IT IS A COMMONPLACE, but true, that the two terms on which Locke rests the greatest weight of doctrine in the Second Treatise are “consent” and “property.” It is with the second of these terms that we are here concerned, and in particular with the use which Locke makes of his doctrine that “the great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”2 There has been a good deal of criticism leveled at Locke’s account of property from one direction or another. Complaints of wild and absurd individualism3 contrast with assertions of his collectivist leanings.4 Complaints about his obsession with history that never happened5 contrast with assertions of his intense interest in, and the great importance to his theory of, sociology, history and anthropology,6 in as genuine a form as the seventeenth century knew them. Here we shall concentrate on a different issue, namely, on the extent to which it is true that Locke’s account of property, and his resultant account of natural rights, political obligation, and the proper functions of government, form an ideology for a rising capitalist class. My question is, how far does what Locke says in the Second Treatise substantiate Macpherson’s7 thesis that he was providing—perhaps no more than half-consciously—a moral basis for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?
One initial clarification of the scope of my discussion of this question is needed. Macpherson uses a good deal of material from outside the Second Treatise to substantiate his view of it. Indeed, his working assumption seems often enough to be that we should look for Locke’s political theory outside the Second Treatise and then see whether previously ambiguous passages in that work (numerous enough in anyone’s reading) will square with the theory obtained elsewhere. This may be a method appropriate to a historical inquiry into Locke’s political intentions; it may yield the historian a coherent and convincing answer to the question of what Locke really meant. Here, however, I take the alternative path of attempting to find within the Second Treatise alone some coherent doctrine of political right and obligation, based on what Locke says there about property. Such an account may perhaps be in danger of refutation by the historian as an account of what Locke intended. It is in less, even no, danger of contradiction from such a quarter as an account of what Locke said. And in case this is thought too small a claim, let me point out that we usually hold people to what they say rather than to what they may suppose to follow from what they meant to say.
The essence of Macpherson’s account is that Locke intends to supply the moral basis of that stage of economic advance that we have called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; this is a state of unrestrained capitalism, brutal in its treatment of the laboring classes and ruthless in its destruction of traditional values, of all social ties that impede the advance of the propertied classes. Locke is thus arguing for nothing less than the rightful absolute power of the propertied classes, for a morally justified tyranny of the employers over the employed. Indeed, the laboring and the unemployed classes have their rights so ruthlessly eroded that their status is to be subject to civil society without being full members of it; they are in it but not of it. The state of nature that Locke envisages must therefore be such that these elements of the bourgeois state follow from it. Crediting Locke, as no one has done before, with a logically rigorous deduction of civil society from the state of nature, Macpherson argues that everything in the state of nature conceived by Locke was put there by him for the purpose of generating some feature or other of bourgeois society. The misery, the viciousness, and the instabilities of the resulting society are attributed to “contradictions” put into the state of nature by Locke. I need not emphasize how different is this Locke from the one we have met before.
The twin pivots upon which Macpherson’s account turns are the premises he ascribes to Locke of the natural proprietorship of one’s own labor, and the dependence of freedom and morality, and hence of citizenship, upon the possession of rationality. These are, of course, important elements in Locke’s political theory; to Macpherson, they account for the whole of this theory. They are central, vital, and closely connected. Rationality is evinced by (sometimes it seems that Macpherson is saying it is identified with) the ability to acquire goods and go on acquiring them up to the limits set by the law of nature. A rational man is one who obeys the law of reason, and the law of reason is in turn the law of nature, and this is the will of God. Given such a gloss on what it is to be rational, the argument clearly runs that it is morally excellent to accumulate, that success in accumulating is a moral virtue, and hence that the man of property is of greater moral worth than the man without property. In the state of nature before the invention of money, the title to property is given by labor, for in the state of nature, each man is originally the unconditional owner of his own labor. This doctrine is, on Macpherson’s account of it, an important and indeed a decisive break with medieval attitudes to labor and property, which were concerned to emphasize the obligations of a man to society and to his fellows, not his rights against them. So the rational man sets about accumulating property, and because his right to it is derived from his absolute right to his own labor, this right is absolute, too. According to Macpherson: “If it is labour, a man’s absolute property, which justifies appropriation and creates rights, the individual right of appropriation overrides any moral claims of the society. The traditional view that property and labour were social functions and that the ownership of property involved social obligations, is thereby undermined.”8 Thus Locke secures the right to unlimited accumulation.
