John+Locke

John Locke was an English Oxford Professor and an admirer of Thomas Hobbes.[1] However, he sought for a different conclusion. He believed a person was born in a state of cleanness, tabula rasa. Nothing is fated. As humans grow they observe and experience and once they have enough of this information their minds begin to make sense of their observations. They discover patterns, order, and harmony. He believed every person, no matter what their life was like, came to the same conclusion about the structure of an underlying order.

In politics he agreed with the gentry. His book The Second Treaties of Civil Government (1690) was similar to Hobbes’s. He agreed with the idea of a State needing a contract between ruler and people, but he came to a different conclusion. There must be the tree rights of life, liberty, and property and though there must be a sovereign they cannot be over these rights. And the sovereign must be subject to a group of representatives, such as Parliament.

Locke’s belief in property strung right along with the gentry, who owned most of the land in England. Freedom was vague, but related back to the Bill of Rights and Locke allowed that subjects could overthrow a government if they were not doing their job correctly. Locke’s main goal was to protect an individual from the government.

Works Referenced
Chambers, Mortimer; Grew, Raymond; Herlihy, David; Rabb, Theodore K.; Woloch, Isser. The Western Experience: Sixth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991

1 All information from the above named source, pages 557-8