SUMMARIZE THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN LOCKE. HOW TO
Concrete mandates are prescribed on how to develop the abstract nature of love and a virtuous life. Locke never leaves his readers in the abstract world of ideas only. Locke, furthermore, explains that virtue of love for the Supreme Being and respect of the Maker, including concrete steps of devotion from an early age, are necessary preconditions for loving others and avoiding injustices and selfishness (Ibid.). Without that, I think, he will be happy neither in this nor the other world” (Ibid., 44). Locke says: “I place virtue as the first and most necessary of those endowments that belong to a man or a gentleman, as absolute requisite to make him valued and beloved by others, acceptable and tolerable to himself. 43), Locke meticulously explains how education works.įirst and the most essential “endowment” of education is a virtue. Locke’s general principles of democracy and civility were very much visible in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).Īfter asserting the “holistic” principle of education (both mind and body should be involved) and confirming the enormous impact of education in human civilization (Locke in Johnson & Reed, p. The natural outcome of this experiment was the historical struggle for democracy in all its dynamic understanding and application in the U.S. The rebellion, however, is justifiable only when the government is dissolved in extreme cases (Ibid.). People have the “supreme power” of sovereignty “to remove or alter the legislative when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them” (John Locke quoted in Stumpf : 273). The Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, of course, based their position of justifiable revolution against the tyrannical government on Locke’s philosophy of government (Ibid., 173). Political states should be evaluated in terms of how they protect these natural rights. We are all bestowed with some natural rights to “life, liberty and possessions” (Ibid.).
Thus, he also wrote Two Treatise on Government (1660) in which for the first time in history, Locke distinguished between “political state” and “the state of nature” (Ibid., 170). However, Locke was very much interested in the application of grand philosophical ideas in practical reality. These foundational ideas of his philosophy are presented in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke’s famous principle of tabula rasa (blank slate) is based on the belief that only experience and reflection on experience can produce epistemological certainty (Ibid.). Empiricism was “hostile to rationalistic metaphysics, particularly to its unbridled use of speculation, its grandiose claims, and its epistemology grounded in innate ideas” (Palmer : 165). John Locke (1632-1704) was the first and probably most crucial British empiricist.
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