people.  Locke can be sure that a healthy liberal democracy can thrive if it is placed in the most concrete and effective passion, widely shared by all human beings: fear. As Locke says in his Letter46 The point is not to suggest that Locke is the first to recognize that the mass public can respond to fear.47 Instead, the novelty is that liberalism rests properly and only on the passion of fear. This is to say, that, borrowing perhaps more directly: the liberalism of rights is the liberalism of fear. The liberalism of rights is the teaching that most comes to the surface of the Second Treatise, and it is the more formalistic 324  In other words, it is a mistake to say that liberalism of fear, not because Locke denies the liberalism of rights, but that Locke shows us that there can be no liberalism of rights without the first liberalism of fear.                                    325  1 has recently Liberating Judgment: FanaPrinceton: Princeton University Press, 2011; Mehta, Uday Singh Thought, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992; Wolterstorff, Nicholas John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. 2 Liberalism and the Moral Life edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1989, 21-39. 3 As I have tried to indicate throughout the whole of this dissertation project, the abstract principles of natural right -should be counted among that group. The tension that I fear I have not been explicit about trying to avoid is this: the existence of natural rights is often taken as the foundation for our moral and political lives, and, consequentially, the basis for our legitimate government (if we are so lucky). Locke certainly has a doctrine of natural rights, and this doctrine is often discussed as if it we the true basis of his liberalism. In other words, Locke presents the story almost matter-of-factly in the beginning of the Second Treatise: we have natural rights, we are free and equal, and so forth. sides: first, the Law of Nature must function like an innate idea in the state of nature, if it is to have the original of God, and this makes liberalism shackled to a certain stripe of Protestantism. In denying natural rights as the most they cannot operate reliably in political life. -foundations were literally falling down around him, as Casson and Wolterstorff make clear in their work on the should not take my thesis to be that Locke does not believe in natural rights, but, instead, I am arguing that the core of his liberalism is not (for reasons I outline in this chapter and generally in this dissertation) abstract foundationalism, but the phenomenology of everyday life, particularly fear.  4 For a discussion of epistemological individualism and egalitarianism in Locke and analytic philosophy more generally, see Zagzebski, Linda Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 5 Essay 2.28.7, and I have discussed this in the previous chapters of the dissertation. I will briefly outline the importance of this distinction for Locke again. Since we now understand that the core of legitimate government rests in the proper understanding of trust, we then must reevaluate the component ideas of both trust and legitimacy. In this laour voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or evil is drawn on us, from the will and power of the law maker; which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending to our observance or breach of the law, by the decree of the ction is composed of both the will animating the act, and that the act be in accordance (or breach) of a law. At the heart of our lives, then, is the fundamental interpretation of our actions in accordance with some lawdivine, civil, or that of opinion or the not the divine law or even the civil law, since he is very aware that these are often animated by a larger yet remote positive good (salvation or safety), which is quickly covered over by the uneasinesses of everyday life. Therefore, recognizing the effective or practical power of the law of opinion, Locke need notsince he is intimately concerned with the practical and effective conditions of our livesn escapes the punishment of their censure and dislike, who point on this can be found in Hans-The Beginning of Philosophy translated by Rod Coltman, New York: Continuum Press, 2001 71-82. For Gadamer, we should be since for Aristotle, techne is properly that which makes nature orderly, or molds the flux of social or political life to mirror the natural order of the cosmos (73-74). The point, then, is that discovery and invention or construction need not be diametrically opposed to one another: Locke is molding what was always already there, but gains its legitimacy in the act of molding not in the passive discovery.   6 See Casson 2011 on this point.                                                   326                                                                                                                                                               7 See Casson 2011; Bourke, Richard and Raymond Guess (eds.), Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 8 A Theory of Justice are telling: Theory, Institutions, Ends. 9 t deny that when it comes to the deciding the case between the people and the government, we ought to side with the people, see Second Treatise 240. 