America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

By Claire Rydell Arcenas

America’s Philosopher examines how John Locke has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted over three centuries of American history.
 
The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.

The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226820415

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Cover Page for America's Philosopher

America’s Philosopher

America’s Philosopher

John Locke in American Intellectual Life

Claire Rydell Arcenas

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63860-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82041-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820415.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Arcenas, Claire Rydell, author.

Title: America’s philosopher : John Locke in American intellectual life / Claire Rydell Arcenas.

Other titles: John Locke in American intellectual life

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054529 | ISBN 9780226638607 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226820415 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Locke, John, 1632–1704—Influence. | United States—Intellectual life. | United States—Civilization—English influences.

Classification: LCC B1295 .A73 2022 | DDC 192—dc23/eng/20211123

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054529

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents

And for Scott

Contents

Preface

1  Locke’s Legacy in Early America

2  Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras

3  Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States

4  Locke Becomes Historical

5  Making Locke Relevant

6  Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition

7  Lockean -isms

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Three thousand miles east across the Atlantic Ocean, in a quiet English churchyard, America’s Philosopher lies buried amidst green grass and clover.¹ Though he never set foot on American soil and died long before the creation of the United States, John Locke stands—and has always stood—at the center of American intellectual life. In this book, I explain how and why a seventeenth-century English philosopher has captivated our attention for more than three centuries, exerting an unparalleled influence on the development of American thought and culture. What follows is the story of Locke in America.

When I first set out to write about Locke in America, in the early 2010s, I thought it would be a straightforward task. I knew Locke as the author of the Two Treatises of Government (1690), honorary founding father, and particular favorite of the libertarian right. And everything I read, heard, and saw—from Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) to episodes of Parks and Recreation (2009–15)—suggested that Americans had always known him as such. Effortlessly packaged as an adjective—Lockean—Locke seemed to have inspired an American political tradition that continued uninterrupted across the centuries. All I needed to do was investigate the one part of the story that seemed a bit murkier—the part that spanned the long nineteenth century, between the founding era and the twentieth-century publication of so many articles and books, like Hartz’s, that set Locke at the heart of this political tradition.

As soon as I started asking questions about Locke’s legacy in America, however, I discovered something unexpected. The Locke I knew and thought I would find in the historical record was missing. He was nowhere to be found. And the text I thought defined Locke’s relevance—his Two Treatises—was conspicuously absent as well. Between 1773 and 1917, it wasn’t even published in an American edition.²

John Locke himself, however, was far from absent. Indeed, he seemed to be everywhere I looked, though in unfamiliar guises and in unexpected places. While nineteenth-century American presses did not publish his Two Treatises, they churned out editions of his (much better known, as I discovered) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).³ The Essay’s influence at colleges was so pervasive that one Massachusetts-based observer declared it undoubtedly the best known of all his works.⁴ Indeed, familiarity with the Essay was so widespread that, in San Francisco, the editors of the Daily Evening Bulletin could reward their readers for making it through the Saturday news with a good Locke joke: Can a curl over the forehead be called, ‘Locke on the Understanding’?⁵

Nineteenth-century men and women also knew Locke as a moral authority who promoted generosity, temperance, and effective communication; as a religious writer, whose A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–7) provided the best method of studying the scriptures; and as the developer of a popular approach to taking notes on one’s reading.⁶ They admired his preference for good conversation over the fleeting pleasures of a card game and applauded his (perceived) distaste for alcohol. And, in the pages of popular histories, they encountered him as the author of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)—an American lawgiver, as George Bancroft put it, whose disastrous attempt at real-world legislation could be held up as an example of the fact that abstract political theories often failed when put into practice, no matter how virtuous or wise their creators.⁷

Moving backward in time, I discovered that Locke was everywhere in eighteenth-century America too. He appeared in diaries, newspapers, personal letters, and magazines as an immediate, pervasive, and essential presence. He taught both men and women how to raise children, cultivate friendships, rise above controversy, retain knowledge, form neighborhood associations, and make sense of their everyday experiences through empirical reasoning. And his reasonable Christianity and persuasive arguments in favor of toleration provided sustenance and inspiration for generations of Americans seeking a more enlightened, hopeful future free from persecution and religious strife. This Locke, "the great Mr. Locke," who taught mothers to immerse their toddlers in ice water, urged young men away from frivolous pursuits, and directed old ministers back to their Bibles, was relevant in ways unfathomable today.⁸

The story of Locke in America is not, then, one of continuity or absence but rather one of striking transformation. Variously idolized, marginalized, embraced, and rejected, Locke has, since the early eighteenth century, impacted every corner of American intellectual life. But his influence, his role in the story, has changed substantially over time.

