CHAPTER 18
Locke and Rousseau:
The Social Contractors
John Locke (1632-1704)
John Locke was bom in Wrington, England in 1632, into a
liberal Puritan family. He attended Oxford University and, after
obtaining a B.A. and M.A., lectured in Moral Philosophy. By
1661 both his parents and his only brother had died, and he was
left alone, but with a small inheritance. He later obtained a
medical degree, but did not practice except as the private
physician to the statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of
Shaftesbury. It was this association with Lord Shaftesbury that
brought him into direct contact with the political events that
helped to shape his political philosophy.
The political turmoil in England caused Lord Shaftesbury to
move to Holland, where Locke followed in 1683. Shaftesbury
died in that same year, and Locke remained there until England’s
Glorious Revolution had run its course. He returned to England
in 1688, and soon thereafter his two most noteworthy works, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of
Government, were published. In his Essay he rejected the notion
of innate ideas, claiming that just because reason discovers
universal ideas, it does not follow that they are innate.
Locke was an Empiricist. He maintained that the mind is a
tabula rasa (blank slate) and that all ideas come from experi
ence. Simple ideas come from sense experience or reflection,
combining in a variety of ways to become complex ideas. Truth,
according to Locke, is the agreement of ideas according to three
types of knowledge— intuitive (self-evident), demonstrative
(logical relationships, rational proofs), and sensitive (observa
tions of probable truths). He accepted the cosmological proof for
the existence of God, and saw natural law as an extension of the
will of God.
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