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Suspect Cryptonomicon's Secret Admirers have a soft spot for Locke in their hearts. In the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions were written in the 1660s by John Locke.

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Wikipedia: John Locke

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John Locke
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Sir Godfrey Kneller 1697 portrait
from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg John Locke (August 29 1632–October 28 1704) was a 17th-century philosopher concerned primarily with society and epistemology. An Englishman, Locke's notions of a "government with the consent of the governed" and man's natural rights—life, liberty, and estate (property)—had an enormous influence on the development of political philosophy. His ideas formed the basis for the concepts used in American law and government, allowing the colonists to justify revolution. Locke's epistemology and philosophy of mind also had a great deal of significant influence well into the Enlightenment period. Locke has been placed in a group called the British Empiricists, which includes David Hume and George Berkeley. Locke is perhaps most often contrasted with Thomas Hobbes.

Biography

Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, about ten miles from Bristol, England, in 1632. His father, a lawyer, served as a captain of cavalry for Parliament during the English Civil War. In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London. After completing his studies there, he obtained admission to the college of Christ Church, Oxford. The dean of the college at the time was John Owen, vice-chancellor of the university and also a Puritan. Although he was a capable student, Locke chafed under the undergraduate curriculum of the time. He found reading modern philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the University.

Locke earned a bachelor's degree in 1656 and a master's degree in 1658. Although Locke never became a medical doctor, he earned a bachelor of medicine in 1674. He studied medicine extensively during his time at Oxford, working with such noted virtuosi as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and Richard Lower. In 1666, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who had come to Oxford seeking treatment for a liver infection. Cooper was impressed with Locke and pressed him to become part of his retinue.

Locke had been looking for a career and in 1667 moved into Shaftesbury's home at Exeter House in London, ostensibly as the household physican. In London Locke resumed his medical studies, under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham had a major impact on Locke's natural philosophical thinking - an impact that resonated deeply in Locke's writing of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Locke's medical knowledge was soon put to the test, since Shaftesbury's liver infection became life-threatening. Locke coordinated the advice of several physicians and was likely instrumental in persuading Shaftesbury to undergo an operation (then life-threatening itself) to remove the cyst. Shaftesbury survived and prospered, crediting Locke with saving his life.

It was in Shaftesbury's household, during 1671, that the meeting took place, described in the Epistle to the reader of the Essay, which was the genesis of what would later become Essay. Two extant Drafts still survive from this period.

Shaftesbury, as a founder of the Whig movement, exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. Locke became involved in politics when Shaftesbury became Lord Chancellor in 1672. Following Shaftesbury's fall from favor in 1675, Locke spent some time traveling in southern France. He returned to England in 1679 when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn. However, Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot — a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. Locke did not return to England until after the Glorious Revolution. The bulk of Locke's publishing took place after his return. He died in 1704 after a prolonged decline in health.

Events that happened during Locke's lifetime include the English Restoration and the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. He did not quite see the Act of Union of 1707, though the office of King of England and King of Scotland had been held by the same person for some time. Constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy were in their infancy during Locke's time.

Writing

The influences of Locke's Puritan upbringing and his Whig political affiliation expressed themselves in his published writings. Although widely regarded as an important influence on modern ideas of political liberty, Locke did not always express ideas that match those of the present day.

Locke's first major published work was A Letter Concerning Toleration. Religious toleration within Great Britain was a subject of great interest for Locke; he wrote several subsequent essays in its defense prior to his death. Locke's upbringing among non-conformist Protestants made him sensitive to differing theological viewpoints. He recoiled, however, from what he saw as the divisive character of some non-conformist sects. Locke became a strong supporter of the Church of England. By adopting a latitudinarian theological stance, Locke believed, the national church could serve as an instrument for social harmony.

Locke is best known for two works, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Civil Government.

The Essay was commenced in 1671, and as Locke himself described, was written in fits and starts over the next 18 years. It was finally published in December 1689.

