John Locke (2017) PDF

## 13 John Locke ### Jeremy Waldron ### Contents - Introduction: Locke as a Liberal Theorist - Locke's Use of the Social-contract Idea - Foundations: Equality and Natural Law - Property, Economy, and Disagreement - Limited Government, Toleration, and the Rule of Law - Conclusion: Locke's Legacy #...

## 13 John Locke ### Jeremy Waldron ### Contents - Introduction: Locke as a Liberal Theorist - Locke's Use of the Social-contract Idea - Foundations: Equality and Natural Law - Property, Economy, and Disagreement - Limited Government, Toleration, and the Rule of Law - Conclusion: Locke's Legacy ### Chapter Guide This chapter discusses and defends the relevance of John Locke's writings as political philosophy. Because historical research by Peter Laslett, John Dunn, and others into the circumstances of the composition of Locke's major political writings has been so productive, it has become fashionable to play down the philosophical aspect of these writings and emphasize their function, as pieces written for particular political occasions. I believe this is a mistake, and in the chapter that follows, I associate myself with those (like A. John Simmons, for example) who see the historical dimension more as a complement to, than as a substitute for, serious philosophical analysis. Locke's political philosophy continues to have an immense impact on the framing and the pursuit of liberal ideas in modern political thought-ideas about social contract, government by consent, natural law, equality, individual rights, civil disobedience, and private property. The discussion and application of Locke's arguments is thus an indispensable feature of political philosophy as it is practised today. ### Biography The most important works of John Locke (1632-1704) were published in the decade following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Before that, Locke's career had taken him from an established and respectable country family in Somerset, to a studentship in medicine at Christ Church, Oxford, to the household of the Whig politician and Exclusionist agitator Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, and eventually into subversive intrigue and hasty exile in Holland during the reign of James II. Though a couple of early works are known from his Oxford days-Essays on the Law of Nature (1660) and An Essay on Toleration (1667)-Locke's mature political theory was developed during his time with Shaftesbury. Historical research has indicated that his most influential work, the Two Treatises of Government, may have been written as early as ten years before Locke deemed it safe to publish it and that therefore the position he adopts in this work is not, as it appears to be, an apology for a revolution that has succeeded but a call for a revolution to take place-a call that might easily have cost the author his life had it been published in the 1680s. The year 1688 was a turning point for Locke: although some of his works were published anonymously, they soon acquired for him a very considerable reputation, and he enjoyed both political influence and minor political and administrative office (membership of the Board of Trade and Commission of Appeals) in the last 15 years of his life. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding established him as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the age, and embroiled him in scientific disputes with Isaac Newton, and others, as well as providing a basis for his work on education. Locke's Two Treatises of Government were published anonymously in 1689, but their authorship soon became well known. His religious views-never orthodox-also embroiled him in dispute, both as a result of his work on toleration and in regard to his late work The Reasonableness of Christianity, which defended a rather minimalistic characterization of Christian belief. Locke's health was always delicate, and the strains of office and controversy, and the London climate, drove him to make a home in his final years with Sir Francis and Lady Masham (with the latter of whom he had some mild romantic as well as intellectual association) in Oates, Essex. He died there in 1704. ### Key Texts - A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) - Two Treatises of Government (1689) - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) - Thoughts on Education (1693) - The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) ### Main Texts Used - A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. J. H. Tully (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983). - Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ### Key Ideas - **Equality:** everyone in the state of nature is born equal, although there is some dispute over whether women were included in this conception. - **Executive power of the law of nature:** no one has any right to exercise power over another and hence everyone has executive power in the state of nature. - **Express and tacit consent:** the exercise of authority over one person by another can only be effected by consent, which may be explicit and overt, as in swearing an oath of allegiance, or it may be indicated by the mere fact that a person enjoys the protection of the laws of a country. - **Liberty versus licence:** liberty is to act within the constraints of the natural law, whereas licence is to be motivated by passions and may be inimical to social life. - **Mixing one's labour:** this is at the heart of Locke's theory of property and differentiates him from the many theories that ground it in consent or first sighting. Mixing one's labour with something is a sign of appropriation and gives one title to the object, e.g. picking an apple. - **Private property:** with the invention of money and the