Lecture 3: Natural Law Roots of the Social Contract Tradition

What this lecture covers

This lecture steps back from specific traditions to examine the Enlightenment itself, using John Locke as the entry point. Shapiro explains the twin Enlightenment commitments introduced earlier in the course: grounding politics in science rather than tradition or religion, and treating individual freedom as the central political value, secured through a doctrine of rights. The lecture shows how the seventeenth century's peculiar idea of "science" as certainty gave rise to Locke's theory of rights.

Where the previous two lectures used the Eichmann case to introduce the question of legitimacy, this lecture supplies the philosophical machinery that the first three Enlightenment traditions (utilitarian, Marxist, social contract) will each draw on: the "workmanship ideal," the notion that making something grounds both knowledge of it and ownership of it. After watching, you should understand why Locke's political theory rests on theological foundations and how it generates a right to resist illegitimate authority.

Key ideas

• Workmanship ideal: the idea, from Hobbes and Locke, that we can have certain knowledge only of what we ourselves make (geometry, the commonwealth), not of natural phenomena like earthquakes, whose causes we can only guess at.
• A priori vs. a posteriori: analytic propositions (like mathematical theorems) can be known with certainty; empirical propositions (like the causes of earthquakes) cannot.
• Maker's knowledge and maker's ownership: God has complete knowledge of, and ownership over, everything he creates; by extension, human beings have similar authority over what they create.
• God's omnipotence versus natural law's timelessness: Locke wrestled with whether God could change natural law, eventually favoring a "command theory" in which natural law expresses God's will.
• No earthly interpreter of scripture: because no person has privileged access to God's meaning, each individual must interpret natural law for themselves — a move that underwrites the right to resist unjust authority.
• Secularizing the workmanship ideal: a recurring theme of the course is how later thinkers (Marx, Nozick, Rawls) try to keep the structure of the workmanship idea while dropping its theological basis.

Walkthrough

The Enlightenment as science (0:01)

Shapiro cautions that periodizing intellectual history (ancients vs. moderns, naturalists vs. anti-naturalists) always obscures as much as it reveals, then sets out the Enlightenment's twin commitments: politics grounded in science, and individual freedom realized through rights. He introduces Descartes's search for certainty (the cogito) as the model of what seventeenth-century thinkers meant by scientific knowledge.

The workmanship ideal (5:33)

Using three example propositions (a geometric theorem, the cause of earthquakes, and the claim that consent grounds legitimacy), Shapiro shows that early Enlightenment thinkers classed mathematics and claims about human-made institutions together as certain, while treating empirical claims about nature as merely probable. He reads a passage from Hobbes explaining that we can have certain "demonstrable" knowledge only of what we construct ourselves — geometry and civil philosophy — because we made them. This "workmanship ideal" is ultimately theological: God has perfect knowledge of, and ownership over, his creation, and gives human beings a similar (though limited) creative capacity. Shapiro also describes Locke's unresolved theological struggle over whether God's omnipotence is compatible with natural law being timeless.

Doctrine of individual rights (29:25)

Shapiro traces how the workmanship ideal generates Locke's theory of rights: because we are all God's creation, we are all equal, and no one owns another person (contrasted with Robert Filmer's view that political authority descends from Adam through inheritance). Because no earthly authority can authoritatively interpret scripture, no ruler, king, or Pope can dictate what natural law requires, and each person must judge for themselves — a doctrine with direct consequences for the right to resist a state's orders, as in the Eichmann case. The lecture closes by noting that this structure of thought persists even after later thinkers try to strip away its religious foundations.

Before you watch

• Review the Eichmann discussion from Lecture 2, since this lecture returns to the idea of a right to resist illegitimate orders.
• Some familiarity with the idea of natural law versus legal positivism (introduced briefly in Lecture 2) helps contextualize Locke's theological worries.

Check your understanding

1. What does Shapiro mean by the "workmanship ideal," and why does it apply to geometry and civil philosophy but not to earthquakes?
2. Why was it theologically problematic for Locke to say either that God can or cannot change natural law?
3. How does the claim that no earthly authority can interpret scripture authoritatively support a right to resist government orders?
4. In what sense is Locke's theory of rights ultimately a theological argument, and why does Shapiro say later thinkers try to "secularize" it?