10 the nature of human beings as a natural kind (Kautz 1995). For Locke, we need to be careful in this ascriptionsince, we cannot claim this insight as a natural discovery. Instead, Locke shows us that what he reveals as the busie head is compiled through numerous examinations of individuals, and that this is the inference drawn from his experience and observation. This, then, allows him to (perhaps uncomfortably) place a seemingly natural claim about the nature of human beings as an inferential claim from observation (and therefore, a truth guaranteed by the nominal essence). naming as a distinct thing not to the natural world but to our understanding of it, and therefore Locke does not (however it may look) ever make a claim (Essay 2.27.9-as I have said, in the identity of consctrue to our political lives: what is  11 This has led many Locke scholars down the path of trying to understand the many paradoxes and contradictions that arise both within the Second Treatise and the Second Treatise in relation to his Essay and other writings. I referenced these debates above in footnJohn Locke: Problems and Perspectives, edited by John W. Yolton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 99-John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, edited by John W. Yolton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 194-Second Treatise: Is Locke a Review of Politics 49:1, 3-28; Dunn, John Locke Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; Forde, Steven American Journal of Political Science 45:2, 396-409; Forde, Steven "What Does Locke Expect Us to Know?" Review of Politics 68 2006, 232-258; Forde, Steven Locke, Science and Politics: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Grant, Ruth Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Meyers, Peter C. Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality, New York: Rowman & Littlefield 1998; Schouls, Peter Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and the Enlightenment Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992; Strauss, Leo Natural Right and History Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 195-Liberalism Reconsidered edited by Douglas MacLean and Claudia Mills, Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld 130-140; Waldron, Jeremy God, Locke, and Equality: Christian FoundationThought Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Yolton, John W. Locke and the Compass of the Human Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Zuckert, Michael Natural Rights and the New Republicanism Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Zuckert, Michael Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002. 12 See chapter 4 above. 13 We should be clear about what wThe Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, and his Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. For Hacking, Locke does not understand probabilities as markers of statistical or frequency.  We should note that probability was indeed emerging well before the late 17th The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers in 2 volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998; and her Classical Probability and the Enlightenment Princeton: Princeton 327                                                                                                                                                               robust if we understand probability to be a function of judgment which is an achievement wrestled out of scholastic ways of thinking that denied probable or plausible judgment. I would hasten to add that, strictly, then, probable judgment as statistical or frequentist marks of an event occurring is a more narth Readings in Philosophical Analysis edited by Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Publishing 1949, 305-Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5:4 1945, 513-532. Here, the concept of probability takes on its more empirical or frequentist tone: measuring and cataloguing the appearance or disappearance of a given event. This is a narrowing of the sense of probability insofar as it obscures the extent to which it ultimately relies on inference and, therewith, the space between certain sciencia and almost meaningless opinio, as Casson (2011) argues Locke was the first to truly make clear. 14 Essay is particularly concerned with cultivating the right opinion in light of proportionate evidence (Essay 4.2; 4.3; 4.11.8-10; 4.14). Since there are few things that attain the level of certainty how ability, (4.15.4). The origins of our probable judgmentsor, rather, the proofs or evidence for these probable judgmentscome from two sourestablishment of demonstrable truths, but in the conduct and guidance of our judgments, in light of the evidence and testimony of others.  15 The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999), and I have suggested throughout this dissertation that Locke is deeply concerned with constructing a liberal subjectivity to go along with his constructed  own meaning: that things could be otherwise and therefore require an action of the will to bring them about. In other words, that things are not inevitable.   16 See footnote 14 above. 17 We should never forget that Locke was trained in (and practiced heavily) medicine at Oxford, and it was through that training that he became involved with both the Royal Society and Shaftesbury. It would be irresponsible to deny g other seemingly unrelated matters like epistemology and politicsthough, of course, we should not be shocked to learn that much of his work in the Education is drawn from his insights as a doctor, touring France in exile, where he had his infamous Second Treatise madness was not simply a physiological  thought, see: Dewhurst, Kenneth John Locke (1632-1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography, Wellcome Historical Library 1963; Romanell, Patrick John Locke and Medicine Prometheus Books, 1984; Sanchez-The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15 1990, 675-695. 