Sublime

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

l’intervention de John Millar, défenseur de premier plan des Lumières écossaises, est particulièrement incisive : « Il est étrange que les mêmes individus qui parlent avec un style raffiné de liberté politique et qui considèrent comme l’un des droits inaliénables de l’humanité le droit d’imposer des taxes, n’aient aucun scrupule à réduire une grand

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) is the apostle of the Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions.

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror