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'A burthern too heavy for humane sufferance': Locke on reputation

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Authors

Stuart-Buttle, Tim 

Abstract

Locke emphasised that a concern for reputation powerfully shaped the individual’s conduct. Most scholarship suggests that Locke portrayed this phenomenon in negative terms. This article complicates this picture. A concern for reputation served a constructive role in Locke’s theory of social development, which offered a powerful alternative explanation of the origins of moral consensus and political authority to Hobbes’. Locke nonetheless suggested that misunderstandings engendered in Christian commonwealths regarding the nature of political and religious authority had impacted negatively on the moral regulation of societies. The forces governing society, which once habituated individuals in beneficial ways, now led them astray.

Description

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Imprint Academic.

Keywords

law of nature, civil law, divine law, sovereignty, political obligation, conscience, toleration, moral obligation, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, atheism, Jesus Christ

Journal Title

History of Political Thought

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Imprint Academic

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Sponsorship
The research for this article was undertaken as part of the project, ‘Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: The Place of Literature’, funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme [(FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617849].