But in the state of nature before the invention of money, there are two limitations upon the exercise of this right. The first is that “enough and as good” must be left for others (Locke, Two Treatises, secs. 27, 33, 35), which one may call the sufficiency limitation. The second is that nothing may spoil in the hands of the person who gathers it: “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” (secs. 31, 37, 38, 46). This we may call the spoliation limitation. There is a third apparent limitation imposed by the labor criterion of ownership, namely, that a man must mix his labor with whatever he appropriates (see, for example, sec. 27). This limitation lies at the heart of what one might call “radical” labor theories of value, where the intention is to deny any title to property other than the title of manual labor. The obvious similarity between Locke’s premises and those of all labor theorists leads many writers to suppose that he shares, or at any rate should have shared, this conclusion; but as we shall see, it is an important part of Macpherson’s case that Locke never intended such a limitation at all.
The two initial limitations are transcended by the invention of money. They are not broken or cast aside; rather, the sort of conditions under which they are applicable no longer obtain. The invention of money is seen by Locke as the discovery of “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” (sec. 47). Although a man may by purchase acquire more land than he can use the immediate product of, he still leaves enough and as good for other men. It is true that this is not enough land and as good as that appropriated—though Locke seems at times to want to argue that even this is true—but rather that the standard of living is at least as good as before for everyone else (secs. 37, 41). That is, even when all the land is appropriated, the general standard of living is improved for everyone, even for the landless, because the invention of money has enabled the rational capitalist to apply his skills and labor to land and raw material that were formerly of little or no value to mankind. Locke puts a good deal of stress on this: “For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated (sec. 37).” Besides this transcending of the sufficiency limitation, there is now no risk of infringing the spoliation limitation.
For money does not decay, so however much of it a man has, he has no fears of it perishing uselessly in his possession. A man may heap up gold and silver ad infinitum: “He might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of the bounds of his just Property not lying in the largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it” (sec. 46). As for the third limitation, Locke never meant it to hold. The crucial point about Locke’s calling labor a form of property is not that it is a peculiar and sacred form of property, but that being property, it is alienable; in the state of nature as elsewhere, men must be supposed free to exchange their labor for subsistence or for a wage. (Indeed they must, if Locke’s fantasy of a prepolitical market economy is to make any sense.) In his support, Macpherson quotes Locke’s equation of “my” labor with the labor of my servant. The passage runs: “Thus the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digg’d in any place where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property, without the assignation or consent of anybody. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my Property in them” (sec. 28). The only meaning that such a passage will bear indicates that Locke never doubted that one man could appropriate the labor of another and thus become the owner of it. “My” labor includes the labor of anyone I employ; hence, the requirement that we mix “our” labor with whatever we appropriate imposes no limits on the right to appropriate.
Given that it is morally excellent to accumulate property, whether consumable or durable, but particularly the latter, and given that the invention of money enables such accumulation to go on indefinitely, certain consequences for Locke’s political theory may be drawn. Macpherson not only goes on to draw them, but also holds that Locke drew them too and, further, that Locke regarded them as the most important parts of his theory. The first is that Locke’s wide definition of property as “Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general Name Property” (sec. 124) is not the one usually adhered to, and is not the one involved in the crucial sections of the Second Treatise dealing with the limits on the authority of any government and with the right of the people to rebel against governments which they find oppressive.9 In these passages, says Macpherson, “property” means what we normally mean by the term, and refers particularly to property in fixed capital goods. From this it follows that “the people” to whom Locke entrusts the right of rebellion cannot be the whole population, but must be the propertied classes only. The grounds of revolt are comprised under the heading of the government failing to preserve the property of its citizens; since very few people have any property, only this small number have any right to rebel. Laborers without property are in any case not fully rational—as demonstrated by the fact that they have no property—and therefore have no claim to full membership of civil society: “While the labouring class is a necessary part of the nation its members are not in fact full members of the body politic and have no claim to be so . . . Whether by their own fault or not, members of the labouring class did not have, could not be expected to have, and were not entitled to have full membership in political society.”10 As something less than full members of political society, they are objects of administration rather than citizens.
