Empiricism and Democracy

For Bacon, Empiricism is an active, methodical, collective process.  For Locke, the foundation of Empiricism is a passive experience of an individual subject, though his concept of Space as a Primary Quality maintains a recognition of the existence of a public sphere that is independent of the individual subject.  For Berkeley, that existence is eliminated, transforming Empiricism into a characterizing of the passive relation of a private subject to a communicating deity.  Thus, despite Locke's efforts to coordinate Empiricism and Democracy, i. e. his concept of Tabula Rasa grounds both, his own abstraction from the active, methodical, collaborative dimension of Bacon's Empiricism paves the way for Berkeley's elimination of the rest of its Democracy, i. e. by grounding the possibility of an a posteriori inegalitarianism. This two-stage radical privatization of Experience, implicitly inherited by Smith, remains to this day a destructive threat to Democracy, and suggests that the significant sequence in Modern Empiricism is not, as it usually taught, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley.