Locke was writing in opposition to a fellow called Robert Filmer. What did Filmer believe about the legitimate origins of political power?

Locke was writing in opposition to a fellow called Robert Filmer. What did Filmer believe about the legitimate origins of political power? What did Locke believe about the legitimate origins of political power?What is the “state of nature”? Has such a place ever existed? Does such a place exist now? Is it a good place or a bad place? How or why do we leave it?If “God gave the World to Men in Common,” why does Locke believe “it cannot be supposed that he [God] meant it should always remain in common”?What are some of the legitimate functions of government? What are some of the things legitimate government cannot do, according to Locke? Pay special attention to the role of government, according to Locke, in regulating religious beliefs and practices. What are the remedies for government that is illegitimate? reading material. JOHN LOCKE1632–1704Near the beginning of his Two Treatises of Government,1 John Locke used the following words to describe the political doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer, an author with whom he strongly disagreed: “[Filmer’s] system . . . is no more but this: That all government is absolute monarchy. And the ground he builds on is this: That no man is born free.”2Locke’s own political teaching may be stated in opposite terms but with similar brevity, in this way: All government is limited in its powers and exists only by the consent of the governed. And the ground Locke builds on is this: All men are born free.The theme of human freedom characterizes those of Locke’s works which are most important for an understanding of his political thought: in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he wrote of religious freedom; in the Two Treatises of Government (1690), of political freedom; and in Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money (1691), of economic freedom. Each of these works is an instructive examination of the principle of human freedom, but since this principle receives its fullest and most political statement in the Two Treatises, this chapter will be confined almost entirely to a description and analysis of that work.Book I of the Two Treatises (usually referred to as the First Treatise or Of Government, and now infrequently published and seldom read) is devoted primarily to a discussion and refutation of the argument advanced by Filmer that kings rule by a divine right inherited from Adam. Book II of the Two Treatises (usually called the Second Treatise or Of Civil Government, and often published and read as if a separate work) begins with a brief summary of the argument of the First Treatise; having refuted the principle of divine right, which many then considered to be the foundation of princely power, Locke acknowledged his responsibility to explain what he considered to be the true foundation of government.Locke’s inquiry begins with the great question: What is political power? To answer that question—”to understand political power right” (§4)*1 and to explain the “true original, extent, and end of civil government”3—is the major concern of the Second Treatise. We are first presented with a definition:Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death and, consequently, all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good [§3].But we are told at once that to understand this definition we must first consider “what state all men are naturally in,” and that is “a state of perfect freedom” and “a state also of equality.” Natural freedom derives from natural equality,there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without sub-ordination or subjection [§4].But though this state of nature is a state of liberty, “yet it is not a state of license. . . . The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges everyone” (§6). The natural liberty of man is not to be understood as meaning that men are not restrained by any law, for “in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom” (§57). “The natural liberty of man is . . . to have only the law of nature for his rule,” “to be under no other restraint but the law of nature” (§22).And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. . . . And being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours [§6].Thus the dictates of the law of nature in the state of nature seem very different from what we were previously taught by Hobbes. According to Hobbes, the state of nature is a state of war “of every man against every man.” But Locke does not equate the states of nature and war; he instead speaks ofthe plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war which, however some men have confounded, are as far distant as a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance, and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence, and mutual destruction are one from another [§19].Our first impression of Locke’s state of nature, then, is of men living together amicably, in the first ages of mankind, before the advent of civil society, enjoying natural freedom and equality in an atmosphere of peace and good will, under the beneficent rule of the law of nature.But let us now examine in greater detail the main elements of this first impression. What is the state of nature? How peaceful is it? And what is the law of nature which governs it?Our first observation on closer inspection is that the state of nature is not limited to the original, prepolitical condition of man. In fact, when Locke first answers the question whether the state of nature ever existed, the example he offers is not at all one of prepolitical men, but rather of men who are essentially, and to an unusual degree, political:It is often asked as a mighty objection, where are or ever were there any men in such a state of nature? To which it may suffice as an answer at present that, since all princes and rulers of independent governments all through the world are in a state of nature, it is plain the world never was, nor ever will be, without numbers of men in that state [§14].All princes and rulers—civilized men living in a civil relation with many other men—are in the state of nature. A subsequent example is of a Swiss and an Indian, at least one of them a man with political experience, meeting in the woods of America; of them Locke says, “they are perfectly in a state of nature in reference to one another” (§14, italics supplied). If, as we see, the phrase “state of nature” is sometimes not related to the condition of prepolitical man, what, then, in precise terms, is the state of nature? Locke provides this brief definition:Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature [§19].The state of nature is more comprehensive than a description of the condition of man prior to the advent of civil society. It is a certain form of human relationship; its existence, when it exists, is without reference to the degree of political experience of the men in it; and it may exist at any time in the history of mankind, including the present: “wherever there are any number of men, however associated, that have no . . . decisive power to appeal to, there they are still in the state of nature” (§89, italics supplied).Using the terms of the definition of the state of nature, we can derive a definition