Though the exact dates of the Two Treatises composition are a matter of dispute, it is clear that the bulk of the writing took place in the period from 1679-1682. It was therefore much more of a commentary on the exclusion crisis, than it was a justification of the Glorious Revolutiuon of 1688. The book itself was published in 1689.

In the Essay, Locke critiques the philosophy of innate ideas and builds a theory of the mind and knowledge that gives priority to the senses and experience. His adherence to this doctrine is what has led to him sometimes being called an empiricist rather than a rationalist such as his critic Leibniz, who wrote the New Essays on Human Understanding. Book II of the Essay sets out Locke's theory of ideas, including his distinction between passively acquired simple ideas, such as "red," "sweet," "round," etc., and actively built complex ideas, such as numbers, causes and effects, abstract ideas, ideas of substances, identity, and diversity. Locke also distinguishes between the truly existing primary qualities of bodies, like shape, motion and the arrangement of minute particles, and the secondary qualities that are "powers to produce various sensations in us" (Essay, II.viii.10) such as "red" and "sweet." These secondary qualities, Locke claims, are dependent on the primary qualities. In Chapter xxvii of book II Locke discusses personal identity, and the idea of a person. What he says here has shaped our thought and provoked debate ever since. Book III is concerned with language, and Book IV with knowledge, including intuition, mathematics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), faith and opinion.

The Two Treatises of Civil Government were highly subversive texts when they were written, and Locke was for a long time reluctant to admit authorship of them. They have now become cornerstones of political liberalism.

Locke and the United States

Supporters

Locke's work, particularly the concepts of liberty, later influenced the written works of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers of the United States. In particular, the United States Declaration of Independence drew upon many 18th century political ideas, derived from the works of both Locke and Montesquieu.

Detractors

According to A People's History of the United States: In the Carolinas, the Fundamental Constitutions were written in the 1660s by John Locke, who is often considered the philosophical father of the Founding Fathers and the American system. Locke's constitution set up a feudal-type aristocracy, in which eight barons would own 40 percent of the colony's land, and only a baron could be governor. When the crown took direct control of North Carolina, after a rebellion against the land arrangements, rich speculators seized half a million acres (2,000 km²) for themselves, monopolizing the good farming land near the coast. Poor people, desperate for land, squatted on bits of farmland and fought all through the pre-Revolutionary period against the landlords' attempts to collect rent. (47)

Locke's statement of people's government was in support of a revolution in England for the free development of mercantile capitalism at home and abroad. Locke himself regretted that the labor of poor children "is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old" and suggested that all children over three, of families on relief, should attend 'working schools" so they would be "from infancy inured to work." (73f)

Locke also provided intellectual justifications for taking the land of the Native Americans. Bhikhu Parekh writes Locke "argued that since the American Indians roamed freely over the land and did not enclose it ... [it] could be taken over without their consent". When it was discovered that some land was enclosed, Locke argued that enclosure was not sufficient since the Native Americans paused every three years to enrich the soil. This "irrational" behavior meant that the Native Americans were uncivilized and thus did not deserve the land. "In Locke's view," Parekh comments, "the trouble with the Indians was that they had very few desires and were easily contented." Nor did Native American society count as a legitimate government, since it lacked "a single, unified and centralized system of authority" nor did they have a single language or culture. (Quotes from Parekh, "Liberalism and Colonialism" in The decolonization of imagination.)

List of major works

Locke's epitaph

(translated from the Latin) "Stop Traveler! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspected praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee,) thou hast one here and everywhere."

Community: John Locke

JohnLocke.jpg John Locke (August 29, 1632 - October 28, 1704) was an English Enlightenment philosopher, Oxford academic, and medical researcher, whose notions of government with the consent of the governed and the natural rights of man (life, liberty, and property) had an enormous influence on colonial Americans, allowing them to justify revolution and shape a new government.

Through his association with the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (similar to Daniel Waterhouse's association with Roger Comstock), he became a government official overseeing trade and colonies, an economic writer, a political dissident, and a revolutionary who is credited with the victory of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In this, he is clearly a major part of the character of Daniel Waterhouse.

