John Locke
John Locke composed his own obituary in Latin, and it begins with a command to a passerby. "Stay traveller: near this place lies JOHN LOCKE." The tablet, he wrote, was a record that would quickly perish. The man it marked was an English philosopher and physician, born on the 29th of August 1632 and dead on the 28th of October 1704. He called himself contented with his modest lot, bred a scholar, devoted to truth alone. He asked that his vices be buried with him and that his writings, not the doubtful eulogies of an epitaph, speak for what sort of man he was. Those writings did speak. They reached a young Virginian named Thomas Jefferson, who reproduced one of Locke's phrases word for word in the Declaration of Independence. They reached Voltaire, who called him "le sage Locke". Yet this is a man who lived in fear of arrest, wrote under false names in a foreign country, and helped draft a document granting planters absolute power over enslaved people. How did a clerk's son from rural Somerset become the father of liberalism? Why did he keep his most dangerous books published anonymously? And what did he believe a human mind was made of when a child is born into the world?
"I found myself in a storm," Locke wrote of his early years. He was 10 when the English Civil War broke out in 1642, dividing royalists who supported Charles I from the Parliamentarian forces. His father, a Puritan attorney and clerk to the Justices of the Peace in Chew Magna, fought on the Parliamentarian side. He served as a captain of cavalry under Alexander Popham, a Member of Parliament for Bath and a wealthy landowner. That personal connection changed the boy's life.
In 1647, under Popham's sponsorship, young Locke left provincial Somerset for the prestigious Westminster School in London. The school sat just half a mile from where Charles I would be executed after his trial by a special court created by Parliament. Westminster students were forbidden to attend the execution. The schooling gave Locke more than learning. It opened a network of friendship and patronage that would later aid his scholarly and political career.
Locke's roots reached back into the cloth trade. During the reign of Henry VIII, his great-grandfather Sir William Locke had been a prosperous merchant dealing in luxury cloth. The family had since produced a businessman in the putting-out system, providing raw wool to weavers in their homes and collecting the finished cloth. Soon after Locke's birth in 1632, the family moved to the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol, into a house his grandfather Nicholas gave to his lawyer son. There the boy grew up in a rural Tudor house in Belluton, where his brother Thomas was born in 1637.
At 20, after completing his studies at Westminster, Locke was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford in the autumn of 1652. The dean of the college was John Owen, also vice-chancellor of the university. Locke proved a capable student, but the undergraduate curriculum irritated him. He found the works of modern thinkers such as Rene Descartes far more interesting than the classical material the university taught.
Through his friend Richard Lower, whom he knew from Westminster, Locke discovered medicine and experimental philosophy. He earned a bachelor's degree in February 1656 and a master's in June 1658, all during the Interregnum. Much later, in February 1675, he received a bachelor of medicine, having already studied and practised the subject for years before formal certification. At Oxford he worked with the experimental scientists Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, and Robert Hooke.
Locke's reading reached beyond Europe. At Oxford he encountered the writings of Islamic scholars, including Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, translated by Edward Pococke. That text shaped his perspective on philosophy and on the notion of the blank mind. A network from his school days would soon pull him outward again. In 1665 Locke travelled outside England for the first time, appointed secretary to Sir Walter Vane on a royal diplomatic mission to the Elector of Brandenburg, writing to Boyle of a place where people "quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven".
In 1666, when Locke was 34, a chance meeting redirected his entire life. Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury, came to Oxford to visit his son and to drink waters from a nearby spa for a liver infection. Locke was tasked with bringing him the waters. Shaftesbury, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was impressed and persuaded Locke to join his retinue. In 1667 Locke moved into Shaftesbury's London home at Exeter House on the Strand to serve as his personal physician.
Locke's medical training was soon tested in earnest. When Shaftesbury's liver infection turned life-threatening, Locke coordinated several physicians and likely persuaded his patron to undergo surgery to remove the cyst, an operation that was itself dangerous at the time. Shaftesbury survived and prospered, crediting Locke with saving his life. In London, Locke also resumed his medical studies under Thomas Sydenham, who pressed him toward observation rather than reasoning from first principles.
