Greed and piety – political reason in the philosophy of John Locke
Greed and piety – political reason in the philosophy of John Locke

Summary/Abstract: John Locke’s political philosophy is to this day an important inspiration for the discourse oscillating around the issues of civil rights, the role and scope of political power and the relationship between property and ethics. However, this discourse is dominated by the one-sided and strongly impoverishing perception of the English philosopher’s thought whose sources lie in Leo Strauss’s interpretation. This article is a polemic with Strauss’s interpretive standpoint, based on a comprehensive reading of Locke’s philosophy. The aim of the text is both to demystify the secular nature of his thought, and to point out its unique coherence and conceptual precision which make it impossible, against Strauss and his followers’ standpoint, to reduce Locke’s philosophy to only a more radical, at the same time less coherent, version of Thomas Hobbes’s political thought.

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