John Locke

John Locke was born in Somerset in 1632; his father, a lawyer, fought on the side of Parliament in the Civil War. He studied philosophy and medicine at Oxford and became physician, secretary and friend to the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs, which drew him into politics. In 1683, implicated in plots against the king, he fled into exile in Holland. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he returned to England with the new Queen Mary, and within a year published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, becoming at once the most influential thinker in Europe. He is called the father of liberalism, and many ideas of the American Declaration of Independence come from him.