In the chapters that follow I chart these changes from 1700 until the present day. I show that, over the course of this period, Americans transformed Locke, his works, and his ideas in five interrelated ways. First and most visibly, Locke went from being known primarily as the epistemologist-author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to being known primarily as the political-philosopher-author of the Two Treatises of Government. Second, and more importantly, Locke’s significance both narrowed and diminished. Once an omnipresent influence in the daily lives of early Americans, a model and guide for cultivation of the self through proper action and education, Locke became a role-player—essential when the time came to address certain topics, such as political institutions, but otherwise irrelevant. Third, Americans moved away from thinking about Locke the man, a historical figure whose shortcomings and celebrated qualities alike were worthy of serious consideration, to invoking Locke’s name as an adjective and an ism—an ideological abstraction that could be used to invoke, symbolize, or represent a variety of concepts: for example, Lockean liberalism.⁹ Fourth, Americans began to claim Locke as their own. While earlier Americans generally emphasized Locke’s Englishness, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, they came to represent Locke as fundamentally American. Finally, and largely as a consequence of the other four changes, Americans weaponized Locke, making him into an avatar of what seemed to them uniquely and quintessentially American political ideals of individual liberty, property rights, and limited government. Locke was so central to the new concept of an American Political Tradition that, by the 1950s, he and his Second Treatise had become nothing less than a massive national cliché.¹⁰

Locke’s American story is worth telling—and worth knowing—for many reasons. It reveals and elucidates major transformations in American intellectual life. It is as much about the major transformations in American intellectual life over the past three hundred years as it is about Locke. For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locke helped Americans address concerns about the moral and intellectual character of individuals and their communities. He provided guidance for living virtuously, learning effectively, and improving both self and society. By the mid-twentieth century, Locke’s importance for the American public was no longer about achieving virtue and understanding. Instead, Locke was important insofar as the perceived influence of his political philosophy revealed something exceptional about American political institutions. No longer taken as a model for how to live one’s life, Locke in the middle of the twentieth century was deployed as a weapon of liberal democracy and capitalism in the ideological battles of the Cold War. In short, Locke’s story reveals how Americans have, over time, addressed what is arguably the central question of any democratic-republican society: how to ensure its (continued) flourishing.

The argument that follows places American intellectual life in conversation with processes of transatlantic cultural, political, and intellectual exchange among nations, organizations, and other groups that looked quite different at my story’s start than at its end. From James Logan’s travails selling imported copies of Locke’s works in early-eighteenth-century Philadelphia to American reviews of Englishman Maurice Cranston’s 1957 John Locke: A Biography, Locke’s American story demonstrates the extent to which the scope of American intellectual history transgresses both national and disciplinary boundaries. When, for example, nineteenth-century scholars and students of the historical and political sciences understood Locke’s political philosophy as standing in opposition to their modern theories of Staatswissenschaft, they did so as participants in a transatlantic conversation that extended from Cambridge, England, to Heidelberg, Germany, to New York City. It is important to emphasize, however, that this book does not provide a global reception history of Locke. Nor does it offer a comprehensive survey of Locke, his works, and his ideas in American thought and culture over the last three hundred years. Rather, it seeks to capture who both Locke the historical figure and Locke the symbolic representation of certain ideas (and ideals) were for the widest possible variety of American men and women—ranging from journalists to judges, students to professors, private citizens to members of Congress.

