Locke, Macpherson and Property
In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism[1]¸ C.B. Macpherson offers a radical interpretation of the account of property found in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.[2] Locke, we are told, “justifies as natural a class differential in rights and in rationality, and by doing so provides a positive moral basis for capitalist society.”[3]
Before assessing this striking claim it is necessary to schematically reconstruct Locke’s account of property in Chapter V of his Second Treatise.
Locke must be read as a responding to Robert Filmer. Not simply because, as Peter Laslett demonstrated, both Treatises were penned as refutations of Filmer’s Patriarcha, but because Filmer sets a very specific challenge for all those who would deny property’s foundation in patriarchal entitlement.[4] For if property did not have its origin in God’s giving it to Adam, and it then being passed-on through patriarchal succession and gift ever since, how can anybody own anything at all? This is the challenge to which Locke is responding.[5]
Locke begins by basic inference. He observes that God gave all things to mankind in common,[6] and then notes the Bible’s dictum that God gave mankind the fruits of the earth so that they may be used to fulfil God’s purpose (in effect, for His possessions – each individual person being the property of God – to live well, go forth and multiply).[7] Taking these two premises, Locke concludes that it must be God’s intention that mankind somehow appropriate the fruits of the world and put them to best use.[8]
What, however, is the correct method of appropriation? Plainly it cannot be receiving consent from all other human beings: “If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him.”[9] So Locke looks instead at human beings themselves, and notes that they have self-ownership. From here Locke moves to the dictum for which his account of property is most famous: that men come to own whatever they “mix their labour with.”[10]
Men can come to have property in whatever they labour upon, but with two important constraints. The first is a spoliation proviso. Men may not appropriate more than they can make use of if this should lead to the commodity in question being wasted: “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”[11] It is permitted to hoard nuts (which don’t rot), but not plums, insofar as the latter are allowed to go bad.[12] This is a straightforward consequence of the observation that God gave mankind the earth with a teleological purpose: to put it to good use. Anyone who lets things spoil subverts God’s telos. The second constraint is that men must leave “enough, and as good…for others”[13] and for the same teleological reason: it is not God’s plan for one person to accumulate everything whilst everyone else is left starving and exposed.
With these constraints alone mankind is committed to a very primitive form of subsistence (a sort of barter economy at best). Things change with two vital innovations. The first is the introduction of money: because money doesn’t spoil, men are permitted to pile up as much of this as they please.[14] One may appropriate all of the apples in the orchard, so long as one sells or eats them all before they rot. There is no limitation on the pile of gold one ends-up with via apple-selling.
The second innovation is cultivation. For Locke, cultivation – or more generally, the labouring of the land – is crucial because it allows mankind to maximally develop the earth that God gave with his teleological purpose. Thus “he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniencies of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind: for his labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common.”[15] With cultivation the “enough and as good for others” proviso drops away, because the benefits of the fruits of the earth are multiplied many times over, such that even those without any land find they live better than they would had the land been left in common.[16] All land can be appropriated, so long as it is cultivated and the benefits of God’s gifts are multiplied accordingly.
With this account, Locke answers Filmer’s challenge of how property could come into existence without patriarchal foundation, and explains how mankind comes to agree to “disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.”[17]
From this we might agree with Macpherson that “[s]tarting from the traditional assumption that the earth and its fruits had originally been given to mankind for their common use, [Locke]…turned the tables on all who derived from this assumption theories which were restrictive of capitalist appropriation.”[18] But the existence of a “class differential”, which gives a “positive moral basis” to “capitalist society”, is an altogether stronger claim – and one that looks conspicuously absent from Locke’s text. Macpherson’s argument for this is as follows.
