Now, nothing seems more Lockean, in the run-amok way with which readers of this blog are becoming familiar, than the face transplant: a "triumph" of science that enables us to freely take on the risk of death on the operating table in order to pursue our freely-chosen desire for a new face. (The mug is to be taken from "a corpse", of course; waste not, want not, or no hoarding and no spoilage.)
Never mind the slippage between 'Locke' and 'Lockean,' two terms that generally bear no relation to each other (see also 'Hegel' and 'Hegelian' or 'Kant' and 'Kantian'). The suffix '-ian' or '-ean' usually means the author is going to take as a starting point some passage from the figure named (usually read in isolation from others) and see what entailments one can read out of it. All of which is perfectly fine: there's much interesting philosophy that uses Kant as a starting point without substantively engaging him. But the postmodern conservative movement seems quite happy to trash Locke ('nothing seems more Lockean'? Really?) on the basis of what 'everyone understands' Locke to be up to, or else that the uses to which he has been put are perfectly natural outcomes of what he writes, and so no one needs to explain it.
Locke is not Nozick, nor is he who Strauss or MacPherson claim him to be (though all tell us something useful about politics, if not always about Locke), and the casual way Locke become responsible for or attached to whatever is wrong with the world today is deeply annoying to me as a political theorist.
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