...notebooks from the early 1680s "reveal Locke work on Two Treatises and the Essay on the Understanding at the same time." (1) As enticing as this seemed, Laslett felt that the differences between these two works were so profound that any argument for kinship had to fail. There was no code that could fit Locke's politics into his epistemology or ontology. Unlike Hobbes, Locke didn't aim at such systematic coherence. The best we could hope for, Laslett suggested, was finding a general "Lockean attitude" that infused all his writings. (2)

The search for more emphatic agreement, however, continued. One line of thought, dominant for much of the twentieth century, drew on Locke's advocacy of bourgeois liberalism to align the politics with the philosophy. Two Treatises of Government was widely held to contain the clearest and earliest formulation of those differentiations that have defined the liberal state, from private/public to state/society, and individual/community. Historians of philosophy found a comparable tendency toward differentiation in the Essay. One of its central contributions to the history of philosophy, they argued, was the assertion that mind and world do not share a common structure, but are clearly distinguished. (3) Charles Taylor has put this rather forcefully by charging Locke with a "radical disengagement and reification of the human psychology." (4) According to this line of thought, the political and the philosophical Locke are thinkers of differentiation and individuation, central contributors to an early enlightenment that rationalized the heterogeneous constitution of the premodern world.

Neal Wood's The Politics of Locke's Philosophy (1983) is probably the most detailed fruit this line of thought has borne. With one eye on Locke's political writings, Wood reads the Essay as promoting the attitudes and beliefs of the rising middle classes. "Locke's ideal," he explains, "is the self-directed, autonomous individual," and this ideal leads Locke to embrace clear distinctions between subject and object, self and other. (5) Wood's is one of the very few studies to offer a sustained political reading of the Essay, but it was out of step with developments in political history that challenged the liberal consensus on Two Treatises. Laslett had already argued that Locke was not the apologist of the new Whig order of 1688, but the advocate of rebellion. John Dunn, James Tully, and Richard Ashcraft widened this vein of antiliberal reinterpretation, with Ashcraft offering a comprehensive case for the radical nature of Locke's political thought. (6) Ashcraft's work opened the door--since then opened further by Jonathan Scott--to recognizing Locke's engagement with republican ideas. J. G. A. Pocock's influential exclusion of Locke from this tradition of thought, it now appears, rested on a rather narrow conception of republicanism. (7)

The broadening consensus among political historians regarding the radical nature of Locke's politics has increased the pressure to rethink its relationship to the philosophy. The revisionist momentum that carried Ashcraft and Tully made them both look for new links, but their emphasis on morality as a master term has produced limited results. As Ashcraft put the case, once we recognize that Locke views philosophy mainly as moral philosophy, we realize that the Essay discusses "the basic presuppositions that are essential to the moral dimensions of the practical action being urged by Locke in the Two Treatises." (8) It is hard to disagree with this statement, but it leaves too much of Locke's philosophy and politics untouched. Ashcraft's broad moral formula fails to capture the concrete local contact between politics and philosophy suggested by Locke's note-keeping habits.

The reason for such failure, I believe, lies in the bland contact a systematic approach is forced into when it comes up against the profound antiformalist tendencies of Locke's thinking. Instead of devising ways around such tendencies, I propose to treat them as significant content. Locke's critique of formal power relies centrally on figures of mixture, and it is these figures that need to be acknowledged as content. They are crucial to understanding the relationship between the Essay and Two Treatises. From mixed modes and mixed species to mixed government and mixed labor, Locke's mixed bodies present an opportunity--unrecognized in Locke scholarship--to renew the conversation between the philosophical and the political Locke. Locke's mixed bodies contradict the purity of formal definition as much as the differentiations of bourgeois liberalism, but they are more than tools of critique. Rather, mixture is the condition of human existence in Locke's postlapsarian world, and it shapes central aspects of his political and philosophical thinking.

Seeing Locke's reliance on mixture as significant content also means recognizing it as a positive counterprogram to Aristotelian ideas of generation, essence, and substance. Still dominant in the universities, Aristotelian ideas circulated widely in seventeenth-century England--in popular lore about sexual generation as much as in debates over sovereignty and succession, embryology, and compounded natural bodies. These ideas became highly political for Locke when Robert Filmer's Patriarcha was republished in 1680, In his still underappreciated first treatise of government, Locke realized that essentially Aristotelian ideas about the agency of the male in sexual generation constitute, as he puts it, "the main basis of all [of Filmer's] Frame." (9) In Aristotle's theory of generation and the various traditions that grew up around it, the male is the repository of form that has to be imposed on inchoate female matter to produce shapely and durable bodies. (10) For Locke, the most immediate argument against such a claim was to insist that male and female made equal contributions in the act of generation. When he refers to the "mixture of Male and Female" in the Essay, Locke denies that form belongs to the male and asserts the generative ability of mixture. (11) This assertion, as we shall see, plays a larger role in Locke's attempt to leave Aristotelian assumptions behind.

In retrieving the importance of mixture in Locke's thinking, I wish to contribute to our ongoing effort to wean eighteenth-century studies from the cloying diet of modernization narratives it has been fed for decades. Locke had no taste for the ingredients that make up such narratives, from individualism and realism to the separation of political, social, and sexual spheres. His thinking evolved around concepts of collection, association, and appropriation--concepts that emphasized the repeated crossing of boundaries and not, as our favorite story about our emergence from the past has it, their increasing enforcement.

My essay approaches the question of Locke's empiricism in a roundabout way. It follows Locke's thought from the contemplation of species to the discussion of identity to the account of the origins of political right. Only at the end will I address the problem of knowledge. I argue that Locke's ontology, politics, and epistemology draw on mixture to reduce the difference between man, animal, plant, and thing. Such a reduction allows Locke to project a profoundly interconnected world in which identity, freedom, and knowledge are communal effects. In the Essay and in Two Treatises, mixture composes the many and the one, society and nature, self and other. That is its appeal for Locke.

I

Aristotle didn't like mixture. He confined it to an awkward space in between elements and substances. Substances occupy the most privileged position in Aristotle's teleological universe. They possess individuality, actuality, and unity, and are therefore at an advanced stage in the movement toward completion and rest that inheres in all things. Mixture, by contrast, is excluded from substance's noble striving toward fulfillment. In De Generatione, Aristotle argues that mixture is unable to shed its associations with the lower states of potentiality and formlessness. Its enduring potentiality maintains the promise of a return to the state that preceded the act of mixing. "It is possible for things which combine in a mixture," he argues, "to 'be' in one sense and 'not-be' in another, the resulting compound formed from them being actually something different but each ingredient being still potentially what it was before they were mixed." (12) Mixtures are ambiguous--they are and they are not. While a different body can be produced by a mixture, such a mixed body can never claim a clear identity or teleology. Its ingredients glance backwards, to their existence before mixture, and can always be restored to their original state.

The possibility of such restoration is crucial for Aristotle's ontology. It places clear limits on the transformation of the miscibilia and keeps them outside...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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