Welcome to the deep dive, the place where we
cut through the noise, bypass the textbooks and
get straight to the foundational ideas that shape
our modern world. Today, we are diving deep into
a figure whose influence is so, so pervasive
you might not even realize it. We're talking
about John Locke, born in 1632, died in 1704.
He's often called the father of liberalism. And
he is. But to just leave it at that label is
to miss the incredible complexity of the man.
His ideas are, and this is no exaggeration, the
literal blueprint for modern governance. But
the man himself is a study in contradictions,
some of them pretty troubling. Oh, absolutely.
That's right. So our listeners shared a really
comprehensive stack of sources on Locke, the
physician, the philosopher, the pragmatic political
operator. And our mission today is to rapidly
dissect that impact. And we need to understand
not just the big famous principles he laid down,
like the tabula rasa, you know, the blank slate
and natural rights. Right. We also have to get
into the messy real world context of his personal
choices and his political actions. That dual
focus is just essential. We have to look at the
lofty universal theories. The ones that end up
in the U .S. Declaration of Independence. Exactly.
And we have to put those right alongside the,
let's say, contradictory ways he participated
in the systems of his time. We're talking about
colonial administration, wealth, and yes, the
slave trade. It's a journey that takes us from
a quiet Oxford college to the high stakes world
of London politics and back again. So let's unpack
this life story and start with the man in his
context. Let's do it. So. John Locke was born
in 1632 in a town called Rington in Somerset.
And the environment he grew up in is just crucial,
isn't it? It's everything. His family was deeply
Puritan. And this wasn't just a casual affiliation.
This was the core of their identity. Which put
them on the side of dissent, of skepticism toward
the established church and the crown. And his
father was an attorney, but more importantly,
he was a cavalry captain for the parliamentarians
during the English Civil War. Okay, so imagine
growing up in that house. The dinner table conversation
is about whether a king's power comes from God
or if it comes from the people. Precisely. That
conflict plants the seeds of skepticism toward
absolute monarchy from day one. So he gets a
very traditional, elite education. He goes to
Westminster School and then on to Christchurch,
Oxford. But he wasn't exactly thrilled with what
they were teaching, was he? Not at all. This
is a really key detail about him. He found the
traditional curriculum, which was mostly just
rehashing Aristotle, just incredibly dull, stultifying.
So while they're pushing Aristotle on him, he's
off reading the moderns. He's secretly devouring
philosophers like Rene Descartes. He was drawn
to this new philosophy that was based on observation
and reason, not just on ancient authority. So
that frustration with the old way of thinking
pushes him towards something new. It pushes him
towards science and medicine, a decisive shift.
And that's what brings him into contact with
the real cutting -edge thinkers of the 17th century.
Exactly. Through friends, he gets exposed to
the experimental philosophy being practiced at
the Royal Society, which he later joined. And
his study of medicine wasn't a hobby. He had
a Bachelor of Medicine in 1675. And he starts
working with absolute giants of the era. People
like the chemist Robert Boyle and the polymath
Robert Hooke. This period was completely transformative
for him. So this grounding in empirical science
and medical observation. That's the engine for
his whole philosophy. It's the engine. It gives
him the tools, the methodology to look at the
human mind as a system you can actually study,
just like Adi. His medical training gives him
the empirical mindset. And his Puritan background
gives him the political skepticism. And you fuse
those two things together and you get the revolutionary
John Locke. OK, so now we get to the moment that
really catapults him from academia into the absolute
highest levels of English politics. Anthony Ashley
Tuber, Lord Ashley. later the first Earl of Shaftesbury.
Tell us about that meeting. It sounds like something
out of a movie. It really does. It's high stakes
medical drama. Shaftesbury, who's already this
huge figure in the court of Charles II, comes
to Oxford in 1666 and he has a life -threatening
liver infection. And the standard treatments
of the day, the bleeding and so on, they're not
working. They're failing. It's an abscess. It's
incredibly dangerous. And somehow Locke, who's
still basically just an academic studying medicine,
gets called in. The pressure must have been immense.
Immense. But he handled it with this incredible
methodical calm. He didn't just act as the doctor.
He coordinated all the advice. And he and the
other physicians came to a terrifying conclusion.
Surgery. Surgery. Which at that time was often
a death sentence. But... Locke oversaw this procedure
to insert a silver tube into Shaftesbury's abdomen
to drain the abscess. And it worked. He saves
the life of one of the most powerful men in England.