of its opposite. That would be a state of men living together with a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them. In other words, the opposite of the state of nature is civil society:Those who are united into one body and have a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them and punish offenders, are in civil society one with another; but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on earth, are still in the state of nature . . . [§87].This makes clearer the sense in which the state of nature and the state of war are not to be confounded. They are not identical and yet they are not opposites. Their difference lies in the fact that they are not things of the same kind. It would be as wrong to confuse the state of nature and the state of war as to confuse civil society and the state of war; such a confusion would reveal a misunderstanding of their definitions, for the definition of the state of war does not include the essential term (“a common superior”) of the definitions of both the state of nature and civil society.The words that define the state of war introduce a wholly different element, that is, the use of force without right, without justice, without authority. “The use of force without authority always puts him that uses it into a state of war” (§155); “it is the unjust use of force then that puts a man into the state of war with another” (§181); “whosoever uses force without right . . . puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it . . . ” (§232). And, finally, “it is such force alone” (§207, italics supplied) which establishes the state of war; that is, the existence of the state of war does not depend on the presence or the absence of a common judge:Want of a common judge with authority puts all men in a state of nature; force without right upon a man’s person makes a state of war, both where there is, and is not a common judge [§19, italics supplied].Since the use of force without right defines the state of war, its opposite, the state of peace, would be defined as the condition of men living together where there is no use of force without right (or, the same thing, where force is used only with right). Now we may state fully the sense in which the state of nature and the state of war differ:1. The state of nature is characterized by the absence of a common judge and by the absence of any law but the law of nature.2. Civil society, its opposite, is characterized by the presence of a common judge with authority to enforce civil law. Then, in addition, either within the state of nature or within civil society:3. The state of war exists if force is used without right.4. Or the state of peace, its opposite, exists if there is no use of force without right.This means that in the state of nature, and also in civil society, at some times a state of peace may prevail and at other times a state of war, and that however clearly we may have distinguished the state of nature and the state of war one from another, we have not at all disposed of the essential question: Will there be war in the state of nature?But before we turn to that question we must first understand how it is that the state of war can exist within civil society, where there is a common judge with authority to prevent the use of force without right. As a matter of fact, just before Locke says that a state of war can exist “both where there is, and is not, a common judge,” he gives a definition which seems to say the opposite, which seems to exclude the state of war from civil society:But force, or a declared design of force, upon the person of another, where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief, is the state of war . . . [§19, italics supplied].The resolution of this difficulty lies in the fact that even in civil society the power of the civil authority cannot always be operative:Thus a thief, whom I cannot harm but by appeal to the law for having stolen all that I am worth, I may kill when he sets on me to rob me but of my horse or coat, because the law, which was made for my preservation, where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which if lost, is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defense and the right of war, a liberty to kill the aggressor, because the aggressor allows not time to appeal to our common judge . . . [§19].The state of war can exist within civil society only when the force of the common judge is rendered ineffectual. It is as if the parties—even though they be fellow citizens met on the king’s highway—were for the moment in the state of nature, without a common judge to settle their differences. Thus we see that the state of war can occur in civil society only to the extent that the state of nature can occur within civil society. Speaking precisely, the state of war cannot exist where civil authority is presently and effectively enforcing the law of society. The state of war can occur only in the absence of such civil authority; the state of war can exist only in the state of nature or something temporarily approximating it. What seems to be the state of war in civil society is rather this: the state of war in the state of nature within civil society. The state of nature is “the state all men are naturally in”; civil society is a human contrivance which obscures, for the most part, the inescapable fact that the state of nature persists, at least partially, and is ineradicable. As we shall see later, Locke makes use of this concept of the recurrence of the state of nature and the state of war within civil society; it is in those terms that he asserts the right to resist the exercise of arbitrary, tyrannical power. Thus Locke is able to speak of the state of war occurring in civil society and also, without contradicting himself, to speak of “civil society being a state of peace amongst those who are of it, from whom the state of war is excluded . . . ” (§212).In the manner just described, war can indeed occur in civil society as well as in the state of nature—with, however, these decisive differences: war is more likely to begin in the state of nature than in civil society and, once begun, is also more difficult to terminate there, because force cannot give way to “the fair determination of the law” (§20), as it does in civil society.Let us now return to consideration of the state of nature in the more limited and more revealing sense of the original, prepolitical condition of man, and let us ask once again: Will there be war in that state? Of numerous passages we might cite, perhaps these will suffice to indicate the answer to the question:I easily grant that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature, which must certainly be great where men may be judges in their own case, since it is easy to be imagined that he who was so unjust as to do his brother an injury will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for it [§13].The state of nature is “not to be endured,” because of “those evils which necessarily follow from men’s being judges in their own cases.” In the state of nature, “everyone has the executive power of the law of nature” (§13), and although the law of nature is “intelligible and plain to a rational creature and a studier of that law” (§12), “yet men, being biased by their interest as well as ignorant for want of study of it, are not apt to allow