Calvin and the Whigs

The relationship between Calvinist political theory and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Civil Government has been debated for some time, and the consensus is that Locke’s theory constitutes the fur­ther development of Calvinist theory. But upon closer analysis, that conclusion proves entirely flawed. Calvinism proves to be worlds apart from the political phi­lo­­sophy of John Locke. It proves to be the mature fruit of the medieval “two swords” form of government, in which church and state share public power, rather than an early stage on the road to the dissociation of church and state, a road which Locke put us firmly upon with his own formu­lation of political power. Indeed, upon closer inspection Calvinism proves to be the product of a thousand-year tradition of Western political thought commenc­ing with Augustine and moving through the Carolingian Renais­sance and the Papal Rev­olution. That history is redis­covered and outlined in this book, as the preliminary means for recovering the true meaning of political Calvinism and its utter discontinuity with the modernism that commenced with Locke’s paradigm. It also helps disabuse us of the notion that history is linear, and that progress is straightforward. Rather, it helps us to under­stand the deformational period of history in which we live, and the need for a return to a confess­ional under­stand­ing of law, the state, and constitutionalism.