Identity and Diversity in the History of Ideas: A Reply to Brian Tierney

I find myself simultaneously disappointed and gratified by Tierney's response to my article: disappointed, because Tierney's focus upon my supposed misinterpretation of his own position and upon Leo Strauss's portrayal of John Locke prevented him from touching upon the core of the matter in dispute between us; and gratified, because Tierney's silence regarding my central arguments concerning the place of Locke's natural rights doctrine within intellectual history must be taken to signify some measure of agreement between us after all. I will respond to Tierney's two main points in reverse order, first addressing Tierney's discussion of Locke before attempting to further clarify and elaborate upon the primary point of disagreement between us concerning the history of the idea of natural rights.Tierney's critique of the interpretation of Locke put forward in my article is colored by his association of my own interpretation with that of Michael Zuckert, and of his further association of Zuckert's interpretation with that of Leo Strauss. This sort of reductio ad Straussum is, in fact, reminiscent of the very sort of generalization Tierney vehemently criticizes when applied to medieval intellectual history. While I do intend to defend Zuckert's interpretation of Locke against Tierney's in the article, this doesn't make my arguments Zuckert's, and it certainly doesn't make Zuckert's arguments Strauss's. To say nothing of the substantial and well-documented differences between Zuckert's Locke and Strauss's,1 my own interpretation of Locke differs significantly from both and is, in some ways, actually more akin to Tierney's.Tierney appears to have been set on the slippery slope from my Locke to Zuckert's to Strauss's by my claim that Locke departed from his medieval predecessors in "altering the order of priority and relative importance among preexisting ideas."2 Tierney takes this claim to indicate that my Locke, like Strauss's, makes natural rights primary and the natural law secondary, thus reversing the preexisting order and deriving the natural law from natural rights. However, I consistently spoke of Locke's contribution in terms of "altering" the preexisting priority and of shifting the traditional emphasis, rather than reversing the order of priority, because I actually think, along with Tierney, that for Locke neither concept is derived from the other. I, however, part ways with Tierney in thinking that this is an original contribution of Locke's rather than an instance of his following the preexisting tradition. One clue to the fact that my idea of "altering" and "shifting" is not equivalent to "reversing" lies in the parallel I draw between Divine workmanship and human workmanship on the one hand, and natural law and natural rights on the other. It would be quite absurd, as Tierney indicates, for God's original creative workmanship to be in any sense derived from or secondary to subsequent human workmanship upon His materials for Locke. Locke was trying to make room for the independent importance of human workmanship and natural rights within a Divine workmanship-natural law dominated context, not to make the latter derivative from the former. As it happens, in another recent article of which Tierney could not have been aware, I address these very issues at some length.3In addition to conflating my interpretation of Locke with Zuckert's and Strauss's, Tierney obscures the central point of contention at issue in my article by excusing himself from the controversy altogether. Rather than directly address and dispute Tierney's interpretation of my article's interpretation of his own position (a tedious academic exercise which would hardly be edifying to anyone) or specifically defend my interpretation of Tierney's writings against the author himself, I will devote the space remaining to simply revisiting and clarifying the central disagreement between Tierney and myself which I was addressing in my article. …