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John Locke: Life, Liberty, & Property
An Examination of Locke’s Key Argument
Locke was an important British philosopher of the 17th century. He contributed to
- our understanding of human nature (tabula rasa or “blank slate”),
- the study of knowledge (empirical method), and
- politics (large influence on the American Declaration of independence, its French counterpart Declaration of Rights of Man, and classical liberalism).
His influence is hard to underplay. In this blog post I will cover one of his key arguments for Life, Liberty, and Property.
Brief Housekeeping
Before I get into that … I will quickly do some housekeeping. I wanted to start a brief series about political philosophy covering key arguments of thinkers from John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and many more.
I realize that a lot of work has already been done on these thinkers but I thought that Medium might need a little bit of a boost of political philosophy, so why not?
This series will be very short, however, and will seek to cover each thinker within 500 words. Let me know in the comments whether you find these beneficial!
So, let’s get into one of Locke’s most famous works, his Second Treatise of Government.
Life, Liberty, and Property
In order for Locke’s argument for life, liberty, and property in his Second Treatise of Government to be valid, he must first establish a number of premises.
Most importantly, he must validate that citizens naturally deserve the rights of life, liberty, and property, which is by no means a self-evident point as his writing suggests. If these rights are not self-evident and primarily upheld by states, as Hannah Arendt later argued, then his argument for life, liberty, and property falls apart.
Not only does Locke need to assume that these rights are natural and self-evident, but he must also defend our ability to reason about these…
