In 1689, John Locke published a short political tract in which he gave a detailed account of how and why human beings had created private property.Footnote 1 The problem was not new. Since at least the sixteenth century, Christian jurists of various confessional hues had been wrangling with it, not least because the Book of Genesis appeared to describe God as having given the world to mankind to enjoy communally. Before Locke, a prominent and interconfessional solution held that although God had originally granted the world to humans in common, they had subsequently agreed, or consented, to its division.Footnote 2 But as C. B. Macpherson pointed out in 1962, Locke took a different tack.Footnote 3 In his telling, consent had not been necessary in order to begin dividing up the common world; it was required only later in time: first (tacitly) for the introduction of money, and second (expressly) for the formation of the civitas or, in Locke's terminology, “political society.”Footnote 4 In Macpherson's eyes, this established an “unlimited natural right of appropriation,” giving landowners a weapon with which they could protect themselves from the unwelcome incursions of politics.Footnote 5 His motivations, Macpherson concluded, must have derived from the seedbed of class interest: Locke's argument had been designed to justify the landholdings of the emergent liberal bourgeoisie of which he was part.Footnote 6
As historians have become more sensitive to the theological dimension of Locke's thought, the claim that he proposed an unconditional right to property has been dismantled as thoroughly as the Marxist explanation of his motivations.Footnote 7 But Macpherson's association of Locke with liberalism remains, and the positions Locke allocated to consent in his account of property remain unusual.Footnote 8 In order to explain the link, historians have begun to cluster round the history of early English imperialism. One of the most prominent arguments to come from this shift has been made by James Tully and David Armitage.Footnote 9 It claims that Locke had two accounts of the origin of property. The first is supposed to lie in a manuscript fragment titled “Morality,” speculatively dated to 1677–8, in which consent featured as a necessary condition of legitimate appropriation.Footnote 10 The second is supposed to lie in the fifth chapter (“Of Property”) of the Second Treatise of Government, in which this condition was removed.Footnote 11 In a 1993 essay, Tully notes this change as part of a broader argument about the chapter's function as a justification of the colonial projects in which Locke was personally involved as a landgrave, or noble, of the colony of Carolina.Footnote 12 In a 2004 article, and again in a 2012 essay, Armitage pushes Tully's observation further, arguing that Locke's removal of consent was a consistency requirement for a revised version of the Constitutions of Carolina to which he was contributing in the summer of 1682.Footnote 13 “Of Property,” he contends, was also composed around this time—much later than both the First Treatise, which dates to 1680, and much of the Second Treatise, which was written throughout 1681 and 1682.Footnote 14 As Locke's mature account of property could now be connected so directly to his role as a colonial administrator, Armitage concludes more forcefully than Tully that the shift from the early note to “Of Property” was motivated by Locke's private imperial designs.Footnote 15 Under Armitage's microscope, one of the “founding texts of liberalism” reveals itself to be exclusionary by design, and liberalism to be exclusionary by nature.Footnote 16
Apology for colonial activity was implicit in Locke's later conclusion that appropriation required no consent, and given the biography carefully marshalled by Armitage, it is certainly plausible to think of such apology as motivating the conclusion itself. But this article aims to suggest other reasons for why Locke saw property as he did—reasons which do not replace his imperial motivations, but which raise questions about how his purposes might be organized. It attempts to do so by underlining the extent to which seventeenth-century property debates took place in the spatial and temporal dimensions inhabited by sacred history—the record of God's actions in and upon time.Footnote 17 Sacred history has only relatively recently begun to attract the attention of intellectual historians.Footnote 18 It has also only recently been pulled into the orbit of the history of political thought, as the resources it provided to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholics wishing to conjecture about the origins of society have been brought to light.Footnote 19 This article, however, takes as its point of departure a recent reminder that despite its abstraction from history, much natural-law thinking was parasitic on (often sacred) conceptions of time and place.Footnote 20
It begins by casting doubt on whether “Morality” can readily be compared with “Of Property” as, once probed, they do not appear as different accounts of property so much as different ways of thinking about human relations altogether. “Morality” framed the problem of possession (not “property”) in terms of sociability: the question of how humans could be expected to behave within and without the political city, or civitas.Footnote 21 But as they were designed to answer Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, published for the first time in 1680, the Two Treatises looked instead at the formation of property as a moment in sacred time and space.Footnote 22
Targeting Patriarcha took Locke, as John Pocock observed some time ago, onto the terrain of “sacred, not national history.” (Filmer's forays into English constitutional history were republished in 1679, but Locke had left them for others to rebut.)Footnote 23 It was in this work that Filmer had traced the origins of property to God's grant of the world to Adam, and followed its donative descent through the biblical narrative of the Fall, the Flood, and the founding by Noah's progeny of the gentes, or nations, which had since spread out over the surface of the earth. Among Filmer's own targets was the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, whose De iure belli ac pacis (1625), though inhabiting the same history, had come to the risible conclusion that property derived not from Adam, but from the later consent of all humankind—a collective act that had taken place once after the Fall, and again after the Deluge.Footnote 24 To answer Filmer on property, then, was to rehabilitate Grotius; and to rehabilitate Grotius was to seize back the sacred-historical land on which Filmer had trespassed in Patriarcha. Locke attempted to do so in the First Treatise, continuing his case in the second. In order to succeed, he had to show that God had not donated the world to Adam; but he also had to show why, after the Fall and after the Deluge, there had been no need for humans to consent to its partition. The latter task was the more difficult, but Locke managed to meet it by arguing that due to the abundance of space in the early ages of the world, humans could in fact have had property before agreeing with one another to protect it.