setting up of political society people are permitted unlimited accumulation of private property. - **Natural rights:** we all possess natural rights in the state of nature, and they are independent of government. The aim of government is to protect our natural rights, including our natural right to property. - **Political versus patriarchal power:** the purpose of the distinction is to undermine Sir Robert Filmer's derivation of political power from God's granting of patriarchal authority to Adam and his heirs. - **Religious toleration:** Locke was quite radical in his views on toleration, but he did not extend it to Catholics or atheists because Catholics have a primary obligation to Rome, and atheists have no foundations for their promises and thus constitute a danger to the state. - **Right to revolution:** Locke is an advocate of constitutional government, and if governments act outside the constitutional constraints imposed upon them, he advocates a right of resistance, the famous 'appeal to heaven'. - **The social contract:** the social contract in Locke establishes political society (the state of nature is already social), and a second stage establishes the government. If the government falls, political or civil society remains, and by consent a new government can be instituted. ### Introduction: Locke as a Liberal Theorist The political writings of John Locke offer the earliest example we have of a well-worked-out liberal political theory; and it is still one of the most influential. The stand that Locke took against political absolutism is the definitive starting point of modern liberal constitutionalism; and the positions he outlines on natural rights, limited government, religious toleration, executive accountability, and the rule of law are essential elements of modern liberal politics. Also his theory of private property rights has been very influential: although it inclines perhaps to one wing of the liberal tradition, it remains an indispensable point of reference in modern discussions of the topic. Important as they are, however, it would be a mistake to identify the modern relevance of Locke's political theory with the mere fact that these Lockean positions are politically congenial to modern liberals. Nor is the importance of his work simply a matter of the historical interest of Locke's positions in relation to the politics of his time. Some historians have suggested that Locke's political theory is most interesting to us as the expression of a particular kind of late seventeenth-century sensibility, evoked primarily by political events in the 1670s and 1680s; and that it is of limited interest to us now apart from that. I believe they are wrong: the main interest of Locke's political writings for us, now, more than 300 years after their publication, is normative and theoretical, not just historical. Locke constructed an elaborate and powerful body of argument, connecting a whole array of (what are now) familiar liberal positions with profound and difficult claims about human equality and natural law. His political and institutional arguments are predicated on the proposition that humans are really one another's equals so far as jurisdiction and authority are concerned; and that they are bound by principles of natural law to respect one another as right-bearers. In turn, these claims about natural rights and equality are defended on the basis of a deep and comprehensive conception of the human position in the world, its relation to God, and our capacity for reason and understanding. Since we today continue to accept the claim about equality and at least some version of the natural-rights idea, but are unsure about both their grounds and their implications, we have every reason to pay attention to the analytic structure and direction of Locke's political arguments. In many respects Locke's way of doing political philosophy may be unfamiliar and disconcerting to our twenty-first-century ears-indeed, he acknowledged that some of his positions might seem 'very Strange' even to his seventeenth-century contemporaries (e.g. Second Treatise, para. 9¹)-but they are familiar enough in the problems they address and the premises they elaborate to be read also as moves in current conversations about how best to ground a robust liberal politics. ### Locke's Use of the Social-contract Idea Of Locke's Two Treatises of Government, the second has been the more important and influential. The first, which is incomplete, attempts a detailed refutation of the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer (1588-1653), which purported to vindicate monarchy as a patriarchal institution founded by God in an original donation to Adam. Much of Locke's response in the First Treatise aims to show that the Old Testament does not in fact establish Adam and his heirs as the God-given rulers of the whole world. More generally-though this is something one has to pick out from his over-elaborate study of the biblical texts-Locke uses the First Treatise to dissociate Judaeo-Christian premises from contemporary views about natural hierarchy. He rejects Filmer's position that 'there cannot be any Multitude of Men whatsoever, either great or small... but that in the same Multitude there is one man amongst them, that in Nature hath a Right to be King of all the rest' (First Treatise, para. 104). And his arguments are particularly interesting in their critique of Filmer's view about the basis of sexual inequality. In general Locke was far from consistent on this issue: compare Second Treatise, para. 82. But in the First Treatise, at any rate, he is adamant that man and woman were both created in God's image, with Godlike intellectual powers (ibid. para. 30), and that neither Adam nor men generally have been