of it as a law binding to them in the application of it to their particular cases” (§124).If the executive power of the law in any state should be in the hands of ignorant and biased men who misapply it against others and refuse its application to themselves, will the enforcement of the law in that state differ in any significant way from the use of force without right? Locke provides many similar passages to support the conclusion that the state of nature will frequently be indistinguishable from a state of war.But this conclusion seems incompatible with the earlier description of the state of nature (“men living together according to reason”), unless we entertain the possibility that Locke was urging on his readers the very strange doctrine that reason sometimes counsels men to kill other men. The conclusion seems also to contradict the teaching of the law of nature that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (§6). What then is the law of nature and what are the obligations it imposes?The obligations of the law of nature are stated in two ways. Every man is obliged to preserve himself, and every man is obliged to preserve all mankind:Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another [§6].We have in this passage direct, explicit statements of unselfish obligations of restraint in relations with our fellow men, but, as we see, they are not without qualification. When there is no common judge, will a man’s “own preservation” come often “in competition”? When it does, what then is his obligation? To what extent will he be able to act “to preserve the rest of mankind”? What considerations will guide him when he undertakes “to do justice on an offender”? By the law of nature “he is bound to preserve himself”; he also has the duty, “as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind.” Will his two duties conflict?Many passages indicate that there is a surprisingly close connection between self-preservation and the obligation to preserve all mankind. In example after example the execution of the duty to preserve others is coupled with the right to kill another man who threatens or might threaten one’s own preservation. The aggressor against me is to be treated as one unfit to associate with human beings, as a savage beast, as, therefore, a threat to all mankind. It isreasonable and just I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction; for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred; and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion . . . [§16].In this formulation there seems to be no conflict between the duty to preserve oneself and the duty to preserve all mankind as much as can be. But the possibility of misjudgment is obvious, if a man is forced to judge not only “who makes war upon him,” but also who has “an enmity to his being,” and, on the basis of that judgment, to destroy him. Thus a zealous effort to fulfill the obligation to preserve the rest of mankind may in practice be indistinguishable from an excessive concern for self-preservation and may itself, in the absence of other restraint, become an unprovoked threat to peace and the preservation of others.Aggression against others is indeed a violation of the law of nature: it exposes all to increased danger; it jeopardizes preservation. If the law of nature is misunderstood, as it will be by those who do not study it, that is, by those who, driven by their strong desire for self-preservation, do not consider sufficiently the importance of the conditions of general peace for their own preservation, destruction of life will be the general result.The connection between the law of nature and the desire for self-preservation is profound. “The first and strongest desire God planted in men, and wrought into the very principles of their nature, being that of self-preservation,”4 men are assured that in pursuing that desire they are also fulfilling their obligation to God and nature:For the desire, strong desire of preserving his life and being, having been planted in [man] as a principle of action by God himself, reason, which was the voice of God in him, could not but teach him and assure him that, pursuing that natural inclination he had to preserve his being, he followed the will of his Maker. . . .5A course of conduct which tends toward self-preservation, then, is not only in accord with reason, which is the law of nature, but it is, one may say, the very definition of reasonable behavior. In this sense, the law of nature is known to all men, and, in this sense, men cannot but follow its dictates. But in another sense, that of understanding the means by which that desire might be fulfilled, men are ignorant of the law of nature “for want of study of it,” and therefore they unwittingly behave contrary to its dictates, contrary to reason, that is, contrary to their interest in their own preservation. However the law of nature may be “writ in the hearts of all mankind” (§11), in one sense, in the other there is little likelihood that men in the state of nature can know how to obey it. The law of nature is both known and not known. Men must discover and contrive the conditions that will enable them to fulfill their natural desire for self-preservation.The source of the law of nature is thus to be found in the strongest desire of men. The law of nature has peace and preservation as its end. It will be obeyed because of the universal desire for preservation; it does not rely for enforcement on obligations to others. Although some relation to earlier teachings may be seen in this, compared to classical and medieval concepts of the law of nature it is indeed “a very strange doctrine” (§9), for this law of nature concerns itself neither with the excellence of man nor with the love of God and of man for his fellow man. Locke, it must be said, does not explicitly deny the importance of excellence or love; he simply disregards them. For that matter, he barely uses or does not use at all, in the Second Treatise, such words as charity, soul, ethics, morality, virtue, noble, or love. They are not essential to his explanation of the foundation of civil society. For that task he names other, more powerful and universal forces in human nature—and, above all, the strongest. It is as if he had said: I do not deny that men are often moderate and just, and that some strive for excellence; nor do I deny that some are moved by fear or love of God, and love and charity for their fellow man. I assert only that when we consider the true foundations of political society, the real origins of government, none of these is of sufficient consequence to merit mention. What counts is what is universal and powerful, what exists with controlling force within every man, what can be relied upon to govern the behavior of man.The basis of the law of nature is that strongest desire implanted within every man. The desire for self-preservation determines how men will behave; since men are not able to behave otherwise, such behavior can never be wrong (“God and nature never allowing a man so to abandon himself as to neglect his own preservation” [§168]); men must be acknowledged to have a right to do what they are unable not to do. No government is securely grounded in nature which does not permit and even encourage men to act as they cannot help acting. This unvarying principle of action governs the behavior of men in varying circumstances and conditions; an understanding of it as the basis of the law of nature, therefore, is the necessary foundation of an inquiry into the nature of political power. And so when we read Locke’s statement that the civil laws of political society “are only so far right as they are founded on the law of nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted” (§12), we must keep in mind the content of that law of nature, if we are to appreciate its political significance:The obligations of the law of nature cease not in society but only in many cases are drawn closer and have by human laws known penalties annexed to them to enforce their observation. Thus the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions must, as well as their own and other men’s actions, be conformable to the law of nature, i.e., to the will of God, of which that is a declaration, and the fundamental law of nature being the preservation of mankind, no human sanction can be good or valid against it [§135].The first impression of Locke’s state of nature seems very unlike Hobbes’s state of nature, as was said. But, in fact, we have discovered three significant similarities. However Locke may have distinguished the state of nature and the state of war, the state of nature is the home—and the only home—of the state of war: the state of nature is “an ill condition” “not to be endured.” Secondly, the source, content, and end of the law of nature can be stated, briefly and not inaccurately, in the word self-preservation. And finally, Locke’s teaching is not unlike Hobbes’s in the assertion that “civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature.”Yet we must not lose sight of the validity of that first impression. There is, notwithstanding their similarities, a deep and significant difference in the two teachings: Locke’s state of nature is not as violent as Hobbes’s. If, as it seems, force will commonly be used without right in Locke’s state of nature, it is not because of a “natural proclivity of men, to hurt each other,” as Hobbes puts it; Locke does not, as Hobbes does, speak of every man as the potential murderer of every other man. The main threat to the preservation of life in the state of nature lies not in the tendencies of men to hurt each other but rather, as we shall see, in the poverty and hardship of their natural condition.Since the defects of the state of nature differ in the two accounts, the remedies proposed by Locke and Hobbes differ accordingly. The main consequence of the crucial difference in the two accounts is the fact that the civil government Locke propounds has a character far less absolute than Hobbes’s. And the most obvious sign of the difference is the very much greater attention Locke gives to the subject of property.The beginning of Locke’s discussion of property has three elements: (1) an assertion or supposition about the original divine donation of the world to man; (2) a question, stemming from the assertion or supposition, concerning the origin of private property; and (3) the promise of an answer to the question:. . . ‘tis very clear that God . . . has given the earth to the children of men, given it to mankind in common. But this being supposed, it seems to some a very great difficulty how anyone should ever come to have a property in anything. . . . I shall endeavor to show how men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the commoners [§25].In the original universal common of which Locke speaks, “nobody has originally a private dominion exclusive of the rest of mankind” (§26). Every man has an equal right to every part of what is common. This cannot mean, however, that everyone has a share in the ownership of everything; it can only mean that originally there was no ownership, there was no property. If in the universal common any man has a right to help himself to any part of the common without the consent of the others, then the others have no property, for it is the nature of property “that without a man’s own consent, it cannot be taken from him” (§193). The assertion that the world was given to mankind in common means, simply, that in the beginning no one owned anything. The original universal common was a state of universal propertylessness. That is why Locke proceeds at once to the question: How did anyone “ever come to have a property in anything”?The answer lies in this, that there was one exception to the otherwise universal common; that sole exception was the person of each man himself:Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself [§27].Furthermore, every man owns not only his own person but also his own labor, which is the immediate extension of his person: “the labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (§27). The property which every man has in his own person and in his own labor is the original and natural property; it is the foundation of all other property in the state of nature. All other property, then, was derivative from that original, natural, and underived property.In the earliest times there were vast uncultivated territories and very few men; there were therefore ample supplies of natural provisions fit for food—fruits and wild beasts. In this setting of abundance (and even superabundance) of provisions, the apples you gathered were yours, for you had combined what belonged only to you (your labor in gathering them) with something that belonged to no one (the apples hanging on the trees or lying on the ground). Another might contest your property in them, claiming that, by removing those apples from the common state, you had deprived him of the opportunity to take them for himself. Although this objection would otherwise be valid, it is fully overcome by a reminder of the condition of abundance, in the form of a decisive and always present qualification: whatever you remove from the natural common and mix your labor with is yours “where there is enough and as good left in common for others” (§27, italics supplied).In the universal common, you come to own unowned apples simply by picking them, if there are so many more unowned apples left on and under the trees that anyone else may have as many simply by picking them himself. Another who contests your property in the picked apples is really not claiming the apples that are common. If apples alone are all he wants, there are enough and as good still left for his taking. By claiming the apples already in your possession, he is really seeking only the labor you have mixed with them—and to that labor he never had any right:For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others [§27].Property in land is, in the original common, acquired in the same way. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (§32). And if the objection is raised, that by thus enclosing the land he deprived another, the same rebuttal, based on the same qualification, applies:Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land by improving it any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of does as good as take nothing at all [§33].This property is a combination of what is private—labor—and what is common—the land. Why then does the combination of the private and the common produce a result that is wholly private?Nor is it so strange, as perhaps before consideration it may appear, that the property of labor should be able to overbalance the community of land. For it is labor indeed that puts the difference of value on everything . . . [§40].When there is so much land for so few people, however much one may enclose, more than enough remains for the others: it is as if nothing had been taken. What is taken is of little or no account; land without labor “would scarcely be worth anything” (§43). This is another way Locke has of stating why the combination of the private and the common results in private property: the private component, labor, constitutes almost entirely the value of the thing; the materials, the common element, are “scarce to be reckoned in.” Labor gives title to property in the state of nature primarily because “labor makes the far greatest part of the value of things we enjoy in this world” (§42). If the addition of my labor made something valuable which was, without it, “almost worthless” (§43), then surely, my labor being the only thing of value in it, it must be acknowledged that the labor made it mine.There are two reasons why the natural provisions are, in themselves, almost worthless. The first is that an apple can provide no benefit to a man until it is picked or in some way appropriated, nor a deer until it is hunted and caught. The fruits and beasts, as they exist in nature, before any addition of human effort, are useless to man. As an apple on another continent is of no use, so it is with an apple ten feet away, until the addition of labor.The second reason why the natural provisions are almost worthless is precisely their very great abundance, which would constitute a surplus supply when the number of human beings is relatively very small. In speaking of the provisions as worthless, Locke does not mean that they are unimportant for survival. The air we breathe and the water we drink are vital, but where air and water are superabundant, we would not pay for a breath or a drink. The natural materials, like anything that is present in practically unlimited abundance, could not command a price or a barter equivalent. This seems to indicate that Locke had in mind some early form of the law of supply and demand; it should not surprise us, therefore, to find in his economic writings the statement that value or price is determined by “quantity and vent” (very roughly equivalent to supply and demand) and “no other way in the world”:He that will justly estimate the value of any thing, must consider its quantity in proportion to its vent, for this alone regulates the price. The value of any thing . . . is greater, as its quantity is less in proportion to its vent. . . . For if you alter the quantity, or vent, on either side, you presently alter the price, but no other way in the world.For it is not the being, adding, increasing, or diminishing of any good quality in any commodity, that makes its price greater or less; but only as it makes its quantity, or vent, greater or less, in proportion one to another.6The original condition was an abundance of almost worthless provisions; it was not an actual plenty but only a potential plenty, to be made actual by human labor and invention. What seems at first to be a kind of paradise, a vast expanse of fertile land well stocked with “the fruits it naturally produces and beasts it feeds,” all “produced by the spontaneous hand of nature” (§26), “the common mother of all” (§28), and with very “few spenders” (§31) to consume this abundance, is in fact a compound of too much of what is almost worthless and not enough of what is necessary to make it valuable—human labor. The general “penury” (§32) of the primitive state is comparable to the condition of the Indians, America’s “needy and wretched inhabitants” (§37),who are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people with the materials of plenty, i.e., a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance what might serve for food, raiment, and delight, yet for want of improving it by labor have not one-hundredth part of the conveniences we enjoy [§41, italics supplied].Another major cause of the penury of the original common is that “the greatest part of things really useful to the life of man . . . are generally things of short duration, such as, if they are not consumed by use, will decay and perish of themselves . . . ” (§46). This natural fact of spoiling was perhaps the major limitation of property in the state of nature.Nature does severely limit property in the universal common: “As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property in. Whatever is beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others” (§31). The possession of land was similarly limited:whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of before it spoiled, that was his peculiar right; whatsoever he enclosed and could feed and make use of, the cattle and product was also his. But if either the grass of his enclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other [§38].Locke seems to have derived from the natural fact of spoiling a kind of rule to assure the fair distribution of goods in the universal common. The reasoning is plausible, but consideration of two questions reveals the inadequacy of that interpretation of Locke’s discussion of spoiling. First, why is such a rule necessary? Second, would it be effective?The foundation of property in the original condition, as has been explained, must be a superabundance of natural provisions. Your labor in picking an apple makes it your property if enough apples and as good are left for others. But when there is such an abundance, what need is there for a rule to limit accumulation? The quantity you take can make no difference to me, so long as you leave me enough and as good; nor would I care whether what you have taken spoils or not in your possession. If you are so foolish as to waste your labor acquiring more than you can use, you cheat yourself but you do not cheat me.Some means of limiting accumulation is required only if there is less than a superabundance, only if what is taken leaves less than enough for others. But whether a rule based on spoiling would serve to limit accumulation even in that case depends on whether it is applied to perishable or durable goods. Suppose that a man achieves an effective local monopoly of nuts, leaving not one for others; since they might “last good for his eating a whole year” (§46), he could take that long to eat his way through his supply without any spoiling. The spoiling rule would be ineffective in limiting possession of these scarce, durable goods. It would not achieve a fair distribution of them.Any rule limiting accumulation is unnecessary when there is a very great plenty of provisions. If, under other conditions, such a rule is necessary, one based on spoiling is ineffective in the case of durable goods. The spoiling rule can be necessary and effective as a means toward fair sharing only in the case of a scarcity of perishable goods. But, as we have seen, the establishment of property in the original condition, by mixing labor with the natural provisions, depends entirely on a very great abundance, one which automatically achieves the leaving of enough for others. If there is not enough for everyone, not even labor can establish a right to a part of the whole, to the exclusion of all other men. And if labor cannot establish a title