A number of recent interpretations of the political writings of John Locke (1632–1704) situate them in the context of the Exclusion Controversy of 1679–1683 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. This portrait of Locke as a radical activist reminds us that his political and religious writings, like those of Hobbes before him, are intimately associated with the turbulent events of seventeenth-century England. His discussions of toleration, property, civil authority, rebellion, and much else are not detached reflections on perennial themes; rather, they are engaged contributions to real political debate and concrete events. Yet, while these events occasioned many arguments in the Two Treatises, it is equally true that Locke was dealing with problems of the origin, extent, and limits to government that were central to political thought in England and Europe since the 1620s and remain central today. Moreover, as with his predecessors, his thinking reverberated well beyond these boundaries, especially in the next century in America, where his account of property, his argument for political obligation, and his justification for the right of a people to rebel against an oppressive government were widely cited in the years preceding the American Revolution. Locke, then, was both a living and a posthumous revolutionary, a defender of liberal government in his own world and in years and places far from his own. There is nothing belated about Locke’s importance to the tradition of Western political theory and philosophy.
Locke was born in Somerset in 1632, went to Westminster, an excellent school near London, and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, where, as Peter Laslett tells us, he was “urbane, idle, unhappy, and unremarkable.” Locke took a medical degree, in order to avoid the clergy, and studied philosophy. His interest in the science of his day continued throughout his life; in 1668 he was elected to the Royal Society, and he was a friend of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Thomas Sydenham, and other figures central to the development of the new science. Like Hobbes, shortly after his graduation Locke became associated with a wealthy, powerful patron. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, played a major role in Restoration politics and religious life. He strongly advocated toleration, vigorously opposed the threat of Catholic influence in England, and was a leader in the movement to exclude Charles II’s brother, James, a Catholic, from the line of succession to the throne. Locke became, first, Shaftesbury’s physician, then his research associate, coauthor, and political advisor. In the years of the Exclusion Controversy, Locke was active in Shaftesbury’s revolutionary group, and even during Shaftesbury’s imprisonment in 1680 and after his death in 1683, Locke continued his participation in this radical political movement.
In 1683, after the failure of the famous Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II, Locke fled to Holland. There he played an active role in the community of exiled revolutionaries, negotiating transfers of funds, writing, and working in behalf of the aborted attempt to place the Duke of Monmouth on the throne. Prior to his flight to the Continent, Locke deposited with his old friend James Tyrrell a manuscript on political matters. Most likely it was the first of the Two Treatises, a detailed critique of the patriarchalism and doctrine of the Adamite right of kings presented in the recently republished work of Robert Filmer. During these years of the Exclusion Controversy and the debate over the rights of government, Locke, like Algernon Sydney (regicide and author of Discourses Concerning Government), Tyrrell (author of Patriarcha Non Monarcha), and Shaftesbury himself, was absorbed with the notion of political power and the rights of the people. This fragment, the First Treatise, was the initial product of these early reflections. But it was not the last. In the 1680s Locke added to his earlier work and by the decade’s end had completed a second treatise to accompany the first. In it he developed his famous account of the state of nature in terms of his conception of property and labor, his argument for the role and authority of government, and his defense of the right of resistance and the rights of the people against an oppressive government. The two treatises were published anonymously in 1689, one year after the installation of William and Mary and in the same year as Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration.
After his return to England in 1689, Locke became a celebrity. By the end of the year appeared his most famous and influential work, the result of twenty years’ labor and the foundation of his intellectual prominence, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here Locke registers his important critique of Descartes’s doctrine of innate ideas, argues for the empirical foundation of all of our concepts, beliefs, and judgments, and clarifies the nature and extent of our knowledge. Along the way, he discusses those ideas which ground the notion of natural law, which is so fundamental for his account of government in the Second Treatise. For his remaining years, Locke was revered as the author of the Essay. He produced a stream of works, on education, money, religion, and much else, engaged in public controversies over his work, and served as a public official. In 1696 he became a member of the Board of Trade; later he was to arrange for his friend, Isaac Newton, to be appointed Warden of the Mint.
In 1702 Locke suffered an attack that left him largely deaf, and then, on October 29, 1704, in Essex, in the home of his closest friend, the wife of Francis Masham, Damaris Cudworth, who had cared for him during his final dozen years, he died quietly. Locke the radical had made peace with his notoriety. He had become an intellectual giant and a respected political participant in a world that knew only part of him. For virtually all of his life, it was unknown by most that the great philosopher was also the author of the Two Treatises of Government.
Recommended Readings
Ashcraft, Richard. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. London: Unwin, 1987.
Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Burns, James (ed.). Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Chappell, Vere (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cranston, Maurice. John Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957, 1985.
Dunn, John. John Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Dunn, John. The Political Thought of John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration, James Tully (ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Marshall, John. John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Simmons, A. John. The Lockean Theory of Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Simmons, A. John. On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent and the Limits of Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Tully, James. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Tully, James. A Defense of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.