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Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720) is best known for her commonplace books, which preserve unique and variant versions of poems by Restoration “wits.” She also kept a diary, in which she recorded her readings and meditations. The diary contains an unnoticed encomiastic “Character” of John Locke, composed at his death. It is one of the earliest obituaries of him, but it was commonplaced from other sources. Her use of her sources exemplifies aspects of the manuscript circulation of texts and the ways in which the active selection and redaction of textual material reflected a reader’s own religious, political, and personal preoccupations. Cowper portrays Locke as a moral exemplar and Christian virtuoso, whose orthodoxy she defends, and whose latitudinarian and Whig commitments she shares.

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I argue for two controversial claims about Locke’s account of liberty in Essay 2.21. The first claim is that Locke does not identify liberty with freedom of action. Instead, Locke places further conditions on liberty beyond to the power to perform or forbear an action at will. The second (and closely related) claim is that Locke takes the power to suspend and examine desire to be necessary for liberty—in other words, that possession of the power to suspend and examine desire is one such further condition upon liberty.

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Locke’s egalitarianism is concerned with not only equality before law (both natural and civil) but also moral and civic equality among those who are treated unequally, according to social rank. He considered the labouring poor as moral equals, with respect to their contribution towards labour and the responsibility they are able and ought to take in their acts, although he also recognised that they often fail to do so. A key to Locke’s moral vision is the term “labour,” implying the use of the common faculties of humankind, with industry and pain, in the manner in which God, who had provided them with these faculties, intended them to do. Locke’s idea of industry, which represents the contribution and disposition every person should make and have, marks the break with the humanist ideal of civic virtue. He also replaced the Protestant dichotomy between ordinary and political callings by recognising common people as equal contributors to the common good.

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In a critical note published in Locke Studies, Waldmann challenges our recent reconstruction of Locke’s thesis, developed across the Second Treatise of Government, that humans cannot possibly agree to subject themselves to absolute rule. Call this thesis No Contractual Absolutism. Our reconstruction, Waldmann objects, “neglects a basic datum of scholarship”: i.e., that Locke’s Second Treatise intended to counter Filmer’s political theory. Our reply is two-pronged. First, we argue that No Contractual Absolutism cannot plausibly be construed as an attack on Filmer, since it challenges a thesis that he did not hold. Indeed, as for him no form of government can be contractual in origin, Filmer would have agreed with Locke that absolute rule cannot be instituted by agreement. As our initial article suggested, the standard view about whom the polemical target is of the Second Treatise requires qualification with respect to No Contractual Absolutism. Second, we contend that Waldmann’s concerns rest on discipline-specific methodological assumptions, which are unhelpful for the kind of analytical reconstruction we advanced. We conclude with a plea for methodological pluralism in the study of Locke’s thought.

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This article contains corrections to Rickless’s article “Locke on the Probability of the Mind’s Immateriality” published in Locke Studies 20 (2020). The original article may be found at the article’ homepage. Rickless provides a corrigendum to his interpretation of Nicholas Jolley’s Locke’s Touchy Subjects. The editor notes three errata, which have been corrected in the original article.

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This is an addendum to the 2020 bibliographic article "Recent Publications," Locke Studies 20 (2020): 1-16. It contains 14 items of interest to Lockeans published in Japanese between 2018-2020 and not yet included in the John Locke Bibliography.

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The following Note responds to a recent article by Johan Olsthoorn and Laurens van Apeldoorn on slavery and political absolutism in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. The Note engages with Olsthoorn and Apeldoorn’s important article but queries its principal contentions.