18 ith Descartes and Locke could not be sharper. What most impressed Descartes and Locke about the opinions of their fellow human beings was not that those of the wise contain a great deal of truth, but that, in general, they are riddled with error, with the consequence praejudicia [or doxa]. To practice scientia successfully, Descartes insisted, we must free ourselves from these praejudicia; we do so not by working through our intellectual inheritance in a dialectical fashion but only by submitting the whole of it to the Locke there is almost no echo of the long contemplative tradition. True knowledge, and hence true scientia, comes to very little. And in any case, what is known is not some realm of higher reality. It is simply the mind and its - Doubt. But now at last it becomes clear we were looking in the wrong place. We were expecting Locke to urge on us some therapeutic regimen. There is, indeed, a bit of that. Bit mainly the counterpart in Locke to 328                                                                                                                                                               Some Thoughts on Education should be seen as the counterpart to those passages in Descartes where Descartes outlines, recommends, and practices his Therapy of -154).  19 Casson 2011. 20 The concept of anxiety plays a particularly important roPolitics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. See especially, chapter 9. See Second Treatise The Review of Politics 43:2 1981 198-217. In particular, logical characteristics of Lockean rebels but principles built into the theoretical structure of the state of nature and the state conclusion, but we should be careful to note that simple distrust or fear of the worst does not lead to the right to revolution or the assertion of self-government, though, like Tarcov says, it is seemingly a theoretical precondition for these to emerge.  21 Terchek, Ronald J. Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties: Retriveing Neglected Fragments of Political Theory, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. 22 The Greek work Doxa enon of seeing that-which-appears. In other words, it is wholly in the realm of appearances, but also intimately concerned with our immediate concernments. 23 See footnote 5 above. 24 The opening of the Second Treatise takes for granted that individuals of whatever partisanship will come to recognize the truth of what Locke will expound because he posits them to be fundamentally interested parties. This political power from nlogos  25 Tarcov, Nathan New York: Lexington Books, 1999. 26 Locke, John Political Essays edited by Mark Goldie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 27 Ashcraft, Richard  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 372-373. Ashcraft makes a point that Coste was no mere Essay into French, but was his close confidant, and someone for whom the political intrigues that Locke inevitably found himself was not lost on Coste. I should take the time here, too, to make the following point about A Letter from a Person of Quality, which strictly of unknown origin (Ashcraft1986, 120-123). Locke clearly knew of the letter, and so the question is simply the extent to which his hand wrote the words. I have tried to show that, strictly speaking, the precise degree of authorship is not all that important, if we know that both Shaftesbury and Locke were writing this as an expression of long talks about the various controversies detailed in the letter, as they were inevitably unfolding in front of them. We know this to be the case. In short, I set out as partial proof ad oculus authorship at least floated behind the Letter. However, the real controversy attached to the Letter kill the king (Ashcraft 129-chapter 4). For Ashcraft, Locke is much than many others have wanted to speculate (Ashcraft 1The Historical Journal 43:3 2000, 647-rical record, which comprises -reported everyday happenings, the ambiguity of his involvement is far which I have certainly tried to demonstrate throughout this chapter and more generally in this dissertationdoes not rest squarely on the idea Locke was historically involved in a conspiracy, but, rather, that he is certainly philosophically open to such a possibility. Here, at least, we must depart from historical record, and analyze his thoughts and speeches, not necessarily his deeds.  28 Locke: Two Treatises of Government edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 29 As with the larger discussion of n as this might be made by a modern scholar attempting to Essay, if, as so nearly happened, it had never become certainly known that 329                                                                                                                                                               the Two Treatises ults, though it cannot be our considerable and acted quite independently of the influence of the Two Treatises. The famous doctrine of the tabula rasa, for example, the blank sheet of the mind on which experience and experience alone can write, made men begin Laslett, and basically only Laslett, the Essay and the Second Treatise should be read independently, even though obviously the teachings within the Essay have clear political importance. And, more importantly, the seeming Second Treatise, is completely antithetical to the epistemology he spent so much time crafting in the Essay. We then have two choices: either to reevaluate the relationship between the Essay and the Second Treatise, or, conclude as Laslperhaps, the least consistent of all the great philospohers, and pointing out the contradictions either within any of his ourse, rather than the latter.  