John Locke: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · A Boy in a Country at War With Itself

Somerset, Westminster and a public execution

1632 – 1660 · Wrington · Westminster · Oxford

John Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, the son of a country lawyer who served as a captain of cavalry in the parliamentary army during the English Civil War. Locke grew up in a Puritan household while the country tore itself apart over who had the right to rule.

His father's commander secured him a place at Westminster School in 1647. Two years later, in January 1649, Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall a short distance from the school; the boys were reportedly kept inside. Whatever he saw, Locke's entire adult life was spent thinking about the question the execution posed: on what basis can subjects judge and remove a king?

He went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1652 and disliked most of what he found there — a curriculum still built on scholastic disputation. What captured him was the new experimental science. He studied medicine, worked with the chemist Robert Boyle, and learned clinical method from Thomas Sydenham, who insisted on careful observation of actual patients rather than deduction from theory. Locke became a competent practising physician and was elected to the Royal Society in 1668.

His early political writings were conservative: he argued that a magistrate could legitimately impose religious forms to keep the peace. Almost everything he later became famous for was a reversal of that youthful position.

Why this matters

Locke's method came from medicine and experimental science — observe first, generalise cautiously — and he applied it to the mind and to politics alike.

You have met the doctor before the philosopher. What would you ask him about those beginnings?

Ask Locke

• “What did growing up during a civil war teach you about authority?”
• “Why did you find Oxford's curriculum so unsatisfying?”
• “What did practising medicine teach you about knowledge?”
• “Why did you change your mind about religious conformity?”
• “What did Robert Boyle's experiments show you?”

Chapter 2 · The Patron, the Operation and the Plot

Politics, an abscess and exile in Holland

1666 – 1689 · London · Carolina · Holland

In 1666 Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and became his physician, secretary and political adviser. Two years later he supervised an operation to drain a dangerous liver abscess — inserting a silver tube that Shaftesbury wore for the rest of his life. Shaftesbury said Locke had saved it; the two men's careers were thereafter joined.

Shaftesbury was a proprietor of the new colony of Carolina, and Locke served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors. He had a hand in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, whose article one hundred and ten granted every freeman absolute power over his enslaved people. Locke also invested in the Royal African Company, which trafficked enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. These facts sit alongside the opening of his *Two Treatises*, which calls slavery a vile and miserable state. Scholars continue to debate whether he was drafting to instruction or endorsing the arrangement — but the involvement is documented, and no reading of Locke should omit it.

Politics then turned dangerous. Shaftesbury led the campaign to exclude the Catholic James from the succession, lost, and fled to Holland, where he died in 1683. After the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II, Locke — under suspicion — followed him into exile.

He spent six years in the Dutch Republic, moving between towns under an assumed name and finishing the works that made his reputation. He returned to England in 1689, in the fleet that carried Princess Mary, after the Glorious Revolution had removed James II.

Why this matters

Locke's political philosophy was not academic speculation: it was written by a man in genuine danger, arguing for the right to resist a ruler who had broken his trust.

You have seen the philosopher as adviser, investor and exile. What would you ask him?

Ask Locke

• “How do you reconcile calling slavery vile with drafting the Carolina constitutions?”
• “Why did you invest in the Royal African Company?”
• “What did serving Shaftesbury teach you about real politics?”
• “What was it like writing in exile under a false name?”
• “Did the Glorious Revolution match the theory you had written?”

Chapter 3 · The Mind as an Empty Cabinet

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

1690 · London

The *Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, published in 1690 after roughly twenty years of work, asks a modest-sounding question with enormous consequences: what can the human mind actually know, and how did it come to know it?

Locke's answer denied innate ideas. Nothing is stamped on the mind at birth. It begins, in his image, as white paper or an empty cabinet, and everything in it arrives through experience — sensation, which delivers information about the outside world, and reflection, our observation of our own mental operations. Complex ideas are then built from simple ones.

He distinguished primary qualities, which belong to objects themselves such as extension, shape and motion, from secondary qualities such as colour, sound and taste, which he argued are powers in objects to produce sensations in us rather than properties of the objects as they are.

The political implications were immediate. If minds are formed by experience, then differences between people are largely the product of upbringing and education, not of nature or birth. His *Some Thoughts Concerning Education* (1693) turned this into practical advice, arguing for gentle instruction, curiosity, physical exercise and no rote beating — which influenced European schooling for a century.

His argument was attacked at once for making knowledge uncertain and, by some, for opening a road to materialism. Berkeley and Hume pushed his empiricism further; Kant said reading Hume, and behind him Locke, woke him from dogmatic slumber.

Why this matters

Locke's claim that the mind is shaped by experience made education a political question — because if people are made rather than born unequal, inequality can be changed.

You have the theory of knowledge in front of you. What would you ask him about it?

