The Philosopher John Locke
Locke was born in the village of Wrington, Somerset, on August 29, 1632. He was educated at the University of Oxford and lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664. In 1667 Locke began his association with the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury, to whom Locke was friend, adviser, and physician. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury lost is power, Locke went to France. In 1679 he returned to England, but in view of his opposition to the Roman Catholicism favored by the English monarchy at that time, he soon found it expedient to return to France. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the restoration of Protestantism to favor, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.
Locke had written Two Treatises of Civil Government in the early 1680s while Whig revolutionary plots against Charles II were still in the works, and in 1690 he was finally able to publish them. This work is a theory of natural law and rights in which he makes a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate civil governments and argues for the legitimacy of revolution against tyrannical governments. He saw that the reason government is established is to protect the life, liberty and property of a people, and if these goals are not respected, then rebellion is entirely permissible by the population who originally consented to the government's power. The first treatise is an attack on Sir Robert Filmer and his text Patriarcha (1680), which he wrote in defense of divine monarchy. Locke uses this critique to launch his criticism of the work of Thomas Hobbes. In the...