In The Second Treatise on Government, John Locke portrays the initial move from communal to private property as one of the most pivotal moments in human history. Crucially, Locke regards this transition as naturally — if not divinely — ordained. In part due to this sacred origin, private property plays an integral role in both the formation and preservation of civil society.
The Beginnings of Private Ownership
Private property’s distinct social role under Locke’s scheme owes much to his conception of how it originally came about. From the very beginning of human history, the earth was commonly held among all men but every man had a property in his own person. Put differently, individual property rights were naturally bestowed from the outset. This initial ownership is the vehicle through which further property acquisition occurs.
Expanding Property Rights Through Labor
An individual can claim ownership over a part of the earth previously held in common by means of his labor. That is, since each man has property over his body and the work it produces, when he mixes his labor with the land he adds something that is his own and thereby makes it his property.
Notably, this right to acquire new property benignly exists even within the state of nature. In the civil state, too, Locke envisions private property in a manifestly benevolent light.
Private Property’s Societal Functions
Far from being the source of his fellow man’s suffering, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later claim, those who add to nature through their labor are humanity’s true benefactors. Locke places little worth in land left solely to nature’s stead and conservatively estimates that man’s labor increases an acre’s output by a factor of ten – though he believes the real ratio is likely closer to 100:1. It is labor, and by extension private property, the confers value on all things.
Furthermore, through the advent of coinage, a man can possess more than is appropriated solely through his own labor. Money, in effect, removes any natural limits to private property. Yet, in anticipation of Adam Smith, Locke asserts that an individual pursuing his own interests through labor and commerce does so to everyone’s advantage.
Labor’s Commercial Benefit for All
It is through their labor that men produce the vast majority of products useful to them and therefore benefit all in common. As evidence, Locke points to the Native Americans of his time and famously remarks that though they are rich in arable land, they have scarcely utilized its potential: “[A]nd a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England.”
Therefore, the world is not meant to lay fallow under the savage’s guard, but to be cultivated by the industrious and rational for the benefit of all mankind. This formulation not only informed much of capitalist thought, but, tragically, much of the brutal European conquests in Africa and the Americas.
Source:
Locke, John, The Second Treatise on Government
Youssef Chouhoud - I’m a young(ish) Muslim-American from Brooklyn, New York by way of Alexandria, Egypt. Part consultant, part freelance writer, my ...
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