John Locke

John Locke recurs across Kyle’s notes as the Enlightenment theorist of natural rights whose ideas are “tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence.” In Why You’re Christian, Locke is the linchpin of the argument that Western law and human rights rest on Christianity, not just the Enlightenment: his theory of natural rights “assumes God owns us,” so “human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted.” The piece pairs him with John Adams’s claim that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People.”

In The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, Locke appears as a leader of the Republic of Letters — the Enlightenment milieu of Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson — and as the author of the Second Treatise, where he argued humans create private property by mixing their labor with nature, subject to the famous Lockean Proviso: only “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” He is also grouped among the Deist-leaning thinkers of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason.

Context: John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher and physician, a founding figure of empiricism and classical liberalism. His Two Treatises of Government and theory of natural rights (life, liberty, property) heavily influenced the American founders and the Declaration of Independence.

Where this appears

• Why You’re Christian — his natural-rights theory is used to argue that human equality presupposes a God-given grounding, not pure Enlightenment reason
• The Greatest Sentence Ever Written — cited as a Republic-of-Letters leader and author of the Second Treatise / Lockean Proviso on private property