1 Locke on the origins of private property

a Locke in context: England and America John Locke: a quick biography; which contexts framed his philosophy of property?; how important is context anyway?: England: Stuart absolutism and divine right; Sir Robert Filmers Patriarcha (republished 1679/1680); the significance of Genesis 1.28, granting Adam dominion over `every living thing that moveth over the Earth; ascending or descending government? America: the colonial administration of America in the late 17th century:

Locke had extensive knowledge and interest in European contact with aboriginal peoples. A large number of books in his library are accounts of European exploration, colonization and of aboriginal peoples, especially Amerindians and their ways. As secretary to Lord Shaftesbury, secretary of the Lord Proprietors of Carolina (1668-71), secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673-4), and member of the Board of Trade (1696-1700), Locke was one of the six or eight men who closely invigilated and helped to shape the old colonial system during the Restoration. He invested in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company (1671) and the Company of Merchant Adventurers to trade with the Bahamas (1672), and he was a Landgrave of the proprietary government of Carolina. His theoretical and policy-making writings on colonial affairs include the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), Carolina's agrarian laws (1671-2), a reform proposal for Virginia (1696), memoranda and policy recommendations for the boards of trade, covering all the colonies, histories of European exploration and settlement, and manuscripts on a wide range of topics concerning government and property in America. (James Tully, Locke in Contexts).

b labour and appropriation The state of nature; `in the beginning, all the world was America; historical fact or heuristic fiction?:

The idea of the mass of individuals in a state of nature is an abstraction disguised as an empirical observation. The abstraction is constructed on the strength of the argument that all known social relations, customs and historical institutions are contingent and transitory. What remains after these historical residues have been subtracted, the chaos of individuals, is then said to be both `the basic truth of mens condition, and merely a `fiction which has to be imagined. (Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, summarising Hegels essay on natural law).

The state of nature, that state that all Men are naturally in, is not an asocial condition but an ahistorical condition. It is that state in which men are set by God. The state of nature is a topic for theological reflection, not for anthropological research. (John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke).

What laws hold in the state of nature?; what justifies the idea that individuals acquire a property right in those things with which they have `mixed their labour?; what is involved in the notion of self-ownership?; what are the limits on appropriation? why private property at all? cf Rousseau in La Nouvelle Hlose: `La nature a tout fait, mais sous ma direction; how does common property become private? if Locke is right that Gods original grant established a regime of common property, how

does this common property become private property? Filmers supporters were quick to point out this problem:

[Locke says] that by the law of nature all things were at first common, and yet teacheth, after that propriety was brought in, it was against the law of nature to use community. He does thereby not only make the law of nature changeable, which he saith God cannot do, but he also makes the law of nature contrary to itself.

How can a right that is a common right become private? Property, common and private?; distinguishing a ius ad rem, or claim right, and a ius in re, a right of ownership in something that one presently possesses (see generally Tully, Locke in Contexts, chapter 3); how does the advent of money change things? What is the larger point of basing ownership rights upon labour?:

It was God, not human convention, that had given men a title to the fruits of their labour. Indeed it was only human convention that gave a monarch such authority as he held over his subjects. Instead of possessing a royal dominion over subjects and territory inherited directly from Gods gift of the world to Adam, Lockes ruler had in the first instance simply the duty to use such power as was available to him to protect the rights which God himself had given directly to his subjects. (John Dunn, Locke. A Very Short Introduction).

c property and `political individualism Distinguishing jurisdiction or government (imperium) from property (dominium); in feudalism, property and sovereignty were indistinguishable, if only because there was, quite simply, no idea of state and very little idea of impersonal, public obligations at all (Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, at page 20); Lockes theory of political obligation; did he have mediaeval precursors, notably William of Ockham and John of Paris?:

Ockham, like John of Paris, does not try to give property rights to men, but attempts to describe the kinds of powers men have as individuals prior to government in the realm of power over things, and subsequently, to analyse the role of government in preserving or augmenting such power. [M]en were described in fourteenth-century political theory, in legal treatises, in political poetry and prose, polemic and ephemera, as individuals controlling their lives by being in some way responsible for their material welfare. Dominium in a variety of interpretations was taken to be the basic fact of their individualism. (Janet Coleman, Dominium in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Political Thought and its Seventeenth-Century Heirs; John of Paris and John Locke(1985) 33 Political Studies 73.

What are the components of the power over material things that property is taken to be? How is that power over material things to be distinguished from the power possessed by popes or kings? The theory of fedualism:

In the thirteenth century freehold land became what it is to us, an object of property, capable of passing from hand to hand rightfully or wrongfully; and the lords rights became merely economic, a sort of servitude attached to the land. (S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law, at p 104)

Vassalage; fiefs and tenures (tenere de); subinfeudination; the erosion of the lords rights and the emergence of alienable estates (NB the statute Quia Emptores 1290): the taxonomy of estates: fee simple; fee tail (entail), life estate, term of years (lease); words of limitation; reversionary title, radical title.