Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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or less.

These variations do not matter for our purpose of examining legiti-

macy of the class state in Locke’s doctrine.

Locke’s complaint against the Crown is that it resists redistricting to

bring representation in Parliament in line with the appropriate principle.

He says in ¶158: “If . . . the Executive, who has the power of Convoking the

Legislative, observing rather the true proportion, than fashion of Represen-

tation, regulates, not by old custom, but true reason, the number of Members,

in all places, that have a right to be distinctly represented, which no part of

the People however incorporated can pretend to, but in proportion to the

assistance, which it [that part of the people however incorporated] affords

to the public, it [the executive] cannot be judged, to have set up a new Leg-

islative, but...tohaverectiﬁed the disorders, which succession of time had

. . . inevitably introduced.”

Now this passage, read together with the whole of ¶¶157–158 and 140,

seems to mean by those “that have a right to be distinctly represented” (as

opposed to those who have a right to be, say, virtually represented), those

who have the right to vote. However, we should not read the passage as ac-

cepting property as the sole basis of redistricting. Rather, we should read

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4. There are various estimates. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England,

1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 27ff, gives the estimate of 200,000 as conserva-

tive for the size of the electorate at the time of William II. This was perhaps as few as 1/30

of the nation including women, children, and the laboring poor, whom no one considered

worthy of political rights (pp. 28f ). J. R. Jones in Country and Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 1979) gives the size of the electorate in Queen Anne’s reign as about

250,000 (p. 43). Richard Ashcraft in his Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Gov-

ernment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) has an account of the electorate

pointing out that it tended to increase for two reasons: one was the steady inﬂation of the

time, which lowered the real value of the property qualiﬁcation; the other was the ten-

dency of Parliament to enlarge the franchise as a way of defending itself against the

Crown (pp. 147f ). The Whigs under Shaftesbury looked to an electorate of tradesmen, ar-

tisans, shopkeepers, and merchants, and most freeholders who prospered at the expense of

middle-size landowners and the small gentry (p. 146). Also, the electorate varied from one

part of the country to another; in London, for example, Ashcraft thinks there was virtually

manhood suffrage in elections of parliamentary representatives and city ofﬁcials (p. 148).

Ashcraft cites Derek Hirst as thinking that in 1641 the electorate may have been as large as

2/5 of the male population (pp. 151f ). In his Authority and Conﬂict: England, 1603–1658

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Hirst says that after Ireton’s proposals

of 1647–1649, representation was fairer than it was to be again until the later 19th century

(p. 330).

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¶¶157–158 together as saying that “fair and equal” representation (¶158) is

based on both “wealth and inhabitants” (¶157), each given a weight in a

manner Locke leaves unspeciﬁed.

I assume, then, that Locke accepts the class state as consistent with his

view. Our task, as I have said, is to ﬁnd an explanation of how he could do

so, and to reject MacPherson’s explanation.

§3. Locke’s Reply to Filmer: I: Chapter 4

1. I now turn to the First Treatise and to Locke’s rejection there of prop-

erty as a basis of political authority. I begin with a summary of Filmer’s

views, following Laslett, who in his introduction to his edition of Filmer’s

writings sums them up as follows:

There is no legitimate government but monarchy only.

There is no legitimate monarchy but paternal only.

There is no paternal monarchy but absolute, that is, arbitrary.

There is no such thing as legitimate aristocracy or democracy.

No legitimate government can be a tyranny.

We are not free by nature but always born subject to obligation.

For our purposes here, perhaps the last statement is most important.

And in First Treatise, ¶6, Locke would seem to agree. There he says that

Filmer’s “...greatPosition is, that Men are not naturally free. This is the

Foundation on which his absolute Monarchy stands....Butif this Founda-

tion fails, all his Fabric falls with it, and Governments must be left again to

the old way of being made by contrivance, and the consent of Men...

making use of their Reason to unite together in Society.” Thus Locke states

a basic foundational difference between himself and Filmer; and he claims

that his view returns to an older social contract tradition.

