Will the Real John Locke Please Step Forward?

Hilarius Bogbinder shows how Locke's intellectual identity changed over time.

- HILARIUS BOGBINDER

“In the beginning, all the world was America” (John Locke, Second Treatise, Para 49).

There is an almost theological sense of poetic sensitivity in this line by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Certainly, there are many who link the English empirical philosopher with the New World. Merle Curti, a historian of intellectual thought, perhaps summed up the majority view when he called Locke ‘America’s Philosopher’ (The Great John Locke, p.107, 1937).

The Founding Fathers revered Locke. The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) states that, “government is instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These words seem to be lifted from Locke in a way that borders on plagiarism: “The liberty of man in society is to live under no other legislative power but that established by consent in a commonwealth” (Second Treatise, Para. 22).

But John Locke was not always a poster-boy for liberty. For starters, he never in his life acknowledged his authorship of The Two Treatises of Government. Yet, while he didn’t admit he wrote the book, he nevertheless recommended it as essential reading. As he said in a letter, “Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained than in a book entitled Two Treatises of Government” (Locke to the Rev. Richard King, 25th August, 1703).

Full of himself he might have been to write that, but it was understandable that he was cautious and careful not to reveal his authorship. Like Thomas Hobbes a generation before, Locke had lived in exile for political reasons. Having opinions that challenged the monarchy could be dangerous.