This, then, is not a book about John Locke, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, but rather a book about how Americans over time have understood and made sense of him, his work, his ideas, and his relevance.¹¹ I present interpretations of Locke’s life, ideas, and works through the eyes of my subjects—not the lenses of modern scholars. What we know or think about Locke is not always what earlier Americans knew or thought about him. Nor is it how they would have conceptualized Locke in the abstract. For example, observers before roughly 1960 knew—or, rather, thought they knew—that Locke wrote his Two Treatises to justify the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and thus frequently labeled him an apologist for the revolution. Today, we know that Locke wrote his Two Treatises in the late 1670s or early 1680s, not in response to the events of 1688.¹² It is tempting to say that we are right and earlier Americans were wrong, but doing so would lead to another misunderstanding—the projection of our present back onto their past. When it comes to Locke, humility seems sensible. Even today, Locke’s authorship of and involvement in the creation of another document, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, is debated.¹³ And we still do not have complete or objective knowledge about his life, writings, and thoughts. New writings by Locke are still being unearthed. Thanks to the discovery and publication in 2019 of a new text weighing the merits of extending toleration to Catholics, for example, we know a great deal more today about Locke’s intellectual development vis-à-vis the question of religious toleration than we did only a few years ago.¹⁴

While this is not a book about Locke the man, it will be helpful to know a bit about him.¹⁵ Born in 1632 in Somerset, England, Locke lived during some of the most tumultuous and transformative times in English history. His seventy-two years encompassed the English Civil War (1642–51), the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and the rapid growth of English colonization in North America. He bore witness—and contributed—to transformations in science, medicine, and metaphysics. By the end of his life, Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and its account of terrestrial gravity had replaced the Aristotelian scholasticism that had dominated European centers of learning for centuries. Locke was, as one historian has put it, a child of the Reformation and a progenitor of the Enlightenment.¹⁶

Locke was a well-educated man, known for his quick mind and sharp wit. He studied, and later taught, at Christ Church, Oxford, where he found himself drawn to René Descartes and the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle rather than the classical and scriptural texts that formed the foundation of the scholastic tradition.¹⁷ A medical doctor by training, Locke in 1667 became the personal physician, secretary, and confidant of Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury. A year later, in 1668, Locke was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Twice in exile (once in France from 1675 to 1679 and once in Holland from 1683 to 1689), Locke was no stranger to church censorship and absolute monarchy. The author of hundreds of essays, tracts, and letters, he wrote to oppose political tyranny and religious persecution, and to free the mind, body, and soul from the shackles of mysticism and skepticism. At the same time, he condoned slavery, denied women full inclusion in civil society, and, ultimately, excluded atheists and Catholics from his calls for toleration.¹⁸

Figure 0.1 John Greenhill, John Locke, 1672. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Although popular with several female friends, including Lady Masham (née Damaris Cudworth), Locke never married. Nor did he have children. Accounts of his close friendships and love for rousing conversation and good company have fascinated Locke’s biographers across the centuries; so too have his many personal travails, including his lifelong struggle with asthma.

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; title page 1690) showed readers that, born without innate ideas, they could think for themselves and acquire knowledge about the world around them through the use of their five senses. Ideas, Locke argued, were formed by sensory perception and reflection. His Essay contains among the most important early modern accounts of a philosophy of language. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke provided strategies for compassionate childrearing and proposed plans for education in accordance with his understanding of how people gained knowledge. Baptized into the Church of England and raised a Calvinist, he argued for (limited) toleration, freedom of religious practice and conscience, and separation between church and state in numerous writings, including A Letter Concerning Toleration (1685; 1689, trans. William Popple). And, as he explained in works such as The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke saw Christianity as entirely reasonable and, quite simply, good for mankind.

Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689; title page 1690) comprises, as the title suggests, two essays. The first refuted Sir Robert Filmer’s theory of the divine right of kings in his Patriarcha (1680). The second provided an account of the origins and purpose of civil society and government. Born free and equal in a state of nature in accordance with natural law, men, Locke argued, join together to create a political society and system of government to ensure protection of their rights. He subsumed these rights—men’s Lives, Liberties and Estates—under the term "Property."¹⁹ Having originated government through consent, those who create it can likewise destroy it. Like several of Locke’s other writings, the Two Treatises remained anonymous until after his death.²⁰

No cloistered philosopher, Locke wrote in response to the real-world events of the seventeenth century. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the impact English colonial endeavors in North America had on his life and work. Early in his career, he was a secretary and adviser to the proprietors of the English colony of Carolina. Decades later, in the 1690s, he served on the Board of Trade, a vital instrument of imperial policy. Following his return from exile in Holland in 1689, Locke was a high-level civil servant in the English government and played an important role in debates over coinage in the 1690s.

