Currently reading a book which goes into Locke in some detail.
Quote:
Locke sought to make sure that, if political participation presupposed leisure, the poor would be kept at work. In 1697, in conformity with his view that unemployment was caused by “nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners,” Locke recommended a poor law which among other things deplored the fact that the labor of the children of the laboring poor “is generally lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old” and so provided that all children over three of families on relief should attend “working schools” which would ensure that they would be “from infancy … inured to work.” Bread, he continued, should be given to the children at their “school” so that their parents would not waste a monetary stipend on drink. “And to this may be also added, without any trouble, in cold weather, a little warm water-gruel; for the same fire that warms the room may be made to use of to boil a pot of it.”
- Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, Staughton Lynd, 1968, p35
This is the man held up as a serious and eminent philosopher? The "Father of Liberalism?" Sounds more to me like a member of the criminally insane.
Sounds to me like you are itching for an argument but for some reason haven't stated but rather only insinuated one or many.
What do you want to talk about? what it meant to be a family on relief at the time he was writing?
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Always look at these things in context most people substance abuse in alcohol was a major issue so the idea, also public schools were not in existance neither were private schools or any equivlent work was mainly done by uneducated labour so children ran wild for better word. So it makes sense to stop substance abuse and to ensure that the children actually were fed (my government is trialling a slightly more modern approach to fix the same issue). Futhermore these "schools" would teach the poor the value of hard work etc.
This is why Paine departed from him. Paine argued for social welfare saftey nets that were backed by a land tax.
The key word is land tax, not labor tax.
What do you want to talk about?
I'm finding similar things with several authors... Edmund Burke, the supposed "father of conservatism" was apparently running around demanding people be put in jail for writing things against the King. And he thought the U.S. was rightfully a colony of Britain... and on and on...
And these are the people who are put forward as 'great men' is Philosophy classes and such? It seems like many of them were just apologists for the existing flaws of their societies, flaws which must have been obvious even to a person of mediocre intelligence.
I surely would agree with you in some cases but not in others about whether so and so is a 'great man'. But i don't think that to be a greatman you need to have perfected a science of everything, or to have never put forward a poor idea in any field.