singled out by God with any mark of natural authority over the rest of humanity. The Second Treatise is more constructive in character, although Locke develops his argument with opposing political and theoretical conceptions clearly in view. His most consistent target is political absolutism, understood as the exercise of power unconstrained by law or by any procedures for settling disputes between rulers and ruled. Some, like Thomas Hobbes, have argued that, humans being what they are, absolute power is necessary to keep the peace between them. But Locke insists that the point of political institutions is 'to avoid, and remedy those inconveniences of the State of Nature, which necessarily follow from every Man's being Judge in his own case' (Second Treatise, para. 90). These 'inconveniences' which include attempts at enslavement, unpredictable aggression, and a social atmosphere of miserable uncertainty-are not solved, he says, by subjecting all but one person in society to the rule of law. If the person exempted is the most powerful force in the society, then the rest will be worse off under his absolute power than they would be if they were left to the uncertain mercy of each other's judgement in a situation without government at all: 'he being in a much worse condition, who is exposed to the arbitrary power of one man, who has the command of 100,000, than he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men' (ibid. para. 137). In order to make this argument, Locke proceeds on the basis of a 'contractarian' approach to politics: he develops normative arguments about human law and political institutions based on an account of what the point of government is; and that functional account is based in turn on an ideal representation of government as an invention set up to ameliorate certain conditions that would obtain among human beings in its absence. Thus government in its ideal form is represented as performing certain functions; and this then provides a basis on which various actually existing forms of government may be rejected as dysfunctional. However, it is important to understand that liberal contractarianism is not the same as functionalism: it is a particular species of functionalism. The image of the social contract makes it particularly apparent that we are looking for the functionality of government in the benefits it confers on individuals: it is an individualized functionalism, not a functionalism of irreducible social value, for example. The prospect of benefit is represented as the motivation that individuals might perceive for agreeing to submit themselves to government, and to give up powers they would otherwise have (to decide for themselves how to cooperate with and respond to others in society). So an institution or practice that is detrimental to individual men and women (relative to what they might secure on their own without government) is illegitimate, 'for no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse' (ibid. para. 131). This individualized functionalism does not require us to accept the story of the social contract as literally true: that is, we do not have to believe that once upon a time people lived in the state of nature and then, because of its difficulties, they got together and agreed in a social contract to set up institutions of government. Hypothetical contractarianism is enough to do a lot of the normative work of Locke's theory, particularly the negative normative work: he condemns absolutism and arbitrary discretion in government on the grounds that nobody in his right mind would agree to these things. Hypothetical contractarianism also provides a helpful model of Locke's argument about religion in A Letter Concerning Toleration. In that work Locke argues that the state has no business meddling in religious affairs or concerning itself with issues about worship or salvation. Part of his argument is that the means available to the state are incapable of producing the inner conviction without which religious practice is meaningless. This is pure negative functionalism, based on lack of means; it does not even require the individualism of the social contract. Part of his argument, though, is more individualized than this: no rational person, Locke says, would trust the salvation of his soul to a secular ruler, given how high the stakes are. But Locke is not content to confine the social contract to this hypothetical role. As far as one can tell, he believes that the social-contract story offers the most accurate and illuminating account of how government was actually invented. He does acknowledge that, to a superficial eye, the growth of political institutions seems to support the patriarchalism of Filmer: government, he says, seems to have grown out of the family, and 'the natural fathers of families, by an insensible change, became the politic monarchs of them too' (Second Treatise, para. 76). But he believes that this gradualist political anthropology is best interpreted using the template of contractarianism. (The idea is that the social contract provides a useful set of categories for understanding what actually happened, not just a moral perspective for evaluating it.) Locke argues that, although in early times grown men and women may have submitted without fuss to the authority of a father or patriarch, they did so by implicit agreement rather than by recognizing an inherent patriarchal right, and they trusted the patriarch-monarch to rule them wisely and in the interests of them all. The difference between those early ages of mankind and the period in which the Two Treatises of Government were written is marked, he says, by a decline in political virtue (which Locke associates with the growth in material greed and ambition) and thus