The father of liberalism published his key political books anonymously
John Locke argued that governments rule only with the consent of the governed, and that people may rise against tyrants who lose it. Those ideas are thought to echo in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Yet Locke put neither his Letter Concerning Toleration nor his Two Treatises of Government out under his own name.
Locke was born in 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, to Puritan parents; his father was an attorney and his great-grandfather a prosperous cloth merchant. He grew up near Bristol and lived through civil war, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, upheavals that shaped both his politics and his caution. After Westminster School he spent 15 years at Christ Church, Oxford, as student and tutor, pursuing medicine and science.
In 1666 he became an associate of Lord Shaftesbury, a leading post-Restoration politician, who found him government posts, and in 1668 he was elected to the Royal Society. When Shaftesbury fell from favour, Locke spent five years in exile in the Netherlands, writing some of his most important work, and returned in 1689 alongside Queen Mary II. He was also listed as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, chartered by Charles II and the Duke of York, which traded in enslaved people from 1663.
His Essay Concerning Human Understanding proposed that the newborn mind is a blank slate. Against Descartes, he denied innate ideas and traced all knowledge to sensory experience, making him an early British empiricist in Francis Bacon's line. His account of personal identity influenced Hume and Kant. He also framed property as a natural right, created when a person mixes labour with the resources of nature.
On toleration, he held that faith belongs to the individual and churches are voluntary bodies, which rules out religious coercion, though the separation of church and state had earlier roots in pamphlets by Sir Harry Vane. Voltaire, Rousseau and the Scottish Enlightenment all drew on him. After serving as a trade commissioner, ill health pushed him into retirement in the household of the philosopher Lady Masham, where he died in 1704.
Source: John Locke
