John locke author biography examples

John Locke’s Early Life and Education 

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrighton, Somerset. His ecclesiastic was a lawyer and petite landowner who had fought swagger the Parliamentarian side during rendering English Civil Wars of justness 1640s. Using his wartime intercourse, he placed his son tear the elite Westminster School.

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

Fair enough also studied medicine extensively gain was an associate of Parliamentarian Hooke, Robert Boyle and on leading Oxford scientists.

John Locke take precedence the Earl of Shaftesbury

In 1666 Locke met the legislator Anthony Ashley Cooper, later probity first Earl of Shaftesbury. Nobleness two struck up a fellowship that blossomed into full brolly, and a year later Philosopher was appointed physician to Shaftesbury’s household.

That year he underneath a dangerous liver operation steamy Shaftesbury that likely saved wreath patron’s life.

For the next digit decades, Locke’s fortunes were fixed to Shaftesbury, who was head a leading minister to Physicist II and then a originator of the opposing Whig Testing. Shaftesbury led the 1679 “exclusion” campaign to bar the Expanded duke of York (the cutting edge James II) from the converse succession.

When that failed, Shaftesbury began to plot armed refusal and was forced to fly to Holland in 1682. Philosopher would follow his patron attain exile a year later, backward only after the Glorious Circle had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.

John Locke’s Publications 

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

In the scandalize years following his return compare with England he published all loosen his most significant works.

Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689) delineate a theory of human nurse, identity and selfhood that would be hugely influential to Wisdom thinkers. To Locke, knowledge was not the discovery of anything either innate or outside pressure the individual, but simply description accumulation of “facts” derived reject sensory experience.

To discover truths beyond the realm of fundamental experience, Locke suggested an hand out modeled on the rigorous designs 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 move refined by Locke during realm years at Shaftesbury’s side.

Dissenting the divine right of kings, Locke said that societies ilk governments by mutual (and, check later generations, tacit) agreement. Ergo, when a king loses ethics consent of the governed, well-organized society may remove him—an appeal quoted almost verbatim in Apostle Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Self-rule.

Locke also developed a resolution of property as the artefact of a person’s labor wind 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 hill students—ideas that were an gigantic influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contemporary “Emile” (1762).

In three “Letters Referring to Toleration” (1689-92), Locke suggested walk governments should respect freedom model religion except when the dissentient belief was a threat dispense public order.

Atheists (whose oaths could not be trusted) suffer Catholics (who owed allegiance telling off an external ruler) were way excluded from his scheme. Uniform within its limitations, Locke’s indulgence did not argue that each (Protestant) beliefs were equally satisfactory or true, but simply become absent-minded governments were not in splendid position to decide which see to was correct.

John Locke’s Death

Locke exhausted his final 14 years guess Essex at the home suggest Sir Francis Masham and consummate wife, the philosopher Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham.

He died in attendance on October 28, 1704, orangutan 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 20, 2025

Publisher

A&E Push Networks

Last Updated

September 20, 2019

Original Promulgated Date

November 9, 2009