John Locke

John Locke was born on August 29, 1632, in Wrington, a village in Somerset in the west of England. His father, also named John Locke, worked as a country lawyer and clerk to the local justices of the peace, and the family soon moved to the market town of Pensford, near Bristol, where the boy grew up in a rural Puritan household of modest but respectable means ^[1].

The England of Locke's childhood was sliding toward civil war. His father served as a captain of cavalry on the Parliamentarian side during the early campaigns of the 1640s, and that connection changed his son's prospects. Alexander Popham, a wealthy member of Parliament under whom the elder Locke had served, sponsored the boy's admission to Westminster School in London in 1647 ^[1]. Westminster was then among the finest schools in the country, and Locke studied there while the trial and execution of King Charles I took place a short walk away in January 1649.

In 1652 Locke won a studentship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1656 and his master's in 1658 ^[2]. He found the standard curriculum of scholastic philosophy tedious and was drawn instead to the experimental science then flourishing at Oxford. He read Descartes with interest, attended the chemistry lectures of the German physician Peter Stahl, and fell in with the circle around Robert Boyle, whose careful laboratory method left a lasting mark on his thinking ^[2]. Rather than take holy orders, the usual path for a Christ Church student, Locke turned to medicine.

Medicine gave Locke his entry into public life. In the summer of 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who had come to Oxford to drink medicinal waters for a liver complaint. The two men took to each other at once, and in 1667 Locke moved to Shaftesbury's London residence, Exeter House, as household physician, adviser, and friend ^[3]. A year later Locke supervised a dangerous operation to drain a suppurating cyst on Shaftesbury's liver, inserting a silver tube to keep the wound open. The patient survived and credited Locke with saving his life ^[3].

Shaftesbury's political career pulled Locke into the machinery of Restoration government. Locke served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, helping to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669, and later held posts connected with trade and the colonies ^[4]. Through these years he also continued serious intellectual work. Discussions with friends in London around 1671 about morality and revealed religion convinced him that no progress could be made until the powers and limits of human understanding had been examined, a project that occupied him, on and off, for nearly two decades ^[2].

Politics grew perilous. Shaftesbury led the campaign to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession, fell from favor, and fled to Holland, where he died in 1683. Locke, suspected of complicity in radical plotting after the Rye House Plot, judged England unsafe. In September 1683 he sailed for the Netherlands, where he lived for more than five years, sometimes under an assumed name while the English government sought his extradition ^[1]. The Dutch years proved the most productive of his life: he finished the Essay, drafted his letter on toleration, and moved in a circle of tolerant scholars and dissenting theologians.

Locke returned to England in February 1689, crossing in the fleet that carried Princess Mary, after the Glorious Revolution had replaced James II with William of Orange. The next two years saw the publication of the three works on which his reputation rests, a burst of output with few parallels in the history of philosophy ^[2].

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in December 1689 with a 1690 imprint, argued that human beings are born without innate ideas and that all knowledge derives from experience, through sensation of the external world and reflection on the mind's own operations ^[2]. The famous image of the mind as white paper, waiting to be written on by experience, became shorthand for the empiricist position. The Essay examined the origin of ideas, the nature of language, the limits of knowledge, and the grounds of probable belief, and it went through four editions in Locke's lifetime. Any serious John Locke biography treats the Essay as the hinge of seventeenth century philosophy, the book that set the agenda for Berkeley, Hume, and much of the Enlightenment ^[5].

The Two Treatises of Government appeared anonymously in 1689. The first demolished Sir Robert Filmer's defense of the divine right of kings. The second built a positive theory: human beings in a state of nature possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, governments are created by consent to protect those rights, and a government that betrays its trust may lawfully be resisted and replaced ^[4]. Scholarship since Peter Laslett's 1960 edition has established that Locke composed most of the work in the early 1680s, during the Exclusion Crisis, rather than as an after-the-fact justification of 1688 ^[4]. The Letter Concerning Toleration, written in Latin in Holland and published in English in 1689, argued that civil government exists to protect civil interests and has no business coercing religious belief, though Locke notoriously excluded atheists and, in practice, Catholics from his scheme of toleration ^[6].

Among John Locke achievements must also be counted Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), a widely read manual urging that children be reasoned with rather than beaten, and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), his case for a simple scriptural faith ^[1].

Locke never married and had no children. He was by temperament careful, even secretive: he published the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration anonymously and acknowledged them only in a codicil to his will ^[1]. He kept meticulous journals, ledgers, and medical notes throughout his life, and this vast personal archive, now held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, gives historians an unusually detailed picture of his reading, finances, and health ^[7].

Friendship anchored his life. In the 1680s he formed a deep attachment to Damaris Cudworth, a philosopher in her own right and daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. She married Sir Francis Masham while Locke was in exile, and from 1691 Locke lived as a paying guest of the Masham family at Otes, their manor house at High Laver in Essex ^[1]. There he kept his books, some 4,000 volumes by the end of his life, received visitors, and carried on an enormous correspondence with figures across Europe, including Isaac Newton, with whom he exchanged letters on theology and biblical criticism ^[7].

His health was never robust. Locke suffered from asthma most of his adult life, and the smoke of London repeatedly drove him to the cleaner air of the countryside. The move to rural Essex was as much a medical decision as a social one ^[3].

The 1690s brought Locke public office as well as fame. In 1696 he was appointed a commissioner of the newly created Board of Trade, a demanding post that made him one of the most influential figures in English commercial and colonial policy. He wrote papers on the coinage during the recoinage crisis of the mid 1690s, siding with those who insisted the silver standard be maintained, and he drafted reports on Ireland, the poor law, and the American colonies before resigning in 1700 as his health declined ^[4].

He also spent these years defending and revising his books. The theologian Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, charged that the Essay's account of substance endangered the doctrine of the Trinity, and Locke answered him in three long printed replies between 1697 and 1699 ^[2]. He prepared the fourth edition of the Essay, added the influential chapter on the association of ideas, and worked quietly on paraphrases of the epistles of St. Paul, published only after his death.

By 1704 his asthma had worn him down. Locke died at Otes in High Laver on October 28, 1704, at the age of 72, while Lady Masham read the Psalms to him. He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, High Laver, where his tomb, with a Latin epitaph he composed himself, can still be seen ^[1].

Few thinkers have had a longer reach. Anyone asking who was John Locke soon discovers that the answer runs through the eighteenth century and beyond. Voltaire and the French philosophes treated the Essay as the model of what philosophy should be, and empiricism in the line of Berkeley and Hume is unthinkable without it ^[5]. In education, his insistence that character is formed by early experience influenced Rousseau and generations of reformers.

His political ideas traveled even further. The argument of the Second Treatise, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and forfeit authority when they invade natural rights, supplied the framework and much of the phrasing behind the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. Thomas Jefferson named Locke, with Bacon and Newton, as one of the three greatest men who had ever lived ^[8]. Constitutional ideas such as majority rule, the separation of legislative and executive power, and the right of revolution all bear his imprint ^[4].

Modern scholarship has complicated the portrait. Locke invested in the Royal African Company, which trafficked in enslaved people, and his hand in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a document that sanctioned slavery, sits uneasily beside his declaration that slavery is vile and miserable. Historians continue to debate how far his theory of property served to justify colonial appropriation of Indigenous land in America ^[4]. These tensions are now part of any honest account of John Locke facts, studied rather than ignored. The Clarendon Edition of his works, in progress at Oxford since 1975, and the eight volume edition of his correspondence keep the full range of his writing before scholars, and his central claims about consent, toleration, and the limits of power remain live questions wherever constitutional government is argued over ^[7].