John Locke Pack: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration - John Locke

Written by John Locke
Read by Leighton Pugh
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.

In these respects, one might think of Locke (1632-1704) as preparing the way for the 18th century, though An Essay Concerning Human Understanding dates from 1690. In the essay he remarks that he was ‘employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’. Everywhere, Locke’s 18th-century readers included learned philosophers, educators, historians and political thinkers but also local community and political leaders, students and many others eager to take advantage of the expanding world of print culture that was a central part of the Enlightenment.

Today, Locke remains an accessible author whose essay can still be listened to with pleasure by an engaged public around the world. Some will listen to his work to know more about the beginnings of the modern era; others will seek arguments to be used in present-day debates.

This recording presents An Essay unabridged. It is prefaced by an informative introduction (written for the Wordsworth Edition) by Mark G. Spencer, who explains: ‘The starting point for much of Locke’s philosophy was his keenness to explore how it was that humans arrived at their knowledge of the world. What do humans know? How do they know what they know?’ Or, as Locke himself puts it in his opening section, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, his purpose was to ‘examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.’ And it remains an approachable text, for, as Spencer points out, Locke’s ‘intended reading audience was not one of scholars and philosophers shut up in their closets’ but the ordinary man.’

The essay is divided into four books: Part 1: Of Innate Notions, Of Ideas, Of Words; and Part 2: Of Knowledge and Probability.

Leighton Pugh reads with clarity and vigour.

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Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration

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.