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In Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, he establishes that "government should not use force to try to bring people to the true religion" and that religious societies are voluntary and "have no right to use coercive power over their own members or those outside their group." He also believed that force is no way to bring people to salvation.

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Locke’s concept of the state of nature says that the state of nature exists wherever there is no legitimate political authority able to judge disputes and where people live according to the law of reason. Because of this, "the state of nature is distinct from political society, where a legitimate government exists, and from a state of war where men fail to abide by the law of reason."

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Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government

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Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government

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Locke claims that "legitimate government" is based on the idea of separation of powers, which is the legislative power, executive power, and federative power. He also states that countries must follow natural law and can punish one another for violations of that law to protect their citizen's rights

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John Locke, a 17th century Englishman, is said to be the “single most important influence that shaped the founding of the United States.” Locke acknowledged the self-interested nature of humans in his political ideas, and believed in the ability of the people to avoid tyranny using reason. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke identifies what makes a legitimate government. According to Locke, “a ruler gains authority through the consent of the governed” and that “the duty of the government is to protect the natural rights of the people, which Locke believed to include life, liberty, and property. He also stated that citizens of a government which fails to protect their rights would have the right to overthrow that government. This concept influenced Thomas Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence. In the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Locke's idea of the separation of State and Church is once again re enforced.

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Locke's theory of natural law and natural rights is one of the most central ideas of his political philosophy. The concept of natural law expresses that there are certain moral truths that apply to every person, regardless of where they're from or their beliefs. The concept of natural rights expresses that certain natural rights are given to each person, and these rights can't be taken away from the individual except by his consent

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Sea travel expanded the horizons of many European nations and created prosperity and the conditions for the Enlightenment. In turn, the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and justice helped to create the conditions for the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitution.

Democracy was not created in a heartbeat. In a world where people were ruled by monarchs from above, the idea of self-government is entirely alien. Democracy takes practice and wisdom from experience.

The American colonies began developing a democratic tradition during their earliest stages of development. Over 150 years later, the colonists believed their experience was great enough to refuse to recognize the British king. The first decade was rocky. The American Revolution and the domestic instability that followed prompted a call for a new type of government with a constitution to guarantee liberty. The constitution drafted in the early days of the independent American republic has endured longer than any in human history.

Where did this democratic tradition truly begin? The ideas and practices that led to the development of the American democratic republic owe a debt to the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, the Protestant Reformation, and Gutenberg's printing press. But the Enlightenment of 17th-century Europe had the most immediate impact on the framers of the United States Constitution.

The Philosophes

Europeans of the 17th century no longer lived in the "darkness" of the Middle Ages. Ocean voyages had put them in touch with many world civilizations, and trade had created a prosperous middle class. The Protestant Reformation encouraged free thinkers to question the practices of the Catholic Church, and the printing press spread the new ideas relatively quickly and easily. The time was ripe for the philosophes , scholars who promoted democracy and justice through discussions of individual liberty and equality.

The ideas of 18th-century philosophes inspired the Founding Fathers to revolt against what they perceived as unfair British taxation. Washington Crossing the Delaware is one of the most famous depictions of the American Revolution.

One of the first philosophes was Thomas Hobbes, an Englishman who concluded in his famous book, Leviathan, that people are incapable of ruling themselves, primarily because humans are naturally self-centered and quarrelsome and need the iron fist of a strong leader. Later philosophes, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau were more optimistic about democracy. Their ideas encouraged the questioning of absolute monarchs, like the Bourbon family that ruled France. Montesquieu suggested a separation of powers into branches of government not unlike the system Americans would later adopt. They found eager students who later became the founders of the American government.

John Locke

The single most important influence that shaped the founding of the United States comes from John Locke, a 17th century Englishman who redefined the nature of government. Although he agreed with Hobbes regarding the self-interested nature of humans, he was much more optimistic about their ability to use reason to avoid tyranny. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke identified the basis of a legitimate government. According to Locke, a ruler gains authority through the consent of the governed. The duty of that government is to protect the natural rights of the people, which Locke believed to include life, liberty, and property. If the government should fail to protect these rights, its citizens would have the right to overthrow that government. This idea deeply influenced Thomas Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Important English Documents

Ironically, the English political system provided the grist for the revolt of its own American colonies. For many centuries English monarchs had allowed restrictions to be placed on their ultimate power. The Magna Carta, written in 1215, established the kernel of limited government, or the belief that the monarch's rule was not absolute. Although the document only forced King John to consult nobles before he made arbitrary decisions like passing taxes, the Magna Carta provided the basis for the later development of Parliament. Over the years, representative government led by a Prime Minister came to control and eventually replace the king as the real source of power in Britain.

