John Locke
John Locke was more of an optimistic guy. His notions of government with consent of the governed the idea of natural rights influenced the Enlightenment greatly. Locke believed that all men were equals. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, he thought of people as reasonable and moral. Each of these people had the basic natural rights which were life, liberty, and property. These rights are rights that one is born with, and nobody can take away from you. The right to live means you have the right to be born and live your life. The right of liberty basically means nobody can enslave you or control your actions, and the right for property means that anybody can buy or own some. His most famous book was called "On Civil Government" and talked about the condition of government in the first part and about the equality of all men in the second. Locke also wrote that the right to take natural goods from public spaces was a right as long as nobody owned the land, and as long as their was enough goods. He is famous for teaching people that one must not simply take whatever he wanted for himself, they must take into consideration the needs of his or her land. Locke was a good embodiment of changing what we call nationalism. See, back then nationalism basically meant having loyalty to your king. Now the meaning of nationalism is having loyalty to your country. One of the most important ideas Locke contributed to the Enlightenment was saying that if the citizens or governed of a population did not like the government, they had the right to overthrow this government. This influenced the American and French Revolutions later on.