to property when there is a scarcity, then nothing can. There is no other way in the original state. Title may be transferred by barter or purchase, but only labor can begin property. In short, if there is a scarcity of perishable provisions in the original state, there cannot be natural property. There can be only possession of what is common. The conclusion is that even when the scarce perishable thing is in your possession, any other man still has as good a claim to it as you have. In the struggle for possession which would ensue, right would be established by the might of the stronger, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to keep more for yourself than could be quickly consumed.The fact of spoiling does indeed limit possessions in the original state and keep every man in a state of penury. “Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy” (§31), we are told, but if all the denizens of the original universal common had become so demented as to devote their entire labor to spoiling as much as they could, the results of their combined efforts would be as nothing compared to the extensive spoiling and waste occurring throughout the vast territory “left to nature” (§37). When we consider “the plenty of natural provisions there was a long time in the world, and the few spenders” (§31), the spoiling that could not be blamed on man is appalling. The spoiling of things by the hand of man is dwarfed by the spoiling that occurs beyond his reach. Natural spoiling can be lessened only by an alteration of the prevailing conditions.However much Locke deplored wastefulness and destruction, his discussion of spoiling does not point toward a moral rule of fair dealing with other men in the original state. It indicates, rather, the massive scale of waste under the rule of nature; it points toward the necessity of discovering some means of liberation from that harsh rule.The third factor contributing to the penury of the earliest stage of the universal common is the lack of cultivation of the land: “land that is left wholly to nature . . . is called, as indeed it is, waste” (§42); the extent of this natural waste can be lessened, therefore, by the spread of agriculture. One is mistaken to think that a man deprives others by enclosing land to cultivate it for his own use. Because cultivated land is much more productive than uncultivated land, all his neighbors will benefit:. . . I have heard it affirmed that in Spain itself a man may be permitted to plough, sow, and reap, without being disturbed, upon land he has no other title to but only his making use of it. . . . The inhabitants think themselves beholden to him who by his industry on neglected and, consequently, waste land has increased the stock of corn which they wanted [§36].Agriculture then is a major step toward alleviating the penury of man’s original condition, but it is limited in its effectiveness by the fact of spoiling. Unless there is some way for a man to dispose of his surplus crops before they spoil, he will surely grow no more than his own family can consume; if he grows more, the surplus will only rot or be taken from him by others. Thus there will be no surplus, which is the necessary basis for the improvement of man’s condition, and no “increase of mankind,” which is the main intention of nature.In brief, what was needed was some invention that would make it reasonable for a man to produce more than was necessary for his own family’s immediate wants, more than they could consume before it spoiled. And that invention was money, which, according to Locke, came into existence through a natural sort of progression. Men first bartered perishable foods for more durable foods, like nuts; later they traded goods for “a piece of metal, pleased with its color” (§46). Finally they arrived at an agreement that scarce but durable things, like gold and silver, would be taken in exchange for the perishable goods.And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful but perishable supports of life [§47].By this invention of money, men solved the basic economic problems of their original condition—with what far-reaching political consequences we shall presently see.It is important to understand that Locke did indeed mean that money came into use before civil society. The use of money came in “by mutual consent” (§47) that men would exchange it for perishable goods. This “tacit and voluntary consent” does not presuppose the existence of civil society; it was made “out of the bounds of society and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money . . . ” (§50). This tacit agreement could not in itself establish civil society,for it is not every compact that puts an end to the state of nature between men, but only this one of agreeing together mutually to enter into one community and make one body politic; other promises and compacts men may make one with another and yet still be in the state of nature [§14].Money was introduced in the natural common, but its use hastened the end of the natural common. Money so altered the conditions that it was no longer possible for men to live together without greater protection for their possessions. Money enabled men to enlarge their possessions; money made it profitable for a man to “possess more land than he himself can use the product of” (§50). Without money, a man can have no incentive to enlarge his holdings and produce a surplus, however favorable all other circumstances may be:Where there is not something both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there men will not be apt to enlarge their possessions of land, were it never so rich, never so free for them to take [§48].But, “find out something that hath the use and value of money amongst his neighbors, you shall see the same man will begin presently to enlarge his possessions” (§49).Introduction of the use of money completes the reversal of all of the original economic conditions. Unowned land becomes scarce because enclosed holdings are enlarged. The increased production can support an increased population, that is, a more plentiful labor supply. The early condition, in which possession was limited to “a very moderate proportion” (§36), gives way to larger possessions. The prevailing equality of penury is replaced by an economic inequality: “as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them” (§48). Locke, we see, has done more than he promised; he has not only shown the origin of private property, he has justified the inequality of possessions:. . . it is plain that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone, these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable . . . only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money [§50].If we now consider the objection that might be most appropriately raised at this point—that an inequality of possessions is not fair—we are led directly to the central theme of Locke’s whole political teaching: increase. The conditions of the first stages of the natural common were hostile to any prospects for increase in the supplies of goods men need for their comfort, convenience, and preservation. The question then was how to share the very little that could be wrested from the tight fist of nature. This meant that whoever took a little more than did his neighbors, “took more than his share and robbed others” (§46). But