Locke's Influence on the Declaration of Independence

In the years leading up to the American Revolution the people of the colonies developed a political ideology that was to be the basis for revolution and for the formation of a new kind of state. The philosophy of John Locke, often referred to as "classical liberalism," was one of the primary sources on which the American Founders drew. Although many sources served their varied purposes, some of the most important and fundamental ideas in the Declaration of Independence are easily traced directly to Locke. Aside from the justification for revolution found in his work, Locke's emphasis on individual rights, his defense of property, and his notion of a social contract between government and governed were all essential parts of the emerging American ideology. After the Revolution Locke's influence continued and, in addition to these ideas, both his "doctrine of the separation of powers" and his conception of "the limitations of political power are ideas at the core of the American Constitution" (Squadrito 121). Although they were mixed with many other ingredients the basic outlines of Locke's thought have always been visible in American political thinking.

Locke's influence throughout the eighteenth century touched on a number of topics. For example, his works dealing in whole or in part with education emphasized the idea that the child began as a blank slate and the impressions made on him/her were essential to the formation of mind and character. This meant that "pare

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n noted, the ideas in the Second Treatise "were absorbed by a sort of intellectual osmosis" so that Americans could subscribe to his ideas without really being aware of it, but educated Americans, of whom Jefferson was certainly one, "derived their view of politics directly from it" (quoted in Squadrito 121). The ideas truly were 'in the air' and, while Locke's Second Treatise was enormously influential, the new political ideology, which "was never completely systematic nor always consistent, was drawn from many sources" (Bonwick 51). Among the intellectual strands from which the Americans selected what served their purposes best were the theological and moral claims of Puritanism, English common law tradition, the classical republicanism of ancient Greece and Rome as interpreted by Machiavelli and by James Harrington, "the theorist of the seventeenth-century English civil war," and varieties of economic-individualist and free-market thinking (Bonwick 51). In many ways the variety of sources was necessary because each one was needed to supplement what certain others lacked. The classical version of Republicanism, for example, conflicted with the idea of individual liberty. Since it "stressed the supremacy of the community ov

Category: Government - L