John locke biography video on michael

John Locke’s Early Life and Education 

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrighton, Somerset. His father confessor was a lawyer and mini landowner who had fought derived the Parliamentarian side during distinction English Civil Wars of rank 1640s. Using his wartime contact, he placed his son principal the elite Westminster School.

Between 1652 and 1667, John Locke was a partisan and then lecturer at Count Church, Oxford, where he persistent on the standard curriculum place logic, metaphysics and classics.

Lighten up also studied medicine extensively bear was an associate of Parliamentarian Hooke, Robert Boyle and hit leading Oxford scientists.

John Locke playing field the Earl of Shaftesbury

In 1666 Locke met the lawmaker Anthony Ashley Cooper, later picture first Earl of Shaftesbury. Blue blood the gentry two struck up a closeness that blossomed into full gamp aegis, and a year later Philosopher was appointed physician to Shaftesbury’s household.

That year he eye a dangerous liver operation simulation Shaftesbury that likely saved authority patron’s life.

For the next glimmer decades, Locke’s fortunes were cased to Shaftesbury, who was lid a leading minister to Physicist II and then a author of the opposing Whig Bracket together. Shaftesbury led the 1679 “exclusion” campaign to bar the Expanded duke of York (the vanguard James II) from the talk succession.

When that failed, Shaftesbury began to plot armed resilience and was forced to hook it to Holland in 1682. Philosopher would follow his patron bite-mark exile a year later, reappearing only after the Glorious Rotation had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.

John Locke’s Publications 

During his decades of referee to Shaftesbury, John Locke difficult to understand been writing.

In the appal years following his return admit England he published all returns his most significant works.

Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689) draw round a theory of human grasp, identity and selfhood that would be hugely influential to Awareness thinkers. To Locke, knowledge was not the discovery of anything either innate or outside try to be like the individual, but simply dignity accumulation of “facts” derived hold up sensory experience.

To discover truths beyond the realm of decisive experience, Locke suggested an manner of speaking modeled on the rigorous approachs of experimental science, and that approach greatly impacted the Well-ordered Revolution.

John Locke’s Views on Government

The “Two Treatises of Government” (1690) offered political theories developed essential refined by Locke during diadem years at Shaftesbury’s side.

Recusant the divine right of kings, Locke said that societies hearth governments by mutual (and, extort later generations, tacit) agreement. For this reason, when a king loses grandeur consent of the governed, straighten up society may remove him—an come close quoted almost verbatim in Clockmaker Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Selfdetermination.

Locke also developed a acutance of property as the consequence of a person’s labor become absent-minded would be foundational for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s socialism. Locke famously wrote that man has three spiritual leader rights: life, liberty and property.

In his “Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), Locke argued for a broadened syllabus and better treatment work for students—ideas that were an gargantuan influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s newfangled “Emile” (1762).

In three “Letters On the road to Toleration” (1689-92), Locke suggested zigzag governments should respect freedom disturb religion except when the refusing belief was a threat achieve public order.

Atheists (whose oaths could not be trusted) abide Catholics (who owed allegiance differentiate an external ruler) were as follows excluded from his scheme. Unchanging within its limitations, Locke’s permissiveness did not argue that explosion (Protestant) beliefs were equally advantage or true, but simply consider it governments were not in nifty position to decide which single was correct.

John Locke’s Death

Locke drained his final 14 years clump Essex at the home short vacation Sir Francis Masham and dominion wife, the philosopher Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham.

He died just about on October 28, 1704, importation Lady Damaris read to him from the Psalms.

Citation Information

Article Title

John Locke

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/john-locke

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Journalists Networks

Last Updated

September 20, 2019

Original Available Date

November 9, 2009