John Locke

 Dan Sanchez

  ·In 1683, the most dangerous man in the world escaped from England to the Netherlands.

He didn’t look very formidable. He was 51 years old, lanky, and asthmatic. He had, according to one description, a “long face, large nose, full lips, and soft, melancholy eyes.”

Yet the King of England considered him one of his deadliest enemies. He was suspected of conspiring to assassinate Charles II. But what really made him a threat to the throne was not his skill in the lethal arts, but his genius in the literary arts.

In the hands of John Locke, the pen was truly mightier than the sword.

Locke sailed out of England with a powerful weapon: one that would eventually overthrow, not just one monarch, but all of them. This weapon was a book, at that point an unpublished draft: Two Treatises of Government.

That book was a systematic philosophical case for liberty. Locke knew that his anti-absolutist book might get him killed by England’s absolute monarch. Indeed, later that year Charles II had Locke’s ally Algernon Sidney executed for treason, citing Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government as evidence.

So Locke did not publish his Treatises until 1689, the year after Charles’s successor James II was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution”—and even then, only anonymously. Locke publicly denied authorship throughout the rest of his life, only admitting it in his will. Locke died in 1704.

Later in that century, the second of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government became the political catechism of the American Revolution. Its ideas permeate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The enormously successful American experiment caused the global prestige of Locke’s ideas to soar. As Locke’s political principles were adopted throughout the world, liberty spread and absolutism receded. The ideas contained in the papers that John Locke smuggled across the water from England in 1683 turned the world upside-down: or rather, right-side-up.

Whether he knew it or not, John Locke was the most dangerous man in the world as well as the most heroic: a menace to tyrants and a liberator of generations.