The Determination of Freedom in John Locke

Abstract

Freedom has no univocal meaning in Locke's work, despite its centrality. It is understood as a duty and right, but also as a power, or, as we will hold here, as a state. The successive modifications of the idea of freedom between An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690), between the editions and in relation to early or later texts, such as The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), allow us to think of freedom as a problem (above all, a political one), rather than as an evidence. Freedom affirms itself as the most sublime characteristic of human nature, as well as the symptom of her precariousness and corruption. Freedom could be compared with reason, as Locke intends to investigate the limits of both, without ever thinking them as franchisable.