John Locke · Politics
How Locke justified private property through the mixing of labour - and how the same argument ended up sanctioning vast inequality and colonial dispossession.
Locke opens with a genuine puzzle. Suppose, as he and his readers believed, that God gave the earth and its fruits to all human beings in common - to mankind as a whole, not to any one person. Then how can anyone ever come to own anything privately? If the world belongs to everyone, by what right do you fence off a field, pick an apple, and call it yours, excluding all others? It seems you would need the consent of all humanity for every acorn you eat - which is absurd. Yet private property plainly exists and seems necessary for life. Locke set out to solve this puzzle: to show how legitimate private property can arise from a world originally held in common, without anyone’s prior permission.
Here is the famous argument. You own your labour. So when you take something from the common store of nature and mix your labour with it - gathering acorns, tilling a field, drawing water, catching a fish - you join something that is indisputably yours (your labour) to something that was no one’s in particular. By doing so, Locke argues, you make it your own. The labour, being yours, ‘annexes’ the thing to you and excludes the common right of others, because no one can have a right to what you have mixed your own self into without doing you an injury. And crucially, this needs no one’s consent: if you had to ask all mankind before picking an apple, everyone would starve. Labour itself does the work of appropriation. The fruit becomes yours the moment your labour gathers it.
Locke’s two limits deserve a closer look, because they are what make his theory a theory of just acquisition rather than a licence for grabbing. The spoilage limit reflects his conviction that nothing was made by God to be wasted: you may accumulate only what you can actually use before it perishes, since to let it spoil in your hands is to have stolen it from others who could have used it. The ‘enough and as good’ proviso is the deeper of the two: it ties the legitimacy of your appropriation to its effect on everyone else. In a world of abundant unclaimed land - Locke imagines early humanity with vast empty continents available - one person’s fencing off a field leaves plenty just as good for the next person, so no one is harmed, and the appropriation is clearly just. The provisos make Lockean property fundamentally relational: what you may rightly take depends not only on your labour but on what your taking does to the common store that others depend on.
This will turn out to be the pressure point of the whole theory. In a world with a frontier of free land and only perishable goods to hoard, the provisos are easily satisfied and property is clearly just. But the modern world has no endless frontier, and - as the next step shows - Locke himself introduced something that lets the spoilage limit be escaped entirely, opening the door to exactly the unlimited accumulation and inequality the provisos seemed designed to prevent.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Locke grounds private property in labour, hedged by two limits. State the labour argument and the two provisos, and say how money was used to escape them.
Leads to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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