in the conditions that would enable people to proceed with a patriarchal monarchy founded in tacit agreement and implicit trust. Now everything had to be made explicit. People found they needed an articulate political theory that would emphasize the conditional and contractual basis of government. They needed a theory (like Locke's) that they could use as a public basis for figuring out new institutional arrangements and articulating express limitations and restraints on their rulers to 'prevent the abuses of that power, which they having intrusted in another's hands only for their own good, they found was made use of to hurt them' (Second Treatise, para. 111). Two other aspects of Locke's political philosophy support the view that he believed in the literal not just the hypothetical application of the social-contract idea. The first has to do with his theory of property. As we shall see, Locke believes that property rights do not depend upon positive law for their existence, although positive law may be necessary for their effective protection. So, he thinks that there could be rights of private property in existence prior to the institution of government, and that if there were, the government would be morally constrained to respect them. Some political philosophers-again Thomas Hobbes is the best-known example-have denied this, even as a theoretical possibility. John Locke seems to believe, however, that it is not just a theoretical possibility, but a reality. There are natural property rights, and what they are and who has them depend on the literal occurrence of certain events and the time and the circumstances in which those events took place: at time t, person X mixed his labour with a piece of land, L, in circumstances C; therefore X is the owner of L beginning at t, and other people, including any government instituted to rule over X at a time subsequent to t, have an obligation to respect these rights. This argument will not work unless the property right is grounded in a literal occurrence. (It is not enough to say that a property right for X in L might have been created in this way.) And the argument will not work either unless the institution of the government supposedly constrained by this right is an actual event subsequent to the right's coming into existence. Otherwise it might reasonably be said, from the perspective of purely hypothetical contractarianism, that regulating the basis on which property rights come into existence is a task for government, and that government should not be thought of as constrained in that task by property rights whose institution has escaped its supervision. The second reason for thinking that Locke's contractarianism is literal, not just hypothetical, has to do with its application to individuals. Locke believes that every human being is born free, subject only to natural law, absolved from the obligations of any social contract supposedly entered into by his parents or ancestors or fellow members of society. His account of each individual's political obligation (i.e. his obligation to obey human laws, to accept direction from the state, and to refrain from exercising what would otherwise be his own natural right to punish natural-law offences) is based on that individual's agreement, 'nothing being able to put him into subjection to any earthly power, but only his own consent' (Second Treatise, para. 119). So even if one rejects the argument that governments were set up pursuant to an agreement among the people (albeit an implicit and inarticulate agreement) as a literal historical account, one still has to reckon with the 'born free' idea as a characterization of the initial position of each person. Of course it is also a moral characterization: to say that X is born free is to say that it is wrong for a ruler to treat X in certain ways without X's consent and that X himself does no wrong in ignoring a ruler's commands until such time as he consents to that ruler's authority. But the fact that 'born free' is a moral characterization does not take it out of the realm of literal contract theory. The moral content is simply what flows from the literal facts about X, given the best moral theory that we have (natural law). And any change in what a given ruler is entitled to do to X or demand from X requires a very literal and quite specific change in X's situation-namely, X giving his actual consent to Y's rule. It is sometimes thought that Locke waters down this literal contractarianism by acknowledging tacit consent rather than express consent as a basis for political obligation. (We have already seen the role that tacit consent plays in his political anthropology, i.e. in his explanation of why early forms of government were not, despite appearances, patriarchal.) He argues that the enjoyment of one's property under the state's protection may amount to tacit consent to the state's authority, and he suggests too that even the mere use of the highways or simply lodging at an inn might commit a person to political obedience. Locke's critics argue that this completely undermines his basic contention that political obligation is incurred voluntarily, for it seems there is virtually nothing that an inhabitant of a country can do without giving his allegiance to the rulers of that country. Such criticisms may be reasonable; but it is important to see that the idea of tacit consent does not affect the moral conclusions that Locke infers from the underlying contractarianism. A person who consents-or who is deemed to have consented to the authority of some set of political institutions thereby acquires a reasonable expectation that those institutions will protect and promote his life, liberty, and property. Thus by his consent (whether it is tacit consent