Unlike Spinoza, Hobbes, or “men of letters” during the French Revolution, Locke was neither a scholarly type nor an armchair theorist; he was more pragmatic, debating and drawing up tomes of political philosophy for real-life purposes. Locke in himself is a man of contradictions. His theories are inconsistent, and some of them fail to reconcile with reality while sometimes they even comprise some contradictions. As any Locke scholar would know, in 1660s, Locke was still a young absolutist: he didn't believe in natural rights, toleration, or parliament supremacy; he did not think people had the right to resist the authority; yet when he began writing Two Treatises, he was a liberal, a radical, a devoter to civil rights. It is certain that at some point during the period of 1660-1681, he went through a radical shift on the political spectrum, but, unfortunately, little in his correspondences, journals and the other manuscripts indicates the reason of such a drastic change (Ashcraft 81). To study Locke without studying the contexts in which the works were written, one would naturally feel puzzled about the holes and inconsistency in Locke’s theories.