By the time he died in 1704, many of Locke’s works had made their first appearance in England’s North American colonies. This New World was a place the philosopher never visited, but it was a place about which he knew, thought, and had read a great deal.²¹ For Locke, "in the beginning all the World was America."²²

1

Locke’s Legacy in Early America

John Locke’s debut in America was a minor disaster. In 1700, William Penn, proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony, ordered a shipment from the London booksellers Awnsham and John Churchill.¹ Among the 125 titles that arrived in Philadelphia, then a provincial outpost on the west bank of the Delaware River, John Locke was the author most represented; nearly a quarter of the books were written by him.² They included An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c., three letters on toleration, three essays on the reasonableness of Christianity, three responses to criticism of the Essay, and the Two Treatises of Government.³

Once the books arrived in Philadelphia, Penn’s agent and secretary, James Logan, was tasked with their sale. Unfortunately for Logan, however, buyers proved scarce. Two years later, he reported to Penn that many of ye Books remained unsold.⁴ In 1706, he was forced to write the Churchills to request [their] further Patience regarding payment for the books’ sale.⁵ After nearly a decade, many of the books were still without buyers, leaving Logan exasperated and Penn in debt.⁶ Locke’s story in America, it seems, was off to an inauspicious start.

But it was just beginning. Locke’s writings would soon be well known throughout the North American colonies. Indeed, several—especially his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education—would become some of the most important books in early America.⁷ What is more, eighteenth-century men and women would come to celebrate Locke, follow his example, and invoke his authority in ways quite unimaginable to us today. The following chapter explains how and why this came to be.

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Who was Locke to early Americans? One answer is that Locke meant different things to different people—that engagement with Locke was multifaceted and diverse.⁸ Locke had something to say about practically everything, and early Americans listened. Indeed, they used Locke and his writings to think about issues relating to education, knowledge acquisition, religion, money, civil government, childrearing, community improvement, old age, and friendship—to name just a few. Consequently, it would be possible to write many different histories of Locke’s influence during this period. One can imagine, for example, histories of Locke’s influence on currency debates in Massachusetts in the 1730s, politics in Maryland in the 1740s, or education in Pennsylvania in the 1750s.⁹

But focusing on the diversity of Americans’ engagement with Locke obscures a more important truth—that the ultimate source of Locke’s authority in all of the aforementioned areas was the same: namely, his status as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his reputation as a man of good character, and his crucial role as a guide, model, and moral exemplar—an immediate and pervasive presence in people’s daily lives, who taught them how to rear children, study scripture, and pursue a variety of other activities related to improving both themselves and their communities.

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In the early 1740s, South Carolinian Eliza Lucas was a tenacious, determined young woman. Tasked with managing her family’s expansive Wappoo Plantation and its enslaved residents when she was not yet seventeen years old, Eliza quickly became an expert in cultivating both rice and, after much experimentation, indigo. Afforded the luxury of a home library, she woke up before five o’clock most mornings to read and study, a habit that served her well. When she died in 1793, Eliza was remembered for her understanding and uncommon strength of memory.¹⁰

These observations should not surprise us. Eliza, after all, knew her Locke. In 1741, her friend, and eventual husband, Charles Pinckney, recommended that she read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Charles’s suggestion proved timely. With Locke’s Essay in hand, Eliza embarked on a period of dogged self-reflection. After a particularly fun-filled visit to nearby Charleston—the Metropolis . . . a neat pretty place, as she described it—Eliza found herself down in spirits, a change in mood she attributed to that giddy gayety and want of reflection wch I contracted when in town. In search of answers that might explain and improve her sorry state of mind, Eliza observed, I was forced to consult Mr. Lock over and over to see wherein personal Identity consisted and if I was the very same self.¹¹ From book 2, chapter 27, section 19 of the Essay, Eliza gleaned that "personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance but rather in the Identity of consciousness.¹² Consulting Locke on this matter made her confident of his relevance for further self-improvement. In truth, she explained to a correspondent, I understand enough of him to be quite charmed. I rec[k]on, she continued, it will take me five months reading before I have done with him."¹³

