Thinkers

John Locke

British Empiricism · Europe · 1632 to 1704

English thinker who argued that the mind starts blank and that knowledge is built from experience, and who defended natural rights.

What it is

John Locke (1632 to 1704) was an English philosopher and political thinker who argued that all our ideas come from experience and that a government is legitimate only when it protects the natural rights of the people it governs and keeps within limited powers. He is often regarded as the founder of British empiricism, and his ideas about government and religious toleration helped shape modern liberal politics.

He spent years at Oxford, where he studied medicine and natural science as well as philosophy. In 1666 or 1667 he joined the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, and that connection drew him into politics. After Shaftesbury's death Locke fled to the Netherlands to escape political persecution. He returned to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and published his two best-known works the next year.

The main ideas

• All ideas come from experience. In the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke argues that we have no innate knowledge. The mind at birth is something like a blank slate, and in the second book he argues that all our ideas come from experience. The phrase is easy to misread: it does not mean the mind is nothing before experience, only that experience supplies what it works on.
• What we can know. The Essay is an inquiry into the limits of human understanding. Locke describes knowledge as a special kind of relation between ideas, and he tries to show what we can claim to know and what we cannot.
• Qualities and identity. Locke separates the primary qualities of things, such as shape and size, from secondary qualities such as colour, and he gives an influential account of what makes a person the same person over time.
• Government by consent. In the Two Treatises of Government he holds that authority rests with the people. A government has obligations to its citizens and only limited powers over them, based on natural rights and a social contract, and citizens can in the end overthrow it under certain circumstances.
• Toleration. In his Letter Concerning Toleration he argues for religious toleration and for separating the work of the church from the work of the state.
• Think for yourself. Across his work Locke asks each person to use their own reason to seek truth, not to accept an authority's word or give in to superstition, and to hold beliefs in proportion to the evidence.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who has been told, all their life, that a certain thing is simply known to be true. A Lockean question is: where did this idea come from, and what experience or evidence stands behind it? If the answer is only that everyone says so, the belief deserves less weight than it has been given. The same test applies to power. When an institution says it may do something to you, the question is what it was given the right to do, and by whom.

Books and moments

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is his major work on knowledge and the mind.
• Two Treatises of Government was published in 1689, though the views in it had been formed years earlier.
• A Letter Concerning Toleration also appeared in 1689 and had been written several years before.

Questions and criticism

• Is there really no innate knowledge? Descartes and Leibniz held that the mind has ideas or truths of its own, and the dispute with Locke's side of the argument is one of the oldest in modern philosophy.
• Can consent alone justify government? It is fair to ask what counts as consent from people who never chose the state they were born into, and where the limits of the people's right to resist should fall.
• What makes a person the same person? His account of identity has been admired and criticised ever since. Whether memory and consciousness are enough is still debated.

Close neighbours

Locke is usually named first among the British empiricists, with Berkeley and Hume. Like them, and unlike Descartes and Leibniz, he rejects innate knowledge. In politics he is a source of the liberal tradition of consent and limited government.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Philosophies they belong to or are close to

• Humean empiricism and skepticism
• Liberalism
• Libertarianism

Who they connect to

Influenced

• Earl of Shaftesbury · Locke tutored him as a boy, though he later reacted against Locke's account of the mind.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Rousseau's educational and political writings respond to Locke's.
• Mary Wollstonecraft · Wollstonecraft's views on education and reason draw on Locke.
• Montesquieu · He praised the English system of liberty that Locke's ideas helped to shape. (scholars disagree about this link)
• Thomas Paine · He took up Locke's view that government rests on consent and protects natural rights.
• Thomas Reid · Reid started from Locke's questions about ideas before rejecting the answer.
• Voltaire · Voltaire's Letters on the English praised Locke and brought his ideas to French readers.

Influenced by

• Francis Bacon · Locke followed Bacon in building knowledge from observation and experiment.
• Hugo Grotius · Locke drew on his natural-law writing when he described rights and government. (scholars disagree about this link)
• Ibn Tufayl · An English translation of Ibn Tufayl's story circulated in Locke's day, and some see a link with his blank-slate mind. (scholars disagree about this link)

Reacted against

• René Descartes · Locke rejected innate ideas.
• Thomas Hobbes · Locke argued for limited government and natural rights against an absolute sovereign. (scholars disagree about this link)

Reacted against by

• Derek Parfit · Parfit developed his puzzle cases as a challenge to Locke's memory account of identity.
• George Berkeley · Berkeley attacked Locke's idea of matter as a substance beyond experience.
• Mary Astell · She questioned the way Locke's theory of consent left women under a husband's rule.

Runs parallel to

• Zera Yacob · Both defend the natural light of reason and religious tolerance. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other British Empiricism thinkers

• Francis Bacon · 1561 to 1626
• Bernard Mandeville · 1670 to 1733
• Earl of Shaftesbury · 1671 to 1713
• George Berkeley · 1685 to 1753
• Joseph Butler · 1692 to 1752
• David Hume · 1711 to 1776

Sources we used

• John Locke · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
• John Locke · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026