1,Why do men behave justly? Is it because they fear societal punishment?

Are they trembling before notions of divine retribution? Do the stronger elements of society scare the weak into submission in the name of law? Or do men behave justly because it is good for them to do so? Is justice, regardless of its rewards and punishments, a good thing in and of itself? How do we define justice? Plato sets out to answer these questions in The Republic. He wants to define justice, and to define it in such a way as to show that justice is worthwhile in and of itself. He meets these two challenges with a single solution: a definition of justice that appeals to human psychology, rather than to perceived behavior. Platos strategy in The Republic is to first explicate the primary notion of societal, or political, justice, and then to derive an analogous concept of individual justice. In Books II, III, and IV, Plato identifies political justice as harmony in a structured political body. An ideal society consists of three main classes of peopleproducers (craftsmen, farmers, artisans, etc.), auxiliaries (warriors), and guardians (rulers); a society is just when relations between these three classes are right. Each group must perform its appropriate function, and only that function, and each must be in the right position of power in relation to the others. Rulers must rule, auxiliaries must uphold rulers convictions, and producers must limit themselves to exercising whatever skills nature granted them (farming, blacksmithing, painting, etc.) Justice is a principle of specialization: a principle that requires that each person fulfill the societal role to which nature fitted him and not interfere in any other business. At the end of Book IV, Plato tries to show that individual justice mirrors political justice. He claims that the soul of every individual has a three part structure analagous to the three classes of a society. There is a rational part of the soul, which seeks after truth and is responsible for our philosophical inclinations; a spirited part of the soul, which desires honor and is responsible for our feelings of anger and indignation; and an appetitive part of the soul, which lusts after all sorts of things, but money most of all (since money must be used to fulfill any other base desire). The just individual can be defined in analogy with the just society; the three parts of his soul achieve the requisite relationships of power and influence in regard to one another. In a just individual, the rational part of the soul rules, the spirited part of the soul supports this rule, and the appetitive part of the soul submits and follows wherever reason leads. Put more plainly: in a just individual, the entire soul aims at fulfilling the desires of the rational part, much as in the just society the entire community aims at fulfilling whatever the rulers will. The parallels between the just society and the just individual run deep. Each of the three classes of society, in fact, is dominated by one of the three parts of the soul. Producers are dominated by their appetitestheir urges for money, luxury, and pleasure. Warriors are dominated by their spirits, which make them courageous. Rulers are dominated by their rational faculties and strive for wisdom. Books V through VII focus on the rulers as the philosopher kings. In a series of three analogiesthe allegories of the sun, the line, and the cavePlato explains who these individuals are while hammering out his theory of the Forms. Plato explains that the world is divided into two realms, the visible (which we grasp with our senses) and the intelligible (which we only grasp with our mind). The visible world is the universe we see around us. The intelligible world is comprised of the Formsabstract, changeless absolutes such as Goodness, Beauty, Redness, and Sweetness that exist in permanent relation to the visible realm and make it

possible. (An apple is red and sweet, the theory goes, because it participates in the Forms of Redness and Sweetness.) Only the Forms are objects of knowledge, because only they possess the eternal unchanging truth that the mindnot the sensesmust apprehend. Only those whose minds are trained to grasp the Formsthe philosopherscan know anything at all. In particular, what the philosophers must know in order to become able rulers is the Form of the Goodthe source of all other Forms, and of knowledge, truth, and beauty. Plato cannot describe this Form directly, but he claims that it is to the intelligible realm what the sun is to the visible realm. Using the allegory of the cave, Plato paints an evocative portrait of the philosophers soul moving through various stages of cognition (represented by the line) through the visible realm into the intelligible, and finally grasping the Form of the Good. The aim of education is not to put knowledge into the soul, but to put the right desires into the soulto fill the soul with a lust for truth, so that it desires to move past the visible world, into the intelligible, ultimately to the Form of the Good. Philosophers form the only class of men to possess knowledge and are also the most just men. Their souls, more than others, aim to fulfil the desires of the rational part. After comparing the philosopher king to the most unjust type of manrepresented by the tyrant, who is ruled entirely by his non-rational appetitesPlato claims that justice is worthwhile for its own sake. In Book IX he presents three arguments for the conclusion that it is desirable to be just. By sketching a psychological portrait of the tyrant, he attempts to prove that injustice tortures a mans psyche, whereas a just soul is a healthy, happy one, untroubled and calm. Next he argues that, though each of the three main character typesmoney-loving, honor-loving, and truth-lovinghave their own conceptions of pleasure and of the corresponding good lifeeach choosing his own life as the most pleasantonly the philosopher can judge because only he has experienced all three types of pleasure. The others should accept the philosophers judgement and conclude that the pleasures associated with the philosophical are most pleasant and thus that the just life is also most pleasant. He tries to demonstrate that only philosophical pleasure is really pleasure at all; all other pleasure is nothing more than cessation of pain. One might notice that none of these arguments actually prove that justice is desirable apart from its consequencesinstead, they establish that justice is always accompanied by true pleasure. In all probability, none of these is actually supposed to serve as the main reason why justice is desirable. Instead, the desirability of justice is likely connected to the intimate relationship between the just life and the Forms. The just life is good in and of itself because it involves grasping these ultimate goods, and imitating their order and harmony, thus incorporating them into ones own life. Justice is good, in other words, because it is connected to the greatest good, the Form of the Good. Plato ends The Republic on a surprising note. Having defined justice and established it as the greatest good, he banishes poets from his city. Poets, he claims, appeal to the basest part of the soul by imitating unjust inclinations. By encouraging us to indulge ignoble emotions in sympathy with the characters we hear about, poetry encourages us to indulge these emotions in life. Poetry, in sum, makes us unjust. In closing, Plato relates the myth of Er, which describes the trajectory of a soul after death. Just souls are rewarded for one thousand years, while unjust ones are punished for the same amount of time. Each soul then must choose its next life.

2The Prince (Italian: Il Principe, [il prin.ti.pe]) is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccol Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (About Principalities). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of the Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings".[1] Although it was written as if it were a traditional work in the mirrors for princes style, it is generally agreed that it was especially innovative. This is only partly because it was written in the Vernacular (Italian) rather than Latin, a practice which had become increasingly popular since the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy and other works of Renaissance literature.[2][3] The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning how to consider politics and ethics.[4][5] Although it is relatively short, the treatise is the most remembered of his works and the one most responsible for bringing the word "Machiavellian" into wide usage as a pejorative term. It also helped make "Old Nick" an English term for the devil, and even contributed to the modern negative connotations of the words "politics" and "politician" in western countries.[6] In terms of subject matter it overlaps with the much longer Discourses on Livy, which was written a few years later. In its use of near contemporary Italians as examples of people who perpetrated criminal deeds for politics, another lesser-known work by Machiavelli which The Prince has been compared to is the Life of Castruccio Castracani. The descriptions within The Prince have the general theme of accepting that the aims of princessuch as glory and survivalcan justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.[7]

He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.

New conquests added to older states (chapter 3) Machiavelli generalizes that there were several virtuous Roman ways to hold a newly acquired province, using a republic as an example of how new princes can act:

to install one's princedom in the new acquisition, or to install colonies of one's people there, which is better. to indulge the lesser powers of the area without increasing their power.

to put down the powerful people. not to allow a foreign power to gain reputation.

More generally, Machiavelli emphasizes that one should have regard not only for present problems but also for the future ones. One should not enjoy the benefit of time but rather the benefit of one's virtue and prudence, because time can bring evil as well as good.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Jump to: navigation, search "Rousseau" redirects here. For other uses, see Rousseau (disambiguation). This article is about the philosopher. For the author-filmmaker, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau (authorfilmmaker). Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau in 1753, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour Born Died 28 June 1712 Geneva, Republic of Geneva 2 July 1778 (aged 66)

Ermenonville, Kingdom of France Era Region School 18th-century philosophy (Modern philosophy) Western Philosophy Social contract theory Romanticism Political philosophy, music, education, literature, autobiography

Main interests

General will, amour-propre, moral simplicity of humanity, child-centered Notable ideas learning, civil religion, popular sovereignty, positive liberty

Influenced by[show] Influenced[show]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French: [ak uso]; 28 June 1712 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Rousseau's novel mile: or, On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism[1] and romanticism in fiction.[2] Rousseau's autobiographical writingshis Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walkerexemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau was interred as a national hero in the Panthon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.

Contents

1 Biography o 1.1 Youth o 1.2 Adulthood 1.2.1 Return to Paris 1.2.2 Return to Geneva (1754) 1.2.3 Rousseau is forced to flee 1.2.4 In Britain (1765) 1.2.5 France (1767) 1.2.6 Final years 2 Philosophy o 2.1 Theory of Natural Human 2.1.1 Stages of human development o 2.2 Political theory o 2.3 Education and child rearing 3 Religion 4 Legacy o 4.1 French Revolution o 4.2 Effect on the United States of America o 4.3 Criticisms of Rousseau 5 Major works 6 Editions in English 7 Online texts 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links

Biography
Youth

Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Five generations before Rousseau his ancestor Didier, a bookseller who may have published Protestant tracts, had escaped persecution from French Catholics by fleeing to Geneva in 1549 where he became a wine merchant.[3] Rousseau was proud that his family, of the moyen order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva".[4] Geneva, in theory, was governed democratically by its male voting "citizens". The citizens were a minority of the population when compared to the immigrants referred to as "inhabitants" whose

descendants were called "natives" and continued to lack suffrage. In fact, rather than be run by vote of the "citizens" the city was ruled by a small number of wealthy families that made up the "Council of Two Hundred", these delegated their power to a twenty-five member executive group from among them called the "Little Council". There was much political debate within Geneva, extending down to the tradespeople. Much discussion was over the idea of the sovereignty of the people, which the ruling class oligarchy was making a mockery of. In 1707, a democratic reformer named Pierre Fatio protested at this situation, saying "A sovereign that never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being."[3] He was shot by order of the Little Council. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father Isaac was not in the city at this time, but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.[4]

The house where Rousseau was born at number 40, Grand-Rue.

The trade of watchmaking had become a family tradition by the time of Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau. Isaac followed his grandfather, father and brothers into the business, except for a short stint teaching dance as a dance master.[3] Isaac notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. "A Genevan watchmaker," Rousseau wrote, "is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches."[5] In 1699 Isaac ran into political difficulty by entering a quarrel with visiting English officers who in response drew their swords and threatened him. After local officials stepped in it was Isaac who was punished, as Geneva was concerned with maintaining its ties to foreign powers.[3] Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, was from an upper-class family who was raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher. He cared for Suzanne after her father Jacques (whom had run into trouble with the legal/religious authorities for fornication and having a

mistress) died in his early thirties.[3] In 1695 Suzanne had to answer charges that she had attended a street theater disguised as a peasant woman so she could gaze upon M. Vincent Sarrasin whom she fancied despite his continuing marriage. After a hearing she was ordered by the Consistory to never interact with him again.[3] She married Rousseau's father at the age of 31. Isaac's sister had married Suzanne's brother eight years earlier, after she had become pregnant and they had been chastised by the Consistory (the child died at birth). Later the young Rousseau was told a romantic fairy-tale about the situation by the adults in his family a tale where young love was denied by a disapproving patriarch but that prevailed by sibling loyalty that, in the story, resulted in love conquering all and two marriages uniting the families on the same day. Rousseau never learnt the truth.[3] Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 and he would later relate "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me."[3] He was baptized on July 4, 1712 in the great cathedral.[3] His mother died of puerperal fever nine days after his birth, which he later described as "the first of my misfortunes."[3] He and his older brother Franois were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne. When Rousseau was five his father sold the house that the family had received from his mother's relatives, and while the idea was that his sons would inherit the principal when grown up and he would live off the interest in the meantime in the end the father took most of the substantial proceeds.[3] With the selling of the house the Rousseau family moved out of the upper-class neighborhood and moved into an apartment house in a neighborhood of craftsmen silversmiths, engravers, and other watchmakers.[3] Growing up around craftsmen Rousseau would later contrast them favorably to those who produced more aesthetic works, writing "those important persons who are called artists rather than artisans, work solely for the idle and rich, and put an arbitrary price on their baubles."[3] Rousseau was also exposed to class politics in this environment as the artisans often agitated in a campaign of resistance against the privileged class running Geneva.[3] Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he remembered how when he was 5 or 6 his father encouraged his love of reading:

Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances [i.e., adventure stories], which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in the morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art." Confessions, Book 1

Rousseau's reading of escapist stories (such as L'Astre by Honor d'Urf) had an effect on him, he later wrote that they "gave me bizarre and romantic notions of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to cure me of."[3] After they had finished reading the novels they began to read a collection of ancient and modern classics left by his mother's uncle. Of these his favorite was Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which he would read to his father while he made watches. Rousseau saw Plutarch's work as another kind of novel the noble actions of heroes and he would act out the deeds of the characters he was reading about.[3] A big impression was made on Rousseau by witnessing the local townsfolk participate in militias. Throughout his life he would recall one scene where after the volunteer militia had finished its maneuvers they began to dance around a fountain and most of the people from neighboring buildings came out to join them, including him and his father. Rousseau would always see militias as the embodiment of popular spirit in opposition to the armies of the rulers whom he saw as disgraceful mercenaries.[3] When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him.[6] Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister.

Les Charmettes: where Rousseau lived with Mme de Warens in 1735-6, now a museum dedicated to Rousseau.

Virtually all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published Confessions, in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks. At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva (on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city gates locked due to the curfew.

In adjoining Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him to Franoise-Louise de Warens, age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin, the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy), to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism in order to regain it. In converting to Catholicism, both De Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man. Leo Damrosch writes, "an eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good'."[7] De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.
Adulthood

Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy) and France. During this time, he lived on and off with De Warens, whom he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, De Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with the idea of becoming a priest. When Rousseau reached 20, De Warens took him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house. The sexual aspect of their relationship (in fact a mnage trois) confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered De Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender, she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She and her circle, comprising educated members of the Catholic clergy, introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and used a portion of it to repay De Warens for her financial support of him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon. In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Acadmie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible with typography, is based on a single line, displaying numbers representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again.

Palazzo belonging to Tommaso Querini at 968 Cannaregio Venice that served as the French Embassy during Rousseau's period as Secretary to the Ambassador

From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera: I had brought with me from Paris the prejudice of that city against Italian music; but I had also received from nature a sensibility and niceness of distinction which prejudice cannot withstand. I soon contracted that passion for Italian music with which it inspires all those who are capable of feeling its excellence. In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was... Confessions Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly.[8] After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy. Return to Paris Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thrse Levasseur, a seamstress who was the sole support of her mother and numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together, though later Rousseau took Thrse and her mother in to live with him as his servants, and himself assumed the burden of supporting her large

family. According to his Confessions, before she moved in with him, Thrse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is no independent verification for this number[9]). Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thrse to give each of the newborns up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she [Thrse] allowed herself to be overcome" (Confessions). In his letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't rich enough to raise his children but in book IX of the confessions, he gave the true reasons of his choice : " I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less." Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son, but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for ad hominem attacks. In an irony of fate, Rousseau's later injunction to women to breastfeed their own babies (as had previously been recommended by the French natural scientist Buffon), probably saved the lives of thousands of infants.[citation needed] While in Paris, Rousseau became a close friend of French philosopher Diderot and, beginning with some articles on music in 1749,[10] contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopdie, the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755. Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with Diderot. His genius lay in his strikingly original way of putting things rather than in the originality, per se, of his thinking. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles", that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Acadmie de Dijon to be published in the Mercure de France on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were basically good by nature. According to Diderot, writing much later, Rousseau had originally intended to answer this in the conventional way, but his discussions with Diderot convinced him to propose the paradoxical negative answer that catapulted him into the public eye.[citation needed] Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame. Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was performed for King Louis XV in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension." He also turned down several other advantageous offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave offense and caused him

problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, prompted the Querelle des Bouffons, which pitted protagonists of French music against supporters of the Italian style. Rousseau as noted above, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music. Return to Geneva (1754) On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (the Discourse on Inequality), which elaborated on the arguments of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose (also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness and landlady Madame d'Epinay, whom he treated rather highhandedly. He resented being at Mme d'Epinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and shallow atheism of the Encyclopedistes whom he met at her table. Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay; her lover, the philologist Grimm; and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau. Diderot later described Rousseau as being, "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked ... He sucked ideas from me, used them himself, and then affected to despise me".[11]

Pierre Alexandre du Peyrou, rich inhabitant of Neufchtel, plantation owner, writer, friend and publisher of some of Rousseau's oeuvre. His mansion was Le Palais du Peyrou.

