It is time to reassess the impact of John Locke (1632-1704) on eighteenth-century Anglophone political thought. This reset edition provides the primary materials for new interpretations. It shows the salience of Locke's presence in the age of the American and French Revolutions, reprinting some of the leading documents in which Locke's authority was claimed both for and against the American rebels. Josiah Tucker's massive attack on Locke in 1781 is included here, together with a series of ensuing assaults upon, and defences of, 'Mr Locke's democratical system'.In these volumes can be traced the manner in which Locke became both the 'idol' of the Whig Settlement of 1689 and the key to unravel that settlement in the name of radical populism: a Locke made safe for Whig gentlemen, as well as a Locke who, in Mary Astell's words of 1706, prompted the question, 'If all men are born free, how is that all women are born slaves?', and a Locke who, in the hands of the socialist Thomas Hodgskin in 1832, stood up for the rights of the oppressed labouring man. In these six volumes Locke is debated across a gamut of genres: in formal treatises, polemical pamphlets, newspaper essays, political sermons, and cheap tracts aimed at politicizing the masses.
The Reception of Locke's Politics Set : From the 1690s to The 1830s