This part of Macpherson’s case is a crucial one, and my criticism of Macpherson’s interpretation of Locke is largely concerned with this part of his account. An added merit Macpherson claims for his account is that it disposes of such riddles as Locke’s basing obligation upon consent. If “the people” are in fact the propertied classes, then they will readily give their consent to whatever the legislative enacts, since what it enacts will always be in their class interest, and the interest of the class against the rest of society is more vital to each member of it than is his own interest against other members of his class. The state has thus become a committee for managing the common interests of the bourgeoisie. Naturally, this also solves the clash between the individualist and collectivist elements in Locke’s thought. To behave as an extreme individualist is to behave as a successful capitalist, and this is to achieve moral excellence; it is, however, a form of moral excellence only possible at the expense of those against whom one competes successfully, and of those whose labor one uses to enrich oneself. Hence, what is needed by the individualists is a strong government that will hold the ring for their competition. Its strength is no threat to them, since it is a blatant instrument of class rule; the tough capitalist does not require protection from his fellows. According to Macpherson: “The individuals who have the means to realize their personalities (that is, the propertied) do not need to reserve any rights as against civil society, since civil society is constructed by and for them, and run by and for them.”11 The propertied class has a coherent, cohesive interest in maintaining its position vis-à-vis the laboring classes. Individual rights thus disappear: the laboring classes have none, the propertied class needs none. Similarly, the oft-noted analogy between Locke’s civil society and a joint-stock company takes on a new aspect. Locke “would have no difficulty in thinking of the state as a joint-stock company of owners whose majority decision binds not only themselves, but also their employees.”12 The only shareholders in the firm are the board of directors. The workers are employed to maximize the wealth of the firm, but have no say in the running of the company. Thus, the domination of the state by the rising bourgeoisie is complete; its goals are their goals; its machinery is their machinery; its decisions are their decisions. Their power over the laboring proletariat is absolute, and it is rightly so.
Macpherson supports this account of the ideological Locke with a good deal of quotation from the Second Treatise; but it will be appreciated by anyone familiar with that work and the variety of interpretation to which it has given rise that no conclusive argument emerges from these quotations alone. The establishing of Locke as a capitalist lackey rests heavily, therefore, on his economic writings, in which his attitude to the laboring poor and even more to the unemployed is indubitably severe. Similarly, Locke’s disparagement of the rationality of the poor is drawn from The Reasonableness of Christianity. In the light of a theory drawn from these sources, it is not difficult to put the appropriate gloss on the ambiguous passages of the Second Treatise. (All my objections to Macpherson are based on the unambiguous passages to which I fear he pays less careful attention.) About these outside sources, I am skeptical. For one thing, they cover a period of forty years, and one may doubt both Locke’s consistency over that period and his remaining interested in precisely the same problems for so long. For a second thing, The Reasonableness of Christianity was largely written to point out that the detailed disputes of sects were beyond the scope of anybody’s reason, and its moral hardly seems to be that the working class is peculiarly irrational. It may be an ungracious response to so exciting an account as Macpherson’s, but the impression made by his welding together of all this disparate evidence into a tough, lucid, and consistent theory is that of an interpretative tour de force rather than of a natural or convincing account of Locke.
