Lyons and Tygers and Wolves, Oh My! Human Equality and the “Dominion Covenant” in Locke’s Two Treatises

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720960438
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Author: Jishnu Guha-Majumdar
• Date: 01 August 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720960438

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(4) 637 –661

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720960438

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Article

Lyons and Tygers

and Wolves, Oh My!

Human Equality and the

“Dominion Covenant” in

Locke’s Two Treatises

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar1

Abstract

This essay reads John Locke’s Two Treatises through its nonhuman animal

presences, especially the emblematic figures of cattle and “noxious

creatures” like “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves. It argues that the real ground

of Lockean human equality is an ongoing practice of subjugating nonhuman

animals, and not any attribute of the human species as such. More specifically,

the Lockean social compact founded on this equality relies on a “dominion

covenant,” an existential “agreement” in which God lends the power of

dominion to man and any threats to this order require punishment. This

dynamic enables violence toward humans, in the name of their humanity, if

they do not properly exert their power of dominion. Critics have connected

Locke’s theory of property to indigenous dispossession and his theory of

punishment to carceral systems; both processes, I argue, intimately rely

on the dominion covenant. Lockean racism is the fulfillment of, and not a

deviation from, his account of human equality.

Keywords

John Locke, human equality, dominion, colonialism, punishment

1Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Ontario, Kingston, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Ontario, John Watson

Hall, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6.

Email: JGuhaM@gmail.com

960438PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720960438Political TheoryGuha-Majumdar

research-article2020

638 Political Theory 49(4)

In 1656, the Virginia House of Burgesses attempted to solve two recurring

problems—wolf predation on livestock and deteriorating relations with

indigenous peoples—through an act granting a cow to the “King or Great

Man” of any Indian group that brought eight wolf heads to colony officials.

Beyond hoping to cull the wolf population, the Burgesses believed that cows

would help convert and civilize the Indians.1

The two named animals bear much symbolic weight. Wolves have long

symbolized tyranny and ruthlessness in Western imaginations, while raising

cattle represented a properly English lifestyle to these elites, as historian

Virginia Anderson notes.2 Moreover, cows conveyed a meaning distinct from

other farm animals. Whereas horses encouraged mobility, which settlers

regarded as a problem with Indian society, and pigs, sheep, and goats were

too self-sufficient and low status, the routine management cows required

would encourage civilized behavior. The Burgesses, then, expected Indians

to cut off their own ostensibly wild, pack-based, and roaming “heads” for the

life of cowherders, sedentary and pastoralist.

The Burgesses’s desire to convert Indians to cattle-raising and enlist them

in a war on wolves foreshadows John Locke’s construction of civil society, a

few decades later, in his Two Treatises of Government.3 Scholarship on the

Two Treatises often elides its animal presences.4 This article shows that

attending to these animal figures reveals deep ties between human dominion

over animals and Locke’s notion of human equality. Locke’s human excep-

tionalism appears not just as an ideational presumption but requires a con-

tinual practice of domination to retroactively justify it. In other words, I

reverse the ordinary picture of Locke’s humanism; it is not that human equal-

ity legitimizes instrumentalizing nonhumans but that instrumentalizing non-

humans enables the idea of Lockean human equality.

I explore this dynamic through the concept of what I call the dominion

covenant. Engaging scholarship that emphasizes the importance of religion

in Locke’s thought, this concept shows animality’s crucial role in his political

theology. The dominion covenant is a presumed “pact” between God,

humans, and nonhuman creation; God is lord over men and lends them

dominion over animals, and any challenge, human or otherwise, to this order

must be punished. In the covenant, wolves and cows respectively represent

the state of war and incipient civil society. Wolves, and other “noxious brutes”

like “lyons” and “tygers,” violate the dominion covenant and must be elimi-

nated as the enemy of mankind par excellence, whereas cattle, the quintes-

sential sign of property and civilization, form the covenant’s basis. The

covenant, however, proves an unstable foundation for human equality due to

animality’s unruliness; securing it thus requires the ongoing domination of

animals to restore the order that the covenant guarantees. Subsequently, this