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THE POLITICAL NEEDS OF A TOOLMAKING ANIMAL: MADISON, HAMILTON, LOCKE, AND THE QUESTION OF PROPERTY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2005
Abstract
When Benjamin Franklin suggested that man is by nature a tool-making animal, he summed up what was for his fellow Americans the common sense of the matter. It is not, then, surprising that, when Britain's colonists in North America broke with the mother country over the issue of an unrepresentative parliament's right to tax and govern the colonies, they defended their right to the property they owned on the ground that it was in a most thorough-going sense an extension of themselves: the fruits of their own labor. This understanding they learned from John Locke, who based the argument of his Two Treatises of Government on the unorthodox account of providence and of man's place within the natural world that Sir Francis Bacon had been the first to articulate. All of this helps explain why the framers of the American constitution included within it a clause giving sanction to property in ideas of practical use.
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Aristotle's definition is really this—that man is by nature the citizen of a city (Stadtbürger). This definition is just as characteristic for classical antiquity as is Franklin's definition for Yankee civilization (das Yankeetum)—that man is by nature a maker of instruments.1
See Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1969–71), 1:289 n. 13. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
—Karl Marx
I. Introduction
Karl Marx was arguably right in contending that Aristotle's claim that “man is by nature a political animal” was an accurate reflection of the spirit of classical civilization.2
Note Aristotle, Politica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1252b27–1253a39; see also Paul A. Rahe, “The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 2 (1984): 265–93; and Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 28–229.
Property rights are the appropriate starting point because within the political ruminations of those whom our French cousins persist in calling les Anglo-Saxons property has long loomed large. “Abstract liberty,” Edmund Burke observed, “like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.”3
Edmund Burke, Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775, in The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1901), 2:120.
Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened … that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise.4
Ibid., 120–21.
In England, as Burke claims, it was indeed otherwise, and it was so as well in England's colonies in North America. This, of course, was the point that Burke was attempting to bring home to his fellow members when he spoke these words on the floor of Parliament in March 1775, in a vain attempt to persuade his colleagues to seek a reconciliation with the American colonists whom they seemed so intent on driving into open rebellion.
Burke was, as always, perceptive in the extreme. The debates foreshadowing and those occasioned by the American Revolution fully confirm his claim. As early as 1764, for example, in what appears to have been the first highly influential pamphlet occasioned by the emerging colonial crisis, James Otis of Massachusetts anticipated the passage of the Stamp Act and the debate concerning the relationship between taxation and representation that it occasioned by sounding the very theme that Burke would subsequently identify as quintessentially English.5
Parliament's attempt to tax the American colonists stirred up fierce opposition and effective resistance: see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965–), 1:425–26.
Samuel Adams was of a similar opinion. In February 1768, in a letter written on behalf of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, he traced the principle of representation to the fact that it “is acknowledged to be an unalterable law in nature that a man should have the free use and sole disposal of the fruit of his honest industry, subject to no controul.”7
Samuel Adams, letter from the House of Representatives of Massachusetts to Henry Seymour Conway, February 13, 1768, in Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–8), 1:190–91.
Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, &c., February 23, 1775, in Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–79), 1:88.
When George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, he gave vent to much the same opinion, claiming that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”9
See Virginia (1776), in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 7:3813. For the various draft versions of this part of the declaration, see the Virginia Declaration of Rights, May 20–June 12, 1776, in Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 1:274–91, esp. 277, 283, and 287.
See Massachusetts (1780), in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, 3:1889.
See Pennsylvania (1776, 1790), Vermont (1777, 1786, 1791), and New Hampshire (1784, 1792), in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, 5:3082–83, 3099; 6:3739–41, 3751–53, 3762–63; 4:2453–54, 2457, 2471–72, 2474–75.
See Maryland (1776), North Carolina (1776), and South Carolina (1790), in Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, 3:1688, 5:2788, 6:3264.
Language of a similar sort nearly made it into the United States Constitution. In 1789, when James Madison proposed a series of amendments to the recently ratified Constitution designed to placate all but the most irreconcilable of the Anti-Federalists, he at first included among the amendments a declaration, put forward by the ratifying conventions of Virginia and North Carolina and eventually supported by Rhode Island, to the effect that “government is instituted, and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”13
Cf. proposed amendments to the Constitution, June 8, 1789, in William T. Hutchinson, William M. E. Rachal, et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, vol. 12, ed. Robert A. Rutland et al. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977–), 196–211, esp. 200 and 203–4; with ratification by Rhode Island, May 29, 1790; Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 27, 1788; and North Carolina Ratifying Convention, August 1, 1788; in Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions, 2d ed. (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), 1:334, 3:657, 4:243. Note also James Madison, Notes for a Speech in Congress, June 8, 1789, in Rutland et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 12:194. The amendment proposed by the three states reads as follows: “There are certain natural rights of which men, when they form a social compact, cannot deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Edward Conrad Smith, ed., The Constitution of the United States, 11th ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), 49.
Consider Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911–37), 1:147, 302, 402–3, 421–23, 428, 440, 469–70, 533–34, 541–42; 2:201–8 (June 6, 18, 25–27, and 29; July 5–6; and August 7, 1787), in light of Bernard H. Siegan, “One People As to Commercial Objects,” in Ellen Frankel Paul and Howard Dickman, eds., Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 101–19. See also Marc F. Plattner, “American Democracy and the Acquisitive Spirit,” in Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra, eds., How Capitalistic Is the Constitution? (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1982), 1–21.
See Edward J. Erler, “The Great Fence to Liberty: The Right to Property in the American Founding,” in Paul and Dickman, eds., Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution, 43–63.
