Under the Influence

Abstract Recent work by Jeffrey Collins and others resuscitates the old idea that Locke’s Two Treatises was decisively influenced by Hobbes. That idea was rejected in 1969 by John Dunn, who found it incredible on the grounds that the problem that concerned Hobbes—the construction of political society from an ethical vacuum—was irrelevant to Locke’s purposes. The segregation of Locke from Hobbes has been emblematic of Cambridge contextualism ever since. This chapter revisits the question of influence and the character of the ‘Cambridge method’ via its patrilineal ancestor R. G. Collingwood. It argues that, given Hobbes’s presuppositions, his problem cannot have been what Dunn said it was and shows that Hobbes’s ‘real’ problem was one to which the Two Treatises constitutes a conclusive Lockean answer. Dunn’s wider sense that Locke’s text is not best seen as a Hobbesian artefact is vindicated by a new reading of its argument and structuring assumptions.