2. Before discussing Locke’s views on property, a comment about the

idea of property. Property consists, it is often said, in a bundle of rights,

with certain conditions imposed as to how those rights can be exercised.

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5. On this point, see John Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke.

6. See the Introduction by Peter Laslett to his edition of Patriarcha and Other Political

Writings of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), p. 20.

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Different conceptions of property, private or otherwise, specify the bundle

of rights in different ways.

For Locke, property—or “propriety in” (as he often says)—is a right to

do something, or a right to use something, under certain conditions, a right

that cannot be taken from us without our consent.

We should distinguish

the right itself and its grounds, from the kind of action or thing we have a

right to do or to use. Even when the right is the right to use and to have ap-

propriate control over land and natural resources, property does not mean

land or resources, even if Locke sometimes seems to talk that way. There is

one meaning of property as a bundle of rights: the right (as a bundle) can-

not be taken away without our consent. Different rights connect with the

different kinds of actions and things we can have property in.

Also we should distinguish at least two uses—not meanings—of “prop-

erty” according to the kinds of things connected with the bundle of rights

in question.

(a) One is Locke’s broad use, in which the rights involve lives, liberties,

and estates, as found in ¶¶87, 123, 138, 173.

(b) The other is his narrow use, in which the rights involve such things

as: fruits of the earth, ¶¶28–32; or land, ¶¶32–39, 47–50; or estates, ¶¶87,

123, 131, 138, 173; or fortunes, ¶¶135, 221.

of these are broad or narrow, for example, ¶94, where Locke declares that:

“...Government has no other end but the preservation of Property.” This

is a very strong assertion of the purpose of government, but seems to cover

both uses of “property.” Others are quite clearly linked to other broad or

narrow uses, given the larger context.

3. To proceed: recall that the aim of Locke’s argument from cases is to

show, against Filmer, that the right of property cannot be the basis of politi-

cal authority. He does this by making two points.

(a) In the First Treatise, Chapter 4, he holds that property in land and re-

sources alone cannot give rise to political authority: my having greater

property than those without property gives me no political jurisdiction over

them.

(b) In the Second Treatise, Chapter 5, he argues that property in land and

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7. See James Tully, A Discourse on Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1980), pp. 112–116, with deﬁnition on p. 116.

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resources can, and did, arise before government; and indeed that one rea-

son for establishing government is for the protection of already existing

property.

Thus, for Locke, property neither establishes nor requires political au-

thority, in contrast with Filmer’s and the feudal view.

I begin with the ﬁrst point. The clearest statement of it is in the First

Treatise: Chapter 4, ¶¶39, 41–43. Filmer had claimed that God gave the

world to Adam as Adam’s property. Much in these chapters is, like much of

the rest of the First Treatise, extremely tedious, but some passages are fun-

damental to Locke’s view. After a long discussion Locke says in I: ¶39:

“...forhowever,inrespect of one another, Men may be allowed to have

propriety in their distinct Portions of the Creatures; yet in respect of God

the Maker of Heaven and Earth, who is the sole Lord and Proprietor of the

whole World, Man’s Propriety in Creatures is nothing but that Liberty to use

them, which God has permitted, and so Man’s property may be altered and

enlarged, as we see it was here, after the Flood, when other uses of them

are allowed, which before were not. From all [of] which I suppose, it is

clear, that neither Adam nor Noah, had any Private Dominion, any Property

in the Creatures, exclusive of his Posterity, as they should successively grow

up into need of them, and come to be able to make use of them.” This pas-

sage, along with the passage in I: ¶41, contains several central features of

Locke’s conception of property.

For one thing, property in something (here, “propriety in creatures”) is

a liberty to use that something for the satisfaction of our needs and require-

ments. God is always the lord and proprietor of the world itself, of living

things and natural resources. But given the fundamental law of nature,

which wills the preservation of mankind, and so far as possible, every

member of it (including our own person), we have two natural duties: one,

to preserve ourselves, the other, to preserve mankind.