or express consent), he acquires not a blind obligation to obey, but standing in the community to evaluate and if need be criticize and resist the laws laid down in civil society. Consent brings one within the community that is entitled to scrutinize laws on this basis and hold lawmakers accountable; indeed, to take it one step further, consent brings one within the community that might lawfully raise a revolution against a corrupt, unjust, or incompetent ruler. Without consent, one would be entitled to resist such a ruler merely as a bandit might be resisted; with consent, however, one's resistance takes on the character of legitimate civic grievance, for one is now a member of 'the people' to whom Locke's theory accords a right in extremis to overthrow this particular ruler. We need to remember also that the consent requirement does not settle anything about the legitimacy of any given law: consent does not make an unjust law right, nor does it preclude resistance or disobedience if the law is unjust. Here the importance of the inalienability of many Lockean natural rights becomes evident: an imputation of consent cannot excuse their violation. I want to go into more detail at the end of this chapter on Locke's theory of revolution and its relation to his views about constitutionalism and the rule of law. But before I do, I want to indicate how what I have said so far is related to the philosophical and religious foundations of Locke's comprehensive liberal theory. ### Foundations: Equality and Natural Law The starting point of Locke's political philosophy is the claim that human beings are, by nature, one another's equals, so far as authority and rule are concerned. Because we are naturally one another's equals, no one may be put under the political authority of another except by his own consent (Second Treatise, para. 95). The premise of equality, therefore, is key to the social-contract theory and to everything which is built on it. At the beginning of the Second Treatise Locke puts forward negative and affirmative versions of the claim about natural equality. On the one hand, he says God has not endowed anyone with any evident mark of natural superiority; and on the other hand, there seems to be a rough equality among us so far as our natural capacities are concerned. As for the affirmative version of the claim, Locke gives the impression that natural equality is founded on humans' common membership of a single species-'there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species... promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection'. But a species-based account of equality cannot be sustained for two reasons: first, it fails to explain why the equality of humans matters much more in Locke's scheme of things than the equality of co-members of other species; and second, it runs into immediate difficulties posed by Locke's own scepticism about species distinctions developed in book iii of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke's discussion there makes it apparent that the basis of equality must be some capacity that we all share, rather than our alleged species membership itself. The capacity that he emphasizes in the Essay as distinctive and importantly distinctive of the persons who engage in politics (as either putative subjects or would-be rulers) is the 'power of abstracting', the capacity to reason on the basis of general ideas. It is 'the having of general ideas', says Locke in book ii of the Essay, 'that puts 'a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes'. The argument for the significance of this capacity appears to be its connection to (what Locke thought of as) the human ability to reason to the existence of God. The understanding of ordinary men and women is far from perfect, yet 'they have light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own duties'. And Locke thinks that the fact that a being has this capacity shows that it is a creature with a special moral relation to God. As someone who knows or can find out about the existence of God and who is therefore in a position to answer responsibly to his commandments, this is someone whose existence has a special significance. Now, that specialness is a matter of intense interest, first and foremost of course to the person who has the relevant property. Knowing that he has been sent into the world by God, by his order, and about his business', the individual person has an interest in finding out pretty damned quick what he is supposed to do. But Locke believes this also affects the way we ought to deal with one another. When I catch a rabbit, I know that I am not dealing with a creature that has the capacity to abstract, and so I know that there is no question of this being one of God's special servants, sent into the world about his business, etc. But if I catch a human in full possession of his faculties, I know I should be careful how I deal with him. Because creatures capable of abstraction can be conceived as 'all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business', we must treat them as 'his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure' (Second Treatise, para. 6), and refrain from destroying or harming or exploiting them. What about intellectual differences above this threshold? Locke has been read by some commentators as arguing that differential rationality (among humans) entitles some to vastly different political power. This is thought to be the basis of his views about the natural subordination of women (though in fact, as we have already seen, Locke rejects any such basis for subordination in the First Treatise). And it is also thought to be the basis of his subordination of the labouring classes-'men who drudge all their lives in laborious