Rousseau's break with the Encyclopedistes coincided with the composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the

universe, in contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, and d'Holbach. During this period Rousseau enjoyed the support and patronage of the Duc de Luxembourg, and the Prince de Conti, two of the richest and most powerful nobles in France. These men truly liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to converse on any subject, but they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Mme de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged.[12] Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose, was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in English, literally Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right) in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the Social Contract, which implied that the concept of a Christian Republic was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than participation in public affairs. Rousseau even helped Roustan find a publisher for the rebuttal.[13] Rousseau published Emile: or, On Education in May. The final section of mile, "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar", was intended to be a defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine Revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense.[14]

A 1766 portrait of Rousseau by Allan Ramsay.

Moreover, Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. This religious indifferentism caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from France and Geneva. He was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were burned, and warrants were issued for his arrest.[14] Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals.[15] Rousseau is forced to flee A sympathetic observer, Scottish philosopher David Hume, "professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were banned in Geneva and elsewhere." Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country ... as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous.'"[16] Rousseau, who thought he had been defending religion, was crushed. Forced to flee arrest, he made his way, with the help of the Duc of Luxembourg and Prince de Conti, to Neuchtel, a Canton of the Swiss Confederation that was a protectorate of the Prussian crown. His powerful protectors discreetly assisted him in his flight, and they helped to get his banned books (published in Holland by Marc-Michel Rey) distributed in France disguised as other works, using false covers and title pages. In the town of Mtiers, he sought and found protection under Lord Keith, who was the local representative of the free-thinking Frederick the Great of Prussia. While in Mtiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, 1765). In Britain (1765) After his house in Mtiers was stoned on the night of 6 September 1765, Rousseau took refuge in Great Britain with Hume, who found lodgings for him at a friend's country estate in Wootton in Staffordshire. Neither Thrse nor Rousseau was able to learn English or make friends. Isolated, Rousseau, never very emotionally stable, suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and others. "He is plainly mad, after having long been maddish", Hume wrote to a friend.[17] Rousseau's letter to Hume, in which he articulates the perceived misconduct, sparked an exchange which was published in Paris and received with great interest at the time.

The tomb of Rousseau in the crypt of the Panthon, Paris

France (1767) Although officially barred from entering France before 1770, Rousseau returned in 1767 under a false name. In 1768 he went through a marriage of sorts to Thrse (marriages between Catholics and Protestants were illegal), whom he had always hitherto referred to as his "housekeeper". Though she was illiterate, she had become a remarkably good cook, a hobby her husband shared. In 1770 they were allowed to return to Paris. As a condition of his return he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings in 1771. At the request of Madame d'Epinay, who was anxious to protect her privacy, however, the police ordered him to stop, and the Confessions was only partially published in 1782, four years after his death. All his subsequent works were to appear posthumously. In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work. In 1776, he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In order to support himself, he returned to copying music, spending his leisure time in the study of botany. Final years Although a celebrity, Rousseau's mental health did not permit him to enjoy his fame. His final years were largely spent in deliberate withdrawal. However, he did respond favorably to an approach from the composer Gluck, whom he met in 1774. Gluck admired Rousseau as "a pioneer of the expressive natural style" in music.[18] One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the marquis Ren Louis de Girardin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died, aged 66.

Rousseau was initially buried at Ermenonville on the Ile des Peupliers, which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers. Sixteen years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthon in Paris in 1794, where they are located directly across from those of his contemporary, Voltaire. His tomb, in the shape of a rustic temple, on which, in bas relief an arm reaches out, bearing the torch of liberty, evokes Rousseau's deep love of nature and of classical antiquity. In 1834, the Genevan government somewhat reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny le Rousseau in Lake Geneva. Today he is proudly claimed as their most celebrated native son. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace.

Philosophy
Theory of Natural Human

The statue of Rousseau on the le Rousseau, Geneva.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people nave enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical State of Nature as a normative guide. Rousseau criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the "state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue". On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature" and he especially praised the admirable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge[19] despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which "always seems to inflame the passions".[20] Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best and most optimal in human development, between the less-than optimal extreme of brute animals on the one hand and the extreme of decadent civilization on the other. "...nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man."[21] Referring to the stage of human development which Rousseau associates with savages, Rousseau writes: "Hence although men had become less forebearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species."[22] Stages of human development Rousseau believed that the savage stage was not the first stage of human development, but the third stage. Rousseau held that this third savage stage of human societal development was an optimum, between the extreme of the state of brute animals and animal-like "ape-men" on the one hand, and the extreme of decadent civilized life on the other. This has led some critics to attribute to Rousseau the invention of the idea of the noble savage,[23] which Arthur Lovejoy conclusively showed misrepresents Rousseau's thought.[24] The expression, "the noble savage" was first used in 1672 by British poet John Dryden in his play The Conquest of Granada.[25] Rousseau wrote that morality was not a societal construct, but rather "natural" in the sense of "innate", an outgrowth from man's instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of compassion or empathy. These were sentiments shared with animals, and whose existence even Hobbes acknowledged.[26]

Frontispiece and title page of an edition of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1754), published in 1755 in Holland.

Contrary to what his many detractors have claimed, Rousseau never suggests that humans in the state of nature act morally; in fact, terms such as "justice" or "wickedness" are inapplicable to prepolitical society as Rousseau understands it. Morality proper, i.e., self-restraint, can only develop through careful education in a civil state. Humans "in a state of Nature" may act with all of the ferocity of an animal. They are good only in a negative sense, insofar as they are selfsufficient and thus not subject to the vices of political society. In fact, Rousseau's natural man is virtually identical to a solitary chimpanzee or other ape, such as the orangutan as described by Buffon; and the "natural" goodness of humanity is thus the goodness of an animal, which is neither good nor bad. Rousseau, a deteriorationist, proposed that, except perhaps for brief moments of balance, at or near its inception, when a relative equality among men prevailed, human civilization has always been artificial, creating inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.[citation needed] In Rousseau's philosophy, society's negative influence on men centers on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self-preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is artificial and encourages man to compare himself to others, thus creating unwarranted fear and allowing men to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others.[citation needed] Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction. It had been invoked by Vauvenargues, among others. In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have

contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty; and he concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy, fear, and suspicion. In contrast to the optimistic view of other Enlightenment figures, for Rousseau, progress has been inimical to the well-being of humanity, that is, unless it can be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty. Only in civil society, can man be ennobledthrough the use of reason: The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.[27] Society corrupts men only insofar as the Social Contract has not de facto succeeded, as we see in contemporary society as described in the Discourse on Inequality (1754). In this essay, which elaborates on the ideas introduced in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau traces man's social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for self-preservation and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. They differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the greatest happiness known to humanity. As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self esteem. Rousseau posits that the original, deeply flawed Social Contract (i.e., that of Hobbes), which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental

feature of human society. Rousseau's own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau would ask "What is to be done?" He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was needed. Like other Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau was critical of the Atlantic slave trade.[28]
Political theory

le Rousseau, Geneva.

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy), featured in Diderot's Encyclopdie. The treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they." Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.

Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles. France could not meet Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free: The notion of the general will is wholly central to Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy. ... It is, however, an unfortunately obscure and controversial notion. Some commentators see it as no more than the dictatorship of the proletariat or the tyranny of the urban poor (such as may perhaps be seen in the French Revolution). Such was not Rousseau's meaning. This is clear from the Discourse on Political Economy, where Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place".[29]
Education and child rearing Main article: Emile: or, On Education

The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated." Rousseau, Emile.

Rousseau's philosophy of education is not concerned with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather with developing the pupil's character and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which he will have to live. The hypothetical boy, mile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of "natural consequences" since, like modern psychologists[who?], Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure that no harm results to mile through his learning experiences.

Rousseau was one of the first to advocate developmentally appropriate education; and his description of the stages of child development mirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages: the first is to the age of about 12, when children are guided by their emotions and impulses. During the second stage, from 12 to about 16, reason starts to develop; and finally the third stage, from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develops into an adult. Rousseau recommends that the young adult learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and thought, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune. (The most illustrious aristocratic youth to have been educated this way may have been Louis XVI, whose parents had him learn the skill of locksmithing.[30]) The sixteen-year-old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex. Although his ideas foreshadowed modern ones in many ways, in one way they do not: Rousseau was a believer in the moral superiority of the patriarchal family on the antique Roman model. Sophie, the young woman mile is destined to marry, as a representative of ideal womanhood, is educated to be governed by her husband while mile, as representative of the ideal man, is educated to be self-governing. This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy; it is essential to his account of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the subordination of women, in order for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should. Rousseau anticipated the modern idea of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the mother at home taking responsibility for the household and for childcare and early education. Feminists, beginning in the late 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792[31] have criticized Rousseau for his confinement of women to the domestic sphereunless women were domesticated and constrained by modesty and shame, he feared[32] "men would be tyrannized by women... For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses... men would finally be their victims...."[33] His contemporaries saw it differently because Rousseau thought that mothers should breastfeed their children.[34] Marmontel wrote that his wife thought, "One must forgive something," she said, "in one who has taught us to be mothers."[35] Rousseau's detractors have blamed him for everything they do not like in what they call modern "child-centered" education. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centered Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau, a development he regards as bad. Good or bad, the theories of educators such as Rousseau's near contemporaries Pestalozzi, Mme de Genlis, and later, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, which have directly influenced modern educational practices do have significant points in common with those of Rousseau.

Religion
Having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva as part of his period of moral reform, Rousseau maintained a profession of that religious philosophy and of John Calvin as a modern lawgiver throughout the remainder of his life.[36] His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism.

At the time, however, Rousseau's strong endorsement of religious toleration, as expounded by the Savoyard vicar in mile, was interpreted as advocating indifferentism, a heresy, and led to the condemnation of the book in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris. His assertion in the Social Contract that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens may have been another reason for Rousseau's condemnation in Geneva. Unlike many of the more radical Enlightenment philosophers, Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion. But he repudiated the doctrine of original sin, which plays so large a part in Calvinism (in mile, Rousseau writes "there is no original perversity in the human heart").[37] In the 18th century, many deists viewed God merely as an abstract and impersonal creator of the universe, which they likened to a giant machine. Rousseau's deism differed from the usual kind in its intense emotionality. He saw the presence of God in his creation, including mankind, which, apart from the harmful influence of society, is good, because God is good. Rousseau's attribution of a spiritual value to the beauty of nature anticipates the attitudes of 19th-century Romanticism towards nature and religion. Rousseau was upset that his deistic views were so forcefully condemned, while those of the more atheistic philosophes were ignored. He defended himself against critics of his religious views in his "Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force."[38]

Legacy
This section may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (September
2011)

A plaque commemorating the bicentenary of Rousseau's birth. Issued by the city of Geneva on 28 June 1912. The legend at the bottom says "Jean-Jacques, aime ton pays" ("love your country"), and shows Rousseau's father gesturing towards the window. The scene is drawn from a footnote to the Letter to

d'Alembert where Rousseau recalls witnessing the popular celebrations following the exercises of the St Gervais regiment.

Rousseau's idea of the volont gnrale ("general will") was not original with him but rather belonged to a well-established technical vocabulary of juridical and theological writings in use at the time. The phrase was used by Diderot and also by Montesquieu (and by his teacher, the Oratorian friar Nicolas Malebranche). It served to designate the common interest embodied in legal tradition, as distinct from and transcending people's private and particular interests at any particular time. The concept was also an important aspect of the more radical 17th-century republican tradition of Spinoza, from whom Rousseau differed in important respects, but not in his insistence on the importance of equality. This emphasis on equality is Rousseau's most important and consequential legacy, causing him to be both reviled and applauded: While Rousseau's notion of the progressive moral degeneration of mankind from the moment civil society established itself diverges markedly from Spinoza's claim that human nature is always and everywhere the same ... for both philosophers the pristine equality of the state of nature is our ultimate goal and criterion ... in shaping the "common good", volont gnrale, or Spinoza's mens una, which alone can ensure stability and political salvation. Without the supreme criterion of equality, the general will would indeed be meaningless. ... When in the depths of the French Revolution the Jacobin clubs all over France regularly deployed Rousseau when demanding radical reforms. and especially anythingsuch as land redistribution designed to enhance equality, they were at the same time, albeit unconsciously, invoking a radical tradition which reached back to the late seventeenth century.[39]
French Revolution

The cult that grew up around Rousseau after his death, and particularly the radicalized versions of Rousseau's ideas that were adopted by Robespierre and Saint-Just during the Reign of Terror, caused him to become identified with the most extreme aspects of the French Revolution.[40] Among other things, the ship of the line Jean-Jacques Rousseau (launched in 1795) was named after the philosopher. The revolutionaries were also inspired by Rousseau to introduce Deism as the new official civil religion of France, scandalizing traditionalists: Ceremonial and symbolic occurrences of the more radical phases of the Revolution invoked Rousseau and his core ideas. Thus the ceremony held at the site of the demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated "Profession de foi d'un vicaire savoyard" in Book Four of mile.[41] Opponents of the Revolution and defenders of religion, most influentially the Irish essayist Edmund Burke, therefore placed the blame for the excesses of the French Revolution directly on the revolutionaries' misplaced (as he considered it) adulation of Rousseau. Burke's "Letter to a

Member of the National Assembly", published in February 1791, was a diatribe against Rousseau, whom he considered the paramount influence on the French Revolution (his ad hominem attack did not really engage with Rousseau's political writings). Burke maintained that the excesses of the Revolution were not accidents but were designed from the beginning and were rooted in Rousseau's personal vanity, arrogance, and other moral failings. He recalled Rousseau's visit to Britain in 1766, saying: "I had good opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day and he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity". Conceding his gift of eloquence, Burke deplored Rousseau's lack of the good taste and finer feelings that would have been imparted by the education of a gentleman: Taste and elegance ... are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste ... infinitely abates the evils of vice. Rousseau, a writer of great force and vivacity, is totally destitute of taste in any sense of the word. Your masters [i.e., the leaders of the Revolution], who are his scholars, conceive that all refinement has an aristocratic character. The last age had exhausted all its powers in giving a grace and nobleness to our mutual appetites, and in raising them into a higher class and order than seemed justly to belong to them. Through Rousseau, your masters are resolved to destroy these aristocratic prejudices.[42]
Effect on the United States of America

The American founders rarely cited Rousseau, but came independently to their Republicanism and enthusiastic admiration for the austere virtues described by Livy and in Plutarch's portrayals of the great men of ancient Sparta and the classical republicanism of early Rome, as did many, if not most other Enlightenment figures.[43] Rousseau's praise of Switzerland and Corsica's economies of isolated and self-sufficient independent homesteads, and his endorsement of a well-regulated citizen militia, such as Switzerland's, recall the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy. To Rousseau we owe the invention of the concept of a "civil religion", one of whose key tenets is religious toleration. Yet despite their mutual insistence on the self-evidence that "all men are created equal", their insistence that the citizens of a republic be educated at public expense, and the evident parallel between the concepts of the "general welfare" and Rousseau's "general will", some scholars maintain there is little to suggest that Rousseau had that much effect on Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers.[44] They argue that the American constitution owes as much or more to the English Liberal philosopher John Locke's emphasis on the rights of property and to Montesquieu's theories of the separation of powers.[45] Rousseau's writings had an indirect influence on American literature through the writings of Wordsworth and Kant, whose works were important to the New England Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as on such Unitarians as theologian William Ellery Channing. American novelist James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and other novels reflect republican and egalitarian ideals present alike in Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and also in English Romantic primitivism.[46] Another American admirer was lexicographer Noah Webster.[47] The Paraguayan dictator Jos Gaspar Rodrguez de Francia sought to found a society based on the principles set forth in Rousseau's Social Contract.[48]

"In truth," wrote Kingsley Martin, "Rousseau was a genius whose real influence cannot be traced with precision because it pervaded all the thought that followed him." He goes on: Men will always be sharply divided about Rousseau: for he released imagination as well as sentimentalism;; he increased men's desire for justice as well as confusing their minds , and he gave the poor hope even though the rich could make use of his arguments. In one direction at least Rousseau's influence was a steady one: he discredited force as a basis for the State, convinced men that authority was legitimate only when founded in rational consent and that no arguments from passing expediency could justify a government in disregarding individual freedom or in failing to promote social equality.[49]
Criticisms of Rousseau

A portrait of Rousseau in later life.

