John locke political philosophy books
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Locke’s Political Philosophy
1. Natural lag and Natural Rights
Perhaps the most central concept in Locke’s political philosophy is his theory of natural lag and natural rights. The natural lag concept existed long before Locke as a way of expressing the idea that there were certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the particular place where they lived or the agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was between laws that were bygd nature, and thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and operated only in those places where the particular convention had been established. This distinction fryst vatten sometimes formulated as the difference between natural lag and positiv law.
Natural law fryst vatten also distinct from gudomlig law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally referred to those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other inspired writers. Natural law can be discovered by reason alone and
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John Locke
1. Historical Background and Locke’s Life
John Locke (1632–1704) was one of the greatest philosophers in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Locke grew up and lived through one of the most extraordinary centuries of English political and intellectual history. It was a century in which conflicts between Crown and Parliament and the overlapping conflicts between Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics swirled into civil war in the 1640s. With the defeat and death of Charles I, there began a great experiment in governmental institutions including the abolishment of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican church, and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s. The collapse of the Protectorate after the death of Cromwell was followed by the Restoration of Charles II—the return of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican Church. This period lasted from 1660 to 1688. It was marked by continued conflicts b
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John Locke The Best 5 Books to Read
The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is, along with Immanuel Kant, one of the Enlightenment’s most famous thinkers. Often dubbed the ‘father’ of empiricism, Locke is perhaps best known for his assertion that at birth we are all tabula rasas (blank slates), as well as for his foundational contribution to modern liberalism.
Locke’s work has had a profound influence on the history of Western philosophy. In epistemology, for example, Locke reacted against the rationalism of thinkers like Descartes (‘I think therefore I am’), and set in motion the great chain of empirical philosophy that would follow with philosophers like George Berkley and David Hume.
In political philosophy, meanwhile, Locke’s emphasis on clearly separating Church and State had a pivotal impact on French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as the Founding Fathers of the United States. In fact, a passage from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government is reproduce