The Grand Model - Locke's Colony

American Political History · Nov 6, 2021 · 20m

Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven-year-old physician who had published nothing — and who, in 1669, sat down at his patron’s direction and wrote the most ambitious constitution in the history of English colonial America. The proprietors called it the Grand Model. This episode tells the story of that document and the mind that made it: the silver tube that bound Locke to his patron, the consent-based political philosophy he was only beginning to work out, and the rigid feudal…