The first to criticize Rousseau were his fellow Philosophes, above all, Voltaire. According to Jacques Barzun: Voltaire, who had felt annoyed by the first essay [On the Arts and Sciences], was outraged by the second, [Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men], declaring that Rousseau wanted us to "walk on all fours" like animals and behave like savages, believing them creatures of perfection. From these interpretations, plausible but inexact, spring the clichs Noble Savage and Back to Nature.[50] Barzun states that, contrary to myth, Rousseau was no primitivist; for him:

The model man is the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. This was cause enough for the philosophes' hatred of their former friend. Rousseau's unforgivable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. Voltaire had sung "The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant's. It was the country versus the cityan exasperating idea for them, as was the amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau's was a huge success, whether the subject was politics, theater, education, religion, or a novel about love.[51] Following the French Revolution, other commentators fingered a potential danger of Rousseau's project of realizing an "antique" conception of virtue amongst the citizenry in a modern world (e.g. through education, physical exercise, a citizen militia, public holidays, and the like). Taken too far, as under the Jacobins, such social engineering could result in tyranny. As early as 1819, in his famous speech "On Ancient and Modern Liberty", the political philosopher Benjamin Constant, a proponent of constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, criticized Rousseau, or rather his more radical followers (specifically the Abb de Mably), for allegedly believing that "everything should give way to collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power." Common also were attacks by defenders of social hierarchy on Rousseau's "romantic" belief in equality. In 1860, shortly after the Sepoy Rebellion in India, two British white supremacists, John Crawfurd and James Hunt, mounted a defense of British imperialism based on "scientific racism".[52] Crawfurd, in alliance with Hunt, took over the presidency of the British Anthropological Society, which had been founded with the mission to defend indigenous peoples against slavery and colonial exploitation. Invoking "science" and "realism", the two men derided their "philanthropic" predecessors for believing in human equality and for not recognizing that mankind was divided into superior and inferior races. Crawfurd, who opposed Darwinian evolution, "denied any unity to mankind, insisting on immutable, hereditary, and timeless differences in racial character, principal amongst which was the 'very great' difference in 'intellectual capacity.'" For Crawfurd, the races had been created separately and were different species. Since Crawfurd was Scottish, he thought the Scottish "race" superior and all others inferior; whilst Hunt, on the other hand, believed in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon "race". Crawfurd and Hunt routinely accused those who disagreed with them of believing in "Rousseau's Noble Savage". (The pair ultimately quarreled because Hunt believed in slavery and Crawfurd did not). "As Ter Ellingson demonstrates, Crawfurd was responsible for re-introducing the PreRousseauian concept of 'the Noble Savage' to modern anthropology, attributing it wrongly and quite deliberately to Rousseau."[53] In 1919 Irving Babbitt, founder of a movement called the "New Humanism", wrote a critique of what he called "sentimental humanitarianism", for which he blamed Rousseau.[54] Babbitt's depiction of Rousseau was countered in a celebrated and much reprinted essay by A. O. Lovejoy in 1923.[55] In France, fascist theorist and anti-Semite Charles Maurras, founder of Action Franaise, "had no compunctions in laying the blame for both Romantisme et Rvolution firmly on Rousseau in 1922."[56]

During the Cold War, Karl Popper criticized Rousseau for his association with nationalism and its attendant abuses[citation needed]. This came to be known among scholars as the "totalitarian thesis". An example is J. L. Talmon's, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952).[57] Political scientist J. S. Maloy states that "the twentieth century added Nazism and Stalinism to Jacobinism on the list of horrors for which Rousseau could be blamed. ... Rousseau was considered to have advocated just the sort of invasive tampering with human nature which the totalitarian regimes of mid-century had tried to instantiate." But Maloy adds that "The totalitarian thesis in Rousseau studies has, by now, been discredited as an attribution of real historical influence."[58] Arthur Melzer, however, while conceding that Rousseau would not have approved of modern nationalism, observes that his theories do contain the "seeds of nationalism", insofar as they set forth the "politics of identification", which are rooted in sympathetic emotion. Melzer also believes that in admitting that people's talents are unequal, Rousseau therefore tacitly condones the tyranny of the few over the many.[59] For Stephen T. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of "imagined communities" that transcend social and religious divisions within states.[60] On similar grounds, one of Rousseau's strongest critics during the second half of the 20th century was political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Using Rousseau's thought as an example, Arendt identified the notion of sovereignty with that of the general will. According to her, it was this desire to establish a single, unified will based on the stifling of opinion in favor of public passion that contributed to the excesses of the French Revolution.[61]

4Locke's Political Philosophy

First published Wed Nov 9, 2005; substantive revision Thu Jul 29, 2010

John Locke (16321704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is) the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over their members. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.

For a more general introduction to Locke's history and background, the argument of the Two Treatises, and the Letter Concerning Toleration, see Section 1, Section 3, and Section 4, respectively, of the main entry on John Locke in this encyclopedia. The present entry focuses on seven central concepts in Locke's political philosophy.

1. The Law of Nature 2. State of Nature 3. Property 4. Consent, Political Obligation, and the Ends of Government 5. Locke and Punishment 6. Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government 7. Toleration Bibliography o Select Primary Sources o Select Secondary Sources Other Internet Resources Related Entries

1. The Law of Nature

Perhaps the most central concept in Locke's political philosophy is his theory of natural law and natural rights. The natural law concept existed long before Locke as a way of expressing the idea that there were certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the particular place where they lived or the agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was between laws that were by nature, and thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and operated only in those places where the particular convention had been established. This distinction is sometimes formulated as the difference between natural law and positive law. Natural law is also distinct from divine law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally referred to those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other inspired writers. Natural law can be discovered by reason alone and applies to all people, while divine law can be discovered only through God's special revelation and applies only to those to whom it is revealed and who God specifically indicates are to be bound. Thus some seventeenth-century commentators, Locke included, held that not all of the 10 commandments, much less the rest of the Old Testament law, were binding on all people. The 10 commandments begin Hear O Israel and thus are only binding on the people to whom they were addressed (Works 6:37). As we will see below, even though Locke thought natural law could be known apart from special revelation, he saw no contradiction in God playing a part in the argument, so long as the relevant aspects of God's character could be discovered by reason alone. In Locke's theory, divine law and natural law are consistent and can overlap in content, but they are not coextensive. Thus there is no problem for Locke if the Bible commands a moral code that is stricter than the one that can be derived from natural law, but there is a real problem if the Bible teaches what is contrary to natural law. In practice, Locke avoided this problem because consistency with natural law was one of the criteria he used when deciding the proper interpretation of Biblical passages.

In the century before Locke, the language of natural rights also gained prominence through the writings of such thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Whereas natural law emphasized duties, natural rights normally emphasized privileges or claims to which an individual was entitled. There is considerable disagreement as to how these factors are to be understood in relation to each other in Locke's theory. Leo Strauss, and many of his followers, take rights to be paramount, going so far as to portray Locke's position as essentially similar to that of Hobbes. They point out that Locke defended a hedonist theory of human motivation (Essay 2.20) and claim that he must agree with Hobbes about the essentially self-interested nature of human beings. Locke, they claim, only recognizes natural law obligations in those situations where our own preservation is not in conflict, further emphasizing that our right to preserve ourselves trumps any duties we may have. On the other end of the spectrum, more scholars have adopted the view of Dunn, Tully, and Ashcraft that it is natural law, not natural rights, that is primary. They hold that when Locke emphasized the right to life, liberty, and property he was primarily making a point about the duties we have toward other people: duties not to kill, enslave, or steal. Most scholars also argue that Locke recognized a general duty to assist with the preservation of mankind, including a duty of charity to those who have no other way to procure their subsistence (Two Treatises 1.42). These scholars regard duties as primary in Locke because rights exist to ensure that we are able to fulfill our duties. Simmons takes a position similar to the latter group, but claims that rights are not just the flip side of duties in Locke, nor merely a means to performing our duties. Instead, rights and duties are equally fundamental because Locke believes in a robust zone of indifference in which rights protect our ability to make choices. While these choices cannot violate natural law, they are not a mere means to fulfilling natural law either. Another point of contestation has to do with the extent to which Locke thought natural law could, in fact, be known by reason. Both Strauss and Peter Laslett, though very different in their interpretations of Locke generally, see Locke's theory of natural law as filled with contradictions. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defends a theory of moral knowledge that negates the possibility of innate ideas (Essay Book 1) and claims that morality is capable of demonstration in the same way that Mathematics is (Essay 3.11.16, 4.3.1820). Yet nowhere in any of his works does Locke make a full deduction of natural law from first premises. More than that, Locke at times seems to appeal to innate ideas in the Second Treatise (2.11), and in The Reasonableness of Christianity (Works 7:139) he admits that no one has ever worked out all of natural law from reason alone. Strauss infers from this that the contradictions exist to show the attentive reader that Locke does not really believe in natural law at all. Laslett, more conservatively, simply says that Locke the philosopher and Locke the political writer should be kept very separate. More recent scholarship has tended to reject this position. Yolton, Colman, Ashcraft, Grant, Simmons, Tuckness and others all argue that there is nothing strictly inconsistent in Locke's admission in The Reasonableness of Christianity. That no one has deduced all of natural law from first principles does not mean that none of it has been deduced. The supposedly contradictory passages in the Two Treatises are far from decisive. While it is true that Locke does not provide a deduction in the Essay, it is not clear that he was trying to. Section 4.10.119 of that work seems more concerned to show how reasoning with moral terms is possible, not to

actually provide a full account of natural law. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Locke did not treat the topic of natural law as systematically as one might like. Attempts to work out his theory in more detail with respect to its ground and its content must try to reconstruct it from scattered passages in many different texts. To understand Locke's position on the ground of natural law it must be situated within a larger debate in natural law theory that predates Locke, the so-called voluntarism-intellectualism, or voluntarist-rationalist debate. At its simplest, the voluntarist declares that right and wrong are determined by God's will and that we are obliged to obey the will of God simply because it is the will of God. Unless these positions are maintained, the voluntarist argues, God becomes superfluous to morality since both the content and the binding force of morality can be explained without reference to God. The intellectualist replies that this understanding makes morality arbitrary and fails to explain why we have an obligation to obey God. With respect to the grounds and content of natural law, Locke is not completely clear. On the one hand, there are many instances where he makes statements that sound voluntarist to the effect that law requires a law giver with authority (Essay 1.3.6, 4.10.7). Locke also repeatedly insists in the Essays on the Law of Nature that created beings have an obligation to obey their creator (ELN 6). On the other hand there are statements that seem to imply an external moral standard to which God must conform (Two Treatises 2.195; Works 7:6). Locke clearly wants to avoid the implication that the content of natural law is arbitrary. Several solutions have been proposed. One solution suggested by Herzog makes Locke an intellectualist by grounding our obligation to obey God on a prior duty of gratitude that exists independent of God. A second option, suggested by Simmons, is simply to take Locke as a voluntarist since that is where the preponderance of his statements point. A third option, suggested by Tuckness (and implied by Grant), is to treat the question of voluntarism as having two different parts, grounds and content. On this view, Locke was indeed a voluntarist with respect to the question why should we obey the law of nature? Locke thought that reason, apart from the will of a superior, could only be advisory. With respect to content, divine reason and human reason must be sufficiently analogous that human beings can reason about what God likely wills. Locke takes it for granted that since God created us with reason in order to follow God's will, human reason and divine reason are sufficiently similar that natural law will not seem arbitrary to us. Those interested in the contemporary relevance of Locke's political theory must confront its theological aspects. Straussians make Locke's theory relevant by claiming that the theological dimensions of his thought are primarily rhetorical; they are cover to keep him from being persecuted by the religious authorities of his day. Others, such as Dunn, take Locke to be of only limited relevance to contemporary politics precisely because so many of his arguments depend on religious assumptions that are no longer widely shared. More recently a number of authors, such as Simmons and Vernon, have tried to separate the foundations of Locke's argument from other aspects of it. Simmons, for example, argues that Locke's thought is over-determined, containing both religious and secular arguments. He claims that for Locke the fundamental law of nature is that as much as possible mankind is to be preserved (Two Treatises 135). At times, he claims, Locke presents this principle in rule-consequentialist terms: it is the principle we use to determine the more specific rights and duties that all have. At other times, Locke hints at a more Kantian justification that emphasizes the impropriety of treating our equals as if they were

mere means to our ends. Waldron, in his most recent work on Locke, explores the opposite claim: that Locke's theology actually provides a more solid basis for his premise of political equality than do contemporary secular approaches that tend to simply assert equality. With respect to the specific content of natural law, Locke never provides a comprehensive statement of what it requires. In the Two Treatises, Locke frequently states that the fundamental law of nature is that as much as possible mankind is to be preserved. Simmons argues that in Two Treatises 2.6 Locke presents 1) a duty to preserve one's self, 2) a duty to preserve others when self-preservation does not conflict, 3) a duty not to take away the life of another, and 4) a duty not to act in a way that tends to destroy others. Libertarian interpreters of Locke tend to downplay duties of type 1 and 2. Locke presents a more extensive list in his earlier, and unpublished in his lifetime, Essays on the Law of Nature. Interestingly, Locke here includes praise and honor of the deity as required by natural law as well as what we might call good character qualities.

2. State of Nature
Locke's concept of the state of nature has been interpreted by commentators in a variety of ways. At first glance it seems quite simple. Locke writes want [lack] of a common judge, with authority, puts all persons in a state of nature and again, Men living according to reason, without a common superior on earth, to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. (Two Treatises 2.19) Many commentators have taken this as Locke's definition, concluding that the state of nature exists wherever there is no legitimate political authority able to judge disputes and where people live according to the law of reason. On this account the state of nature is distinct from political society, where a legitimate government exists, and from a state of war where men fail to abide by the law of reason. Simmons presents an important challenge to this view. Simmons points out that the above statement is worded as a sufficient rather than necessary condition. Two individuals might be able, in the state of nature, to authorize a third to settle disputes between them without leaving the state of nature, since the third party would not have, for example, the power to legislate for the public good. Simmons also claims that other interpretations often fail to account for the fact that there are some people who live in states with legitimate governments who are nonetheless in the state of nature: visiting aliens (2.9), children below the age of majority (2.15, 118), and those with a defect of reason (2.60). He claims that the state of nature is a relational concept describing a particular set of moral relations that exist between particular people, rather than a description of a particular geographical territory. The state of nature is just the way of describing the moral rights and responsibilities that exist between people who have not consented to the adjudication of their disputes by the same legitimate government. The groups just mentioned either have not or cannot give consent, so they remain in the state of nature. Thus A may be in the state of nature with respect to B, but not with C. Simmons' account stands in sharp contrast to that of Strauss. According to Strauss, Locke presents the state of nature as a factual description of what the earliest society is like, an account that when read closely reveals Locke's departure from Christian teachings. State of nature theories, he and his followers argue, are contrary to the Biblical account in Genesis and evidence

that Locke's teaching is similar to that of Hobbes. As noted above, on the Straussian account Locke's apparently Christian statements are only a faade designed to conceal his essentially anti-Christian views. According to Simmons, since the state of nature is a moral account, it is compatible with a wide variety of social accounts without contradiction. If we know only that a group of people are in a state of nature, we know only the rights and responsibilities they have toward one another; we know nothing about whether they are rich or poor, peaceful or warlike. A complementary interpretation is made by John Dunn with respect to the relationship between Locke's state of nature and his Christian beliefs. Dunn claimed that Locke's state of nature is less an exercise in historical anthropology than a theological reflection on the condition of man. On Dunn's interpretation, Locke's state of nature thinking is an expression of his theological position, that man exists in a world created by God for God's purposes but that governments are created by men in order to further those purposes. Locke's theory of the state of nature will thus be tied closely to his theory of natural law, since the latter defines the rights of persons and their status as free and equal persons. The stronger the grounds for accepting Locke's characterization of people as free, equal, and independent, the more helpful the state of nature becomes as a device for representing people. Still, it is important to remember that none of these interpretations claims that Locke's state of nature is only a thought experiment, in the way Kant and Rawls are normally thought to use the concept. Locke did not respond to the argument where have there ever been people in such a state by saying it did not matter since it was only a thought experiment. Instead, he argued that there are and have been people in the state of nature. (Two Treatises 2.14) It seems important to him that at least some governments have actually been formed in the way he suggests. How much it matters whether they have been or not will be discussed below under the topic of consent, since the central question is whether a good government can be legitimate even if it does not have the actual consent of the people who live under it; hypothetical contract and actual contract theories will tend to answer this question differently.

