John Locke

John Locke (1632–1704) enters this wiki through the Second Treatise of Government, the founding text of modern natural-rights liberalism and the keystone of the natural-law lineage as libertarians receive it.

Place in This Wiki

Locke was an English physician and philosopher, central to the Enlightenment both in epistemology (the empiricism of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) and in politics. The wiki uses him for the political work: his claim that individuals hold rights to “life, health, liberty, or possessions” under a law of nature prior to any government, that property is acquired by mixing one’s labour with the world, and that political authority is a revocable trust held only by consent for the protection of those rights.

He is the hinge of the tradition — receiving the Grotian natural-law inheritance and handing a theory of individual rights to the American founders and, eventually, to the libertarian natural-rights school. Locke himself is a constitutional, limited-government liberal, not an anarchist; his heirs Spooner and Rothbard push the same premises further than he did.

See Also

• Second Treatise of Government - the work present in this wiki
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the lineage Locke is the keystone of as libertarians receive it
• Hugo Grotius - the predecessor whose secularized natural law Locke inherits
• Thomas Aquinas - the Scholastic root of the tradition Locke modernizes
• Thomas Paine - the radical who turns Lockean rights into a popular revolutionary creed
• Lysander Spooner - the heir who pushes Locke’s premises toward anarchism
• Murray N. Rothbard - the heir who carries the natural-rights premises furthest
• Homesteading - The libertarian theory of how unowned things first become property: by being put to use — Locke’s labor-mixing, Rothbard’s first-use-first-own.
• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Full Text) - the basis for this profile