John Locke
English philosopher and physician whose theory of natural rights and government by consent, set out in the Two Treatises of Government, and whose empiricist account of the mind in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding became founding documents of liberal political thought and modern epistemology.
1632–1704
Biography
John Locke (1632 to 1704) was an English philosopher and physician whose writings on government, knowledge, and religious toleration became foundational texts of the Enlightenment. He was born on August 29, 1632, at Wrington in Somerset, the son of a country lawyer who had served as a cavalry captain for the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. His father's connections secured him a place at Westminster School in London, and in 1652 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he would remain associated for more than thirty years.
At Oxford Locke found the required curriculum of Aristotelian scholasticism unsatisfying and turned instead toward experimental science and medicine. He worked alongside the chemist Robert Boyle and the physician Thomas Sydenham, and in 1668 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Though he never took a medical degree in the usual course, he practiced medicine, and it was medicine that shaped the decisive relationship of his life. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and soon joined his household as physician and adviser. Locke oversaw an operation to drain an abscess on Shaftesbury's liver, and the earl credited him with saving his life.
Through Shaftesbury, Locke entered public affairs. He assisted in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, served as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, and held shares in the Royal African Company. When Shaftesbury led the parliamentary opposition seeking to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession, Locke was drawn into the political danger surrounding him. After Shaftesbury's fall and death, and amid the government's investigation of the Rye House Plot, Locke fled to the Dutch Republic in 1683 and lived there in relative obscurity for several years.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 changed his fortunes. Locke returned to England in 1689, traveling in the same period as Princess Mary, and within roughly a year he published the works that made his reputation. The Two Treatises of Government appeared anonymously, its first treatise a point-by-point rebuttal of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha and its second an argument that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed and exists to protect life, liberty, and property. When rulers break that trust, Locke held, the people retain a right to resist. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published the same year, argued that the mind at birth is a blank sheet, or tabula rasa, and that all ideas derive from sensation and reflection rather than innate principles.
Alongside these Locke issued A Letter Concerning Toleration, first printed in Latin as Epistola de Tolerantia and translated into English by William Popple. In it he argued that the state has no business coercing religious belief and that the magistrate's authority extends to civil interests but not to the care of souls. His later works continued in the same vein: Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), drawn from letters to his friend Edward Clarke about raising a son, and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), which sought to reduce the essentials of Christian faith to a small set of scriptural propositions.
In his final years Locke served as a commissioner on the newly established Board of Trade from 1696, advising on colonial and economic policy while continuing to write and to defend his Essay against critics. He spent his last decade largely at Oates, the Essex manor of Sir Francis Masham and his wife Damaris, Lady Masham, herself a philosopher with whom Locke maintained a long intellectual friendship. He died there on October 28, 1704, and was buried in the churchyard at High Laver.
Life & Career
Why Locke Matters
Locke's Second Treatise of Government gave the modern world an influential secular account of political authority. By grounding government in a social contract entered into by naturally free and equal individuals, and by defining its purpose as the protection of life, liberty, and property, he displaced older theories of the divine right of kings that writers such as Robert Filmer had defended. His claim that a people may reclaim their power when a ruler violates the public trust supplied a vocabulary for resistance that later revolutionaries adopted directly.
That vocabulary passed into the founding documents of the United States. Thomas Jefferson's phrasing in the Declaration of Independence, with its appeal to unalienable rights and government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, echoes Locke closely, and his arguments circulated widely among the American founders and in the debates of the French Enlightenment. His case for religious toleration, drawing a line between the civil concerns proper to the magistrate and matters of conscience, helped establish the principle of separating religious authority from the power of the state.
In philosophy, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding made Locke the founder of British empiricism. By insisting that knowledge is built from experience rather than implanted at birth, he set the agenda for George Berkeley and David Hume after him and framed the epistemological questions that Immanuel Kant would later take up. His analysis of personal identity, primary and secondary qualities, and the limits of what the human mind can know became standard reference points for the philosophy that followed.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education carried his influence into a further domain. Its emphasis on forming character and judgment through habit, example, and the cultivation of reason rather than rote learning shaped later educational theory and the practices of tutors and reformers well into the following centuries.
