John Locke

Locke came of age during England's convulsions: civil war, regicide, restoration, revolution. He spent fifteen years at Oxford in medicine and natural philosophy, then attached himself to Lord Shaftesbury, a lightning rod in Restoration politics. When Shaftesbury fell and died, Locke fled to the Netherlands for five years, where he wrote his major works. He returned in 1689 with Queen Mary II and published anonymously: A Letter Concerning Toleration argued religion was private and churches voluntary, severing faith from state power; Two Treatises of Government laid out consent-based rule and the right to revolt, shaping Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding proposed the mind as a blank slate - tabula rasa - built entirely from experience, rejecting innate ideas and founding British empiricism. He served as Commissioner of Trade, then retired ill, spending his last fourteen years in the household of Sir Francis Masham and the philosopher Lady Masham. His thinking on identity, property, and toleration runs beneath the theory and practice of limited government everywhere.