john locke biography

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 20, 2019 | Original: November 9, 2009

Portrait of John Locke, British empiricist, philosopher 1632-1704.

The English philosopher and political theorist John Locke (1632-1704) laid much of the groundwork for the Enlightenment and made central contributions to the development of liberalism. Trained in medicine, he was a key advocate of the empirical approaches of the Scientific Revolution. In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” he advanced a theory of the self as a blank page, with knowledge and identity arising only from accumulated experience. His political theory of government by the consent of the governed as a means to protect the three natural rights of “life, liberty and estate” deeply influenced the United States’ founding documents. His essays on religious tolerance provided an early model for the separation of church and state.

John Locke’s Early Life and Education

John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrighton, Somerset. His father was a lawyer and small landowner who had fought on the Parliamentarian side during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. Using his wartime connections, he placed his son in the elite Westminster School.

Did you know? John Locke’s closest female friend was the philosopher Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham. Before she married the two had exchanged love poems, and on his return from exile, Locke moved into Lady Damaris and her husband’s household.

Between 1652 and 1667, John Locke was a student and then lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, where he focused on the standard curriculum of logic, metaphysics and classics. He also studied medicine extensively and was an associate of Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and other leading Oxford scientists.

John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury

In 1666 Locke met the parliamentarian Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The two struck up a friendship that blossomed into full patronage, and a year later Locke was appointed physician to Shaftesbury’s household. That year he supervised a dangerous liver operation on Shaftesbury that likely saved his patron’s life.

For the next two decades, Locke’s fortunes were tied to Shaftesbury, who was first a leading minister to Charles II and then a founder of the opposing Whig Party . Shaftesbury led the 1679 “exclusion” campaign to bar the Catholic duke of York (the future James II) from the royal succession. When that failed, Shaftesbury began to plot armed resistance and was forced to flee to Holland in 1682. Locke would follow his patron into exile a year later, returning only after the Glorious Revolution had placed the Protestant William III on the throne.

John Locke’s Publications

During his decades of service to Shaftesbury, John Locke had been writing. In the six years following his return to England he published all of his most significant works.

Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689) outlined a theory of human knowledge, identity and selfhood that would be hugely influential to Enlightenment thinkers. To Locke, knowledge was not the discovery of anything either innate or outside of the individual, but simply the accumulation of “facts” derived from sensory experience. To discover truths beyond the realm of basic experience, Locke suggested an approach modeled on the rigorous methods of experimental science, and this approach greatly impacted the Scientific Revolution .

John Locke’s Views on Government

The “Two Treatises of Government” (1690) offered political theories developed and refined by Locke during his years at Shaftesbury’s side. Rejecting the divine right of kings, Locke said that societies form governments by mutual (and, in later generations, tacit) agreement. Thus, when a king loses the consent of the governed, a society may remove him—an approach quoted almost verbatim in Thomas Jefferson 's 1776 Declaration of Independence . Locke also developed a definition of property as the product of a person’s labor that would be foundational for both Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx ’s socialism. Locke famously wrote that man has three natural rights: life, liberty and property.

In his “Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), Locke argued for a broadened syllabus and better treatment of students—ideas that were an enormous influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel “Emile” (1762).

In three “Letters Concerning Toleration” (1689-92), Locke suggested that governments should respect freedom of religion except when the dissenting belief was a threat to public order. Atheists (whose oaths could not be trusted) and Catholics (who owed allegiance to an external ruler) were thus excluded from his scheme. Even within its limitations, Locke’s toleration did not argue that all (Protestant) beliefs were equally good or true, but simply that governments were not in a position to decide which one was correct.

John Locke’s Death

Locke spent his final 14 years in Essex at the home of Sir Francis Masham and his wife, the philosopher Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham. He died there on October 28, 1704 , as Lady Damaris read to him from the Psalms.

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GREAT THINKERS John Locke

John Locke was an English philosopher born in 1632. His father was a lawyer and a Puritan who fought against the Royalists during the English Civil War. The commander of his father’s regiment, Alexander Popham, a wealthy MP, arranged for Locke’s education at Westminster and Oxford. At Oxford, Locke studied medicine, assisting in the laboratory of the chemist Robert Boyle, and produced several of his early works, including the texts which would be posthumously published as the Two Tracts on Government and the Essays on the Law of Nature . Locke stayed on at the university until 1666, when he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, a powerful political figure who would serve as Lord of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor, and later as one of the founders of the Whig party.