when some men, by invention and industry, created the new conditions for the production of plenty, there came to be very much more to share; and although the new conditions required an inequality of possessions proportionate to the “different degrees of industry” among men, no one was cheated. Those who had a smaller share of the greatly increased whole were better off than those who had earlier shared, on an equal basis, in the pitiful little of the original condition. The poorest of men in a society having agriculture and money is richer than the most fortunate in the primitive, pre-agricultural natural common. Consider the “needy and wretched” Indians in America, who do not cultivate the soil: “a king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-laborer in England” (§41, italics supplied).It is difficult to exaggerate the importance Locke ascribed to the combination of agriculture and money. As he described the problem in an early essay, nature is utterly powerless to provide the conditions in which nature’s own main intention—the increase of mankind—might be fulfilled:The inheritance of the whole of mankind is always one and the same, and it does not grow in proportion to the number of people born. Nature has provided a definite profusion of goods for the use and convenience of men, and the things brought forth have been bestowed in a definite manner and quantity deliberately; they have not been fortuitously produced nor are they increasing in proportion with men’s need or avarice. . . . Whenever either the desire or the need of possession increases among men, there is no extension, then and there, of the world’s limits. Victuals, clothes, adornments, riches, and all other good things of this life have been given in common; and when any man snatches for himself as much as he can, he takes away from another man’s heap the amount he adds to his own, and it is impossible for anyone to grow rich except at the expense of someone else.7This passage may be said to state the problem which Locke solved in the Two Treatises. The world remains constant; it is not within nature’s power to extend its limits by even one square yard. But without such extension, how can there ever be sufficient support for the increase of mankind? And how can there be any improvement in the condition of men generally if “no gain falls to you which does not involve somebody else’s loss”?8 The answer Locke provides is shocking in its audacity. What is completely beyond the power of nature is well within the power of any farmer:. . . he who appropriates land to himself by his labor does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of human life produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land are (to speak much within compass) ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore he that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind [§37, italics supplied].Men, by their labor, invention, and arts, make increase possible, and thereby solve the economic problems that beset them in the original natural condition. But at the same time they also make the continuance of that state impossible. The original common, however dangerous and inconvenient, is tolerable when its conditions are a plenty of raw provisions, few men, lots of room, and a general equality of weakness. But the consequences of increase are to make unowned provisions scarcer, men more numerous, and open space harder to come by; and in this new situation there is generated a new inequality of power among men, based on the new inequality of possessions. Under these new conditions, labor can no longer give title to property or be the measure of value, and spoiling ceases to limit acquisition. Now, for the first time, there is the possibility of possessions too extensive to protect by the means available in a state of nature. The sovereignty of nature dissolves and men must institute a new form of rule of their own making to take its place. Men are “quickly driven into society” (§127) for the protection of their property.The possessions of the “industrious and rational”—those men upon whose powers of increase the well-being of all depends—must be protected from the “fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious” (§34). The final step in the long process of the liberation of man’s powers of increase from the restraints of nature is government. “The increase of lands and the right employing of them is the great art of government,” and the prince is called “godlike” who “by established laws of liberty [secures] protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind. . . .”9And so we have seen that Locke’s discussion of property is an account of the development of the original natural economic condition of men through several stages to the point where they can no longer live together without the authority and power of a common judge to protect the enlarged possessions made possible, to the benefit of all, after the introduction of money. Locke’s theory of property explains the necessity for the transition from the state of nature to civil society. We have moved very far now toward an understanding of Locke’s answer to the great question: What is political power?Although Locke addresses himself to the question of the nature of political power throughout the Two Treatises, it must be acknowledged that his approach is quite indirect. The First Treatise is, in large measure, a demonstration that Filmer’s patriarchal power cannot be transformed into political power; and the first half of the Second Treatise is mostly devoted to a description of the natural powers and the natural state of man, as opposed to his political powers and political state. It is only thereafter that Locke takes up directly and in detail the discussion of political power and political society. It remains for us, therefore, to see how Locke moves from the nonpolitical base he has established to the political consequences.The relevance of the nonpolitical to the political is made immediately obvious in Locke’s statement that “the great and chief end . . . of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property” (§124). (Here, and in many places other than the chapter called “Of Property,” Locke uses the word property in the comprehensive sense, which includes “life, liberty, and estate” [§87]). In the state of nature, property is “very unsafe, very unsecure” (§123), because there are lacking three things necessary to its preservation: “an established, settled, known law” (§124); a “judge with authority to determine all differences according to the established law” (§125); and the “power to back and support the sentence when right, and to give it due execution” (§126). Political society, the opposite of the state of nature, is designed to remedy these three defects. The character of political society derives from the fundamental intention to assure the preservation of property by providing a power to make law and judge controversies and a power to execute the judgments and punish offenders.Any number of men can make a compact to leave the state of nature and “enter into society to make one people, one body politic under one supreme government” (§89). Only those who make such an express compact with one another are in political society together; those who do not join are, in relation to the society and