3. Property
Locke's treatment of property is generally thought to be among his most important contributions in political thought, but it is also one of the aspects of his thought that has been most heavily criticized. There are important debates over what exactly Locke was trying to accomplish with his theory. One interpretation, advanced by C.B. Macpherson, sees Locke as a defender of unrestricted capitalist accumulation. On Macpherson's interpretation, Locke is thought to have set three restrictions on the accumulation of property in the state of nature: 1) one may only appropriate as much as one can use before it spoils (Two Treatises 2.31), 2) one must leave enough and as good for others (the sufficiency restriction) (2.27), and 3) one may (supposedl y) only appropriate property through one's own labor (2.27). Macpherson claims that as the argument progresses, each of these restrictions is transcended. The spoilage restriction ceases to be a meaningful restriction with the invention of money because value can be stored in a medium that does not decay (2.4647). The sufficiency restriction is transcended because the creation of private property so increases productivity that even those who no longer have the opportunity to acquire land will have more opportunity to acquire what is necessary for life (2.37). According to Macpherson's view, the enough and as good requirement is itself merely a derivative of a prior

principle guaranteeing the opportunity to acquire, through labor, the necessities of life. The third restriction, Macpherson argues, was not one Locke actually held at all. Though Locke appears to suggest that one can only have property in what one has personally labored on when he makes labor the source of property rights, Locke clearly recognized that even in the state of nature, the Turfs my Servant has cut (2.28) can become my property. Locke, according to Macpherson, thus clearly recognized that labor can be alienated. As one would guess, Macpherson is critical of the possessive individualism that Locke's theory of property represents. He argues that its coherence depends upon the assumption of differential rationality between capitalists and wagelaborers and on the division of society into distinct classes. Because Locke was bound by these constraints, we are to understand him as including only property owners as voting members of society. Macpherson's understanding of Locke has been criticized from several different directions. Alan Ryan argued that since property for Locke includes life and liberty as well as estate (Two Treatises 2.87), even those without land could still be members of political society. The dispute between the two would then turn on whether Locke was using property in the more expansive sense in some of the crucial passages. James Tully attacked Macpherson's interpretation by pointing out that the First Treatise specifically includes a duty of charity toward those who have no other means of subsistence (1.42). While this duty is consistent with requiring the poor to work for low wages, it does undermine the claim that those who have wealth have no social duties to others. Tully also argued for a fundamental reinterpretation of Locke's theory. Previous accounts had focused on the claim that since persons own their own labor, when they mix their labor with that which is unowned it becomes their property. Robert Nozick criticized this argument with his famous example of mixing tomato juice one rightfully owns with the sea. When we mix what we own with what we do not, why should we think we gain property instead of losing it? On Tully's account, focus on the mixing metaphor misses Locke's emphasis on what he calls the workmanship model. Locke believed that makers have property rights with respect to what they make just as God has property rights with respect to human beings because he is their maker. Human beings are created in the image of God and share with God, though to a much lesser extent, the ability to shape and mold the physical environment in accordance with a rational pattern or plan. Waldron has criticized this interpretation on the grounds that it would make the rights of human makers absolute in the same way that God's right over his creation is absolute. Sreenivasan has defended Tully's argument against Waldron's response by claiming a distinction between creating and making. Only creating generates an absolute property right, and only God can create, but making is analogous to creating and creates an analogous, though weaker, right. Another controversial aspect of Tully's interpretation of Locke is his interpretation of the sufficiency condition and its implications. On his analysis, the sufficiency argument is crucial for Locke's argument to be plausible. Since Locke begins with the assumption that the world is owned by all, individual property is only justified if it can be shown that no one is made worse off by the appropriation. In conditions where the good taken is not scarce, where there is much water or land available, an individual's taking some portion of it does no harm to others. Where this condition is not met, those who are denied access to the good do have a legitimate objection

to appropriation. According to Tully, Locke realized that as soon as land became scarce, previous rights acquired by labor no longer held since enough and as good was no longer available for others. Once land became scarce, property could only be legitimated by the creation of political society. Waldron claims that, contrary to Macpherson, Tully, and others, Locke did not recognize a sufficiency condition at all. He notes that, strictly speaking, Locke makes sufficiency a sufficient rather than necessary condition when he says that labor generates a title to property at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others (Two Treatises 2.27). Waldron takes Locke to be making a descriptive statement, not a normative one, about the condition that happens to have initially existed. Waldron also argues that in the text enough and as good is not presented as a restriction and is not grouped with other restrictions. Waldron thinks that the condition would lead Locke to the absurd conclusion that in circumstances of scarcity everyone must starve to death since no one would be able to obtain universal consent and any appropriation would make others worse off. One of the strongest defenses of Tully's position is presented by Sreenivasan. He argues that Locke's repetitious use of enough and as good indicates that the phrase is doing some real work in the argument. In particular, it is the only way Locke can be thought to have provided some solution to the fact that the consent of all is needed to justify appropriation in the state of nature. If others are not harmed, they have no grounds to object and can be thought to consent, whereas if they are harmed, it is implausible to think of them as consenting. Sreenivasan does depart from Tully in some important respects. He takes enough and as good to mean enough and as good opportunity for securing one's preservation, not enough and as good of the same commodity (such as land). This has the advantage of making Locke's account of property less radical since it does not claim that Locke thought the point of his theory was to show that all original property rights were invalid at the point where political communities were created. The disadvantage of this interpretation, as Sreenivasan admits, is that it saddles Locke with a flawed argument. Those who merely have the opportunity to labor for others at subsistence wages no longer have the liberty that individuals had before scarcity to benefit from the full surplus of value they create. Moreover poor laborers no longer enjoy equality of access to the materials from which products can be made. Sreenivasan thinks that Locke's theory is thus unable to solve the problem of how individuals can obtain individual property rights in what is initially owned by all people without consent. Simmons presents a still different synthesis. He sides with Waldron and against Tully and Sreenivasan in rejecting the workmanship model. He claims that the references to making in chapter five of the Two Treatises are not making in the right sense of the word for the workmanship model to be correct. Locke thinks we have property in our own persons even though we do not make or create ourselves. Simmons claims that while Locke did believe that God had rights as creator, human beings have a different limited right as trustees, not as makers. Simmons bases this in part on his reading of two distinct arguments he takes Locke to make: the first justifies property based on God's will and basic human needs, the second based on mixing labor. According to the former argument, at least some property rights can be justified by showing that a scheme allowing appropriation of property without consent has beneficial consequences for the preservation of mankind. This argument is overdetermined, according to

Simmons, in that it can be interpreted either theologically or as a simple rule-consequentialist argument. With respect to the latter argument, Simmons takes labor not to be a substance that is literally mixed but rather as a purposive activity aimed at satisfying needs and conveniences of life. Like Sreenivasan, Simmons sees this as flowing from a prior right of people to secure their subsistence, but Simmons also adds a prior right to self-government. Labor can generate claims to private property because private property makes individuals more independent and able to direct their own actions. Simmons thinks Locke's argument is ultimately flawed because he underestimated the extent to which wage labor would make the poor dependent on the rich, undermining self-government. He also joins the chorus of those who find Locke's appeal to consent to the introduction of money inadequate to justify the very unequal property holdings that now exist. A final question concerns the status of those property rights acquired in the state of nature after civil society has come into being. It seems clear that at the very least Locke allows taxation to take place by the consent of the majority rather than requiring unanimous consent (2.140). Nozick takes Locke to be a libertarian, with the government having no right to take property to use for the common good without the consent of the property owner. On his interpretation, the majority may only tax at the rate needed to allow the government to successfully protect property rights. At the other extreme, Tully thinks that, by the time government is formed, land is already scarce and so the initial holdings of the state of nature are no longer valid and thus are no constraint on governmental action. Waldron's view is in between these, acknowledging that property rights are among the rights from the state of nature that continue to constrain the government, but seeing the legislature as having the power to interpret what natural law requires in this matter in a fairly substantial way.

4. Consent, Political Obligation, and the Ends of Government

The most direct reading of Locke's political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies. While there are of course some general obligations and rights that all people have from the law of nature, special obligations come about only when we voluntarily undertake them. Locke clearly states that one can only become a full member of society by an act of express consent (Two Treatises 2.122). The literature on Locke's theory of consent tends to focus on how Locke does or does not successfully answer the following objection: few people have actually consented to their governments so no, or almost no, governments are actually legitimate. This conclusion is problematic since it is clearly contrary to Locke's intention. Locke's most obvious solution to this problem is his doctrine of tacit consent. Simply by walking along the highways of a country a person gives tacit consent to the government and agrees to obey it while living in its territory. This, Locke thinks, explains why resident aliens have an obligation to obey the laws of the state where they reside, though only while they live there. Inheriting property creates an even stronger bond, since the original owner of the property permanently put the property under the jurisdiction of the commonwealth. Children, when they

accept the property of their parents, consent to the jurisdiction of the commonwealth over that property (Two Treatises 2.120). There is debate over whether the inheritance of property should be regarded as tacit or express consent. On one interpretation, by accepting the property, Locke thinks a person becomes a full member of society, which implies that he must regard this as an act of express consent. Grant suggests that Locke's ideal would have been an explicit mechanism of society whereupon adults would give express consent and this would be a precondition of inheriting property. On the other interpretation, Locke recognized that people inheriting property did not in the process of doing so make any explicit declaration about their political obligation. However this debate is resolved, there will be in any current or previously existing society many people who have never given express consent, and thus some version of tacit consent seems needed to explain how governments could still be legitimate. Simmons finds it difficult to see how merely walking on a street or inheriting land can be thought of as an example of a deliberate, voluntary alienating of rights (69). It is one thing, he argues, for a person to consent by actions rather than words; it is quite another to claim a person has consented without being aware that they have done so. To require a person to leave behind all of their property and emigrate in order to avoid giving tacit consent is to create a situation where continued residence is not a free and voluntary choice. Simmons' approach is to agree with Locke that real consent is necessary for political obligation but disagree about whether most people in fact have given that kind of consent. Simmons claims that Locke's arguments push toward philosophical anarchism, the position that most people do not have a moral obligation to obey the government, even though Locke himself would not have made this claim. Hannah Pitkin takes a very different approach. She claims that the logic of Locke's argument makes consent far less important in practice than it might appear. Tacit consent is indeed a watering down of the concept of consent, but Locke can do this because the basic content of what governments are to be like is set by natural law and not by consent. If consent were truly foundational in Locke's scheme, we would discover the legitimate powers of any given government by finding out what contract the original founders signed. Pitkin, however, thinks that for Locke the form and powers of government are determined by natural law. What really matters, therefore, is not previous acts of consent but the quality of the present government, whether it corresponds to what natural law requires. Locke does not think, for example, that walking the streets or inheriting property in a tyrannical regime means we have consented to that regime. It is thus the quality of the government, not acts of actual consent, that determine whether a government is legitimate. Simmons objects to this interpretation, saying that it fails to account for the many places where Locke does indeed say a person acquires political obligations only by his own consent. John Dunn takes a still different approach. He claims that it is anachronistic to read into Locke a modern conception of what counts as consent. While modern theories do insist that consent is truly consent only if it is deliberate and voluntary, Locke's concept of consent was far more broad. For Locke, it was enough that people be not unwilling. Voluntary acquiescence, on Dunn's interpretation, is all that is needed. As evidence Dunn can point to the fact that many of the instances of consent Locke uses, such as consenting to the use of money, make more sense on this broad interpretation. Simmons objects that this ignores the instances where Locke does

talk about consent as a deliberate choice and that, in any case, it would only make Locke consistent at the price of making him unconvincing. A related question has to do with the extent of our obligation once consent has been given. The interpretive school influenced by Strauss emphasizes the primacy of preservation. Since the duties of natural law apply only when our preservation is not threatened (2.6), then our obligations cease in cases where our preservation is directly threatened. This has important implications if we consider a soldier who is being sent on a mission where death is extremely likely. Grant points out that Locke believes a soldier who deserts from such a mission (Two Treatises 2.139) is justly sentenced to death. Grant takes Locke to be claiming not only that desertion laws are legitimate in the sense that they can be blamelessly enforced (something Hobbes would grant) but that they also imply a moral obligation on the part of the soldier to give up his life for the common good (something Hobbes would deny). According to Grant, Locke thinks that our acts of consent can in fact extend to cases where living up to our commitments will risk our lives. The decision to enter political society is a permanent one for precisely this reason: the society will have to be defended and if people can revoke their consent to help protect it when attacked, the act of consent made when entering political society would be pointless since the political community would fail at the very point where it is most needed. People make a calculated decision when they enter society, and the risk of dying in combat is part of that calculation. Grant also thinks Locke recognizes a duty based on reciprocity since others risk their lives as well. Most of these approaches focus on Locke's doctrine of consent as a solution to the problem of political obligation. A different approach asks what role consent plays in determining, here and now, the legitimate ends that governments can pursue. One part of this debate is captured by the debate between Seliger and Kendall, the former viewing Locke as a constitutionalist and the latter viewing him as giving almost untrammeled power to majorities. On the former interpretation, a constitution is created by the consent of the people as part of the creation of the commonwealth. On the latter interpretation, the people create a legislature which rules by majority vote. A third view, advanced by Tuckness, holds that Locke was flexible at this point and gave people considerable flexibility in constitutional drafting. A second part of the debate focuses on ends rather than institutions. Locke states in the Two Treatises that the power of the Government is limited to the public good. It is a power that hath no other end but preservation and therefore cannot justify killing, enslaving, or plundering the citizens. (2.135). Libertarians like Nozick read this as stating that governments exist only to protect people from infringements on their rights. An alternate interpretation, advanced in different ways by Tuckness, draws attention to the fact that in the following sentences the formulation of natural law that Locke focuses on is a positive one, that as much as possible mankind is to be preserved. On this second reading, government is limited to fulfilling the purposes of natural law, but these include positive goals as well as negative rights. On this view, the power to promote the common good extends to actions designed to increase population, improve the military, strengthen the economy and infrastructure, and so on, provided these steps are indirectly useful to the goal of preserving the society. This would explain why Locke, in the Letter, describes government promotion of arms, riches, and multitude of citizens as the proper remedy for the danger of foreign attack (Works 6: 42)