His most influential work was the two part treatise On Civil Government [1]. The first part describes the current condition of the civil government, while the second describes his justification for government and his ideals for its operation. He advocated that all men were equal and that each should be permitted to act as long as he harms no other. Using these foundations, he continued to make a classic justification for private property by declaring that the natural world is the common property of all men, but that any individual could appropriate some bit of it for himself by mixing his labor with the natural resources.

In this, he is commonly credited as a greater inspiration for the Founding Fathers of the United States than Jean-Jacques Rousseau by most everyone outside of socialist circles. In fact, the philosophical differences between Locke and Rousseau are generally pointed to as the seed distinctions between the moderation, success, and long term stability of the American experiment in revolution and self government, versus the intemperate, emotional, tyrannical, and terroristic end of the French experiment in revolution and failure of self-government, as well as similar failures by socialistic and communist governments since.

The Lockean Proviso

This treatise also introduced the "Lockean proviso" in which Locke stated that the right to take goods from the natural commons is limited by the consideration that "there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use;" in other words, that one should not simply take whatever one wanted, one had also to take the common good into consideration.

This is commonly interpreted by western land socialists like Henry George and his followers to justify their concepts of 'Economic Scarcity Rent' as an excuse for broad, high, and onerous property taxation by the state on any or all goods owned by the individual: "your house is made from wood and stone which came from the land, so you owe us, the state, tax on it". This has led directly to a society in which the degree of taxation is many times higher than in Lockes (or even George's) day, such that most persons are in a state of labor indenturement to the state for almost half of the calendar year. This condition is completely contrary to that which Locke thought proper.

The failure of conception by George and others is that they fail to appreciate that as technology advances, the improvements in resource utilization efficiency that such technology provides literally expands the resource pie by making it possible to satisfy more consumers with smaller slices. Given that technology advances the greatest when private property is highly protected, it clearly follows that the Lockean proviso is entirely satisfied by the 'invisible hand' mechanisms of the free market, and does not require any initiations of force by government upon property rights to make room for later generations.

Tabula Rasa

Locke is considered the protagonist of empiricism, commonly called the "blank slate" or "Tabula rasa" theory. This theory states that all people start out knowing absolutely nothing and that they learn from experiences and trial and error. This is considered the foundation for behaviorism.

In law, this also is the basis of the principle that the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. This is the political benefit of the scientific principle as applied to government, that every trial is an experiment of observation and examination to determine objectively where the truth lies.

Political Career

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In 1666 Locke had a fateful meeting with Lord Ashley as a result of his friendship with Thomas. Ashley, one of the richest men in England, came to Oxford. He proposed to drink some medicinal waters there. He had asked Dr. Thomas to provide them. Thomas had to be out of town and asked Locke to see that the water was delivered. Locke met Ashley and they liked one another. As a result of this encounter, Ashley invited Locke to come to London as his personal physician. In 1667 Locke did move to London becoming not only Lord Ashley's personal physician, but secretary, researcher, political operative and friend. Living with him Locke found himself at the very heart of English politics in the 1670s and 1680s.

Locke's chief work while living at Lord Ashley's residence, Exeter House, in 1668 was his work as secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas. Lord Ashley was one of the advocates of the view that England would prosper through trade and that colonies could play an important role in promoting trade. Ashley persuaded Charles II to create a Board of Trade and Plantations to collect information about trade and colonies, and Locke became its secretary. In his capacity as the secretary of the Board of Trade Locke was the collection point for information from around the globe about trade and colonies for the English government. Among Ashley's commercial projects was an effort to found colonies in the Carolinas. In his capacity as the secretary to the Lords Proprietors, Locke was involved in the writing of the fundamental constitution of the Carolinas. There is some controversy about the extent of Locke's role in writing the constitution. In addition to issues about trade and colonies, Locke was involved through Shaftesbury in other controversies about public policy. There was a monetary crisis in England involving the value of money, and the clipping of coins. Locke wrote papers for Lord Ashley on economic matters, including the coinage crisis.

