John Locke Research Paper

John Locke the man can be taken as the archetype of the English country gentleman turned intellectual. He was the first born of the two sons of a lawyer who fought for the Parliament against King Charles I when John was a teenager. The family had a small landed estate in the county of Somerset and Locke was born on August 29 1632 in the village of Wrington, though the family seat was at Belluton some ten miles away. He inherited the family properties and his father’s modest position within the community of gentry of the county. He was an absentee landlord, except for brief intervals, for most of his life. This was because his father designed him for a scholarly career, not all that unusual for the gentry but exceptional for an heir (Laslett 1948).

Locke’s father set his sights high for his son, whose outstanding intelligence must have been evident from the beginning. In 1647 he sent him to Westminster School, the best in the country, and thereafter, in 1652, to the college of Christ Church in Oxford, where he went on to take office as a teacher between 1658 and 1684. Locke never married, and insisted that he would have liked to have lived his whole life there as a bachelor don. However, it proved otherwise, and within a decade he found himself for much of his time in London at the center of national politics, in the entourage of one of the great political magnates of the time, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, who was then in high office but subsequently became leader of the movement of opposition to the succession to the throne of the Catholic James, brother of the childless Charles II, the Exclusion campaign, as it is called. The explanation for this transmogrification, which left his position at Christ Church unaffected, was that Locke had taken up medicine so that he could continue his academic career without becoming a priest. In 1666, on a visit to Oxford, the invalided Shaftesbury met Locke who performed upon his body one of the medical miracles of that age which saved his life. It was as a medical adviser of Shaftesbury, not as an academic, that Locke took up and pursued his career as a writer on the theory of knowledge, and on what we now recognize as social scientific subjects. Two Treatises of Go ernment, also published in 1690, was composed while Locke acted as what a close friend called ‘assistant pen’ to Shaftesbury in the early 1680s during the Exclusion campaign. The Catholic James nevertheless became James II in 1685.

A now outmoded interpretation of Two Treatises perceives it as the subsequent rationalization of the so- called Glorious Revolution of 1688 9; it is now accepted that the author’s intention was to justify a revolution yet to be brought about by Shaftesbury and his party, but which did not take place. This makes it easier to understand its usefulness as a persuasive in favour of national revolutions for two hundred years and more after its publication. Without Shaftesbury, it has been said, Locke would not have been Locke at all. Indeed he had composed numbers of unpublished treatises before 1666, mainly of a theological type, though with a political admixture conservative in tone. But the younger Locke cannot be described as wholly backward looking, if only because of his association with Robert Boyle and others in the earliest advances in natural science in England, and in the establishment of the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1668.

As his convictions changed in the liberal direction, Locke suffered for them, both at the hands of his Christ Church colleagues and of state authority. Getting further and further absorbed into Shaftesbury’s affairs, taking a job in government, exercising responsibility for various commercial and colonizing undertakings, he undertook the writing out in 1668 of a political constitution of the colony that his master owned on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (Locke 1794). This was the first written political constitution ever composed, and provided nearabsolute toleration for nonconforming belief. Things like this, and failure to conform himself, were unacceptable to the regime and in 1684 Locke was expelled from Christ Church by Royal Order. Shaftesbury had died in exile in Holland, and the beleaguered Locke finally took up residence in that country, the haven of political progressives. He was there in 1689 when William and Mary sailed to England to bring about the Whig revolution. Locke returned with the joint monarchs, and was given minor political offices of a commercial kind. In the fifteen years left for him to live he twisted his fingers round the haft of English intellectual life and got it in so firm a grasp that it began to point in the direction of his choice. This is the period in which he published his books and addressed himself to posterity.

He spent this final, intellectually victorious, period at his London address, but also living as much as he could as a country gentleman once more, not on his own estate but as a lodger in the manor house of Oates in the country of Essex, much nearer his London activities. These activities made him into a founder of the British Empire, especially in relation to the North American colonies which were later to call on his doctrines when they came together as the United States (Laslett 1969). An intimate association grew up with the lady at the house at Oates, Dame Damaris Masham, a devout Christian and a theologian of the Lockeian description, along with her son and stepdaughter. When he died at the house on October 28 1704, he was buried in the churchyard of the nearest village, at High Laver. He should be remembered in this final dual role, as the sovereign of London intellectual society, and as the revered elderly gentleman seated in the garden at Oates—he himself was a passionate gardener—surrounded as often as possible by young people and children.

2. Publications

Included here are books he published on the social sciences which have affected his vast readership for three hundred years rather than the treatises left in manuscript, which have begun to influence scholars in recent years.

