Tacit Tactics: A Strategic Reading of Consent in Locke's Second Treatise

• In Event: Bodies and the Body Politic in Modern Political Thought

Abstract

Is speaking out always a political good, and is silence always a marker of violence or oppression? The general consensus today seems to affirm these suppositions. Yet these presumptions preclude any consideration of cases in which the inverse may be true, wherein being expressive sets up barriers or limitations and remaining silent allows one to retain a certain latitude of movement. To think this way about silence’s limitations and possibilities is not a necessary point of view—it is permissible to think otherwise, as has been done before. The history of political thought recurrently reveals an understanding—albeit a sometimes latent one—that silences are multifarious, and that some of its manifestations are not destructive or dominative, but rather can be used to repair, build, and strengthen. I contend that Locke’s theory of consent, and especially his formulation of tacit consent, is one such moment of revelatory understanding. To show this, I track his writing as operating on multiple levels of performative speech act. As a locutionary act, Locke’s writings sketch out a distinction between express and tacit consent wherein both variations have specific content. As an illocutionary act, he is seeking to map out the conditions of legitimacy for a liberal political order while also contending with a series of anxieties shared among his social milieu and himself. As a perlocutionary act, Locke’s words make perspicuous to his audience that there is a substantive difference between being express and tacit in one’s agreement to political obligations, and that this difference gestures towards potentially ameliorative or empowering implications to the decision to remain silent in certain contexts. On each of these levels, and especially with all three in concert, the acknowledgment of tacitness as a legitimate political positionality opens up a new zone of theoretical investigation into how far and in what ways such silences may be used.

Author

• Derek Kennedy, University of Pennsylvania