Locke's Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject

Abstract

AbstractSome Thoughts Concerning Educationoffers the theory of governance theTwo Treatiseslack. Education is the key to Lockean politics: self-government and public order require virtuous citizens, and these citizens, as Locke suggested in theEssayand explains in theEducation, are made rather than found, constructed from the ground up by discipline. Through early and careful practices of education, they are enmeshed in a net of habit and custom that naturalizes the moral commitments they are taught, rendering the process, and the artifice, invisible. Locke entangles his subjects in an architecture of power of which they become the bearers, thereby providing the foundation for public order and limited government. Locke's disciplinary liberalism allows us to better appreciate late modern subjectivity as an achievement, rather than a given of political life, albeit an achievement that involves some uncomfortable compromises and a willingness to accept, if not laud, our disciplinary commitments.