John Locke: Property Rights and Labour-Mixing

Abstract

John Locke was an English philosopher, writing during and immediately after the Glorious Revolution. His political philosophy, found in his Two Treatise of Government, is one expression of the early modern, Protestant natural law tradition. Typically regarded as proto- liberal, Locke’s political philosophy is grounded in a view of human beings as moral equals, each endowed with natural rights that can be invoked to critique and resist political institutions such as the state. To Locke, the state is created by a society of equals already endowed with rights, rather than an institution that created those rights ex nihilo. Importantly, then, the territorial rights held by a state are strictly a function of the property rights of its citizenry, administration of which they voluntarily yield to the state for the sake of mutual convenience.

Keywords: Locke, Labour, Consent, Equality, Territory

JEL Classification: B12, k11, k12, k33, b31