“Locke’s real starting-point was not a theoretical mass of right-possessing individuals in a state of nature, but his own countrymen under the English constitution of his own day. The state of nature and its whole concomitant apparatus of natural rights and the social contract was the regular stock in-trade of the political writers of his age. He adopted all this because he could hardly help doing so, and because it was what the readers of political treatises expected and accepted. But what he was really doing, under the guise of erecting a form of government on the basis of freely consenting individuals, was to describe the operation of the traditional English constitution in terms of the political philosophy current in his age. The notion of consent, never strictly analysed, and involving some element of legal fiction, had come to be embodied in this constitution in the course of its historical development, and was already so well established (particularly with respect to taxation and legislation) by the time Locke inherited it that he (and no doubt his readers also) found no need to subject it to a close analysis and scrutiny. Under such a scrutiny, I think we must conclude, the notion may seem self-contradictory, and it might therefore be wiser for us to abandon it. Yet it is so deeply embedded in our history and our habitual ways of speech and thought that perhaps this is scarcely possible.”
“This is Water” is the title of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005.