Prior to the framing of the Constitution, of course, there was the Declaration of Independence, drafted and signed in 1776. In it, Thomas Jefferson and the other members of the Continental Congress claimed on their compatriots' behalf that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” so that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”17
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:429.
It has on occasion been suggested that, in substituting “the pursuit of happiness” for property, Jefferson intended to deny that property's acquisition and possession are among man's inalienable rights.18
Cf. Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984), with Jean Yarbrough, “Jefferson and Property Rights,” in Paul and Dickman, eds., Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution, 65–83.
See The Revisal of the Laws, June 18, 1779, Bill no. 64, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital, in Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:492–507, quotation at 492.
See Jeffrey Barnouw, “The Pursuit of Happiness in Jefferson and Its Background in Bacon and Hobbes,” Interpretation 11, no. 2 (1983): 225–48; Barnouw errs solely in drawing an untenable distinction between Bacon and Hobbes, on the one hand, and Locke, on the other.
In fact, no one spoke with greater force on this matter than Jefferson himself. In his Second Inaugural Address (1805), he put great emphasis on the protection of “that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry, or that of his fathers.”21
Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896–99), 1:378–82, quotation at 382.
Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, April 8, 1816, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), 14:456–66, quotation at 466.
Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–5), 11:519–25, quotation at 522–23.
In much the same spirit, in his First Inaugural Address (1801), Jefferson had singled out as “the sum of good government” not just “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another,” but one which “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”24
Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, in Richardson, ed. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1:323.
II. The Toolmaking Animal
Those who thought most deeply about the matter took the argument one step further. On July 13, 1787, at the federal constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson intervened in a debate concerning representation, denying “that property was the sole or the primary object of [government and] Society” and urging that population be the basis for representation. In his judgment, “cultivation [and] improvement of the human mind was the most noble object” pursued by man. “With respect to this object,” he argued, “as well as to other personal rights, numbers were surely the natural [and] precise measure of Representation.”25
See Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 1:605 (July 13, 1787).
Four months later, on November 22, 1787, when James Madison first published in the New York press what would eventually become the most famous number of The Federalist, he unpacked the logic underpinning Wilson's remarks in the course of advancing what, at first, might have seemed to some of his readers a hypothesis both novel and strange. “The rights of property” Madison traced to “the diversity in the faculties of men,” and his defense of America's infant republican regime he grounded on the premise that “the first object of Government” is “the protection” of the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.”26
See Federalist No. 10 (J. Madison), in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 58.
Alexander Hamilton further expanded on this argument in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures that, in his capacity as Secretary of the Treasury, he presented to Congress on December 5, 1791. Therein, he justified a policy of selective economic intervention on the part of the new American government not only on the grounds that promoting manufactures would strengthen the fledgling United States economically, tie its various regions more closely together, and make it more nearly self-sufficient with regard to the resources necessary for its own defense, but also because this particular branch of human endeavor would furnish “greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions, which discriminate men from each other.”27
Alexander Hamilton, Report on the Subject of Manufactures, December 5, 1791, in Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 10:254. That Hamilton favored a measure of economic intervention did not distinguish him from his fellow founders. No one opposed the Constitution's patent clause at the federal convention; no one objected to it during the ratification debates. There were, of course, subsequent disputes concerning Hamilton's program as Secretary of the Treasury, but these turned on the propriety of the particular proposals he advanced and on their constitutionality. At the state level, government intervention was much less controversial, and Madison, as president, proposed a constitutional amendment sanctioning a program of internal improvements on the part of the federal government. See Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 573–747.
that minds of the strongest and most active powers for their proper objects fall below mediocrity and labour without effect, if confined to uncongenial pursuits. And it is thence to be inferred that the results of human exertion may be immensely increased by diversifying its objects. When all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community, each individual can find his proper element, and can call into activity the whole vigour of his nature. And the community is benefited by the services of its respective members, in the manner, in which each can serve it with most effect.28
Hamilton, Report on the Subject of Manufactures, in Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 10:255.
In Hamilton's opinion, it was one of the responsibilities of government to “cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise.” “Even things in themselves not positively advantageous,” he contended, “sometimes become so, by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.”29
Ibid., 256.
What Hamilton, Madison, and Wilson had in common was an adherence to the opinion that James Boswell attributed to Benjamin Franklin one fine evening when, in the presence of Samuel Johnson, Franklin advanced the notion that man is by nature “a tool-making animal.”30
James Boswell, journal entry, April 7, 1778, in George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Boswell's Life of Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 3:245.
See Marx, Das Kapital, 1:150, 289 n. 13.
For Locke's acknowledgment of his debt to Bacon, see John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 1, which I cite from The Works of John Locke (London: Thomas Tegg, 1823), 3:203–89. See also John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), bk. 4, chap. 12, sec. 12.
III. Lógos and Téchne
To get a sense of what Bacon was up to, one need only attend to the manner in which he transformed familiar rhetorical tropes. Bacon was an unabashed admirer of the author of The Prince (1513). “We are much beholden,” he wrote, “to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.” With this statement, Bacon endorsed the Florentine's repudiation of the classical and Christian understanding of virtue and his substitution of a view that defined human excellence strictly in terms of its contribution to “security and well-being.”33
Cf. Sir Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 9, in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (London: Longman, 1857–74), 3:430, and Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, bk. 7, chap. 2, ibid., 1:729 (translated at 5:17), with Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe, chap. 15, in Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1971), 280.
Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, bk. 1, chap. 10, in Martelli, ed., Tutte le opere, 91–93. Cf. Aristotle, Politica, 1253a29–39.
See Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 129, in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, 1:221–23 (translated at 4:113–15). See also Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 1, chap. 7, sec. 1, and Bacon, De interpretatione naturae, proemium, ibid., 3:301–2, and 518.
