Robert Filmer
His fame and significance lost to the vagaries of history for modern readers, Filmer at the time was an essential character in Locke’s formulation and expression of key elemental political theory, especially those concerning link between ownership of property and political power. This inviolability of this connection has since been discharged, but its echoes are still felt even today. Even the American democracy was established upon the concept of extending the right to vote (and therefore exercise political power) only to those citizens who owned property. Locke proceeds to utterly dismantle Filmer’s central contention that political power and property ownership should be given supremacy because it is an inheritance from God’s creation of Adam.
Richard Hooker
Hooker was a highly regarded Anglican theologian whose most prominent work relative to Locke’s development of his political theories of expression was a volume titled Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Locke drew upon the theories outlined here and otherwise manifested by Hooker in his chapter analyzing the normative state of human nature. It was Hooker’s fundamental assumption that government could only be constructed upon the collective agreement of consent that there exists “no reason that one man should take upon him to be lord or judge over another.”
Edward Clarke of Chipley, Esq.
In 1760, Locke write an essay on the subject of education. This essay was stimulated through a process in which a friend, Edward Clarke, had asked Locke for some useful advice on raising his young song. The result was a full-bodied comprehensive management guide for raising children to become responsible adults made aware of their responsibilities to contribute positively to society as adults. As with any handbook on teaching or curriculum for instruction, Locke’s ultimate decision-making process is revelatory of his political ideology. Locke became such close friends Clarke and his family that he eventually got to the point of occasionally making a joking reference to the man’s daughter Elizabeth as his wife.
Thomas Hobbes
Though not often directly addressed by name, Thomas Hobbes may well be the most significant “character” throughout the political essays of Locke. The philosophical views of Hobbes—which often stand in direct contrary opposition to those Locke—referenced or alluded to in robust fashion. Locke is particularly discursive in referencing Hobbes on the issue of absolutism while at the same time quite open an explicit in the actual act of negating arguments easily associated with the other man’s most famous work, Leviathan.
