Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration

Written by John Locke

Narrated by Leighton Pugh

John Locke (1632-1704) was a product of his troubled times: he lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, Monmouth's Rebellion, the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution. His empirical thinking was very much directed at finding rational solutions to the root causes of those troubles. Considered the founder of English empiricism and a precursor of the Enlightenment, his ideas on religious toleration, human rights and limitations on governmental power may seem so normal to us now as to be common sense, so well have they been assimilated by the social psyche; but this was far from being the case when Locke proposed them. The son of a Puritan family - his father fought as a captain of cavalry in the parliamentary army in the English Civil War - Locke was educated at Westminster school and then Oxford University, where he studied medicine and natural philosophy. He became the personal physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, later the Lord Chancellor and founder of the Whig party. It was probably at Shaftesbury's behest that he produced the Two Treatises Concerning Government. He began work on these in 1679, after travelling extensively in France. But in 1683 he fled to Holland following the failed Rye House Plot, in which he was suspected of having been involved by the authorities. The Two Treatises would not be published until 1689, after the Glorious Revolution. The first treatise is essentially an in-depth critique of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, a work which argued in favour of the divine right of kings and which was much referred to in the reign of Charles II, mainly by clerics preaching from the pulpit asserting the divine right in support of the monarch. Locke systematically dismantles and invalidates every one of Filmer's assertions, dissecting his arguments one by one, invoking scriptural references in support of his counterarguments and disentangling and clarifying a host of ideas pertaining to the nature and origins of authority. In the second treatise, which is the better known, much more influential and important work, Locke suggests a different account for the origins and nature of government, referring back to the Hobbesian notion of the state of nature postulating three basic natural rights: the right to life, to liberty and to property. Section by section the philosopher examines his subject, lays out his thinking process and explains his conclusions, very different from Hobbes' ideas, articulating a series of beliefs and concepts now germane to government by liberal democracy: the separation of church and state, and of the legislative and executive powers, the doctrine of checks and balances and the labour theory of value being among them. Locke's contention that populations had the justifiable right to overthrow tyrannical governments clearly influenced Thomas Jefferson and played an important part in the American Revolution and the setting up of the Republic. A Letter Concerning Toleration, here translated by William Popple, was originally written in Latin and focuses on the problems of religion and government advocating a philosophy of tolerance among Christians as the solution, albeit with certain qualifications. These seminal Locke works are read with brio by Leighton Pugh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ukemi Audiobooks from W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781004133970

John Locke

John Locke kommt 1632 im englischen Wrington zur Welt. Nach dem Besuch der Westminster School in London studiert Locke bis 1658 in Oxford. Zwischen 1660 und 1664 lehrt er dort Philosophie, Rhetorik und alte Sprachen. Sein enzyklopädisches Wissen und seine Studien in Erkenntnistheorie, Naturwissenschaften und Medizin bringen ihm früh die Mitgliedschaft in der Royal Society ein. Als Sekretär und Leibarzt des Earl of Shaftesbury ist Locke in Folge der politischen Machtkämpfe in England gezwungen, ins holländische Exil zu fliehen. Erst 1689 kehrt er nach England zurück und widmet sich auf seinem Landgut seinen Studien. Im selben Jahr erscheint anonym Ein Brief über Toleranz, der die ausschließliche Aufgabe des Staates im Schutz von Leben, Besitz und Freiheit seiner Bürger bestimmt. Die hier formulierten Ideen finden in der amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitserklärung ihren politischen Widerhall. Lockes Hauptwerk, der Versuch über den menschlichen Verstand, erscheint erst 1690 vollständig, wird aber vermutlich bereit 20 Jahre früher begonnen. Es begründet die Erkenntnistheorie als neuzeitliche Form des Philosophierens, die besonders in der französischen Aufklärung nachwirkt. Locke lehnt darin Descartes' Vorstellung von den eingeborenen Ideen ab und vertritt einen konsequenten Empirismus. Aus der theoretischen Einsicht in die Begrenztheit der Erkenntnisfähigkeit ergibt sich für Locke die Forderung, daß sich weder ein Staatssouverän noch eine Glaubensgemeinschaft im Besitz der allein gültigen Wahrheit wähnen darf. Der mündige Bürger, der in der Lage ist, kritisch selbst zu entscheiden, wird konsequenterweise zum pädagogischen Ziel Lockes. John Locke stirbt 1704 als europäische Berühmtheit auf seinem Landsitz in Oates.