I
First to “Morality,” and whether it can be read as an early “contractual account of the origins of property.”Footnote 25 An initial problem with doing so is its dating: written on each side of two loose leaves of paper, the fragment has so far proved impossible to date with certainty, though various conjectures have been made. Thomas Sargentich, its first publisher, dated it to the early 1690s, citing theoretical similarities between it and another fragment, “Ethica A” (1692).Footnote 26 Among them was the hedonism with which the note began.Footnote 27 But Locke had already dipped his toe in hedonistic waters in 1676: “happiness and misery,” he wrote on 16 July that year, “seem to me wholly to consist in . . . pleasure and pain of the mind.”Footnote 28 Unconvinced by Sargentich, Patrick Kelly gave “Morality” the alternative date of 1677–8, citing its similarity to Locke's journals from around that time (though without giving examples).Footnote 29 This dating has been silently followed by Tully and Armitage and accepted as probable by Mark Goldie, the editor of a modern collection of miscellaneous political pieces in which the fragment appears. But it remains uncertain.
The second problem with reading “Morality” as an account of property's origins is analytical, for the note appears unconcerned with the origins of property at all: it has neither spatial nor temporal dimensions, offers little sense of where or when human beings might have found property necessary, and gives no indication of a foundational moment (or series of moments) having taken place in sacred-historical time. Regarding possession, the note stated baldly that “man at his birth can have no right to anything in the world more than another. Men therefore must either enjoy all things in common or by compact determine their rights.”Footnote 30 If the world were to be left in common, it continues, “want, rapine and force will unavoidably follow in which state, as is evident, happiness cannot be had which cannot consist without plenty and security.”Footnote 31 If these “compacts” were to be broken, “then whatever I possess will be subjected to the force or deceit of all the rest of the men in the world, in which state it is impossible for any man to be happy unless he were both stronger and wiser than all the rest of mankind.”Footnote 32 If kept, they would establish justice, “the greatest and difficultest duty,” distinct from secondary virtues “not comprised under direct articles of contract such as . . . civility, charity, liberality.”Footnote 33 Locke concluded the fragment by defining only civility, as “nothing but outward expressing of goodwill and esteem or at least of no contempt of it.”Footnote 34
As Tully and Armitage have pointed out, Locke in the fragment required consent as a condition of legitimate possession. But taken in context, the remarks concern sociability more than they do property. Human beings, Locke was acknowledging, required the institution of the civitas to prevent their destruction; without signing up to a set of rules, they were destined endlessly to subject one other in the process of aggrandizing themselves. But outside the auspices of the civitas, they appeared capable of performing—if not actually holding—respect for one another. Locke was clear enough that this “civility” needed shoring up by the foundation of the city; but he nevertheless indicated that the city was not the only means through which human beings could be brought peacefully to coexist.Footnote 35
Analytically, the note's discussion of civility and justice is less similar to “Of Property” than to Locke's translation of the Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole's Essais de Morale (1671–8).Footnote 36 Between 1675 and 1679 Locke was in France, and acquired the first two volumes of Nicole's Essais in 1676.Footnote 37 By August that year, he had begun to translate three essays: “On the Existence of a God,” “Discourse of the Weaknesse of Man,” and the “Treatise concerning the way of preserving peace with men.”Footnote 38 Completing the bulk of the work in 1677, he presented his translation in manuscript to the Countess of Shaftesbury upon his return to England in 1679.Footnote 39 He did not publish it.
