LOCKE, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1694 edition of Locke's classic Two Treatises of Government. The "immediate cause [of Locke's Treatises] was the Patriarcha of Sir Robert Filmer, in which a Hobbesian absolutism was modified to accord with the view of monarchy which Charles II, in emulation of Louis XIV, sought to impose. A confutation of this occupies the first treatise. The second treatise contains a plain statement of the principles of democracy. In an age and country in which the practice of democracy had just been triumphantly vindicated, Locke's theories... had all the freshness of novelty... Locke presupposes an original and necessary law of reason, and bases the constitution of society on it, rather than on the de facto existence of a government based on the actual submission of the governed to the rulers... civil rulers hold their power not absolutely but conditionally; government being essentially a moral trust, which lapses if the trustees fail to maintain their side of the contract... [with] his Letters on Tolerance... the Treatises of Government provide a classic example of the empirical approach to social and political economy which has remained ever since the basis of the principles of democracy."
LOCKE, John. An Essay concerning Humane Understanding. 1690. First edition, first issue, with an inlaid leaf at the front bearing Locke's signature. First issue, with the canceled title, the dedication undated. Inlaid at the front is an endpaper leaf bearing Locke's full signature above the bookplate of Richard Palmer. With the bookplates of the renown Johnsonian collector R. B. Adam and the great collector of literature and Americana, Roderick Terry. With several contemporary ink corrections and additions. "The Essay Concerning Humane Understanding... was the first attempt on a great scale, and in the Baconian spirit, to estimate critically the certainty and the adequacy of human knowledge". "[Locke's] design... covers a remarkably wide field of investigation into human knowledge; it is the first modern attempt to analyse it". "Locke's authority as a philosopher was unrivalled in England during the first half of the eighteenth century... His spiritual descendant, J. S. Mill, indicates his main achievement by calling him 'the unquestioned founder of the analytic philosophy of mind'". An extraordinary copy of a landmark book, rare in the first edition, containing Locke's signature and with a superb provenance. PREVIOUS NEXT