5. Locke and Punishment

John Locke defined political power as a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties (Two Treatises 2.3). Lockes theory of punishment is thus central to his view of politics and part of what he considered innovative about his political philosophy. But he also referred to his account of punishment as a very strange doctrine (2.9), presumably because it ran against the assumption that only political sovereigns could punish. Locke believed that punishment requires that there be a law, and since the state of nature has the law of nature to govern it, it is permissible to describe one individual as punishing another in that state. Lockes rationale is that since the fundamental law of nature is that mankind be preserved and since that law would be in vain with no human power to enforce it, it must therefore be legitimate for individuals to punish each other even before government exists. In arguing this, Locke was disagreeing with Samuel Pufendorf. Samuel Pufendorf had argued strongly that the concept of punishment made no sense apart from an established positive legal structure. Locke realized that the crucial objection to allowing people to act as judges with power to punish in the state of nature was that such people would end up being judges in their own cases. Locke readily admitted that this was a serious inconvenience and a primary reason for leaving the state of nature (Two Treatises 2.13). Locke insisted on this point because it helped explain the transition into civil society. Locke thought that in the state of nature men had a liberty to engage in innocent delights (actions that are not a violation of any applicable laws), to seek their own preservation within the limits of natural law, and to punish violations of natural law. The power to seek ones preservation is limited in civil society by the law and the power to punish is transferred to the government. (128130). The power to punish in the state of nature is thus the foundation for the right of governments to use coercive force. The situation becomes more complex, however, if we look at the principles which are to guide punishment. Rationales for punishment are often divided into those that are forward-looking and backward-looking. Forward-looking rationales include deterring crime, protecting society from dangerous persons, and rehabilitation of criminals. Backward-looking rationales normally focus on retribution, inflicting on the criminal harm comparable to the crime. Locke may seem to conflate these two rationales in passages like the following: And thus in the State of Nature, one Man comes by a Power over another; but yet no Absolute or Arbitrary Power, to use a Criminal when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own Will, but only to retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictates, what is proportionate to his Transgression, which is so much as may serve for Reparation and Restraint. For these two are the only reasons, why one Man may lawfully do harm to another, which is that [which] we call punishment. (Two Treatises 2.8) Locke talks both of retribution and of punishing only for reparation and restraint. Some have argued that this is evidence that Locke is combining both rationales for punishment in his theory (Simmons 1992). A survey of other seventeenth-century natural rights justifications for punishment, however, indicates that it was common to use words like retribute in theories that reject what we would today call retributive punishment. In the passage quoted above, Locke is saying that the proper amount of punishment is the amount that will provide restitution to injured

parties, protect the public, and deter future crime. Lockes attitude toward punishment in his other writings on toleration, education, and religion consistently follows this path toward justifying punishment on grounds other than retribution. His emphasis on restitution is interesting because restitution is backward looking in a sense (it seeks to restore an earlier state of affairs) but also forward looking in that it provides tangible benefits to those who receive the restitution (Tuckness 2010). There is a link here between Lockes understanding of natural punishment and his understanding of legitimate state punishment. Even in the state of nature, a primary justification for punishment is that it helps further the positive goal of preserving human life and human property. The emphasis on deterrence, public safety, and restitution in punishments administered by the government mirrors this emphasis. A second puzzle regarding punishment is the permissibility of punishing internationally. Locke describes international relations as a state of nature, and so in principle, states should have the same power to punish breaches of the natural law in the international community that individuals have in the state of nature. This would legitimize, for example, punishment of individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity even in cases where neither the laws of the particular state nor international law authorize punishment. Thus in World War II, even if crimes of aggression was not at the time recognized as a crime for which individual punishment was justified, if the actions violated that natural law principle that one should not deprive another of life, liberty, or property, the guilty parties could still be liable to criminal punishment. The most common interpretation has thus been that the power to punish internationally is symmetrical with the power to punish in the state of nature. Recent scholarship, however, has argued that there is an asymmetry between the two cases because Locke also talks about states being limited in the goals that they can pursue. Locke often says that the power of the government is to be used for the protection of the rights of its own citizens, not for the rights of all people everywhere (Two Treatises 1.92, 2.88, 2.95, 2.131, 2.147). Locke argues that in the state of nature a person is to use the power to punish to preserve his society, mankind as a whole. After states are formed, however, the power to punish is to be used for the benefit of his own particular society (Tuckness 2008). In the state of nature, a person is not required to risk his life for another (Two Treatises 2.6) and this presumably would also mean a person is not required to punish in the state of nature when attempting to punish would risk the life of the punisher. Locke may therefore be objecting to the idea that soldiers can be compelled to risk their lives for altruistic reasons. In the state of nature, a person could refuse to attempt to punish others if doing so would risk his life and so Locke reasons that individuals may not have consented to allow the state to risk their lives for altruistic punishment of international crimes.

6. Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government

Locke claims that legitimate government is based on the idea of separation of powers. First and foremost of these is the legislative power. Locke describes the legislative power as supreme (Two Treatises 2.149) in having ultimate authority over how the force for the commonwealth shall be employed (2.143). The legislature is still bound by the law of nature and much of what it does is set down laws that further the goals of natural law and specify appropriate punishments for them (2.135). The executive power is then charged with enforcing the law as it is applied in

specific cases. Interestingly, Lockes third power is called the federative power and it consists of the right to act internationally according to the law of nature. Since countries are still in the state of nature with respect to each other, they must follow the dictates of natural law and can punish one another for violations of that law in order to protect the rights of their citizens. The fact that Locke does not mention the judicial power as a separate power becomes clearer if we distinguish powers from institutions. Powers relate to functions. To have a power means that there is a function (such as making the laws or enforcing the laws) that one may legitimately perform. When Locke says that the legislative is supreme over the executive, he is not saying that parliament is supreme over the king. Locke is simply affirming that what can give laws to another, must needs be superior to him (Two Treatises 2.150). Moreover, Locke thinks that it is possible for multiple institutions to share the same power; for example, the legislative power in his day was shared by the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the King. Since all three needed to agree for something to become law, all three are part of the legislative power ( 1.151). He also thinks that the federative power and the executive power are normally placed in the hands of the executive, so it is possible for the same person to exercise more than one power (or function). There is, therefore, no one to one correspondence between powers and institutions (Tuckness 2002a). Locke is not opposed to having distinct institutions called courts, but he does not see interpretation as a distinct function or power. For Locke, legislation is primarily about announcing a general rule stipulating what types of actions should receive what types of punishments. The executive power is the power to make the judgments necessary to apply those rules to specific cases and administer force as directed by the rule (Two Treatises 2.8889). Both of these actions involve interpretation. Locke states that positive laws are only so far right, as they are founded on the Law of Nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted (2.12). In other words, the executive must interpret the laws in light of its understanding of natural law. Similarly, legislation involves making the laws of nature more specific and determining how to apply them to particular circumstances ( 2.135) which also calls for interpreting natural law. Locke did not think of interpreting law as a distinct function because he thought it was a part of both the legislative and executive functions (Tuckness 2002a). If we compare Lockes formulation of separation of powers to the later ideas of Montesquieu, we see that they are not so different as they may initially appear. Although Montesquieu gives the more well known division of legislative, executive, and judicial, as he explains what he means by these terms he reaffirms the superiority of the legislative power and describes the executive power as having to do with international affairs (Lockes federative power) and the judicial power as concerned with the domestic execution of the laws (Lockes executive power). It is more the terminology than the concepts that have changed. Locke considered arresting a person, trying a person, and punishing a person as all part of the function of executing the law rather than as a distinct function. Locke believed that it was important that the legislative power contain an assembly of elected representatives, but as we have seen the legislative power could contain monarchical and aristocratic elements as well. Locke believed the people had the freedom to created mixed constitutions that utilize all of these. For that reason, Lockes theory of separation of powers

does not dictate one particular type of constitution and does not preclude unelected officials from having part of the legislative power. Locke was more concerned that the people have representatives with sufficient power to block attacks on their liberty and attempts to tax them without justification. This is important because Locke also affirms that the community remains the real supreme power throughout. The people retain the right to remove or alter the legislative power (Two Treatises 2.149). This can happen for a variety of reasons. The entire society can be dissolved by a successful foreign invasion (2.211), but Locke is more interested in describing the occasions when the people take power back from the government to which they have entrusted it. If the rule of law is ignored, if the representatives of the people are prevented from assembling, if the mechanisms of election are altered without popular consent, or if the people are handed over to a foreign power, then they can take back their original authority and overthrow the government (2.21217). They can also rebel if the government attempts to take away their rights (2.222). Locke thinks this is justifiable since oppressed people will likely rebel anyway and those who are not oppressed will be unlikely to rebel. Moreover, the threat of possible rebellion makes tyranny less likely to start with (2.2246). For all these reasons, while there are a variety of legitimate constitutional forms, the delegation of power under any constitution is understood to be conditional. Lockes understanding of separation of powers is complicated by the doctrine of prerogative. Prerogative is the right of the executive to act without explicit authorization for a law, or even contrary to the law, in order to better fulfill the laws that seek the preservation of human life. A king might, for example, order that a house be torn down in order to stop a fire from spreading throughout a city (Two Treatises 1.159). Locke defines it more broadly as the power of doing public good without a rule (1.167). This poses a challenge to Lockes doctrine of legislative supremacy. Locke handles this by explaining that the rationale for this power is that general rules cannot cover all possible cases and that inflexible adherence to the rules would be detrimental to the public good and that the legislature is not always in session to render a judgment (2.160). The relationship between the executive and the legislature depends on the specific constitution. If the chief executive has no part in the supreme legislative power, then the legislature could overrule the executives decisions based on prerogative when it reconvenes. If, however, the chief executive has a veto, the result would be a stalemate between them. Locke describes a similar stalemate in the case where the chief executive has the power to call parliament and can thus prevent it from meeting by refusing to call it into session. In such a case, Locke says, there is no judge on earth between them as to whether the executive has misused prerogative and both sides have the right to appeal to heaven in the same way that the people can appeal to heaven against a tyrannical government (2.168). The concept of an appeal to heaven is an important concept in Lockes thought. Locke assumes that people, when they leave the state of nature, create a government with some sort of constitution that specifies which entities are entitled to exercise which powers. Locke also assumes that these powers will be used to protect the rights of the people and to promote the public good. In cases where there is a dispute between the people and the government about whether the government is fulfilling its obligations, there is no higher human authority to which one can appeal. The only appeal left, for Locke, is the appeal to God. The appeal to heaven, therefore, involves taking up arms against your opponent and letting God judge who is in the right.

7. Toleration
In Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, he develops several lines of arguments that are intended to establish the proper spheres for religion and politics. His central claims are that government should not use force to try to bring people to the true religion and that religious societies are voluntary organizations that have no right to use coercive power over their own members or those outside their group. One recurring line of argument that Locke uses is explicitly religious. Locke argues that neither the example of Jesus nor the teaching of the New Testament gives any indication that force is a proper way to bring people to salvation. He also frequently points out what he takes to be clear evidence of hypocrisy, namely that those who are so quick to persecute others for small differences in worship or doctrine are relatively unconcerned with much more obvious moral sins that pose an even greater threat to their eternal state. In addition to these and similar religious arguments, Locke gives three reasons that are more philosophical in nature for barring governments from using force to encourage people to adopt religious beliefs (Works 6:1012). First, he argues that the care of men's souls has not been committed to the magistrate by either God or the consent of men. This argument resonates with the structure of argument used so often in the Two Treatises to establish the natural freedom and equality of mankind. There is no command in the Bible telling magistrates to bring people to the true faith and people could not consent to such a goal for government because it is not possible for people, at will, to believe what the magistrate tells them to believe. Their beliefs are a function of what they think is true, not what they will. Locke's second argument is that since the power of the government is only force, while true religion consists of genuine inward persuasion of the mind, force is incapable of bringing people to the true religion. Locke's third argument is that even if the magistrate could change people's minds, a situation where everyone accepted the magistrate's religion would not bring more people to the true religion. Many of the magistrates of the world believe religions that are false. Locke's contemporary, Jonas Proast, responded by saying that Locke's three arguments really amount to just two, that true faith cannot be forced and that we have no more reason to think that we are right than anyone else has. Proast argued that force can be helpful in bringing people to the truth indirectly, and at a distance. His idea was that although force cannot directly bring about a change of mind or heart, it can cause people to consider arguments that they would otherwise ignore or prevent them from hearing or reading things that would lead them astray. If force is indirectly useful in bringing people to the true faith, then Locke has not provided a persuasive argument. As for Locke's argument about the harm of a magistrate whose religion is false using force to promote it, Proast claimed that this was irrelevant since there is a morally relevant difference between affirming that the magistrate may promote the religion he thinks true and affirming that he may promote the religion that actually is true. Proast thought that unless one was a complete skeptic, one must believe that the reasons for one's own position are objectively better than those for other positions. Jeremy Waldron (1993), in an influential article, restated the substance of Proast's objection for a contemporary audience. He argued that, leaving aside Locke's Christian arguments, his main position was that it was instrumentally irrational, from the perspective of the persecutor, to use

force in matters of religion because force acts only on the will and belief is not something that we change at will. Waldron pointed out that this argument blocks only one particular reason for persecution, not all reasons. Thus it would not stop someone who used religious persecution for some end other than religious conversion, such as preserving the peace. Even in cases where persecution does have a religious goal, Waldron agrees with Proast that force may be indirectly effective in changing people's beliefs. Much of the current discussion about Locke's contribution to contemporary political philosophy in the area of toleration centers on whether Locke has a good reply to these objections from Proast and Waldron. Some contemporary commentators try to rescue Locke's argument by redefining the religious goal that the magistrate is presumed to seek. Susan Mendus, for example, notes that successful brainwashing might cause a person to sincerely utter a set of beliefs, but that those beliefs might still not count as genuine. Beliefs induced by coercion might be similarly problematic. Paul Bou Habib argues that what Locke is really after is sincere inquiry and that Locke thinks inquiry undertaken only because of duress is necessarily insincere. These approaches thus try to save Locke's argument by showing that force really is incapable of bringing about the desired religious goal. Other commentators focus on Locke's first argument about proper authority, and particularly on the idea that authorization must be by consent. David Wootton argues that even if force occasionally works at changing a person's belief, it does not work often enough to make it rational for persons to consent to the government exercising that power. A person who has good reason to think he will not change his beliefs even when persecuted has good reason to prevent the persecution scenario from ever happening. Richard Vernon argues that we want not only to hold right beliefs, but also to hold them for the right reasons. Since the balance of reasons rather than the balance of force should determine our beliefs, we would not consent to a system in which irrelevant reasons for belief might influence us. Other commentators focus on the third argument, that the magistrate might be wrong. Here the question is whether Locke's argument is question begging or not. The two most promising lines of argument are the following. Wootton argues that there are very good reasons, from the standpoint of a given individual, for thinking that governments will be wrong about which religion is true. Governments are motivated by the quest for power, not truth, and are unlikely to be good guides in religious matters. Since there are so many different religions held by rulers, if only one is true then likely my own ruler's views are not true. Wootton thus takes Locke to be showing that it is irrational, from the perspective of the individual, to consent to government promotion of religion. A different interpretation of the third argument is presented by Tuckness. He argues that the likelihood that the magistrate may be wrong generates a principle of toleration based on what is rational from the perspective of a legislator, not the perspective of an individual citizen. Drawing on Locke's later writings on toleration, he argues that Locke's theory of natural law assumes that God, as author of natural law, takes into account the fallibility of those magistrates who will carry out the commands of natural law. If use force to promote the true religion were a command of natural law addressed to all magistrates, it would not promote the true religion in practice because so many magistrates wrongly believe that their religion is the true one. Tuckness claims that in Locke's later writings on toleration he moved away from arguments based on what it is instrumentally rational for an individual to consent to. Instead, he

emphasized testing proposed principles based on whether they would still fulfill their goal if universally applied by fallible human beings.
5

Introduction
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason. His famous 1651 book "Leviathan" and his social contract theory, developed during the tumultuous times around the English Civil War, established the foundation for most of Western Political Philosophy. His vision of the world was strikingly original at the time, and is still relevant to contemporary politics. He did not shrink from addressing sensitive issues head on, and while few have liked his thesis, many have seen the political realism it represents. Like Machiavelli before him, Hobbes looked on politics as a secular discipline, divorced from theology, and he has always attracted his share of powerful (and often vitriolic) detractors. Other have taken issue with his apparent assumption of mankind as not inherently benevolent, but rather self-centred and competitive.

