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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the political imagination in the political and philosophical work of John Locke. Reading the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I argue that there is a powerful and indispensable power of the imagination at work in Locke's conception of reasonable conduct. The version of the imagination that Locke uses is an early modern version, informed by a classical and medieval Aristotelian tradition that differs from more familiar late modern accounts of an unruly and purely subjective imagination. Locke works from and reworks key elements of this tradition to offer a notion of human reasoning that requires the imagination to creatively draw from experience. This Lockean imagination transforms our understanding of Locke's account of political rationality and thus his account of political freedom. Through readings of the First and Second Treatises of Government, I argue that the Lockean imagination is integral to his understanding of political critique. The imaginative facet of Lockean rationality remains closely tied to the experience and context of particular political societies and, in this way, it differs from the abstract rationalist version of critique often attributed to Locke's political theory. Read through the lens of the Lockean imagination, Locke's political thought offers a way of understanding political critique as a practice embedded within particular sociohistorical communities. Thus, Locke's political imagination takes on new relevance for democratic theory with its model of imaginative reasoning that sustains a reciprocal relationship between contingent political practices and political critique.