He does. And that act cements this lifelong bond
of loyalty and gratitude. Shaftesbury was so
impressed with Locke's mind, his skill, his trustworthiness.
He basically tells him to get out of Oxford and
come to London. Pretty much. He says, your ideas
are too important for the classroom. Come with
me and I'll show you how the world really works.
And so in 1667, Locke moves into Shaftesbury's
London home, Exeter House. And he's transformed
from a quiet academic into a high -level political
operator. Instantly. He's plunged right into
the heart of what would become the Whig movement,
which was all about opposing absolute monarchy
and a Catholic succession to the throne. And
he wasn't just sitting on the sidelines. He's
given actual jobs. Very hands -on roles. He was
secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina
and secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations.
So he's writing colonial policy. He's dealing
with trade, economics, and... And, controversially,
the administration of colonies that were built
on servitude and exploitation. This is where
you see the Lockean paradox in its earliest form.
Yeah. The philosopher of liberty is writing policy
for colonial expansion. OK, so this background
medicine, science, hard politics is the perfect
crucible for his major works. Let's talk about
the timing of those. This is one of the biggest
changes in how we understand Locke. I'm talking
about his most famous political work, The Two
Treatises of Government. Right. For a long time,
everyone thought he wrote it after the glorious
revolution of 1688. As a justification for what
had already happened, making him seem like a
defender of the new status quo. But modern scholarship
has completely flipped that idea on its head.
It has. The work of Peter Laslett in the 1960s
was groundbreaking. He argued that the bulk of
the two treatises was actually written much earlier,
around 1679, right in the middle of a major political
crisis. At Shaftesbury's urging. Almost certainly.
So that changes everything, doesn't it? It means
the book isn't a justification after the fact.
It's a revolutionary argument against absolute
monarchy. It's a call to arms written when the
fight was still happening. It was treasonous.
It was an explosive argument against the divine
right of kings, challenging thinkers like Robert
Filmer and Thomas Hobbes. It was arguing for
a government based on the consent of the people.
And of course, the political situation went south
for his side. Shaftesbury's plots failed. He
fled, and Locke was implicated. He had to flee
too. He went to the Netherlands in 1683, under
suspicion for being part of the Rye House plot
to assassinate the king. He lived there for five
years, under a fake name, Dr. van Linden. But
that exile, as difficult as it must have been,
was incredibly productive for him. He gave him
the space he needed. He's in Holland associating
with these free -thinking dissenting Protestant
groups, some with connections to Spinoza's circle.
Which would have reinforced all his ideas about
tolerance. Absolutely. And it's during this period
that he composes his letter concerning toleration
and does the bulk of the work on his masterpiece
of epistemology, an essay concerning human understanding.
And then the big return, 1689. The Glorious Revolution
is a success and he comes back to England with
the new queen, Mary II. And then comes the publishing
spree. In just a couple of years, the essay,
the two treatises, and the letter concerning
toleration all come out. It's this incredible
burst of intellectual output that cements him
as the hero of the new Whig government. He lived
out his final years as a kind of elder statesman,
didn't he? He did, at the country home of his
friend Lady Masham, corresponding with people
like Isaac Newton, a pillar of the new establishment
he had helped, in secret, to create. A perfect
transition. Let's move from the life to the radical
ideas themselves, starting with his theory of
the mind. Let's do it. So when Locke turns that
empirical medical mind of his to the question
of how do we know what we know, he starts a revolution.
And it all begins with one core idea. The tabula
rasa. The blank slate. Exactly. It's a Latin
phrase for a scraped tablet when you could write
on. Locke's whole system is agreed on this one
postulate. At birth, the mind is empty. So no
pre -existing concepts, no innate idea of God
or good and evil? Nothing. It's a direct contradiction
of the philosophers who came before him, especially
Descartes, who believed we were born with certain
innate ideas already in place. Okay, so if the
mind is empty at birth, everything we know has
to be built from scratch. Where does the information
come from? For Locke, it comes from one place
and one place only. Experience. This is the absolute
foundation of empiricism. All our ideas, which
are the building blocks of knowledge, come from
what he called two distinct fountains. Let's
break those down. What's the first one? The first
is sensation. This is the most obvious one. It's
just the perception of the outside world through
our senses. Looking at a blue sky, feeling heat
from a fire, tasting salt. All simple ideas derive
directly from sensation. And the second fountain
is more internal, right? Yes. The second is reflection.