30 If you will pardon my etymological digression. Suspect or suspicion derives from the Latin sub (under) and specio (to see, observe). Suspect is then here to put something under observation. Specio is derived from the Greek word skeptomai, derived term from Latin and Greek. But, the full Greek origin of the Latin suspicion is the following phrase, only seldom used, hypo (under) and skeptomai (to think, see, edical writings where he describes it as the bjectivity: a suspicious and understand the difference between suspicion or hyposkeptomai Oxford and later life (see: Woolhouse, Roger Locke: A Biography Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007; Romanell Locke and Medicine; and Laslett, Peter and John R. Harrison, The Library of John Locke Oxford: Claredon Press 1971). 31 Rahe, Paul Soft Despotism, DemocraNew Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 40-4; see also: Holmes, Stephen Benjamin Constant and the making of modern liberalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. 32 Uneasiness can be taken as a given of our self-understanding if we believe in original sin, for example. This committed to one of the Protestant variants of a constant focus of many Locke scholars (cf. Dunn, Locke), we should not be so quick to place the doctrine of uneasiness on such a narrow bottom as divine revelation as understood through a particular brand of 17th century phenomenological approach, which is to say that uneasiness is the inevitable outcome of our sober reflection on the human condition, whatever its originaccept a particularly Protestant notion of uneasiness, since he would have to reject the claims of certainty and redemption if these doctrine (which they inevitably must) cover over our uneasiness, fear, and vulnerability. For help understanding this perspective (which is itself not wholly outside of Christianity, though not explicitly based on it), see Heidegger, Martin Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy translated by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 2009, particularly section 21; and his Being and Time translated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. 33 Rhetoric, I will use in text parenthetical citations that refer to their Bekker numbers. Unless otherwise noted, references to Aristotle will come from the Rhetoric, and the edition is from: Barnes, Jonathan (editor) The Complete Works of Aristotle in two volumes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. The Rhetoric is found in volume two. 34 On this point, see particularly Garver, Eugene Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 130.  35 The articulation of freedom and determinism is purposefully vague in this sentence. Locke, I believe, oscillates Compatibilism is the view that we are some parts determined and in some parts free to choose. However, while it is probably generally true that Locke is a compatibilist, my argument here is that, by taking the reins of that which makes us afraid, i.e. controlling our fears, we can move more and more out of the realm of necessity (determinism) and into the realm of freedom (free will). This may be another way in which Locke is directly following Aristotle 330                                                                                                                                                               Nichomachean Ethics,Ancient Philosophy 10:1, 81-103). On the philosophical doctrine of compatibilism and various responses to it see: Ayer, A.J., Philosophical Essays, The Journal of Philosophy, 81:10, 553-567; Bratman, Michael Structures of Agency Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Mind 66, 28-41; Pettit, Philip A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.   36 The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, (Hofstadter 1964, 3). Though Hofstadter originally coined the phrase to explain the particular behaviors and beliefs ht-understand their reasoning processesas this style fundamentally underwrites (and indeed, organizes) the whole of their political belief systems. The paranoid style is, to provocative claim, not merely an accident of American political life, but a recurring and seemingly inextinguishable recurrence of the paranoid style over a long span of time and in different places suggests that a mentality disposed to 39). Numerous papers and books havexample Fenster, Mark Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). My point here is to suggest that relies upon and (therefore) helps cultivate  beyond the scope of this chapter. 37 Ashcraft 1986, chapter 8. 38 Joyce Lee Malcom, The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century English Political Tracts, 2 vols, ed. Joyce Lee Malcolm (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999). Vol. 2. 6/28/2016. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1824> 39 Essay: God and His divine law, the Monarch and the civil law, and the People and the law of opinion. The point, as I have made throughout this dissertation, is that the contestation between the civil law (the legal) and the law of opinion (the social) is a needed one to maintain peace. However, as Locke says in the Second Treatise, and is defending here in the Letter monarch.  