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petent, and hence unfit—because not sufficiently reasonable or rational—to be a party to the social compact. For if we say this, we must also say either that political power can arise from great inequality in real property (land and natural resources) without consent, which Locke denies; or else that the constraints of ideal history are violated: the poor are denied sufficient means out of the surplus of the rest to be able to fulfill their duties to God and intelligently to exercise their natural rights.
To conclude: Locke’s view in the First Treatise is that the right of property is conditional. It is not a right to do what we please with our own, just like that, no matter how the use of our own affects others. Our right—our liberty of use—presupposes that certain background conditions are satisfied. These conditions are indicated by the three principles of justice, charity, and reasonable opportunity. This last implies that those without property must have a reasonable opportunity of employment: the opportunity to earn by their honest labor the means of life and to rise in the world.
§4. Locke’s Reply to Filmer: II: Chapter 5
1. Turning to the Second Treatise, Locke’s argument against Filmer in Chapter 5 is roughly this: His aim (as he states in ¶25) is to show how we might in the first ages of the world, and before the existence of political authority, come to have legitimate property “in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common.” Locke must answer Filmer here, since he must show how his view can account for, as opposed to justify, the right of property acknowledged on all sides.
Locke holds that God gave the world to all mankind in common, and not to Adam. But this grant of property is understood by Locke not as a grant of collective exclusive ownership—exclusive ownership by mankind as a collective body—but as a liberty that all persons have to use the necessary means of life provided by nature and the right to appropriate them by honest labor so as to satisfy our needs and requirements.8 All this is done so as to fulfill our two natural duties to preserve mankind and ourselves as members of it.
8. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 166–172.
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Two provisos are implicit in this conception:
(a)First proviso: enough, and as good left for others: ¶¶27, 33, 37.9 This follows because the right of use is not an exclusive proprietorship. Others also have the same right.
(b)Second proviso: spoilage clause: ¶¶31, 36f, 46.10 This follows because God is always sole proprietor of the earth and its resources. To take more fish, say, than we need as food is to waste and destroy part of God’s property.
2. Next we come to “the great Foundation of Property” (a phrase Locke uses in ¶44) (see ¶¶27, 32, 34, 37, 39, 44f, 51). This foundation is the property we have in our own person, which no one else has a right to (¶27). The labor of our body, the product (the work) of our hands, are properly ours. This too suggests a precept of justice: to each according to the product of his honest labor (¶27).
Again in ¶44: we are masters of ourselves and proprietors of our own person, and the actions and the labor of it, and so we have in ourselves “the great Foundation of Property.” What we improve for ourselves is truly our own, and not common property. So labor, in the beginning, gave the right in things.
In ¶¶40–46 Locke presents a version of the labor cost theory of value, for example: that labor accounts for 90 to 99 percent of the value of land. The point of these sections is to argue that the institution of property in land, properly limited, is for everyone’s benefit. Those without land need not be sufferers for it. In ¶41 Locke says that a king in a large and potentially fruitful territory in America, rich in land not yet improved by labor, is fed, housed, and clad worse than a day laborer in England. The institution of private property in land, when duly hedged by the constraints of ideal history, is both individually and collectively rational: he holds that it makes us all better off than we would be without it.
9.Locke says: “No man but he can have a right to what that [viz. his labor] is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left for others.” Second Treatise, ¶27, p. 288.
10.“As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a Property in. Whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy.” Second Treatise, ¶31, p. 290.
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3.We come finally to the introduction of money and the transition to political authority. Locke discusses these matters in: ¶¶36f, 45, 47–50.
(a) A crucial point here is that the introduction of money in effect suspends the spoilage proviso, which says that we can take no more from the bounty of nature than we can use before it spoils. For now by industrious labor we can acquire more than we can use but exchange the surplus for money (or claims to valuable things of various kinds), and thereby accumulate larger and larger holdings in land and natural resources, or whatever. Money allows us to “fairly possess” more land, say, than we can use the product of, “by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone” (¶50).
(b) In tacitly (without a compact) consenting to the use of money, people “agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth” and did so by “a tacit and voluntary consent” (¶50).
(c) Both property and money come into being before political society and without social compact, and this only by “putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money” (¶50).11
4.Thus, Locke has, I think, a two-stage account of property. The first stage is that of the state of nature in its various phases before political society. Here we may distinguish three phases:
(a)the first ages of the world: ¶¶26–39, 94.
(b)the age of fixing tribal boundaries by consent: ¶¶38, 45.