This was, to say the least, a highly controversial opinion. In the first half of the seventeenth century, as the English antiquarian and writer John Aubrey soon thereafter remarked,
'Twas held a strange presumption for a Man to attempt an Innovation in Learnings; and not to be good Manners, to be more knowing than his Neighbours and Forefathers; even to attempt an improvement in Husbandry (though it succeeded with profit) was look'd upon with an ill Eie. Their Neighbours did scorne to follow it, though not to doe it, was to their own Detriment.36
Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey's Brief Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 27–28.
More to the point, Aubrey added, “ 'Twas held a Sin to make a Scrutinie into the Waies of Nature,” for those who were taught that it was “a profound part of Religion to glorify God in his Workes” were inclined to think also that an attempt to conquer nature had to be predicated on doubts as to the bounty of Providence, on ingratitude for God's benevolence, and on an impious pride in the capacities left to fallen man.37
Ibid., 28.
Thus it was that Bacon found it necessary to turn the Book of Genesis on its head, arguing that it was an appropriate and even a righteous task for the practitioners of the “arts and sciences” to pursue progress in the arts and improvements in the sciences for the purpose of conferring on human beings once again that “dominion over creation” that they had supposedly lost as a consequence of the Fall. Lest the titanic ambition underpinning so formidable a project be judged a grave sin, Bacon looked to God's judgment in search of religious sanction for science's liberation of mankind from the supposed consequences of that very same judgment of God. “[C]reation was not by the curse made altogether and for ever a rebel,” Bacon insisted, “but in virtue of that charter ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ it is now by various labors … at length and in some measure subdued … to the uses of human life.”38
Cf. Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, bk. 4, chap. 3, and Bacon Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, chap. 11, sec. 3, in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, 1:608–9 (translated at 4:400–401), 3:381, with Gen. 1:28–30, 3:17–19, 9:1–3, and Ps. 115:16. See also Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 2, aphorism 52, and “Valerius Terminus,” chap. 1, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 1:365 (translated at 4:247–48) and 3:222–23, respectively; then, cf. Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 1, chap. 6, sec. 8 (ibid., 3:297) with Gen. 4:17–24 and 11:6; and see Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, bk. 6, chap. 1, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 1:653 (translated at 4:440–41).
For the earlier interpretations of the critical passage, see Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
To succeed in his quest—and succeed in time he did—Bacon had to discredit the view, universal among the classical philosophers, that contemplation is “the last or furthest end of knowledge,” and he had to persuade future students of natural philosophy that learning is “a rich storehouse” not only “for the glory of the Creator” but also “for the relief of man's estate.” Above all else, he had to convince them that improving the human condition “is that which will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action may be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been.”40
See Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 1, chap. 5, sec. 11, in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, 3:294–95. See also Of the Advancement of Learning, bk. 2, chap. 20, sec. 1 through bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 11 (ibid., 3:417–32).
More than any other figure, Bacon was responsible for the subordination of theory to practice, which dictated applying reason (lógos) to the mechanical and industrial arts (téchnaı) and thereby gave birth to what we know as modern technology.41
For the close connection between Baconian science and the mechanical arts, see Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorisms 98–99, 110, 117, 129, and Bacon, Cogitata et visa de interpretatione naturae, ibid., 1:202–3, 208–9, 212–13, 221–23 (translated at 4:94–95, 100–101, 104–5, 113–15), and 3:612–17.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: J. Martyn, 1667), 397.
Two centuries later, when Lord Macaulay found an opportunity to express his judgment of Bacon's accomplishment, he remarked that “it was not by furnishing philosophers with rules for performing the inductive process well, but by furnishing them with a motive for performing it well, that he conferred so vast a benefit on society.” As a consequence of this achievement, Macaulay added, the author of The Advancement of Learning should be regarded as one of the “few imperial spirits” to exercise “the rare prerogative” of conferring on “the human mind a direction which it shall retain for ages.”43
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Lord Bacon,” in Macaulay, Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1860), 3:336–495, esp. 458–59, 463–64, and 480.
It is no wonder, then, that Thomas Jefferson came to regard Bacon, along with Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, as “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception,” men distinguished for having “laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.”44
See Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Trumbull, February 15, 1788, in Boyd, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 14:561. See also Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, January 16, 1811, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892–99), 9:294–99. In the letter to Rush, Jefferson recalls a conversation with Alexander Hamilton and John Adams in which he referred to “Bacon, Newton, and Locke” as “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.” In this connection, see Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1990). Cf. the praise bestowed on Bacon by “Poor Richard” in 1749, in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–), 3:339, with that subsequently accorded him by John Adams in a letter to Jonathan Sewall in February 1760, in Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–), 1:41–45, at 42–43. When Hamilton, after his retirement from office, expressed an interest in conducting “a full investigation of the history and science of civil government, and the practical results of the various modifications of it upon the freedom and happiness of mankind,” he stipulated that he wanted “to have the subject treated in reference to past experience, and upon the principles of Lord Bacon's inductive philosophy.” See James Kent, letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, December 10, 1832, in William Kent, ed., Memoirs and Letters of James Kent (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1898), 281–331, quotation at 327–28.
See James Madison, “Spirit of Governments,” for The National Gazette, February 18, 1792, in Rutland, et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 14:233–34.
IV. Property
In his own lifetime and for a long time thereafter, as Madison's testimony suggests, Locke was best known as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).46
Cf. John Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century,” in John W. Yolton, ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives: A Collection of New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 45–80, who makes the point but overstates the case, with Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), who gives a more balanced account.
John Locke to Richard King, August 25, 1703, in Esmond S. de Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89), 8:56–59, esp. 58.
