John Locke: A Complete Biography

John Locke stands among the most consequential thinkers in the history of Western civilization, a philosopher whose ideas shaped the way modern people understand the mind, knowledge, government, religious freedom, and the rights of the individual. To ask who was John Locke and why is he called the father of liberalism is to open a door onto the entire intellectual world of the Enlightenment, for Locke did more than any single writer to give that movement its characteristic confidence in reason, experience, tolerance, and human equality. He was an Englishman of the seventeenth century, a quiet, cautious, secretive man who lived through civil war, regicide, plague, fire, restoration, exile, and revolution, and who distilled the lessons of that turbulent age into a body of work that still underwrites the political vocabulary of free societies more than three centuries after his death.

The breadth of Locke's achievement is difficult to overstate. In philosophy proper he became the founder of British empiricism, the doctrine that all human knowledge derives ultimately from experience rather than from ideas planted in the mind at birth. His great book on this subject, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, set the agenda for the theory of knowledge for the next two centuries and provided the starting point for George Berkeley, David Hume, and, by a longer route, Immanuel Kant. In political thought he produced, in the Two Treatises of Government, the classic statement of the idea that legitimate political authority rests on the consent of the governed, that human beings possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property which no government may justly violate, and that a people whose rulers betray their trust retain the right to resist and replace them. In the field of religion he wrote the most influential early defense of toleration in the English language, arguing that the state has no business coercing the conscience and that faith compelled is no faith at all. He wrote with authority on education, on economics and money, on the interpretation of scripture, and on the proper conduct of the understanding. Few writers in any century have ranged so widely or left so deep a mark in so many separate fields.

Yet the man behind this enormous influence was, by temperament, anything but a flamboyant revolutionary. Locke was reserved, watchful, and habitually discreet, a man who guarded his privacy, kept his most dangerous opinions to himself, traveled with coded notes and concealed manuscripts, and published the boldest of his books anonymously, denying his authorship of the Two Treatises of Government to the end of his life. He came late to fame. The works that made him immortal all appeared within a few months of one another in 1689 and 1690, when their author was already fifty-seven years old, a sober physician and civil servant who had spent decades as the trusted adviser of a great political magnate and had only recently returned from years of nervous exile abroad. The flowering of John Locke's mind was slow, deliberate, and hard-won, the product of a long life of observation, reading, conversation, illness, danger, and patient revision.

This account follows that life from its beginning in a Somerset village in the year before the outbreak of England's constitutional struggles, through the schoolrooms of Westminster and the lecture halls of Oxford, into the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury and the dangerous politics of the Restoration, across the Channel into exile and back again in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, and finally to the quiet country house in Essex where the most celebrated philosopher in Europe spent his last years reading scripture and corresponding with admirers across the continent. It is a story of how a cautious and bookish man, working through one of the most violent centuries in his nation's history, came to articulate the principles on which the modern liberal order was built.

England in the Year of His Birth

John Locke was born on the twenty-ninth of August, 1632, in a small thatched cottage near the parish church of Wrington, a village in the county of Somerset in the west of England. The house belonged to his mother's family, and the choice of birthplace was a matter of convenience rather than residence, for the family home lay some miles away. The infant was baptized the same day in the parish church, the entry in the register recording the arrival of a son to John Locke the elder and his wife. Within a few years the family settled in the village of Belluton, near the market town of Pensford, a few miles south of the city of Bristol, in a comfortable but unpretentious rural house surrounded by the modest landholdings that supported them.

To understand the world into which Locke was born it is necessary to grasp the condition of England in 1632. The country was ruled by King Charles the First, a monarch convinced of the divine right of kings and increasingly at odds with his Parliament over questions of taxation, religion, and the limits of royal authority. In 1629 Charles had dissolved Parliament and embarked on the years of personal rule, governing without that body and raising revenue by expedients that many of his subjects regarded as illegal. The religious settlement of the nation was bitterly contested. The established Church of England, under the rising influence of Archbishop William Laud, was moving toward a ceremonial and hierarchical form of worship that the large and growing party of Puritans regarded with horror, seeing in it a betrayal of the Protestant Reformation and a covert return toward Rome. Beneath the surface calm of the personal rule, the tensions were accumulating that would, within a decade of Locke's birth, erupt into open civil war.