Early Modern · 1632–1704
Locke
Their big question
“Is the mind a blank slate at birth?”
John Locke argued that we're born with minds like a blank slate — we know nothing until experience writes on it through our senses. Everything we understand, he said, ultimately comes from what we see, hear, touch, and feel. He also argued that all people are born with natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”
The big idea
Locke was a leading empiricist: the mind starts empty (‘tabula rasa’) and all knowledge is built from sensory experience — there are no ‘innate’ ideas we're born knowing. In politics, he argued that governments get their authority from the consent of the people and exist to protect everyone's natural rights.
Why it matters
He's a founder of modern empiricism and of liberal democracy. His idea that people have rights a government cannot take away — and may overthrow a government that violates them — directly inspired the American and French Revolutions.
The big argument
Critics ask whether the mind is really a total blank slate. And although Locke championed liberty, he invested in the slave trade and helped write rules for a slave-holding colony — a glaring contradiction historians still debate.
In their own words
- “The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.” — John Locke
- “Where there is no law, there is no freedom.” — John Locke
🤯 Fun fact
Locke's ideas about rights and government were echoed almost word-for-word in the American Declaration of Independence.
Learn more
Portrait: Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller. Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons.
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