trade... enslaved to the necessity of their mean condition, whose lives are worn out only in the provisions for living'. But even with regard to day-labourers, Locke denies that there is anyone who lacks the opportunity 'to think of his soul, and inform himself in matters of religion'. Thus even the meanest man can establish his status as someone with a special relation to God. (The Christian religion, he said in his late work The Reasonableness of Christianity, is 'a religion suited to vulgar capacities', and men can learn about equality and the ground of one another's preciousness on the same basis as the 'ignorant, but inspired fisherman' to whom the gospel was originally preached.) Moreover, Locke's political and epistemological writings are suffused with suspicion of the political pretensions that tend to be associated with intellectual abilities that rise above this threshold: the Treatises talk of the dangers attending the virtuoso exercise of intellectual powers, whereby 'the busy mind of man can carry him to a brutality below the level of the beasts' (First Treatise, para. 58), and book iii of the Essay.contrasts 'learned disputants' and 'all-knowing doctors' unfavourably with 'the unscholastic statesman' and 'the illiterate and contemned mechanic' to whom most improvements in human affairs can be attributed. It is true that Locke's account of natural law is rationalistic. He rejects any innatist account of moral knowledge. Natural law is the law of reason, and it is reason that teaches us the basis of our duties to one another. Specifically, Locke believes that reason teaches us to have special respect for one another, not just as creatures of God-after all, rabbits are creatures of God too-but as creatures of God of whom it may plausibly be said (in virtue of their potential knowledge of God's existence) that they have been 'sent into the world by his order, and about his business made to last during his, not one another's pleasure' (Second Treatise, para. 6). It is on this basis, Locke reckons, that we can figure out that 'Every one... is bound to preserve himself, and... by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not. take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another' (ibid.). Thus Locke's natural law commands certain duties to others. It commands negative duties not to attack or injure one another, and even positive duties-duties to preserve others (not leaving them, for example, to starve, if one has the resources to help them) so long as this does not prejudice one's own self-preservation. Even the priority of self-preservation has a moral edge for Locke. We tend to read it as a right. But it also has the character of a duty owed to God; it's a matter of stewardship. And so, considered as a right, it is inalienable: no one may give up his right to preserve his own life or subject himself to the arbitrary power of another. And so no theory of government may be predicated on the hypothesis that people have consented-again, expressly or tacitly to their own enslavement or transferred their lives to a sovereign. The inalienability of certain natural rights is one of the crucial premises of Locke's approach to politics. ### Property, Economy, and Disagreement Modern commentators often say that Locke failed to elaborate his theory of natural law in any detail. I believe that is falsified by the presence in his Second Treatise of a sustained natural-law argument about property. Locke's views about private property are well known and controversial; in recent years they have attracted considerable discussion by virtue of their association with arguments set out in Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State and Utopia. Briefly, Locke believed that private property rights could be established unilaterally, by the initiative of hunters, gathers, or farmers, quite independently of positive law or social convention. Someone who transforms an object by labour acquires a right to it, Locke believed, and he may then transfer that right to another person by gift or sale, thus initiating a complex economy of natural property rights. The acquisition of such rights is governed by several conditions, or 'provisos' as they are sometimes called: the amount initially acquired must be related closely to the labour performed; the acquisition must not lead to waste; and my appropriation of resources must not drastically worsen the position of others. (Thus I cannot appropriate a whole territory, simply by turning a sod, in order to deny resources to everyone else.) Within these constraints, Locke believed that natural property rights form part of the natural-law endowment that people bring to the state, or with which they confront the demands of positive law. And though it is entitled to regulate property, even naturally acquired property, the state is not entitled to confiscate it or redistribute it, unless that is necessary to ensure that the natural-law constraints are respected. From the point of view of Locke's theory of natural law, the important thing about these positions is that they are argued for, not just announced, in chapter v of the Second Treatise. The chapter, therefore, furnishes a fine example of Lockean natural-law argumentation in a most difficult and important area. It shows us how Locke thought one might reason about natural law. And it also shows how he proposes to use and deploy the initial premise of natural-law equality with which the Second Treatise begins. For although his ostensible aim in the chapter is to justify 'disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth' (Second Treatise, para. 50), he does so in a way that claims to respect our status as equals. This makes his argument extremely interesting to us, because one of the features of our modern debates about property and social justice is that we too are interested in showing how something like a market order, with considerable disparities in people's access to and control of resources, nevertheless treats us as equals even if it does not command equal treatment or equal outcomes in any literal sense. It follows from Locke's premise of equality that the earth's bounty is initially made available by God for everyone's use (Second Treatise, paras. 