Page 129 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 7: John Locke

Through the discussions on property, Locke stated that it represented human entitlements and in Notes
fact “the great and chief end of men’s uniting into commonwealth and putting themselves under
government is the preservation” and protection of their property. The purpose of government was
to secure human entitlements and ensure lives, liberties and the material possessions of all human
beings. Even if the commonwealth was based on freely elected representatives, it could not dispose
of the property of its subjects arbitrarily. “The connection between property and the supportive role
of society lies in Locke’s identification of property with society rather than with the political order”.
It was the social character of property that enabled Locke to defend a minimal state with limited
government and individual rights, and reject outright the hereditary principle of government. He
was willing to defend entitlements that were directly acquired through one’s labour, and avoided
the issue of inheritance or transactions as gifts.
Locke also wanted to emphasize that no government could deprive an individual of his material
possessions without the latter’s consent. It was the duty of political power to protect entitlements
that individuals enjoyed by virtue of the fact that these had been given by God. It was for the
protection of liberties and property that they entered into an agreement instructing the government
to recognize these rights and embody them in a statutory form. Since the state was created for the
sole protection of property, consequently no part or the whole of the individual’s property could
be taken without the individual’s consent. Besides, no taxes could be levied without the consent of
the individual, otherwise it invaded the fundamental right to property and subverted the ends of
the government. The American slogan “No taxes without representation” during the Boston Tea
Party was typically Lockeian in spirit and content.
Macpherson argued that Locke’s views on property made him a bourgeois apologist, a defender
of the privileges of the possessing classes. “With the removal of the two initial limitations which
Locke had explicitly recognized, the whole theory of property is a justification of the natural right
not only to unequal property but to unlimited individual justification”.
As a result, there was a divorce between appropriating and labouring. Simultaneously, Locke also
justified and defended class differentials in rights and rationality and wage contracts, in the
process becoming a spokesman for a market society providing the moral basis for capitalist society
(Macpherson ibid). From a society of equal individuals, Locke accepted two classes with different
rights, those with and those without property.
Macpherson’s arguments were challenged by Dunn (1968b: 54-58), Laslett (1960: 114-119) and
Tully (1980: 150-155), who found it difficult to accept Locke as a spokesman of capitalism. Wood
(1984: 101-105) saw Macpherson as distorting history, for Locke could at best be seen as a spokesman
of agrarian capitalism. The important fact was that agriculture still dominated the economic scene
in the late seventeenth century. Landed property was the main source of wealth, power and social
position. Mercantile and manufacturing capitalism on the other hand were still in their embryonic
stages. A semblance of market relations had begun to appear but was restricted. Locke’s stress on
the importance of labour and industry for higher productivity became apparent during the Enclosure
movement. The Enclosure movement protested against confiscation of land without the consent of
the individual owner. Land was the chief source of wealth and its enclosure increased its yield.
Moreover the capitalist landlord could sequestrate the benefits. Not only did Locke have the
example of the American colonists in mind but also the “superior productivity of private agricultural
economy as compared with the communal tillage of a more primitive system” (Sabine 1973: 486).
The claim to land as property without harming anyone else was became an established fact during
the Enclosure movement. Moreover, the contention by Macpherson that Locke presumed wage
slavery in his conception of property was rejected by Ebenstein, who pointed out that Locke used
the term “property” in the broad sense for liberating one’s self rather than for enslaving others.
For him, as it was with the early liberals, property had a moral dimension. It conveyed independence
of the person and possessions.

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