John Locke: Selected Correspondence

by Goldie, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780199204304
• ISBN10: 0199204306
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-04-12
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

John Locke (1632-1704) was a prolific correspondent and left behind him over 3,600 letters, a collection almost unmatched in pre-modern times. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide social connections, his letters open up the cultural, social, intellectual, and political worlds of the later Stuart age. Spanning half a century, they mark the transition from the era of revolutionary Puritanism to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Locke is chiefly known as a philosopher, a theorist of empiricism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a theorist of liberalism in his Two Treatises of Government, and a theorist of religious toleration in his Letter concerning Toleration. But his interests extended further still, to education, medicine, finance, theology, empire, and the natural world. He was a Fellow of the early Royal Society. He received letters from scholars in Paris and Amsterdam, from colonial administrators in Virginia, from aristocrats and shopkeepers, from children, from tenants, from politicians, from philosophic women, from astronomers, chemists, and physicists. He is one of the first people whose correspondence is as far flung as North America, India, and China. A friend of Anglican archbishops and of freethinking anticlericals, of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, of William Molyneux the "virtuoso" of Dublin, of Jean LeClerc of Amsterdam, and of Damaris Masham, Locke stood in the midst of the "Republic of Letters". This book brings together 245 of the most important and revealing letters. Half of them are letters written by Locke (twelve per cent of the total number surviving), the other half are letters written to him. If Locke's place is already secure among those who explore philosophy and political ideas, these letters will give Locke a new presence among those who are interested in the social and cultural worlds of seventeenth-century Britain.

Table of Contents

Introduction Note on the text Chronology Letters

Revolutionary England, 1656-1660

Restoration Oxford and the Embassy to Cleves, 1660-1666

Lord Ashley's Servant and the 'New World', 1667-1675

France, 1675-1679

Popery and Arbitrary Power, 1679-1683

Exile in Holland, 1683-1688

The Glorious Revolution, 1688-1689

Government and the Law of Nature, 1690-1692

Philosophy and Correction, 1692-1694

Civility and Superstition, 1694-1695

Coinage and Commerce, 1695-1696

Reasonable Christianity, 1696-1697

Divinity and Ireland, 1697-1698

Manners and Americans, 1699-1701

Politics Revived, 1701-1703

Recessional, 1703-1704

Biographical register of correspondents

Further reading

Checklist of letters selected

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.