Locke

Revolutionises our understanding of Hobbes's influence over Locke and their roles within the history of religious freedom and liberalism.

Locke's Education for Liberty presents an analysis of the crucial but often underestimated place of education and the family within Lockean liberalism. Nathan Tarcov shows that Locke's neglected work Some Thoughts Concerning Education compares with Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile as a treatise on education embodying a comprehensive vision of moral and social life. Locke believed that the family can be the agency, not the enemy, of individual liberty and equality. Tarcov's superb reevaluation reveals to the modern reader a breadth and unity heretofore unrecognized in Locke's thought.

In John Locke's Theology: An Ecumenical, Irenic, and Controversial Project, Jonathan S. Marko offers the closest work available to a theological system derived from the writings of John Locke. Marko argues that Locke's intent for The Reasonableness of Christianity, his most noted theological work, was to describe and defend his version of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity and not his personal theological views. Locke, Marko says, intended the work to be an ecumenical and irenic project during a controversial time in philosophy and theology. Locke described what qualifies someone as a Christian in simple and irenic terms, and argued for the necessity of Scripture and the reasonableness of God's means of conveying his authoritative messages. The Reasonableness of Christianity could be construed as personal, but mainly in the sense that it puts the burden of understanding Scripture and arriving at theological convictions on the autonomous individual, rejecting the notion that one should base one's doctrinal opinions on so-called authorities. His work was inadvertently controversial partly because then, like today, readers typically failed to make a distinction between Locke's personal and programmatic positions. Marko also points to places in Locke's corpus where he avoids advocating for a particular sectarian position in his treatment of theological doctrines. What is more, it shows why attempting to categorize Locke--a philosopher, theologian, and political scientist all at once--according to traditional Christian paradigms is a dangerous misstep and a difficult scholarly feat.

John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a classic text, which laid out the basic principles of the Empiricism that was to characterise British Philosophy for centuries to come. This work explains the philosophical background against which the book was written and the key themes inherent in the text.

Moving beyond previous scholarship, he gives us a Locke as much concerned with the effective functioning of government as with the roots of its moral legitimacy."--BOOK JACKET.

The canonical image of John Locke as one of the first philosophes is so deeply engrained that we could forget that he belonged to a very different historico-political context. His influence on Enlightenment thought, not least that of his theories of political liberty, has been the subject of widespread debate. In Locke's political liberty: readings and misreadings a team of renowned international scholars re-evaluates Locke's heritage in the eighteenth century and the ways it was used. Moving beyond reductive conceptions of Locke as either central or peripheral to the development of Enlightenment thought, historians and philosophers explore how his writings are invoked, exploited or distorted in eighteenth-century reflections on liberty. Analyses of his reception in England and France bring out underlying conceptual differences between the two nations, and extend an ongoing debate about the difficulty of characterising national political epistemologies. The traditional Anglocentric view of Locke and his influence is demystified, and what emerges is a new, more diverse vision of the reception of his political thinking throughout Europe. Of interest to political philosophers and historians, Locke's political liberty: readings and misreadings reveals how the issues identified by Locke recur in our own debates about difference, identity and property - his work is as resonant today as it has ever been.