Locke enlightenment writings

English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy.

But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries. Whole passages from his epically radical “Second Treatise” (1689) are used almost verbatim in the Declaration of Independence.

Locke was also an inspiration to the generations of liberal thinkers whose ideas now underpin ideals of Western political thought.

But Locke’s place in the Western canon is also controversial. For one, some feminist writers aver that he helped perpetuate a tradition of ideas dating back to Aristotle and used for ages to subjugate women.

Jeremy Waldron, a scholar of law and philosophy at New York University, asks us to reconsider this view of Locke, and understand him as an early champion of women’s rights.

Waldron outlined his arguments this week (April 27) in a lecture on Locke, motherhood, and equality. The title was drawn from the 17th century philosopher’s own words, “The mother too hath her title.”

The talk, which drew roughly 100 listeners to the Radcliffe Gymnasium, was the third in a 2008-09 Dean’s Lecture Series sponsored by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Waldron was on sabbatical this year at Oxford University’s Christ College, where he immersed himself in Locke’s lesser-known “First Treatise,” published as a companion to the famous second.

The 1689 document — “negative and polemical,” said Waldron — is a line-by-line refutation of a 1680 book by Sir Robert Filmer arguing for the divine right of kings.

The “First Treatise” covers the “scriptural side” of Locke’s arguments against absolute power, said Waldron. The “Second Treatise” explicates Locke’s notions of “rational political theory,” he said — a text more palatable to audiences estranged from the idea that the Bible has a place in

English philosopher and physician (1632–1704)

For other people named John Locke, see John Locke (disambiguation).

John Locke (; 29 August 1632 (O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.

Locke's philosophy of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of personal identity and the psychology of self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers, such as Rousseau,

His contributions to philosophy were vast and varied but underlying them is a momentous break with the past—although not one attributable to Locke alone. The men who set philosophy’s new direction as Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and Scholasticism came to be called “rationalists.” Reasoning meant identifying first premises (e.g., “I think, therefore I am”) and deducing from them, by logic, an entire philosophical structure. Réné Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and Wilhelm Leibniz were the towering figures in the rationalist school—at the core of Western philosophy’s story.

It is perhaps no accident that John Locke viewed himself not primarily as a philosopher, mathematician, or theologian but as a physician and medical investigator. The natural sciences do not and cannot proceed by logical deduction from accepted premises. He warned: “No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”

Isaac Newton, a physicist, and Locke, a physician-scientist, approached knowledge as observers—as empiricists—and decisively influenced the emergence of empiricism in contrast with rationalism. The scientific revolution, of course, already had introduced and succeeded with the methods of observation and experimentation. But Locke turned Western philosophy in the direction of empiricism—changing the world forever. If Locke’s philosophy were to be inscribed on a banner, it might be: “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” 

His Two Treatises on Government(1689) expounds arguments for natural law and what it tells us about morality and human rights, the state of nature and the social contract, the legitimate organization of society and government, and the nature and justification of property—among much else. Every principle and argument is part of the intellectual capital of Western culture (and beyond), beginning with Locke’s inspiration of the new American republic’s constitution an

The Influence of John Locke’s Works

Hans Aarsleff remarks that Locke “is the most influential philosopher of modern times”. He notes that besides initiating the vigorous tradition known as British empiricism, Locke’s influence reached far beyond the limits of the traditional discipline of philosophy: “His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relation to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense” (Aarsleff 1994: 252). Locke may well have influenced such diverse eighteenth century figures as Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Voltaire, Priestly and Jefferson.

Beginning with the publication of the 92 page summary of the Essay in the Bibliotheque universelle et historique for January through March of 1688 along with the publication of the first edition in December 1689, the Essay was both popular and controversial on both the continent and in England for the next fifty years. The sustained argument in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for rejecting the old scholastic model of knowledge and science in favor of empirically disciplined modes of inquiry was enormously successful. Locke’s arguments against innate principles and ideas largely prevailed. This was an early and striking success of the Essay. Recall that Locke’s attack on innate ideas was part and parcel of his anti-authoritarianism and his emphasis on the importance of free and autonomous inquiry. As Aarsleff also notes, the radical nature of Locke’s attacks on epistemic, political, and religious authority are difficult for us to grasp today. (Aarsleff, 1994, 258) Bishop Stillingfleet, the most prominent of Locke’s early critics, claimed that Locke’s new way of ideas would lead to skepticism and that his account of substance undermined the doctrine of the trinity. Locke denied this, but given that we have good reason to hold that Locke was an anti-trinitarian, we have