The ideas of the French Enlightenment philosophes strongly influenced the American revolutionaries. French intellectuals met in salons like this one to exchange ideas and define their ideals such as liberty, equality, and justice.

The Petition of Right (1628) extended the rights of "commoners" to have a voice in the government. The English Bill of Rights (1688) guaranteed free elections and rights for citizens accused of crime. Although King George III still had some real power in 1776, Britain was already well along on the path of democracy by that time.

The foundations of American government lie squarely in the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment. The American founders were well versed in the writings of the philosophes, whose ideas influenced the shaping of the new country. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and others took the brave steps of creating a government based on the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and a new form of justice. More than 200 years later, that government is still intact.

Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes said that humans are savages who need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Hard to believe he was just a stuffed orange cat.

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Sea travel expanded the horizons of many European nations and created prosperity and the conditions for the Enlightenment. In turn, the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and justice helped to create the conditions for the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitution. Democracy was not created in a heartbeat.

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Consent, Political Obligation, and the Ends of Government

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Consent, Political Obligation, and the Ends of Government

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Another central concept of Locke's political philosophy is the concept of consent. this concept stresses that "individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies." While there are certain obligations and rights that all people have from the law of nature, special obligations come about only when we consent to them.

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The Influence of John Locke's Works

Hans Aarsleff remarks that Locke "is the most influential philosopher of modern times". He notes that besides initiating the vigorous tradition known as British empiricism, Locke's influence reached far beyond the limits of the traditional discipline of philosophy: "His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relation to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense" (Aarsleff 1994: 252). Locke may well have influenced such diverse eighteenth century figures as Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Voltaire, Priestly and Jefferson.

Beginning with the publication of the 92 page summary of the Essay in the Bibliotheque universelle et historique for January through March of 1688 along with the publication of the first edition in December 1689, the Essay was both popular and controversial on both the continent and in England for the next fifty years. The sustained argument in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding for rejecting the old scholastic model of knowledge and science in favor of empirically disciplined modes of inquiry was enormously successful. Locke's arguments against innate principles and ideas largely prevailed. This was an early and striking success of the Essay. Recall that Locke's attack on innate ideas was part and parcel of his anti-authoritarianism and his emphasis on the importance of free and autonomous inquiry. As Aarsleff also notes, the radical nature of Locke's attacks on epistemic, political, and religious authority are difficult for us to grasp today. (Aarsleff, 1994, 258) Bishop Stillingfleet, the most prominent of Locke's early critics, claimed that Locke's new way of ideas would lead to skepticism and that his account of substance undermined the doctrine of the trinity. Locke denied this, but given that we have good reason to hold that Locke was an anti-trinitarian, we have some reason to doubt that this denial is sincere. Locke's epistemological views and his advocacy of rational religion were taken up by early eighteenth century deists such as John Toland and Anthony Collins who drew conclusions about religion that outraged the orthodox. The age of rational religion was coming to a close by the middle of the eighteenth century.

Within a few years of the publication of the fifth edition of Locke's essay, Berkeley attacked the alliance between empiricism and the science of Newton and the Royal Society which is an important feature of Locke's Essay. Berkeley argued that the causal or representative account of perception leads to skepticism about the existence of the external world as there is no good solution to the problem of the veil of perception and the associated distinction between primary and secondary qualities is untenable. These attacks gave rise to several misapprehensions about the doctrines of the Essay and their connection with the history of philosophy. If one accepts Berkeley's arguments the result is the view that empiricism leads to idealism and that the atomism which Locke regarded as the most plausible hypothesis about the world must be abandoned. Locke certainly thought he had the resources to solve the problems posed by the veil of perception doctrine and his account of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is not the same as the one that Berkeley gives. Nonetheless, Berkeley's attacks on the Essay have produced long lasting and influential misinterpretations of the Essay. These misinterpretations led Thomas Reid, for example, to the rejection of the way of ideas (as it leads to the denial of the existence of the external world) and probably fueled Kant's notion that the British empiricism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with its characteristic inadequacies and virtues is one of the two great streams leading inevitably towards his own transcendental idealism. If one does not accept the force of Berkeley's arguments, then neither Reid's conclusion or Kant's story have much force to them.

