John Locke

John Locke supplied the arguments that the American revolution and modern liberalism were built on. Born in Somerset in 1632, the son of a country lawyer who fought for parliament, he was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, where he found the scholastic curriculum useless and turned to medicine and experimental science, working with Robert Boyle and Thomas Sydenham. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, and joined his household as physician and adviser. He supervised an operation to drain a liver abscess that probably saved Shaftesbury's life, and was drawn into the politics of exclusion — the campaign to bar the Catholic James from the succession. Shaftesbury fell, and Locke went into exile in the Netherlands in 1683, returning after the revolution of 1688. He then published in quick succession. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1689 argued that the mind at birth is a blank sheet and that all knowledge derives from experience, which founded British empiricism. The Two Treatises of Government, published anonymously the same year, demolished the divine right of kings and argued that people possess natural rights to life, liberty and property, that government exists by their consent to protect those rights, and that when it violates them they may replace it. Jefferson took the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence almost directly from it. The Letter Concerning Toleration argued that the magistrate has no business coercing belief, excluding Catholics and atheists. He invested in the Royal African Company and helped draft a colonial constitution recognising slavery, which sits against everything else he wrote. He died in 1704.

• Lived: 1632 CE – 1704 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: philosopher, political_theorist