Let's talk a little bit about Locke who is more like you, in that he thinks people are basically good natured. People, they basically fulfill their promises. The state of nature wouldn't be so terrible. His main complaint about the state of nature was, not that it was a vicious condition, but a very inefficient one. And it was inefficient because everybody has to protect their own rights. So, if I wanna come in here and give a lecture, I have to worry about somebody possibly stealing my car and what I'm gonna do about that. So, it's an inefficient condition where everybody has to look after their own rights, but it's not necessarily that terrible. And that's gonna be important because we'll see Locke is gonna have more robust circumstances in which it's legitimate to resist the government than Hobbes. Partly because he thinks the condition to which you would return wouldn't be so bad. And this is one of the things we are gonna see in social contract theories, generally that part of what you agree to about government is conditioned on what you think life would be without it. So consent is real for Locke in a sense that's stronger than it was for Hobbes. And he thinks about consent as an actual agreement, not a metaphor or a feature of rationality in the way that Hobbes' stories. Any rational person must agree to this. Locke talks about what people actually agree to, and that's something different. He has a theory of the social contract that is played out both through his account of property and his account of political authority. And we'll talk about each of them separately, although they're all part of his unified account that goes back to our old friend, the workmanship ideal. So let's start with his theory of property. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer no man but he can have a right to what that is joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others. He's saying there is a common right. We have a right in common to the fruits of the earth, the common property that God created, the common land. Any one of us can go on to the common and remove stuff from it, so long as there's as much and as good left for others. So why was this picture that I put up at the beginning of the class misleading? Do you know what that painting is? >> That's the Creation of Adam. It's a little bit contrary to his conception of a spiritual hierarchy. >> What do you mean by that? >> Well. This suggests that his thought was that God gave the earth basically to everybody, not just the descendants of Adam. >> That's right. That's what he just said. And you're exactly right. This is from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, the Creation of Adam. And it's misleading because of this highlighted phrase here that we can use what's taken from the common, at least where there is enough, and as good, left for others. But Locke was arguing against somebody called Sir Robert Filmer who was an absolutist like Hobbes. And as you just intimated Filmer took the view, better captured in that painting from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, Filmer took the view that God gave the world to Adam and his heirs. So it was a hierarchical view. Both property and political authority came down through primogeniture, inheritance from the oldest son to the oldest son to the oldest son to the current kings and queens of Europe. And indeed there was a kind of scam going on in much of 17th century Europe where for a fee somebody would give you a genealogy that would prove that you were a closer descendant of Adam than the next person. A more direct descendent of Adam than the next person. This is somehow thought to be a source of status. But Filmer literally believed that the kings and queens of Europe got their authority from Adam and his heirs through inheritance, and that the property that we have and the property that we own also comes down through system of inheritance from Adam. A very high logical view, right? And Locke said no, God gave the world to mankind in common. We can go on and take stuff off the land. We can farm the land. We can graze our sheep on the land. We can do that kind of thing. But we can't do it to the point where we don't allow others. So it's sometimes called a use right, or a use you right. We have a use right to the common. We can use it, but we can't take it out of circulation. And that's why there must be as much and as good left to others in common. Now, the puzzle. Locke supported the Enclosure Movement. Either of you know what the Enclosure Movement was in the 17th century? >> Yes. Enclosure Movement was the movement of turning the common land into private one. >> Yeah. It was the beginning of the creation of what we think of as private property. Exclusive rights, not use. Use rights are not exclusive. You can't exclude others from the common. The Enclosure Movement was, as the word suggests, literally about enclosing land, and letting it become private. Thereby, enabling whoever meant, this was done, they had to have individual bills of parliament for every enclosure, but the were doing it. And Locke was a supporter of this, essentially creating modern private property from which others can be excluded. So that's a puzzle, right? It's a puzzle because on the one hand he's saying, we all have a right to the common. On the other hand, he's supporting enclosure. So how might he have reasoned his way through that? Seems like, it's puzzling, yeah. No reason you'd know. And the answer is, basically a productivity argument. He says, whoever appropriates land by himself to himself, by his labour, does not lessen, but actually increases the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support human life, provided by one acres of enclosed and cultivated land, are ten times more than those which are yielded by an acre of an equal richness lying waste in common. So, now he's gone from talking about common as God's gift to us, as God's waste. The waste in common. And therefore, he says that if anyone encloses land, and has great or plenty of the convenience of life from ten acres, then he could have had from 100 left in nature, maybe truly said to give 90 acres to mankind. So if your increasing productivity from ten to a hundred, you're giving ninety to mankind. For his labor now supplies him with the provision of ten acres, which were about the product of a hundred lying in common. And then he says, I may have even underrated it here. That rather being ten to one, perhaps it's more like a hundred to one. So it's a productivity argument. He's saying, yes we all have a right to the common, but in reality if everybody grazes their sheep, they'll over graze the common. They won't leave land fallow. You won't have any division of labor. We've talked about that in relation to Adam Smith and Marx. A very primitive form of farming, so better to allow enclosure and everybody will be better off right? So there's an implication that you could think of as kind of implicit defense of the welfare state. You could say, okay, that productivity gain justifies in closing land, but still in all, there might be some people who don't get the benefits of the trickle down, right? After all we saw one of the few correct empirical assumptions Marx made was that there's always some unemployed people, right? And, this would be a kind of natural right to a welfare state. That everyone would have a residual and inextinguishable right to whatever they could have gotten from the common land once the common land has been taken away, right? So, I think Locke does defend modern private property as we think of it, but always with this lurking, background, natural law constraint, that everybody has an inextinguishable claim to what they could have produced from the common land. And you would have to have a kind of welfare state, guaranteeing everybody at least that minimum. So it's private property with that caveat.
