1632 - John Locke born

         John Locke, the great English empiricist and social philosopher, was born on August 29, 1632, in Somerset, England. 

  John Locke, and the book of essays that launched the American republic nearly a century after it was published.

         Given Locke's contributions to the ideas about government that guided the Founding Fathers of the United States through the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it is difficult to imagine how the United States could have come into being without Locke's revolutionary ideas of government. (Click here for more on John Locke)  More than once it has been noted that England's greatest political theorist of the Enlightenment would inspire American colonists to sue the English king for independence.