Ask Locke

• “What does it mean to say the mind begins as white paper?”
• “How can you be sure there are no innate ideas?”
• “Why is colour not really in the object?”
• “If experience makes us, what does that mean for education?”
• “What are the limits of what we can know?”

Chapter 4 · Consent, Property and the Right to Resist

Two Treatises of Government

1689 · London

The *Two Treatises of Government* appeared anonymously in 1689. For a long time they were read as a justification of the Glorious Revolution written after the fact; the historian Peter Laslett showed they were largely composed a decade earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis — which makes them not a defence of a completed revolution but an argument for one that had not yet happened, and therefore a far more dangerous document.

The First Treatise demolishes Robert Filmer's claim that kings inherit absolute authority from Adam. The Second builds the alternative. In a state of nature people are free and equal under a law of nature that no one may harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions. Property arises when a person mixes their labour with what nature provides — an argument that justified ownership without royal grant, and that was also used to claim that land not farmed in European fashion was unowned, with devastating consequences for Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Government exists because enforcing natural law privately is unreliable. People therefore consent to a government whose sole purpose is to protect their rights, and which holds power in trust. If it breaks that trust — ruling arbitrarily, taking property without consent — the trust is dissolved and the people may replace it.

His *Letter Concerning Toleration* argued that the state cannot compel genuine belief, so persecution is both wrong and pointless. He excluded atheists, whose oaths he thought untrustworthy, and in practice Catholics, whom he saw as owing allegiance abroad.

Why this matters

Locke's formulation — rights, consent, government in trust, resistance when trust is broken — was quoted almost directly in the American Declaration of Independence and has shaped constitutional argument ever since.

You have the political theory that reshaped two continents. What would you ask him?

Ask Locke

• “When exactly does a people have the right to remove a government?”
• “Why does mixing labour with land create ownership?”
• “How was your property argument used to dispossess Indigenous peoples?”
• “Why exclude atheists from toleration?”
• “Did you write the Treatises to justify a revolution or to start one?”

Chapter 5 · Last Years and Long Consequences

From Essex to the Declaration of Independence

1691 – 1704 and after · Oates, Essex

Locke spent his last thirteen years at Oates in Essex, in the household of Sir Francis Masham and the philosopher Damaris Masham, with whom he had a long intellectual friendship. Asthma had made London unbearable. He was not idle: he served on the Board of Trade from 1696 to 1700, advising on colonial administration and, in a notorious 1697 report, on making the poor — including children from the age of three — work for relief. He published *The Reasonableness of Christianity* and revised the *Essay* through several editions. He died at Oates on 28 October 1704, aged seventy-two, while Damaris Masham read the Psalms to him.

His influence is hard to overstate. Voltaire and Montesquieu carried his arguments into France. The American revolutionaries used his vocabulary so closely that Jefferson's phrase about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness reworks Locke's life, liberty and estate. Constitutional protections of property, religious freedom and limited government all trace to him.

So does the harder inheritance. His labour theory of property supplied a justification for settler expansion; his role in Carolina and the Royal African Company implicates him in Atlantic slavery. Recent scholarship has stopped treating these as awkward footnotes and started asking what it means that the founding text of liberal rights was written by a man financially bound to the slave trade.

That question is not a reason to stop reading Locke. It is a reason to read him properly.

Why this matters

Locke shows why students must read foundational thinkers whole: the same body of work supplied both the argument for universal rights and the reasoning used to deny them to others.

You have reached the long consequences of the argument. What would you ask him at the end?

Ask Locke

• “How did your words end up almost verbatim in the Declaration of Independence?”
• “What did you recommend about the poor on the Board of Trade?”
• “Should your theory of rights have applied to everyone?”
• “What did your friendship with Damaris Masham mean to your work?”
• “Which of your ideas do you think has been most misused?”

What Locke changed

Locke's arguments underpin modern constitutional government: rights that precede the state, authority derived from consent, separation of church and state, and a legitimate right of resistance. His empiricism reshaped philosophy and psychology, and his writing on education influenced European and American schooling for generations.

A debate that continues

The most active current debate concerns Locke and slavery — whether his colonial involvement contradicts his philosophy outright, whether his theory contains an implicit exclusion of non-Europeans, or whether the principles he stated ultimately provided the tools used to abolish the institution he profited from.

Keep exploring — ask Locke

• “How much does a philosopher's conduct affect the value of their arguments?”
• “What would you change in the Two Treatises if you were writing today?”
• “How did practising medicine shape the way you built arguments?”

Related lives

• Thomas Jefferson — Author of the Declaration · Third President
• Voltaire — Philosophe · Voice of the Enlightenment
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — The Citizen · Father of Romanticism

Related themes

The Enlightenment · Natural rights and the social contract · The Glorious Revolution