In a manuscript fragment dated to 1677, and probably intended as a draft preface to the translated essays, Locke admitted that he had been cavalier with the French text.Footnote 40 “I have thought fit,” he wrote, “sometimes to dispense with the strict formalities of a translator . . . to keep close to his argument, [I] have sometimes deviated from his words.”Footnote 41 Uninterested in showing the “world the proprieties or agreements of these two languages or how well I might render the one into the other,” he attempted rather to depict what he saw as the Jansenist's key ideas.Footnote 42
Nicole sat at the intersection of what might tentatively be characterized as Jansenist scholastic and Protestant conceptions of natural law, the former centred on the individual agency of Fallen man, the latter on a sphere of behaviour towards others (“alterity” or sociability).Footnote 43 Accordingly, the “Discourse” ruminated on the fragile and mortal condition of Fallen human beings, whilst the “Treatise” concerned the social systems they were able to construct on the basis of the passions. For Nicole, the passions and bodily movements of pre-lapsarian man were subjected to his faculty of reason.Footnote 44 But after the Fall, the capacity of reason to control the passions had been lost. As Locke rendered the problem, “We [now] flote in the Ocean of this world, under the conduct of our passions, with which we drive, some times this way, some times that way, as a vessell, without compasse, without pilot.”Footnote 45 Fallen man was mortal, and “continually expos'd to a thousand accidents.”Footnote 46 His pathology consisted in a turning away from God toward other creatures, particularly himself: in the terminology of Nicole and other Port-Royal Jansenists, this was amour-propre.Footnote 47 In his “Traité des moyens de conserver la paix,” the final of the essays translated by Locke, Nicole addressed the question whether it was possible to conceive of a social sphere in which individuals might peaceably engage with each other whilst driven mainly by amour-propre, or self-love.
“The necessitys, & wants of life,” Locke wrote, “drive men into societys, & keep them there togeather.”Footnote 48 This meant that “societys are according to the will of god, since to that end he hath left us under those necessitys.”Footnote 49 In Locke's rendering of Nicole, man's inclination toward society therefore stemmed from his desire to satisfy his own material needs rather than from any other-regarding aspect of his moral psychology.Footnote 50 This did not obviate the requirement for “Love, & respect,” both of which were “necessary to [society's] preservation.”Footnote 51 But “being of themselves invisible, men have by consent establishd certain dutys, to passe as the marks, & pledges of them.”Footnote 52 These tokens of respect and esteem were “external actions” visible to the naked eye, and were payable “wherever the internall [and invisible] dispositions, they stand for, are due.”Footnote 53 The performance of these actions was crucial: human societies were made up of people who “are full of love, & esteeme of them selves: & if others endeavour not a litle to satisfie, & sooth those inclinations, societys will prove but heards of malcontents, and hardly hold togeather.”Footnote 54 It was thus incumbent on human beings to conform to the “devoirs de civilité,” rendered by Locke as the dictates of “civility.”Footnote 55 Fallen men were capable of massaging the egos of others, but only if their own egos were massaged in return: “Those that pay us civilitys, expect the same from us again.”Footnote 56 It was a “sort of commerce” in external affections, Locke wrote, which was both “establishd & regulated by self-love [amour-propre] which being supreme judg in the case obleiges both sides to equall, & punctuall returns; & allowes us to complain, when others faile in their part of the performance.”Footnote 57
The civility Locke described in “Morality”—“nothing but outward expressing of goodwill and esteem”—resembles the civility he had articulated in his translation of Nicole's Essais.Footnote 58 In “Morality,” as in the translation, civility could no more replace the civitas than it could save the soul: humans were incapable of having possessions without agreeing with one another to respect them; they had to “enjoy all things in common or by compact determine their rights.”Footnote 59 Civility acted rather as a secondary source of stability within the city, and was part of the note's enquiry into how the disorder generated by human passions might be resolved. But neither “Morality” nor Nicole's Essais gave Locke an articulation of, or an answer to, the question whether (or how) sociability might be maintained prior to a point at which some sort of communal consent became necessary. By explaining the origin of property in the spatial and temporal terms provided by the sacred history of Creation, Grotius came to give him both; Locke's response, however, emerged only from his tussle with Filmer, who himself had been tussling with Grotius.
