While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man . Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the period's contractarian thought.
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