Liberalism and Locke's Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract Perhaps in part because of an issue related to chronology of publications, the connections between Locke's liberalism and philosophical anthropology are underappreciated. This essay addresses that issue and re-examines Locke's account of the person, treating it as an interpretive key to Locke's political thought. Locke's person is, contra the standard readings, a relational concept that refers to beings capable of law in terms of their accountability to law; descendants of Adam are equal as persons in that they hold identical rights (or prerogatives) and duties under the divine law. This philosophical anthropology leads to a principle—eschatological accountability delimits legitimate moral and political authority, so authority over a person is necessarily limited by that person's accountability to God—that helps to clarify certain misunderstandings of the status of moral authority within Lockean liberalism and to explain how Locke set the terms of subsequent debates about the limits of political authority.