Locke definition of justice

John Locke’s account of justice, featuring equality and liberty, is surely the philosophical work with the greatest influence on Modern culture.

The triumph of parliamentarianism in England, the “truths” held to be “self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence, and the “

Liberté” and “Egalité” of the French Revolution attest to it.

Moreover, virtually every Western philosopher of ethics since Locke has followed his lead.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a proto-collectivist; Immanuel Kant, an idealist; G.W.F. Hegel, both a collectivist and an idealist; and John Stuart Mill, the ultimate Utilitarian, made liberty paramount in their conceptions of justice.

As recently as the 1970’s, John Rawls assumed without comment human equality and made liberty the penultimate (“lexically prior”) “social value.” Even Karl Marx, the great materialist, agreed partly with Locke’s construct of justice; though he condemned the “bourgeois