John Locke (1632–1704)

Renowned modern British philosopher of materialist empiricism, and also a thinker who had a significant impact on political science, economics, religion, and education.

Locke was born on 29 August 1632, in Wrington, Somerset, England, into a rural lawyer family. His father was a Puritan father who embraced the English bourgeois revolution. In 1647 Locke received a scholarship from Westminster to study at that prestigious school, and in 1652 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he received his master’s degree in 1658 and stayed on as a teacher after graduation. From 1657, he began to engage in medical and experimental scientific research, made friends with many famous scholars of the then emerging science, and read the works of Boyle, Descartes, and Gassendi. 1665, Locke left the University of Oxford, and went to work in Germany and France for two years as a secretary of the embassy abroad. After returning home, Locke entered the British political arena. Besides politics, Locke began to study philosophical questions, and in 1690 he published his work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which took him 20 years to write. In addition, his chief representative works include: A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Two Treatises on Government (1690), and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

In epistemology, Locke systematically argued for the materialist empiricist principles of Bacon and Hobbes, holding that all knowledge springs from experience, and that there are no innate ideas that serve as the source and foundation of knowledge, either in the domain of speculation or in the domain of moral practice. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke inquired into “the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge; together, with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent”, i.e., the question of the origin, nature and scope of human knowledge and the human capacity for knowledge. He held that the human mind was originally a “tabula rasa” (blank slate) without any marks or traits, and therefore without any innate ideas, and that all knowledge arose from experience, and that whatever existed in the intellect did not exist in sensation. All of our knowledge was based on experience, and knowledge ultimately stemmed from experience. Locke also distinguished between simple and complex ideas, holding that simple ideas come from sensation or reflection, while complex ideas are composed of simple ideas and sprang from our mind’s processing of simple ideas. As for Locke’s contribution to materialist empiricism, Marx once pointed out: “Hobbes systematized Bacon, but did not give a more precise proof of his basic principle that our knowledge and our ideas have their source in the world of the senses. Locke proved the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in his essay on the origin of human reason.”

Locke’s political doctrine is mainly concentrated in his work of political theory, Two Treatises of Government. The basic spirit of the Two Treatises of Government is to protect the natural rights of citizens and to prove the rationality of the bourgeois democratic political system. Locke criticized the theory of the divine right of kings of the English royalists, arguing that the power of the monarch and the government stemmed from the social contract reached by the people through democratic agreement. According to Locke, man initially lived in a state of nature in which everyone naturally enjoyed various “natural rights,” the most important of which were the rights to personal security and property. The whole purpose of establishing a state and a government is to protect the natural rights that people enjoy according to natural law. In order to prevent despotic tyranny, Locke put forward the famous “separation of powers”. He divided the power of the state into three kinds of power, legislative power, executive power and federative power (or diplomatic power), held by three different branches, with the legislative power being the supreme, held by the elected legislative body, the Congress, the executive power being held by the executive body, the Government, and the federative power being held by the federal agencies dealing with foreign affairs. This idea of “separation of powers” was further developed into the doctrine of “separation of three powers” of legislature, the executive and the judiciary by the French enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, which had a great impact on the structure and development of the bourgeois state system. In his later years, Locke retired to Oates, Essex, where he died in October 1704.