Political Individuals and Providential Nature in Locke and Pope

Abstract

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.

An appetite for ambivalence: Pope studies in the twenty‐first century

“…For a contrasting view, however, in which a less radical, more liberal Pope can be perceived as sharing in Locke's contractual thinking, one would be well-advised to consult recent work by Courtney Weiss Smith (2012Smith ( , 2016. Similarly, James E. Force presents Pope as something of a closet Newtonian in his use of empiricist principles in the Essay on Man, though Pope is also more cautious than Newton about what we can infer of God's nature and design from "our limited experience" (2009, p. 124).…”