Waldron Jeremy. God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought

Cambridge University Press, 2002. — 276 p.Are we humans all one another’s equals? And if we are, what is this equality based on and what are its implications?
In this concise and engaging book, Jeremy Waldron explores these questions in the company of the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Waldron believes that Locke provides us with “aswell-worked-out a theory of basic equality aswe have in the canon of political philosophy.” But for us it is a challenging theory because its foundations are unabashedly religious. God has created us equal, says Locke, and a proper grasp of the implications of this equality is inseparable from an understanding of ordinary men and women as creatures of God, created in his image and “made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.”
The religious foundations of Locke’s political thought have been noted before, but they have never been explored more sympathetically, or with greater attention to their implications for modern debates about equality. Jeremy Waldron is one of the world’s leading legal and political philosophers, and this book is based on the Carlyle Lectures that he presented in Oxford in 1999. It provides new perspectives on Locke’s egalitarianism and the tribute he paid to the status and dignity of the ordinary person; it examines the problems Locke faced in defining the human species for the purposes of his commitment to basic equality; it explores the relation between his egalitarianism and his Christian beliefs; and most important, it offers new interpretations of Locke’s views on toleration, slavery, property, aboriginal rights, the Poor Law, the distribution of the franchise, and relations between the sexes.
But this is not just a book about Locke. God, Locke, and Equality discusses contemporary approaches to equality as well as rival interpretations of Locke, and this dual agenda gives the whole book an unusual degree of accessibility and intellectual excitement. Indispensable for Locke scholars and for those who study the foundations of equality and the relation between politics and religion, it will be of interest also to philosophers, political theorists, lawyers, and theologians around the world.