(c)the age of money and trade arising by consent: ¶¶35, 45, 47–50.
The second stage is that of political authority, and has, it seems, two phases:
(a)the age of paternal monarchy: ¶¶74ff, 94, 105–110, 162.
(b)the age of government by social compact and the regulating of property: ¶¶38, 50, 72f.
In the second stage, it is the age of government by social compact that Locke is mainly concerned with. In this stage property is conventional: that is, it is specified and regulated by the positive laws of society. I assume these laws respect all the constraints of the fundamental law of nature we have discussed. They also respect what Locke calls the “Fundamental Law of Prop-
11. How is this tacit consent related, if at all, to that of ¶¶119–122? Presumably it is different, but how?
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erty” in political society: that no one’s property can be taken from them, even for the necessary support of the government, without their consent, or the consent of their representatives (¶140).
An important consequence of the conventional nature of (real) property in political society is that a liberal socialist regime12 is not, I think, incompatible with what Locke says. Indeed, it may be unlikely that the Parliament (the representatives) in Locke’s class state would ever enact the laws definitive of socialist institutions. Perhaps so, but that is another matter. The point is only that there need be no violation of the rights of (real) property, as Locke defines them, in such a regime.
Moreover, it is perfectly possible that once political parties form, they may compete with one another for votes, say by urging the expansion of the electorate by lowering, or eliminating, the property qualification. Indeed, this happened in Locke’s time, as Parliament tended to look favorably on increases in the franchise, particularly in the cities and towns, in part as way of defending itself against the Crown.13 Given evolving political and economic conditions within ideal history, there may be good reasons for enough of those with property to favor such legislation. This kind of legislation if passed would not violate, so far as I can see, anything in Locke’s account of property. In time, then, there might develop from Locke’s class state something like a modern constitutional democratic regime. Has something similar to this actually happened?
§5. Problem of the Class State
1. Finally we come to the problem of the class state in Locke. Recall that this is the problem of how it can happen, consistent with Locke’s view, that beginning from the state of nature as a state of equal jurisdiction, all being equal sovereigns as it were, a social compact leading to a class state could be entered into.
One might want to reject this problem as not well posed. That is, one might say that Locke does not in fact accept the class state; at best he only appears to. We cannot fight every political war at once, so he takes them as they come, beginning with the most urgent. As the most urgent problem,
12.Such a regime was envisaged by the English Labor party and the German Social Democrats.
13.See note 4 above.
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he opposes royal absolutism. So one ought not to say Locke accepts the class state. He is really not taking any stand on this question, nor on the equality of women.
Now, I sympathize with this reply. It may be correct. For our purposes I simply assume that he does accept the class state in the following weak sense: he thinks such a state could, and in fact did, come about and exist in the English mixed constitution of his day. I don’t say that he accepts the class state if this means he fully endorses its values and is satisfied with it.
2. Again, one might reject the problem as not allowing Locke to appeal to reasons of necessity. That is, his thought in accepting the class state, so far as he appears to do so, might be that even in ideal history social conditions can be quite harsh and limiting, so that if a class state is justified, and could come about consistent with his view, that is only because of harsh and limiting conditions. As things get better over time, a class state will no longer be legitimate by Locke’s own principles; only a regime founded on a more equal franchise and distribution of property will meet his requirements for legitimacy. Eventually a just constitutional state may come about that answers fully to the ideas of liberty and equality in his doctrine.
As before I am sympathetic to this objection. I don’t deny Locke the plea of necessity, as political philosophy must recognize the limits of the possible. It cannot simply condemn the world. Nor do I deny that there are ideas of liberty and equality in Locke that can provide much of, though perhaps not all of, the basis of a conception of what we would regard as a just and equal democratic regime.
Rather, the point is this. For Locke to accept a class state, it is only required that there should exist, in ideal history, some conditions under which, consistent with his view, a class state could come about. To show this to be the case all we need do is to tell one plausible story about such conditions, a story that answers to all the enumerated constraints. We might then conjecture that such is the way Locke may have thought the English constitution could have come about, although of course it did not. (Recall what we said earlier about William the Conqueror.) What we are doing is testing Locke’s account of legitimacy. Here it should be stressed that there can be other conditions in which not a class state, but only a state far closer to our present ideals, could come about.
We need to keep in mind the point of this exercise: namely, to illustrate how, in Locke’s doctrine, the terms of the social compact and the form of regime depend on various contingencies, including people’s bargaining ad-
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