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Articles

Will the Real John Locke Please Step Forward?

Hilarius Bogbinder shows how Locke’s intellectual identity changed over time.

“In the beginning, all the world was America”
(John Locke, Second Treatise, Para 49).

There is an almost theological sense of poetic sensitivity in this line by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Certainly, there are many who link the English empirical philosopher with the New World. Merle Curti, a historian of intellectual thought, perhaps summed up the majority view when he called Locke ‘America’s Philosopher’ (The Great John Locke, p.107, 1937).

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