John Locke: life, ideas and books

Life

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took degrees including a medical one. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1668 and worked as a physician and secretary in the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He held posts connected with the Carolina colony and with the Council for Trade and Plantations, and later served as a Commissioner for Trade and Plantations from 1696 to 1700.

Because of his ties to Shaftesbury's opposition politics, Locke went into exile in the Dutch Republic from 1683 to 1688. He returned to England after the Glorious Revolution and published his major works in 1689 and 1690. He died in 1704 in Essex. Historians have also noted that he held shares in a company engaged in the slave trade, a fact that complicates his legacy as a theorist of liberty.

Ideas

Locke's political theory begins from natural rights to life, liberty and property that exist before government. People form political societies by consent in order to protect those rights, and governments that violate them lose their claim to obedience. In the Second Treatise he argued that property arises when a person mixes labour with what nature provides, and that legitimate power is limited, divided and answerable to the governed.

In the Letter Concerning Toleration he argued that churches are voluntary associations and that the magistrate should not coerce belief. In philosophy he defended empiricism: the mind begins without innate ideas and knowledge comes from experience.

Major works

• A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).
• Two Treatises of Government (1689-90), published anonymously.
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689-90).
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

Why conservatives read him

For American conservatives Locke is a source of the founding-era case for natural rights, property and consent. The Declaration of Independence reuses language from the Second Treatise, and arguments about limited government, religious liberty and the security of property often trace back to him. Traditionalist conservatives are more guarded, since his contractual picture of society differs from Edmund Burke's inherited partnership, so the two are often read side by side.