Confining ourselves to the Second Treatise, there is ample room for doubt about Macpherson’s account, and some plainly unambiguous statements by Locke that flatly contradict it. On the issue of rationality, for example, it is true that this is Locke’s basis for knowledge of the moral law and hence the basis for being able to obey it. But it is quite incredible that Locke intends us to believe it is the property of one class only, or that he thinks it is chiefly displayed in the acquisition of capital goods. It is stated explicitly by Locke that very nearly all men are rational enough to know what the law of nature requires of them, though most men are little enough inclined always to obey it: “The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and Reason which is that Law teaches all mankind who will but consult it” (sec. 6; cf. sec. 12). The problem is not that some people have not the ability to know what the law requires of them, but that they will not take the trouble to think that they are morally obliged to do, or if they do take that trouble, they will not take the trouble to do what they are morally obliged to. The reason, in general, why the law of nature is not enough is human selfishness and not human intelligence. In fact, the only qualification Locke places on the general possession of rationality is that of age or mental defect: “We are born Free, as we are born Rational; not that we have actually the exercise of either; Age that brings one, brings with it the other too” (sec. 61.). The only persons other than the young who are not qualified by rationality are “Lùnaticks and Ideots. . . . Madmen” (sec. 60), who hardly seem to be coextensive with the whole class of the laboring poor whom Locke is said to have written off as nonrational. Moreover, this statement by Locke comes only one chapter after the account of property rights in which the erosion of the rationality of the propertyless is supposed to have occurred. The total absence of any sign that Locke was sliding into the doctrine that is said to be his considered opinion leaves us with no grounds for supposing that the mere absence of property in the sense of capital goods is sufficient to deny citizenship to persons who, by all normal tests, are sane and rational when they reach years of discretion.
Moreover, there is a good deal of confusion in Macpherson’s account of what is supposed by Locke to be the distinctively rational feature of capitalist accumulation. There is initially a good deal of confusion in Locke too, but Macpherson does not so much clear this up as ignore it in favor of a doctrine that he attributes to Locke, apparently for no better cause than that it is the doctrine that a moralizing capitalist ought to have held. The only consistent line for Locke to take is fairly simple, and the elements of it are at least hidden in the account of property rights he does give. The will of God, which he identifies with the law of nature and the demands of reason, requires all men to be preserved as far as possible. The man who appropriates land, employs his skill upon it, and thus enriches mankind is thereby obeying the demands of reason, that is, he is being rational. This is Locke’s argument in a number of places. He refers initially to the right that each man has of preserving all mankind (see, for example, sec. 11)—a “right” that is better termed a duty. He argues that the man who encloses land and works it confers a benefit upon mankind; almost everything required for a civilized existence is due to the skill and effort that men have lavished upon the raw materials supplied by nature. In one passage he begins with the assertion:
I think it will be but a very modest Computation to say, that of the Products of the Earth useful to the Life of Man nine out of ten are the effects of Labour. (sec. 40)
Just how modest he thinks this computation to be appears soon enough:
Nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several Expences about them, what in them is purely owing to Nature, and what to labour, we shall find, that in most of them ninety-nine out of one hundred are wholly to be put on the account of labour. (sec. 40)
And a moment later the proportion becomes 999 parts in 1,000 (sec. 43). The invention of money allows this process to be carried to the lengths typical of a developed economy. Thus the laborer, along with society generally, benefits from the activities of the capitalists. And this is the rationale of capitalism.
But, what is the incentive for the capitalist himself? According to Macpherson, Locke holds that capitalists develop their personalities in capitalism; but Locke says nothing of the sort, and in any case, it is both an unconvincing and vacuous account of the matter. What does it amount to beyond the assertion that people who want to become capitalists gratify their wish if they do become capitalists? Locke in fact is confused. At one point he suggests that nothing more than a fanciful liking for gold is at the bottom of it—but the rationality of piling up prettily colored stones and metals is not clear. The value of money, of course, is a fancy value, not in the sense of being a fanciful value, but in the sense of being an agreed or conventional value. But Locke does sometimes equate this with having no value at all. When he refuses to allow the conqueror the right to the conquered’s territory, he excludes money thus: “For as to Money, and such Riches and Treasure taken away, these are none of Natures Goods, they have but a Phantastical imaginary value: Nature has put no such upon them” (sec. 184; cf. sec. 46). This clearly confuses conventional value and no value at all. The explanation of the good sense of capitalism that Locke hints at elsewhere, which makes a sound case, had three elements in it. The first is that men have come to have more wants than nature gave them; they desire more than they absolutely need; clearly, the day laborer living at the English subsistence level is much better off than the Indian king living at a high standard for a savage; a rational man will clearly join in this better consumption—an explanation of the inducement to become a capitalist that Macpherson rejects, but that makes good sense. But on occasion, Locke identifies the desire of having more than we need with simple greed and suggests that the premonetary state of nature was a golden age (sec. 111). In which case, the capitalist is not merely not rational, not morally excellent, but positively corrupt. (Macpherson’s defense that the condemnation of greed applies not to the capitalist but to the propertyless who covet the capitalists’ goods is clever, but is impossible to reconcile what Locke says about the earliest governments ruling a simple society.13 It is the whole state of society, not that of a single class, that Locke commends or disapproves of, and he clearly places the arrival of greed at the time of the invention of money [sec. 108].) The second element is one that we have already discussed, namely, the argument that the capitalist is morally bound to promote the well-being of society; and Locke tends—as we noted in the case in which he terms a duty a “right”—to equate being bound by reason with wanting to do what reason tells one. So for Locke, doing what is right can be something the capitalist gets out of being a capitalist. The third element is Locke’s suggestion that a man will want to provide for other people to whom he feels an obligation or perhaps for those to whom he simply wants to give his goods. Giving away is a recognized form of use (sec. 46).