In 1674 after Shaftesbury had left the government, Locke went back to Oxford, where he acquired the degree Bachelor of medicine, and a license to practice medicine, and then went to France. (Cranston, 1957. p. 160) In France Locke went from Calais to Paris, Lyons and on to Montpellier, where he spent the next fifteen months. Much of Locke's time was spent learning about Protestantism in France. The Edict of Nantes was in force, and so there was a degree of religious toleration in France. Louis XIV was to revoke the edict in 1685 and French Protestants were then killed or forced into exile.

While Locke was in France, Shaftesbury's fortunes fluctuated. In 1676 Shaftesbury was imprisoned in the tower. His imprisonment lasted for a year. In 1678, after the mysterious murder of a London judge, informers (most notably Titus Oates) started coming forward to reveal a supposed Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the King and put his brother on the throne. This whipped up public anti-Catholic frenzy and gave Shaftesbury a wide base of public support for excluding James, Duke of York from the throne. Though Shaftesbury had not fabricated the conspiracy story, nor did he prompt Oates to come forward, he did exploit the situation to the advantage of his party. In the public chaos surrounding the sensational revelations, Shaftesbury organized an extensive party network, exercised great control over elections, and built up a large parliamentary majority. His strategy was to secure the passage of an Exclusion bill that would prevent Charles II's Catholic brother from becoming King. Although the Exclusion bill passed in the Commons it was rejected in the House of Lords because of the King's strong opposition to it. As the panic over the Popish plot receded, Shaftesbury was left without a following or a cause. Shaftesbury was seized on July 21, 1681 and again put in the tower. He was tried on trumped-up charges of treason but acquitted by a London grand jury (filled with his supporters) in November.

At this point some of the Country Party leaders began plotting an armed insurrection which, had it come off, would have begun with the assassination of Charles and his brother on their way back to London from the races at Newmarket. The chances of such a rising occurring were not as good as the plotters supposed. Memories of the turmoil of the civil war were still relatively fresh. Eventually Shaftesbury, who was moving from safe house to safe house, gave up and fled to Holland in November 1682. He died there in January 1683. Locke stayed in England until the Rye House Plot (named after the house from which the plotters were to fire upon the King and his brother) was discovered. He took ship for Holland that very week.

While in exile Locke finished An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and published a fifty page advanced notice of it in French. (This was to provide the intellectual world on the continent with most of their information about the Essay until Pierre Coste's French translation appeared.) He also wrote and published his Epistola de Tolerentia in Latin. Recent scholarship suggests that while in Holland Locke was not only finishing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and nursing his health, he was closely associated with the English revolutionaries in exile. The English government was much concerned with this group. They tried to get a number of them, including Locke, extradited to England. Locke's studentship at Oxford was taken away from him. In the meanwhile, the English intelligence service infiltrated the rebel group in Holland and effectively thwarted their efforts -- at least for a while. While Locke was living in exile in Holland, Charles II died on Feb. 6, 1685 and was succeeded by his brother -- who became James II of England. Soon after this the rebels in Holland sent a force of soldiers under the Duke of Monmouth to England to try to overthrow James II. Because of the excellent work of the Stuart spies, the government knew where the force was going to land before the troops on the ships did. The revolt was crushed, Monmouth captured and executed (Ashcraft, 1986).

Ultimately, however, the rebels were successful. James II alienated most of his supporters and William of Orange was invited to bring a Dutch force to England. After William's army landed, James II realizing that he could not mount an effective resistance, fled the country to exile in France. This became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It is an watershed in English history. For it marks the point at which the balance of power in the English government passed from the King to the Parliament. Locke returned to England in 1688 on board the royal yacht, accompanying Princess Mary on her voyage to join her husband.

