Locke's Ideas Research Articles

Discourses of Resistance in the American Revolution

Debates over whether the discourse used to justify resistance during the American Revolution was "liberal" or "republican" often obscure the more central question of why and how early American thinkers were able to combine strands of political thought that many modern scholars find contradictory. The arguments the Americans used to justify resistance are better understood as falling into four types that were not understood to be mutually exclusive: Lockean, Biblical, legal/historical, and republican. Locke's ideas often provided an organizing framework within which the other types of argument were used.

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture Edward Larkin (bio) The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Gillian Brown. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Pages 237, Price 49.95, ISBN 0-674-00298-9. For the past three decades, with the ascendancy of the republican synthesis in historical and literary studies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, John Locke's contributions and influence over [End Page 170] this crucial era in American cultural and political history have been downplayed by most scholars of early America. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims and, more recently, Steven Dworetz's The Unvarnished Doctrine both offer important challenges to this view of Locke's influence. Gillian Brown's new book, The Consent of the Governed, represents a stunning new addition to the study of Locke's American influence and clearly establishes Locke's centrality to the formation of the nation and its incipient cultural production. Rather than seeking to overturn the place of republicanism in early America, Brown shows how Locke's philosophy and particularly his pedagogical theories played an integral role in the development of new ideas, most significantly a particular sense of the individual, in Europe and America that would make the American Revolution possible. She deconstructs the binarism between liberalism and republicanism that has profoundly marked the study of early America in recent years, and offers a more nuanced and compelling understanding of the philosophical foundations of late eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Instead of competing with republicanism, in fact, in Brown's analysis Lockean ideas serve as a critical foundation for "the civic sense registered by republicanism" (9). With claims such as this one in her introduction, Brown makes it clear that her book will yield a significantly different understanding of Locke's influence on the eighteenth century and the literature produced as a consequence of the dissemination of his thought. Principally focused on Locke's complex theories of consent, The Consent of the Governed deftly traces the development of this influential concept, which informed theories of education, politics, and family relations in the eighteenth century. The first major task of Brown's book is to recover Locke's ideas as they appeared and were circulated in the eighteenth century. As Brown points out early in her text, for the last half-century or so we have received a version of Locke that has served the political and ideological needs of twentieth-century liberals, that is distinctly different from the Locke that eighteenth-century Americans would have encountered. The center of her book is ameticulous close reading of Locke's theories of consent and education and the various versions of them that circulated in early America. Brown's readings of Locke are not only fascinating and insightful but also original. In perhaps the most startling and provocative insight of the book, Brown points out the extent to which Locke's notions of consent are located specifically in the person of the child. For [End Page 171] this reason, Locke's educational theories supersede his political arguments in their breadth of influence on eighteenth-century culture. In the first half of the study, then, Brown analyzes a number of key texts where children or childhood figure prominently, beginning with the New England Primer. Her reading of the ways the various woodcuts illustrating the text supplement, complement, and complicate the written messages of the Primer is nothing less than a tour de force of literary and visual analysis. Repeatedly, the woodcuts, rather than simply confirming the message of text, generate their own potential meanings and invite readers to meditate on the meaning of the words attached to them. The meanings generated by the woodcuts often compete (even if only slightly) with the meanings offered by the verses. By offering the child a choice, this supplementary relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer asks the child to decide for him- or herself what is the ultimate meaning embedded in the text. Thus, the relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer enacts the process of consent that is so central to the pedagogical mission of...

From Disobedience to Toleration: William of Ockham and the Medieval Discourse on Fraternal Correction

In order to tackle the problem of ecclesiastical heresy, late medieval theologians elaborated on the idea of fraternal correction. Alexander of Hales laid the foundation of the standard theological discourse, which was developed by Thomas Aquinas. In applying this concept to the problem of papal heresy, William of Ockham questioned and reversed the hierarchical assumptions and premises in the traditional discourse. Drawing on his ethical theory of invincible ignorance, he also provided a moral basis for an inferior's dissent from ecclesiastical authority. Ockham's emphasis on the inalienable obligation of conscience in defence of ecclesiastical disobedience shows a striking similarity to some of John Locke's ideas on religious toleration.