See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, 2d ed., ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), Second Treatise, chaps. 4–5, which constitute the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the thirty contained in the work as a whole. Chapter 5, “Of Property,” in the Second Treatise thus stands as the centerpiece of the work. In citing the Two Treatises of Government, I have used this Laslett edition, adopting the corrections suggested by Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 229–30 n. 324, and 253–54 n. 187.
To understand Locke's intention, one must attend to his rhetoric and strive to catch his drift.49
For a defense of this approach, see Paul A. Rahe, “John Locke's Philosophical Partisanship,” The Political Science Reviewer 20 (1991): 1–43. For a more elaborate discussion, see Michael P. Zuckert, Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 25–126.
See Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 9, sec. 127.
Ibid., chap. 5, sec. 28.
Ibid., sec. 29.
Ibid.
Ibid., sec. 25.
Ibid., sec. 26.
Ibid.
Ibid., sec. 31.
Cf. ibid. with 1 Tim. 6:1–18.
But in the course of Locke's argument, this reassuring depiction reveals itself as a mirage, and God presents himself under another aspect as a figure not unlike the absolute monarch whom Locke condemns in his First Treatise, a figure “likelier by want and the dependance of a scanty Fortune, to tye them to hard Service, than by liberal Allowance of the Conveniencies of Life, to promote the great Design … Increase and Multiply.”59
Consider Two Treatises of Government, First Treatise, chap. 4, sec. 41, in light of a later passage in chap. 5, secs. 45–46. It may not be fortuitous that Locke begins the First Treatise with the word “Slavery” and ends it with “Adam” and that the central chapters of his tract as a whole deal with slavery and property: see First Treatise, chap. 1, sec. 1; chap. 11, sec. 169; and Second Treatise, chaps. 4–5. The First Treatise deserves more attention than it has been accorded: see, for a start, Zuckert, Launching Liberalism, 129–46; and Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 131–275.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:1–18 and Luke 12:15–34 with Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 32 and 35.
Thus, in spite of all that God has given man richly to enjoy, man's neediness turns out to be his defining quality. That which is on offer from “un-assisted Nature” is “of so little value, without labour” that Locke judges it “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.” Then, without a pause, he corrects himself, saying, “Nay, if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several Expenses 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.” By the time Locke has once again reviewed his estimates, not one thousandth of the value of the useful things we draw from cultivating the earth is credited to nature and nature's God, for “Nature and the Earth furnished only the almost worthless Materials.”61
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 36–37 and 40–45.
Cf. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum libri quinque, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 3.20.67; Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De beneficiis (Pisa: Giardini, 1982), 7.12.3–6; Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, ed. P. C. Molhuysen (Lugduni Batavorum: A. W. Sijthoff, 1919), II.ii.2; and John Locke, Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, ed. and trans. Robert Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), question XI, folio 112, ln. 7, through folio 113, ln. 11; and consider Lev. 3:16–17 and 17:10–14 in light of Lev. 25:23 and Num. 11.
By the time he drafted his Two Treatises of Government—during the crisis, in the period stretching from 1679 to 1683, occasioned by the attempt to exclude the Catholic heir apparent, James, the duke of York, from succession to the English throne—Locke had been thinking along these lines for a while.63
The precise date of composition remains and is likely to remain in dispute. The arguments for dating Locke's completion of the original draft to the period immediately following the first publication of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha in 1680 were advanced by Peter Laslett in “The English Revolution and Locke's Two Treatises of Government,” Cambridge Historical Journal 12, no. 1 (1956): 40–55, and then further developed in Laslett's introduction to Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 45–66. The arguments were further refined and given a new twist by Richard Ashcraft, in Ashcraft, “Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory,” Political Theory 8, no. 4 (1980): 429–86, and Richard Ashcraft, Locke's Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 286–97. Laslett was not persuaded by all of Ashcraft's refinements: see Peter Laslett, addendum to introduction, 1987, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, student edition, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 123–26. Since that time, other authors have entered the fray: see Mark Goldie, introduction to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Mark Goldie (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), xix–xxi; David Wootton, introduction to John Locke, Political Writings of John Locke, ed. David Wootton (New York: Mentor, 1993), 7–122, esp. 49–64; and John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205–91, esp. 222–65. In no way does this ongoing dispute affect my argument.
If we consider our selves in the condition we are in this world, we cannot but observe that we are in an estate the necessitys whereof call for a constant supply of meat drinke cloathing and defence from the weather and very often physick; and our conveniences demand yet a great deale more. To provide these things nature furnish[es] us only with the materials for the most part rough and unfitted to our uses[;] it requires labour art and thought to suit them to our occasions, and if the knowledg of men had not found out ways to shorten the labour and improve severall things which seeme not at first sight to be of any use to us we should spend all our time to make a scanty provision for a poore and miserable life… .
Had man kinde noe concernments but in this world [and] noe apprehension of any being after this life[,] they need trouble their heads with noe thing but the history of nature and an enquiry into the qualitys of the things in this mansion of the universe which hath fallen to their lott, and [with] being well skild in the knowledg of materiall causes and effects of things in their power[,] directing their thoughts to the improvement of such arts and inventions, engins and utinsils as might best contribute to their continuation in it with conveniency and delight.64
See Locke's journal, February 8, 1677, “Understanding,” in R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb, eds., An Early Draft of Locke's Essay Together with Excerpts from His Journals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 84–86.
