An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Why it lasts
- A founding text of modern philosophy and of empiricism.
- Argues that all our ideas come from experience, not from knowledge we are born with.
- Pictures the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa), written on by what we see, feel and reflect on.
- It launched British empiricism, carried on by Berkeley and Hume, and drew a book-length reply from Leibniz.
- Its blank-slate view fed the Enlightenment belief that education and surroundings, not birth, make people who they are.
Behind the book
Finished in exile
Locke finished much of it in Holland, where he had fled when suspected of plotting against the king.
Sparked by a friendly argument
Around 1671 a debate among Locke's friends stalled, so he proposed first asking what our minds can grasp.
Sold for thirty pounds
After nearly twenty years of on-and-off writing, Locke sold the book to a London bookseller for just £30.
Unwelcome at Oxford
In 1703 the heads of Oxford's colleges agreed to discourage their students from reading it.