American Mythology: John Locke and Natural Law

The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is one of the most important names in modern philosophy. Following Descartes, he is often taken to be the second major philosopher of the modern era. Additionally, his philosophy was of particular influence on early American political thought, and he was even involved in the design of one of the colonial American governments, that of Carolina. Today, I’ll be looking at his philosophy, and to what degree contemporary America is living up to or failing to live up to his ideals, whether that’s even something we should be aiming for in the first place, and why all of this is relevant to us as Satanists and to American Satanists in particular. Works Cited or Consulted Armitage, D. (2004). John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government. Political Theory, 32(5), 602–627. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591704267122 Cahoone, L. (n.d.). The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas. Retrieved March 9, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-modern-political-tradition-hobbes-to-habermas Declaration of Independence: A Transcription. (2015, November 1). National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript Diethe, C., & Nietzsche, F. (2006). Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812026 Guelzo, A., Gallagher, G., & Allitt, P. (n.d.). A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/a-history-of-the-united-states-2nd-edition Laslett, P. (n.d.). Locke and Hobbes. In J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government. Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (2nd edition). (2002). Oxford University Press. Lloyd, S. A., & Sreedhar, S. (2019). Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/hobbes-moral/ Locke, J., & Laslett, P. (1988). Two treatises of government (Student ed). Cambridge University Press. MacCallum, G. C. (1967). Negative and Positive Freedom. The Philosophical Review, 76(3), 312. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183622 Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As “Honest” And “Morally Upstanding.” (2020, March 12). NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/815097747/survey-most-evangelicals-see-trump-as-honest-and-morally-upstanding The Problem With Human Rights. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q Thorpe, F. N. (Ed.). (1998). The Federal and State constitutions, colonial charters, and other organic laws of the states, territories, and colonies now or heretofore forming the United States of America. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp Uzgalis, W. (2020). John Locke. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/locke/ Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2015). A people’s history of the United States (Thirty-fifth anniversary edition). HarperPerennial.