Locke's Compatibilism

Matthew A. Leisinger (York University)

Locke is often placed in the pantheon of compatibilists alongside the likes of Hobbes and Hume. This historiography, however, is not uncontroversial: Locke’s eighteenth-century readers were divided about how best to interpret his discussion of liberty in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, and a significant minority of commentators today continue to insist upon reading Locke as a libertarian. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I propose to defend the orthodox reading of Locke as a compatibilist. To this end, I will lay out what I take to be the strongest case for Locke’s compatibilism and address some of the prima facie evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, I’ll argue that there is something importantly misleading about the compatibilist label. More specifically, while I think that we have good reason to go on thinking of Locke as a kind of compatibilist, I’ll suggest that his views about (1) God’s role in the causal order of the world and (2) the nature of the will as an active power reveal certain incompatibilist threads woven into what is, at the end of the day, a recognizably compatibilist theory.