John Locke

10 Key excerpts on "John Locke"

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  The Lockean Mind

  • Jessica Gordon-Roth, Shelley Weinberg(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART 10 Locke’s political philosophy One of the things that Locke is perhaps best known for – especially outside of the academy – is his contributions to political philosophy. In fact, for those not particularly well versed in philosophy, it’s the ‘political Locke’ who likely first comes to mind whenever Locke is referenced. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were both highly influenced by Locke’s philosophical ideas. Contemporary libertarianism, too, with its emphasis on small government, the requirement of actual consent to that government, and a natural executive right to establish one’s own sovereignty and enforce one’s own rights, has its roots in Locke. But as the chapters in this section of the volume make clear, getting a grip on the true nature of the ‘political Locke’ is a whole lot more difficult than it at first seems. In ‘Locke on the State of Nature,’ S.-J. Savonius-Wroth explores how Locke’s Two Treatises serves as a response to Robert Filmer’s arguments for an absolutist view of government. Savonius-Wroth shows why Locke relies on the authority of Richard Hooker, and argues that the legitimacy of governmental coercive power and the legitimacy of dispersed coercive power are both derived from the state of nature for Locke. But, as Helga Varden makes clear in ‘Locke on Property,’ Locke’s account of private property – a thing that Locke thinks we first acquire in the state of nature – faces overwhelming obstacles. Even though Varden claims that these problems render Locke’s account of private property one that does not and cannot work philosophically, she argues that this doesn’t mean that Locke’s account is valueless

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  Rights

  • Duncan Ivison(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 . Central here is the notion of self-ownership; I "own" myself in the sense that no one else has the right to use my body, or control my choices, unless I consent. What is striking about this idea is how it has been central to a range of different political ideologies and traditions. Libertarians take it very seriously, but so too do Marxists and egalitarian liberals. A central theme of this chapter is the way conceptions of the self inform and shape our conceptions of rights. The normative idea of self-ownership points to a set of ways of thinking about what is most distinctive or significant about human beings and why they should have rights. But I also want to examine how an emphasis on choice and self-ownership shapes our conception of the legitimacy of political power. An emphasis on self-ownership is strongly correlated with an emphasis on consent as the basis of political obligation and legitimacy.

  I want to explore these ideas through the political philosophy of John Locke. Locke provides us with a rich philosophical approach to rights in which the ideas of property and self-ownership are central. His influence on the drafters of the American Constitution is self-evident (see White 1978; Pangle 1988; Lacey & Haakonssen 1991). Our discourse of rights, and our public culture more generally, despite all the distance between our time and his, still bears the imprint of many of his arguments.

  Another thing Locke does is link the language of rights to consent in a particularly dramatic way, through his account of political obligation and popular sovereignty. I want to draw out two important ideas here. First of all, it has proved to be a remarkably influential conception of political power. But as I argued in Chapter 1 , we should resist a too easy assumption that rights are best grasped as always fundamentally opposed to social and political power. We saw in Chapter 2 how both Grotius and Hobbes, starting from premises that granted that everyone was naturally free and possessed certain natural rights, ended up justifying absolutist government. For Locke the story will be different, but equally illuminating. Consent grounds the exercise of political power, but the very capacities and powers required for the effective exercise of rights are themselves the object of "government", understood more broadly to include not just the government, but other forms of social power too. So consent and the ascription of rights can explain some aspects of the exercise of power, but not all. We need to keep this broader conception of government and social power in mind if we want to grasp what rights do, as much as understand what they are.