Of these three elements, only the first is a genuine prudential consideration that would allow us to say that the capitalist was being rational in the prudential sense rather than in the moral sense. It is plainly the account that Locke ought to have taken to match his conventionalist account of money. For if money has a conventional value within some society or other, then the whole point of getting rich is to be able to share the advantages of that society’s economy to an increased extent. It seems that Macpherson confuses further what Locke confuses sufficiently. The only consistent line to be found in Locke is that capitalism is rational—morally—because it is a step to the betterment of society, and that being a capitalist is rational—prudentially—because it enables one to enjoy a greater share of the betterment. A man’s share in the greater social product is both his incentive and his reward. But so simple a doctrine as this is far indeed from fulfilling the requirements of Macpherson’s theory.
This becomes clearer when we examine Macpherson’s curious assertion that property rights are absolute because labor rights are so. The labor theory of proprietorship has been much misunderstood by Macpherson. It begins not as a theory of proprietorship but as theory of identification.14 Locke says of the diet of the Indian: “The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life” (sec. 26). But the sense in which food must belong to a man before it can do him any good is a biological one—namely, he has to eat it; and the sense in which an Indian’s nourishment is his is a logical one—namely, that we can identify nourishment only by identifying the man nourished. This is not to talk of rights at all, and particularly not to talk of absolute rights. It is a very dangerous way of talking, for it swiftly confuses the “his” of identification with the “his” of ownership or rightful possession. Thus, there is a perfectly good sense in which “the Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands we may say, are properly his” (sec. 27). But this sense needs elucidating. In one sense, it is bound to be “his,” since it is a truth of logic that only he can do his laboring, and in this sense, whomever he labors for, it is still “his” labor. But this does not establish that the only person entitled to benefit from his labor is himself. It is, moreover, impossible to reconcile Locke’s concern for the rights of wives and children with the right to be absolutely selfish that Macpherson ascribes to Locke’s natural man.
The confusion may be as much Locke’s fault as anyone’s, but it is fair to point out that Locke never talks of an “absolute” right to anything at all. Customarily accepted moral obligations are not mentioned—or not often—but this might well be because Locke took them for granted, not because he did not accept them. Locke’s concern, after all, was to defend men against royal force and robbery, and this is not a category that includes the demands of friends and family. The point of Locke’s initial account of the right to goods given by labor is surely negative. He is faced with the question of how undifferentiated goods become the exclusive property of some one man; and the answer is that where there is plenty for everyone, acquisition and ownership need not be distinguished. If a man acquires something without breaking the laws of nature in the manner of his acquiring it, that is enough. The answer to the question “Who has it?” serves as the answer to the question “Whose is it?” Macpherson’s emphasis on the absence of obligation to society is odd in view of the fact that at this point, the conditions that create social ties do not exist at all; and the minimal obligation of leaving enough and as good for whoever may chance along is surely some sort of obligation, while obligations to one’s family presumably exist at this rudimentary stage too. And Locke says clearly enough that when a man enters society, he has his social title to his goods on society’s terms (sec. 120)—a pre-echo of Rousseau. This, after all, is Locke’s consistent line: we enter society to protect our property, so we must be prepared to contribute our fair share of whatever is required for this defense, and society must judge what it needs for the successful performance of its functions. If property includes life, limb, liberty, and possessions, then some pay taxes, but all forgo their natural liberty, and all are liable for the defense of the country from enemies external and internal (secs. 128–30).
