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John Locke: A Universal Thinker

            The Enlightenment was a period of intense intellectual ferment that lasted from approximately AD 1650 to 1789. The Enlightenment was a turning point in history that ushered in the contemporary age. It was a period when Europe emerged from the middle ages and the Modern Mind was born. The Enlightenment had many short and long term causes seen not only in Europe where the Enlightenment originated but are seen even now in the present day United States. One very significant figure of the Enlightenment was John Locke. He was a highly respected English scholar whose ideas contributed an establishment to the foundation for the Enlightenment. John Locke's Enlightenment ideas have forever changed the meaning of government and where it is directly seen, in the current American government. .
             The years before the Enlightenment were very important to the development to the ideas that inevitably would shape the world today. Before the Enlightenment was the time period called the Middle Ages. During this time religion was the focus of life and government at the time was base on feudalism. In the years leading up to it, and the early years of Enlightenment there were strong monarchs throughout Europe. These monarchs were justifying power by the divine right in which Kings claimed not just the right to rule, but to right to rule with absolute power. They backed this claim with the assertion that a king's power came from God. Preachers of the divine right said that monarchs are chosen by God and responsible only to him. To challenge the authority of the monarch in any way was a sin. Because of the divine right, kings were protected and common people were without any rights at all. What power people had was restricted to only wealthy noblemen. Another thing pre-Enlightenment was the lack of "say" that people had in the government. Many of the needs of the majority of people in a country were not concerns of the monarch.


Essays Related to John Locke: A Universal Thinker

1. John Locke and Politics

... , which led him to postulating. It is extremely crucial to understand every aspect of a thinker's ideology and an attempt to cover almost everything has been made. John Locke – Life Sketch Locke is the greatest figure in the history of political thought. He was born in 1632. ... A pursuit of knowledge purely through experience, especially by means of observation and sometimes by experimentation could be explained as 'Empiricism'. John Locke was considered to be the founder of Empiricism. His first book (Essay Concerning Human Understanding) concerned arguing with Plato, Descartes ...

  • Word Count: 7056
  • Approx Pages: 28
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: High School

2. Universal Human Rights

... model roughly, but not unfairly describable as individualistic, secularizing, morally autonomous, acquisitive, and so on' (Bauer, 1995, p1). This is an interesting and useful premise to question how universal human rights can be when understanding the idea of 'human' from different perspectives. To conceptualise the idea of 'human' a good starting point is that rights are accorded based ... (Robertson and Merrils, 1996, p2). The ancient Greeks thinker Aristotle spoke of man as a social being with a 'reasoning soul' and in Christianity the biblical notion of man is in the &...

  • Word Count: 1758
  • Approx Pages: 7
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Graduate

3. The Illusion of Utopia

... philosophers in the 17th century. Thomas Hobbes declared a horizontal covenant between citizens, "by mutual covenants with one another."" John Locke was an Englishman who wrote down many of the 'fundamental rights' that were later listed in the Declaration of Independence. Locke's idea of a tabula rasa' (clean or blank slate) for the natural man was greatly influential in that it ... to be abolished; and how a new régime of liberty and equality was to be established."" Voltaire, born Francois-Marie Arouet, was considered to be the first thinker of the Enlightenment, an epoch which chall...

  • Word Count: 14382
  • Approx Pages: 58

4. What Makes A Political Theory A Classic

... a rather unsatisfactory reason. Levin suggest five criteria for which a book might be justified as a classic. Using these criteria he undoubtably believes that John Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a political classic. The work was published in a defense of the 1688 Revolution. The fact that it is still ... of a certain category of thought. 5. Extended relevancy beyond their own time of publication to the present, or even to provide judgments of universal application. He admits that there is a lack of originality but that can be associated with other great theorists. His influence...

  • Word Count: 1243
  • Approx Pages: 5
  • Grade Level: High School

5. Enlightenment

... broadened their curriculum to include courses such as mathematics, natural science, law, and science. The Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes believed in free education. Locke stated in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that people are not born with innate ideas but rather acquire knowledge ... The concept of God in both movements varied in some aspects however they both converged on one universal idea. The idea that God is the Supreme Being. The enlightenment thinker's believed that God was the creator of all and that the universe was a machine ...

  • Word Count: 823
  • Approx Pages: 3
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

6. Why is Spinoza such a controversial figure in the history of

... independently of any theological sanction."" Seventeenth century Britain saw a very significant intellectual movement known as Deism. Deist belief involves a theory of knowledge based upon the recognition of fundamental universal characteristics on the object perceived, and is rigidly opposed to knowledge that is supernatural in its origin and determined only by strife and conflict. There are five common marks ... for many of his contemporaries, it was this unorthodox viewpoint which led to his reputation as being scandalous blasphemer. He has been identified as the " first major Europe...

  • Word Count: 2438
  • Approx Pages: 10
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

7. Writers of the Late Romantic Period

... (Baym 211). According to Dr. Watson in her lecture titled "Emerson and Transcendentalism," Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement which rejected Enlightenment empiricism and the thoughts of John Locke (Watson 17 Feb 2015). Transcendentalists celebrated the self, individualism, consciousness, and Neoplatonism, which stems from a Puritan tradition (Ruland 118). First published in 1841 in Essays, Emerson's "Self- ... ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am no...

  • Word Count: 1963
  • Approx Pages: 8
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

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