II
Filmer troubled Locke because he claimed to be able to derive a specific political doctrine from Scripture, thus precluding any further form of political reflection.Footnote 60 But Scripture was also historical record: the book of Genesis was “Moses’ history of the creation,”Footnote 61 and it was on this ground that Filmer had ridiculed Grotius. “It seems strange,” he intoned, that “Grotius should maintain that community of all things should be by the law of nature, of which God is the author, and yet such community should not be able to continue.”Footnote 62 Does it not “derogate from the providence of God Almighty, to ordain a community which could not continue?”Footnote 63
If Scripture showed that God gave the world to mankind in common, Filmer reasoned, then any subsequent abrogation of that community by the introduction of property must have been a “sin of high presumption.”Footnote 64 To skirt the problem, Grotius had adopted a solution advanced by the sixteenth-century Dominican scholastics Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. They had argued that God gave the world to mankind in common, but left open the question of how exactly it might be shared.Footnote 65 This meant that appropriation was allowed under natural law, but that human beings had to agree with one another to effect it. All mankind, they claimed, had consented to the partition of the world after the Fall, and again after the Flood. This consensus took the role normally assigned to God or a lawgiving prince, and marked a historical transition from the realm of natural law to the law of nations, or jus gentium.Footnote 66 As Grotius saw, this intricate (and sophisticated) scholastic proposition had managed to shake off the association of property with sin. But Filmer was insistent. The simplicity of his own argument—that God gave the world directly and exclusively to Adam, and that all property derived (by donation) from this ultimate source—allowed him to paint the jus gentium as sophistry: if “the law of nature” was really “one and the same with the moral,” he asked, then why was a separate law needed to legitimate property?Footnote 67
Consent was a further absurdity. He mocked the idea that “all the men in the world at one instant of time should agree together in one mind to change the natural community of all things”; the dissent of one man alone would have brought the entire consensual edifice crashing down.Footnote 68 Non-unanimous consent fared little better. If “some” of our forefathers had consented to “property of goods and subjection to governors” (Filmer yoked together what Grotius had kept apart), they could just as easily have opted to return to “community and liberty” whenever it suited.Footnote 69 On this account of property and politics, there was nothing stopping men from doing the same thing now: it would be “lawful for every man, when he please, to dissolve all government, and destroy all property.”Footnote 70
Locke took the challenge seriously, and used the First Treatise to repair the damage Filmer had inflicted on Grotius.Footnote 71 The patches he applied were sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. In order to see how they fitted together, some comparison will therefore be necessary: first with Grotius himself, and second with the German jurist Samuel Pufendorf.Footnote 72 In 1678, Locke bought Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis (1673);Footnote 73 in June 1680, he purchased his magnum opus, De jure naturae et gentium (1672).Footnote 74 Acquisition is no guarantee of engagement, but, like Locke, Pufendorf was committed to reformulating the weaker parts of Grotian natural law; setting them alongside one another helps to clarify the revisions they made to Grotius's account of property. Most significantly, Pufendorf (like Grotius) introduced consent quickly as part of the temporal sequencing dictated by the sacred history of Creation. Locke, however, did not.
In De iure belli—the work torn into by Filmer—Grotius argued that “Almighty GOD, at the Creation, and again after the Deluge, gave to Mankind in general a Dominion over Things of this inferior World.”Footnote 75 Every man “converted what he would to his own Use, and consumed whatever was to be consumed; and such a Use of the Right common to all Men did at that Time supply the Place of Property, for no Man could justly take from another, what he had thus first taken to himself.”Footnote 76 This state of things could have continued indefinitely, had “Men persisted in their primitive Simplicity.”Footnote 77 Before long, however, they “applied themselves to various Arts,” the first of which “were those of Agriculture, and Feeding Cattle; they were exercised by the first Brothers, so that there was between them some Sort of Division of Goods.”Footnote 78 This division was repeated after the Flood, when nations (gentes) “went afterwards some one Way, and some another, and thus divided the Lands amongst them.”Footnote 79 The “origin of property” thus “resulted from a certain Compact and Agreement, either expressly, as by a Division; or else tacitly, as by Seizure.”Footnote 80 As part of his own narrative of the Creation, Grotius inserted consent at the very moment at which the common was first divided.