Shaftesbury's rise carried Locke upward with him. His patron became Lord Chancellor in 1672 and was raised to 1st Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673. Locke was appointed secretary to the Lords Proprietors and secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1668. He was also among the first scholars in Britain to read and own Baruch Spinoza's radical Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which he acquired in 1672 and later took great care to avoid being tainted by. When Shaftesbury fell from favour in 1675, Locke left England for France, where he would travel on extended tours and, perhaps at his patron's prompting, begin composing the bulk of the Two Treatises of Government.
In 1683, Locke slipped away to the Dutch Republic in political exile, beginning five years that one assessment called intellectually the most productive period of his life. The danger was real. In 1684, Charles II ordered the head of Christ Church to revoke Locke's senior studentship, stripping him of the Oxford home that might have housed him for life. Under surveillance by British authorities, fearing arrest and extradition, Locke moved between cities under a variety of aliases, one of them Dr. Van Linden.
Freed from court duties, Locke wrote. He worked on the Two Treatises and spent great effort on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, sending the manuscript to Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom he had met in France. He also composed A Letter on Toleration, likely addressed to Philipp Van Limborch, leader of the Remonstrants in Amsterdam and a good friend. Among his new acquaintances were the Swiss theologian Jean LeClerc and the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.
A royal birth changed everything. When James II's Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, bore a son, the royal line would remain Catholic rather than pass to James's Protestant daughter Mary, wed to William of Orange. Whig nobles invited William to invade and return England to Protestantism. Lord Charles Mordaunt asked Locke to join the party accompanying Princess Mary back to England. Locke arrived in February 1688, aged 57, having lost his Oxford security and possessing only a small income from properties inherited from his father, but now connected to Pembroke and Mordaunt, men positioned to help him after the Revolution.
With William III and Mary II installed as joint rulers, Locke published the works he had carried out of exile. A Letter Concerning Toleration, the Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding appeared in 1689 and 1690 in quick succession. Only on the Essay did he put his name as author. The others he published anonymously, the habit of a man who had learned the cost of dangerous ideas.
The writing on toleration argued that religion is a matter for the individual and that churches are voluntary associations. Locke ruled out religious coercion and uniformity, an argument that leads toward the separation of church and state. The Two Treatises argued for government founded on the consent of the governed and for the right to revolt against a tyrannous government that has lost that consent. Today the work is read as a general argument against absolute monarchy, particularly as defended by Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes.
Locke's ideas were revolutionary for English politics, and the parallel was dangerous. The philosopher Algernon Sidney, exploring similar ideas, was executed for treason against Charles II in 1683. Locke survived to enjoy a quieter triumph. His close friend Lady Masham invited him to Oates, the Mashams' country house in Essex, where despite asthma attacks he became an intellectual hero of the Whigs and discussed matters with figures such as John Dryden and Isaac Newton.
At birth, Locke held, the mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Against Descartes, who held that man innately knows basic logical propositions, and against the Augustinian view of man as originally sinful, Locke argued that we are born without innate ideas. Knowledge comes only from experience, drawn from sensation and reflection, the two sources of all our ideas. This is the position now known as empiricism, and it placed Locke among the first British empiricists in the tradition of Francis Bacon.
Locke defined the self as "that conscious thinking thing... which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends". Intellectual historians have argued that his Essay marks the beginning of the modern Western conception of the self. His ideas figured prominently in the later work of Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, and his theory of two kinds of ideas, simple and complex, prompted Hume and George Berkeley to revise and extend it.
Locke believed early impressions shape a person for life. "The little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences," he wrote. He warned against letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that goblins and sprites haunt the night, lest darkness ever after bring those frightful ideas. This theory came to be called associationism. It strongly influenced 18th-century educational thought and helped lead to David Hartley's attempt, in his Observations on Man of 1749, to find a biological mechanism for it.
One passage from the Second Treatise appears verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a "long train of abuses". Jefferson ranked Locke alongside Bacon and Newton as one of "the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception". Yet Locke's own century barely noticed the Two Treatises. One historian recorded that until 1703 the book was generally ignored, and in the 50 years after Queen Anne's death in 1714 it was reprinted only once outside his collected works. Its American readership grew only with colonial resistance to new taxes after the Seven Years' War, and the first American printing came in 1773 in Boston.