This is our perception of our own mind's operations,
the act of thinking, doubting, believing, willing.
It's the internal sense. So sensation gives us
ideas about the external world. And reflection
gives us ideas about our own internal world,
our consciousness. Which every person, as he
puts it, has wholly within himself. So you sense
the apple, that's sensation. And then you think
about the apple, you remember other apples, you
decide you want the apple. That's reflection.
Precisely. And all complex knowledge, ideas like
justice or government or art, are just built
up by combining these simple ideas from sensation
and reflection. It's so methodical. It's like
he's describing a machine for creating knowledge.
And that's exactly what it was. It was a mechanism.
Yeah. And it completely reoriented philosophy
towards subjective experience. It's not about
some external truth anymore. It's about how you
build truth from your own perceptions. And this
work on how the mind processes information leads
him directly to defining what it means to be
a person, what it means to be a self. Yes, and
this is maybe his most profound contribution,
even if it's less famous than his politics. He
completely detaches personal identity from any
specific substance, like a soul or even a body.
So what is it then? What makes you you? It's
consciousness. Simple as that. How does he phrase
it? He defines the self as, and I'm quoting here,
that conscious thinking thing. which is sensible
or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of
happiness or misery, and so is concerned for
itself, as far as that consciousness extends.
So my identity is just the continuous stream
of my memories and my self -awareness. That's
it. It's a radical break. Your identity isn't
guaranteed by God or by your physical form. It's
psychological. It's dynamic. And intellectual
historians argue this is basically the birth
of the modern Western self. It is. This is the
self that is defined by its inner life. It's
personal history. And it's this conscious remembering
self that is capable of consenting to be governed,
which connects his psychology directly to his
politics. And his theory about how ideas get
linked together in the mind, this association
of ideas, that had a huge influence on psychology,
didn't it? It's the basis for what became known
as associationism. He was fascinated and a bit
worried by how the mind gets wired. especially
in childhood. He noticed that if two ideas get
presented together over and over, the mind links
them, even if there's no logical connection between
them. Exactly. And that connection can become
so strong that you can't have one without the
other popping into your head. This is the mechanism
for learning, but it's also the mechanism for
prejudice and irrational fear. Which brings us
to that. Very famous example he used, the one
about the goblins and sprites. Right. He warns
parents and educators to be so careful about
what impressions are made on the tender infancies
of children because those early associations
are incredibly powerful and lasting. And his
example is a pretty common domestic scene. He
says, imagine a foolish maid who wants to keep
a child from wandering off in the dark. So she
tells him stories about. goblins and sprites
that live in the dark. So the child's natural
unease with darkness gets powerfully, irrationally
associated with the terrifying idea of a ghost.
And even when that child grows up and his reason
tells him that sprites aren't real, the association
is still there. The feeling of terror is permanently
linked to darkness in his mind. So the grown
man, as Locke puts it, can no more bear the one
than the other. It's a powerful illustration
of his point. The blank slate is incredibly vulnerable
to its environment. If you control the input,
you control the output. You control the person.
And he formalizes this in his book, Some Thoughts
Concerning Education. He says that nine parts
of 10 are what they are, good or evil, useful
or not. by their education. And this is where
the idealist philosopher runs headlong into the
hard -nosed economic pragmatist. This is where
we get the really controversial stuff, the child
labor advocacy. His essay on the Poor Law from
1697, it's a policy paper about how to deal with
poverty in England. And Locke was obsessed with
productivity and utility. His main concern wasn't
welfare. It was waste. Total economic waste.
He looked at the children of the poor and he
lamented that they were being kept in idleness
until they were 12 or 14. All that potential
labor, as he saw it, was being lost to the public.
So what was his solution? It was severe. He proposed
setting up working schools in every parish for
poor children. The goal was to instill a work
ethic and make them profitable. And he proposed
they start when? He specifically suggests they
start from infancy. He names the age of three.
Three years old. Working. Yes. They would be
brought to the school, taught simple tasks, and
their labor would, in theory, pay for their upkeep
and even generate a profit for the parish. That
is just a brutal focus on economic utility. It
is. And it's a stark, unavoidable contradiction
to his grand principles of natural liberty. It
shows how even in his own mind, the demands of
a new capitalist economy could collide with the
ideals of human dignity. A perfect bridge then.