Pufendorf began to modify Grotius's account by crafting a distinction between positive and negative community. Understood “negatively,” common things were said to be “No Body's, rather negatively, than privatively, i.e. that they are not yet assigned to any particular person, not that they are incapable of being so assign'd.”Footnote 81 It was on this basis that God had granted the world to mankind: “antecedently to any Act of Agreement of Men, there was a Communion of all Things in the World; not such as we have before term'd positive, but a negative Communion.”Footnote 82 In this way, Pufendorf overcame the charge that the individuation of what was common must necessarily contradict God's providence. But whilst managing to reshape Grotius's conception of consent, Pufendorf found no way of doing away with it altogether: in both De jure naturae and De officio hominis, the position he accorded to consent in the Scriptural history of Creation toed the Grotian line.
“In the beginning,” Pufendorf began, all things required for human sustenance “are thought to have been made available by God to all men indifferently, so that they did not belong to one more than to another.”Footnote 83 The partition of the common was “afterwards adjusted, by the Disposal of Men, according as the Peace of human Society seem'd to require.”Footnote 84 Hence once population started to grow, and men started to cultivate “things which produce food and clothing,” they began to divide “things amongst themselves, and each was assigned his own proper portion.”Footnote 85 In this way, “property in things or ownership was introduced by the will of God, with consent among men right from the beginning and with at least a tacit agreement.”Footnote 86
Unlike Grotius, however, Pufendorf was keen to establish the incremental and contingent quality of this consent: “Men left this original negative Communion, and, by Covenant, settled distinct Properties, not at the same Time, and by one single Act, but by successive Degrees.”Footnote 87 The gloss was more than cosmetic: behind it lay Pufendorf's recognition that in light of the challenge presented by Hobbes, Grotius's concept of sociability needed reworking.Footnote 88 Grotius, Pufendorf saw, lacked an individualist moral epistemology underpinning his theory of sociability—a shortcoming that was impossible to defend in the wake of De cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651). Much of De jure naturae and De officio hominis was aimed at providing him with one, and Pufendorf's complication of Grotius's clean historical transition between jus naturale and jus gentium was part of the endeavour.Footnote 89 That consensual agreements about property were made by multiple early human communities over time—rather than all of humankind at once—demonstrated two things: that disparate human beings could enter into agreements with each other in response to changing circumstances and, consequently, that human association must—at least to some degree—revolve around the principle of utility. Covenants relating to property, Pufendorf claimed, therefore issued from the changing utility requirements and calculations of groups of human agents over time.Footnote 90 This adaptation of the temporal dimension of Grotius's sacred-historical story served effectively to counter the position of Hobbes, for whom time was rather internal and particular to the mind of any given human agent.Footnote 91 Without filtering his state of nature through a sacred-historical account of the first ages of humankind, time for Hobbes was a source only of strife, and another confirmation that the civitas alone could resolve the problems generated by the aggressive honour-seeking of human beings.Footnote 92 But whilst Pufendorf's adaptation of Grotian sociability helped him to avoid this particular conclusion, consent nevertheless remained central to his account of property: in Pufendorf as in Grotius, consent was a requirement of division, and was embedded in the history of God's grant of the world to mankind.
In the First Treatise, Locke began by indicting Filmer for wrongly asserting that God's grant of government to Adam (Genesis 1:28) took place at the moment of his creation, rather than after the Fall.Footnote 93 Taken in its proper historical setting, Locke argued, the grant conferred “no immediate power to Adam over men,” but only over “inferior creatures.”Footnote 94 It was nothing but the “Confirmation of the Original Community of all things amongst the Sons of Men.”Footnote 95 More importantly, the power God did confer was not “Private Dominion over the Inferior Creatures, but right in common with all Mankind.”Footnote 96 The post-diluvian grant of government given to Noah and his sons (Genesis 9:1–3) was similar insofar as it conferred no dominion over other men.Footnote 97 But in one crucial respect, it was different: “Property [was] not only given in clear words, but in a larger extent than it was to Adam.”Footnote 98 Genesis 1:29–30 showed that Adam “could not make bold with a Lark or a Rabbet to satisfie his hunger, and had the Herbs but in common with the Beasts.”Footnote 99 But Noah and his sons were given the “utmost Property Man is capable of, which is to have a right to destroy any thing by using it; Every moving thing that Liveth, saith God, shall be Meat for you, which was not allowed to Adam in his Charter.”Footnote 100 Locke noticed Filmer's attempt to brush the difference under the carpet: the Noachic grant, he had argued in the Observations, left Adam's title “to a property of all things” untouched, and offered Noah “but an enlargement only of [Adam's] commons.”Footnote 101 Locke responded by asking why Adam, putative lord of all the world, was not allowed to eat meat. (A vegetarian lord, he was implying, was no lord at all.)Footnote 102 Properly understood, the distinction between Adamic and Noachic property was analogous to “having Dominion, which a Shepherd may have, and having full Property as an Owner.”Footnote 103
