This volume provides the first complete edition of the third and final surviving draft of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, dating from 1685, four years before the publication of the Essay itself (December 1689). There is a General Introduction that gives a detailed account of the content and circumstances of composition of this draft, and a Textual Introduction that provides a full description of the manuscript and its0history.

J. R. and Philip Milton present the first critical edition of John Locke's Essay concerning Toleration, based on all extant manuscripts, and other writings on law and politics composed between 1667 and 1683. It is an invaluable resource for historians of early modern philosophy, legal, political, and religious thought, and 17th century Britain.

This is the first critical edition of the literary and historical writings of John Locke : poems, orations, a plan for a play, a guide to compiling a commonplace book, rules for societies, writings on the liberty of the press, and a memoir of Locke's patron, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, all framed by general and textual introductions.

There is as yet no general agreement about exactly when Locke's Second Treatise of Government was written. Primarily as a result of Peter Laslett's arguments, the old assumption that it was written after the Revolution of 1688 has been abandoned, and it is almost universally agreed that both of the Two Treatises were written (apart from a small number of additions made in 1689) in the period between Locke's return to England from France at the end of April 1679 and (...) his departure for Holland in August 1683. An earliest possible date for the First Treatise can be established without difficulty. It cannot have been started before Filmer's Patriarcha was published in the winter of 1679-80, and probably not before Locke bought his own copy on 22 January 1680. Theories about the composition of the Second Treatise may therefore be divided into two classes: those which suppose, with Laslett, that it was begun in 1679, before Patriarcha was published, and therefore before Locke could have formed any intention of writing the First Treatise; and those which hold that it was not started until Locke had written at least the main part of the First. The second is of course the traditional view, and one that was taken for granted before Laslett's work; its most notable defender has been Richard Ashcraft, who has accepted Laslett's demolition of the 1689 dating, but has diverged from him in ascribing the Second Treatise to the period after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681. Ashcraft's criticisms of Laslett have been accepted by several recent writers, notably David Wootton, Mark Goldie and John Marshall, but they themselves have not agreed with each other or with Ashcraft in their positive claims. The whole question is therefore worth examining again. (shrink)

J. R. and Philip Milton present the first critical edition of John Locke's Essay concerning Toleration, based on all extant manuscripts, and a number of other writings on law and politics composed between 1667 and 1683. Although Locke never published any of these works himself they are of very great interest for students of his intellectual development because they are markedly different from the early works he wrote while at Oxford and show him working out ideas that were to (...) appear in his mature political writings, the Two Treatises of Government and the Epistola de Tolerantia. With authoritative contextual guidance from the editors, this will be an invaluable resource for all historians of early modern philosophy, of legal, political, and religious thought, and of 17th century Britain. (shrink)

J. R. and Philip Milton present the first critical edition of John Locke's Essay concerning Toleration, based on all extant manuscripts, and a number of other writings on law and politics composed between 1667 and 1683. Although Locke never published any of these works himself they are of very great interest for students of his intellectual development because they are markedly different from the early works he wrote while at Oxford and show him working out ideas that were to (...) appear in his mature political writings, the Two Treatises of Government and the Epistola de Tolerantia. With authoritative contextual guidance from the editors, this will be an invaluable resource for all historians of early modern philosophy, of legal, political, and religious thought, and of 17th century Britain. (shrink)

John Locke's earliest significant publications appeared between 1686 and 1688 in the Bibliothèque universelle et historique. They were a translation of his New Method of a Commonplace Book, an abridgment of his (as yet unpublished) Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and two reviews, of a medical work by Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton's Principia. It is likely that he contributed some other book reviews, but these cannot now be identified. An examination of surviving copies of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique shows (...) that it had a very complicated printing history, and both the volumes (tom. 2 and tom. 8) that certainly contain items by Locke were reprinted on several occasions, in some cases in editions that probably have false dates and imprints. Though this article concentrates mainly on the two volumes known to contain material by Locke, a preliminary survey of entire printing history of the journal has also been made, with the results presented in tabular form in Appendix I. (shrink)

Two early drafts of the Essay have survived, one in the commonplace book Adversaria 1661, and the other in loose gatherings of leaves subsequently bound together into one volume by the Bodleian Library. Though both works were given titles by John Locke, they are now invariably known as Draft A and Draft B. Both manuscripts are in Locke's hand. Locke seems to have been doing further work on the Essay while in France. Draft C is very different from Drafts A (...) and B in one important respect. They are true drafts, written in Locke's own hand. The broad organization of Draft C is very similar to that of the published Essay, both (unlike Drafts A and B) being divided into books and chapters. The Abrégé covered all four books of the Essay, though Book Four was summarized briefly in a single paragraph. (shrink)