ABSTRACT
Locke separated adult psychological status from that of children and therefore from childlike adults. The politics of rational consent, to which Locke’s Whig political doctrine was the handbook, remains in some sense the road to the kingdom of the saints, with the intellectually disabled – Locke’s idiots and changelings – in the out-group role formerly occupied by reprobates. When the Leveller John Lilburne said, “Christ doth not choose many rich, nor many wise, but the fools, idiots, base and contemptible poor men and women in the esteem of the world,” all these groups were parts of a single concept. And when Locke’s Quaker friend William Penn prefaced his own account of toleration with the remark that absolutist and paternalist ideologies “cannot convince the understanding of [even] the poorest idiot,” did he mean here a wage labourer, or someone who is disabled in their understanding? Locke simply ignores the language of grace, describing capability in terms of its detailed psychological operations.
