Locke and Freedom

Locke's major contribution to Western thought was a powerful conception of freedom. Most importantly, and notably unlike conceptions before, it was a concept that could run quite consistently through a political philosophy and a modern philosophical psychology, exemplifying itself at nearly every level of importance in these two areas (thus bringing them into a close relation as never before--though Hobbes went far in this direction and indeed, in a gesture even more profound than Locke, seriously opened up the area for thought). This concept of freedom is stated by Locke in any number of forms, throughout both his Essay and his Treatises, as well as his very important Letter Concerning Toleration, but I will take a formulation from Section 57 of his Second Treatise on Civil Government, where I think the context is important:

Where there is no law, there is no freedom.

In other words, freedom is never absolute, but always governed in a particular way, such that the above proposition is always true. Nowhere is there a freedom that is not subject to a law.

This sounds paradoxical, but Locke (again building upon Hobbes, but in a particular way) shows that the opposite assumption is even more odd. To suppose that freedom is absolute (as he puts it, that it involves a liberty for every person to do what they want) means that it never can, with certainty (or in accordance with reason), be said to be freedom. In other words, and to put it more loosely, what is clear is that if by freedom we mean some consistently free behavior, some behavior that is able to be established with some certainty (that is, by reason), this consistency implies the presence of a rule or a law (which establishes or formalizes in what way the consistency operates). And in the case of a freedom that would know no bounds, one that would for example allow us to fly if we indeed wanted it to be so (one sees how we have moved into psychology, as this absurdity on the level of the mind is...