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  A History of English Philosophy

  • W. R. Sorley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Endymion Press

    (Publisher)

  John Locke

  ~

  John Locke MAY BE regarded as, on the whole, the most important figure in English philosophy. Others excelled him in genius; he had not the comprehensive grasp of Hobbes, or the speculative originality of Berkeley, or the subtlety of Hume; but he was surpassed by none in candor, sagacity, and shrewdness. These qualities recommended him to his countrymen, and the width of his interests reconciled them to his philosophy. He was a physician, always on the outlook for new knowledge, an adviser of statesmen, a sufferer in the cause of freedom, and an amateur theologian. His writings on economics, on politics, and on religion expressed the best ideas of the time — the ideas that were about to become dominant. He was the philosopher of the Revolution settlement; and, when the settlement was made, he came home to publish the books which he had prepared in exile. Even his great work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, may have seemed only to show the grounds in the human mind for the lessons of honesty, liberty, and toleration which he constantly inculcated. It is almost with a shock of surprise that one realizes that this same Essay, by its “historical plain method,” gave a new direction to European philosophy and provided a new basis for the science of psychology.

  Locke was born at Wrington, a village in Somerset, on 29 August, 1632. He was the son of a country solicitor and small landowner who, when the civil war broke out, served as a captain of horse in the parliamentary army. “I no sooner perceived myself in the world than I found myself in a storm,” he wrote long afterwards, during the lull in the storm which followed the king’s return. But political unrest does not seem to have seriously disturbed the course of his education. He entered Westminster school in 1646, and passed to Christ Church, Oxford, as a junior student, in 1652; and he had a home there (though absent from it for long periods) for more than thirty years — till deprived of his studentship by royal mandate in 1684. The official studies of the university were uncongenial to him; he would have preferred to have learned philosophy from Descartes instead of from Aristotle; but evidently he satisfied the authorities, for he was elected to a senior studentship in 1659, and, in the three or four years following, he took part in the tutorial work of the college. At one time he seems to have thought of the clerical profession as a possible career; but he declined an offer of preferment in 1666, and in the same year obtained a dispensation which enabled him to hold his studentship without taking orders. About the same time we hear of his interest in experimental science, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1668. Little is known of his early medical studies. He cannot have followed the regular course for he was unable to obtain the degree of doctor of medicine. It was not till 1674 that he graduated as bachelor of medicine. In the following January his position in Christ Church was regularized by his appointment to one of the two medical studentships of the college.

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  America's Philosopher

  John Locke in American Intellectual Life

  • Claire Rydell Arcenas(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Historians and political theorists continued, for example, to recognize Locke as an important figure in the development of political thought; to emphasize both the chronological and the conceptual distance between Locke and themselves; and to eschew discussion of his relevance to present-day questions. At the same time, they gave Locke a prominent role in their accounts of the founding moment

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  Madison's Sorrow

  Today's War on the Founders and America's Liberal Ideal

  • Kevin O'Leary(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  John Locke Invents America

  V iewed from Europe, the United States once appeared as a culturally and politically conservative country.1 But philosophically, America has been a deeply liberal nation, founded by people who rejected the old ways of Europe and sought a new path forward. In authoring the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson famously cribbed from John Locke.2 We not only borrowed the right to revolution and property from Locke, but just as important, we adopted his wholesale refutation of the ancien régime—the political and social system of hereditary monarchy and feudalism—and his radical philosophy that spurned the Old World based on caste and class; Americans wanted the New World to be different. Locke’s articulation of rational liberty, defense of the sanctity of the individual, embrace of the reality of human equality, and belief that people have a right to choose the government under which they live have been deeply ingrained in American culture and modern liberalism.

  America’s political consciousness has been largely restricted to Locke’s intellectual universe and the language of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. For generations, Americans have been fortunate in this regard. It was Locke, more than any other thinker, who supplied the American founders with their conceptions of liberty, equality, property, natural rights (a powerful mental and moral fiction, not an historic fact, for Locke), and government by consent. Lockean liberalism, at once radically egalitarian and protective of individual rights and initiative, provides the philosophic canopy under which Americans of a progressive and conservative mindset have worked together for more than two centuries. While liberals and conservatives have often disagreed on public policy, they both operate in the world created by Locke and celebrated in the American Revolution. The illiberal right does not.