The significance of this distinction between post-lapsarian and post-diluvian property, however, did not lie wholly in what it said about Filmer, nor in what it said about Noah and his progeny. It lay in the fact that a distinction had existed at all. Taken together, the two grants showed that in respect of God, “Mans Propriety in the 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.”Footnote 104 If combined, the Fall and the Flood laid bare the conditions of God's gift of the world to man. Neither post-lapsarian nor post-diluvian grant determined who was to have property in “distinct portions of the Creatures”: that was a matter for mankind to settle themselves, “in respect of one another.”Footnote 105 What the grants did do was dictate the kind of property mankind were permitted to have, or the uses to which they were permitted to put the earth. By forbidding Adam from eating meat, God had restricted his use of the world. By then lifting this restriction for Noah and his progeny, God altered the kind of property they were permitted to acquire. As the question of who owned what was not at stake after either the Fall or the Flood, Locke could conclude that in respect of God, “What other Property Man can have in the Creatures, but that Liberty of using them, is hard to be understood.”Footnote 106
This may be taken as an oblique formulation of Pufendorf's negative community, itself a conception of a world given to no one in particular, but free for the use of all. Nevertheless, Locke came close in the following three paragraphs to claiming that God gave the world to mankind collectively (or in Pufendorf's terminology, positively).Footnote 107 It was ludicrous to suppose, Locke went on, that by making Adam proprietor of all the world, God had denied mankind access to the materials they needed to survive; it was more “reasonable to think” that he “should rather himself give them all a Right, to make use of the Food and Rayment, and other Conveniencies of Life, the materials whereof he had so plentifully provided for them.”Footnote 108 Rather than giving “one of his children” property, he had given “his needy Brother a Right to the Surplusage of his Goods.”Footnote 109 This was because human beings had been put on earth for a purpose: to be fruitful and to multiply.Footnote 110 In order to align themselves with God's directive, they must all be able to subsist.Footnote 111
But if Locke saw God as having given humans a right to the means of self-preservation, he might have struggled to remove consent from his Creation story by the end of the chapter—a feat neither Grotius nor Pufendorf had managed.Footnote 112 He did so by proposing a world owned, as Filmer had suggested, by one man alone. Such a world would fail to show that “propriety in Land, even in this Case” bestowed sovereignty.Footnote 113 It would show only that “Compact might; since the authority of the Rich Proprietor, and the Subjection of the Needy Beggar began not from the Possession of the Lord, but the Consent of the poor Man, who preferr'd being his Subject to starving.”Footnote 114 There was no suggestion that consent was required for the proprietor to become a proprietor in the first place; consent intervened only at the foundational moment of the civitas.
A question remains. Locke's reading of Genesis suggested that, initially, mankind had no need of rights to the means of self-preservation, and no need to consent to the formation of property. But he still had to show how, without either of these aids, human beings could still comply with God's directive to be fruitful, to multiply, and to replenish the earth. He managed it only by adapting Grotius: Locke saw in him a way of using the spatial dimensions of the first ages of the world to extend the temporal duration of the original community of mankind.
III
Grotius's discussion of the Flood contained a double-sided analysis of space. After the post-diluvian division of the world by the gentes, there was enough space for common places to remain in the interstices between them. There remained among neighbours a “Community” of pastures, “because the Extent of Grounds was as yet so great in Proportion to the small Number of Men, that it was sufficient to answer the Occasions of many, without their incommoding one another.”Footnote 115 But it was precisely this abundance of space that served to ensure the original division of the “antient” community: “by Reason of the Distance of Places where each [of the gentes] was settled; and afterwards because of the Defect of Equity and Love,” there was “no Possibility then of using Things in common.”Footnote 116 On this point, Pufendorf concurred: “When Men are scattered into different Places, and fixed at a Distance from each other, ’twould be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass.”Footnote 117
Attention has recently been drawn to Grotius's deliberate placement of distance before vice—the “Defect of Equity and Love”—in his causal explanation of the ending of natural community.Footnote 118 For Grotius, the distances between gentes were a blight on history; they represented the departure of mankind from their original, communal, and naturally sociable condition.Footnote 119 But there remained a network of common places which, if used, could reconnect the gentes with one another. Traders, merchants and travellers thereby acquired a theological function: as they navigated the sea and passed through highways linking place to place, they restored the communication that division had destroyed and, in doing so, tugged humanity back toward its original (and sociable) condition.Footnote 120 Migrants served the same purpose, but so did settlers. As long as the occupants of the place being colonized had not instituted their own political power, or imperium, there was nothing preventing its settlement (as, for Grotius, there could be no imperium over place without imperium over people).Footnote 121 Like migration and commerce, colonial activity was a tonic for division, and pushed human beings back toward the community which God had originally designed for them.