40 Dimensions of Radical Democracy edited by Chantal Mouffe New York: Verso Books, 1992 240-Locke not Karl Marx, because the problem is not to show that a social class should seize powerno special class in an advanced society can pretend to the universality of right which Marx presupposed in the works of his daybut to s not to buy into the teleological narrative of a universal class ascending the throne, struggling against the forces of History. This revolution is too much. a right to overturn and destroy institutions but to fashion new ones because those who rule have perverted the old  right of resistance into normal everyday politics: the right to alter. crucial, for if the right to revolt is about devising new institutions, citizenship is more than a matter of being able to claim rights. It is about a capacity to generate power, for that is the only way that things get established in the world. And it is about a capacity to share in power, to cooperate in it, for that is how institutions and practices are not produce apathy 331                                                                                                                                                               as always entail verification on our part. That our stability is guaranteed through our mutual recognition that things could in fact be otherwise, that the right to alter cannot be denied. 41 Benhabib, Social Research 61:2 1994, 477-488. 42 redistributionist government, the call for a citizenship of vigilance, and the insistence upon the moral integrity of public officialdom go far beyond the dystopic liberalism of fear in terms of which Judith Shklar at times characterized her own project. Her vision of liberalism is one of active politics, public rectitude, and social well to follow Benhabipolitics that follows the work of Gramsci. We should also remember that the innovative synthesis between liberalism and democracy set out by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, which I coopted in chapter 4 for the proper directly related to the work of Gramsci. In this way, we come both the liberal democratic liberalism of rights and the more radical liberalism of fear.  43 Political Theory 29:3, 2001: 337-363. The Ethics 106:4 1996, 834--ertainly is the case that fear is perhaps universally felt, the emergence of the distinctly liberal subjectivity is not an inevitable process. More to the point, the line between reasonable and unreasonable will always be a matter of judgment (and therewith, of potential oppression). But this means merely that the liberalism of fear for both Shklar and Locke will gladly give up the principle of neutrality and the principle of non-interference for a more solidly gained principle of toleration and the principle of self-government or non-The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism edited by Steven Wall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 381--interference. 44 Social Theory and Practice 38:1 2012, 55-82. 45  46 people do well under necessity than freedom (cf. Strauss, Leo Thoughts on Machiavelli Chicago: University of cs 75 2013, 573-586). 47 Journal of the History of Ideas, 69:3 2008, 353-373. Kapust makes clear that the ancients (as opposed to the moderns) held the view that fear can be particularly energizing. In this chapter, I have made clear that, by following Aristotle, Locke is one modern keenly aware of the importance of fear as a spur for industry and awareness.   332  CONCLUSION  The liberal statesman and the liberal theorist must therefore, it seems to me, always seek to cultivate a certain prudent insecurity among liberal citizens, a reasonable understanding of the many (hidden) threats to our way of life and the various liberal virtues necessary to preserve it: sober fear makes men reasonably virtuous. This is a task for partisans of liberalism, even, and especially, in the most secure times. And this is a liberal paradox: liberal statesmen must often seem to be crying wolf, so to speak, since the preservation of our humane way of life depends on our regarding it as always vulnerable, because of certain facts about human nature, even when it seems to be most secure (Kautz 1995, 190).1   I sought to defend the following argument: liberal constitutionalism rests on a particular recognition of a potential or actual, hidden or explicit betrayal; and so liberal constitutionalism emerges and rests on the recognition of betrayal, a certain paranoia, anxiety, or fear. For Locke, a major problem facing liberal constitutionalism is that suspicious trust rests tenuously between two -relationships antithetical to liberalism: the parent-child relationship of basic trust, and the master-slave relationship of mere reliance and stability. Unlike Hobbes, who thought the people were too distrustful, Locke see the exact opposite problem: the people are too trusting, and their trust tends naturally in an illiberal direction.2 For Locke, these two positions stem from a quest for certainty, for avoiding and overcoming the flux we experience in our everyday lives. A major problem facing liberal constitutionalism today is the desire to escape from flux, contingency, and vulnerability. If liberal constitutionalism does rest on a sober recognition of flux and fear, our contemporary denial of these facts does not bode well for our liberalism.    so much about establishing trust as it is in correcting basic, natural trust by making it more reflective, mature. I claimed that the principle way that Locke accomplishes this task is through two joint arguments. First, if our natural tendency to trust s333  political lives, then Locke wants to displace certainty and ontological foundationalism, thereby making us unwilling to rely on an unreflective natural trust. The connection between trusting unreflectively and striving for certainty is that if one believes in a world where such certainty is possible, then believing the trust is not a function of the will or judgment, absolving us of responsibility and the need for sober reflection about what we believe and the grounds for those beliefs. For Locke, in order to be responsible, we must believe we are in a world where innate or inevitable ideas do not obtain, where certainty about our political and ethical lives is not possible. Indeed, it is only in a world of flux or uncertainty where trust is the thing most needful. But this trust is not faith, but reasonable and reflective or responsible trust.   