The Appeal to Heaven: Locke, Jephtha, and the Right of Conquest

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Locke

Abstract

John Locke introduces the right of citizens to “appeal to heaven” and resist unjust government with force by invoking the biblical story of Jephtha (Second Treatise §21). This choice of example is puzzling, since Jephtha’s appeal rests on claims about just war that Locke explicitly rejects in the Second Treatise, and ultimately leads to the death of his daughter at his own hands (Judges 11). How can we explain this seemingly careless use of the biblical text? I argue that Locke’s appeal to the Jephtha story was intended to qualify rather than reinforce his defense of the “appeal to heaven.” The Two Treatises were published at the height of the Allegiance Controversy (1689-1694); the hotly-contested debate about whether and on what grounds William of Orange had a legitimate claim to the English throne. Locke sets out to defend the radical Whig view that popular consent is the only legitimate basis of government, and to refute Robert Filmer’s competing patriarchal theory of monarchy. His association of the “appeal to heaven” with the Jephtha story suggests that he had another quarry in view: those who held that William’s title arose from the fact that he had conquered James II in a just war. This line of argument was attractive to many non-Jacobite Tories because it was consistent with the key Tory doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance, and explained why in the event of abdication James’s title should pass to William in particular. The argument from just conquest also gained a substantial following among moderate Whigs. The Jephtha story focuses precisely on the question of whether territory, and thus political rule, can legitimately be acquired through conquest, and on the dangerous consequences of invoking God’s support for such an acquisition. It’s therefore not implausible to suppose that the inconsistency between Jephtha’s appeal to heaven and Locke’s own position on conquest is deliberate, and that Locke was making a subtle but pointed intervention in the Allegiance Controversy as it stood in the fall of 1689. It follows that the passages associating the appeal to heaven with Jephtha were a late addition to the text. If correct, then, my proposed solution to the Jephtha puzzle sheds light on the longstanding debate about when and how the Two Treatises were composed.

Author

• Eric MacGilvray, Ohio State University