Charles and Eliza’s shared engagement with Locke’s Essay in the early 1740s is, in many respects, unremarkable. The Essay was, far and away, Locke’s most popular and influential work in early America.¹⁴ And as Eliza’s experience reveals, it made a deep impression on its readers. From the Essay, they learned that people were born without innate ideas and that they acquired knowledge about themselves and the world around them from a combination of sensation and reflection. They learned of the humbling difficulties associated with putting their ideas into words—that is, of the shortcomings of language for conveying meaning. And they learned, to use Locke’s own words, that people "are fitted for moral Knowledge, and natural Improvements and that Morality is the proper Science, and Business of Mankind."¹⁵

However many months she spent with the Essay, Eliza’s devotion to Locke was only just beginning. Sometime around 1742, she read the second part of Samuel Richardson’s popular epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which endorsed—explicitly, in over a hundred pages of references—Locke’s approach to pedagogy and childrearing.¹⁶ When she first read Pamela, Eliza was unmarried with no children of her own, so it is not surprising that aspects of Pamela’s apparent vanity made more of an impression than the novel’s retelling of Locke’s emphasis on, for example, the importance of teaching young children self-sufficiency. Before long, however, Eliza seems to have decided that Locke’s educational recommendations demanded not only careful investigation but also scrupulous implementation.

In 1746, now married to the man who had introduced her to Locke, Eliza gave birth to a baby boy. And when the time came to raise her son, Eliza knew one thing for certain: she would teach him according to Mr. Locks method.¹⁷ This method, explained in Locke’s popular Some Thoughts Concerning Education and grounded in his theory of human understanding and dismissal of long-standing beliefs regarding the innate sinfulness of children, transformed childrearing practices on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁸ Locke’s approach made—or, at least, was intended to make—learning how to read and write more enjoyable. He pushed back against the ordinary Road of the Horn-Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible in which learning was incentivized by a child’s fear of punishment. Instead, he advocated for making learning seem another sort of Play or Recreation.¹⁹

Eliza was an eager and enthusiastic adopter of Locke’s recommendations. She carefully studied Some Thoughts Concerning Education and from it concluded that it was best for her baby boy to play him self into learning, as Locke advised.²⁰ Unfortunately, however, she was missing one key piece of the puzzle: the right sort of toy to facilitate this sort of learning-through-play. Lacking options at home, but determined to do as Locke directed, she dashed off a request to an English friend for an ivory ball with lettered sides such as the philosopher described.²¹ By any measure, Eliza’s efforts to follow Locke were successful. Before he was two years old, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—later a Revolutionary leader, signer of the Constitution, and two-time presidential candidate—was learning to read and spell, whether he liked it or not, thanks to his mother and Locke.²²

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Not two years after John Locke died in Essex, England, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A self-described bookish boy, Franklin first encountered Locke in the 1720s, when he read the Essay as a teenage apprentice to his older brother, the Boston printer James Franklin.²³ Perhaps James had brought Locke’s Essay back with him from London, where he had been working, or perhaps young Ben himself found it on the shelves of a Boston bookseller.²⁴

Locke’s Essay had an immediate and profound influence on Franklin.²⁵ It formed the basis of his resolution, at age twenty, to reform his life according to a plan for regulating my future Conduct in Life, which included commitments to be frugal, sincere, industrious, and honest.²⁶ Several years later, these resolutions became Franklin’s now-famous bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection, which included precepts along the lines of eat not to Dulness.²⁷ In his Essay, Locke emphasized the importance of tackling pain, unease, and unhappiness through action, especially habitual action.²⁸ Here and elsewhere, Locke set Franklin on the path of cultivating—or, at least, extolling the benefits of cultivating—strong habits of moderation, even self-denial, to achieve virtue.²⁹ It seems fitting then that once he had established himself as a bookseller in Philadelphia, Franklin sold copies of "Lock of Human Understanding";³⁰ that his Poor Richard’s Almanack was advertised as containing references to "Locke, the famous John, Esq";³¹ and that the catalog Franklin printed for the Library Company of Philadelphia called attention to Locke’s Essay with the notation esteemed the best Book of Logick in the World.³²

More than just motivating Franklin’s personal pursuit of self-responsibility, however, Locke provided guidance on public pursuits as well. These included, for example, his Philadelphia association, the Junto, founded in 1727. Franklin scoured Locke’s Rules of a Society, which met once a Week for their Improvement in useful Knowledge, and for the Promoting of Truth and Christian Charity for guidance on a proper format for the Junto. Like Locke’s proposed society, the Junto met weekly on Friday evenings, and its meetings were structured around debating and discussing questions of interest. In sizing up prospective society members, Franklin required answers to four questions:

1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? –Answer. I have not. 2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? –Answ. I do. 3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? –Ans. No. 4. Do you love truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? –Answ. Yes.³³

These queries mirrored Locke’s almost exactly.³⁴

Following Locke, Franklin envisioned the Junto as a space for ensuring the mutual Improvement of its members and their community through charitable projects such as a volunteer fire station and a library.³⁵ Rather characteristically, Franklin did not acknowledge the source of his idea for the Junto, but he was certainly familiar with Rules of a Society. It was, after all, part of Locke’s A Collection of Several Pieces, which Franklin donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1733.³⁶

Franklin also turned to Locke for help while developing a plan to educate young Philadelphians in accordance with the principles he had employed during his own self-education.³⁷ In his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749)—a prospective outline of his vision for the academy he established in 1751—he identified "the great Mr. Locke, who wrote a Treatise on Education, well known, and much esteemed, being translated into most of the modern Languages of Europe as one of his major sources of inspiration.³⁸ He also adopted many of the specific practices promulgated by Locke. For example, he recommended that students cultivate their writing style by writing Letters to each other, making Abstracts of what they read; or writing the same Things in their own Words, noting that this Mr. Locke recommends."³⁹ He also relied on Locke’s authority to support his recommendations for specific curricular content, including that students read Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, whose De Jure naturali & gentium Locke regarded as the best book on society’s origins.⁴⁰ And in a later discussion of the academy’s curriculum, he recommended that students read Locke for themselves in their final year of study.⁴¹ Franklin’s academy had a lasting impact on education in Philadelphia; it became the Academy and College of Philadelphia in 1755 and was eventually incorporated into the University of Pennsylvania.

Locke, then, was clearly an important influence on Franklin throughout his life. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Franklin was, in many ways, an eighteenth-century Lockean.⁴² Insofar as we wish to apply, retrospectively, the adjective to Franklin, however, it would have little to do with another retrospectively applied term—liberal—or with Franklin’s donation of the Two Treatises to the Library Company of Philadelphia.⁴³ And it would have rather more to do with his dedication to Locke’s Essay, his invocation of Locke’s authority as author of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and his familiarity with the range of Locke’s writings on strategies for self-improvement. Locke provided Franklin with critical guidance on matters of self-cultivation, inspiring him to undertake certain personal reforms in his youth and later to motivate others in his broader community to do the same. For Franklin, Locke was, in other words, an exemplar, an immediate presence across many areas of his life, not a narrowly construed philosopher—political or otherwise. In Locke, with his wide-ranging interests and expansive expertise, Franklin doubtless saw some of himself—and some of the man he wanted to become.⁴⁴ He was not alone.

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Figure 1.1 The index from John Locke’s popular method of keeping a commonplace book. John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London, 1706). EC65 L7934 706n, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Before he became president of Harvard in the early 1770s, Samuel Locke (no relation) wanted to be a minister. He also knew that this would take hard work, industry, and careful study. Luckily for him, young Samuel had another Locke by his side. More specifically, he had John Locke’s model and method of keeping a commonplace book, which was widely recognized as the best by the 1720s.⁴⁵

As a young man like Samuel knew all too well, it could be downright tedious to keep track of what one read—not to mention what one thought about it. Honed over decades of trial and error, Locke’s method for commonplacing, posthumously published as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706), streamlined, simplified, and regimented this process.⁴⁶ Specifically, Locke’s method entailed indexing entries on a grid, in cells, based on an assessment of a reading’s most appropriate title or subject head, using both the first letter and first vowel of the subject. Locke recommended using capital letters for the heads or titles and Latin for these as well as for the index. One could, for example, record notes from a reading under the title EPISTOLA, writing it in large letters in the margin of a page for notes and then index this entry by writing the page number for these notes under the first letter E and the first vowel I in the index. Locke’s approach meant that someone like Samuel could create the index as he went, rather than waiting until the notebook was full. But because the titles were not written out fully in the index, the user had to accurately remember that he had, for example, selected EPISTOLA as the appropriate categorization. In contrast to more free-form approaches, Locke’s demanded precision.