Abstract

The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives brings together research essays by political theorists, historians of political thought, and intellectual historians to survey Locke’s political writings in their immediate historical and intellectual contexts and in the longer perspective of the history of their reception up to the present. The volume traces the long shadow of John Dunn’s germinal monograph, The Political Thought of John Locke (1969), while in dialogue with other interventions since. The chapters shed fresh light not only on Locke’s Two Treatises (its publication, its international dimensions, and its resistance theory, for example) but also his writings on toleration, on his relationship with contemporary theology and with Thomas Hobbes, and on his contributions to the histories of liberalism, colonialism, and post-colonial theory.