IDEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

THE END OF ABSOLUTISM IN ENGLAND

In England, the seminal political theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were in the spirit of the same rational approach to problem solving, but had also been influenced by the dramatic conflicts that unfolded in Britian between the 1640s and the 1680s.
Hobbes wrote in his masterwork, the Leviathan (1651), that men were motivated primarily by the desire for power and by fear of other men, and so needed an allpowerful sovereign to rule over them. He characterized their lives without a strong ruler as "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.” For Hobbes, the English Civil War, which began in 1642, and ended with the execution of King Charles I in 1649, was convincing evidence that men were ultimately selfish and competitive. In addition, Galileo’s ideas concerning the nature of the physical world, led him to reason that only matter exists, and that human behavior could be predicted by exact, scientific laws. In the Leviathan, he attempted to turn politics into a science, in which the clash of competing material bodies (men), could be predicted with mathematical accuracy, and thus regulated.
John Locke, a generation later, developed an entirely different notion of the basic nature of humankind, which he saw as innately good. While attending Oxford in 1666, he became friends with the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and in 1679, when the Earl was implicated in plots against King Charles II, Locke was also suspected. He fled to the Netherlands, where he met Prince William and Princess Mary (Mary Stuart) of Orange.
Locke ultimately enjoyed a favored position at court after William and Mary were invited to invade England and assume the throne in 1688. They came and conquered, but real power was now in the hands of Parliament, representing the propertied classes, which granted them the throne in 1689.
Locke then, witnessed this almost bloodless, so-called “Glorious Revolution,” and became convinced that people could live amicably together, after discovering God´s law through the appliction of reason. In Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), he outlined a theory of politics based on people’s natural rights: life, liberty, and the ownership of property. To Locke, the task of the state was to protect these rights.
Government was a contract between ruler and subjects, as the events of 1688-1689 had demonstrated: rulers were granted power in order to assure their subjects’ welfare. His writings were seminal for the American revolutionary leader Thomas Jefferson, who closely followed Locke’s ideas in the Declaration of Independence.

In the early eighteenth century, this early critical inquiry into the nature of man and society, spurred by events in England, influenced a group of French thinkers who came to be known as the Philosophes. Many French thinkers, such a Montesquieu (1689–1755), came to admire the economically advanced country across the channel with its unique form of representative government.

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