Let's move from shaping the individual mind to
shaping the political state. Let's do it. So
Locke's political philosophy, like his rival
Thomas Hobbes, starts from this idea of a state
of nature. but they go in completely different
directions. They share the starting point of
a social contract, that government is an invention
in agreement. But their ideas about what came
before, about human nature itself, are poles
apart. Everyone knows Hobbes. He saw the state
of nature as chaos, a war of all against all.
Life was nasty, brutish, and short. Right. Whereas
Locke believed that human nature is fundamentally
characterized by reason and tolerance. In the
state of nature, people are governed by natural
law, which they can discover through reason and
which teaches them not to harm one another. Okay,
so if the state of nature is generally peaceful
and reasonable, why leave it? Why do we need
government at all? Locke says it's not that it's
terrible, it's that it's inconvenient. The main
problem is that in the state of nature, every
person is their own judge, jury, and executioner
when a dispute arises. And that leads to bias
and endless cycles of revenge. Exactly. But he
also identifies a specific thing that makes the
state of nature much more unstable. And that's
the invention of money. That's the invention
of money. Because currency allows for unlimited
accumulation, it introduces significant inequality
and selfishness, which generates much more conflict.
So people agree to form a civil society, a government,
not to escape terror, but to get an impartial
referee. Precisely. Government isn't there to
create our rights. It's there to protect the
rights we already have by nature and to resolve
our conflicts in a civil way. And this brings
us to arguably his most famous and influential
idea, the definition of those natural rights.
He defines them as inherent, pre -political.
They exist before any government. Every person
has a natural right to defend their audience.
And this phrase is crucial. Life, health, liberty,
or possessions. Life, liberty, and possessions,
or property. That's the bedrock. And any government
that fails to protect those rights forfeits its
legitimacy. That simple list has so much power,
it's a direct challenge to the idea that rights
come from a king or a state. It's revolutionary.
Against the idea of absolute power, Locke offers
this elegant, universal set of rights that no
government can legitimately violate. And this
list is, of course, the direct blueprint for
the American experiment. Without question. You
can draw a straight line. from Locke's life,
liberty, and property to Thomas Jefferson's life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the
Declaration of Independence. Jefferson called
Locke one of the three greatest men who ever
lived. He did, along with Bacon and Newton. And
the influence isn't just thematic. The language
is there. The Declaration justifies revolution
after a long train of abuses by the king. And
that's a direct quote from Locke. Verbatim from
the Second Treatise. He uses a long train of
abuses, prevarications, and artifices to describe
the point at which a ruler has broken the trust
of the people. And his influence on the American
founders goes beyond just the Declaration, right?
It's in the structure of the government itself.
Oh, absolutely. He advocated for a separation
of powers, legislative and executive, as a check
against tyranny. He demanded a government that
was limited, representative, and based entirely
on the consent of the governed. And then there's
the most radical idea of all, the one that gave
the American Revolution its philosophical license.
The right to revolution. Locke argued that if
a government becomes a tyranny and fundamentally
violates the social contract. Revolution isn't
just a right, it's an obligation. It's a moral
duty. The people are not only permitted, but
are required to dissolve that government and
create a new one. That idea alone made him a
hero in the American colonies. But it's interesting,
as we noted, his two treatises didn't have that
same explosive impact in England right away.
That's a fascinating historical detail. For years,
the book was mostly ignored or just cited by
people who wanted to attack it. So who were the
English Whigs reading at the time? They were
much more into Algernon Sidney's discourses concerning
government. Sidney also argued for resisting
tyranny, but he based his arguments on the ancient
historical rights of Englishmen and the English
Constitution. So it was a more conservative,
more traditional argument. Exactly. It felt more
English. Locke's argument based on abstract,
universal, God -given natural rights that anyone
could figure out through reason. That felt a
bit too radical, too abstract for the British
establishment. Locke really becomes a superstar
decades later when the Americans needed exactly
that kind of universal argument. Let's dig into
the concept that drives so much of this. His
theory of property. How does he justify private
ownership in the first place? It all comes down
to his labor theory of property. The starting
point is that God gave the earth to all of humanity
in common. So everything is shared. Everything
is shared until an individual mixes their labor
with... A part of it. When you exert your effort,
your energy on something in nature, you remove
it from the common state and make it your own.
