In this episode, we explore the relationship between John Locke's philosophical arguments and the American Revolution, specifically how Locke influenced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence.
TranscriptKyle Chattleton: This is Mountaintop History, a podcast produced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
Olivia Brown: Mountaintop History brings forward meaningful stories from this historic home and plantation — from the past and from the present.
Kyle Chattleton: My name is Kyle Chattleton.
Olivia Brown: And I'm Olivia Brown.
Kyle Chattleton: Thank you for joining us. We hope you'll learn something new.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This sentence comes from the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, a document which was approved in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, by members of the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration marked not only a bold announcement of a new and independent nation, the United States of America, but also served as a declaration of the ideas upon which the nation would be founded.
Today, we know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration, which was then subsequently revised by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other members of the Continental Congress. But where did these words, phrases, and ideas originally come from? Put another way, were Jefferson and his colleagues the first to have these thoughts?
The answer was no. According to Jefferson, he wrote the Declaration of Independence “not to find out new principles, or arguments, never before thought of […] but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; […] it was intended to be an expression of the american mind.”
When historians study this document from the United States’ past today, they largely agree with Jefferson’s view. Jefferson and his colleagues were well aware of other documents like, for example, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted in June of 1776. That text declares: “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights […] namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” These words will no doubt sound familiar when compared to Jefferson’s Declaration.
Both of these documents — the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence —, as well as numerous state constitutions, Revolutionary-era pamphlets, and the “american mind” as Jefferson put it, were heavily influenced by a period in history called the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment, roughly speaking, was centered in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and its central ideas were expressed by various philosophers and scientists like Voltaire, David Hume, Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Montesquieu. Enlightenment thinkers broadly understood that knowledge and reasoning could lead to human progress. One of these thinkers, who had an impact on Americans like Thomas Jefferson and George Mason was an English physician and philosopher named John Locke. In fact, Jefferson considered Locke to be among the “greatest men that ever lived.”
John Locke was born in Somerset, England on August 29, 1632. The time in which he lived was, according to scholar William Uzgalis, “One of the most extraordinary centuries of English political and intellectual history.” Locke witnessed the English Civil War, the defeat (and beheading) of King Charles I, and the overthrow of the monarchy, the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell, the return of the monarchy with Charles II, as well as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the era of William and Mary.
Locke was born in a Puritan household. He received an excellent education for the period due to his father’s connections. He went to Westminster School in London, and then, at age 20, enrolled at Oxford University. Locke, however, was unimpressed with the school’s emphasis on classical texts, authors, and methodologies, and over time, instead was drawn to more recent scholarship and ideas from Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, John Wilkins, Rene Descartes, and others.
After studying medicine while at Oxford, Locke became an assistant and physician to Lord Ashley, a powerful politician living in London. Locke’s work as a medical doctor would have a considerable impact in England. According to Uzgalis:
“Locke used his medical training to organize a successful operation on Ashley. This was perhaps the most carefully documented operation in the 17th century. Locke consulted doctors across the country to determine what the best practices were for this operation and made cleanliness a priority. In doing so he saved his patron’s life and thus changed English history.”
Locke’s life took many exciting turns. He traveled to France to practice medicine. He became involved in English politics. It was suspected that he was part of the Rye House Plot, a conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II; this led to Locke fleeing to Holland in exile.
And when he returned to England in 1688, he began publishing philosophical texts that he had been composing over many years. These included his Two Treatises of Government, and the Second Treatise would profoundly affect the American Revolution almost one hundred years later.
In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke expanded upon two ideas that had already been circulating among philosophers: the idea of natural rights and of the social contract or compact. Locke argued that, as human beings in the natural world, we all have certain natural rights, and that the laws of nature demand that other people do not deprive us of those rights. He explained:
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind […] no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. […] And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind.”
This sentiment is later found in the Declaration of Independence, with ideas like, “all men are created equal” with rights that are “unalienable” and cannot be taken away, and that these rights include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Locke was not the first philosopher to argue for the existence of natural rights, but that is not all that Locke argued for in his Treatise. Locke continued by explaining that as people develop communities and greater societies, they will entrust one another with preserving those natural rights. They will, in other words, create governments, and therefore task others to write laws, enforce those laws, and remedy injustice. As a consequence, people willingly surrender aspects of their freedom to others, such as legislators, police officers, and judges. In philosophy, this is often referred to as the social contract, an agreement between the general public and those imbued with authority and power.
Decades earlier, Thomas Hobbes, another English philosopher, believed that social contract theory justified the existence of an absolute monarchy — an individual entrusted with total, unquestioned power. But Locke argued against Hobbes, and in the process won the hearts and minds of individuals like Thomas Jefferson a century later. Locke explained that within society, power and authority were given by consent from the people to their leaders:
“The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.”
Locke concluded that, if a government has acted against the social contract, the people had the right to replace the government with a new one:
“Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security.”
Once more, we can find Locke’s influence in the text of the Declaration of Independence. The most famous line from the Declaration was only the beginning of a thought which ultimately channeled Locke’s arguments on natural rights and the social contract:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Locke published his Second Treatise of Government anonymously, and during his final years he would serve on the English Board of Trade. It was the government body directly responsible with overseeing the British American colonies. Little did he know that decades later, the actions of the English government would lead those same colonies to dramatically break from that form of government and announce the creation of a new one, inspired by the words and ideas that Locke wrote down.
Olivia Brown: This has been another episode of Mountaintop History, a collaboration podcast between WTJU and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Kyle Chattleton: Join us for new episodes every two weeks on Apple and Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and the Virginia Audio Collective.
Olivia Brown: To learn more about Monticello or to plan your next trip, visit us online at Monticello.org.