Locke cut out the consensual division of the world by the gentes from his own discussion of the Deluge. But he held on to Grotius's spatial abundance. Filmer may have claimed, Locke argued, that Noah inherited the world at the expense of his progeny. But he had failed to show what harm would have befallen Noah if God had permitted his sons use of the earth, as “the whole was not only more then Noah himself, but infinitely more than they all could make use of, and the Possessions of one could not at all Prejudice, or as to any use streighten that of the other.”Footnote 122 By keeping abundance and dropping division, Locke inverted Grotius's argument. For Grotius, the vast space into which the gentes sprawled spelled the end of the original community: mankind became divided, and the distances between gentes made its common enjoyment impossible. But for Locke, space preserved community. If the world was “infinitely more” than Noah and his sons could use, there was no cause for “Prejudice,” and thus no occasion for men to agree on (or consent to) a division of land. Distance obstructed natural sociability for Grotius, but maintained it for Locke. This was why consent was absent from Locke's Creation story: at this point, it was simply unnecessary. Humans could take up their freedom to use the world without impinging on one another or contravening God's directive to increase and to multiply.
In “Of Property,” Locke buttressed his claim. But he did so on different territory. The First Treatise’s exploration of the Fall and the Deluge had taken place in the world of sacred history; the Second Treatise began from the “State all Men are naturally in” (the state of nature) before following them into property and, after that, into political society.Footnote 123 This world remained God's: its men were “the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property.”Footnote 124 But it also retained the dimensions of sacred time and space in which the First Treatise had operated; at the very least, it was parasitic upon them. The chapter therefore picked up where Locke's discussion of Noah left off, and overturned Pufendorf's claim that in the early ages of the world, natural resources had been scarce: “considering the plenty of natural Provisions there was a long time in the World, and the few spenders . . . there could be then little room for Quarrels or Contentions about Property.”Footnote 125 Hence, “at least where there [was] enough, and as good left in common for others,” men could appropriate without consent.Footnote 126 Conditions of “enough, and as good,” Locke continued, would persist because the small and relatively uniform size of the human stomach set a natural limit on how much one would labour, and how much property one could thereby acquire: “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.”Footnote 127
Without Locke's claim about space, however, his spoliation proviso might not have been able to overcome Grotius and Pufendorf. For both of them, conditions of “enough, and as good” may well have existed for a time, but cultivation soon necessitated a consensual division of goods. Grotius was clear that as soon as agriculture and pasturage were developed by the “first brothers” (Cain and Abel), the common was divided.Footnote 128 Pufendorf's marker was the cultivation of “things which produce food and clothing.”Footnote 129 For both, agriculture multiplied the possibilities for conflict by exacerbating natural inequalities between the capabilities, industriousness and inclinations of different human beings. Combined with their dispersal across the world, this made its common enjoyment impossible.
But Locke's spoliation limit could withstand the development of agriculture: “As much Land as a man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property.”Footnote 130 The reason for this, he argued, was spatial: “Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use.”Footnote 131 After all, “He that had as good left for his Improvement, as was already taken up, needed not complain.”Footnote 132 As long as there was enough space for individuals or families to disperse, they would be unlikely to clash over the same goods: there were few causes of conflict, and little reason for men to agree to dissolve the common. Moreover, mankind's diffusion could safely be assumed in the “first Ages of the World, when Men were more in danger to be lost, by wandering from their Company, in the then vast Wilderness of the Earth, than to be straitned for want of room to plant in.”Footnote 133 In the hands of Grotius and Pufendorf, distance brought forward the consensual division of the common. But in Locke's, distance delayed it.
