which are an inalienable right, are regarded as criminal. Indeed, in such circumstances, the anger of the mob is usually the greatest tyrant of all.”27
His advice for dealing with populists and their adherents reads well today: elites should get over their snobbish notion that the hoi polloi are ignorant and unfit to judge what is good for the polity or themselves. “[E]veryone shares a common nature,” he asserted, suggesting that elitism was a dubious category, especially if the intellectual class determined what was good for the “inferiors.”28
In this regard, Spinoza was wary of his own profession. If his fellow philosophers in their cloisters continued to extol cool reason and dismiss the passions of the crowds on the streets, as was their wont, they would stir up resentment and incite demagoguery. To avert that, he put the onus on government and the elites themselves. In their civic roles, they should study the people’s lives and needs.
Spinoza’s quest took him to a distant, lonely corner of the philosophical universe in a relatively short life. He died at the age of forty-four, about the average lifespan of a seventeenth-century European.29 In death, he would become part of God/Nature. A passage from the Ethics serves as a fitting epitaph: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is to meditate not on death but on life.”30 It took several generations for Spinoza to be widely rediscovered, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, in some cases, reinterpreted for purposes that would be alien to his philosophy.31
John Locke was born the same year as Spinoza and shared fundamental beliefs with this bold outsider, notably the inalienable rights of all human beings, including the right to rebel against tyranny. However, Locke was a proper Anglican. He welcomed the patronage of aristocrats, who, in turn, might have looked dubiously on his work had they known Locke was influenced by a renegade Jew with a reputation as a pagan.32
While Spinoza was a shooting star in the firmament of the Enlightenment, Locke’s ascent started gradually. After studying medicine at Oxford, Locke entered an upper-class medical practice before turning to epistemology and political philosophy. He wrote slowly, meticulously, and prolifically. And because of the dangerous Stuart reign, with its entangled power plays between Crown and Parliament and between Protestantism and a revived Catholicism, he wrote discreetly, encrypting his notes and hiding manuscripts in a secret compartment of his desk. Such precautions did not, however, remove him from suspicions that he was plotting against the Crown, so Locke slipped off to Holland, the most liberal nation in Europe.
Algernon Sidney, a reformist parliamentarian and political theorist, was protesting the divine right of kings, much as Locke made that case in the same period. But Sidney was less discreet and fortunate. In 1683 he was accused of conspiring to assassinate Charles II. He was arrested, and a draft of his treatise justifying revolution was confiscated.33 Sentencing Sidney to death, the presiding judge proclaimed “Scribere est agere” (To write is to act). Sidney’s response from the scaffold resonates today: “We live in an age that makes truth pass for treason.”
Locke’s self-exile in his fifties could have been an anticlimax to what seemed a middling career: a lapsed physician turned into a brilliant but skittish philosopher. Most of the evidence of his genius was in his head or squirreled away. As he contemplated old age, he saw little chance of returning to England, nor could he be sure that several projects he had been working on for nearly two decades would ever be read. Although he was sufficiently comfortable and safe, he seemed unmoored, spending time “much in my chamber alone,” sitting by a fire, reading, and corresponding with friends in a homeland he might never see again.34 And though he returned to medicine, his passion would always remain the study of the mind.
When Charles II died in 1685, the Crown passed to his stunningly inept brother, James II, who wasted no time making powerful enemies. He raised suspicions that he intended to roll back Parliament’s hard-won prerogatives, infuriated the Anglican establishment by promoting his fellow Catholics to high posts, and sidled up to Britain’s archrival, France. After four tumultuous years, James was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter, Mary, keeping the Stuart dynasty on the throne. Mary, in turn, insisted that her husband, William of Orange, join her as co-monarch, adding to his status as stadholder (effectively, chief executive and commander of five Dutch Republic provinces) the title King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
Convoluted as this maneuver was, the reigning couple brought to English politics a measure of stability and liberalism—two trends that do not always come in tandem. It was now possible for Locke to return home and publish his books.
In his masterwork, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejected the concept of “native ideas” stamped “upon [our] minds, in their very first being.”35 The mind at birth is a tabula rasa, he believed—a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”36
Rationality, he concluded, was an innate human faculty that produces ideas as we accumulate knowledge through experience: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”37 By studying our environment and exercising rationality in our own lives, we gain the capacity and incentive to form ideas on how to cope with the opportunities and challenges of life.38
Locke, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that happiness—or at least an environment in which it could be pursued—was a perquisite for an enlightened polity and society. “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles, which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing: These may be observ’d in all Persons and all Ages, steady and universal.”39
In present-day English, happiness usually carries the connotation of personal good fortune or contentment, fleeting or otherwise. But, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers gave it added moral weight. Happiness should be the result of altruism and empathy. A worthy person should care for the happiness of others, and an enlightened government should care for the collective happiness and prosperity of society as a whole.
Locke had been revising the Essay for almost a decade before he launched into Two Treatises of Government. It would not be published until 1689 and even then, anonymously. Despite growing tolerance following the Glorious Revolution, Locke knew his ideas were ahead of his time and therefore dangerous.
The Two Treatises was a model social contract between the governors and the governed. He considered rationality, tolerance, and happiness critical for both. Whether surveying the world around us or probing inward to understand our minds, we are each a monarch unto ourselves, entitled to personal liberty in thought, belief, persuasion, religion, and speech.40
Locke denounced “received doctrines” such as the divine right of kings. He asserted that all individuals are free—and, moreover, obligated—to use their wits to understand the world and cope with it ethically.
Locke, Hobbes, and Spinoza believed that, in nature, there was no such thing as right or wrong, virtue or sin. It was incumbent upon the state to set rules and to enforce them with punishment or reward. Hobbes did not trust the Leviathan’s subjects to have leverage over their government, whereas Locke (like Spinoza) insisted the opposite. Hobbes believed an authoritarian regime would, inevitably, repress its subjects, whereas an enlightened government would respect the inborn, inherent rights of its citizens: “Being all equal and independent,
