Justice and the Interpretation of Locke's Political Theory:

TLDR: The two most powerful and incisive recent interpretations of Locke's political philosophy have been produced by men who feel a shared antipathy to contemporary liberalism and contemporary capitalism and who ascribe to Locke a deep affinity with these uiisavoury developments as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: THE two most powerful and incisive recent interpretations of Locke’s political philosophy have been produced by men who feel a shared antipathy to contemporary liberalism and contemporary capitalism and who ascribe to Locke a deep affinity with these uiisavoury developments. Both see him indeed as incarnating that authentic ‘spirit of capitalism’ which is the source of all that is most repulsive in contemporary civilization.1 Since there was a certain initial novelty to this interpretation2-and since it was, as Strauss and Macpherson so often emphasize, so far froin the delicately roseate picture which contemporary liberal democrats liked to have their of historic forebears3-fairly strenuous interpretation of the texts has been needed to sustain it. This operation has shed an enormous amount of light on the complicated intellectual context in which Locke wrote and the notably heterogeneous set of conceptions which he attempted to integrate. But the shedding of this light has been regarded as, in some degree, incidental to the assignment of confirming the truth of this interpretative doctrine. We are not left by it with the picture of a figure in a state of sharp tension between mediaeval and capitalist social ethics, between collectivism and individualism, the organic community and the market. True, there is some significant divergence of tactics between Strauss and Macpherson over the proper proccdures for simplification. Macpherson accepts the existence of a real conflict of values within the thought and indeed ascribes it to the transitional character of the society in which Locke lived.4