An unidentified source of John Locke's some thoughts concerning education

An example of cultural exchange in the second half of the seventeenth century is discussed. The subject is a well-known case: John Locke's ideas on education, formulated during his five-year sojourn in Holland in the 1680s (autumn 1683 until spring 1689), a period during which – as R. Colie stressed – ‘his whole life was to be changed … neither he nor anybody else had any idea that he was the man whose ideas on human nature, on politics, on education … were to cause such a change in English thinking in the course of the next century’. According to Colie it was the intellectual climate of the Arminian (or Remonstrant) medical and theological circle in Amsterdam which stimulated the ‘composition’ of his work, ‘especially for a man as prepared as Locke, who could well carry out the conclusions he had reached in his head’. In place of this interpretation the author shows that Locke’s stay in Holland – regarding educational questions of children – was more than a period of compilation and composition of experiences made earlier, and of concepts prepared beforehand. It is suggested that Locke’s ideas on education were far more influenced and much more stimulated by his encounters with Dutch educational literature (even to literal borrowing), on the one hand, and Dutch educational practice, mentality and culture, on the other, than has been credited by other researchers until now.

The troublesome concept of the person.

In today's bioethical debates, the concept of the person plays a major role. However, it does not hold this role justly. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the concept of the person is unsuited to be a central concept in bioethical debates, because its use is connected with serious problems. First, the concept is superfluous. Secondly, it is a confusing concept and it lacks pragmatic use. Thirdly, its use leads to simplifications. Finally, the concept can easily be used as a cover-up concept. Therefore, it is argued that relinquishing the concept of the person could enhance the clarity and quality of bioethical debate. Moreover, the historic origin of much of the present confusion surrounding the concept of the person is clarified. It is demonstrated that three influences resulting from Locke's ideas on the person and personal identity can be determined as contributing factors to the confusion and controversy within the present bioethical debates centering around the person.

Alain Locke and the AAAE Movement: Cultural Pluralism and Negro Adult Education

Alain Locke's philosophy of cultural pluralism contained a vision of American society that would be inclusive of ethnic European immigrants and also those of the American Negro. Drawing on themes developed during the new Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, Locke developed a vision of Negro adult education emphasizing culturally—grounded adult education. The Harlem and Atlanta experiments in Negro adult education sponsored by the American Association for Adult Education actualized many of Locke's educational ideas from 1931 to 1935. Locke's role as evaluator of these projects provided him the opportunity to apply his philosophy of cultural pluralism to adult education.

John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (review)

~o6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 with immoderate characterizations such as "ludicrous," "dishonest scholarship," and "scholarly fantasy." And so for Steinberg, obsessed as he is with his crusade, it turns out that Hobbes is not really a political philosopher or theorist at all, but a polemicist, an ironist, an allegorist, who "was engaged in a polemical mode of reasoning in which he manipulates the literal sense of words to convey a variety of figurative meanings, all of which are associated with the English Civil War" (18). Thus, the state of nature is not part of an argument for the necessity of government, but an allegory of England's fall into civil war. Similarly, the rights of nature, the laws of nature, the social covenant, and Hobbes's scientific claims are all reduced to ideological maneuvers. The Hobbes that emerges from this vehemently overzealous book is merely a long-winded Anglican apologist who cannot be taken at his word, a constructor of "figurative puzzles" (25) requiring ideological decoding. Steinberg is indeed usefully sensitive to those places where Hobbes's texts have relevance to those he wished to counteract. Had he been more aware of the legitimate issues involved in the textualist/contextualist debate, Steinberg might have produced a valuable study of Hobbes's engagement with his ideological foes. As it is, the best parts of the book are three appendices: the first a detailed critique of Macpherson (though this is now rather flailing a long-dead horse); the second a careful criticism of Skinner's attempt to link Leviathan to the engagement controversy of 1649; and the last an original and speculative study of affinities between Hobbes's views and those of Plato's Laws, an interesting and neglected topic. Here one gets the impression that Steinberg believes there is a good deal more in Hobbes than Anglican propaganda. It is a shame the body of the book is not equally balanced. PAUL J. JOHNSON California State University, San Bernardino W. M. Spellman. John Locke and the Problem of Depravity. New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. viii + 244- $49.95. This excellent study offers a developmental view of how John Locke's awareness of the doctrine of original sin, or the problem of depravity, influenced his theory of human thought and acdon. W. M. Spellman's revisionist approach does not try to situate Locke's views in a movement towards deistical optimism, but on the contrary explores how Locke's ideas of depravity are sympathetic to Pauline and Augustinian orthodoxy and, closer to his own day, Cambridge Platonism and latitudinarianism. Spellman also shows how these two intellectual phenomena subtly mediate between theories of total depravity and moral perfectibility. The first chapter discusses traditional meanings of original sin, especially in the Augustinian and Pelagian contexts, and argues that Anglican and Puritan views on the subject do not necessarily conflict. The second chapter details various themes in Locke's early writings, such as the desire for political stability, interest in natural law, pessimism about human obedience to reason, and the necessity of moral action in the BOOK REVIEWS 307 world. The third chapter offers a brilliant summary of Cambridge Platonism and latitudinarianism as they apply to this study. During the 167os, Spellman writes, Locke came to share with these intellectual movements "not only their desire for toleration, but also the doctrine of the minimal creed and the argument that conduct lay at the heart of Christianity" (87). Like them also, Locke "remained within the camp of Pauline orthodoxy by refusing to entertain the notion that man's rational faculties had been left unimpaired by the fall" (95). The fourth chapter interprets Locke's Essay concerningHuman Understanding to conclude that "our ability to procure actual knowledge in this our temporal state [is] extremely limited" (t 15); Spellman's point takes force from the context of weakened human nature that he develops. The fifth chapter deals with The Reasonablenessof Christiani~ and characterizes its author as "very different from the myth of Locke as the inaugurator of the Age of Reason" 052). The sixth chapter discusses critics of the Essay, and the seventh compares and contrasts Locke's...

Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and: John Locke's Liberalism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 133 argument that the third dream contains an anticipation of the "Cogito, ergo sum," in that Descartes, towards the end of the dream, recognizes that he is dreaming. This monograph is rounded out with Sebba's reflections on some of the problems involved in writing the history of philosophy, including the need for the historian to be philosophic in a way which exceeds the need for a historian of science to be an active scientist. Here Sebba expressed his debt to his friend and mentor, the intellectual historian Eric Voegelin. As an indication of his plans (sadly, never to be realized), Watson has also included some notes Sebba put together, in which he reacted especially to Richard Popkin's work on the history of scepticism. The Descartes student is grateful not only to Sebba for these studies, but also to Professors Watson and Popkin for the care they have taken to bring this work before the public via the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series. In the light of their generosity, it seems churlish to wish they had added an index and a bibliography of works referred to. DESMOND J. FITZGERALD University of San Francisco Andrzej Rapaczynski. Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 3o2. $29.95. Ruth W. Grant.John Locke'sLiberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Pp. viii + 22o. $~4.95. Both Grant and Rapaczynski claim that their books clarify the place of Locke's political theory with respect to liberalism as a set of beliefs and social practices transmitted from one generation to the next over time, although each author premises this claim upon a different interpretive approach to Locke's political thought. Professor Rapaczynski maintains that a historical dimension is indispensable to an understanding of political theory (a), but since he offers no historical evidence, uncovers no new facts or information, and generally fails even to make use of available evidence produced by other historians, this pronouncement appears to be little more than a defensive piece of rhetoric divorced from his actual interpretive practice. Historical accuracy is an important element of interpretation, he writes, "but I have not felt bound by the strictures that would constrain a more narrowly historical work" (5), and he is "quite prepared," he insists, for the objection that his reading of Locke is anachronistic (15). Well might he be prepared for such a criticism, for his interpretation of Locke's thought is not only anachronistic, but replete with errors and unsubstantiated assertions . Apparently, for Rapaczynski, historical accuracy is a necessary ingredient of a "narrowly historical" work of scholarship or a "narrowly contextualist reading" of Locke's Two TreatisesofGovernment, but in order to grasp "the proper historical meaning of liberal doctrine" (5, 15-16) and Locke's place in the tradition of liberalism, interpretive leaps into the evidential void are required. Rapaczynski is right to focus upon the recovery of meanings from a text, for that is what interpreters do. Yet, meanings are neither arbitrarily created by the author (or ~34 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY I990 the interpreter) nor are they wholly contained "in" the text; rather, meanings are conventional, embedded in social practices, and are significandy affected by those factors which increase or decrease the causal efficacy of beliefs in relation to the execution of actions with which those beliefs are assumed to be associated. If, therefore , Rapaczynski interprets Locke's ideas as expressing a secular viewpoint, an indifferent attitude towards nature, an understanding of natural law premised upon a mechanistic model of natural science, and as the embodiment of an unqualified defense of capitalism (117-~5), the question arises, from what source are such meanings to be drawn? They are certainly not reflections of Locke's intentions or authorial meaning, nor are they expressions of the conventional meanings accepted by Restoration thinkers. They cannot even draw upon the general authority of "the political tradition to which Locke's readers have belonged," as Rapaczynski assumes (5), for that tradition includes Paine and Adam Smith, Bentham and Hegel, Defoe and John Stuart Mill, individuals for whom Locke's arguments carried...

