ISBN John Locke: Selected Correspondence book English Paperback 416 pages

John Locke (1632-1704) was a prolific correspondent and left behind him over 3600 letters a collection almost unmatched in pre-modern times. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide social connections his letters open up the cultural social intellectual and political worlds of the later Stuart age. Spanning half a century they mark the transition from the era of revolutionary Puritanism to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Locke is chiefly known as a philosopher a theorist of empiricism in his Essay Concerning Philosophyrstanding a theorist of liberalism in his Two Treatises of Government and a theorist of religious toleration in his Letter concerning Toleration. But his interests extended further still to education medicine finance theology empire and the natural world. He was a Fellow of the early Royal Society. He received letters from scholars in Paris and Amsterdam from colonial administrators in Virginia from aristocrats and shopkeepers from children from tenants from politicians from philosophic women from astronomers chemists and physicists. He is one of the first people whose correspondence is as far flung as North America India and China. A friend of Anglican archbishops and of freethinking anticlericals of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle of William Molyneux the 'virtuoso' of Dublin of Jean LeClerc of Amsterdam and of Damaris Masham Locke stood in the midst of the 'Republic of Letters'. This book brings together 245 of the most important and revealing letters. Half of them are letters written by Locke (twelve per cent of the total number surviving) the other half are letters written to him. If Locke's place is already secure among those who explore philosophy and political ideas these letters will give Locke a new presence among those who are interested in the social and cultural worlds of seventeenth-century Britain.