"There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse"
About this Quote
Locke turns table manners into moral philosophy with a single, coolly absolutist line: “There cannot be greater rudeness…” The overstatement is the point. By ranking interruption as the peak social offense, he’s not policing chatter so much as defending the conditions that make thinking possible in public. “Current of his discourse” isn’t casual small talk; it casts speech as a flowing process, something with direction and internal logic. To cut in is to dam the river, forcing someone’s mind to restart, justify, or perform for an audience suddenly trained on the interrupter.
The subtext is deeply political. Locke wrote in a world where authority often spoke over everyone else: courts, pulpits, patrons, parliament. Interruption is a miniature version of that power move. It asserts hierarchy (my urgency outranks your reasoning), and it turns dialogue into a contest for the floor rather than a search for truth. Locke’s liberal project depends on consent, deliberation, and the idea that a person’s mind is their own; letting someone finish a thought becomes a small act of recognizing their agency.
The line also reads like a preemptive strike against the performative heckler, the conversational bully, the man who treats debate as sport. Locke’s “rudeness” is not just bad etiquette; it’s epistemic sabotage. You can’t evaluate an argument you won’t allow to exist in full. In that sense, interruption isn’t merely impolite - it’s an attack on reason itself, carried out with the innocuous weapon of impatience.
The subtext is deeply political. Locke wrote in a world where authority often spoke over everyone else: courts, pulpits, patrons, parliament. Interruption is a miniature version of that power move. It asserts hierarchy (my urgency outranks your reasoning), and it turns dialogue into a contest for the floor rather than a search for truth. Locke’s liberal project depends on consent, deliberation, and the idea that a person’s mind is their own; letting someone finish a thought becomes a small act of recognizing their agency.
The line also reads like a preemptive strike against the performative heckler, the conversational bully, the man who treats debate as sport. Locke’s “rudeness” is not just bad etiquette; it’s epistemic sabotage. You can’t evaluate an argument you won’t allow to exist in full. In that sense, interruption isn’t merely impolite - it’s an attack on reason itself, carried out with the innocuous weapon of impatience.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
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