The Theory and Practice of Discomfort: Richard Rorty and Pragmatism

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DISCOMFORT: RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 0 VER THE LAST twenty years, one of the most consistently incisive critics of traditional Anglo-American philosophy has been Richard Rorty. Few contemporary writers can match the vigor, breadth, and intelligence of his books and articles, even as few readers can accept the radicality of the views they express. Rorty disturbs and astonishes like spring weather. His pages mount like cumulus clouds in our intellectual sky, saturated by the past and promising (ambiguously) either to irrigate or to inundate the present fields of our culture. Almost everybody complains about him, but can anything be done? This essay is an attempt to come to grips with aat least part of Rorty's multi-faceted and troubling corpus. His diagnosis of the root problems of epistemology and their larger significance (or insignificance) for Western intellectual life is often brilliant, but I shall argue that his prescription for the future is unattractive. His uncompromising war on dogmatism is based on a rejection of conventional notions of objective truth and metaphysical comfort and is presented in the name of human freedom. It represents, however , a potentially disastrous kind of pragmatism which can be criticized on both theoretical and practical grounds. Of the two, the practical considerations may perhaps be the more telling. I. The Problems of Reading Rorty In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty evaluates modern philosophy's comon self-understanding.1 One as1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). ~70 RICHARD RORTY AND PRAGMATISM 271 sumed occupation of the discipline, on his view, is the discovery of the " foundations " of knowledge and thus the validation or invalidation of specific claims to know made in such various fields as science, ethics, art, and religion. Philosophy can claim to take the measure of these other areas of intellectual life because it claims to understand the nature of the mind and its capacity for accurate representation of reality. Philosophy can claim to be foundational with respect to the rest of culture because it claims to encompass the rest of culture, because it claims to know better than science and religion, for instance, what communion with reality they can and cannot attain to. Or so many modern philosophers would (perhaps only implicitly) believe. Rorty suggests that this conception of philosophy stems largely from intellectual developments beginning in the 17th Century, and in this vein he isolates three key contributions: (1) Descartes's idea of the mind as a separate substance, the " inner" workings of which are uniquely knowable to itself; (2) Locke's idea that a "theory of knowledge" is both necessary and possible on the basis of an understanding of the mind and how it works; and (3) Kant's idea that philosophy both can and should provide other fields with overarching canons of reason by dissecting a priori the structure of reason itself. These three contributions to modern philosophy's self-image are interrelated but nonetheless distinguishable. Each played its own crucial part in suggesting a foundation for that discipline , philosophy, which claimed to be foundational for all others. Over against this common picture of philosophy and its proper labors stand Rorty's "heroes": Wittgenstein, Heidegger , and Dewey. These three men agree, in Rorty's estimation , that the picture (common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant) of knowledge as needing certain foundations and of the mind as locus of privileged epistemic processes, needs to be abandoned. They agree that both epistemology and metaphysics can and should be " set aside as possible disciplines " 272 TIMOTHY P. JACKSON in the name of a therapeutic form of life and a postmodernist self-image.2 It is this deconstructive, therapeutic line that Rorty wishes to champion. Philosophy should no longer conceive of itself as underwriting links between the human mind and the "objective " world; we have no access to the objective world as it is in itself; so most of traditional epistemology is misguided. Rorty characterizes his efforts as more akin to moral surusion than rigorous argument, claiming that the epistemological positions with which he takes exception are immune to such argument but objectionable (or at least optional) even so...

