Brief biography: John Locke (1632-1704)

[The_Sonarman]

Brief biography: John Locke (1632-1704)

John Locke's influence on modern views of liberty is profound, including providing much of the philosophical influence for the American Revolution.
http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/00sep_oct/liberaltradition.html

[DesertFox]

IMO Locke was the Man of the Millennium. He arrived at his insights after years and years of thought, hard work, and watching the British system evolve. He invented the arguments in favor of the concept of rights and extended them to every single individual. An intellectual, he nevertheless understood that even the stinkiest, most repulsive person has to have the same rights as the handsomest, most elegant person, if anyone is to have any rights at all.

This is complex stuff. Locke was the one who came up with the "labor theory of value" that Marx incorporated into his vicious social scheme. Marx literally took the argument out of context, since it was presented in Locke's 2-volume work on property, in which he concluded that private property is the basis of all rights and functioning courts are the only way to ensure the contracts that underlay private ownership of property.

But for Locke, 1776 would never have meant what it did and America would never have become what it did.