Life
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England on 5 April 1588. His father, also Thomas, was the vicar of Charlton and Westport, but he abandoned his three children to the care of his older brother, Francis Hobbes, and fleed to London after an altercation outside his own church. Nothing is known of his mother. Luckily, Francis was wealthy enough to provide for Thomas' education, and he was educated at Westport Church from the age of four, before passing to Malmesbury School and then to a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, a graduate of Oxford University. Hobbes was a good pupil and, around 1603, he moved to Magdalen College, Oxford to continue his education. He was little attracted by the Scholastic learning of the day, and largely pursued his own curriculum, graduating in 1608. Sir James Hussey, his master at Magdalen, recommended him as tutor to William, the son of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick (and later Earl of Devonshire), and began a life-long connection with that family. In 1610, as companion to the younger William, he undertook a grand tour of Europe, where he was exposed to European scientific and critical methods (in contrast to the Scholastic philosophy which he had learned in Oxford). Although he associated with literary and philosophical figures such as Ben Jonson (1572 - 1637) and Sir Francis Bacon (and shared Bacon's Atomist beliefs for a time), he did not extend his efforts into philosophy until after 1629. His only output before that time was the first English translation of the "History of the Peloponnesian War" by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, which was published in 1628. After his employer, the Earl of Devonshire, died of the plague in June 1628, the widowed countess dismissed Hobbes, but he soon found work as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clifton. This time, chiefly spent in Paris, ended in 1631, when he again found work with the Cavendish family, tutoring the son of his previous pupil. Over the next seven years, as well as tutoring, he expanded his own knowledge of philosophy, including a visit to Florence in 1636 and attendance at regular philosophical debates in Paris.

During these years, he first developed a theory of physical motion and momentum (although disdaining any experimental work in physics), and then extended this to the more human phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions, and from there he began to consider the sociological and political aspects of human interaction. The first two parts of his three-part treatise, "Human Nature" and "De Corpore Publico", were written in 1640, but, before publishing them, and in the light of the uncertain political climate in the run up to the English Civil War of 1642 - 1651, he cautiously decided to move to Paris, where he remained for the next 11 years. There, he continued to work on his treatise, critiqued and corresponded with Ren Descartes among others, and developed a good reputation in philosophic circles. When the Royalist cause in the English Civil War began to decline in the middle of 1644, there was an exodus of the king's supporters to Europe, and especially to Paris. Hobbes's political interests were revitalised, and the third (and most political) part of his three-part treatise, "De Cive", was republished and more widely distributed in 1646. In 1647, after some months as mathematical instructor to the young Charles, Prince of Wales (later to become Charles II of England), he was persuaded by his Royalist friends to set forth his theory of civil government in detail, especially in relation to the political crisis resulting from the Civil War. Despite a serious illness which disabled him for six months, he continued in this task until 1651, when his famous masterwork "Leviathan" was published. The work had immediate impact, and soon Hobbes was both more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time. The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics, and he was ulimately forced to flee the exiled royalists back to England and to appeal to the new revolutionary English government for protection. From the age of about sixty, he began to suffer "shaking palsy" (probably Parkinsons Disease), which steadily worsened over the years. In addition to publishing some ill-founded and controversial writings on mathematics and physics, Hobbes also continued to produce and publish philosophical works. "Behemoth", published posthumously in 1682, though written rather earlier, was his account of England's Civil Wars. From the time of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he acquired a new prominence, and his former pupil, now Charles II, remembered Hobbes and called him to the court to grant him a pension of 100. The king was also important in protecting Hobbes when, in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against Atheism and profaneness, which specifically targeted "Leviathan". In the end, the only consequence was that Hobbes was disallowed from publishing anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct (including even responses to the attacks of his enemies), and later editions of his works were printed in Amsterdam. Despite this, his reputation abroad remained formidable. His final works were a curious mixture: an autobiography in Latin verse in 1672, and a translation of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" in 1675. In October 1679, Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder, which was followed by a paralytic stroke from which he died on 4 December 1679 in Derbyshire, England, aged 91.

Work

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Hobbes was not (as many have charged) an atheist, but he had a boundless contempt for Scholastic philosophy and the speculations of the Scholastics, (with their combinations of Christian theology and Aristotelian Metaphysics), and he was insistent that theological disputes should be kept out of politics. He also adopted a strongly Materialist metaphysics, which made it difficult to account for God's existence as a spiritual entity. He claimed there is no natural source of authority to order our lives, and that human judgment is inherently unreliable, and therefore needs to be guided.

He was deepy influenced by the new deterministic science of the age (Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Hooke, etc) and by the certainty of mathematics. He was interested in constructing a completely mechanical model of the universe and, after visiting Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), he came to believe that the entire physical world could be expleined by the new science of motion. He further believed that the human body was also explicable as a dynamic system, as were even the workings of the mind and the whole of civil society. In his "Leviathan" (subtitled "The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil") of 1651, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments, based on social contract theories (Contractarianism). It was written during the English Civil War of 1642 - 1651, and much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority and the avoidance of the evils of discord and civil war. It built on the earlier "Elements of Law" of 1640, (which was initially an attempt to provide arguments supporting the King against his challengers), and particularly on his "De Cive" of 1642. He argued that the human body is like a machine, and that political organization ("commonwealth") is like an artificial human being. Beginning from this mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulated what life would be like without government, a condition which he called the "state of nature" and which he argued inevitably leads to conflict and lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In order to escape this state of war and insecurity, men in the state of nature accede to a "social contract" and establish a civil society. Thus, all individuals in that society cede their natural rights for the sake of protection, and any abuses of power by this authority must be accepted as the price of peace (although in severe cases of abuse, rebellion is to be expected). In particular, he rejected the doctrine of separation of powers, arguing that the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers, which some have seen as a justification for authoritarianism and even Totalitarianism. Thus, Hobbes' ethical views were based on the premise that what we ought to do depends greatly on the situation in which we find ourselves: where political authority is lacking (as in his famous natural condition of mankind), our fundamental right is self-preservation (to save our skins by whatever means we think fit); where political authority exists, however, our duty is merely to obey those in power. In other fields, he was also known as a scientist (especially in optics), as a mathematician (especially in geometry, although some of his mathematical work has been unceremoniously slammed as inadequate and unrigorous), as a translator of the classics, and as a writer on law.

Introduction
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist and Member of Parliament of the early Modern period. His philosophical roots were in the British Empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. But he is best known for his further development of the Utilitarian theory of his teacher, Jeremy Bentham, which he popularized as a movement and of which he became the best known exponent and apologist. He was instrumental in the development of progressive political doctrines such as Socialism, Libertarianism and Feminism, and he was active in calling for political and social reforms such as the abolition of the slave trade, universal suffrage, labour unions and farm cooperatives.

He was perhaps the most influential English-speaking philosopher and liberal thinker of the 19th Century, and he made important contributions to British thought, especially in Ethics and Political Philosophy.

Life
John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in the Pentonville area of north-central London, the eldest of nine children of the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill (1773 - 1836). His mother was Harriet Barrow, but she seems to have had very little influence upon him. We have a detailed account of his youth from Mill's own "Autobiography" of 1873. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing and education by his father, with the advice and assistance of the English social reformers Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place (1771 - 1854), and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age (other than his siblings). His father was an almost fanatical follower of Bentham and Associationism (the idea that mental processes operate by the association of one state with its successor states), and wanted to deliberately groom John as an intellectual genius who would carry on the cause of Utilitarianism after he and Bentham were dead. Mill was anyway a notably precocious child, leaning Greek at the age of three. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's "Fables", Xenophon's "Anabasis", and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Lartius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato, as well as arithmetic and a great deal of history in English. At the age of eight he began learning Latin, algebra and Euclid and to teach the younger children of the family. By the age of ten he could read Plato and Demosthenes, and was familiar with all the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schools and universities at the time, such as Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Homer, Dionysus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Thucydides. In his "spare time", he enjoyed reading about natural sciences and some popular novels (such as "Don Quixote" and "Robinson Crusoe"). One of Mill's earliest poetry compositions was a continuation of the "Iliad". At about the age of twelve, Mill began a thorough study of scholastic Logic, reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language. In the following year he was introduced to political economy and studied the works Adam Smith and David Ricardo (a close friend of his father, who would often discuss economics with the young Mill). At fourteen, Mill spent a year in the mountains of southern France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham (Jeremy Bentham's brother), also attending the winter courses on chemistry, zoology and logic of the Facult des Sciences in Montpellier, as well as taking a course of higher mathematics with a private tutor. He also spent some time in Paris with the renowned French economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767 - 1832), who was a friend of Mill's father, and met several other notable Parisiens, including the utopian socialist thinker Henri Saint-Simon (1760 - 1825), all through his father's myriad connections. In 1823, at the age of 17, Mill chose (rather than take Anglican orders from the "white devil" in order to study at Oxford University or Cambridge University) to follow his father to work for the British East India Company. He led a long and active career as an administrator there, rising through the ranks to become the chief of office in 1856, and retiring with a pension in 1858 when the Company's administrative functions in India were taken over by the British government following the Mutiny of 1857. All his intensive study, however, had had injurious effects on Mill's mental health and state of mind and, in 1826, at the age of twenty, he suffered a nervous breakdown, probably from the great physical and mental arduousness of his studies and the suppression of most normal childhood feelings. This depression eventually began to dissipate, however, with Mill taking solace in the Romantic poetry of

Coleridge, Wordsworth and Goethe. He was also introduced around this time to the Positivism of Auguste Comte, which had a strong influence on his future thinking. He began having articles published in the "Westminster Review" (a journal founded by Bentham and James Mill to propagate Radical views) and in other newspapers and journals including the "Morning Chronicle" and the "Parliamentary History & Review. In 1834, Mill co-founded the Radical journal, the "London Review" with Sir William Molesworth (1810 -1855) and then, two years later, purchased the "Westminster Review" and merged the two journals, using it to support politicians who were advocating further reform of the House of Commons. In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor (on the death of her husband) after over twenty years of intimate friendship. Brilliant in her own right, she was a significant influence on Mill's work and ideas during both friendship and marriage, including his advocacy of women's rights. After only seven years of marriage, though, she died on a trip to Avignon in the south of France in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion. Mill took a house in Avignon in order to be near her grave and thereafter divided his time between there and London. He became involved with the abolitionist movement against the slave trade (as well as other contemporary reform movements on the prisons, poor laws, etc), and penned a famous rebuttal in 1850 (which came to be known under the title "The Negro Question") to Thomas Carlyle's anonymous letter in defence of slavery. From 1865 to 1868, Mill served as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Westminster, as well as serving as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. During his time as an MP, Mill became the first person in Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, and advocated easing the burdens on Ireland, as well as working indefatigably for such political and social reforms as proportional representation, labour unions and farm cooperatives. Mill died on 8 May 1873 in Avignon, and was buried alongside his wife.

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Throughout his life, Mill tried to persuade the British public of the necessity of a scientific approach to understanding social, political and economic change while not neglecting the insights of poets and other imaginative writers. Philosophically, he was a radical empiricist who held that all human knowledge, including even mathematics and Logic, is derived by generalization from sensory experience. He believed firmly that there is no such thing as innate ideas, no such thing as moral precepts. His "System of Logic" of 1843 was an ambitious attempt to give an account not only of Logic, as the title suggests, but of the methods of science and their applicability to social as well as purely natural phenomena. Mill's conception of Logic comprised not only formal logic (what he called the "logic of consistency"), but also a "logic of proof" (a logic that would show how evidence tended to prove the conclusions we draw from the evidence). This led him to an analysis of causation and ultimately to an account of inductive reasoning that remains the starting point of most modern discussions on Logic. The "System of Logic" also attacked the Intuitionist philosophy (the belief that explanations rested on intuitively compelling principles rather than on general causal laws) of William Whewell (1794 1866) and Sir William Hamilton (1788 - 1856), which he saw as "bad philosophy". His "Principles of Political Economy" of 1848 tried to show that economics was not the "dismal science" that Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) and its radical and literary critics had supposed, and it became one of the most widely read of all books on economics in the period, and dominated economics teaching for decades. His early economic philosophy was generally one of free markets with minimal

interventions in the economy, and the "Principles" is largely a highly proficient re-statement of Smith and Ricardo's theory of classical capitalist economics. He helped develop the ideas of economies of scale, opportunity cost and comparative advantage in trade. But in the "Principles", Mill also made the radical arguments that we should sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the environment, and should limit population as much to give ourselves breathing space as in order to fend off the risk of starvation for the overburdened poor, and advocated his own ideal of an economy of worker-owned cooperatives. His "Utilitarianism" of 1861 remains the classic defence of the Utilitarian view that we should aim at maximizing the welfare (or happiness) of all sentient creatures. However, he was keen to develop Utilitarianism into a more humanitarian doctrine. One of Mill's major contributions to Utilitarianism was his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures, his insistence that happiness should be assessed not merely by quantity but by quality and, more specifically, that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to more physical forms of pleasure. He went so far as to say that he would rather be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig. He also turned away from Bentham's external standard of goodness to something more subjective, arguing that altruism was as important as selfinterest in deciding what ought to be done. However, it was Mill's essay "On Liberty" of 1859 that aroused the greatest controversy and the most violent expressions of approval and disapproval. It addressed the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual, and he laid down his "one very simple principle" governing the use of coercion in society (whether it be by legal penalties or by the operation of public opinion), arguing that we may only coerce others in self-defence: either to defend ourselves, or to defend others from harm (the so-called "harm principle"). Thus, if an action is self-regarding (i.e. it only directly affects the person undertaking the action), then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself. Man is therefore free to do anything unless he harms others, he argued, and individuals are rational enough to make decisions about what is good and also to choose any religion they want. "On Liberty" also contains an impassioned defence of free speech, arguing that free discourse is a necessary condition for intellectual and social progress, and that we can never be sure that a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth. It introduces the concepts of "social liberty" (limits on a ruler's power to prevent him from harming society, requiring that people should have the right to a say in a governments decisions), and also the concept of the tyranny of the majority (where the majority oppresses the minority by decisions which could be harmful and wrong sometimes, and against which precautions are needed). Mill's "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy" of 1865 constituted the first developed presentation of the doctrine of Phenomenalism (the epistemological view which regards sensations as the basic constituents of reality, and attempts to construct the external world from sensations and the possibilities of sensation), and it included his quote: Matter, then, may be defined as the Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Although the origins of Phenomenalism can be traced back to George Berkeley, it was only after Mill that a commitment to the doctrine became standard among scientific philosophers, until superseded by Physicalism in the 1930s. "The Subjection of Women" of 1869, apparently published late in life in order to avoid controversies that would lessen the impact of his other work, was thought to be excessively radical in Mill's time, but is now seen as a classic statement of liberal Feminism. Mill argued that if freedom is good for men, then it is for women too, and that every argument against this view drawn from the supposedly different "nature" of men and women is based on mere superstitious special pleading. If women do have different natures, the only way to discover what they are is by experiment, and that requires that women should have access to everything to which men have access. He felt that the oppression of women was one of the few remaining relics from ancient times, a set of prejudices that severely impeded the progress of humanity.

Likewise, he chose not to have his "Three Essays on Religion" published until after his death, although they remain models of calm discussion of contentious topics, and actually disappointed those of Mill's admirers who had looked for a tougher and more abrasive Agnosticism. In general the essays criticized traditional religious views and formulated an alternative (inspired by Comte) in the guise of a "Religion of Humanity". Mill argued that belief in an omnipotent and benevolent God, encouraged intellectual laziness. Among other points, though, he argued that, although it is impossible that the universe is governed by an omnipotent and loving God, it is not unlikely that a less omnipotent benign force is at work in the world.

1plato

Introduction
Plato (c. 428 - 348 B.C.) was a hugely important Greek philosopher and mathematician from the Socratic (or Classical) period. He is perhaps the best known, most widely studied and most influential philosopher of all time. Together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, he provided the main opposition to the Materialist view of the world represented by Democritus and Epicurus, and he helped to lay the foundations of the whole of Western Philosophy. In his works, especially his many dialogues, he blended Ethics, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphysics and moral psychology into an interconnected and systematic philosophy. In addition to the ideas they contained (such as his doctrine of Platonic Realism, Essentialism, Idealism, his famous theory of Forms and the ideal of "Platonic love"), many of his writings are also considered superb pieces of literature. Plato was the founder of the famous Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. The philosophical school which he developed at the Academy was known as Platonism (and its later off-shoot, Neo-Platonism).