4. In view of these two duties, we have two natural rights. These are en-

abling rights: that is, rights we have so that we can fulﬁll certain duties that

are prior in the order of grounds. And from those duties, we also have a

third natural right. This Locke describes here as a “liberty to use” inferior

things and natural resources as essential means to preserve mankind and

ourselves as members of it. From I: ¶41: “...itismorereasonable to think,

that God who bid Mankind increase and multiply, should rather himself

give them all a Right, to make use of the Food and Rayment, and other

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Conveniences of Life, the Materials whereof he had so plentifully provided

for them; than to make them depend upon the Will of a Man for their Sub-

sistence, who should have Power [right] to destroy them all when he

pleased.”

Another feature of Locke’s view of property is that this liberty of use is

not an exclusive right: that is, it is not a right to which that we can appeal to

restrict the liberty of use of those who succeed us, when they need to use,

or to have access to, the bounty of nature for their legitimate interests. In

short, no one can be excluded from the use of, or from the access to, the

necessary means of life provided by the great common of the world, except

from that which we have made our property subject to the two provisos.

This third natural right to the means of preservation is our right, along

with every one else, in the use of, or the access to, that great common.

These remarks prepare us for I: ¶¶41–42, in which Locke rejects alto-

gether the idea that property can be the basis of political authority. This

seems already clear from the passage in I: ¶41 quoted above. But Locke

goes on to say that God has not left us to the mercy of others; nor given

any one such property that excludes others, who are in need, from also hav-

ing a right to the surplus of others’ goods: “And therefore no Man could

ever have a just Power over the Life of another, by Right of property in

Land or Possessions; since it would always be a Sin in any Man of Estate, to

let his Brother perish for want of affording him Relief out of his Plenty. As

Justice gives every Man a Title to the product of his honest Industry, and the

fair Acquisitions of his Ancestors descended to him; so Charity gives every

Man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from ex-

tremewant....[A]Mancannomorejustly make use of another’s neces-

sity, to force him to become his Vassal, by withholding that Relief . . . than

he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his

Obedience, and with a Dagger at his Throat offer him Death or Slavery”

(I: ¶42).

This is a strong statement, and I: ¶43 makes the same point. It may

seem at ﬁrst that ¶43 says that even in such extreme situations consent is

what establishes political authority. Locke says: “Should anyone make so

perverse [a] use of God’s Blessings poured on him with a liberal Hand;

should any one be Cruel and Uncharitable to that extremity, yet all this

would not prove that Propriety in Land, even in this Case, gave any Author-

ity over the Persons of Men, but only that Compact might; since the Au-

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thority of the Rich Proprietor, and the Subjection of the Needy Beggar be-

gan not from the Possession of the Lord [ownership of property], but the

Consent of the poor Man, who preferred being his Subject to starving.”

That Locke describes the man of property as making a perverse use of

his blessings, and as cruel and uncharitable, means, I think, that he denies

the binding force of consent in such a case. Rather, he is saying that what-

ever political authority there might be (and there may be none) arises from

compact: from the consent the poor man gives. As to how much authority

there is, Locke goes on to say that if we count such consent as valid, we

might as well say that when our stores of grain are full at a time of scarcity

and with money in our pocket, when others are starving; or our being on a

vessel at sea and able to swim when others are drowning and need our

help; in all these and other such cases we could likewise properly demand

others’ consent to our political authority over them. But Locke believes no

such thing; and concludes that no matter what private dominion God gave

to Adam (and he says he has proved that God gave Adam no such private

dominion), it could never give rise to sovereignty. Only free consent under

certain conditions, violated in the cases described, can do that.

5. From the preceding, we may infer three further constraints on ideal

history:

(a) Practices and custom, however primitive they may be, must allow

for, or secure to, all persons a title to the product of their honest labor. This

is a principle of justice. (So we have a precept of justice: to each according to

the product of their honest labor.)

