You are right, I edited most of the Locke disputes out because the blog post was turning into a thesis.
The American Revolution was a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians. The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke’s philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s actions make it clear that, had Locke’s philosophy been the inspiration for the American Revolution, the U.S. would never have become the world’s leading nation and industrial power. Jefferson, who claimed that the three greatest men in history were the British empiricists Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, adopted their outlook that sense certainty is the basis for all knowledge, writing:
I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
Having denied that human nature is creative reason, Jefferson saw society and economics as based on fundamentally fixed relationships. Therefore he endorsed Thomas Malthus’ ideology, that man’s needs must exceed his ability to produce. He rejected national economic development through the increase of the productive powers of labor, and instead accepted Adam Smith’s free trade doctrines. Jefferson saw slavery as appropriate for Blacks, whom he considered as inherently inferior.
Jefferson opposed Hamilton’s measures for the development of the nation, and in a private letter stating his opposition to Hamilton’s National Bank, for example, he raved that any person in the state of Virginia, who cooperated with the Bank, “shall be adjudged guilty of high treason and suffer death accordingly.”
Jefferson was fanatically opposed to the development of American industry, and described the growth of cities in America as “a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” He fought to keep the nation as a feudal plantation.
Cites:
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Trumbull, Feb 15, 1789, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings - New York: Library of America, 1984, pp. 939-40
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Jean Baptiste Say, Feb. 1, 1804, in Writings, pp. 2243-44.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Oct. 1, 1792, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by John Catanzariti - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 432-33.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings, p. 290.
Leibniz wrote New Essays on Human Understanding as an explicit refutation of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.