If we are correct in arguing that talk of “absolute” property is seriously misleading and that no sort of absolute ownership is involved in life, liberty, or goods, on all of which there can be claims, then there seems less reason than ever to suppose that Locke restricts the meaning of “property” to fixed property in goods or to suppose that he is engaged in an attempt to deprive the proletariat of all political rights for the benefit of the employing classes. The only essential characteristic that property possesses is that property is that of which a man cannot be deprived without his consent; for example, Locke says of the rights of the conquered under the conqueror: “Whatsoever he grants them, they have so far as it is granted, property in. The nature whereof is, that without a Man’s own consent it cannot be taken from him” (sec. 195). And elsewhere, it is the absence of this characteristic that removes a possession from the position of actually being a man’s property: “For I have truly no Property in that, which another can by right, take from me, when he pleases, against my consent” (sec. 138). This characteristic applies for Locke to all goods both bodily and mental, except one’s own life, which one cannot dispose of by contract, but which one can lose the right to by a sufficient breach of the natural law. It is significant that Macpherson’s view of the power exercised over the propertyless is that of Locke; it is despotic power, absolute and arbitrary, a power that Locke explicitly contrasts with political power. And it is crucially important to notice that the only case of despotic power allowed by Locke, and hence, by inference, the only case he allows of a man without property, is power over the renegade against reason and society:
Despotical Power is an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases. This is a power, which neither Nature gives . . . nor Compact can convey . . . but it is the effect only of Forfeiture, which the Aggressor makes of his own life, when he puts himself into the state of war with another. (sec. 172)
Of political power he says in the next paragraph:
(By Property I must be understood here, as in other places, to mean that property which men have in their persons as well as goods.) Voluntary Agreement gives . . . Political Power to Governours for the benefit of their subjects, to secure them in the possession and use of their properties. (sec. 173)
And this power is immediately contrasted with power over the propertyless:
And Forfeiture gives the third, Despotical Power to Lords for their own benefit, over those who are stripp’d of all property. (sec. 173)
And finally he sums up:
Paternal Power is only where minority makes the child incapable to manage his property; Political where men have property in their own disposal; and Despotical over such as have no property at all. (sec. 174)
This seems to me conclusive enough against Macpherson’s thesis that “property” is to be read as if it referred only to property in goods. An obvious consequence, however, that we must draw is that if we accept Locke’s wide reading of property as bona civilia (“civil goods”), or “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like” (sec. 3, editor’s note), then it is clear that we must accept the whole population who have reached years of discretion as being the “people” for the purposes of entrusting them with the right of revolution. That Locke did so is shown clearly by what he considers as a possible objection to his doctrine: “To this perhaps it will be said, that the people being ignorant, and always discontented, to lay the foundation of Government in the unsteady opinion, and uncertain humour of the people, is to expose it to certain ruine” (sec. 223).
His reply does not matter: what is important is how this contradicts Macpherson’s picture of Locke. Locke is hardly likely to think it a plausible criticism of the rising capitalists that they are ignorant or unsteady of opinion or uncertain of humor. One verbal point that might lead one into accepting Macpherson’s account is Locke’s talk of “deputies” and “representatives”; it is easy enough to slip into thinking that this involves electing MPs—and of course no one suggests that Locke is advocating universal suffrage. But if we recall that Locke counts a monarch ruling without a council, or a permanent oligarchy, as legislatives in precisely the same sense as the English king-in-Parliament is a legislative, it becomes clear that to be represented is not necessarily to have voted (sec. 138). Macpherson may still be willing to argue that the laborer is not a “full member” of civil society—but the trouble here is that Locke talks only of members, and never distinguishes between full and any other sort of membership. The passage Macpherson rests his case on is an oddity, and is anyway concerned with distinguishing the status of foreigners residing in a country from that of genuine subjects:
And thus we see, that Foreigners, by living all their lives under another Government, and enjoying the priviledges and protection of it, though they are bound, even in conscience, to submit to its administration, as far forth as any Denison; yet do not thereby come to be Subjects or Members of that Commonwealth. Nothing can make any man so, but his actually entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact. (sec. 122)
Here it is the foreigner who is being contrasted with the member or subject; Macpherson’s contrast is between the laborer who is a subject but not a member, and the propertied man who is both, a contrast of which the text is innocent. The obligation that the laborer and the foreigner incur, they incur along with the capitalist, for they have all given their tacit consent by enjoying property: “Whether this his possession be of land to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling freely on the highway” (sec. 119).
