Philosopher, humanistic and English doctor.

Theorist of a science postcartésienne founded on the experimental method, promoter of a political philosophy which reconciles natural right and biblical revelation and poses the bases of liberalism, Locke was the model of the French philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment.

The youth of Locke coincides, indeed, with the English Revolution, which start in 1642 (it will be completed in 1649) with the deposition and the execution of king Charles Ier, and with the Commonwealth, placed under the authority of Cromwell until the death of this last, in 1658. The father of John Locke will take share to the civil war in the army of the Parliament. The Locke young person between in Westminster School in 1647 and Christ Church (Oxford) in 1652. Its literary culture extends then to the linguistic disciplines useful for interpretation from the Writings. In 1660 he is reader of Greek, in 1664, critic of philosophy. It is formed however with medicine, in particular at Sydenham, but especially it meets Robert Boyle who reveals the new face of physical science to him. From 1666 to 1683, Locke is the adviser of Lord Ashley, thus entering in policy the rows of those which want to limit the initiative of Stuarts, restored on the throne since 1660. He will also take part in the activities of the whigs against Charles II.

The public life of Locke - it was named, in 1696, police chief of the office Commercial and Colonies - was mainly devoted to the monetary reforms, the creation of the Bank of England and the question of the colonies. Its philosophical work, with the Thoughts on education (1693) and especially reasonable Christianity (1695), which caused a polemic with the Stillingfleet bishop on the question of the Trinity, inaugurated the great quarrels between freethinkers and theologists. After having written its “Discourse on Method”, control of the understanding, Locke died in Oates (Essex) in 1704.

The philosophy of Locke

For Locke, science embraces three fields: the physics, or natural philosophy, which knows the constitution, the properties and the operations of the bodies and the spirits; the ethics, which determines the rules which lead to happiness and the led right-hand side; semiotics, or science of the signs. This one interprets the words, which represent our ideas, and our ideas, which are the signs of the things.  

Critic of the language
In the middle of the language are the names which represent the things. But it sometimes happens to us to learn from the words before knowing which contents have the complex ideas which they mean. Or our terms change employment imperceptibly. The arguments between the men see the triumph of the sophists, who misuse unintelligible words and logical easy ways. Especially, we have the annoying tendency to take the words for the things, and it is enough for us to speak to accept so that we say. Thus it of the concepts metaphysics like the “vegetative heart goes from there”, the “horror of the vacuum”, the “heart of the world”. The hollow words mislay the understanding. Locke thinks that the names of the species and the kinds (the man, the animal) are not false, but that they do not represent the real gasoline of the individuals, who only exist: to say that the man is a reasonable animal is nothing more than one play of language. Obscure, too often general and simplifying, the language misses flowering of the words which, ideally, would reproduce the infinite multiplicity of the things. It should be supervised and, for that, to know well by which mechanisms our simple ideas are constituted, how our complex ideas are formed and which knowledge we can obtain real-world.  

Ideas and the nature of the things
For Locke - and it is in that one opposed it to Descartes -, the man does not have any innate idea, in theory like in practice. Our ideas come from two sources, the feeling and the reflection. Let us examine initially what are our simple ideas. They are obvious, resemble their object, that they deliver to us immediately, so that to have an idea simple it is to be able to be mistaken. The error starts with the judgments and the compositions which our understanding operates. The simple ideas which come from the directions relate to physical space, the form of the body, its rest or its movement. Those which we form by our reflexive power are the thoughts and the vouloirs. What is the objects of these ideas? In fact the same things for us seem the seats of various qualities.  

Qualities first and seconds
Descartes had already taken again on his account the old division of qualities - in first and seconds - to tighten with more close this reality of the wide thing that the scientific understanding knows with certainty.  

Locke hardly moves away from him when it distinguishes qualities first, which really belong to the thing - such solidity, extent, mobility, the number or the form -, from qualities second - colors, sounds, odors -, which cease when we do not perceive any more the object. The complex ideas are formed by the spirit, by construction and composition, starting from the simple ideas. It there has initially the ideas of the simple modes, spaces or lasted. We can always add a length to a line, one moment at one duration. Locke encounters a true difficulty then: how space and time are infinite, if they are built thus by successive additions of finished parts? It is the cross of any empiricism.  

The number
The number, heard this time like mathematical unit (natural entireties), is also a simple mode, composed by addition repeated of the unit. How the series of the numbers is infinite? Here are which remains incomprehensible as well. The complex ideas of the modes reveal at which point it is difficult to deduce from realities without limits starting from the composition of given parts. In addition to these simple modes, we use of mixed modes, i.e. of made up complex ideas starting from simple ideas different and noncontradictory. They are innumerable, and populate all our moral and political speech, like our daily communication.  

Relations and substances
Let us come finally to the relations and the substances. They are not simple ideas. The relation par excellence is that of the power, which indicates the provision of a body to modify other bodies. He is added to qualities first of which he is an effect. The substance is the unknowable substrate of qualities of the thing. It is with it that corresponds the real gasoline, which condenses a made constitution structured physical small portions. The empiricist philosopher adopts for ultimate model of reality the corpuscular model of the scientists of his time. This whole of parts is so rich that our directions do not deliver it to us in entirety. The substance is in recognizable right, but in fact it is never exhausted by our knowledge. It is the ideal of science. The real gasoline of the things is thus out of reach, but it must be supposed to convince us that the flow of the representations stops well with something and that reality has a minimum of unit.  

