Locke’s Political Philosophy
1. Natural Law and Natural Rights
Perhaps the most central concept in Locke’s political philosophy is his theory of natural law and natural rights. The natural law concept existed long before Locke as a way of expressing the idea that there were certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the particular place where they lived or the agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was between laws that were by nature, and thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and operated only in those places where the particular convention had been established. This distinction is sometimes formulated as the difference between natural law and positive law.
Natural law is also distinct from divine law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally referred to those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other inspired writers. Natural law can be discovered by reason alone and applies to all people, while divine law can be discovered only through God’s special revelation and applies only to those to whom it is revealed and whom God specifically indicates are to be bo
Property and Ownership
1. Issues of Analysis and Definition
More than most policy areas dealt with by political philosophers, the discussion of property is beset with definitional difficulties. The first issue is to distinguish between property and private property.
Strictly speaking, ‘property’ is a general term for the rules that govern people’s access to and control of things like land, natural resources, the means of production, manufactured goods, and also (on some accounts) texts, ideas, inventions, and other intellectual products. Disagreements about their use are likely to be serious because resource-use matters to people. They are particularly serious where the objects in question are both scarce and necessary. Some have suggested that property relations only make sense under conditions of scarcity (Hume [] , pp. –98). But other grounds of conflict are possible: there may be disagreements about how a given piece of land should be used, which stem from the history or symbolic significance of that piece of land, whether land in general is scarce or not. (Intellectual property provides an example of property rules that do not respond directly
John Locke’s Theory of Property: Problems of Interpretation
“Locke made extensive use of efficiency arguments in his economic and political writings because he valued wealth and economic growth as important human goals.”
The Problem: Locke, Liberalism, and Property
John Locke’s major political analysis, The Two Treatises of Government (), has long been hailed as a seminal work in the history of political liberalism. In the Second Treatise especially, it is generally recognized, Locke argues the case for individual natural rights, limited government depending on the consent of the governed, separation of powers within government, and most radically, the right of people within a society to depose rulers who fail to uphold their end of the social contract. While the history of the writing of the Treatises shows that it was first conceived and executed as a revolutionary tract, its importance has far exceeded the specific revolutionary machinations which occasioned it. Although the nature of its influence on subsequent ideas is debated among scholars, few question its powerful influence on French, American, and, to a lesser extent, Spanish revolutionari
John Locke is one of the most important modern philosophers. He contributed, most famously – though often misunderstood by people who name-drop him – to political philosophy; but Locke also made important contributions to philosophy more broadly (including epistemology, theology, and labor theory in economics). I have a comprehensive summary of Locke’s Second Treatise which you can begin to read here. In this post I would like to examine the internal logic of Locke’s core argument that runs throughout the book: how the law of nature is the law of self-preservation and how this becomes the basis of property and that all politics is about the preservation of property which is why property is really the only “natural right” in Locke because life and liberty are intertwined with it.
Locke is famously remembered for stating that man’s natural rights are “life, liberty, and property.” At first glance it would seem as if he settles on three natural rights. In reality they are all intertwined together – a result of the implicit monistic materialism of Locke’s broader metaphysical and ontological philosophy. While Locke is, properly a
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