John locke theory of private property
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Locke on Property: A Bibliographical Essay by Karen Vaughn
Source: This essay first appeared in the journal Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought , vol. III, no. 1, Spring 1980 published by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio. It is republished with thanks to the original copyright holders.
Karen Vaughn is an Austrian economist and political philosopher who has written on the work of John Locke and the history of Austrian economics in the United States.
Karen Vaughn, "John Locke's Theory of Property: Problems of Interpretation"
Table of Contents
The Problem: Locke, Liberalism, and Property
John Locke's major political analysis, The Two Treatises of Government (1690),1 has long been hailed as a seminal work in the history of political liberalism. In the Second Treatise especially, it is generally recognized, Locke argues the case for individu
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John Locke: The Justification of Private Property
In his first essay in a new series on John Locke, Smith explains some essential features of Locke’s case for private property.
George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American History for Cato Summer Seminars, and Executive Editor of Knowledge Products. Smith’s fourth and most recent book, The System of Liberty, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.
My last essay discussed John Locke’s theory of a negative commons. This was the moral status of natural resources prior to the emergence of private property, a situation in which every person had an equal right to use unowned land and other natural goods. I included this topic in my lengthy series on “Freethought and Freedom” because it was germane to understanding how natural-law philosophers during the seventeenth century moved from the traditional Christian doctrine of p
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Locke’s Political Philosophy
1. Natural lag and Natural Rights
Perhaps the most central concept in Locke’s political philosophy is his theory of natural lag and natural rights. The natural lag concept existed long before Locke as a way of expressing the idea that there were certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the particular place where they lived or the agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was between laws that were bygd nature, and thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and operated only in those places where the particular convention had been established. This distinction fryst vatten sometimes formulated as the difference between natural lag and positiv law.
Natural law fryst vatten also distinct from gudomlig law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally referred to those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other inspired writers. Natural law can be discovered by reason alone and