So if I pick an apple from a wild tree, my labor
of picking it makes it my apple. That's the basic
idea. But, and this is crucial, his original
theory had two major limits on it. Okay, what
were they? First was the anti -waste principle.
You could only take as much as you could use
before it spoiled. If you gather 100 apples and
90 of them rot, you've taken more than your share
and violated natural law. That makes sense. And
the second one is the really famous one. The
Locking Proviso. It says you can take property
for yourself, at least where there is enough
and as good left in common for others. So you
can't just take the only water source in the
desert for yourself. Exactly. You have a social
obligation not to harm others through your appropriation
of property. These two rules together. make his
initial theory sound very limited, almost egalitarian.
So how do we get from that to the world of unlimited
accumulation and massive inequality that we have
today? The answer is one brilliant and world
-changing intellectual maneuver, the introduction
of money. How does money change the rules? Locke
argues that money is made of durable goods like
gold and silver. And the key thing about gold
and silver is that they do not spoil or decay.
So they don't violate the anti -waste principle?
They don't. I can't hoard thousands of apples
because they will rot. But I can trade all those
perishable apples for a few durable gold coins.
And I can hoard those coins forever without any
of them spoiling. And just like that, the natural
limit on accumulation is gone. It's completely
gone. And Locke knew this. He acknowledged that
this would lead to massive inequality. But he
argued that this inequality didn't come from
the social contract or the government. Where
did it come from? He said it came from the tacit
agreement of humanity to put a value on money.
By agreeing to use money, we all implicitly consented
to a system of unlimited accumulation and the
inequality that comes with it. That's a huge
claim. So did he offer any solution to the conflict
this would obviously create between the rich
and the poor? This is where his theory kind of
runs out of steam. He recognizes the problem,
and he says it's the government's job to moderate
the conflict that arises. But he never really
tells us how. He doesn't lay out the principles
for taxation or regulation. He basically gives
us the philosophical engine for capitalism, but
leaves it without any breaks. And that tension
is the perfect place to start looking at the
deeper contradictions in his life and work. The
deepest of which is slavery. Let's go there.
The paradox of Locke and slavery is impossible
to ignore. It is the great stain on his legacy.
Here you have the man who declared liberty to
be an inalienable natural right, and he was an
investor in the Royal Africa Company. The company
that ran the British transatlantic slave trade.
He was a stockholder. He profited from the buying
and selling of human beings. And his involvement
was more than just financial, wasn't it? As secretary
to Shaftesbury, he was involved with the founding
of the Carolina colony. He was. He helped graft
the fundamental constitutions of Carolina. And
that document contained a chilling clause. It
granted the planters absolute power and authority
over their Negro slaves. So he's literally helping
to write the legal code for chattel slavery in
America while he's formulating his theories of
liberty. Which is why many historians like James
Farr just call him a hypocrite. They argue his
work helps lay the legal and philosophical groundwork
for a system of brutal exploitation But the sources
also show there's a debate here. Some historians
try to add more nuance to his role. There is
a revisionist take The historian Holly Brewer,
for instance, argues that his role in the Caroline
Constitution was more like a paid clerk, that
he was just revising and copying a document whose
core principles were already set. She also points
out that he sold his stock in the Royal Africa
Company after just a few years. Right. And Brewer
argues that later in his life, after the Glorious
Revolution, he actually worked to undermine slavery.
He attacked policies that gave huge land grants
to slave owners in Virginia, and he encouraged
the Christian baptism of enslaved children. Which
was significant because the justification for
slavery often rested on the idea that they were
heathens. So baptism was a way to challenge their
legal status as property. It was a subtle but
potentially powerful challenge to the whole system.
And then there's the contradiction within his
own masterpiece, the two treatises. He does provide
a justification for slavery, but it's an incredibly
narrow one. It's so narrow that it basically
invalidates all the slavery that was actually
happening. He says slavery is only legitimate
for captives taken in a just war. They forfeited
their lives and their conqueror can enslave them
instead of killing them. But that definition
would specifically rule out kidnapping people
from another continent. It would rule out hereditary
slavery. It would rule out enslaving children.
It rules out the entire basis of the Atlantic
slave trade. So by his own philosophical standard,
all the slavery happening in the British Empire
was illegitimate. enslaved, had a moral right,
even an obligation to escape. Exactly. So what
do you do with that? Was he a hypocrite whose
philosophy accidentally condemned his own investments?