After his return from exile, Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Two Treatises of Government. In addition, Popple's translation of Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration was also published. It is worth noting that the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration were published anonymously. Locke took up residence in the country at Oates in Essex, the home of Sir Francis and Lady Masham (Damaris Cudworth). Locke had met Damaris Cudworth in 1682 and became involved intellectually and romantically with her. She was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, and a philosopher in her own right. After Locke went into exile in Holland in 1683, she married Sir Francis Masham. Locke and Lady Masham remained good friends and intellectual companions to the end of Locke's life. During the remaining years of his life Locke oversaw four more editions of the Essay and engaged in controversies over the Essay most notably in a series of published letters with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester. In a similar way, Locke defended the Letter Concerning Toleration against a series of attacks. He wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity and Some Thoughts on Education during this period as well.

Nor was Locke finished with public affairs. In 1696 the Board of Trade was revived. Locke played an important part in its revival and served as the most influential member on it until 1700. The Board of Trade was, in Peter Laslett's phrase "... the body which administered the United States before the American revolution." (Laslett in Yolton 1990 p. 127) The board was, in fact, concerned with a wide range of issues, from the Irish wool trade and the suppression of piracy, to the governance of the colonies and the treatment of the poor in England. During these last eight years of his life, Locke was asthmatic, and he suffered so much from it that he could only bear the smoke of London during the four warmer months of the year. Locke plainly engaged in the activities of the Board out of a strong sense of patriotic duty. After his retirement from the Board of Trade in 1700, Locke remained in retirement at Oates until his death on Sunday 28 October 1704.

Of Understanding, Knowing, and Classifying

PD
The Portrait The System of the World demonstrates Daniel's system of classifying all human knowledge into numbers being impressed upon the 'tabula rasa' of the blank cards of hammered and cut Solomonic Gold sheet. This is an event fraught with meaning and portent. Newton and the alchemists maintained that innate knowledge of the nature of the universe, the 'philosophikal mercury' existed within Solomonic Gold. This Gold had gone around the world many times in the System of the World's Trade on the high seas, nailed to the hull of the trading ship "Minerva", seas of which it is said have no memory. As the "bringer of wisdom", Minerva brings Daniel the tabula rasas he needs to classify all human found knowledge, and through this, attain wisdom.

By striking his prime numbers into the gold cards, Daniel is impressing found knowledge upon the tabula rasa, thus implying that the claims of innate knowledge by the alchemists were a blank slate.

Locke's "Concerning Human Understanding" was a similar "inquiry into the originality, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent". In this, he begins with ideas, the materials from which one constructs knowledge. Locke's principle of the tabula rasa was the basis of the modern behaviorists, however he wasn't absolutist about the idea with everything, as the concept clearly conflicts with his political principles of natural law, that men are endowed with inalienable rights, and that the universe operates by objective truth, which may be unknown to man, but is not unknowable.

John Locke In Other Fiction

John Locke is the name of a character in the award winning television series "Lost". The character is an embodiment of the original's philosophy. He lives stranded on a Pacific Island with other passengers of a crashed airliner (a la "Lord of the Flies"), including another character, a French woman named "Rousseau" who plays a bit at being a 'noble savage'. Other characters play various roles in the political spectrum and try to form a functioning society in the wilderness while under threat from a mysterious cult-like group called 'the Others' who have apparently lived on the Island for many years and practice various forms of mind control, brainwashing, subterfuge, guerilla tactics, and New Age tin pot dictatorship of "Earl".

Suggested further reading

  • Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknapp/Harvard University Press, 1967. Enlarged Edition, 1992. Discusses influence of Locke and other thinkers upon American political thought.
  • John Dunn, Locke Oxford University Press, 1984. A succinct introduction.
  • John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Introduced the interpretation which emphasizes the theological element in Locke's political thought.
  • Roland Hall (ed.) `Locke Studies' is an annual journal of research on John Locke (obtainable from the editor for £12; the current volume is 300 pages).
  • John W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Reassesses Locke's political philosophy from different points of view.