2.1 Philosophy

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, Locke (1975) established himself as the first and most important empiricist thinker. The exclusive source of knowledge was experience gained from sensation. Apart from revelation, nothing else was given to the intelligence, and he was particularly insistent that no knowledge was innate. Everything to be known was printed on the blank sheet of the mind through its ideas, simple ideas elaborated systematically into a nexus of complex ideas. Locke went beyond his empirical assumptions and used rational arguments to underwrite his firm belief in a real world behind the ideas which he systematized, and in the existence of God. It is the inconsistency between his rationalism and empiricism which has been seen as his weakness, though by some as also a source of relevance and insight.

2.2 Political Theory

Two Treatises of Go ernment (1960), lays it down that the sole source of political power is the consent of the citizens of the society concerned. The target throughout both treatises was the patriarchal theory of Sir Robert Filmer (died 1653) whose posthumous work Patriarcha (1680) provided theoretical justification for Shaftesbury’s opponents. Filmer and his devotees, the Tories in the nascent English party system, believed that the source of all authority and property, political, social, and personal was fatherhood, on which God had conferred absolute divine right. Extreme, even ridiculous as it may seem, this had evident appeal to landowning gentry families, and it had strong scriptural and ecclesiastical authority behind it. Moreover Filmer displayed a needling effectiveness by exposing all alternative justifications of power and property as even more unrealistic and ridiculous.

This laid Locke’s way open to fundamentals. Whatever may have been the patriarchal underpinnings of social and political relationships, governance could only be exercised by those individuals specifically entrusted with it and elected representatively by citizens, mainly the propertied. Though property could be inherited, its basis was labor: you owned those natural objects on which you had done work, and this property was protected by the state set up in this way as its most important function. Government was in a sense divine, as an emanation of power, but no regime could conceivably rule by divine right, and once it lost the consent of the governed it could be, had to be, overthrown by the property-owning citizenry and replaced by one of their choosing. Both the preeminence of property in political society, and the intellectual origins of democratic revolution as a perpetual sanction on all political authority, are plain to see.

2.3 Toleration

Epistola de Tolerantia (1968). Locke flatly denied that any authority had a right to prescribe or proscribe religious belief, or to punish anyone for holding a religious opinion. All such matters were reserved to the Church, defined as ‘a voluntary society of men.’ The discipline within the Church was limited to exhortation with no other sanction than expulsion. Nevertheless, opinions contrary to civil peace had to be controlled, and atheists also, because they could not be bound by promises. A muted resistance to governmental intolerance was contemplated by Locke, in spite of what he says about civil peace.

2.4 Economics

Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering Interest and Raising the Value of Money— Further Considerations (1991). Locke was the last and most influential mercantilist writer, preoccupied like all the others with the value of money, which was considered to be the spring, instrument, and channel of all economic activity. Money had a price which was determined to a considerable extent by the rate of interest. Maintaining the constancy of the value of money by regulating the coinage and manipulating interest rates was the object of this analysis and of the policy which he recommended. Particularly important were the regular supplements to the supply of money through foreign trade, a crucial activity in the Lockeian system.

2.5 Education

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke 1988). The familiar phrase ‘A sound mind in a sound body’ are the opening words and the leitmoti of this extraordinarily popular and influential treatise. A great deal of it is given up to habits conducive to health, especially exercise and diet. Strict discipline is needed but not through corporal punishment: the proper instrument is encouragement and strictly consistent practice. The mode of instruction should be as conversational as possible. In short, children should be treated not so much as little adults, but as adults in the making, learning by their own intellectual assent as their capacities developed.

3. Influence and Importance

The huge influence and great historical importance of Locke’s political theory should be evident from the account already given. Two Treatises of Go ernment was repeatedly printed as the eighteenth century went by; it was translated into French, the international language, in 1691, and was published more often in French than in English; editions also appeared in most of the other European languages (see Locke 1960).

As has been said, it repeatedly came to the fore in the history of nations when issues of despotic government arose, sometimes along with the Epistola de Tolerantia. The next most printed and cited work was that on Education, though An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ran it close. His economic theory had widespread influence up to the time of Adam Smith and has been regarded as the quintessential early expression of the capitalist spirit (MacPherson 1962). His educational doctrine has been continuously influential for at least two centuries and can be regarded as the origin both of companionate upbringing in the home, parents and children on a level, and of the teaching practice of Anglo-Saxon elite schools. In short, the social scientific works discussed here can be claimed to have ushered in empirical– rational social scientific enquiry in their respective areas. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding has been aptly called the first modern book, a title which would also sit well on all the treatises we have commented on. There is surely no need to go further to demonstrate Locke’s outstanding influence and importance.

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