Alea- I've not read Spinoza
My own interests run to the American Antebellum and Civil War periods, and the discipline of Psychology.
As far as the roots of Locke's ideas of liberty, European thinkers had been rediscovering the writings of the Greeks and Romans for a couple of hundred years before Locke's time-a bit ironic that the Muslim world played such a major role in preserving those ideas that we hold so dear today, don't you think?
Regarding your view of Darwin's theories trumping Locke's ideas- Locke in fact bases his theory of the reasons that men formed governments upon a very Darwinistic view of the natural world of men. Locke's early chapters describing the state of nature in which men lived in the absence of governments show that Locke thought men would act in a cruel manner to one another. This would produce a state of war, everyone upon another, as he described it. So, Locke and Darwin do not disagree. Instead, Locke moves the discussion past simple survival and describes the difference between the animal world and humans. We chose to end the anarchy by forming governments-and that became a part of our natural state, according to Locke. Life, liberty and property must be protected in such a system because unless people feel they are secure in those fundamental rights, government will break down and anarchy will reassert itself. This was true in Locke's time, and IMO it is still valid today.
AI
