LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704)

LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704), English philosopher, political and educational theorist, political economist, scholar, statesman, and sometime physician. John Locke, one of the leading figures in the history of English letters, was born on 29 August 1632 in the village of Wrington, Somerset, and was immediately surrounded by the political and religious controversies that were always to be at the center of his life. His parents were Puritans, and his father later fought on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War. Locke attended Westminster School from 1646 to 1652, when he was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1656. During this period, he wrote but did not publish a pair of essays criticizing the extensive conceptions of religious indifference and toleration advocated by Edward Bagshawe's The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship (1660), and he delivered a series of lectures on natural law.

At Oxford, Locke was a friend of the scientist Robert Boyle and other original members of the Royal Society, to which Locke himself was elected in 1668. Rather than take religious orders, he changed his studies to medicine and was trained and influenced by the physician Thomas Sydenham. On a diplomatic mission to Cleves in Brandenburg in 1665, Locke experienced an unanticipated degree of toleration, which seems to have had a major impact on his philosophical and political thinking. In 1666 he had met Anthony Ashley Cooper, subsequently the Earl of Shaftesbury, into whose household he moved in 1667 as the earl's personal physician and advisor, political aide, and author of political documents.

Shaftesbury, who fell into and out of grace with the king, was at the center of Restoration politics, and Locke was invariably at his side. For Shaftesbury Locke wrote a tract defending toleration in 1667, a draft constitution for the Carolina colony of which Shaftesbury was a proprietor, a defense of the king's prerogative power to issue a declaration of religious toleration in 1669, and—most important—the Two Treatises of Government. It was also while he was a member of the Shaftesbury household that Locke's interest in philosophy deepened, and he completed various drafts of his Essay concerning Human Understanding.

Locke returned to Oxford in 1675, but like Shaftesbury he later went into political exile in the Netherlands, where he remained until 1689. There he enjoyed the friendship and support of Jean Leclerc, to whose Bibliothèque universelle et historique (1686–1693) he made several contributions, and Phillip Limborch, to whom he would dedicate the Epistola de tolerantia, published anonymously in the Netherlands in 1689 and translated into English (also anonymously) the next year as the Letter concerning Toleration. During his exile, Locke completed much of the final version of the Essay, an abstract of which was published by Leclerc in 1688.

While in the Netherlands, Locke presumably was involved in Monmouth's Rebellion in 1685 and in the politics of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought the Dutch sovereign William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II, to the English throne. Locke himself returned to England in 1689 and began his public literary career, publishing the works that would establish his status in the pantheon of western philosophy and political theory. The Essay concerning Human Understanding appeared in December 1689 (dated 1690), and the Two Treatises were published anonymously in 1690.

The Essay is regarded as one of the foundational works of modern empirical, or rather "experiential," philosophy. It opens with an extensive attack on the notion that some ideas are "innate," arguing, on the contrary, that the human mind at birth is a "blank slate" (tabula rasa) but has the capacity to perceive and reason. Locke went on to claim that all ideas and knowledge are acquired from experience, which can be either sensationalist or rational, and that they bear direct relationships to a real, external world. The Essay also deals with language, its relationship to ideas, and its imperfections and abuses, and with reason and its role in the acquisition and assessment of knowledge. This "rationalism," albeit less extreme than that of René Descartes (1596–1650), is sometimes seen as conflicting with the rest of the Essay, but the apparent contradiction between the two positions can be found throughout the work. In a move that would be anathema to modern empiricists, Locke occasionally sidestepped difficult philosophical issues by referring to their resolution in the ultimately unknowable mind of God, for faith, as the acceptance of revelation, was one of the cardinal supports of Locke's entire system.

The Two Treatises are equally foundational for subsequent political philosophy as is the Essay for empirical philosophy, and their reliance upon divine will is even more overt. Written in the early 1680s as part of Shaftesbury's exclusion campaign, the work was not published until 1690, when it was issued as a theoretical support of the successful Glorious Revolution. The Two Treatises were directed against the patriarchal theory of Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653); the First Treatise, in particular, was a detailed and sometimes page-by-page attack on patriarchalism. In the Second Treatise Locke developed his own political theory, which was also an implicit assault on Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whom Locke never identified. Locke replaced Filmer's divine right sovereignty, derived from the paternity of Adam, with a conception of government and politics based on vaguely articulated notions of natural law and natural rights. He posited a pre-political state of nature characterized by human equality and freedom, the ownership of the world in common by God's grant, and legitimacy based on consent. Personal property was acquired by the mixing of one's labor with that which was common.

The most important part of Locke's criticism of Filmer was his insistence that fatherhood and political government are distinct forms of authority. Filmer had asserted their identity. Locke, however, was at pains to argue that while political or civil society had emerged historically and anthropologically from the household, paternal and political dominion were altogether distinct. The act of consent transformed fatherhood into government and undergirded all subsequent legitimacy.

The Two Treatises are perhaps best known for their theories of property and revolution. Government, according to Locke, is a human contrivance made necessary by the growing complexities of the state of nature and especially by the increasing insecurity of personal property. Locke had two conceptions of "property." In the state of nature (through chapter V of the Second Treatise), "property" meant land and goods, including money; in civil society, however, it almost always meant "life, liberty, and estate," which was the more widely accepted meaning in seventeenth-century England. Locke's initial reliance upon the former definition—and the subsequent importance of the Two Treatises—undoubtedly played a large role in popularizing that narrower understanding among modern English speakers, but his shift back to the more conventional and broader meaning was the source of some ambiguities in his political theory.

The purpose of government according to Locke is to protect property, and it is in return for that protection that people agree to transfer to the government their individual rights to interpret and enforce the law of nature. When the government no longer provides that protection, or if it becomes an enemy to property, the duty to obey is superseded by a right of revolution, whereby the power and authority conveyed to the government revert to the people (or their representatives) who may then establish a new government.

The Letter concerning Toleration is a specific application of the principles of the Two Treatises. What was innovative and radical about the Letter was the argument that religious imposition went so far beyond the legitimate competence of the magistrate as to be a ground for resistance. Locke drew a firm distinction between the secular ends of magistracy and the religious ends of churches. In doing so, he made a bolder move toward genuine religious liberty than had any of his contemporaries. But Locke excluded Roman Catholics from this toleration, alleging, like many of his contemporaries, that they owed their primary political loyalty to the pope rather than to civil rulers. He was confident, however, that Protestant Christians could live at peace within one civil society despite their diverse religious beliefs.

Locke spent the rest of life in public service and writing. He was a member of the Board of Trade and published revisions of the Essay, replies to criticisms of the Letter concerning Toleration, and tracts on education, religion, and money, some of which were published after his death. Locke died on 28 October 1704 at Oates, Essex, at the home of Sir Francis and Lady Masham (the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth), where he had been living since 1691. He is buried in High Laver Church in Essex. Much of his massive collection of personal manuscripts—including journals, diaries, letters he received, and copies of those he sent—and a substantial part of his library have survived and are now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704)

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