its members, still in the state of nature.The substance of the compact that all the members make with one another in order to form a political society is an agreement to transfer the powers that each had in the state of nature “into the hands of the community” (§87). In the state of nature, every man has two natural powers: “to do whatsoever he thinks fit for the preservation of himself and others within the permission of the law of nature” and “the power to punish the crimes committed against that law” (§128). These two natural powers of every man are “the original of the legislative and executive power of civil society” (§88). The second power, the power of punishing, every man, upon entering political society, “wholly gives up, and engages his natural force . . . to assist the executive power of the society, as the law thereof shall require” (§130). But Locke does not say that the first power, which includes judging what is necessary for preservation, is wholly transferred; he says it is given up “so far forth as the preservation of himself and the rest of that society shall require” (§129). We must be alert, therefore, for the answers to these questions: To what extent is the transfer of this power to society required? Why is this power not wholly transferred? and, What are the rights and obligations of a member of society if, as may happen, the preservation of “himself” conflicts with the preservation of “the rest of that society”?The natural powers of men in the state of nature are transformed by compact into the political powers of civil society. These political powers are limited, however, by the purpose for which they were made. Since the purpose was to remedy the uncertainty and danger of the state of nature by providing settled laws for the protection of the property of all the members, the exercise of unlimited power is not and cannot be considered political power:Absolute arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government, which men would not quit the freedom of the state of nature for, and tie themselves up under, were it not to preserve their lives, liberties, and fortunes, and by stated rules of right and property to secure their peace and quiet. It cannot be supposed that they should intend, had they a power so to do, to give to any one, or more, an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates. . . . This were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of nature, wherein they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others and were upon equal terms of force to maintain it . . . [§137].Locke’s insistence on the limited nature of political power reveals both his agreement and very great disagreement with Hobbes. Locke, starting from the principle of self-preservation as the rock-bottom foundation of civil society, shows again and again that absolute arbitrary power is no remedy at all for the evils of the state of nature. To be subject to the arbitrary power of an uncontrolled ruler without the right or strength to defend oneself against him is a condition far worse than the state of nature; it cannot be supposed to be that to which men consented freely, for “no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse” (§131). Therefore, Locke says, absolute monarchy is “no form of civil government at all” (§90). The great error of Hobbes is not his premise but his political conclusion that the only remedy for the state of nature is for men to make themselves subject to the unlimited power of the mighty leviathan, a conclusion which contradicts the premise that the fear of violent death or the desire for self-preservation is the first principle of human action. Locke’s conclusion—limited government based on the consent of the governed—is more true to that premise than Hobbes’s own conclusion.Political society is a human invention and contrivance, but this artificial thing, once made, has a nature of its own and hence has an applicable natural law. It is “acting according to its own nature” when it is “acting for the preservation of the community” (§149), for, not surprisingly, “the first and fundamental natural law . . . is the preservation of the society” (§134). The first obvious consequence of this natural law of society is that all of the rights of its members must be consistent with the preservation of the society. No society can concede to any of its members any right that would lead to its destruction. To do so would threaten the preservation of its members, whose safety depends so much on the protection the society affords them. For this reason also, the commitment made by the members must be permanent. Once a man has become a member of a commonwealth, he “is perpetually and indispensably obliged to be and remain unalterably a subject to it, and can never be again in the liberty of the state of nature” (§121), so long as the government survives. And the power of the society must be all-inclusive, reaching to every member and all controversies under the law:. . . there and there only is political society where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it. And thus all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire by settled standing rules, indifferent and the same to all parties, and by men having authority from the community for the execution of those rules, decides all the differences that may happen between any members of that society concerning any matter of right, and punishes those offenses which any member hath committed against the society with such penalties as the law has established [§87, italics supplied].The power of the community over its members seems sweeping—one might even say, unlimited. It is here that we see clearly the fundamental difficulty inherent in the attempt to develop a theory that political power is limited because it has its source in natural powers and rights. If the members of a community retain some of their natural power, relying on it rather than on the power of the community for their protection, can political society function as intended? On the other hand, if all power is put into the hands of the community, what then will remain to protect the members from possible abuses of that concentrated power?Another natural law applicable to the body politic—and, in fact, to all bodies composed of discrete elements—might be called the law of the greater force. This law is the basis of Locke’s doctrine of majority rule. As was said, political society is formed by the unanimous agreement of its members to make one community; but although every political society is founded on the basis of unanimity, no such unanimity can be expected in other matters. The immediate consequence of this first unanimous agreement and the impossibility of continuing unanimity is that a part of the society, the majority, will rule:For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any community being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move one way, it is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority; or else it is impossible it should act or continue one body, one community, which the consent of every individual that united into it agreed that it should; and so everyone is bound by that consent to be concluded by the majority [§96, italics supplied].The first proposition of this argument is that the greater force within any society will rul