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  Reconsidering American Liberalism

  The Troubled Odyssey Of The Liberal Idea

  • James Young(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  John Locke and the Theory of Liberal Constitutionalism

  FROM THE TIME of the Mayflower Compact, the American colonies had had experience with the practice of government based on an agreement to certain specified principles. It was therefore natural that they would turn toward the social contract tradition in political theory as a device for the legitimation of their political actions. And for reasons to be explored in Chapter 3 , it was equally natural that they would turn to John Locke as a model contractarian. However, hovering in the background behind Locke was Thomas Hobbes, the prototypical contract theorist in the Anglo-American tradition. Hobbes presented an altogether harsher view of the problems of politics than did Locke, and a brief sketch of his views is useful as a counterpoint to the work of his successor.

  The central idea of all social contract theory is an agreement among free, equal individuals existing in a presocial state of nature to establish society and/or government according to some set of principles rooted in a particular conception of human nature. The idea is to picture human nature as it exists naturally, uncontaminated by the influences of society. It is this conception that is of crucial importance. For Hobbes, the picture was dark indeed. Men were restless, asocial, if not antisocial, atoms, driven by their desires and aversions in a relentless pursuit of the power that made possible such fleeting felicity as was conceivable in the absence of social and political order. The result was the notorious war of all against all, which tended to render felic-ity—the necessarily impermanent achievement of ones desires—impossible and to generate such a deep fear of violent death that it motivated human beings to enter into a social contract. The social contract obligated them to obey an all-powerful, unlimited sovereign for as long as the sovereign achieved the supreme goal of preserving peace. It should be carefully noted that the social contract creates a society and a state, but it by no means creates a meaningful sense of community. Instead, what is provided is the minimal degree of order that makes it possible for the Hobbesian man to pursue his self-defined personal interests with at least some minimum hope of achieving a modicum of success. Locke, although neither a follower of Hobbes nor an author writing to refute Hobbes, surely had this theory in the back of his mind while he was composing his political writings.

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  Nonsense upon Stilts (Routledge Revivals)

  Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man

  • Jeremy Waldron(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Natural rights in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries DOI: 10.4324/9781315742809-2

  I

  It is easy for us to take the idea of human rights for granted. But to understandit properly, we need to see it in the context of the ideas to which it has beentraditionally opposed. In its classic form the theory of natural rights may beseen as an attack on two quite different approaches to the defence of politicalabsolutism: it is a response to the theory of natural hierarchy, and it is aresponse to theories of contractual subjection to absolute authority. Both theseresponses are found in the political philosophy of John Locke, and the argumentset out in the Two Treatises of Government will serve us, as itserved the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, as the paradigm of a theoryof natural rights.1

  The Lockean philosophy can be viewed, first, as a response to contemporary claimsabout the divine right of kings and, more generally, to all theories of thenatural ordination of political authority. Suppose human beings are taken to bethe creatures of a God who has set up a certain order for the world in which theyare to live; suppose too that this order can be perceived by them either throughthe use of reason or through divine revelation or both; and suppose finally thatboth reason and biblical revelation indicate the indispensability of politicalauthority in human affairs, given the nature of man. Then the question arises: onwhat basis is this authority to be constituted? Has our Creator Himself institutedthe authority needed for human life, designating certain individuals (or certaintypes of individuals) as natural rulers and placing all others in naturalsubjection to them? Or is this something He has left for us to work out on ourown?

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  Reading Political Philosophy

  Machiavelli to Mill

  • Derek Matravers, Jonathan Pike, Nigel Warburton(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 John Locke: Second Treatise of Government Jon Pike

  By the end of this chapter you should:

  • Have read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and studied the most important sections in detail.
  • Have a good understanding of Locke’s political theory.
  • Be able to offer some criticism of that theory.
  • Have continued and entrenched the discussion of the sources of rightful political authority.
  • Be aware of some contemporary interpretations of Locke and of his continuing relevance to political philosophy.
  • Have further developed your reading skills.

