ABSTRACT
It would seem that of all the classical social contract theories—Thomas Hobbes', John Locke's, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Immanuel Kant's—Locke's has least to do with the idea that social and political life requires constructing a sphere of public reason, and so to some extent, setting aside one's private judgment. The author believes that the problem of conflicting private judgment about morality is much more severe than anarchistically inclined Lockeans believe. For Locke, there is some range of reasonable interpretative dispute that is defined by the convergence of judgments of the great body of people about the plausible interpretations of natural law. Locke's insulation thesis has been absolutely critical to most liberal theories of public reason, including that of John Rawls. Two-staged liberal theories of public reason commence by identifying those political or civil matters about which there is broad agreement, and then construct a theory of justice, or political right, on their basis.
