Sublime

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

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If you look at the history of professionalization of any kind, you’ll see that it tends to follow this route. In America and Europe, a great deal of professionalization occurred in the nineteenth century, when most gentlemen of breeding considered themselves amateurs at all kinds of disciplines. Go all the way back to Jefferson, who collected fossi

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For Locke, openness and intellectual interchange would help to counter the overweening influence on politics of the Church and the aristocracy. His ideas were to have a profound influence on political life in general and on the shaping of the American constitution in particular. In a way, Locke is emblematic of the deeper connection between educati

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