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Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke’s Political Thought. By Shanks Torrey. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. 168p. $69.95 cloth, $32.95 paper.
Like Gaul, John Locke has been (more or less neatly) divided into three parts, and so there have been three disjunctive texts to study, and three disjunctive “Lockes” to consider. Philosophers have focused on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; political theorists have treasured the second of the Two Treatises of Government; and the distinctively unloved of the first of the Two Treatises has been taken up by historians and feminists. Irritatingly, all three appeared in the same year, 1689, and so the usual strategies of periodization (early/middle/late) could not be easily applied in order to explain away any textual discrepancies or substantive differences. Nonetheless, scholars of each text have filled this gap to a certain extent by undertaking thorough research into the timing and circumstances, the authorial intensions, and the network audiences of the three works. Still there was a puzzle. Were there really three Lockes? A personality split three ways? Surely not, and as Torrey Shanks informs us in this sparkling study, scholars have constructed various overarching presumptions and commitments to resolve the issue. These have been chiefly Christianity (of some sort) and political commitments (to antityrannical institutions), which have been referenced at length in order to tell us “who Locke (really) is” and what makes him tick, albeit in such an apparently inconsistent manner.
In Authority Figures, Shanks has managed to resolve these puzzles in quite a new way, and in doing so her work speaks to all of the aforementioned constituencies. Moreover, to do this she moves smoothly through all three texts, negotiates the relevant authorities and established...