Or was it a very clever way of creating a philosophical
loophole that sounded good but changed nothing
in practice? It's an unavoidable tension. Let's
shift to his views on women in the family. It's
another area where he's both progressive for
his time and deeply conventional. He definitely
took a hammer to the old patriarchal structure.
He directly attacked Robert Filmer's idea that
the father had absolute God -given power over
his family. How did he do that? By making a simple
but profound change in language. He insisted
on talking about parental power, not just paternal
power. He explicitly wrote that a mother have
an equal title to her children. Which is a huge
elevation of the mother's status in the family.
It is. He saw marriage as a contract. He argued
that women had the right to negotiate terms,
to have custody of their children, even to divorce.
Within the domestic sphere, he was quite progressive.
But that domestic equality didn't translate into
the political world. Not at all. When it comes
time to form a government, he's very clear. He
writes that it is men who unite into commonwealths.
So women are left out of the original social
contract. That's the argument from critics like
Carol Pateman. They say women aren't partners
in the contract, they're subjects of it. Their
sphere is the home, and they're excluded from
the political liberty that men enjoy. And yet
that very exclusion created an opening for later
feminist thinkers. An opening that Mary Wollstonecraft
walked right through. She brilliantly used Locke's
own ideas, the blank slate against the patriarchal
system. How so? Well, if Locke is right that
our rationality depends entirely on our education
and experience. Then Wollstonecraft could argue
that society keeps women subordinate by deliberately
denying them a proper education. Precisely. She
argued that society trains women to be alluring
mistresses rather than rational wives, deliberately
stunting their rational development to keep them
dependent. She used Lockean principles to demand
equality. It's a fantastic intellectual move.
Just before we move on, let's touch on a less
discussed topic. His views on animals. Again,
he's pushing back against Descartes. He is. He
completely rejected the Cartesian idea that animals
are just unthinking machines, biological robots
with no feelings. So he thought they could think.
He did. He wrote that animals have perception
and memory in some degree. He even says oysters
and cockles have some kind of dull sensation.
He believed they felt pleasure and pain. So where
did he draw the line between humans and animals?
For him, the defining line was the ability to
form abstract ideas. An animal can recognize
this specific man or this specific apple. But
it can't conceive of the general idea of mankind
or apple -ness. That's the line. The ability
to use language and reason about universal concepts.
That, for Locke, was the unique and defining
feature of human consciousness. Let's move on
to Locke's ideas about faith and economics, which
are deeply intertwined. His arguments for religious
tolerance were born from a very bloody history.
Absolutely. He's writing in the aftermath of
Europe's devastating wars of religion. So his
arguments in the letters concerning toleration
aren't just an abstract philosophical exercise.
They're a desperate... practical plea for peace.
And he builds his case on three main pillars,
all aimed at convincing the government to stay
out of the business of saving souls. Right. The
first argument is about humility. He says earthly
judges, the state, simply cannot know for sure
which religion is the one true religion. Only
God knows that. So the government has no authority
to enforce a specific doctrine. Exactly. The
second argument is psychological. He says you
cannot compel belief with violence. All you can
do with force is create hypocrites. You can make
people say the right words, but you can't make
them believe. Coercion is ineffective for salvation.
And the third argument is purely pragmatic. It's
the most powerful one, politically. He argues
that trying to force everyone into one church
leads to more social disorder, more rebellion,
and more chaos than just allowing people to worship
as they see fit. Diversity is more stable than
forced uniformity. But his tolerance had its
limits, didn't it? He made a couple of pretty
big exceptions. He did. He argued that the state
should not tolerate atheists. Why not? Because
for Locke, the entire social order rested on
a belief in God. God was the ultimate source
of natural law. If you don't believe in God,
you don't believe in the basis for morality,
for contracts, for oaths. So an atheist, in his
view, couldn't be trusted to be a part of civil
society. He believed it would lead to chaos.
It reveals how deeply his entire liberal philosophy
is grounded in his Protestant Christian worldview.
Natural law and biblical revelation were, for
him, basically the same thing. And his deep religious
engagement went into some surprising places.
His private papers show he was really interested
in end times prophecies. Yes, he was deep into
the millenarian debates of his time. just like
his friend Isaac Newton. He was fascinated by
prophecies about the restoration of the Jews
to the land of Israel. What did he believe would
happen? In his private notes on the Bible, he
interpreted a passage from St. Paul as a prophecy
that the Jewish people would one day convert
to Christianity and be restored to their ancestral
homeland. It shows a side of him that's very
different from the cool, rational philosopher
of politics. Let's pivot back to the more worldly
topic of economics. He had a very modern theory
of value and price. He did. In a work from 1691,
he lays out what is basically a supply and demand
theory. He said the price of anything is set
by its quantity in proportion to their vent.
