"Of Property" Reexamined

tags

LAW 343 Dispossession

Notes

Locke concentrated his efforts on the origins of private property in land and the emergence of the distinction between private landed property and common landed property.

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His justificatory discourse, recently illuminated by James Tully,? belongs to the tradition of natural law discourse

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view that man’s entitlement to property depends on “shaping” the raw stuff of nature with his labor

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view the language of natural law primarily as the means adopted by Locke rather than the substance of what he has to say. That substance is in essence the broad economic and social position revealed in the 1668 memorandum.

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brief, concise natural history of a loaf of bread within his larger natural history of property: from the different kinds of labor necessary to produce the wheat to those involved in the final baking of the loaf

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In the original God-given condition of men, Pufendorf argued, the world and its fruits were neither common nor private. All property, however held, depended on the tacit or express covenants of men.

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the natural right to property in political society, however, was not an absolute right, for it was subject to the common good, the preservation of society being the first and fundamental law of nature, taking priority over self-preservation

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An improver, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, was “One who applies himself to making land more productive or profitable.”

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“common saying” that more waste existed in England than in the whole of Europe.!

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with a large population to feed and clothe and increasing unemployment, the whole question of wastes, regardless of the accu- racy of contemporary assessments of their extent, was a critical one.

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Locke, therefore, seems to have thought of unimproved commons as waste land.

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profit-oriented yeomen were prominent enclosers, often found guilty of violating common rights.

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common grazing lands and wastes generated unemployment, idle- ness, and vagabondage.

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Because the land was held in common, a lack of clarity and precision in regard to who was to use it and how it was to be used led to disputes among the commoners over entitlement, to claims and counter-claims

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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 9/10 are the effects of labour: 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 99/100 are wholly to be put on the account of labour.

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