Shaftesbury’s and Locke’s meeting came about after Shaftesbury had suffered an abscess on his liver, and Locke was sent to attend him. Shortly thereafter, Locke devised a means by which to treat the abscess by surgically installing a pipe with a faucet-like fixture to drain it, which—against all odds—worked. In gratitude, Shaftesbury placed Locke in various administrative offices over which he held sway; Locke served as the secretary to the proprietors of the Carolina colony and to the Board of Trade, composing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in the service of his patron, as well as reports to the Board of Trade that laid out some of his early economic ideas. He also served as a tutor to Shaftesbury’s son, the third earl of Shaftesbury, who would go on to become a philosopher in his own right.

Locke left England for France in 1675, but returned in 1679 to assist Shaftesbury during the Exclusion Crisis. Shaftesbury was involved in the Whig effort to prevent Charles II’s Catholic younger brother, James, from inheriting the throne, at first by means of parliamentary legislation to exclude Catholic heirs from the royal succession. Under an increasing cloud of suspicion for his involvement in extra-legal Exclusion efforts, Locke fled to Holland in 1683 and did not return to England until 1688. It was long thought that Locke wrote the Two Treatises of Government in 1688 in order to provide a philosophical justification for the Glorious Revolution, but more recent scholarship has suggested that he in fact composed most of the work during the period of the Exclusion Crisis in the context of pressure to find a way to exclude Catholics from the royal succession. The final version bears the traces of both events, and the Glorious Revolution was certainly conducive to Locke’s own politics. He returned to England and began publishing his work for the first time. In 1689, the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration were published anonymously, and he had the Essay Concerning Human Understanding printed under his name.

The Essay in particular brought him broad fame, while his authorship of the other works remained under dispute but suspected for some time. The 1690s continued to be a fruitful decade for Locke, and he published Some Thoughts Concerning Education ,”The Reasonableness of Christianity,” and papers on money and interest, as well as several lengthy responses to objections to his works on toleration and Christianity. Locke remained active in both political and intellectual life in England until his death in 1704.

For more biographical information, see also:

Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” Two Treatises of Government , Cambridge: 1988.

Famous Philosophers

Biography, Facts and Works

The Father of Liberalism, John Locke was one of the most significant Enlightenment thinkers as well as a physician and philosopher. He was amongst the first British empiricists and a major figure of the social contract theory. Casting a profound influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, John Locke’s influence is evident in the works of numerous Enlightenment thinkers including Voltaire and Rousseau. The American Declaration of Independence also displays contributions of Locke’s works to classical republicanism and liberal theory. John Locke is widely known to pioneer the concepts of identity, self and consciousness. He believed the human mind to be a clean slate, born without pre-existing ideas and that knowledge came with experience.

John Locke was born to Puritan parents on August 29, 1632 in Wrington, Somerset. He grew up in Pensford, Belluton where the family moved soon after Locke’s birth. In 1647, Locke was sent to London to study in the prestigious Westminister School. After the completion of his schooling, Locke entered Christ Church, Oxford. During the course of studies, Locke was always more interested in modern philosophies and works rather than the classics taught at university. Locke developed a keen interest in medicine and after obtaining his bachelors and masters degrees in 1656 and 1658 respectively, Locke obtained another bachelors of medicine degree in 1674. He worked extensively with renowned names such as Robert Boyle, Richard Lower and Thomas Willis. In 1666, Locke met Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, who was visiting Oxford to seek treatment for his failing liver. Impressed by Locke’s intelligence, Shaftesbury requested Locke to join his team of attendants.

In 1667, Locke moved to the Shaftesbury house where he served as a personal physician to Ashley Cooper while pursuing his medical studies. Cooper credited Locke with saving his life after Locke had suggested a surgery for Cooper’s liver cyst. Under Shaftesbury’s influence, Locke became involved in politics. He became Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and also served as Secretary to the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas. After Shaftesbury’s fall in 1675, Locke travelled to France for some time. He came back to England in 1679. During this time, Locke composed the Two Treatises of Government. In 1683 Locke was suspected of involvement in the Rye House Plot due to which he fled to the Netherlands. He used the free time in Netherlands to resume writing. He spent an ample amount of time writing new works and rewriting and revising older works. Most of his work was published upon his return from exile after the Glorious Revolution.

Some of John Locke’s significant works include A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), A Second Letter Concerning Toleration (1690), A Third Letter for Toleration (1692), Two Treatises of Government (1689), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) and A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). Some other major works left unpublished or published posthumously include First Tract of Government (1660), Second Tract of Government (1662), Questions Concerning the Law of Nature (1664), Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), and A paraphrase and notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians (1707).

John Locke passed away on October 28, 1704. He is buried in the churchyard of the village of High Laver, east of Harlow in Essex. Locke never got married and did not have any children.