Monday, October 6, 2014

Do the founding documents of the United States follow the philosophical ideas of John Locke?Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation,...

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
pretty clearly follow Locke's ideas.  The Articles of Confederation do so, but much less
explicitly.


Locke's major idea was that the point of
government was to protect the life, liberty, and property of the people.  People
willingly give the government sovereignty over them so long as the government protects
these rights.  The Declaration lays out this role of government and the fact that it
gets its power from the people quite explicitly.  The Constitution (as well as the Bill
of Rights) again states this idea.  The 5th Amendment, for example, guarantees that
people's liberties cannot be taken away without the due process of law.  By contrast,
the Articles included no explicit guarantees of rights.  Instead, they left that to the
state constitutions.  The Articles wanted to protect people from government tyranny, but
they did so by making a government that was generally
weak.


In this way, all of these documents, to some extent
or other, reflect Locke's ideas.

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