In May 1652, only a year after Thomas Hobbes had shaken the intellectual world to its scholastic roots with his infamous Leviathan, John Locke was elected to Christ Church, Oxford. For the rest of his life, Locke would labor in the mighty shadow Hobbes cast, drawing out the implications of Hobbes's thought all the while denying any influence.

To say that the philosophic specter of Hobbes haunted the “thinkeing men of Oxford” in Locke's day is to understate the case. In 1683, at the very time Locke was immersed in the intellectual excursions that would eventuate in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and the Two Treatises of Government (1689), in the last book burning held at Oxford, “Hob's De Cive and Leviathan” were deemed good fuel for the flames of scholarly intolerance. For Locke, the lesson was hardly ambiguous; the art of writing was far from being free of persecution. If the ages were not still dark, they were surely dim; enlightenment and toleration were for another day.

The Oxford that Locke entered was little changed from the one that Hobbes had left decades before. The arid scholasticism Hobbes had encountered and detested at Magdalen was still in control of Christ Church. Locke was no more impressed with the forms and substance of the tradition than Hobbes had been. To Locke, the tedious and pointless exercises in formal logic and rhetoric were mere “hogshearing.” The future philosopher seems to have preferred romance novels.