Politics & Power Quote by Robert Trout

Calling Locke “bestial” isn’t analysis so much as a deliberate downgrade: a move to shove Enlightenment liberalism back down the evolutionary ladder. Robert Trout, a mid-century broadcast journalist with a taste for big moral stakes, loads the sentence with contempt to make a philosophical dispute feel like an ethical emergency. “Sense certainty, pleasure and pain” reduces empiricism to a pig-trough caricature, implying that if you start with the senses you end with selfishness. That’s the subtext: Locke’s psychology is being indicted as a pipeline to a cold-blooded politics.

The phrase “equally bestial theory of the nation” tightens the screw. Trout isn’t merely saying Locke is wrong about human nature; he’s suggesting that Locke’s foundational story about political legitimacy (state of nature, natural liberty) is animalistic, antisocial, and therefore suspect. It’s a rhetorical strategy common to ideological combat: attack the origin myth, and you don’t have to argue about later details like consent, rights, or property. Discredit the premises as degraded, and the whole liberal architecture looks like a moral mistake rather than a workable system.

Context matters. In the 20th century, “Lockean” ideas were tied to capitalism, individual rights, and the American civic self-image. Calling them “bestial” reads as an anti-liberal gesture: a push for a thicker, duty-bound, tradition-heavy view of the nation. The irony is that Locke’s state of nature is a thought experiment, not zoology; Trout pretends it’s a diagnosis, then sneers at the patient.