This study is an effort to demonstrate John Locke's central place and important role in the development of the collection of philosophical, social, political, and theological ideas broadly defined as modernity. As an intellectual phenomenon, modernity is characterized both by what is not, that is in contradistinction to the pre-modern period, and by its constitutive aspect as the body of beliefs, principles, and attitudes toward human life that have dominated western civilization since the seventeenth century arguably through to our own time. The central question then animating this book is to what extent, if any, did Locke's thought contribute to the creation of the world we know.

Admittedly, this is a task that presents several daunting interpretive challenges. First, there is by no means consensus among Locke scholars that he even has any place among the ranks of seminal thinkers of modernity. Most notably, John Dunn established an influential line of interpretation nearly forty years ago when he insisted that he “simply cannot conceive of constructing an analysis of any issue in contemporary political theory around the affirmation or negation of anything Locke says about political matters.” For Dunn, as for many commentators who followed in his wake, Locke was not an apostle of modernity, but rather a somewhat forlorn figure marooned between a disintegrating Christian natural law tradition on the one hand and the emerging wave of secular modernity, the central antitheological tenets of which he could never subscribe to, on the other.