John Locke

John Locke

John Locke is known as the father of Liberalism and was an important and influential philosopher during 1600s. The main piece of work, which was the focus of our reading and seminar, is “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “ This essay outlines Locke’s ideas about how human ideas are gained and how we interpret and understand the world around us.  

Locke begins by outlining his ideas about how when we are born we have no ideas or previous knowledge; he believes that everything we know we have learnt from a past experience at some point within our lives. He describes a child as a “white page” which is then covered by experiences and ideas that they get through life experiences. This is a direct opposition to the ideas of Rene Descartes who believed in innate ideas that were given to him by God.  Locke does not abolish the idea of God but rather sais, as I mentioned before, that knowledge is gained from experience. 

The second part of his essay Locke outlines his ideas on exactly how he believed ideas were formed. He thought that our senses give us a primary experience of something like fire; they will tell us that it is hot, yellow/orange in colour and it gives of light. Now with this let us recognise a fire again if we see it, but we may also then think that an orange or yellow piece of paper is fire. To then understand what fire is we must reflect upon what our senses have told us and this is when an understanding of fire is formed.  Locke is basically saying the brain is a processor for all the information we get from our primary senses and only after reflection is understanding formed. 

There are two aspects to Locke’s work which we looked at, as I have said we studied his philosophical work, but he was also very involved with political science.  His political views were much like Hobbes and based most of his work upon a theory of a social contract. This theory states that socially a society must live under a set of almost preordained ideals or a set of laws that were decided upon, not by a King or government, but by all the people living within the society. 

Locke and Hobbes do differ in some aspect of their social theories is the idea of the State Of Nature; This is the idea of a world with no government or kingdoms where men govern themselves without a formal hierarchy. Hobbes believes that men living in this state would turn to chaos without rule then men are just like animals, because they would act on their passions and take whatever they wanted. He then believes that eventually they would choose to give power to a ruler to end the chaos. But Locke has a differing idea and believes that in this state if nature men will learn to live together without conflict and will form a set of ideals which they will all live under. He describes there as a set of morals that have been interwoven into mans mind, but these are not ideas. For example a man will know not to kill but will not know the rules of the road. 

Locke does believe that there are limitations to this idea, because there is now ruler or government then “every man becomes his own lawyer” which means that every man will defend his own actions on his own beliefs and this makes it hard to question a crime. For example if someone killed my wife I would think it perfectly just to kill theirs but there are obvious problems with this system.  This is why Locke said that at one point a government would need to be formed to give a structure to laws and justice. Although this seems to go against the ideas of the state of nature Locke described some very important rules to which government and society must adhere. He said that a government is only formed for the protection of property and if they fail to do this it is the human right of man to revolt, and that the tax could only be levied with the people’s consent. So although there was a body which governed power over the men, it was for the greater good and if they were not fulfilling their promises then the citizens had the right to rebel and overthrow the government. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me! 

Some of Locke’s ideas were new a differed from other political theories that had come before, I have also mentioned Locke and Hume, but I also see contradiction between Machiavelli and Locke. As I mentioned above Locke believed that rebellion was a good thing, in moderation, whereas Machiavelli believed it to be the worst thing that could happen in a principality. But the main difference, I think, in their thinking is about the divine power of Kings. Machiavelli believed that a king should have absolute power over his subjects and was exempt from the law, whereas Locke is in polar opposition to this idea.  Locke believed that power came from the people and they should have the choice to give it to someone and then to relinquish it. This idea about power coming from the people rather than God is the basis to Locke’s social contract.