(b) Barring catastrophes, practices and custom must permit no one to

fall into extreme want, or to become incompetent and unable to exercise

their natural rights and to fulﬁll their duties in an intelligent manner. This is

a principle of charity.

or of access to, the great common of the world, so that in return for their

honest industry they can earn the means of life. This is a principle of reason-

able opportunity. Here we can’t say equal, or fair, opportunity; these terms

appear too strong for what Locke has in mind. Nevertheless, this reasonable

opportunity is of great signiﬁcance.

It would seem to follow from these constraints that, in ideal history, it

simply cannot happen that the larger part of the adult male population (the

fraction without the vote) can be so brutish and so callous as to be incom-

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petent, and hence unﬁt—because not sufﬁciently reasonable or rational—to

be a party to the social compact. For if we say this, we must also say either

that political power can arise from great inequality in real property (land

and natural resources) without consent, which Locke denies; or else that

the constraints of ideal history are violated: the poor are denied sufﬁcient

means out of the surplus of the rest to be able to fulﬁll their duties to God

and intelligently to exercise their natural rights.

To conclude: Locke’s view in the First Treatise is that the right of property

is conditional. It is not a right to do what we please with our own, just like

that, no matter how the use of our own affects others. Our right—our lib-

erty of use—presupposes that certain background conditions are satisﬁed.

These conditions are indicated by the three principles of justice, charity,

and reasonable opportunity. This last implies that those without property

must have a reasonable opportunity of employment: the opportunity to

earn by their honest labor the means of life and to rise in the world.

§4. Locke’s Reply to Filmer: II: Chapter 5

1. Turning to the Second Treatise, Locke’s argument against Filmer in

Chapter 5 is roughly this: His aim (as he states in ¶25) is to show how we

might in the ﬁrst ages of the world, and before the existence of political au-

thority, come to have legitimate property “in several parts of that which

God gave to Mankind in common.” Locke must answer Filmer here, since

he must show how his view can account for, as opposed to justify, the right

of property acknowledged on all sides.

Locke holds that God gave the world to all mankind in common, and

not to Adam. But this grant of property is understood by Locke not as a

grant of collective exclusive ownership—exclusive ownership by mankind

as a collective body—but as a liberty that all persons have to use the neces-

sary means of life provided by nature and the right to appropriate them by

honest labor so as to satisfy our needs and requirements.

All this is done so

as to fulﬁll our two natural duties to preserve mankind and ourselves as

members of it.

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8. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1979), pp. 166–172.

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Two provisos are implicit in this conception:

(a) First proviso: enough, and as good left for others: ¶¶27, 33, 37.

This

follows because the right of use is not an exclusive proprietorship. Others

also have the same right.

(b) Second proviso: spoilage clause: ¶¶31, 36f, 46.

This follows because

God is always sole proprietor of the earth and its resources. To take more

ﬁsh, say, than we need as food is to waste and destroy part of God’s prop-

erty.

2. Next we come to “the great Foundation of Property” (a phrase Locke

uses in ¶44) (see ¶¶27, 32, 34, 37, 39, 44f, 51). This foundation is the prop-

erty we have in our own person, which no one else has a right to (¶27). The

labor of our body, the product (the work) of our hands, are properly ours.

This too suggests a precept of justice: to each according to the product of

his honest labor (¶27).

Again in ¶44: we are masters of ourselves and proprietors of our own

person, and the actions and the labor of it, and so we have in ourselves “the

great Foundation of Property.” What we improve for ourselves is truly our

own, and not common property. So labor, in the beginning, gave the right

in things.

In ¶¶40–46 Locke presents a version of the labor cost theory of value,

for example: that labor accounts for 90 to 99 percent of the value of land.

The point of these sections is to argue that the institution of property in

land, properly limited, is for everyone’s beneﬁt. Those without land need

not be sufferers for it. In ¶41 Locke says that a king in a large and poten-

tially fruitful territory in America, rich in land not yet improved by labor, is

fed, housed, and clad worse than a day laborer in England. The institution

of private property in land, when duly hedged by the constraints of ideal

history, is both individually and collectively rational: he holds that it makes

us all better off than we would be without it.

