John Locke

English philosopher and physician (John Locke, 1632–1704), born in Wrington, Somerset, trained in medicine and natural philosophy at Oxford, and the founder of British empiricism and one of the most influential political theorists in history. Personal physician and political adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury, he lived in exile in the Netherlands during the years of political repression in England, returning only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an event his political work would help theoretically justify. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he rejected the doctrine of innate ideas, arguing that the mind is born as a 'blank slate' (tabula rasa), receiving all its content through sensory experience and reflection upon that experience: there is nothing in the understanding that did not first pass through the senses, a foundational principle of the entire subsequent British empiricist tradition. In the Two Treatises of Government (1689), written partly to refute the divine-right absolutism defended by Robert Filmer, he developed a theory of the social contract radically different from Hobbes's: the state of nature is not a war of all against all but a condition governed by natural law, in which all men are free and equal and possess natural rights to life, liberty and property; legitimate government arises from the consent of the governed solely to protect these rights, and if it systematically violates them, the people retain the right of rebellion. These ideas directly influenced the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Enlightenment, and mark him as the intellectual father of modern political liberalism.

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