John Locke: Against Freedom
August 22, 2016 5:05 AM   Subscribe

If Locke is viewed ... as an advocate of expropriation and enslavement, what are the implications for classical liberalism and libertarianism? The most important is that there is no justification for treating property rights as fundamental human rights, on par with personal liberty and freedom of speech.
In an essay in Jacobin entitled John Locke Against Freedom, Australian economist John Quiggin argues that Locke's "classical liberalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone except owners of capitalist private property."

This essay forms the first in a series of three pieces that offer a critique of Locke from a left, post-colonial perspective. In publication order, they are:
The contrast between Locke’s reputation as an advocate of freedom for Englishmen and his support for the enslavement and expropriation of Africans and Native Americans has caused some to label him a racist.

But Locke was more than a simple bigot. Not content with advocating slavery for blacks, Locke proposed the reintroduction of a form of serfdom for white workers.
John Quiggin, John Locke's Road to Serfdom, Jacobin (18 October 2015).
Jeffersonian Democrats made a serious attempt to implement Locke’s theories. Colonization and expropriation followed.
John Quiggin, Locke's Folly, Jacobin (14 August 2016).
posted by Sonny Jim (9 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting. At many levels, we've failed to deploy good alternatives to physical "property" so far, so they're worth discussing, but sound like an uphill fight.

Right now, we should focus on rolling back our harmful expansion of the notion of "property" beyond the physical. At this point, western politicians, business men, etc. have broadly accepted that the west should stop making things, or even designing them, while instead focusing on merely owning fake "intellectual property", that gives them an ability to extract unjustifiable rents.

We'll find far more breathing room for alternative theories of physical property once we're no longer beset by intellectual property that attempts to push everything into the mold physical property for the benefit of rent seekers who contribute nothing.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:06 AM on August 22, 2016 [7 favorites]


This historical reappraisal implies a new and radically different understanding of his political philosophy.

Only if you think the job of political philosophers who draw on Locke is to discover the intentions or beliefs of this one guy who died some centuries ago. One doesn't really follow from the other. Locke's own awful applications of some of his ideas don't make it impossible for others in the liberal tradition to make use of those ideas, having restated them in terms that make better moral sense, and they still have value from this perspective.

Personally, I think Locke helps us to see that there are solid justifications for 1) treating private property rights as natural rights, operating as a constraint on government and and 2) treating them as more limited in scope than other natural rights (eg because of the potential misuse of these rights to trample on other people's freedoms, including their right to basic subsistence). This remains a valuable perspective on how governments handle land expropriations in all kinds of situations - it means you can allow for the possibility of justified expropriation while still insisting on certain rights of the owner or occupier (eg to a voice in decision-making, to compensation, and to dignified treatment when it comes to eviction). I've read plenty of persuasive critiques of the Kelo decision from this perspective, for example, enriched by Locke's ideas about the moral importance of private property and the limits of private property. His own inconsistency and prejudices don't really affect the validity of these arguments using his ideas.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:27 AM on August 22, 2016 [5 favorites]


His own inconsistency and prejudices don't really affect the validity of these arguments using his ideas.

It's a good thing that the articles don't focus on his personal inconsistency and prejudices so much as the inconsistencies within the ideas, and the assumptions that underpin them, then.

Key quote from the first article: the credibility of any Lockean theory defending established property rights from the state that established them depends on the existence of a frontier, beyond which lies boundless usable land. This in turn requires the erasure (mentally and usually in brutal reality) of the people already living beyond the frontier and drawing their sustenance from the land in question.
posted by PMdixon at 7:18 AM on August 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


That argument doesn't analytically follow from Locke's theory, however; the article says that it does primarily on the basis of the historical uses that have been made of the theory, by Locke himself and by others. A Lockean defence of private property can be made purely on the basis of the self-ownership thesis. The challenge is that Locke also thinks that there is a natural right to subsistence / enough and as good and that private property can clash with this right. Given this set-up, we have 3 options if we still want to hold on to Locke's basic justification of private property:

1) effectively jettison the right to subsistence, like Nozick and other libertarians. If we do this, we don't need to posit the endless availability of other non-owned land to justify private property, on the basis that we are happy with the idea that people have no right not to starve. This is a pretty unattractive theory for other reasons, but it kills off the argument that colonialism is necessary for the defence of private property.

