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.
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