A new document has emerged that paints the father of liberalism in a less than flattering light. Here is Alison Flood at The Guardian:
John Locke is regarded today as one of England’s greatest philosophers, an Enlightenment thinker known as the “father of liberalism”. But a previously unknown memoir attributed to one of his close friends paints a different picture – of a vain, lazy and pompous man who “amused himself with trifling works of wit”, and a plagiarist who “took from others whatever he was able to take”.
Dr Felix Waldmann, a history lecturer at Cambridge, found the short memoir at the British Library while looking through the papers of 18th-century historian Thomas Birch, who had acquired a trove of manuscripts from his contemporaries. Among these were drafts of a preface to an edition of Locke’s minor works by Huguenot journalist Pierre des Maizeaux. Sandwiched between Des Maizeaux’s drafts were five pages written in French, in which the journalist had recorded an interview with an anonymised “Mr …” about Locke.
Waldmann describes the discovery as the “holy grail” of Locke scholarship: not only is the memoir scathing about Locke’s character, it also reveals that he had read Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 masterpiece Leviathan, a work that was hugely controversial at the time, and which Locke had always denied knowing. Other scholars have hailed the find as “extraordinary”.
“This changes scholarship on Locke and I was absolutely stunned to find it,” said Waldmann. “It’s extraordinarily exciting … I don’t think I’ll ever find anything as significant.”
In a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Modern History, Waldmann identifies the anonymous source as James Tyrrell, a close friend of Locke for decades. The pair met in Oxford in 1658 and corresponded for most of their lives. Locke stayed in Tyrrell’s home for several weeks, and Tyrrell took care of many of Locke’s possessions between 1683 and 1689 when the philosopher was exiled to the Netherlands.
Read the rest here.