2) treat each individual right to private property as subject to an obligation correlative to another person's right to subsistence. This means that my private property is a prime facie reason for leaving me alone with my stuff but your right to satisfaction of your basic needs can trump that reason. If we adopt this model, we can stick with the Lockean framework of natural property rights without boundless useable resources; all we need to say is that private property rights are not themselves boundless, because available resources inherently are. Waldron's interpretation of Locke looks like this.

3) believe in absolute private property and in an absolute right to subsistence, in which case we have to imagine a world of unlimited resources from somewhere else and colonialism. This is of course one possible and unattractive take on Locke's theory, but it doesn't inevitably follow from that theory. We can have good reasons for jettisoning this take on Locke without jettisoning the rest of what he has to tell us about private property.
posted by Aravis76 at 7:38 AM on August 22, 2016 [7 favorites]


It goes along with The New Yorker's A. J. Liebling's critique of the First Amendment: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." (And that Freedom of Religion part: it takes money to build a respectable church)
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:06 PM on August 22, 2016


Fine with me— screw Locke, let's go back to Benjamin Franklin: "All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition."
posted by zompist at 3:19 PM on August 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


Right-libertarians like to elide the:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockean_proviso

also mentioned here:

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:01 PM on August 22, 2016 [3 favorites]


All that the business about mixing one's labor with the land in Locke is just a bit of sleight-of-hand. Ultimately, the significant thing about Locke's system isn't that under it propety is derived through labor mixed with land, but instead it's how Locke carefully allows for social/technological fixes to all of the constraints that would appear to keep humans limited to holding only finite amounts of property, while hoping that the reader will interpret those fixes in favor of infinite accumulation as being themselves natural.

Chief among these dodges is the money dodge to the problem of spoilage; although Locke argues that naturally one cannot hold more property than one can take advantage of before the goods produced on that property spoil, gold doesn't spoil. Therefore, there are no limits based on natural spoilage under Locke's system, so long as you can successfully convert your goods to gold before they go bad. Likewise, one person can only personally mix so much labor with so much land, which seems to be a natural limit on property concentration — except that Locke allows that being able to hire the labor of others is natural, too.

In general in Locke's there's a multi-step process designed to make social arrangements seem to derive from natural law:
  1. Locke appeals to a natural process that could hypothetically be carried out by a Robinson Crusoe, all alone and no one to trade with.
  2. Locke argues that property is based on that natural process and is therefore natural.
  3. Locke introduces some sort of social dodge against natural limitations that would appear in the Crusoe example — the social agreement to store value in gold, the social agreement that labor time can be sold, with the products of the labor going to the buyer of the labor time — but describes those social arrangements as being as natural as the stuff in step 1.
That said: There is, though, something pleasantly Latourean in Locke's treatment of property as being a social arrangement between humans and things. Property, in Locke, is a collaboration between humans and gold, because for property to extend beyond what one human can use without spoilage, access is needed to a material very much like gold. Property, in the Lockean sense, works differently for people with access to different materials with different physical properties.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:40 PM on August 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


so speaking of the (socially constructed ;) political economy of 'property', i recently came across this, to me, clarifying statement: "Homeowners and financial savers run America."

but when it comes to 'wealth generation' and public goods...

Today, wealth is no longer derived from the ownership of agricultural land, however that land might have been originally acquired.

and taking the land->capital->attention model of scarcities that characterize institutional development -- feudalism/colonization (during the agrarian age), managerialism/financialization (of the 'commanding heights' of industry) and burbclaves/phyles whatever information economy 'platforms' silicon valley (or shenzhen?) has in store for us, respectively! -- i think thomas paine had it right all along:*

"The oldest argument for UBI (Thomas Paine's) is that it justly allocates economic rent to which no one has a fair individual claim, since it results from windfall natural resources or the overall productivity of society. Paine applied his argument to land ownership; it seems entirely plausible to apply the same argument to some of the rents created by technological innovation and privatised intellectual property."

afterall: "The social optimum... is for land to be nationalized and provided at zero rent."
posted by kliuless at 9:54 PM on August 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


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