Both John Locke and Pierre Bayle were very much children - and philosophers - of the Enlightenment, being most intensely interested not with the rights of kings but with the rights - and liberties - of individual citizens. While the philosophical importance of both Locke and Bayle cannot be over-stated, it should also be emphasized that their writings were also very much the natural result of ideas that were in fairly wide circulation at the time - ideas that were the natural outgrowth of historical occurrences as each responded to the broader world that the Enlightenment was giving birth to.
Locke - as he argues in his Second Treatise of Government - turned away from the central problems of the 17th-century political philosopher, which was the question of how a monarch could most effectively ensure internal order and protect national sovereignty. But by the time that Locke was writing the winds of revolution were blowing hot and unquenchable: Even by the end of the 17th century Locke made it clear that he understood that the lessening power monarchies to which he was a witness was an historical and political vector that will not be reversed. The question for the political philosopher in the 18th century was not how the king might keep his power but how the people might find theirs.
The centrality of Locke's political argument that monarchs did not in fact have a divine right to rule but rather that each individual had an inalienable and innate right to freedom and equality and because of this each individual had the right to participate in the governance of his or her (although perhaps Locke might have excluded women). However, Locke argued that two groups of people should certainly be excluded from this social contract to which all others belonged: Catholics and atheists. Locke argued that these two groups should be excluded from the social contract to which all Protestants must join themselves because no social contract could...