Locke, John (1632–1704)

John Locke was a British philosopher who stands foremost among the founders of what we now call “classical liberalism.” His most important teachings on government and economics are set forth in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, and they begin from the view that the individual is naturally free, equal, and sovereign and possesses rights to life, liberty, and “estate.” From such a beginning Locke concludes that the just powers of governments are limited and derive from the consent of the governed; that labor naturally constitutes a claim to ownership; and that the natural world, without labor, has very little value.

Locke is well known to Americans for having first made the philosophic case for a number of the doctrines that were later presented in the Declaration of Independence as “self-evident truths,” and his Letters on Toleration advanced the case for religious toleration. In showing what knowledge is, and both its possibility and its limits, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding also prepares the way for a fresh look at reigning moral and political opinions.

Whereas many in the West now tend to take Locke's core positions for granted, he faced the challenge of establishing them against once-powerful rivals. He had first, for example, to bury the view that political authority descends by divine right, which he did in his First Treatise of Civil Government. With this task accomplished, Locke turned in his Second Treatise to argue that people have rights by nature and that they authorize governments only to protect these rights. The individual is clearly prior to civil government, not vice versa.

Like Hobbes before him, Locke began by imagining people in a prepolitical condition, “the state of nature,” as a way of exploring and highlighting the relationship between human nature and civil society. Unlike Hobbes, Locke appears to teach that this original anarchic condition is not a state of war, but he nevertheless joins “the justly descried Hobbes” in presenting civil government as the “the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature.” He traces these “inconveniences” especially to the lack of any consistent enforcement of law (for one can possess rights even in circumstances in which they are not likely to be respected) and to the stinginess of nature prior to its transformation by human labor.

Locke makes it unmistakably clear that he cannot abide Hobbes's defense of absolute monarchy, which he calls “no form of civil government at all.” Since people create government to escape the perils of the state of nature, they cannot be supposed to consent to the establishment of governments that, granting them no rights or protections, put them in a condition even more perilous than the state of nature. From Locke's emphasis on limiting government to protect the individual, it was but a short step to Montesquieu's defense of the separation of powers as a way of securing these limits.

One of Locke's most novel and influential doctrines is his teaching that there is no private property in the state of nature until someone mixes his or her own labor with something natural: When no one owns something, it is labor that constitutes the decisive claim to possession. Part of this teaching argues that without labor, nature is very stingy indeed, so our original condition was harsh and insecure. The key to a more comfortable existence is to encourage labor, which contains the potential of transmuting nature's stinginess into limitless abundance. Above all, it is the invention of money that makes this possible. Only after people consent to value something imperishable, like gold, does it become reasonable for people to work for more than they need in the short term: No one would farm much land, for example, without the prospect of trading the produce for some durable good. Money liberates human productivity and thus [Page 1304]fuels the transformation of our impoverished natural condition. It does so, at least, if people are granted the right to possess money in unequal amounts, and Locke argues that their very consent to give value to money implies consent to the unequal wealth that is its natural consequence.

...