John Locke's Contributions to Rhetoric
Abstract
For many twentieth-century teachers of English, John Locke (1632-1704) is a peripheral, rather than a mainstream, figure in the literary history of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. With some of those teachers, he merits mention only as the friend and the physician of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who served as the model for Achitophel in John Dryden's famous satire, and as the tutor for the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the author of the pre-Romantic manifesto Characteristics. Maybe in connection with an undergraduate course in political science or in a Great Books course in the Humanities division or in a course in Colonial American literature, some of them read Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government and learned that this document not only attempted to justify the Whig revolution of 1688 in England but also served our Founding Fathers as the rationale for our own Revolution and our own democratic form of government. Even if they had not read snippets from Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in anthologies of eighteenth-century literature, they could not escape the many references to that work in the literary works of the period and in the literary histories of the period. If they were aware that the Essay was a philosophical work, they were not quite sure whether it could be classified primarily as a contribution to psychology or logic or metaphysics or epistemology. Virtually none of those twentieth-century teachers-including myself, until recently-were aware that Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding made a contribution to the development of rhetoric in the eighteenth century. For those of us who regarded John Locke as only a subsidiary figure in the literary life of the eighteenth century, the following statement by Kenneth MacLean in his bookJohn Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936) is an eye-opener: The book that had most influence in the Eighteenth Century, the Bible excepted, was
- Journal
- College Composition and Communication
- Published
- 1981-12-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/356605
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Citation Context
Cited by in this index (5)
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Schultz (1995)Rhetoric Review
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Peaden (1992)Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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DiPARDO (1990)Written Communication
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Corbett (1982)Rhetoric Review
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Knoblauch (1982)Rhetoric Society Quarterly
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