ABSTRACT
What should be our estimate of the place of John Locke in the history of philosophy and of his influence on succeeding generations of thinkers? What impact has his work had upon society at large and has it been on balance a beneficial one? Big questions like these are tempting to ask and to try to answer, but it would be an illusion to suppose that they can be settled definitively and in a wholly objective fashion. Each succeeding age fashions its own intellectual heroes, often more in order to vindicate its own prejudices than in dispassionate recognition of the true achievements of the individual thinkers who are selected for this purpose. Unsurprisingly, then, the reputation of past philosophers has often been subject to large swings of fashion from one age to the next. David Hume, for example, is now widely admired by academic philosophers, not least because the sceptical, atheistic and naturalistic tendencies of his thought are in tune with recent and current philosophical and scientific attitudes. It is probably true to say that Hume’s stock amongst academic philosophers is at present still somewhat higher than Locke’s, although I sense that the balance is now shifting. But it was not always so and at various times in the past Hume’s philosophy was very much out of fashion. Locke, however, has never really been out of fashion in this way and it is interesting to speculate as to why this should be so.