Second, I argued, Locke sets out to create a more reflective or responsible trust by designs and intentions of the government. Locke not only empowers this individual insofar as the call for alteration and dissent is encouraged in a world of flux, but the busie head is also entrusted with two constitutional duties. First, the busie head is entrusted with the duty of critically examining and publicly questioning the influence of the prerogative power. The liberal constitutional system, as Locke envisions it, has at its center the potential climactic conflict the busie head plays an important role in revealing the invisible influence of the prerogative power, anticipating its evolution into tyranny. The people, being too trusting, are cannot be counted on in doing this investigative work. Instead, Locke insists that the busie head must be the constant gadfly that hopefully uncovers the ill-designs of the governing before it is too late.  334   Besides the duty to uncover potential, hidden plots, serving a distinctly epistemic function, Locke gives the busie head another duty. Given the natural tendency of the people, Locke also envisions that the busie head is important in constituting the people as a collective identity, as a political agent. The busie head constitutes the people through establishing a chain of equivalences or a long train of injustices that tie individual and seemingly remote cases into a much larger story that potentially reveals the ill-intention of the governor. The people emerge as a collective identity through the particular abuses becoming general so much so that Locke says they cannot but feel and see them. The investigative work of the busie head becomes the backbone for the political identity of the people. The people is a body established against an unjust power, and therefore is a distinctly democratic expression and a uniquely constitutional expression of popular power. The democratic and suspicious element of society must be guided by the busie head, not only epistemologically but politically as well.   I have argued that this fixation on yet it seems all too apparent that fear is a very dangerous emotion. Perhaps so dangerous that, if it cannot be approached with severe caution, it might be better off being eradicated altogether. In no way have I suggested that unbridled fear is not dangerous. Instead, what I am arguing is that the dangerousness of fear is not enough to discount its political efficacy, especially for liberal politics.  Instead, what I am arguing is that fear is not necessarily antithetical to a reflective, rational, and sober trust. Indeed, fear is constitutive of this reasonable and reflective trust. Locke makes a of ripolitics, I argue, is an education in rhetoric and especially the power of establishing a reasonable trust upon the emotion of fear. I make this argument in chapt335  Rhetoric. Education and what Aristotle says in the Rhetoric. At the center, I find that Locke believes (like Aristotle) that fear can make us reasonably virtuous. On this low but solid ground of reasonable fear, Locke sets out to build his liberal politics of trust. Insofar as the busie head is the agent of paranoia or fear, liberal constitutionalism rests on the work of the busie head.   Today, however, we believe fear is bad and is dangerous to our liberal way of life. Where Locke recognized and took seriously the reasonableness of fear, we today set out to construct our liberal politics on the opposite premise: the politics of fear is mutually exclusive with our liberalism. I have detailed the work of John Rawls to establish this point, and to show that his liberalism is really a liberal absolutism and not a liberal constitutionalism. His absolutism emerges at the moment where he decides to find some other, transcendental ground for politics instead of remaining in the world of flux, vulnerability, and fear. For Locke, we dwell in the latter and ought to avoid the former. Instead of an absolutist reduction to establish certainty and eradicate fear, Locke sees liberalism as a prudential judgment, a modus vivendi. This is not usually how we understand ourselves as liberals, however, and this is a problem today that Locke uniquely can help us remedy.  My argument is that we need to tell a different story about what it means to be a liberal and what the basis of our liberalism really is. We are not a more evolved species of human, with genetically modified superior moral faculties. Nor does our liberalism rest so closely with our economic prosperity or our technological advancements, since the roots of liberalism extend back to a much poorer 17th century. We also should not consider ourselves to have transcended the common everyday struggles for survival, living in a utopia free from fear, conflict, and scarcity, 336  as many ideal theory liberals do implicitly and explicitly in their theorizing. We are liberals because we have reflected on our historical experiences, because we want to live in a world where we want to hold ourselves and others responsible, and because we value self-government. The presentation, but in engaging with themin our experiences and observations. The attempt to separate our logos, ethos weaken our commitments to liberal democracy. It confuses us because we do not know that our liberalism rests on an ethos as much as it does our logos. Part of reinvigorating liberal democracy, then, is to tell a different story about what it means to be a liberal, to talk about our ethos.   