Locke's Theory of Language and Johnson's Dictionary

IN AN ESSAY ON JOHN LOCKE in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Norman Kretzmann writes that no work had a greater influence over the development of semantics during the Enlightenment than did Book III of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding-Of Words.' As Kretzmann points out, and as other students of Locke have recognized, Locke's principal innovation in the field of linguistic theory lay in the fact that he expressly connected his thoughts on language with a theory of knowledge, and his emphasis on the mind as crucial to the process of signification had a critical influence on several generations of linguistic theoreticians in both England and France.2 By the time Samuel Johnson began work on his Dictionary in 1746, Locke's ideas on language and the mind had become commonplaces. Johnson himself-in the Ramblers, in Boswell's Life, in the Preface to the Dictionary, and elsewhere-not infrequently echoes both Lockean sentiments and Lockean phraseology, sometimes with a parenthetical off-handedness that reveals more effectively than direct quotation ever could, the extent to which Locke's notions had

Suzanne's 'cri animal': Aural and Musical Imagery in Diderot's La Religieuse

Diderot's indebtedness to John Locke's theory of the senses has long provided scholars with a sound extra-literary basis for studies of the sensual imagery in his fiction. While Diderot examined each of the senses, he was primarily interested in vision, a fact which helps explain the critical evaluation of visual imagery in many of his works and particularly in the subject of this study, La Religieuse,. In his Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) and Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751), Diderot concentrated on practical applications of Locke's ideas by investigating test cases of the sensory impaired in order to assess normal sensory development. Both of these essays devoted considerable attention to the significance of aural sensitivity; the Lettre sur les sourds et muets laid the foundation for his aesthetic and musical theories, developing hearing as the link between music and literature.

Locke's Essay and the Strategies of Eighteenth-Century English Satire

Locke's Essay and the Strategies of Eighteenth-Century English Satire PETER M. BRIGGS —Attitudes are nothing, madam,—'tis the transition from one attitude to another—like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all. —Tristram Shandy The examination of human error is the satirist's vocation, and con­ temporary satirists were well aware of Locke's new views on error relatively soon after the publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. More than a generation ago Kenneth Maclean demonstrated that nearly all eighteenth-century men of letters read the Essay, Addison and others sought to popularize some of its ten­ ets, and satirists from Swift to Blake toyed or wrestled with Locke's ideas about sensation, mental habits, the nature of imagination, the potentialities of education, and other matters.1 My purpose here is not to survey the breadth of Locke's influence, however, but to ex­ plore some of its particular complexities: specifically, to ask what dif­ ference the currency of Lockean ideas made in satire, both in its down-to-earth technical and strategic aspects and, somewhat more broadly, in its moral ethos. Locke's clear-eyed and quite systematic examination of man's cognitive abilities and limitations had a signifi­ cant impact upon contemporary discussions of human error and con­ sequently upon the literary practices of satirists. Locke was primarily interested in urging that man possesses no innate ideas and in showing that all of his thoughts are ultimately 135 136 / BRIGGS traceable to sensations received from the external world. Man re­ ceives sensory data from the world and the mind organizes and eval­ uates those data; the individual understanding works by finding pat­ terns in its sensations, by comparing new data and its previous formulations of experience, by inferring connections among particu­ lar instances and general rules from them, by reflecting upon the design of its own experiences. Through such processes, Locke ar­ gued, man can eventually arrive at true though limited knowledge of his world; man cannot know everything, but he can know enough to manage his life in a reasonable way. Several ideas derived from Locke's system attracted both immedi­ ate and sustained attention in the literary world. The most important of these, at least from the point of view of moralists and satirists, was the fact that Locke consistently treated human error in terms of spe­ cific, identifiable mental failures—that is, perceptual, cognitive, or linguistic failures—rather than in terms of moral failure, a weakness of character or will. A reasonable man would do the right thing un­ less his reason was deluded (hence the enormous importance of ed­ ucation in Locke's view). Second, Locke's model drew particular at­ tention to understanding as a process, not a fixed product; the mind engages in a continuing dialogue, not only with the external world reported by the senses, but also with its own habits and its own past formulations of experience. Third, Locke's critical attention to lan­ guage as an aspect of understanding treated in a systematic way a problem which had bothered both philosophers and literary writers for some time previously: words, with all their imperfections, were an inevitable intermediary between man and man, between man and the external world, even between man and his own inner reflections; the fallibilities of language and the failures of man's understanding were related and reciprocal. Two important qualifications are necessary here. Strictly speaking, Locke was not the originator of any of these ideas, though he contrib­ uted much to their refinement; he was indebted to a long tradition of skeptical philosophers—Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and others—and a large part of Locke's contribution was the critical systemization of possibilities raised by others. It is also important to note at the outset that writers do not really need a philosopher to tell them that human beings can go astray from misunderstanding their world, their perceptions, or their language. It is only necessary to think of Don Quixote or Shakespeare's plays to remind oneself that a great deal of literary insight preceded Locke's formulation of the mind's work­ ings...