If this puts the laborer on a level with the foreigner, it does so only by putting him on a level with his employer too. Locke never solves the problem of why a man’s first country is thought to be his only country, but it is surely implausible to suggest that he anticipated Marx in holding that the proletarian has no country, only a class. It would be a foolish doctrine for Locke to hold, since it would have involved him in releasing laborers from the obligation to defend their country against external enemies, and would have meant that they could not be held guilty of such crimes as treason. We cannot but conclude that if laborers can be said to have a property—and we have seen no reason why they cannot be—then they are members of civil society. They receive benefits and accept corresponding obligations. They may pay no taxes, but they lend their labor and their strength to the defense of their society against enemies internal and external: “The Power of Punishing he wholly gives up, and engages his natural force (which he might before imploy in the execution of the Law of Nature, by his own single Authority, as he thought fit) to assist the executive power of his society, as the law thereof shall require” (sec. 130; cf. 136). Men allow society to regulate their lives, their liberties, and their possessions; all who have need of protection for any of these things can receive it from civil society and thereby become obliged by its rules. The state exists not for a class but for all who are willing and able to use it on equitable terms.
Although Macpherson’s theory about Locke’s doctrine is thus falsified in so many details, it still presents a challenge to any critic. For its overall coherence and interest is extremely impressive, even though its foundations are shaky; and some of the detail—for example, the exposition of Locke’s defense of unequal property rights—is superior to anything yet produced on Locke. All discounting made of the ideological overtones that Macpherson hears in every word of Locke, the force of Macpherson’s account challenges one to produce some alternative picture that fits the text better than his, but that takes notice of what is most valuable in his account. Let us then agree that the chapter “Of Property” is intended to justify the achievement of the capitalist and the reward he reaps. As we argued above, the simplest argument for this is based on God’s will that all mankind should flourish. Given fair distribution, the greatest social product is the will of God and the dictate of reason. Locke never argues explicitly that the distribution is fair, though the elements of the argument required are there. They lie in the insistence that even the worst off in modern society is better off than he would be outside it, a thesis backed up by the ubiquitous American Indian; these latter, it will be remembered “have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy: And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England” (sec. 41). And they lie too in the suggestion that it is the superior ability and greater efforts of the capitalist that lead to his greater wealth: “And 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” (sec. 48). And perhaps, finally, in the suggestion that even now there is some surplus land left “in some inland, vacant places of America” (sec. 36). Thus, the capitalist is worthy of his profit; that he is worthy of all his profit Locke does not argue; perhaps his laissez-faire inclinations were not so strong that he thought it was true; perhaps they were so strong that he thought it needed no proving. The basic point, however, is simple enough: since all men have profited by entering a market society, there is no cause for complaint if some men have done better than others.
But, here we part company with Macpherson. In Macpherson’s account, Locke now proceeds to pile political oppression on top of inequality of possessions. A more convincing picture is that of Locke moving from the negative point that the laborer and the capitalist were not at odds to the positive task of showing that they have a shared interest, a common ground of political obligation, and a common right to see to the maintenance of their interests. It is indubitable that both are bound by the law; therefore the law must give something to them both, in return for which they are bound to obey it. And it is this something that Locke calls “the Preservation of their Property” (sec. 124) or else “the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates which I call by the general Name, Property” (sec. 123). A common interest requires one term to describe it, even though the most disparate things come as a result to shelter under the name of “property.” All the inhabitants of a well-governed and well-organized country benefit from its government—even resident foreigners—so they all have a share in something; and whatever it is that they have a share in, Locke calls property. Peace and security are also said by Locke to be the ends of government; men enter civil society “by stated Rules of Right and Property to secure their Peace and Quiet” (sec. 137). All men require peace and security to lead tolerable lives, so all men have as much property as requires government for its preservation. It is, of course, odd to talk of all the things that society protects as property, but the effect is surely not that of setting up a bourgeois dictatorship so much as of finding some common interest shared by both the proletarian and the bourgeois in a state that must often have seemed to give nothing except to those who were rich and powerful enough to need nothing from it.