Two assumptions are implicit in Locke’s work. First, that the labouring class are not full members of political society. Second, that the labouring class is not fully rational.[19] Macpherson holds the first assumption to be a product of the second: because the labouring class are not fully rational, they cannot be full members of political society (though “they were certainly subject to the jurisdiction of the political community.”)[20] In sum, “whether by their own fault or not, members of the labouring class did not have full membership in political society; they did not and could not live a fully rational life.”[21]
Macpherson does not pretend this claim about rationality is found explicitly in the Treatise, however. Rather, it is “implicit” in Locke’s thought: “these ideas were so generally prevalent in Locke’s day that it would be surprising if he had not shared them”[22]; he “did not have to argue these points, he could assume that his readers could take them for granted, as he did.”[23]
Nonetheless, Macpherson does offer some textual support for this ascription. He points us to Locke’s Works, which are interpreted as positing labourers as too subjugated to think or act rationally.[24] We are directed to the Considerations, where Locke allegedly depicts the labouring class as: “an object of state policy…rather than fully a part of the citizen body. It was incapable of rational political action.”[25] The Reasonableness of Christianity is appealed to as evidence for Locke’s belief that “without supernatural sanctions, the labouring class is incapable of following a rationalist ethic.”[26] Yet Macpherson holds that even these examples of Locke’s (alleged) assumptions are brought into the open “only to establish a technical religious or economic argument by reminding his readers of something they already knew but had not correctly applied.”[27]
Macpherson goes further. As well as not being full members of the body politic the labouring classes, due to their class differential in rationality, also experience a class difference in rights. This is where Macpherson directly connects Locke’s alleged assumptions to the theory of property. The argument is complex, but essentially consists of the following.[28]
Having imbibed the assumption of a class difference in rationality from his own society, Locke read this class difference back into the situation of pre-society.[29] Macpherson’s contention is that through the introduction of money and the cultivation of land, Locke’s concept of rationality undergoes a change: “it shifts from individualistic appropriation of that modest amount of land that a man could use to produce what he and his family needed, to appropriation of amounts greater than could be used for that purpose. And when this unlimited accumulation becomes rational, full rationality is possible only for those who can so accumulate.”[30]
Macpherson believes that “Locke has generalised the assumption of a class differential in rights in his own society, into an implicit assumption of differential natural rights”;[31] that “at the point where labouring and appropriating become separable, full rationality went with appropriating rather than with labouring.”[32] This leads Macpherson to conclude that “there was in Locke’s view a class differential in rationality in the state of nature. Those who were left without property after the land was all appropriated could not be accounted fully rational. They had no opportunity to be so.”[33]
Locke allegedly holds that the process of acquisition is identical with rationality, creating a basis for differentiating between the rights of the labouring (ergo non-rational) class and the acquisitive (ergo rational) class. Likewise (and as seen above) Macpherson’s contention that Locke posits a difference in class rationality between labourers and non-labouring classes also informs his claim that for Locke the labouring classes are not full members of the body politic. That there is a class distinction in rationality between labouring and acquisitive classes implicit in Locke’s work is therefore the pivot-point of Macpherson’s interpretation.
There is good reason, however, to doubt whether it is correct. As Macpherson himself notes, Locke’s Treatise must be considered alongside the account offered in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. [34] Yet if we turn to the Essay, we find Locke stating explicitly that:
“God has furnished Men with faculties sufficient to direct them in the Way they should take, if they will but seriously employ them that Way, when their ordinary Vocations allow them the Leisure. No Man is so wholly taken up with the Attendance on the Means of Living, as to have no spare Time at all to think of his Soul, and inform himself in Matters of Religion. Were men as intent upon this as they are on things of lower concernment, there are none so enslaved to the necessities of life who might not find many vacancies that might be husbanded to the advantage of their knowledge.”[35]
Jeremy Waldron correctly observes that Locke is committed to “the fundamental adequacy of even the meanest intellect.”[36] The problem of the labouring classes is not that they are essentially sub-rational, it is that they have very little opportunity for advancing their rational faculties given limited resources and time. Nonetheless, Locke clearly believes that the labouring classes remain reprehensible insofar as they fail to develop their rational faculties, meaning they must have such faculties: “Even the hard-pressed day-labourer must regard the honest workings of his own intellect, not the learning of others, as normative in the conduct of his life.”[37]
Considerations from the Essay alone are not, however, decisive against Macpherson. It could be replied that even if Locke stated a commitment to the fundamental adequacy of even the meanest intellect in the Essay, nevertheless when he turned to his political Treatise he unwittingly deployed the class assumptions of his time to justify the exploitation of the labourers to the benefit of those with property.