In some places space soon became constrained enough to necessitate consensual partition. Locke had two (related) answers to the question of how this had happened, the first of which involved explicitly contesting the early moment at which Grotius had inserted consent into Scripture. Consent would have been superfluous, Locke argued, between Grotius's “first brothers,” Cain and Abel: “Cain might take as much Ground as he could till, and make it his own Land, and yet leave enough to Abel’s Sheep to feed on; a few Acres would serve for both their Possessions.”Footnote 134 Neither was any division of the world necessary among the earliest families and gentes. Right down to the time of Abraham (son of Terah, the tenth descendant of Noah), families “wandred with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their substance, freely up and down,” making it clear that “a great part of the Land lay in common; that the Inhabitants valued it not, nor claimed Property in any more than they made use of.”Footnote 135 Consent, Locke concluded, only emerged as the product of explicit competition over the same pastoral lands, itself a product of a natural increase in livestock: “when there was not room enough in the same place, for their Herds to feed together, they, by consent, as Abraham and Lot did, Gen. xiii. 5. separated and inlarged their pasture.”Footnote 136
Locke's second answer introduced money as an artificial accelerant of the constriction of space. There would be still enough land in the world to provide for double its current inhabitants, Locke claimed, “had not the Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a value on it, introduced (by Consent) larger Possessions, and a Right to them.”Footnote 137 The spoliation proviso had previously provided no outlet for natural covetousness, because “as a Man had a Right to all he could imploy his Labour upon, so he had no temptation to labour for more than he could make use of.”Footnote 138 But money unleashed it by allowing men to cheat the proviso: man could now appropriate more than he could consume and exchange the surplus for non-perishable specie, “the exceeding of the bounds of his just Property not lying in the largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of any thing uselesly in it.”Footnote 139 This triggered competition for space, necessitating consent. But this time, agreement could not be as simple as it had been for Abraham and Lot; the inequalities made possible by money raised the question of how juridically equal men could agree to an unequal division of goods.Footnote 140 Locke's answer was tacitly: “This partage of things, in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of Societie, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money.”Footnote 141
In places where competition for resources had become fierce and the common had already been consensually divided, communities tended to form in order to institute the civitas: “in some parts of the World, (where the Increase of People and Stock, with the Use of Money) had made Land scarce, and so of some Value, the several Communities settled the Bounds of their distinct Territories,” and then, “by Compact and Agreement settled the Property which Labour and Industry began.”Footnote 142 But elsewhere—and by this, Locke meant America—there were still “great Tracts of Ground to be found, which (the Inhabitants thereof not having joyned with the rest of Mankind, in the consent of the Use of their common Money) lie waste, and are more than the People, who dwell on it, do, or can make use of, and so still lie in common.”Footnote 143 Besides explaining how the individuation of the common could precede both its consensual division and the formation of the civitas, Locke's spatial argument could also serve to justify the non-consensual appropriation of American land; by this point, its potential to act as imperial apologetic had become clear. But apology was not necessarily the primary object of Locke's argument: it may just as plausibly have been motivated by his desire to rebuild Grotius in a way that met Filmer's challenge. At stake was the authority over the earliest written (and sacred) records of human history, which, following Patriarcha’s publication, had been thrust into Filmer's hands. In taking it back, Locke articulated a view of imperial acquisition which followed from his understanding of how God had bequeathed the world to human beings, and of what they had done to it since. In arriving at this understanding, he had outlined a social sphere which accommodated both the non-consensual acquisition of property and the tacitly consensual use of money. In time, he had situated it after God's original grant of the world to mankind but before the (consensual) foundation of cities, which answered Filmer on the question of order as well as consent: dissolution of the civitas would return its citizens not to natural community and liberty, but to the less appetizing prospect of property rendered insecure by a scarcity of goods and space.
The best recent work on liberalism and empire has not stopped at revealing the colonial contexts in which a purportedly universal idiom was formulated and expressed: it has taken the further step of exploring the character of the connection, and how it changes across time and space.Footnote 144 But in Locke's case, the revelation of his imperial complicity remains the terminus of the story,Footnote 145 and has been presented as a gleaming example of what an internationalized—or globalized—intellectual history can do.Footnote 146 This article has sought to step beyond Locke's complicity by asking whether it might not be distortive to see Carolina as the only (or even the overriding) determinant of his view of property.Footnote 147 In the early modern historiographical culture in which Locke operated, the past continued to consist primarily of the textual records of human actions.Footnote 148 The Old Testament continued to be the earliest of such records, so it mattered to Locke that Filmer had brandished it as the source of his politics. Accepting this as one of the contexts in which Locke articulated his own account of property does not eliminate the context of imperial acquisition; the Two Treatises was formed in both. What it does do is raise the possibility that, for Locke, justifying the expropriation of American land was a second-order priority. It also suggests that global contexts need to be related to intellectual contexts, rather than simply extruding them.