25-6). No one has any original title in any resource, apart from his own body, that would exclude the right of other men: this is established in the First Treatise (paras. 29-30), where Locke rejects the idea of an original donation to Adam and his heirs exclusive of any other human. This is a view that Locke shared with his predecessors in the natural-law tradition, Grotius and Pufendorf. He rejected, however, their inference that the allocation of the benefit of this common heritage to individuals must be understood as a matter of convention. So far as individual use is concerned, it is evident that every man has a peremptory right 'to the use of those things, which were serviceable for his subsistence'. Indeed, in this regard, reason reinforces man's natural inclination: > God having made Man... and furnished the world with things fit for food and raiment and other necessaries of life, subservient to his design, that man should live and abide for some time upon the face of the earth, and not that so curious and wonderful a piece of workmanship by its own negligence, or want of necessaries, should perish again, presently after a few moments continuance. (First Treatise, para. 86) The right Locke talks about here is peremptory in the sense that it does not depend on anyone's consent--'If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him' (Second Treatise, para. 28)-and it remains in the background of Lockean political economy, always available (by virtue of its proximity to the foundations of Locke's natural-law theory) to trump both naturally acquired private property rights and property rights established by positive law (First Treatise, para. 42). Arguably the right to use resources is not itself a private property right, although Locke argues that it already involves a prototype of proprietary exclusion (Second Treatise, para. 28). Full private property is established in the first instance by labour, that is by productive actions that instil something of oneself in the animal, object, or piece of land that one has laboured upon. What I labour on, what I cultivate, 'hath by this labor, something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men' (ibid. para. 27). He supports this in a number of ways against those who might complain of an acquisition: sometimes he uses a version of the labour theory of value to show that the labour that generates entitlements (on his theory) creates almost all the value that property has, and sometimes he relies on the point that others have their own opportunity to create private property by labour, 'at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others' (ibid.). Eventually, of course, that last condition will fail, and all the usable natural resources-certainly all the land-will have been taken into private ownership. In that eventuality, the theory is buttressed by a claim that even the landless will prosper in an economy in which all the resources are in private hands. Certainly they will prosper by comparison with societies that have not organized themselves around private cultivation. Locke thought the clearest demonstration of this was aboriginal America, whose inhabitants are 'rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of life'. The native Americans, for want of improving their land by labour, 'have not one hundredth part of the conveniencies we enjoy: and a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England' (ibid. para. 41). This attempt to show that everyone benefits is crucial to Locke's natural-law argument for private property. Without it, there would be no way of defending property rights against the charge that they are prejudicial to the survival of some of God's special servants. Given his egalitarian premises, Locke is in no position to be nonchalant about the possibility that property for some might mean deprivation for others. Indeed, as I said a moment ago, he is committed to the view that in extremis desperate poverty has a foundational, trumping right against property: charity, as he puts it, gives 'every man a title to so much out of another's plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise' (First Treatise, para. 42). Commentators sometimes treat this as an anomalous insertion in the First Treatise, with little relevant to the argument about property in the Second. But it is unavoidable for Locke, given the basis on which his overall theory of natural law is established. Although it claims, as we have seen, a rationalist natural-law foundation, Locke's theory of property is quite controversial. Modern socialists deny his assumption that cultivation or other productive uses of God's bounty require private property. And the argument based on 'mixing one's labor' has seemed puzzling to many. In Locke's day the most controversial feature of his account-apart from his rejection of consent as a basis of property-was his argument against first occupancy theory. Both with regard to aboriginal modes of subsistence in America, and with regard to things like common grazing rights in England, this was seen (quite accurately) as Locke's taking the side of the colonist and the encloser, treating them as entitled unilaterally to brush aside immemorial practices of occupancy and common use simply because they did not answer