Vent meaning demand or sales? Exactly. Quantity
is supply, vent is demand. That relationship
sets the price. And he applied this idea to money
itself, which led to the quantity theory of money.
Right. He argued that since the demand for money
is more or less constant, its value is determined
almost exclusively by how much of it is in circulation.
If you double the amount of money without creating
more goods. Prices will double. Inflation. A
critical insight. He also distinguished the two
main functions of money. He said it acts as a
counter. which is a way to measure the value
of things. And a pledge. A pledge, which is a
way to claim goods in the future. And this is
why he was so insistent on using gold and silver
for international trade. Because unlike paper
money, which is only a promise from one government,
gold and silver have intrinsic universal value.
They hold their value as a pledge across all
of humanity, which makes international trade
and debt possible. And his overall view of national
economies was very much in the mercantilist camp.
Very much so. He believed that the world's supply
of money, meaning gold and silver, was constantly
growing. Therefore, for a nation to stay powerful,
it had to constantly get a bigger piece of that
pie. So you need a favorable balance of trade.
Export more than you import. Always. You had
to be constantly enlarging your national stock
of gold and silver, or you would fall behind
your rivals. It's a very competitive view of
the global economy. Before we wrap up, we should
touch on Locke the Man, the scholar. He was an
obsessive collector and organizer of information.
He really was. His personal library was enormous
for the time. He had over 3 ,000 books when he
died. And it wasn't just English books? Not at
all. Almost 40 % of his library came from France
and the Netherlands, which shows how connected
he was to continental European thought, especially
after his exile. And the subjects tell a story,
don't they? They really do. The biggest category
was theology, which was nearly a quarter of his
library. That really underscores the religious
foundation of everything he thought. Then came
medicine. then politics and law. It's the perfect
map of his mind. And we're lucky so much of it
survived. We are. Most of it ended up at the
Bodleian Library at Oxford. So scholars can literally
trace the development of his ideas through his
books and manuscripts. And he wasn't just a reader.
He was known as a master note taker. He believed
that managing information was a philosophical
task in itself. He said a good notebook should
be like a chest of drawers for your ideas so
nothing gets confused. And he had his own unique
indexing system to make it work. It's brilliantly
nerdy. He used a grid and a system of keywords
based on the first letter and first vowel of
a word. So a note on epistle would be filed under
I. A note on obedience would be filed under O.
A 17th century life hack. And he thought it was
so useful that he had it published after he died
so other people could use it. It just speaks
to his methodical, empirical approach to absolutely
everything. So as we pull it all together, what's
the lasting legacy? He seems to be the architect
of modernity in a few key ways. First, our concept
of the self. Absolutely. He redefined what it
means to be a person. The idea that your identity
is your consciousness, your experience, your
memory. That is the foundation of modern psychology.
It's how we think about ourselves today. Second,
obviously, in politics and law. He's the foundational
theorist of classical liberalism, limited government,
consent of the governed, and the idea that the
entire purpose of the state is to protect our
basic inherent rights to life, liberty, and property.
And finally, there's that core conflict we've
returned to again and again. The deep, fascinating
tension between the universal power of his principles,
natural liberty for all. and his own personal
involvement in the exploitative systems of his
day, from slavery to his proposals for child
labor. It forces us to ask if these grand ideals
can ever really be separated from the messy economic
compromises of the real world. It's a remarkable
legacy. It shows that even the most brilliant
thinkers are products of their time, trapped
in that gap between high ideals and economic
reality. And that leads us to our final provocative
thought for you, our listener. Locke's philosophy
creates the intellectual framework for unlimited
wealth accumulation through the use of money.
But he also insists that government exists to
moderate the conflict that this inequality will
inevitably create. So the system he helped design
is now a global reality with vast, infringed
inequality. The question for you to explore is
this. If John Locke were alive today, looking
at the world his ideas helped build, what specific
pragmatic principles would he advise our governments
to apply to solve this inequality without betraying
his own core principle of the natural right to
property? What does moderating the conflict actually
look like in the 21st century? Something to ponder.
Thanks for diving deep with us.