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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

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Amendments 9 and 10 maybe. Not saying I approved of Locke, however.

I suppose all of the first ten amendments were limitations on government.

Got to put all that stuff in historical context, Vincent. In those days the big concern was 'negative freedoms' - that is, 'freedoms from - ' (the King, any central government; any over-controlling powers). Thomas Hobbes, in 'Leviathan', painted a picture of a horrifying world in which humans were just an inch away from that Nature, which was 'red in tooth and claw', and in which life was indeed 'nasty, brutish and short' - and that was the instant result should human control (of the State over other humans; of individual humans over themselves) once falter. For his time, though, Locke was an optimist - a righty-on hippy by today's standards. He articulated the idea that if you just leave people to do their stuff - intelligently, creatively - things will be fine. Natch, he was thinking of the nascent middle class and not the plebs - because such was how social-class- thinking ran at the time. Bottom line: Hobbes had a pessimistic view of human nature; Locke did not. It was a big difference. The USA's constitution was built much more on Locke's sort of thinking than that of Hobbes - and that was quite a radical thing for the day. To the Brits of the 18th C you Septic Tanks were a bunch of hippy radicals in the way you carved out your country, in short. Something very much to be proud of, I'd say.

You describe the difference between the two men much better than I did, Peon, but keep in mind Locke was a slave trader, or owned a piece of a slave trading company. Furthermore, you lot ran about grabbing the poor and destitute off the streets of London and impressed them into contractual servitude and shipped them off to Virginia and New England. I find little to cheer for there by my standards. [:D]

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

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Amendments 9 and 10 maybe. Not saying I approved of Locke, however.

I suppose all of the first ten amendments were limitations on government.

Got to put all that stuff in historical context, Vincent. In those days the big concern was 'negative freedoms' - that is, 'freedoms from - ' (the King, any central government; any over-controlling powers). Thomas Hobbes, in 'Leviathan', painted a picture of a horrifying world in which humans were just an inch away from that Nature, which was 'red in tooth and claw', and in which life was indeed 'nasty, brutish and short' - and that was the instant result should human control (of the State over other humans; of individual humans over themselves) once falter. For his time, though, Locke was an optimist - a righty-on hippy by today's standards. He articulated the idea that if you just leave people to do their stuff - intelligently, creatively - things will be fine. Natch, he was thinking of the nascent middle class and not the plebs - because such was how social-class- thinking ran at the time. Bottom line: Hobbes had a pessimistic view of human nature; Locke did not. It was a big difference. The USA's constitution was built much more on Locke's sort of thinking than that of Hobbes - and that was quite a radical thing for the day. To the Brits of the 18th C you Septic Tanks were a bunch of hippy radicals in the way you carved out your country, in short. Something very much to be proud of, I'd say.

You describe the difference between the two men much better than I did, Peon, but keep in mind Locke was a slave trader, or owned a piece of a slave trading company. Furthermore, you lot ran about grabbing the poor and destitute off the streets of London and impressed them into contractual servitude and shipped them off to Virginia and New England. I find little to cheer for there by my standards. [:D]

Lordy, people don't get what the phrase 'social class' meant and why it came into being. They could see that all humans *were* human and couldn't be seen as a different species. Nonetheless there needed to be 'categories of humans', arranged in a hierarchy. The working class were worth far less than 'persons of quality'; black people were as close as you could get to a different species. This is one reason why Marx was so contemptuous of the 'bourgeois' and its aspirations. Locke was thoughtful and considerate about *proper people* - not their 'inferiors'.