John Locke and England’s Empire

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On Thursday, November 18, 2021, as part of a scholarly seminar directed by Professor David Armitage on behalf of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, Professors Mark Goldie and Vicki Hsueh offered an open session on John Locke, political thought, and empire.

John Locke's reputation is Janus-faced. For many, he remains the godparent of liberalism and democracy, an honorary Founding Father of the American Revolution. For others, he embodies the entanglement of early liberalism with empire, a theorist of colonial constitutionalism, indigenous expropriation, and Atlantic slavery. How should intellectual historians and political theorists face the challenge of the ongoing 'postcolonial turn' in Locke scholarship? Mark Goldie and Vicki Hsueh use Locke’s biography and the colonial archive to re-think conceptual categories, interpretative norms, and disciplinary conventions in both political theory and the history of political thought.

Mark Goldie is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History, University of Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Intellectual History, University of Sussex. He is working on an intellectual biography of Post-Revolutionary Locke.

Vicki Hsueh is a professor of political science at Western Washington University. She is the author of Hybrid Constitutions: Making and Unmaking Power and Privilege in Colonial America and articles in The Review of Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Journal of the History of Ideas, and History of Political Thought. Her current book project, Affective Democracy: Direct Action in an Age of Precarity, examines the role of affect and history in direct action protest.