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Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, to reveal the ways in which rhetoric and experience are essential to his critique of authority in philosophy and politics. In considering these two texts, we go to the source of Locke’s reputation for hostility to rhetoric and imagination and his reputation for both rationalism in politics and empiricism in philosophy. The choice of these two of Locke’s works should not be taken as a sign that they are the only texts that reveal the significance of rhetoric to critique or that they are the only ones carrying significance for political theory and philosophy. Quite to the contrary, Locke was a prolific writer, and I believe that the dynamics of rhetoric and experience in his thought echo throughout his writings in various and interesting ways. I have chosen these two for their outsized significance for scholars of political theory, philosophy, and literature. Further, they are particularly rich for their insights into Lockean critique because of the extended engagement with questions of judgment. For this reason, I begin my exploration of the inventive nature of Lockean critique with these two classics. Such a beginning should be understood as an invitation rather than a conclusion to the powerful work of rhetoric to be found elsewhere in Locke’s thought.

      We begin, in Chapter 2, by revisiting Locke’s well-known claim to experience, as the basis for his long-standing reputation as an empiricist and by extension his hostility to rhetoric. Whereas this claim has traditionally been situated within a historical narrative that charts a sharp break in the seventeenth century, marking the decline of the rhetorical tradition and the rise of the New Science, I resituate Locke in a more nuanced and overlapping contact zone between rhetoric and science, or natural philosophy. Understanding Locke’s situation within the early modern revival of Epicurean materialism allows us to take his interest in experience seriously without rushing to attribute to him a naive and untenable foundationalism in unmediated sense perception. As we will see, two important implications follow from this shift. First, Locke’s notion of reason is rooted in probable judgment rather than certainty. This notion of judgment as a qualitative weighing of evidence and testimony places Locke at the intersection of rhetorical and legal tradition, on the one hand, and a new empirical science, on the other. Locke figures centrally in the reworking of experience from the realm of rhetoric and politics to a new philosophy with judgment at its center. Second, Epicurean materialism acknowledged the essential role of rhetoric, in contrast to the Cartesian and Spinozan hostility to language. Recognizing Locke’s Epicurean materialism opens up new ways of exploring a productive relationship between experience and rhetoric that are obscured by reading back into his work a latter-day empiricism. In examining the claim to experience through this lens, however, we gain a deeper sense of the challenges that Locke sets up for himself in grounding judgment in moral and natural philosophy, in experience.

      Chapter 3 examines Locke’s negotiation of the problem of judgment that follows from his claim to experience. This chapter reveals most vividly Locke’s relationship of both debt and denial to the rhetorical tradition. Experience for Locke becomes the basis for reasonable judgment, but also a source of error, caused by imaginative and passionate excess. Locating this problem of judgment at the center of the Essay, I argue that Locke’s well-known anxiety about the passionate force of rhetoric is uneasily but significantly combined with his reappropriation of rhetoric for his critique of timeless, universal claims to truth. Whether in science, religion, or politics, we will see how, for Locke, even the most abstract and universal concepts emerge from particular experience. Sensory experience alone is not enough to give us the normative purchase or the passionate force needed for good judgment, however. So Locke turns to rhetoric—to analogies, metaphors, and personification—for the invention of his most cherished concepts out of ordinary experience. Rhetoric’s capacity to impart new meaning through vivid figures and tropes is essential to his account of concepts (both moral and scientific) and language. Locke, however, reassigns rhetorical capacities from the orator to the individual participant in ordinary speech. In a sense, he democratizes the inventive and forceful possibilities of rhetorical speech. I contend that Locke articulates a critical capacity, shared by all, to reinvent words and ideas, that is, to critically reinterpret human experience.

      In chapters 4 and 5, I show how this novel account of Lockean critique transforms the meaning of Locke’s political thought. Chapter 4 takes a new look at the infamously repetitive refutation of patriarchal authority in the First Treatise. What has been dismissed as redundant preoccupation with minutiae is rather Locke’s transformation of a timeless political universal—that of patriarchalism. Identifying in Locke’s repetitions a rhetorical strategy, I draw out the deep affinities between the critical project of the Essay and the First Treatise, in that both seek to unseat claims to timeless universal truths. Locke unexpectedly emerges as a creative and forceful challenger not only to the political claims of patriarchalists but also to a larger symbolic order of interwoven images of familial and political authority. In tracing Locke’s use of feminine and foreign figures, we find that Lockean critique works because, not in spite of, the pluralization of meaning and the turning of language against itself. Such a thorough transformation of a symbolic political order could not be achieved by logic alone, and indeed, the force of Locke’s text is lost on those looking only for its logic. My emphasis on the formative role of rhetoric and experience reveals a creative strategy of reinventing the familiar terms of patriarchalist politics. With figure and trope, satire and parody, Locke turns the language of patriarchal order against itself. In other words, rhetoric sustains Locke’s devastating critique as it proceeds from within the very social and political discourse that he challenges.

      In chapter 5, I take up the challenge of showing how Locke’s debt to rhetoric matters for his classic theory of consent and resistance in the Second Treatise. Does the rhetorical reinvention of experience that challenges claims to authority in the Essay and First Treatise contribute positively to Locke’s political vision? I argue that it must. The normative force of the Second Treatise depends upon the capacity to instill the conviction that political authority comes from acts of consent rather than the immemorial rule of father-kings. This counterintuitive task is not achieved through the mere assertion of a concept of consent. Rather, Locke seeks to shift the terms of familiar experience with his political anthropology, a series of examples and stories usually accorded secondary status. He recounts a familiar past of fatherlike kings as a story of consent. In recurring versions of this story, he presents this past from increasingly plural perspectives. Readers witness as Locke successively reconstructs their political past as tales of judgment based on experience and a recent, but reversible, loss of freedom. Through these successive recollections of the past, the anthropology reawakens dulled political sensibilities to a memory of freedom and the possibility of founding anew. The chapter offers a significant reversal of the received interpretation that the abstract and universal concepts alone provide the normative force of Lockean critique. Instead of breaking with the past, Locke reinvents contingent political experience to generate new horizons of political possibility. Lockean critique, in this way, emerges from the familiar ground of political experience to inventively reimagine the political past and present so as to generate futures that could be otherwise.

      In the conclusion, we come back to Locke’s reputation for masterful reason and his association with what James Tully calls the “empire of uniformity” of modern constitutionalism.⁴⁴ The central place of rhetorical invention in Lockean critique, however, suggests a very different legacy for his thought. It is not a flight from the material and contingent conditions of political thought that Lockean critique requires; rather, Locke draws inventively from political experience to generate normative force. The past does not always obviously offer the resources for critical purchase on the present that we seek and that is why invention is essential for generating new critical vantage points. It is thus not detachment from our shared political situations, but rather an inventive relation to our past and present, that brings into sight possibilities for new political futures. Locke emerges as an exemplary political theorist for

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