  Introduction

  Locke is widely held to be one of the founders of modern liberalism, and his Second Treatise of Government, with its clear advocacy of limited government, is one of liberalism’s founding documents. There are echoes of the language of the Second Treatise in the Constitution of the United States and in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Second Treatise was not written in order to ‘found liberalism’ but to make a contribution to a political debate in England about the limits of a legitimate sovereign.

  For some time it was thought that the Second Treatise was a post hoc justification of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 which deposed James II and put William of Orange on the British throne. But most historians believe that both the first and second treatises were composed between the years 1679 and 1682, and published later in the more favourable political climate after the Glorious Revolution.

  The Two Treatises of Government were written at a time when Locke’s political patron, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, and probably Locke himself, were heavily involved in revolutionary politics. Shaftesbury was a leading figure in the Whig attempt to push through an Exclusion Bill (1680) which would prevent Charles II’s Roman Catholic brother James from inheriting the throne. For the Whig opponents of James, Catholicism was indissolubly tied to absolutism on the French model. Recent scholarship has shown how far Locke’s work reflects the revolutionary pamphlets of the time, and suggests that he was providing ‘a political declaration for the revolutionary movement of the 1680s’ (Ashcraft (1986

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  The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls

  • David Boucher, Paul Kelly(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The blossoming of royalist ideology, Locke believed, threatened to distort and perhaps subvert the course of political development, and to drive it into new channels of absolutism and oppression, with the misery and instability which that would generate. Against the background of this crisis in political legitimization, Locke claims that it has become necessary for the first time for men ‘to examine more carefully the Original and Rights of Government and to find out ways to restrain the Exorbitances and prevent the Abuses of the Power’. 32 (This idea that the need for political self-consciousness is the novel feature of the modern age would sound almost Hegelian were it not for the fact that Locke seems to view it rather as a regrettable and contingent necessity than as the consummation of the growth of spirit in the world.) The Second Treatise — according to its author—is itself the theory that is called for by these circumstances. Thus, instead of the paradoxes of the social contract, we have in Locke’s anthropology a theory of the political which purports to have the remarkably modern ability to explain both the circumstances of its own production and the novelty and strangeness that would initially be attributed to it. So the anthropological story cannot be faulted in the ways that the social contract story can be. But then Locke is in a difficulty. We have already seen that it is the contract story that packs the normative punch of his political philosophy. It gives us the theory of rights, representation, separation of powers, justified resistance, and so on. The anthropology, on its own, gives none of this. It seems, therefore, that the story Locke needs (for his moral and political purposes) he cannot have (for historical reasons), and the story that is consistent and historically plausible is not one that gets him anywhere near the normative conclusions he desires

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  Liberal Internationalism

  Theory, History, Practice

  • B. Jahn(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Yet, by recovering the core dynamics of liberalism, thirdly, this conception opens up the possibility of a more comprehensive analysis of liberalism in theory and practice. Locke, as the historical and biographical context suggests, did not analyze the workings of an already existing ‘liberalism’. Though he picked up on what was later identified as core ‘liberal’ ideas and interests that had some currency in the socio-political context of the time, his work largely consisted in developing a systematic account of these ideas and interests and a program for their realization. Locke, in short, developed a political program and provided a complex and sophisticated conception of history as a framework within which that program made sense. And it was indeed as a political program that his work was already during his lifetime taken up by the Whig party and subsequently by other political actors – notably in America (Arneil 1996). Yet, since these ideas and interests were not widely shared, their realization – through privatization/expropriation – required political power and thus generated tensions whose management led to the development of the separate spheres of economics and politics, each over time developing its own norms, actors, institutions, and practices characteristic of the modern liberal state. This transformation of traditional political communities into modern states, however, also implied the separation between different political communities and thus led to the constitution of domestic and international politics as separate spheres – each again with their own norms, actors, institutions, and practices. The inequalities enshrined in and between these different spheres – voting rights for some but not for others, rights of sovereignty for some but not for others, (a measure of) redistribution in the domestic but not the international sphere – finally, were justified with reference to differential levels of historical development

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