Locke's record on human freedom carried sharp contradictions. He wrote against slavery in general, yet was briefly an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. As Shaftesbury's secretary he was directed to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which pledged that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves". The historian James Farr noted that Locke never addressed his own contradictory views on slavery. The historian Holly Brewer argued his role was exaggerated, comparing it to a lawyer writing a will, and pointed out that he later attacked colonial policy granting land to slave owners while heading a Board of Trade under William of Orange.
Locke's views on women drew similar scrutiny. He wrote that a mother "hath an equal title" to her children, challenging the assumption of paternal superiority, and granted women rights of contract in marriage. Yet he also claimed it is "Men who unite into commonwealths", framing political rights in male terms. In the 18th century Mary Wollstonecraft turned his own empiricism against such limits, writing that "Mr. Locke has clearly proved that the senses are the primary source of knowledge", and arguing that women denied education are kept from developing the rational capacities Locke prized.
By his death in 1704, Locke had amassed a library of more than 3,000 books, a striking number for the seventeenth century. He was an assiduous collector and an obsessive notetaker, called a "Master Note-taker" by one scholar. He devised his own indexing method using a grid and Latin keywords, shortening words to their first letter and vowel, so that "Epistle" became "Ei". He published this method in French in 1686, and it was republished in English in 1706, two years after he died.
Locke spent his last fourteen years in the household of Sir Francis Masham and his wife, the philosopher Lady Damaris Masham, his friend since she was a young woman. He had lived at Oates Manor in Essex since 1691, his health worn down by asthma. He died in his rooms there on the 28th of October 1704 and was buried in the churchyard of All Saints' Church in High Laver, near the Mashams' house.
His will divided the library with care. Lady Masham could choose any four folios, eight quartos, and twenty smaller books. The bulk passed to his cousin Peter King and to Lady Masham's son, Francis Cudworth Masham, who was promised half upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Over two centuries the collection scattered, but most of the King portion was bought by the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1947, and the collector Paul Mellon, who recovered another part in 1951, transferred his holdings to the Bodleian in 1978. There the Locke Room still holds more than 800 of his books, many bearing his signature on the pastedowns and his marginalia in the pages, a record that did not quickly perish after all.
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Common questions
Who was John Locke and why is he called the father of liberalism?
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician who lived from the 29th of August 1632 to the 28th of October 1704. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers and is commonly known as the father of liberalism. His major works include A Letter Concerning Toleration, the Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
What did John Locke mean by tabula rasa and the blank slate?
John Locke held that at birth the mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, shaped only by experience. He argued against Descartes that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge comes from sensation and reflection. This position is now known as empiricism, and it placed Locke among the first British empiricists in the tradition of Francis Bacon.
How did John Locke influence the American Declaration of Independence?
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government influenced the language Thomas Jefferson chose in drafting the July 1776 Declaration of Independence. One passage from the Second Treatise, the reference to a long train of abuses, appears verbatim in the document. Jefferson ranked Locke alongside Bacon and Newton as one of the three greatest men who ever lived.
Why did John Locke go into exile in the Dutch Republic?
John Locke slipped away to the Dutch Republic in 1683 as a political exile after his patron Lord Shaftesbury fell from favour and died. He spent five years moving between cities under aliases such as Dr. Van Linden, under surveillance by British authorities and fearing arrest. In 1684 Charles II had his senior studentship at Christ Church, Oxford revoked.
What was John Locke's relationship with Lord Shaftesbury?
John Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury, in 1666 by chance at Oxford, and in 1667 moved into his London home at Exeter House as his personal physician. Locke likely persuaded Shaftesbury to undergo surgery for a life-threatening liver infection, and Shaftesbury credited him with saving his life. Through Shaftesbury, Locke gained governmental posts as secretary to the Lords Proprietors and to the Council of Trade and Plantations.
What were John Locke's contradictory views on slavery?
John Locke wrote against slavery in general but was briefly an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. As Shaftesbury's secretary he was directed to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which pledged that every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power over his slaves. The historian Holly Brewer argued his role was exaggerated and that he later worked to undermine slavery while heading a Board of Trade under William of Orange.