The Life of John Locke (1632-1704)

John Locke was born on August 29, 1632 and lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of English history. Locke was a child and teenager during the English Civil War, in which Parliamentary forces battled King Charles I over matters of taxation, political power, and the true religion.

Locke's father was a small landowner and attorney in western England. The father fought with the Parliament and had Puritan religious views. Locke's family was well-enough off to send him to Oxford University, where he was "ever prating and troublesome and paid little attention to his lecturers."1 He read a lot, though.

John Locke was a young man in his late twenties when the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and the Anglican Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. After his studies, Locke went on to be a professor of philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664.

In 1667 Locke became the physician, adviser, and friend of the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. Through Shaftesbury, Locke held a number of minor government posts and was embroiled in the continuing political and religious turmoil.

In 1669, Locke had the opportunity to write the constitution for the proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America. Though the plan was never implemented, Locke's political philosophy would latter become the intellectual blueprint for the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution.

In 1675 his protector, Shaftesbury had fallen from favor, so Locke spent four years in France where he sought out French philosophers and scientists. After a few years back in England, Locke fled again In 1683 to live in political exile in Holland, because of his opposition to the Roman Catholic King James II. Locke returned to England in 1689 after the Glorrious Revolution in which the Catholic James II was replaced by the Anglican William of Orange and his wife Mary II, who was herself the older daughter of James.

The years in exile in his fifties provided the occasion for Locke to write his books. In 1689, his Letter on Toleration was published in Latin and English. In 1690, both Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government were published.

Locke read the works of Descartes and Newton. He was a close friend of the chemist Robert Boyle. Locke was also influenced by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooker, whom he quotes several times in the Second Treatise.

Locke held a number of government posts, but lived mostly in the country after his return to England. From 1696 to 1700 he was commissioner with the Board of Trade and Plantations. He died in 1704.

Locke is recognized not only as an important political philosopher but also as the founder of empiricism, which eschews intuitive speculation and sees sensation and experience as the root of all knowing.

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1 Anthony Wood (1632-1695): Author of a history of Oxford University (in Latin 1674) as quoted in the introduction to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, edited by Thomas Peardon, New York: Macmillian, 1952, vii.