Life
Plato was born in Athens (or possibly in Aegina, according to some sources) some time between 429 and 423 B.C. (most modern scholars use estimate of 428 or 427 B.C.) He was possibly originally named Aristocles after his grandfather, and only later dubbed "Plato" or "Platon" (meaning "broad") on account of the breadth of his eloquence, or of his wide forehead, or possibly on account of his generally robust figure. His father was Ariston (who may have traced his descent from Codrus, the last of the legendary kings of Athens); his mother was Perictione (who was descended from the famous Athenian lawmaker and poet Solon, and whose family also boasted prominent figures of the oligarchic regime of Athens known as the Thirty Tyrants). He had two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone. Plato later introduced several of his distinguished relatives into his dialogues, indicating considerable family pride. When Ariston died early in Plato's childhood, his mother married her own uncle, Pyrilampes, who was also a friend of Pericles (the leader of the democratic faction in Athens), and who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court. Together, they had another son, Antiphon, who was therefore Plato's half-brother.

Coming as he did from one of the wealthiest and most politically active families in Athens, Plato must have been instructed in grammar, music and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time, and certainly his quickness of mind and modesty were widely praised. He had also attended courses of philosophy and was acquainted with Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus, before meeting Socrates. This life-changing event occurred when Plato was about twenty years old, and the intercourse between master and pupil probably lasted eight or ten years. As a youth he had loved to write poetry and tragedies, but burnt them all after he became a student of Socrates and turned to philosophy in earnest. It is plain that no influence on Plato was greater than that of Socrates. Plato was in military service from 409 to 404 B.C. and, for a time, he imagined a life in public affairs for himself. He was even invited to join the administration of the regime of the Thirty Tyrants (through the connection with his uncle, Charmides, who was himself a member), but he was soon repelled by their violent acts and backed out. In 403 B.C., democracy was restored to Athens, and Plato had renewed hopes of entering politics again, although the excesses of Athenian political life in general persuaded him to hold back. The execution of Socrates in 399 B.C. had a profound effect on him, and he decided to have nothing further to do with politics in Athens. After Socrates' death, he joined a group of Socratic disciples who had gathered in the Greek city of Megara under the leadership of Euclid of Megara, before leaving and travelling quite widely in Italy, Sicily, Egypt and Cyrene. During his time in Italy, he also studied with students of Pythagoras and came to appreciate the value of mathematics. When he returned to Athens in about 385 or 387 B.C., Plato founded the Academy (or Akademia), one of the earliest and most famous organized schools in western civilization and the protoype for later universities, on a plot of land containing a sacred grove just outside the city walls of ancient Athens, which had once belonged to the Athenian hero Akademos. Plato had been bitterly disappointed with the standards displayed by those in public office, and his intention was to train young men in philosophy and the sciences in order to create better statesmen, as well as to continue the work of his former teacher, Socrates. Among Plato's more noteworthy students at the Academy were Aristotle, Xenocrates (396 - 314 B.C.), Speusippus (407 - 339 B.C.) and Theophrastus (c. 371 - 287 B.C.). Except for two more rather ill-advised and ill-fated trips to Syracuse in Sicily in 367 B.C. and 361 B.C. to tutor the young ruler Dionysius II, Plato presided over his Academy from 387 B.C. until his death in 347 B.C., aged about 80. He was supposedly buried in the school grounds, although his grave has never been discovered. On Plato's death, his nephew Speusippus succeeded him as head of the school (perhaps because his star pupil Aristotle's ideas had by that time diverged too far from Plato's). The school continued to operate for almost 900 years, until A.D. 529, when it was closed by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, who saw it as a threat to the propagation of Christianity.

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Plato is perhaps the first philosopher whose complete works are still available to us. He wrote no systematic treatises giving his views, but rather he wrote a number (about 35, although the authenticity of at least some of these remains in doubt) of superb dialogues, written in the form of conversations, a form which permitted him to develop the Socratic method of question and answer. In his dialogues, Plato discussed every kind of philosophical idea, including Ethics (with discussion of the nature of virtue), Metaphysics (where topics include immortality, man, mind, and Realism), Political Philosophy (where topics such as censorship and the ideal state are discussed), Philosophy of Religion (considering topics such as Atheism, Dualism and Pantheism), Epistemology (where he looked at ideas such as a priori knowledge and Rationalism), the Philosophy of Mathematics and the theory of art (especially dance, music, poetry, architecture and drama).

We have no material evidence about exactly when Plato wrote each of his dialogues, nor the extent to which some might have been later revised or rewritten, nor even whether all or part of them were ever "published" or made widely available. In addition to the ideas they contained, though, his writings are also considered superb pieces of literature in their own right, in terms of the mastery of language, the power of indicating character, the sense of situation, and the keen eye for both tragic and comic aspects. None of the dialogues contain Plato himself as a character, and so he does not actually declare that anything asserted in them are specifically his own views. The characters in the dialogues are generally historical, with Socrates usually as the protagonist (particularly in the early dialogues). It is generally thought that the views expressed by the character of Socrates in Plato's dialogues were views that Socrates himself actually held, and the works had the effect of gradually rehabilitating Socrates's rather tarnished image among Athenians in the wake of his death. As time went on, though, the dialogues began to deal more with subjects that interested Plato himself, rather than merely providing a vehicle for the ideas of Socrates. It seems likely that Plato's main intention in his dialogues was more to teach his students to think for themselves and to find their own answers to the big questions, rather than to blindly follow his own opinions (or those of Socrates). Among the (likely earlier) Socratic dialogues are: "Apology", "Charmides", "Crito", "Euthyphro", "Ion", "Laches", "Lesser Hippias", "Lysis", "Menexenus" and "Protagoras". The following are often considered "transitional" dialogues: "Gorgias", "Meno" and "Euthydemus". The middle dialogues are generally seen as the first appearances of Plato's own views: "Cratylus", "Phaedo", "Phaedrus", "Symposium", "Republic", "Theaetetus" and "Parmenides". The late dialogues probably indicate Plato's more mature thought, including criticisms of his own theories: "Sophist", "Statesman", "Philebus", "Timaeus", "Critias" and "Laws". The huge "Republic" in particular is considered one of the single most influential works in the whole of Western Philosophy, although his account of Socrates' trial in the "Apology" may be the most read. Central to Plato's Metaphysics is his theory of Platonic Realism, which inverts the common sense intuition about what is knowable and what is real. Confusingly, this is also known as Platonic Idealism, and indeed Idealism may be a better description. Plato believed that universals (those properties of an object which can exist in more than one place at the same time e.g. the quality of "redness") do in fact exist and are real. However, they exist in a different way than ordinary physical objects exist, in a sort of ghostly mode of existence, unseen and unfelt, outside of space and time, but not at any spatial or temporal distance from people's bodies (a type of Dualism). Part and parcel of Plato's Platonic Realism is his theory of Forms or Ideas, which refers to his belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only a shadow or a poor copy of the real world. This is based on Plato's concept (or Socrates' through Plato) of hylomorphism, the idea that substances are forms inhering in matter. He held that substance is composed of matter and form, although not as any kind of a mixture or amalgam, but composed homogeneously together such that no matter can exist without form (or form without matter). Thus, pure matter and pure form can never be perceived, only comprehended abstractly by the intellect. Forms, roughly speaking, are the pure and unchanging archetypes or abstract representations of universals and of all the things we see around us, and they are in fact the true basis of reality. These ideal Forms are instantiated by one or many different particulars, which are essentially material copies of the Forms, and make up the world we perceive around us. Plato was therefore one of the first Essentialists in that he believed that all things have essences or attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is. According to Plato, true knowledge or intelligence is the ability to grasp the world of Forms with one's mind, even though his evidence for the existence of Forms is intuitive only. This idea was most famously captured and illustrated in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, from his bestknown work, "The Republic". He represented man's condition as being chained in the darkness of a

cave, with only the false light of a fire behind him. He can perceive the outside world solely by watching the shadows on the wall in front of him, not realizing that this view of existence is limited, wrong or in any way lacking (after all, it is all he knows). Plato imagined what would occur if some of the chained men were suddenly released from this bondage and let out into the world, to encounter the divine light of the sun and perceive true reality. He described how some people would immediately be frightened and want to return to the familiar dark existence of the cave, while the more enlightened would look at the sun and finally see the world as it truly is. If they were then to return to the cave and try to explain what they had seen, they would be mocked mercilessly and called fanciful, even mad. In the allegory, Plato saw the outside world, which the cave's inhabitants glimpsed only in a second-hand way, as the timeless realm of Forms, where genuine reality resides. The shadows on the wall represent the world we see around us, which we assume to be real, but which in fact is a mere imitation of the real thing. Plato's theory of Forms was essentially an attempt to solve the dichotomy between Parmenides' view (that there is no real change or multiplicity in the world, and that reality is one) and that of Heraclitus (that motion and multiplicity are real, and that permanence is only apparent) by means of a metaphysical compromise. Plato himself, though, was well aware of the limitations of his theory, and in particular he later concocted the "Third Man Argument" against his own theory: if a Form and a particular are alike, then there must be another (third) thing by possession of which they are alike, leading to an infinite regression. In a later (rather unsatisfactory) version of the theory, he tried to circumvent this objection by positing that particulars do not actually exist as such: rather, they "mime" the Forms, merely appearing to be particulars. In the "Timaeus", Plato gave his account of the natural sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology) and the creation of the universe by the Demiurge. Unlike the creation by the God of medieval theologians, Plato's Demiurge did not create out of nothing, but rather ordered the cosmos out of already-existing chaotic elemental matter, imitating the eternal Forms. Plato took the four elements (fire, air, water and earth), which he proclaimed to be composed of various aggregates of triangles, and made various compounds of these into what he called the Body of the Universe. In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on Plato's unwritten teachings, which were passed on orally to his students and not included in the dialogues (on several occasions, Plato stressed that the written transmission of knowledge was faulty and inferior to the spoken logos). We have at least some idea of this from reports by his students, Aristotle and others, and from the continuity between his teachings and the interpretations of Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. One recurring theme is that the first principle of everything, including the causation of good and of evil and of the Forms themselves, is the One (the cause of the essence of the Forms). It can be argued, then, that Plato's concept of God affirms Monotheism, although he also talked of an Indefinite Duality (which he also called Large and Small). In Epistemology, although some have imputed to Plato the remarkably modern analytic view that knowledge is justified true belief, Plato more often associated knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another. He argued that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained, so that, if one derives an account of something experientially then (because the world of sense is always in flux) the views attained will be mere opinions. On the other hand, if one derives an account of something by way of the non-sensible Forms, then the views attained will be pure and unchanging (because the Forms are unchanging too). In several dialogues, Plato also floated the idea that knowledge is a matter of recollection ("anamnesis"), and not of learning, observation or study. Thus, knowledge is not empirical, a but essentially comes from divine insight. To a large extent, it is Plato who is responsible for the modern view of the Sophist as a greedy and power-seeking instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. He was at great pains in his dialogues to exonerate Socrates from accusations of Sophism. Plato, and Aristotle after him, also believed in a kind of Moral Universalism (or Moral Absolutism), opposing the Moral Relativism of the Sophists.

In Ethics, Plato had a teleological or goal-orientated worldview, and the aim of his Ethics was therefore to outline the conditions under which a society might function harmoniously. He considered virtue to be an excellence of the soul, and, insofar as the soul has several components (e.g. reason, passions, spirit), there will be several components of its excellence: the excellence of reason is wisdom; the excellence of the passions are attributes such as courage; and the excellence of the spirit is temperance. Finally, justice is that excellence which consists in a harmonious relation of the other three parts. He believed, then, that virtue was a sort of knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) that is required to reach the ultimate good (or eudaimonia), which is what all human desires and actions aim to achieve, and as such he was an early proponent of Eudaimonism or Virtue Ethics. Plato's philosophical views had many societal and political implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government (much influenced by the model of the severe society of Sparta), although there is some discrepancy between his early and later views on Political Philosophy. Some of his most famous doctrines are contained in the "Republic" (the earliest example of a Utopia, dating from his middle period), as well as in the later "Statesman" and the "Laws". In general terms, Plato drew parallels between the tripartite structure of the individual soul and body ("appetite-stomach", "spirit-chest" and "reason-head") and the tripartite class structure of societies. He divided human beings up, based on their innate intelligence, strength and courage, into: the Productive (Workers), labourers, farmers, merchants, etc, which corresponds to the "appetite-stomach"; the Protective (Warriors), the adventurous, strong and brave of the armed forces, which corresponds to the "spirit-chest"; and the Governing (Rulers or Philosopher Kings), the intelligent, rational, self-controlled and wise, who are well suited to make decisions for the community, which corresponds to the "reasonhead". The Philosophers and the Warriors together are thus the Guardians of Plato's ideal state. Plato concluded that reason and wisdom (rather than rhetoric and persuasion) should govern, thus effectively rejecting the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) as only a few are fit to rule. A large part of the "Republic" then addresses how the educational system should be set up (his important contribution to the Philosophy of Education) to produce these Philosopher Kings, who should have their reason, will and desires united in virtuous harmony (a moderate love for wisdom, and the courage to act according to that wisdom). The Philosopher King image has been used by many after Plato to justify their personal political beliefs. He also made some interesting arguments about states and rulers. He argued that it is better to be ruled by a tyrant (since then there is only one person committing bad deeds) than by a bad democracy (since all the people are now responsible for the bad actions). He predicted that a state which is made up of different kinds of souls will tend to decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honourable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people) and finally to tyranny (rule by a single tyrant). In the "Laws", probably Plato's last work and a work of enormous length and complexity, he concerned himself with designing a genuinely practicable (if admittedly not ideal) form of government, rather than with what a best possible state might be like. He discussed the empirical details of statecraft, fashioning rules to meet the multitude of contingencies that are apt to arise in the "real world" of human affairs, and it marks a rather grim and terrifying culmination of the totalitarian tendencies in his earlier political thought. Plato's views on Aesthetics were somewhat compromised and he had something of a love-hate relationship with the arts. He believed that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves, and that they should incorporate proportion, harmony and unity among their parts. As a youth he had been a poet, and he remained a fine literary stylist and a great story-teller. However, he found the arts threatening in that they are powerful shapers of character. Therefore, to train and protect ideal citizens for an ideal society, he believed that the arts must be strictly controlled, and he proposed excluding poets, playwrights and musicians from his ideal Republic, or at least severely censoring what they produced. He also argued that art is merely imitation of the objects and events of ordinary life,

effectively a copy of a copy of an ideal Form. Art is therefore even more of an illusion than is ordinary experience, and so should be considered at best entertainment, and at worst a dangerous delusion. In the "Symposium" and the "Phaedrus", Plato introduces his theory of ers or love, which has come to be known as "Platonic love". Although he invented the image of two lovers being each other's "other half", he clearly regards actual physical or sexual contact between lovers as degraded and wasteful forms of erotic expression. Thus, unless the power of love is channelled into "higher pursuits" (culminating in the knowledge of the Form of Beauty), it is doomed to frustration, and people sadly squander the real power of love by limiting themselves to the mere pleasures of physical beauty. On an unrelated note, he is also responsible for the famous myth of Atlantis, which first appears in the "Timaeus". Plato's consideration of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, comes mainly in the "Theaetetus". In it, he (through the person of Socrates) considers three different theses - that knowledge is perception, that knowledge is true judgement, and that knowledge is true judgement together with an account refuting each of them in turn, without leaving us with any definitive conclusion or solution. One is left, though, with the impression that Plato's own view is probably that what constitutes knowledge is actually a combination or synthesis of all these separate theses. Although the study of Plato's thought continued with the Neo-Platonists, his reputation was completely eclipsed during Medieval times by that of his most famous student, Aristotle. This is mainly because Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the century before its fall by the Greek Neo-Platonists George Gemistos Plethon (c. 1355 - 1452). The Medieval Scholastic philosophers, therefore, did not have access to the works of Plato, nor the knowledge of Greek needed to read them. Only during the Renaissance, with the general resurgence of interest in classical civilization, did knowledge of Plato's philosophy become widespread again in the West, and many of the greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with Scholasticism saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences. By the 19th Century, Plato's reputation was restored, and at least on par with Aristotle's. Plato's influence has been especially strong in mathematics and the sciences. Although he made no important mathematical discoveries himself, his belief that mathematics provides the finest training for the mind was extremely important in the development of the subject (over the door of the Academy was written, "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here"). He concentrated on the idea of "proof", insisting on accurate definitions and clear hypotheses, all of which laid the foundations for the systematic approach to mathematics of Euclid (who flourished around 300 B.C.) However, Plato also helped to distinguish between pure and applied mathematics by widening the gap between "arithmetic" (now called Number Theory) and "logistic" (now called Arithmetic). Plato's resurgence in the Modern era further inspired some of the greatest advances in Logic since Aristotle, primarily through Gottlob Frege and his followers Kurt Gdel (1906 - 1978), Alonzo Church (1903 1995) and Alfred Tarski (1901 - 1983). Plato's name is also attached to the "Platonic solids" (convex regular polyhedrons), especially in the "Timaeus", in which the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron are given as the shapes of the atoms of earth, fire, air and water, with the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, being his model for the whole universe. Plato's beliefs as regards the universe were that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon all move round the Earth in crystalline spheres. The sphere of the Moon was closest to the Earth, then the sphere of the Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and furthest away was the sphere of the stars. He believed that the Moon shines by reflected sunlight.