In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke goes even further, intimating that a lack of provision is God's only provision for man, and concluding that human neediness justifies and even sanctifies a liberation of man's acquisitive instincts. The fact that “unassisted Nature” is for all intents and purposes “wast[e],” that “the benefit of it amounts to little more than nothing,” that what nature provides is “scarcely … worth any thing,” that the “Materials” furnished by “Nature and the Earth” are “almost worthless,” and that they are unable to meet man's innumerable “Wants” renders personal appropriation through human labor not only necessary but just. In order to endure, much less to increase and multiply, men must “subdue” the earth; and to accomplish this and secure for themselves both “Food and Rayment,” they must “sow” and “reap,” “toil” and “spin,” and place their “trust in” the “uncertain riches” that St. Paul had exhorted them never to trust.65
Cf. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 32 and 42–45, with 1 Tim. 6:1–18 and Luke 12:15–34.
In providing for himself, man reveals his true nature. Men have many failings, but they have an astonishing capacity to contrive their future preservation, and they are set off from the other animals by their ability to labor methodically toward that end. The one and only quality that is uniquely human, Locke suggests in his Second Treatise, is the fact that “every man has a Property in his own Person” that “no Body has any Right to but himself.”66
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 27.
Ibid., secs. 26–28, 32, 35–37, 41–42, and 44–45. See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., “On the Political Character of Property in Locke,” in Alkis Kontos, ed., Powers, Possessions, and Freedom: Essays in Honour of C. B. Macpherson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 23–38. In his notebooks, Locke wrote, “We ought to look on it as a mark of goodness in god that he has put us in this life under a necessity of labor.” See Locke, Commonplace Book, 1661 (p. 310, manuscript in the collection of Arthur J. Houghton, Jr.), quoted in John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 232 n. 3.
Locke argues that because the fruits of the soil rot, there was, early in human history, a natural limit to the land that a man in the state of nature could profitably and justly lay hold of for his own purposes. In consequence, there would always be “enough, and as good left” for others who might present themselves, and no one could have grounds to object to anyone's appropriation of the land.68
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 33, 36–37, and 46.
Ibid., secs. 36–37 and 46–50.
Technological progress is Locke's theme—chiefly in agriculture, but also in the industrial arts.70
For the relationship between Locke's thinking and that of the agricultural improvers inspired by Bacon, see Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15–114. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Locke's program of improvement was strictly agricultural: see J. E. Parsons, Jr., “Locke's Doctrine of Property,” in Parsons, Essays in Political Philosophy (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 127–54. See also Patrick Kelly, “All Things Richly to Enjoy”: Economics and Politics in Locke's Two Treatises of Government,” Political Studies 36, no. 2 (1988): 273–93.
the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compasse) ten times more, than those, which are yeilded by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing wast[e] in common. And therefor he, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniencys of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind. For his labour now supplys him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common. I have here rated the improved land very low in making its product but as ten to one, when it is much nearer an hundred to one. For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast[e] of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yeild the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?71
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 37.
Where trade is constrained by the absence of a medium of exchange and ingenuity is denied inspiration, men are fated to be poor. But where there is money and ingenuity receives its reward, though there will be an unequal distribution of the land and of the other means of production, and some men will be constrained to work for others, all concerned will come out ahead. Locke was aware of the relationship between supply and demand, and he understood why it was that the “King of a large fruitful Territory” in America “feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England.”72
Ibid., sec. 41. Consider ibid., secs. 33, 36–37, 40–43, and 46–50, in light of John Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of Lowering the Interest and Raising the Value of Money, in The Works of John Locke, 5:40; note Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 129, in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, 1:221–22 (translated at 4:114); and see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 234–51. C. B. Macpherson's otherwise admirable exposition of the fifth chapter of the Second Treatise is marred by his inability to distinguish labor at subsistence wages from slavery: cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 203–14, with Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 21, secs. 45–50; and see Locke, Two Treatises of Government, First Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 42–43.
An account that starts out as a hypothetical history of the origins of property is quickly transformed into a celebration of the “Invention and Arts” that in the course of the ages have so much “improved the conveniencies of Life.” Locke repeatedly contends that the transformation that labor works on objects and even land gives to them virtually all of the value that they in the end possess: “Whatever Bread is worth more than Acorns, Wine than Water, and Cloth or Silk than Leaves, Skins, or Moss, that is wholly owing to labour and industry.” It would be almost beyond human capacity, he suggests, to list everything that labor contributes toward the production of a single loaf of bread: “For 'tis not barely the Plough-man's Pains, the Reaper's and Thresher's Toil, and the Bakers Sweat, is to be counted into the Bread we eat; the Labour of those who broke the Oxen, who digged and wrought the Iron and Stones, who felled and framed the Timber imployed about the Plough, Mill, Oven, or any other Utensils, which are a vast Number, requisite to this Corn, from its being seed to be sown to its being made Bread, must all be charged on the account of Labour, and received as an effect of that.” To put together a simple “Catalogue of things, that Industry provided and made use of, about every Loaf of Bread” would be “almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.”73
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 40–44. Cf. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, chap. 1, sec. 11, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
The focus of Locke's entire argument is his claim that “God gave the World … to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsom and Contentious.”74
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 34.
Ibid., First Treatise, chap. 4, sec. 30, and chap. 6, sec. 53. Cf. ibid., Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 34, 37, 40, and 42–43, with First Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 53, and Second Treatise, chap. 2, sec. 6, and chap. 6, sec. 56. See also Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 1, sec. 1, and bk. 4, chap. 17, sec. 1.
V. A Society for Toolmaking Animals
“In the beginning,” Locke observes, “all the World was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known.”76
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 49.
Ibid. Consider sec. 49 in light of secs. 36, 41, 43, 46, and 48 in the same chapter, as well as chap. 6, sec. 65, and chap. 8, secs. 106–8. For the travel literature in Locke's library dealing with the New World, see William G. Batz, “The Historical Anthropology of John Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 4 (1974): 663–70.