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9. Locke says: “No man but he can have a right to what that [viz. his labor] is once

joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left for others.” Second Treatise, ¶27,

p. 288.

10. “As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so

much he may by his labour ﬁx a Property in. Whatever is beyond this, is more than his

share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy.” Sec-

ond Treatise, ¶31, p. 290.

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3. We come ﬁnally to the introduction of money and the transition to

political authority. Locke discusses these matters in: ¶¶36f, 45, 47–50.

(a) A crucial point here is that the introduction of money in effect sus-

pends the spoilage proviso, which says that we can take no more from the

bounty of nature than we can use before it spoils. For now by industrious

labor we can acquire more than we can use but exchange the surplus for

money (or claims to valuable things of various kinds), and thereby accumu-

late larger and larger holdings in land and natural resources, or whatever.

Money allows us to “fairly possess” more land, say, than we can use the

product of, “by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver,

which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone” (¶50).

(b) In tacitly (without a compact) consenting to the use of money, peo-

ple “agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth” and

did so by “a tacit and voluntary consent” (¶50).

and without social compact, and this only by “putting a value on gold and

silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money” (¶50).

4. Thus, Locke has, I think, a two-stage account of property. The ﬁrst

stage is that of the state of nature in its various phases before political soci-

ety. Here we may distinguish three phases:

(a) the ﬁrst ages of the world: ¶¶26–39, 94.

(b) the age of ﬁxing tribal boundaries by consent: ¶¶38, 45.

The second stage is that of political authority, and has, it seems, two phases:

(a) the age of paternal monarchy: ¶¶74ff, 94, 105–110, 162.

(b) the age of government by social compact and the regulating of

property: ¶¶38, 50, 72f.

In the second stage, it is the age of government by social compact that

Locke is mainly concerned with. In this stage property is conventional: that is,

it is speciﬁed and regulated by the positive laws of society. I assume these

laws respect all the constraints of the fundamental law of nature we have

discussed. They also respect what Locke calls the “Fundamental Law of Prop-

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11. How is this tacit consent related, if at all, to that of ¶¶119–122? Presumably it is

different, but how?

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erty” in political society: that no one’s property can be taken from them,

even for the necessary support of the government, without their consent,

or the consent of their representatives (¶140).

An important consequence of the conventional nature of (real) prop-

erty in political society is that a liberal socialist regime

is not, I think, in-

compatible with what Locke says. Indeed, it may be unlikely that the Parlia-

ment (the representatives) in Locke’s class state would ever enact the laws

deﬁnitive of socialist institutions. Perhaps so, but that is another matter.

The point is only that there need be no violation of the rights of (real)

property, as Locke deﬁnes them, in such a regime.

Moreover, it is perfectly possible that once political parties form, they

may compete with one another for votes, say by urging the expansion of

the electorate by lowering, or eliminating, the property qualiﬁcation. In-

deed, this happened in Locke’s time, as Parliament tended to look favorably

on increases in the franchise, particularly in the cities and towns, in part as

way of defending itself against the Crown.

Given evolving political and

economic conditions within ideal history, there may be good reasons for

enough of those with property to favor such legislation. This kind of legis-

lation if passed would not violate, so far as I can see, anything in Locke’s ac-

count of property. In time, then, there might develop from Locke’s class

state something like a modern constitutional democratic regime. Has

something similar to this actually happened?

§5. Problem of the Class State

1. Finally we come to the problem of the class state in Locke. Recall

that this is the problem of how it can happen, consistent with Locke’s view,

that beginning from the state of nature as a state of equal jurisdiction, all

being equal sovereigns as it were, a social compact leading to a class state

could be entered into.

One might want to reject this problem as not well posed. That is, one

might say that Locke does not in fact accept the class state; at best he only

appears to. We cannot ﬁght every political war at once, so he takes them as

they come, beginning with the most urgent. As the most urgent problem,

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12. Such a regime was envisaged by the English Labor party and the German Social

Democrats.

13. See note 4 above.

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