IV. George Lawson and John Locke

In the year of 1657, a Shropshire clergyman, George Lawson by name, followed a prevailing fashion among English moralists and political writers of the day in publishing a formal refutation of Hobbes' then notorious Leviathan. Three years later, he further provided a positive and complete enunciation of his principles of civil and ecclesiastical polity in a work which he entitled Politica Sacra et Civilis. While it is perfectly evident that neither of these works attracted anything like that degree of contemporary attention which was aroused by the Leviathan of Hobbes or the Oceana of Harrington, it is no less evident, on the other hand, that they did not fall stillborn from the press. Not only are they to be found listed, with a fair measure of frequency, in extant catalogues of private libraries of the period, but in the critical year 1689—eleven years after the death of Lawson—Politica Sacra et Civilis was well recognized by certain ardent supporters of the revolution then in progress in England to be sufficiently timely to warrant its republication, and was palpably considered by at least one Whig pamphleteer to be well worth the trouble of plagiarizing. The popularity of the work was, however, of the most transient nature. The truth would seem to be that those principles of civil government which were maintained by Lawson were some three decades in advance of the age for which he wrote them; and that when, at length, the circumstances attending the English Revolution rendered them particularly appropriate, a greater political thinker, John Locke, was at hand to give them full expression in a form which, for clarity and fidelity to the spirit of the audience to which they were addressed, has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed. In all probability it is chiefly owing to this fact that the name of Lawson has been almost completely forgotten even by students of the history of English political philosophy, while Locke, for more than two centuries, has been regarded as one of the greatest political philosophers of all time.