In the First Treatise, when Locke takes note of “the busie mind of Man” and criticizes “the Practices which are in use and credit amongst Men,” he proclaims that “the Woods and Forests, where the irrational untaught Inhabitants keep right by following Nature, are fitter to give us Rules, than Cities and Palaces, where those that call themselves Civil and Rational, go out of their way, by the Authority of Example.”78
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, First Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 58.
Cf. ibid., Second Treatise, chap. 8, sec. 111, with Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson (Leipzig: Teubner, 1982), 1.131.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 8, sec. 110.
When closely reexamined, however, “the first ages of the World” turn out not to have been virtuous at all—unless one thinks virtue consistent with a mere dearth of temptation. If there was then “little room for Quarrels or Contentions about Property,” it was simply because “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.”81
Ibid., chap. 5, secs. 31 and 36.
Ibid., chap. 6, sec. 75.
Ibid., chap. 8, sec. 107.
Ibid., chap. 5, sec. 37, where I see no reason to accept Laslett's emendation.
This liberation of the passions at the same time inspired the “Ambition and Luxury” that “taught Princes to have distinct and separate Interests from their People.”85
Ibid., chap. 8, sec. 111.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), sec. 110.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, First Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 58.
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sec. 110.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, First Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 58.
Consider Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 37, and Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sec. 105, in conjunction with ibid., secs. 103–4 and 110.
Note Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 7, secs. 79–80, and cf. ibid., First Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 58, with ibid., Second Treatise, chap. 3, sec. 26; then see Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, secs. 103–5 and 110. Note the central example in Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 7, sec. 79.
Locke was impressed by the “busie Humour” evidenced by children, and in Some Thoughts Concerning Education he takes note of the inability of adults to remain “perfectly idle.”92
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, secs. 129, 152, and 207.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 4, sec. 15.
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, secs. 72, 74, 167, and 207.
Ibid., secs. 72–76, 128–29, 148–55, 167, and 206–9.
Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 16.
In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke attempts to come to grips with this fact by identifying “Foresight and Desire” as man's “two great Springs of Action.” Where “there is no Desire,” he observes, “there will be no Industry.”97
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sec. 126. See ibid., secs. 46 and 51.
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 20, sec. 6.
Consider Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sec. 122, in conjunction with Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 51; Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 6; and John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Toleration,” in Scritti editi e inediti sulla toleranza, ed. Carlo Augusto Viano (Turin: Taylor, 1961), 98. See also Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 48–49.
From this latter perspective, human beings would appear closely to resemble “un-assisted Nature” itself. The intelligence and the character that they possess at birth is “of so little value, without labour,” Locke tells us in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, that it would be “a very modest Computation to say” that “of all the Men we meet with, Nine Parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education.”100
Cf. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sec. 1, with Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 37, 40, 42–43, and 45. See also Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 38.
Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 6. See also ibid., secs. 2–3.
Ibid., sec. 6.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 8, sec. 101. Consider Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 16, secs. 6–8; and bk. 4, chap. 12, sec. 11; and Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, secs. 37 and 41; in light of secs. 43, 46, and 48–49 (in the same chapter); chap. 6, sec. 65; chap. 7, sec. 92; and chap. 8, secs. 102, 105, and 108. The fact that thinking is a species of making or construction and that it is therefore painful and laborious is yet another indication of nature's niggardliness: see Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 1, sec. 1; chap. 2, secs. 8–10; chap. 4, secs. 15–16 and 22; bk. 2, chap. 13, sec. 27; bk. 3, chap. 6, sec. 30; and bk. 4, chap. 2, sec. 4; chap. 3, sec. 6; chap. 12, secs. 7–9; and chap. 20, sec. 6; and Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, secs. 4, 7, 16–17, 20, 23–25, 28, 30, 37–39, and 45. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 56, with Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 3, chap. 1, sec. 1, through chap. 2, sec. 8, esp. chap. 1, sec. 5.
Almost everything that Locke asserts regarding childhood and the authority of parents applies in similar fashion to early man. “We are born Free,” he writes in the Two Treatises, but only “as we are born Rational; not that we have actually the Exercise of either.”104
See Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 6, sec. 61, which should be read in light of secs. 55 and 59.
Ibid., secs. 59–60 and 63.
Ibid., secs. 74–76. See ibid., chap. 8, secs. 105–11, esp. 107.
In Locke's opinion, this “Frame of Government” was both “obvious and simple,” and it was quite well “suited to their present State and Condition,”107
Ibid., chap. 8, secs. 105–11, esp. 107.
Consider ibid., chap. 5, sec. 51 in light of ibid., chap. 6, sec. 55; then see Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 2, secs. 5–27.
Initially, the invention of money gave birth to inequality, and this stirred up disputes and gave rise to conflicts. As men came to require an impartial umpire for the settling of their quarrels, the loose, patriarchal dominion of tribal chieftains and holy men gave way to the de facto rule of absolute monarchs. Adhering closely to his rhetorical purpose, Locke asserts that man's circumstances under absolute monarchy are far worse than they ever were when he was in his natural state. At the same time, however, Locke enables us to discern that human beings are, overall, less wretched and needy under arbitrary government than when left entirely ungoverned. Absolute monarchy is a halfway house between man's original condition and what Locke has in mind when he speaks of civil society. Because an absolute monarch has an interest in the peace and in the well-being of his kingdom, often enough he will be inclined to act as an impartial judge when arbitrating the disputes of his subjects. To this degree, his subjects will have escaped the ill condition into which mankind was at first born. But those whom the monarch governs have no comparable umpire to whom to appeal when their dispute is with him; and in this undoubtedly important respect, they remain “perfectly,” as Locke puts it, in the state of nature. It is only natural that a ruler who is unchecked will take advantage of the power he wields when the interests at stake are his own. To this, one can add that rulers are prey to flattery—especially to the flattery of crafty, greedy, and ambitious priests—and they are for this reason exceedingly vulnerable to “Ambition, Revenge, Covetousness,” and many another “irregular Passion.”109
Consider Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 7, secs. 87–94; chap. 8, secs. 105–12; chap. 11, secs. 134–39; chap. 14, sec. 162; and chap. 18, sec. 199; in light of chap. 5, sec. 45. Note that, in reaching judgments and in enforcing them, patriarchs exercise “the executive power of the Law of Nature” and that alone: ibid., chap. 6, sec. 74. There is no sign that they are authorized and have the “Authority” to do so on behalf of anyone but themselves: ibid., chap. 7, sec. 89. In this connection, see Richard Ashcraft, “Locke's State of Nature: Historical Fact or Moral Fiction?” American Political Science Review 62, no. 3 (1968): 898–915, esp. 908–14, and Ashcraft, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 152–66.