Locke's account of personal identity was genuinely revolutionary and a real contribution to philosophy. This, along with his agnosticism about whether the soul was material or immaterial, were debated hotly through much of the eighteenth century, and at least the debates about personal identity were largely recapitulated in the twentieth century. Much of this begins with the Clarke/Collins controversy of 1707-08. Locke's account of free agency is just as interesting and important as his account of personal identity with which it is connected. Yet it seems not to have been as controversial as Locke's account of personal identity. Gideon Yaffe's recent book Liberty Worth the Name (2000) may well revive interest in Locke's views on this subject as Yaffe argues that they are still of relevance to contemporary debates about free will and compatibilism.

The extent of the influence that Locke's account of language has had over the centuries is a matter of scholarly debate. Norman Kretzmann (1968) holds that Locke's views, while not original, had a powerful influence on the Enlightenment view of the connection of words and ideas. Noam Chomsky in Cartesian Linguistics (1966) traces the important ideas in linguistics back to Descartes and the school at Port Royal rather than Locke. This is largely a matter of the importance of the innate in Chomsky's thought. Hans Aarsleff, on the other hand, believes that Locke stands at the beginning of the developments that produced contemporary linguistics and that Chomsky's account is more polemical than historical (Aarsleff 1982: 101-119.

That Locke's works on education had considerable influence is indicated by the four editions that were published in his lifetime, a fifth that came out after his death, and some twenty-one editions in the eighteenth century. There were numerous translations into European languages during the eighteenth century as well. Peter Gay remarked that "John Locke was the founder of the Enlightenment in education as in much else" (Gay 1964: 1).

The Two Treatises of Government were published anonymously, and it was only in Locke's will that he acknowledged the authorship of this work and others such as the Letters Concerning Toleration. As a consequence, the Two Treatises had very little influence on the debates over how to justify the legitimacy of replacing King James II with William and Mary. John Dunn claims that in the eighteenth century in England, the work had little influence (Dunn 1969: 17). It was supposed that since it was written by England's greatest philosopher, it must be the way things were done, but few bothered to read it. Certainly, conservatives such as Josiah Tucker read it and rejected its doctrines. There has been considerable scholarly debate about how much Locke's political doctrines affected the American revolutionaries and the writing of the American declaration of independence. The original claim that Locke's thought had considerable influence on the colonists was challenged and has more recently been reaffirmed. In France, Locke was influential through the first half of the eighteenth century and then rapidly lost influence as the French came to regard the English as conservative.

The 'Republic of Letters' was quite a success. Its members published many works on toleration, of which the two with the longest life and the greatest influence were Locke's Letter on toleration and Pierre Bayle's Philosophical Commentary. The journals founded by the members of the Republic of Letters began publishing accounts of scholars upon their death. John Marshall tells us: "The intent here was to declare that such a life in service of scholarship was significant and laudable as much as it was to identify critically what was valuable about the specific works composed by an individual." (Marshall 2006, 516) Pierre Coste's "Character of Mr. Locke" was such a work and set out the behavioral norms for scholars in the republic of letters. Coste's encomium was filled with fulsome praise of Locke 's good humor, humanity, pleasantness, and politeness in the search for truth. Marshall goes on to say:

The ethos here of 'civility' combined with a desire to gain from another's knowledge and a willingness to change one's mind in response to this knowledge was central to the attitudes of the 'of letters' and to the 'Early Enlightenment', and it was simultaneously central to the ethos of religious toleration by defenders of religious toleration in the 1680's and 1690's, who were simultaneously the editors of the journals of the 'republic of letters.' (Marshall 2006, 516-17)

Marshall continues: "it is important to stress that the 'Early Enlightenment'combination of these commitments and practices in the late seventeenth century was crucial in their later evolution as the commitments and practices of the 'High Enlightenment'" (Marshall 2006, 517).

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locke's views were largely rejected, and his influence was at its lowest ebb. He was regarded as one of the prophets of the American and French revolutions. The doctrines of natural rights and human rights were rejected in favor of utilitarianism. Locke's philosophy was largely misinterpreted and rejected. Even the publication of Fox Bourne's two volume biography of Locke (1876) hardly raised any new interest.

In the twentieth century, with the sale of the Lovelace papers and their donation to Oxford University, interest in Locke among philosophers has considerably revived. These papers included letters, several drafts of the Essay, and other works. We now know considerably more about Locke and the development of his thought than was known previously, and Locke scholars have been putting Locke's philosophy in its historical, religious, political and intellectual context. This renewed interest in Locke's philosophy has continued apace into the twenty-first century.

Return to John Locke

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John Locke > The Influence of John Locke's Works (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Hans Aarsleff remarks that Locke "is the most influential philosopher of modern times". He notes that besides initiating the vigorous tradition known as British empiricism, Locke's influence reached far beyond the limits of the traditional discipline of philosophy: "His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relation to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense" (Aarsleff 1994: 252).