Locke, John

Locke, John (1632–1704), held various academic posts at Oxford, and became physician to the first earl of Shaftesbury in 1667. He held official positions and subsequently lived at Oxford, then fled to Holland in 1683. In 1687 he joined William of Orange at Rotterdam; on his return to England he became commissioner of appeals and member of the council of trade.

Locke's principal philosophical work is the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), a work which led J. S. Mill to call him the ‘unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind’. His defence of simple biblical religion in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), without resort to creed or tradition, led to a charge of Socinianism, which Locke replied to in two Vindications (1695, 1697).

Locke published in 1690 two Treatises of Government, designed to combat the theory of the divine right of kings and finding the origin of the civil state in a contract. Throughout, Locke in his theory of the ‘Original Contract’ opposes absolutism. Although in his early manuscripts he was closer to Hobbes's authoritarianism and continues to share with Hobbes the view that civil obligations are founded in contract, he strongly rejected Hobbes's view that the sovereign is above the law and no party to the contract. He published a volume on education in 1693, and on the rate of interest and the value of money in 1692 and 1695.

Locke's writings had an immense influence on the literature of succeeding generations, perhaps notably on Sterne and Addison, and his distinctions between ‘wit’ and ‘judgement’ were much discussed in the Augustan age.