2 machiavelli.

Introduction
Niccol di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 - 1527) was an Italian philosopher, political theorist, diplomat, musician and writer of the Renaissance period. He was a central figure in the political scene of the Italian Renaissance, a tumultuous period of plots, wars between city states and constantly shifting alliances. Although he never considered himself a philosopher (and often overtly rejected philosophical inquiry as irrelevant), many subsequent political philosophers have been influenced by his ideas. His name has since passed into common usage to refer to any political move that is devious or cunning in nature, although this probably represents a more extreme view than Machiavelli actually took. He is best known today for two main works, the well-known "The Prince" (a treatise on political realism and a guide on how a ruler can retain control over his subjects), and the "Discourses on Livy" (the most important work on republicanism in the early modern period). Although he is sometimes presented as a model of Moral Nihilism, that is actually highly questionable as he was largely silent on moral matters and, if anything, he presented an alternative to the ethical theories of his day, rather than an all-out rejection of all morality. He was also accused of Atheism, again with little justification.

Life
Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy on 3 May 1469, the second son of Bernardo di Niccol Machiavelli (a lawyer) and Bartolommea di Stefano Nelli. His family were believed to be descended from the old marquesses of Tuscany, and were probably quite wealthy. Little is known of his early life, but his education (possibly at the University of Florence) left him with a thorough knowledge of the Latin and Italian classics, and he was trained as a man with great nobility and severe rigour by his father. He entered governmental service in Florence as a clerk and ambassador in 1494, the same year as Florence had restored the republic and expelled the ruling Medici family. He was soon promoted to Second Chancellor of the Republic of Florence, with responsibility for diplomatic negotiations and military matters. Between 1499 and 1512, he undertook a number of diplomatic missions to the court of Louis XII of France, Ferdinand II of Aragn and the Papacy in Rome. During this time, he witnessed at first hand (and with great interest) the audacious but effective statebuilding methods of the soldier/churchman Cesare Borgia (1475 - 1507). From 1503 to 1506, Machiavelli was responsible for the Florentine militia and the defence of the city (he distrusted mercenaries, preferring a citizen militia). He had some early success, but in 1512, the Medici (with the help of Pope Julius II and Spanish troops) defeated the Florentine force, and Machiavelli was removed from office, accused of conspiracy and arrested. After torture, he was eventually released and retired to his estate at Sant'Andrea (in Percussina near Florence) and began writing the treatises that would ensure his place in the history of Political Philosophy, "Il Principe" ("The Prince") and "Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio" ("Discourses on Livy"). Near the end of his life, and probably with the aid of well-connected friends whom he had been constantly badgering, Machiavelli began to return to the favour of the Medici family. From 1520 to 1525, he worked on a "History of Florence", commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de'Medici (who later become Pope Clement VII). However, before he could achieve a full rehabilitation, he died in San Casciano, just outside of Florence, on 21 June 1527. His resting place is unknown.

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Machiavelli's best known work, "Il Principe" ("The Prince"), was written in some haste in 1513 while in exile on his farm outside Florence, and was dedicated to Lorenzo de'Medici in the hope of regaining his status in the Florentine Government. However, it was only formally published posthumously in 1532. In it, he described the arts by which a Prince (or ruler) could retain control of his realm. A "new" prince has a much more difficult task than a hereditary prince, since he must stabilize his newfound power and build a structure that will endure, a task that requires the Prince to be publicly above reproach but privately may require him to do immoral things in order to achieve his goals. He outlined his criteria for acceptable cruel actions and pointed out the irony in the fact that good can come from evil actions. Although "The Prince" did not dispense entirely with morality nor advocate wholesale selfishness or degeneracy, the Catholic Church nevertheless put the work on its index of prohibited books, and it was viewed very negatively by many Humanists, such as Erasmus. It marked a fundamental break between Realism and Idealism. Although never directly stated in the book, "the end justifies the means" is often quoted as indicative of the Pragmatism or Instrumentalism that underlies Machiavelli's philosophy. He also touched on totalitarian themes, arguing that the state is merely an instrument for the benefit of the ruler, who should have no qualms at using whatever means are at his disposal to keep the citizenry suppressed. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, though, Machiavelli was not looking to describe the ideal society, merely to present a guide to getting and preserving power and the status quo. His other major contribution to political thought, the "Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio" ("Discourses on Livy") was begun around 1516 and compeleted in 1518 or 1519. It was an exposition of the principles of republican rule, masquerading as a commentary on the work of the famous historian of the Roman Republic. It constitutes a series of lessons on how a republic should be started and structured, including the concept of checks and balances, the strength of a tripartite structure, and the superiority of a republic over a principality or monarchy. If not the first, then it was certainly the most important work on republicanism in the early modern period.

3 rossuea

ROUSSEAU
HISTORIAN OF THE HEART (1712- 1778)
"Man is naturally good..."

Overview
An omnivorous reader, but basically self-educated, Jean Jacques Rousseau's writings followed no academic school of thought and covered a wide range of subjects and genres. He invented a new form of musical notation, and as well as philosophical treatises, he wrote a novel and an opera which was received well at the court of Louis XV whose patronage Rousseau refused as inconsistent with his principles.

Rousseau is perhaps best known for his political philosophy as outlined in "The Social Contract". In this, he argues for political sovereignty of the entire citizen body over itself with government and law based on a concept of "general will". Because "general will" comes from all alike, Rousseau argues, it would tend to promote liberty and equality and inspire a sense of fraternity. These principles became the catchcry of the French Revolution and many see Rousseau's influence on the instigators of the revolution as paramount. Rousseau's famous epigram, that "Man is born free and is everywhere in chains" derives from his central doctrine that man is naturally good but corrupted by society. The sources of corruption come from within the individual's own makeup but tend to be deepened by social pressure and competition. Rousseau's educational treatise, "Emile", envisages the possibility of a different destiny for men educated in a new way that encouraged the nurturing of man's natural virtue. He is best known for his political treatise "The Social Contract". His political ideals inspired revolutionary leaders and the governments of Corsica and Poland to ask him to write them a constitution. Critic of contemporary society whose political ideals inspired many, whose passion for nature inspired the later Romantics.

MAJOR WORKS

"The Social Contract" (1762) "Emile" (1762)

John locke
Introduction
John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason and early Age of Enlightenment. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of Epistemology and Political Philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential early Enlightenment thinkers. He is usually considered the first of the British Empiricists, the movement which included George Berkeley and David Hume, and which provided the main opposition to the 17th Century Continental Rationalists. He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived from experience, and the knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and certainty. His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self". He also postulated, contrary to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that the mind was a "tabula rasa" (or "blank slate") and that people are born without innate ideas. Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical groundwork of democracy, republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism. He is sometimes referred to as the "Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views influenced both the American and French Revolutions.

Life
Locke was born on 29 August 1632 in the small rural village of Wrington, Somerset, England. His father, also named John Locke, was a country lawyer and clerk to the Justices of the Peace in nearby town of Chew Magna, and had served as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces during the early part of the English Civil War. His mother, Agnes Keene, was a tanner's daughter and reputed to be very beautiful. Both parents were Puritans, and the family moved soon after Locke's birth to the small market town of Pensford, near Bristol. In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London (sponsored by the local MP Alexander Popham) as a King's Scholar. After completing his studies there, he was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the largely classical (Aristotelian) undergraduate curriculum of the time, and found more interest in the works of modern philosophers such as Ren Descartes, and the more experimental philosophy being pursued at other universities and within the embryonic Royal Society. Locke was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1656, and a master's degree in 1658. He was elected lecturer in Greek in 1660 and then in Rhetoric in 1663, but he declined the offer of a permanent academic position in order to avoid committing himself to a religious order. During his time at Oxford, he also studied medicine extensively, and worked with such noted scientists and thinkers as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, Robert Hooke and his friend from Westminster School, Richard Lower. He later obtained a bachelor of medicine qualification in 1674. It was through his medical knowledge that he obtained the patronage of the controversial political figure, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury), and in 1667 he moved to Shaftesbury's London home to serve as his personal physician. He was credited with saving Shaftesbury's life afer a liver infection became life-threatening. In London, Locke continued his medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham, who also had a major influence on Locke's natural philosophical thinking. During the 1670s, Locke served as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas, helping to shape his ideas on international trade and economics. Locke became more involved in politics (and further developed his political ideas) when Shaftesbury, a founder of the Whig movement in British politics, became Lord Chancellor in 1672. It was also during this time in London that he worked on early drafts of his "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", eventually published in 1690 and considered one of the principal sources of Empiricism in modern philosophy. After some time travelling across France following Shaftesbury's fall from favour in 1675, he returned to England in 1679 (when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn), and began the composition of his famous work of Political Philosophy, the "Two Treatises of Government", which was published anonymously (in order to avoid controversy) in 1689, and whose ideas about natural rights and government were quite revolutionary for that period in English history. In 1683, Locke fled to Holland, under strong (but probably unfounded) suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot. He did not return to England until 1688's Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of King James II by the of the Dutchman William of Orange (King William III of England), which Locke saw as the ultimate triumph of his revolutionary cause. The publication of "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", the "Two Treatises of Civil Government" and "A Letter Concerning Toleration" all occurred in quick succession upon his return from exile. His "Essay" in particular brought great fame, and Locke spent much of the rest of his life responding to admirers and critics by making revisions in later editions of the book.

In 1691, he moved to his close friend Lady Masham's country house at Oates, Essex. During this period, he became something of an intellectual hero of the Whigs, and he discussed matters with such figures as John Dryden and Sir Isaac Newton. He continued to work at the Board of Trade from 1696 until his retirement in 1700. However, his health deteriorated, marked by regular asthma attacks, and he died on 28 October 1704, and was buried in the churchyard of High Laver. He never married, and had no children.

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Locke wrote on philosophical, scientific and political matters throughout his life, in a voluminous correspondence and ample journals, but the public works for which he is best known were published in a single, sudden burst in 1689 - 1690. The fundamental principles of Locke's Epistemology are presented in his monumental "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" of 1690, the culmination of twenty years of reflection on the origins of human knowledge. In it he argued the empiricist approach that would be adopted by the British Empiricism movement: that all of our ideas, whether simple or complex, are ultimately derived from experience and sensory input. The knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope and certainty, in that we can never know the inner nature of the things around us, only their behaviour and the way in which they affect us and other things (a kind of modified Skepticism). One of the ways in which they affect us is through our senses, giving us experiences (or representations or images) of their properties or qualities. Locke saw the properties of things as being of two distinct kinds. Their real inner natures derive from the primary qualities, which we can never experience and so never know. Our knowledge of material substances, therefore, depends heavily on their secondary qualities (by reference to which we also name them), which are mind-dependent and of a sensory or qualitative nature. He therefore believed in a type of Representationalism, that these primary qualities are "explanatorily basic" in that they can be referred to as the explanation for other qualities or phenomena without requiring explanation themselves, and that these qualities are distinct in that our sensory experience of them resembles them in reality. He claimed that "the mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone" (an idea being something within the mind that represents things outside the mind). However, he also argued that a proper application of our cognitive capacities is enough to guide our action in the practical conduct of life, and that it is in the process of reasoning that the mind confronts the raw ideas it has received (an approach not dissimilar to the Dualism of Descartes). His definition of knowledge might be stated, then, as the perception of the relationship between ideas. Where Locke differed markedly from Descartes and other predecessors, though, was in the status he granted to the senses. Descartes held that the senses incline us to have certain beliefs, but that this alone does not amount to actual knowledge (which requires interpretation and explanation by reason and the intellect). For Locke, however, the senses themselves are a basic and fundamental faculty which deliver knowledge in their own right. Indeed, his whole conception of an idea differed from that of Descartes: for Descartes, an idea was fundamentally intellectual; for Locke it was fundamentally sensory, and all thought involved images of a sensory nature. In later editions of the treatise, he also included detailed accounts of human volition and moral freedom, the personal identity on which our responsibility as moral agents depends, and the dangers of religious enthusiasm.

With his "Two Treatises of Civil Government", published anonymously in 1690 in order to avoid controversy, Locke established himself as a political theorist of the highest order. The "First Treatise" was intended merely to refute Sir Robert Filmer's support of the Divine Right of Kings, arguing that neither scripture nor reason supports Filmer's contentions. The "Second Treatise", however, offered a systematic account of the foundations of political obligation. In Locke's view, all rights begin in the individual property interest created by an investment of labour. The social structure (or "commonwealth") depends for its formation and maintenance on the express consent of those governed by its political powers (the so-called Social Contract or Contractarianism). He believed that majority rule thus becomes the cornerstone of all political order, although dissatisfied citizens reserve a lasting right to revolution. Like Thomas Hobbes before him, Locke started from a belief that humans have absolute natural rights, in the sense of universal rights that are inherent in the nature of Ethics, and not contingent on human actions or beliefs (a kind of Deontology). However, much of his political work is characterized by his opposition to authoritarianism, and particularly to the tendency towards Totalitarianism advocated by Hobbes. Locke believed that no one should be allowed absolute power, and introduced the idea of the separation of powers, whereby the Church and the judicial system operate independently of the ruling class. In particular, he defined our civil interests (those which the State can and should legitimately protect) as life, liberty, health and property, specifically excluding religious concerns, which he saw as outside the legitimate concern of civil government. If much of this seems familiar from the American Declaration of Independence, that is no coincidence as the American founding fathers freely admitted their debt to Locke's Political Philosophy. His "Letter Concerning Toleration" of 1689 came in the wake of King Louis XIV of France's revocation of the Edict of Nantes (and the religious persecution which followed it). It argued for a broad (though not limitless) acceptance of alternative religious convictions, as well as a strict separation betwen Church and State. In his 1695 "The Reasonableness of Christianity", he argued that the basic doctrines of Christianity are relatively few and entirely compatible with reason. In 1693, Locke produced his contribution to the Philosophy of Education, his influential "Some Thoughts Concerning Education". In it, he claimed (influenced by Avicenna and the Medieval Avicennist movement) that a child's mind is a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and does not contain any innate ideas, nor anything that might be described as human nature. Thus, all men are created equal, and each of us can be said to be the author of our own character. These ideas flowed logically and seamlessly from Locke's underlying belief in Empiricism, that all human knowledge derives from the senses and that therefore there can be no knowledge that precedes observation. According to Locke, the mind was to be educated by a three-pronged approach: the development of a healthy body; the formation of a virtuous character; and the choice of an appropriate academic curriculum. He maintained that a person is to a large extent a product of his education, and also pointed out that knowledge and attitudes acquired in a child's early formative years are disproportionately influential and have important and lasting consequences.