Yet this is difficult to maintain when considering wider aspects of Locke’s account. Alan Ryan claims that Macpherson’s account “misconceives the direction from which Locke anticipated trouble; it was not the rebellious proletariat who threatened England, but the Catholic friends of Charles II.”[38] As John Marshall has shown, Ryan’s claim is somewhat overstated. Locke was concerned to license rebellion against tyrannical government without simultaneously giving license to radicals claiming the right to annul existing property arrangements (levellers like Richard Overton being of particular concern).[39] Indeed, this is part of the reason Locke’s account posits property as being pre-societal: should a tyrannical regime be dissolved, property nonetheless remains where it was. But Locke’s wariness of radicalism not withstanding, his account is a far cry from licensing the class-suppression Macpherson depicts. We see this by turning again to Waldron.
Macpherson’s interpretation strongly implies that Locke seeks to justify the self-interested exploitation of the labouring classes by property-holders via a system of subjugation. Yet this is hard to square with Waldron’s observation that Locke “is at pains to show that [the labourers] are among the beneficiaries of the sort of unequal money economy he envisages.”[40] After all, Locke justifies the acquisition of land because it leads to cultivation, and in this way (as we saw above) the man who cultivates land gives more to his compatriots than he takes away. As it is cultivation through labour which leads to virtually all the value being put on land,[41] Locke “actually seeks to show that the poorest participant in the English economy is better-off than the best-off participant in the native American economy.”[42] In other words, it is to the direct benefit of the labouring classes that land be appropriated and cultivated.
Locke’s justification of the acquisition of land – and the exclusion of others from its use – on the grounds that overall this makes even the worst-off better-off than they would be if the land remained in common, may not be considered a particularly convincing argument. The point, however, is that Locke feels compelled to offer a justification for acquisition of property parsed in terms of the benefits this yields to the worst-off, i.e. the labouring classes. The offering of such justification is difficult to square with the Macpherson view of Locke as apologist for the subjugation and exploitation of labourer to the singular advantage of a capitalist class.
Finally, it is worth recalling that Locke justifies the introduction of money in large measure because it is based upon consent.[43] As Waldron notes, “consent is demanded at this point precisely to vindicate the interests of those whom Macpherson believes Locke has an interest in marginalizing.”[44] Locke’s appeal to consent as the foundation of money may be a very poor argument: those likely to be most disadvantaged by inequalities arising from money are likely to be participating least in monetary conventions, and hence least likely to be tacit consenters assigning conventional value to money. Yet the fact Locke felt compelled to offer a justification of money in terms of the labouring class’ consent is strongly at odds with the tenor of Macpherson’s interpretation.
We have seen that there is reason to be sceptical of Macpherson’s pivotal claim that Locke posited a class difference in rationality between labourers and capitalists. Furthermore, the tenor of Locke’s account is strikingly at odds with Macpherson’s implication that he sought to justify the exploitation of labourers by those possessing property. By way of a closing remark, I now offer a speculative explanation as to why Macpherson’s interpretation appears so off-target.
