Locke

John Locke is the philosopher you get if you take Hobbes's contractarian framework and use it for radically different political conclusions. Where Hobbes saw the state of nature as war, Locke saw it as inconvenient — people mostly working things out, hampered by the lack of an impartial judge. The contract therefore creates a *limited* government, not an absolute one, and the people retain the right to revolt if the government breaks its trust.

The *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) — published anonymously, since Locke was politically exposed — is the founding text of liberal political theory. The first treatise demolishes the divine right of kings; the second builds the positive case for government by consent. Natural rights to life, liberty, and property are pre-political — government's job is to protect them, not grant them. When it fails, revolution is legitimate. The American founders read this carefully; the *Declaration of Independence* is recognizably Lockean.

The epistemology — *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1690) — is the foundational text of British empiricism. The mind at birth is a *tabula rasa*; all knowledge comes from experience, either through sensation or reflection. There are no innate ideas. Primary qualities (size, shape, motion) really inhere in objects; secondary qualities (colour, taste, smell) are produced by the interaction of objects with our senses. This distinction shaped the next two centuries of philosophy of mind, even as Berkeley and Hume successively dismantled it.

The *Letter Concerning Toleration* (1689) is the religious-pluralism argument: the state cannot save souls, civil and religious authority should be separated, dissenting Protestants should be tolerated. (Catholics and atheists, in Locke's qualified version, get less generous treatment — historians of liberalism debate how much this matters.) The framework that came out of these books is the template for modern liberal democracy: limited government, property rights, religious toleration, popular sovereignty. The arguments Locke didn't quite finish — about Indigenous land, about slavery (in which he was complicit through the *Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina*) — are arguments his intellectual heirs are still working through.