And the importance of giving the proletariat and the bourgeoisie a common interest is surely that their interests are opposed to absolute monarchy; nothing could be clearer than that the target of the Second Treatise is not the peaceful and docile proletariat, but the doctrine that a monarch has an absolute and, more particularly, arbitrary power over his subjects. This is a recurring theme of the whole treatise, which might indeed have been subtitled “A Treatise against Arbitrariness and in Favor of Relevance in Political Power.” A large part of the chapter “Of the Dissolution of Government” is a defense of regicide as a last measure against a king who claims to have an absolute and arbitrary authority over his people (secs. 232–39). Despite the occasionally lighthearted manner in which he discusses the question of how we are to join reverence with a knock on the head, Locke commits himself to views that abundantly explain why he did not wish to be known as the author of the work during the lifetime of James II. Locke’s bitterest attacks are always on absolute monarchy, as when he says:
Hence it is evident that Absolute Monarchy, which by some men is counted the only Government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with Civil Society. (sec. 90)
or that:
Absolute, arbitrary power, or governing without settled standing Laws, can neither of them consist with the ends of society and government. (sec. 137)
or that:
Absolute Dominion, however placed, is so far from being one kind of civil society, that it is as incompatible with it, as slavery is with property. (sec. 174)
It seems quite incredible that anyone should not take it as an attack on the pretensions made by James II (or those that he was suspected of being about to make) to the position of a recipient of divinely granted power, and thus to freedom from all human law and control.
Locke’s target is arbitrariness rather than absoluteness; he goes into some detail about martial law, which allows summary execution for disobedience even to lethally dangerous orders, but which will not allow a general to touch one penny of a soldier’s goods; the reason given by Locke is this: “Because such a blind Obedience is necessary to that end for which the Commander has his Power, viz the preservation of the rest; but the disposing of his Goods has nothing to do with it” (sec. 139). Locke generalizes the argument that authority is limited in its scope to what is necessary to secure the ends for which the authority is set up to cover the case of Parliament, the monarch, and any other sort of authority. All rights are limited by the ends they are meant to secure, and the right to our obedience vested in our rulers is in exactly the same case. Royal authority, in other words, depends not on the person of the monarch, but on the good of the society. The quarrel is not between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but between king and people. No doubt the people are but rarely justified in revolution; but there is no question that they have the right to rebel in extremis.
Even in this reading of Locke, his theory is still a bourgeois one. It is beyond doubt a bourgeois mind that envisages all rights as property rights; it is also, more importantly for the political philosopher, a perceptive sort of confusion that leads to such an identification. For “property” is not an inapt general name for the class of rights and obligations that enter into social theory—quasi-contractual rights and duties as they are. For in many ways, property rights, in the ordinary sense of “property,” are paradigms of the rights that are exchanged and protected by contract. But only a bourgeois mind could fail to see that they are paradigmatic rather with respect to procedure than with respect to the importance of the ethical values involved. They are paradigmatically contractual, but they are not the most important contractual rights. But this still goes no way toward justifying Macpherson’s attributing to Locke a ruthless, dictatorial program of class domination. In the joint-stock company that is Locke’s state, all men are shareholders. Some men hold shares of life, liberty, peace, and quiet alone, while others hold shares of estate as well; these latter may receive more of the benefits and play a greater part in the running of the state, but there is no reason to suppose that in the eyes of God or Nature (or even in the eyes of John Locke), their shares have a peculiar importance. Few or no practical conclusions follow readily from Locke’s account of political obligation; Macpherson’s conclusions follow even less readily than the more egalitarian and humane ones that have been drawn in the past.