Macpherson’s account is avowedly Marxist. He posits Locke as necessarily engaged in the process of justifying class exploitation, albeit unconsciously. Driving Macpherson’s interpretation appears to be the Marxist dictum that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”[45] rather than a sensitivity to original texts. This tenet, through much admirable and sophisticated supplementary reasoning, seemingly causes Macpherson to attribute to Locke positions he was unlikely to have held. As Alan Ryan notes: “To see Locke as no more than an apologist for capitalism is ludicrous; to suggest that wilder minds in other ages would see him as such, and side with him or against him for that reason is not.”[46]
[1] C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)
[2] John Locke, “Second Treatise” in Laslett (ed.) Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
[3] Macpherson (1962) p.221
[4] Peter Laslett, “Introduction” in Laslett (ed.) Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
[5] cf. Jeremy Waldron, Locke, God and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) p.153; Alan Ryan, Property and Political Theory (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p.26
[6] Locke (1988) §25
[7] Ibid §26
[8] Ibid §26
[9] Ibid §28
[10] Ibid §27-9
[11] Ibid §31
[12] Ibid §46
[13] Ibid §27, 31
[14] Ibid §46, 50
[15] Ibid §37
[16] The proviso is therefore best thought of, with Waldron, as a sufficient but not necessary condition of appropriation. See Waldron (2002) p.172
[17] Locke (1988) §50
[18] Macpherson (1962) p.221
[19] Ibid p.221-2
[20] Ibid p.227
[21] Ibid p.226
[22] Ibid p.222
[23] Ibid p.229
[24] Ibid p.223
[25] Ibid p.223
[26] Ibid p.225
[27] Ibid p.229
[28] Ibid p.229-238
[29] Ibid p.235
[30] Ibid p.232 emphasis added
[31] Ibid p.231
[32] Ibid p.234
[33] Ibid p.238
[34] Ibid p.230
[35] John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1975) p.708
[36] Waldron (2002) p.87
[37] Ibid p.87
[38] Ryan (1984) p.20
[39] John Marshall, Resistance, Religion and Responsibility, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p.270
[40] Waldron (2002) p.176
[41] Locke (1988) §40
[42] Waldron (2002) p.176
[43] Locke (1988) §45
[44] Waldron (2002) p.176
[45] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, 2004) p.64
[46] Ryan (1984) p.48
Unapologetic Self-Indulgent Long Philosophy Post « Bad Conscience said,
July 7, 2010 at 7:32 am
[...] try to give a flavour of this here (though criminally with no reference to Dunn), which should demonstrate the extent to which [...]
Ste For Sure said,
July 13, 2010 at 4:20 pm
“The point, however, is that Locke feels compelled to offer a justification for acquisition of property parsed in terms of the benefits this yields to the worst-off, i.e. the labouring classes. The offering of such justification is difficult to square with the Macpherson view of Locke as apologist for the subjugation and exploitation of labourer to the singular advantage of a capitalist class.”
Don’t all apologists for capitalism feel compelled to make something like this argument? I don’t see how this is so at odds with Macpherson (although its a long time since I read his book). To say that Locke justified early forms class exploitation arising out of private property isn’t the same as to say that Locke hated poor people and wanted them to starve.
The British political economists justified the emerging entrepeneurial capitalism in the 19th century – they argued in favour of capitalist social relations. They were also clearly very concerned, on broadly utilitarian grounds, for the well-being of the labouring classes.
The claim that Locke justified a class state, in which the labouring classes were exploited might well be true, even if part of his argument is that such a state guarantees the well-being of the labouring classes.
Paul Sagar said,
July 13, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Ste, I wrote this ages ago and so don’t remember Macpherson’s account in detail – but I’m fairly sure his argument was *not* of the sort “Locke only wants the poor to be better off insofar as that’s good for the capitalist producer class”, but rather a more blunt “Locke is an apologist for the bourgeoise exploitation of the workers” sort. It’s quite a bad book, tbh, the product of forcing Marxist thoery into places it doesn’t belong, and has rightfully been superceded by interpretations in the wake of John Dunn’s work.
Ste For Sure said,
July 14, 2010 at 4:34 pm
Yes, I am aware that nobody agrees with Macpherson, and his project was overly ambitious and made him say some silly things. And, since neither of us seem to remember Macpherson’s work all that well, and probably don’t intend on reading it again this discussion is fairly moot! haha