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Leighton Library has 1740 edition of "A letter concerning toleration" by John Locke
Added at 08:20 on 29 August 2025
The Leighton Library has a 1740 edition of "A letter concerning toleration" the first work of English philosopher and physician known as the "Father of Liberalism" John Locke who was born #OnThisDay 29 August 1632, in whose memory today is also #IndividualRightsDay.
Originally written in 1685 (in Latin as Epistola de Tolerantia) and first published in 1689, Locke’s letter argued that civil government should not interfere in matters of religion, and that religious groups should not wield political power.
In 1740, when Europe was deep into Enlightenment discourse, the reissue of Locke’s work aligned with growing calls for religious pluralism, especially in Britain and its colonies, where dissenting Protestant groups were still navigating legal and social restrictions. Locke’s ideas were foundational to American colonial political thought. This book would have circulated among intellectuals who would later shape revolutionary discourse in the 1760s and beyond.
His work was important to social contract theory, and greatly affected development of epistemology and political philosophy. His theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, postulating that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.
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