Unquestionable knowledge
Once known the nature of our ideas, it is necessary to determine what is an unquestionable knowledge. It comes from the proposals which are faithful to the fitting of our ideas, when those resemble indeed what exists in nature. The commonplace proposals, without true interest for the knowledge, are those where the predicate is contained in the subject. The instructive proposals add something to the idea of the subject. All would go extremely well if our ideas joined between them according to the effective order of the things. But connections are done very often randomly, or according to the practice, without reflection. The association of the ideas, support of our power to deduce, is as well the permanent occasion of the error, or rather of is delirious. It is not excessive to say that the spirit is more often in the grip of the imaginary one than with the truth. As the real gasoline of the things escapes to us, and that we can only approach it, our knowledge is often only probable. Locke has the great merit to have inaugurated a tradition of the approached knowledge, which holds the medium between skepticism and dogmatism. Our knowledge has thus various certainty and degrees of accuracy, according to whether it is close or remote of the immediate resemblance of the things.  

There is nothing more certain than our sensory intuitions, in which our idea even presents the thing to us. Our demonstrations are richer, but they connect several intuitions, which makes them resolutely fragile. The objects, finally, strike us passively generally accepted ideas, the ideas of sensitive knowledge, which are indubitable. On the whole, science rests very whole on the demonstration; however the surest knowledge, but the least suitable for extension, which receive passively our directions are that.  

A founded policy in kind
If Locke did not admit the existence in the man of a thinking substance having innate ideas, it however preserved a decisive contribution of the Cartesianism: the men have a real freedom, which the power of their understanding expresses when it is fortunately directed; all morals consists of a right limitation of our inevitable passions. Locke emphasized what it names discomfort, this state where we feel a lack, where we suffers from an absence, that the desire seeks to fill. All our effort aims at dissipating this discomfort, but it gets often more sorrow to us than of pleasure. Morals and education teach us a moderation and an application where we discover the true pleasure. Ordered with happiness rather than with the moral rule, the ethics of Locke is however concerned natural law, similar to that of God, than it should be heard if one wants to avoid the disorders and the nuisances of the existence.  

This free man, aspiring to happiness, is the statesman of nature. In its first Treaty on the government, Locke refutes the arguments to sir Robert Filmer, the defender of the absolute monarchy, which justified the royal absolute power by that, that it believed natural, of the father on his children. But, for Locke, the political authority could not reproduce the paternal authority, since it is placed on the assumption of a state of nature such as any feature of our civil life does not exist there yet. The men have there undoubtedly a life which is clean for them, and they have the right and the duty to preserve it. How would they give up this right and this duty while giving their existence between the hands of a man? No slavery is legitimate, unless being itself the fruit of a contract between the Master and his servant. As for the king, far from nourishing his subjects, it well rather is nourished and maintained by them. Locke disqualifies any political doctrines thus where sovereignty would belong by nature to a providential man.  

A “mutual insurance company”
It is in its second Treaty of the government that Locke will build the new system of the political legitimacy, that which will support, during all the XVIII E century, the ideology of the contract and the natural rights. It is of political power only to the state of company, where exists a law to make laws be observed under penalty of death. These positive laws are legitimate only if they accurately reflect the characteristics of the man to the state of nature: its individual freedom, its right to have the instruments and the fruits of its work, its right to exchange the surplus of its production, the equality which he knows with his similar, the kindness finally of its nature, regulated by the natural law.  

The natural man is an owner before the letter, surrounded by his family, worker and honest. Why does it give up this so happy state to sign contract with others and to form a company? It exchanges, and for this reason it creates, with the center even state of nature, the two instruments of the exchange which are the currency and the capitalization of the goods. The practical values became naturally exchange values. In consequence of the chances of successive harvests, or by effect of lazes and of bad wanting some, the properties change. Some grow, the different ones are reduced or disappear.  

Naturally equal in front of the right, the men imperceptibly become unequal in front of fortune. Locke is made the theorist of a primitive accumulation of the capital which creates two unequal classes, that of the owners and that of the private producers of means of production, dedicated to sell what remains to them, their productive force. This inequality generates a danger, that of the war between the men. It is thus necessary to reactivate by the laws and the threat of the punishment the natural equality, to protect by a “mutual insurance company” the great majority from the individuals against those which dispute them. Thus is born the company political, founded on the contract freely authorized and tacitly accepted by these even which would not have liked it.  
 
The founder of the modern concept of right

Locke is thus held halfway to Hobbes and of Rousseau. Against the first, he refuses that the instinct which pushes the men to leave the state of nature is the fear, and which the contract which them dregs is that where one gives all his powers to the hands of only one. He affirms the right to the insurrection: if a Master offends the laws and undermines the natural rights, it is right to break the contract and to return to the state of natural freedom. Against what will be the fundamental thought of Rousseau, made Locke of the individual and his particular will, of its inalienable right to the property and the exchange, the base of sovereignty.  

The political thought of Locke thus constitutes the theoretical base of the worldwide market, such as capitalism creates it. And in the same movement, it creates the modern notion of the right, either founded on the positive authority, but on universal qualities of the men. The American Constitution will be inspired some. It from of deduced obviously a universal tolerance, which corresponds to freedom to think clean of each one in its state of nature. Between the natural law - which apply to all - and the equality of the consciences judged by God alone a harmony is established which the legislator must respect. But this universality always has, like its remorse, the defect to be threatened by the economic inequalities which it founds and seeks to correct by the exercise of freedom.