LOCKE ON GOVERNMENT
SIR,—Among the criticisms in Mr. Hill's apprecia- tive review of my edition of Locke On Government is the reproach that less than justice is done to the rigorous analytic work of my friend Professor C. B. Macpherson. I am sorry to have given that im- pression, and must apologise that one of Professor Macpherson's two articles was unintentionally omitted from the Bibliography. But his contributions are repeatedly cited, in the Introduction and the foot- notes, where the remarkable clarity of his exposition of Locke's incoherencies is commented upon. I felt bound to add, however, that I could not accept his general solution, because it rests on what I take to be an unhistorical and unrealistic attitude of the traditional Marxist type. He is anxious, as he says, to demonstrate that Locke had nothing of 'petty bourgeois socialist doctrine.' Will Mr. Hill permit no one to register his differences from such old- fashioned interpretative dogma without claiming that injustice is being done to it?—Yours faithfully,
Trinity College, Cambridge PETER LASLETT
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