Should we read John Locke today? (2024)

Usually when wrestling with these tricky questions, we turn back to the great political thinkers associated with developing a robust idea of freedom. These are historical thinkers, often those associated with an era once known as the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and Immanuel Kant.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual period in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which ideas of reason, science and liberty were championed. The traditional authority of unaccountable kings, the church and the aristocracy were questioned like never before. In the French Revolution, the revolutionaries demanded liberty, equality and fraternity. At the same time, many key thinkers of the Enlightenment held what would now be considered racist views. Some even owned shares in slave plantations or helped write legal documents that protected slave ‘owners’.

How, then, should we approach what seems to be a double standard: freedom for some but not all? To what extent should we draw upon – or disregard – thinkers who lived in a vastly different world to ours, and correspondingly held very different beliefs?

To explore these questions, you are first going to look at the life of one key classic thinker of freedom, John Locke.

Who was Locke and why does he matter?

John Locke (pictured left) was an English philosopher, educator and political writer. Over the course of an eventful life he lived through the English Civil Wars, the violent overthrows of two kings (Charles I and James II) and the rapid expansion of English colonialism and slave-trading across the Atlantic. As well as producing the foundations of a new philosophical approach to knowledge based on experience (later called ‘Empiricism’), Locke was also a significant political thinker, setting out some of the core arguments for what we would now call liberalism.

As Locke saw it, politics should begin not with unrestricted obedience to a ruler or religious power, but with the rights of the citizen. This was a radical challenge in a time in which it was argued that kings were God’s appointed rulers on Earth (known as ‘the divine right of kings’). Instead, Locke argued that all people are entitled to rights derived directly from God, and that earthly rulers should not interfere with these rights, particularly a person’s ‘life, liberty and estate’ (John Locke, page 323, "Second Treatise of Government," in Two Treatises of Government, 1689; ‘estate’ refers to a person’s property, entitlements and obligations). In its place, Locke argued for politics based on consent. Political rule must be based on the ‘common consent’ of the governed. This reflected, he thought, our human nature and universal value. ‘Men being … by Nature, all free, equal and independent’, he argues, ‘no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent’ (John Locke, page 330, "Second Treatise of Government," in Two Treatises of Government, 1689).

Locke’s ideas were highly influential in his time and after. He argued for religious toleration (for everyone except Catholics). He was in favour of free speech and representative government. He reframed politics away from cultural ideas of nations and histories, and religious ideas of virtues and vices, to focus instead on what we are, and can accomplish, in terms of our universal nature.

Human rights hero?

While he was not the first to set it out, John Locke invited his readers to imagine a state of nature, meaning a fictional world in which there were no political structures or nation-states. What kind of politics would follow from it? While, like Thomas Hobbes, an earlier English philosopher, had suggested a vicious ‘war of all against all’, Locke instead set out some of the earliest arguments for universal human rights. ‘The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone’, he writes, ‘[a]nd Reason, which is that law, teaches all Mankind that all being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty or Possessions’. For Locke then, people thrive when they come together as citizens through a social contract, consenting to be governed in return for the guaranteed protection of their rights.

Which all sounds rather promising.

You can hear the voice of Locke when you listen to the words of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776): ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.

And you can hear an echo in Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, upon which the modern idea of human rights is based: ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.’

Or apologist for slavery?

You have seen then that John Locke’s ideas inspired a lot of modern thinking about equality and human rights. And Locke argued that these natural rights were shared equally. But some were more equal than others. For Locke, it was men and in particular men who owned private property who he envisioned sharing in these rights. Women were seen as living in the private sphere of family life and the home and were not assumed to require the same rights as men. These were characteristic and widely shared views of Locke’s time and very rarely questioned.

But if Locke was in favour of ‘life, liberty and estate’, what about the rights of those who had been captured and enslaved by European slave-trading companies and armies? Didn’t the indigenous Americans or enslaved peoples of the Gold Coast, transported over to the tobacco plantations of the eastern seaboard, have rights to life, liberty and estate too?

Here Locke is on shakier ground. When he worked as a lawyer, Locke had helped draft a new constitution for the Carolinas which legitimised slave-ownership. He was also a shareholder in the Royal African Company, which was an early key player in the transatlantic slave trade. While Locke had a lot to say about human freedom and slavery in an abstract, philosophical sense, his work is silent on the systematic enslavement of black Africans taking place over his life.

Should we read Locke? Two academics give their views

The following audio will introduce you to some of these challenges for thinking about freedom. You will hear from two academics with different perspectives: Kehinde Andrews (pictured below left), Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, and Holly Brewer (pictured below right), Professor of American Cultural and Intellectual History at the University of Maryland.

Play the audio clip. As you listen, keep a note of the key points made by the two speakers.

Transcript 152.6KB

Having listened to the audio, try to answer the following questions:

1. Kehinde argues that Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Locke were racist. What reasons does he give?

Viewpoints from the discussion: Kehinde points out that Kant published racist views – that white Europeans were racially superior – and even wrote guidance on how to beat enslaved peoples. Meanwhile, Locke helped write a political constitution for a slave-owning society and owned shares in slave plantations. Kehinde argues that we should not cherry-pick the most modern bits of these thinkers while ignoring their positions on race and slavery, or the context of European colonialism and slave ‘ownership’ beneath the Enlightenment.

2. Both Kehinde and Holly argue that context matters. What points does Holly raise about recognising the world in which Locke lived?

Viewpoints from the discussion: Holly argues that seventeenth-century England was hugely different to today. The king ruled with no accountability to parliament, and the king championed the slave trade. To criticise or resist royal policy might be a treasonable offence. It would have been exceedingly difficult for Locke to openly criticise the slave trade. One person – Morgan Godwyn – who tried to challenge it mysteriously disappeared soon after. Perhaps Locke could have done more, but he lived in dangerous times.

3. Do you agree with Holly that while we should not put these thinkers on a pedestal, we should try to understand them all the same? Or do you agree with Kehinde that we should no longer read them today?

Summary

You have now learned about John Locke and his ideas of equality and considered two different viewpoints about how to understand him and his context. What this article has shown is that political concepts are rarely abstract and detached from real life. Debates about ‘freedom’, free speech and the limits to freedom have changed history and they continue to shape our world. While there is a great deal we cannot change about politics and history, what is within our power is to understand the complexity, nuance and importance of where our thinking about politics and society comes from.