In the end, then, under absolute monarchies, “the Industrious and Rational” are but rarely provided in full measure with the protection that they seek when they submit themselves and their property to government. In breaching its trust, such a polity forfeits all claim to loyalty: it not only can but it should be replaced. For, according to Locke, government arises from consent, and it cannot seriously be supposed that anyone would consent to his own destruction. No one who lived in the age of Charles II, James II, and Louis XIV, and no one who lived through the English Civil War (1642–51) or considered the similar struggles taking place on the European continent in the mid-seventeenth century could fail to discern that Locke had both kings and priests in mind when he denounced “the Fancy” and “Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”110
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 5, sec. 34.
The history of human association that Locke adumbrates in his Two Treatises reaches its denouement when he gives an account of the manner in which industriously rational men not only fabricate a species of political society that is genuinely civil but also doff the allegiance they once pledged to these putative viceroys of God and render man for the first time fully “Master of himself, and Proprietor of his own Person” by removing him and fencing him off, to the greatest extent that they can, “from the common state Nature placed” him in.111
Consider ibid., secs. 26–28 and 44, in light of sec. 34.
Consider Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 7, secs. 87 and 93, through chap. 8, sec. 112 (esp. chap. 7, sec. 94, and chap. 8, sec. 111); chap. 9, secs. 123–31; chap. 11, sec. 134, through chap. 12, sec. 148; chap. 14, sec. 162; chap. 15, secs. 171 and 173; in light of Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, sec. 6.
Locke's tract has two purposes, which correspond to the two parts of politics: first, and above all else, he desires to convince his readers that consent is the sole foundation of government and that safeguarding and encouraging industry is government's only legitimate aim; second, he aspires to reveal how men may confine the prerogative of princes and establish political institutions guaranteeing impartial judgment and rendering safe and secure the property each man holds in his life, his liberty, and his estates. Ultimately, it is the expectation that man can liberate himself from fatherly rule both human and divine that accounts for the revolutionary call to arms that Locke passes off as an “appeal to Heaven.”113
Consider Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 13, sec. 149; chap. 14, sec. 168; chap. 16, secs. 176, 192, and 196; chap. 18, secs. 204, 208–10; and chap. 19, secs. 220–43; in light of chap. 3, secs. 20–21. In making Jephtha's appeal to heaven his model (ibid., chap. 3, sec. 21; chap. 14, sec. 168; chap. 16, sec. 176; and chap. 19, sec. 241), Locke ignores the more pertinent example of self-restraint under tyrannical provocation evident in David's similarly worded appeal and lights upon what he knows (ibid., chap. 8, sec. 109) to have been an ordinary case of war: cf. Judg. 11:1–40 (esp. 27, 30–40) with 1 Sam. 24:6, 12, 15, 26:9–11, 23. Note John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mario Montuori (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 86–89. As Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 66, points out, Locke nowhere suggests that God will intervene to see that justice is done. See Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 16, sec. 176.
In keeping with this fact, except where politically salutary (Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chap. 4, sec. 23; chap. 11, sec. 135; chap. 13, sec. 149; chap. 14, sec. 168; and chap. 15, sec. 172), Locke silently abandons his initial claim (ibid., chap. 2, sec. 6) that man is God's “Property” and asserts, instead, that he is “absolute Lord of his own Person” (ibid., chap. 5, secs. 27 and 44; and chap. 9, sec. 123). His inconsistent treatment of the question of suicide is explicable in similar terms: cf. ibid., chap. 2, sec. 6 with chap. 4, sec. 23; note Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 21, secs. 53 and 57; and see George Windstrup, “Locke on Suicide,” Political Theory 8, no. 2 (1980): 169–82.
Such would appear to be the aim of Locke's argument.115
It is possible, of course, that Locke badly missed his aim—but then one must question his sanity, for the contradictions in his argument are too glaring; the inconsistencies, too obvious. They cannot have escaped the notice of a man with his wits about him. It can hardly be an accident that the figure that emerges from the most exacting attempt ever mounted to make sense of Locke as a pious Christian in the Puritan mold is a “profoundly and exotically incoherent” thinker guilty of nearly every intellectual failing that one finds excoriated in his epistemological writings. Locke was “brought up in a Calvinist family”; and though the logic of his new way of ideas clearly pointed away from the doctrines he had imbibed in the nursery, we are told that he never managed to fully liberate himself from a posture of blind credulity. On this reading, his oft-revised Two Treatises of Government turns out to be an “incoherent and carelessly written work”; and, as a consequence of the tension between his faith and the dictates of his reason, both it and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding are “in so many ways patently inconsistent and absurd” that one can render the arguments there presented explicable only by supposing their author a victim of “intellectual akrasia”—profoundly insecure, ridden by anguish, and “very neurotic.” See Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, passim, esp. 13, 29, 80–82, 92–93, 164, 187–99, and 256–60. For further elaboration of the view that Locke was a victim of “intellectual akrasia,” see John Dunn, “Individuality and Clientage in the Formation of Locke's Social Imagination,” “‘Trust’ in the Politics of John Locke,” and “From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break between Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in John Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays, 1979–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 13–67. Note also Dunn, “Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke,” in John Dunn, Political Obligation in Its Historical Context: Essays in Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 29–52.
