Anyone here familar with John Locke?

[BamaLefty]

I'm a freshman at the University of Alabama and I'm having to write a paragraph or two about Locke for my Poli Sci exam tommorrow. I've read Locke but I'm just not really feeling his work. I'll post the question here and if any of you have any ideas thanks to your familiarity with his work, feel free to post! I'm trying hard to brainstorm, but all I'm getting are hit and miss showers! :D

Here's the question that I will be asked on my exam tommorrow:

Explain Locke's state of nature. What can it lead to? Why did person's want to get out of it and get into a civil society? How do they get into the civil society? What group rules the civil society and why?

[meegbear]

1. Check here ...

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/

[Lerkfish]

2. DU ate your homework

gee, when I was a student, I actually had to do my own research, I had to understand the material...who'da thunk? is that lame or what?
The internet wasn't around then, so how unfair was that to me? huh? I actually had to LEARN the subject I was being TESTED on.


/rant

[graywarrior]

3. He's also a main character on LOST which I found interesting.

[Lerkfish]

4. Dude! he found the hatch!

put that on the test

[Teaser]

5. Locke in a nutshell

1) Explain Locke's state of nature.


Locke was a radical environmentalist, and believed that mankind ought to revert to the "state of nature" a pre-agrarian lifestyle of hunter-gathering.


2)What can it lead to?
Locke's view was that it would lead to a form of universal polygamy, in which one man would be coupled with many women, for him, the ideal state.


3)Why did person's want to get out of it and get into a civil society?
Usually selfishness and organized religion led mankind to reject the polygamous organization implicit in the state of nature.

4)How do they get into the civil society?
Force of arms, or economic coersion.

5)What group rules the civil society and why?
The crowd, or as Locke's contemporary Nietzsche would have called them, the "sheep."

It is the message of both Locke and Nietzsche that mankind return to a primal religion that includes the deification of nature as a goddess. Most of all, manking must return to true morality.


(on edit: if you haven't figured it out, I'm bullshitting you). If you write pretty much the opposite of everything I've said you'll probably get a passing grade).

[soothsayer]

6. Find a way to work this into your exam! (applies today)

Violation of the social contract: If a ruler seeks absolute power, if he acts both as judge and participant in disputes, he puts himself in a state of war with his subjects and we have the right and the duty to kill such rulers and their servants.

On edit: of course, your professor will turn you into the fbi where you'll be tortured, so maybe you should just keep this to yerself..!

[RoyGBiv]

7. You've read Locke?

You don't have to "feel" Locke to get the answers to these questions. They're pretty straightforward. You could almost cut and paste. You actually don't even have to read Locke seeing as how this is the social contract theory, which forms, oh, the philosophical foundation of this country.

I assume you're dealing with _Two Treatises on Government_?

Hell, just google "Locke" and "social contract."

[Teaser]

8. Two treatises on Government is a well known forgery.

Well, not forgery, as it was not intentionally deceptive. It was written by Christopher Marlowe, under the penn name of Jon Lokke, as an homage to Owen Cavendish's "The Routine of the Mercurial"....The similarities are largely coincidental.

[Sammy Pepys]

9. No offense to anyone here, but...

...let the kid do his own homeowrk.

[Teaser]

10. oh believe me

I am :)