Locke On Property

In order to answer this question I first intend to establish Locke's reasoning regarding property, and then show how this is central to his description of civil society. To achieve this I will follow his reasoning regarding property and then investigate how Locke links this to his need for a civil society and indeed whether the very notion of property is central to this need. To achieve this I will show that the basis for Locke's civil society is the need for an individual to protect their own property, and that this forms the central idea upon which his need for a civil society is built.

Early in the Locke's Second Treatise on Government he addresses the state of nature to define political power. He describes the state of nature as a state of equilibrium in which no one person has any kind of power over another, and that everybody is free to determine their own actions. Locke makes it clear that this freedom does not extend to a license to abuse the freedom of others. Everybody in what he has described as a state of nature has the power to execute laws of nature, simply that the punishment fit the crime. A person in the state of nature can seek penance for a crime committed against him in order to discourage the perpetrator repeating the crime. Locke also notes that everybody is in a state of nature until an agreement between them makes them members of a political society.

Locke begins his chapter on property by stating that the Earth can be considered to be the property of the people to use for their own benefit and survival by reason or the word of God. He follows this statement with a key question; if the Earth belongs to humankind, how can individual property be justified. Locke argues that for individual property to exist, there must exist a way in which each person can appropriate the objects around them. Locke first assumes that each person in a state of nature owns his or her own body, and all the work they carry out with the body. Whenever a person adds their work and therefore their property to an object, that object becomes theirs as they have added their work. Locke uses the example of picking an apple, when I pick an apple it becomes mine, because I have added my work to it and made it my property. This way of acquiring objects requires no consent from the general populace; each person is free to appropriate items by their own initiative. The premise here is quite simple: if people add their work to an item they have the right to appropriate said item. This applies to many types of items including the land itself. "The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them." Locke sees that it is necessary for this type of acquisition to be bounded, he says that a person may only acquire as many items as they can reasonably use. This can again be expanded by the apple example; I can only take as many apples as I can eat before they become rotten. If I take more than this allowance of apples then I have gone beyond my rights of acquisition. This bound is known as the law of subsistence.

These rudimentary rules are then applied to the land, a person who encounters free land may claim it merely by adding work to it, for example farming it or building upon it. The bound still applies so that they may only build upon or farm what they can reasonably use without waste. Locke then defines work as the factor which determines the value of an object; he recognizes how humans use it as a tool to make the world more advantageous to themselves.

With the foundation of work and peoples rights, money becomes the basis for moving beyond the subsistence level of property. Upon the establishment of any kind of trading system it is logical for people to want there to be an item of common value that can be traded for all goods, this item is money. The system Locke puts into place and limitations he places upon property are as follows, you must put work into an item to claim it as your own, you may not take more of an item than you can reasonably use and money is a general principle in which both of these ideas meet.

Locke has described how money can transcend the idea of subsistence; it can also be shown to transcend the idea of work. For example if I own a large orchard and I pay people to work in my orchard, all the apples produced by that orchard are still mine. I have mixed my work with the orchard, in other words my work translated into property. I may then sell the apples produced by my orchard for a profit, and I can own as many orchards as I wish since I waste none of the apples. I may then sell my apples, my property for money. Since the use of