One cannot paper over the difficulties: Locke was either sane and devious, as his contemporaries tended to suppose—see Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Rahe, “John Locke's Philosophical Partisanship,” 1–43—or he was deeply troubled and intellectually at odds with himself, as Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke, contends. There really is no alternative. Cf., however, A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Whether any argument for natural rights and the natural equality of man can ultimately be sustained in the absence of the Christian God is, of course, another matter entirely: see Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For Locke, the natural-rights argument—which is difficult, if not impossible, to square with the account of nature that he provides in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—may be entirely rhetorical, a public teaching crafted to suit his immediate ends. The same concerns may explain Locke's undoubted interest in Socinian argumentation: see Marshall, John Locke, passim, esp. 327–451.
VI. Conclusion
As should by now be clear, when James Wilson declared that the “primary object of [government and] Society” is the “cultivation [and] improvement of the human mind,” when James Madison asserted that “the first object of Government” is “the protection” of the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property,” and when Alexander Hamilton argued for selective economic intervention on the part of the new American government in such a way as to furnish “greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions, which discriminate men from each other,” they were tracing the logic of the argument that Locke presented in his Two Treatises of Government. That they were not alone among their compatriots in thinking that there was more to the protection of property rights than a prudential provision for self-preservation and commodious living is evident from the fact that those in attendance at the federal convention in Philadelphia voted unanimously and without adverse comment to adopt the suggestion advanced by Madison and South Carolina delegate Charles Pinckney that the new federal Constitution provide for the establishment of the world's first permanently organized patent office—an institution designed for the protection of the rights of inventors and for the encouragement of their activity.118
See Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, 2:324–26, 505–6 (August 18 and September 5, 1787). Originally, Madison argued that the government should have the power “to encourage by premiums [and] provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries”; Pinckney explicitly called for the government to have the power “to grant patents for useful inventions.” See George W. Evans, “The Birth and Growth of the Patent Office,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 22 (1919): 105–24. Madison revealed an interest in patent law well before the convention. See Bill for Granting James Rumsey a Patent for Ship Construction, November 11, 1784, in Hutchinson, Rachal, et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 8:131–33. See also Irving Brant, James Madison (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941–61), 2:370. Because the patent clause was uncontroversial, the Constitution's most eloquent defenders and exponents deemed it unnecessary to speak of it at length, but they did manage to hint at its importance by giving its discussion central place: see Federalist No. 43 (J. Madison), in Cooke, ed., The Federalist, 288.
The patent was, of course, nothing new. The practice of granting a temporary monopoly to those who had imported or invented new products and techniques of use had a long history in England and had been promoted in the sixteenth century by Queen Elizabeth I's chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his young nephew Francis Bacon. This was, however, a matter of royal indulgence and had no standing per se as a legal right.119
For a comprehensive discussion of the origins of the patent, see Harold G. Fox, Monopolies and Patents: A Study of the History and Future of the Patent Monopoly (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1947), 3–189. See also William Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), 3–46; and Arthur Allan Gomme, Patents of Invention: Origin and Growth of the Patent System in Britain (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1946), 5–12. See also E. Wyndham Hulme, “The History of the Patent System under the Prerogative and at Common Law,” Law Quarterly Review, vol. 12, no. 46 (1896): 141–54, and vol. 16, no. 61 (1900): 44–56.
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, when Major Pierre-Charles L'Enfant developed his grand plan for the city of Washington in the District of Columbia, he deliberately left space midway between the White House and the Capitol for a national church. In the Observations Explanatory of the Plan that accompanied his plans, he proposed that “this Church” be “assigned to the special use of no particular Sect or denomination” and that it be “equally open to all.” L'Enfant envisaged this great ecclesiastical edifice as a temple suited to rituals “such as public prayer, thanksgivings, funeral orations,” and the like; and it was to serve also as “a proper shelter for such monuments as were voted by the late Continental Congress for those heroes who fell in the cause of liberty, and for such others as may hereafter be decreed by the voice of a grateful Nation.”120
See Elizabeth S. Kite, L'Enfant and Washington (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929), 61–66, where the plan and L'Enfant's observations are reprinted. See also Report of June 22, 1791, in ibid., 54–55. L'Enfant's purpose in developing his plan was to reinforce or at least imitate the separation of powers by setting the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court at a sufficient distance from each other that three separate communities would grow up within the District of Columbia. The nondenominational church was to be the central point at which the three converged. See James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 1–10.
The church planned by L'Enfant was never built. In its place, a monument was constructed with a tellingly different purpose. In 1836, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Congress approved plans submitted by William Parker Elliot for an ambitious and impressive Greek revival structure—a neoclassical “temple of the useful arts”—to house the Patent Office and to provide showrooms for the display of the models submitted by the nation's inventors.121
See Louise Hall, “New Threat to Washington Landmark: The Design of the Old Patent Office,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 15, no. 1 (1956): 27–30; and Jane B. Davies, “A. J. Davis' Projects for a Patent Office Building, 1832–1834,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 24, no. 3 (1965): 229–51. The phrase used to describe the structure was coined by Elliot's older brother Jonathan.
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