ground of our liberalism of rights is the sober recognition of fear. Our reason emerges in deliberating about what is fearful and what we ought to do about it. To sever fear from our lives not only makes it difficult for us to dwell in this world of flux, but further alienates us from our own original liberal spirit. Fear and flux are essential elements to our lives, and they ought to be central to our political thinking.   If we understand fear, flux, and conflict as central facts of political life, we can see how contemporary ideal theory liberalism is left wanting. It denies fear and the power of emotions; it denies the ontological fact of flux, insisting on ontological certainty; and, it denies conflict, by making our public lives free of collective identities. Ideal theory liberalism leaves us dazed because it presents a world that does not even attempt to map on to the most basic facts of our empirical political reality. When we think about liberalism, and we try to sculpt a liberal polity through institutional mechanisms, we cannot help but feel alienated. I believe this particular feeling of 337  alienation, wholly new in contemporary times, is a powerful causal element in the rise of global authoritarianism and right-wing populism today. By making political life seem as if it is a well-oiled machine run by expert mechanics, we present to ourselves and others the image of liberal political life completely devoid of character and meaning. The affective us/them distinction central to collective identities, the emotional aspect of politics, are all left out of our story of a healthy liberalism: liberals, we say, are not emotional or prone to collective identities, which is a fancy phrase for mob rule. This, I have tried to show, is an unfortunate misstep on our part: liberals are emotional and we do rely on at least one affective, collective identitythe people. This misstep in our theorizing turns into a monumental political disaster in practice. Since we fail to recognize the proper place for emotion and collective identity in our own liberalism, we leave that space cleared for others to take from us. Because we do not recognize emotion and collective identity as important elements of our liberal constitutionalism, we abdicate this important dimension of public life to those illiberals who are ready and willing to seize the opportunity. The apolitical story of liberalism that we tell ourselves has cleared fertile ground for authoritarianism today.  As I said in the introduction, in turning back to Locke I originally sought out to critique own separation of the liberalism of rights from the liberalism of fear. However, this is obviously not what I found. There is no separation between the liberalism of rights and the liberalism of fear in Locke, but actually the interweaving of the two. The hero of the model of liberal democratic statesmanship, I would sayis not the individual in an abstract state of nature, but the turbulent spirit, the dissenter, the busie head. By taking this marginal figure, who at first sight 338  ural tendency to trust uncritically. The way to correct this natural tendency is through fear, uneasiness, and anxiety, which, while dangerous in the extreme, makes us industrious, aware, deliberate, and responsible. Liberals today would do well to recognize that our liberalism is not other-worldly, but derived from our engagement with our empirical world. Lockean liberalism needs the busie head because this is the figure that cultivates and guides our fears, suspicions, and uneasinesses toward a recognizable liberal end. The defense of liberal democracy, then, rests on recognizing that fear and flux are the conditions of our liberal reason, and that we need to think of ourselves and be ready to act like busie heads.     339   1 Kautz, Steven J. Liberalism and Community Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. 2 On the one hand, people may be too busy to question or critically examine authority, taking trust to be more like a faith in the governor to care for the commonwealth. This is basic trust. On the other hand, Locke also recognizes that people who do set out to examine their beliefs and question authority may become confused or intentionally misled by others who seek to only dominate rather than educate toward self-government. In particular, Locke says that we quickly stumble in our investigations because we seek something that we cannot have: certain knowledge of the world. This makes even the inquisitive particularly prone to trusting too quickly, taking knowledge to be an apology reasons: first, they believe they (or those they trust) have the truth; or, conversely, they are so cynical and disheartened by the pluralism of opinions about the truth that they become distrustful of each other that this cynical skepticism leads to a quietism, where the best authority is the established and stable authority. For more on this, see chapter 5 above.                                                    340            BIBLIOGRAPHY           341  BIBLIOGRAPHY   Aarsleff, Hans. 1963. American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (3): 165-188.  Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. London: Penguin Classics.  Armstrong, Robert L. 1965. Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (3): 369-382.  Ashcraft, Richard. 1968. American Political Science Review 62 (3): 898-915.  Ashcraft, Richard. 1987. London: Allen and Unwin Press.  Ashcraft, Richard and M. M. Goldsmith. 1983. 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