Locke's Idea of God: Rational Truth or Political Myth?

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesLocke's Idea of God: Rational Truth or Political Myth?William T. Bluhm, Neil Wintfeld, and Stuart H. TegerWilliam T. Bluhm Search for more articles by this author , Neil Wintfeld Search for more articles by this author , and Stuart H. Teger Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 42, Number 2May, 1980 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2130467 Views: 20Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1980 Southern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Erman KAÇAR A Discussion on the Political Context of Locke's Critique of Innate Ideas, Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi (Apr 2022).https://doi.org/10.32600/huefd.986287Vered Sakal Two Conceptions of Religious Self in Lockean Religiosity, The Journal of Religion 96, no.33 (Jun 2016): 332–345.https://doi.org/10.1086/686565Elissa B. Alzate From Individual to Citizen: Enhancing the Bonds of Citizenship Through Religion in Locke’s Political Theory, Polity 46, no.22 (Nov 2016): 211–232.https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.2Thomas G. West THE GROUND OF LOCKE'S LAW OF NATURE, Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no.22 (Jul 2012): 1–50.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052511000392 Michael S. Rabieh The Reasonableness of Locke, or the Questionableness of Christianity, The Journal of Politics 53, no.44 (Oct 2015): 933–957.https://doi.org/10.2307/2131861Michael P. Zuchert Self-Evident Truth and the Declaration of Independence, The Review of Politics 49, no.33 (Aug 2009): 319–339.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670500034434 Sanford Kessler John Locke's Legacy of Religious Freedom, Polity 17, no.33 (Nov 2016): 484–503.https://doi.org/10.2307/3234655Richard Sherlock Suicide and public policy: A critique of the ?New consensus?, The Journal of Bioethics 4, no.1-21-2 (Mar 1982): 58–70.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01352274

Some Political Origins of the Denial of Death

Although the political dimensions of the attempt to deny death in our culture have been largely neglected, this denial is positively required by the assumptions and incentives of our political ideology. An examination of the political theory of John Locke, the philosopher who has had the largest impact upon American institutions and ideology, reveals how central to his thought were assumptions about the lure of unlimited acquisition, the inevitability of human estrangement and the significance of achievement. All three of these assumptions survive today encased in Locke's widely accepted doctrine on property and all three are undermined by the movement to treat death more openly and humanly. In particular, the recognition of the limits of human existence allows for a perspective on life's activities that threatens the Lockean inspired politics of growth for the sake of growth. The force of this collision reveals both the contemporary prevalence of Locke's ideas and the potential for significant political repercussions in the insights gained from facing death.

Locke's Idea of Spatial Extension

Locke's Idea of Spatial Extension

Locke's idea of “idea”

Locke's idea of “idea”

The Epistemological Basis of Locke's Idea of Property

The Epistemological Basis of Locke's Idea of Property

The Epistemological Basis of Locke's Idea of Property

HE MOST regularly encountered criticism of the political theory of John Locke concerns the seeming lack of consistency between his epistemology and his practical doctrine, moral and political. This criticism turns on the contrast between the apparent empiricism of his epistemology and the rationalism of his political theory. In the words of Sir Leslie Stephen, one of the leading students of modern English thought, the object of the Essay on the Human Understanding is to destroy the doctrine of innate ideas, and to reduce all knowledge to a generalisation of experience. ... The treatise on Civil Government . . is the very reverse of all this. . . . It is grounded on two conceptions of the state of nature and the law of nature, and it is difficult to see how Locke could arrive at either of these conceptions from experience.