29/08/2026
🎂 Happy Individual Rights Day! 🔐
Today marks the birthday of John Locke, born on this day in 1632 - and, in my clearly unbiased opinion, one of the top three greatest English philosophers of all time. 😉 Locke is often called the father of individual rights and classical liberalism (that’s the good kind of liberalism, not the clown show currently calling itself the Lib Dems 🎪).
His Two Treatises of Government argued that individuals possess natural rights; especially life, liberty and property. Because these rights are 'natural', we are born with them, not handed them by government. Government’s job is to protect those rights, not to hand them out at its own discretion. The central Lockean idea is wonderfully simple: you own yourself and your life, and government needs a VERY good reason before interfering with either.
Those ideas had a massive influence on the development of modern constitutional government, especially in the English-speaking world; and most famously on the American tradition of natural rights. 🇬🇧🇺🇸 Locke’s influence can be seen in the thinking behind the American Declaration of Independence and the wider tradition that produced the Bill of Rights.
But there’s an important philosophical distinction that’s worth remembering. For Locke, a right was fundamentally something that others, especially government, ought not to take away from you. Today, the language of rights is sometimes used to mean an entitlement to something provided by the state, which creates an obvious problem. If government has a duty to give you something, somebody else has to provide it: usually through taxation, regulation or compulsion. 💷
In an age of ever-expanding government, perhaps we could do worse than revisit Locke’s original vision: limited government, individual responsibility, private property, religious toleration and the liberty to live your own life without interference.
Happy Individual Rights Day! 🥳🔐
