References for Theme: On Locke
- Arneil, Barbara
- "Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism" (1994)
(p.609) From its inception the natural right to property is defined in such a way as to exclude non-Europeans from being able to exercise it. In defending the English plantation from the skeptics in England, Locke creates a right of agrarian labor which is particularly English and Protestant. Unlike the Spanish conquistador or native American hunter, the Devonshire farmer described in the Second Treatise is the only legitimate proprietor and citizen. He is the "industrious and rational" being to whom, Locke claims, God gave the world. This English farmer, through the application of his reason and industry, becomes in turn the...
- "Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism" (1994)
- Cohen, G A; Cohen, Gerald Allan
- Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)
(p.34) One difference between a modern capitalist state and a slave state is that the natural right not to be subordinate in the manner of a slave is a civil right in modern capitalism. The law excludes formation of a set of persons who are legally obliged to work for other persons. That status being forbidden, everyone is entitled to work for no one. But the power matching this right is differentially enjoyed. Some can live without subordinating themselves, but most cannot. The latter face a structure generated by a history of market transactions in which, it is reasonable to say,...
- Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)
- Day, J P
- "Locke on Property" (1966)
(p.209) Consider Locke's wild Indian, picking apples in some inland vacant place of America. Even though he has done all the picking, his wife and children surely have a moral right to use, i.e. eat, some of them? I suggest that the cause of Locke's mistake here is his failure to distinguish between two different senses of work. He thinks, I believe, that the passage from (2) to (3) is scarcely an " inference " at all, but simply a move from every man has a right to own his work to every man has a right to own his work, which looks irreproachable if uninteresting. But it...
- "Locke on Property" (1966)
- Henry, John F
- "John Locke, Property Rights, and Economic Theory" (1999)
(p.617) During the period in which Locke wrote, wage labor, while certainly extant, had not yet crystallized as the dominant form of labor relationship we are now accustomed to in modem capitalist economies. Rather, various forms of labor existed, running the gamut from indentured servitude to independent craft production. Indeed, when Locke lists examples of labor [see Locke 1967, 316], his examples could all be associated with independent craft producers or representatives of various contract workers who still had some semblance of independence but were certainly not wage laborers during the time Locke wrote- plowman, baker, stonemason, carpenter, rope maker, and the like. Labor...
- "John Locke, Property Rights, and Economic Theory" (1999)
(p.620) For the Lockean argument to hold, individuals must have the right to establish themselves as independent proprietors: when the commons is privatized, the appropriation of land must not "prejudice" any individual, for there must be enough equally good land for others to appropriate as they so choose. That is, in neoclassical terms, one must have the right to exit not just one market and enter another (a right usually assigned to the "entrepreneur"), but to exit markets altogether-if, in the subjective appraisal of the individual (the utility calculation), that individual would be better served through independent production.
- "John Locke, Property Rights, and Economic Theory" (1999)
- Hull, Gordon
- "Clearing the Rubbish: Locke, the Waste Proviso, and the Moral Justification of Intellectual Property" (2009)
(p.68) In answering the objection that, if gathering confers a property right on that which is gathered, "one may engross as much as he will," Locke claims the following: The same law of nature that does by this means give us property does also bound that property, too. "God has given us all things richly" ( 1 Timothy 6: 1 7), is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it to us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much may he by...
- "Clearing the Rubbish: Locke, the Waste Proviso, and the Moral Justification of Intellectual Property" (2009)
(p.69) Whether a property regime in land does, in fact, make better use of the resource is taken by Locke to be an empirical question with an overwhelmingly affirma- tive answer, as his repeated and increasingly extravagant comparisons to North American land use suggest. Indeed, this is a central feature of Locke's narrative: against those who claim that property rights regimes damage the commons, Locke claims that proprietized labor, in fact, gives back to the commons, and results in an increase to it; hence, "he who appropriates land to himself by his labor, does not lessen but increase the common stock...
- "Clearing the Rubbish: Locke, the Waste Proviso, and the Moral Justification of Intellectual Property" (2009)
- Hundert, E J
- "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History" (1972)
(p.14) By treating labor as a commodity, Locke established as legitimate the premise that is at the heart of liberal social thought. Viewing human action and personality as things owned and thus alienable, he subsumed them under the category of commodities whose movement results from market operations. Seen in this way Locke's elevation of work to the distinctly human sphere takes on a double meaning. While human creation (both as activity and product) is raised to a supramundane significance, its operations (both in the sense of what one is doing and what one has done) are fully removed from the private sphere and brought into the...
- "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History" (1972)
(p.5) Locke's understanding of poverty varied slightly from that of his contemporaries, and then only in its harshness. He felt that the proper relief of the poor, and thus the improvement of the health of the nation, "consists in finding work for them." The task of "restraining their debauchery" involved a concerted attempt to reform their habits. Aside from the then common nostrums for more efficient law enforcement and the closing of ale-houses, Locke's main proposal consisted of the establishment of more and better houses of correction, since he found present institutions inadequate, "too lax," and their training shipshod. Through hard labor, whipping, and torture, Locke insisted, the state-should...
- "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History" (1972)
(p.7) In the economic writings, Locke, like the majority of his contemporaries, was concerned with the role of the worker and only tangentially interested in the nature of work itself. The Second Treatise of Government, however, was the first modern piece of major significance which, whatever its other purposes, considered the relationship between man, his property, environment, and society in terms of the nature and value of human labor; and in his discussion of property relations Locke established the foundations for the modern conception of labor.
- "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History" (1972)
(p.8) Whether performed by the working class or the owners of property, by men working for wages or independent producers, labor, Locke insisted, was the distinctly creative activity of the race. When men work they do more than improve nature by increasing its value. Through the ac- tivity of work man molds dead matter into something uniquely set apart from the given natural order. In working, men inject the very essence of their personalities into the object worked upon. The fruit of such action is not merely a commodity whose economic value is in- creased by the labor embodied in it....
- "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History" (1972)
- Irvine, Robert P
- "Labor and Commerce in Locke and Early Eighteenth-Century English Georgic" (2009)
(p.964) The stated aim of chapter 5 of Locke's Second Treatise is to explain how a world given "to Mankind in common" could come to be divided up as the private property of individuals.4 Locke's initial assumption here is important for his ongoing refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's patriarchalism. If God gave the earth to Adam in particular, as his estate to divide and bequeath among his sons, then God gave the earth specifically to its patriarchs, from whom all kings are descended. Apologists for absolutist monarchy could use this to argue that the holding of private property was thus made possible by, and conditional on, the property-holder's...
- "Labor and Commerce in Locke and Early Eighteenth-Century English Georgic" (2009)
(p.971) [I]f "labor" is defined as that activity that fulfills God's purposes by making natural resources useful to humankind, then the work of the merchant too is "labor"; so is the work of the landowner, for that matter, insofar as he too is engaged in commerce. Thus the effect of understanding Locke's account of labor in terms of its fulfillment of a teleology of natural resources is to strip specifically manual labor of the unique, originating role in the production of value that the early paragraphs of chapter 5 appear to grant it. What differentiates manual labor from other areas of...
- "Labor and Commerce in Locke and Early Eighteenth-Century English Georgic" (2009)
- Kramer, Matthew H
- Marx, Karl
- Economic Works (1861-1863) (1988)
(p.89) Taking Locke's whole doctrine of LABOUR together with his doctrine of the origin of interest and rent—for he considers surplus value only in these specific forms—surplus value is nothing but alien labour, surplus labour, which land and capital—the conditions of labour—enable their owners to appropriate. And ownership of a greater quantity of conditions of labour than one person can himself put to use with his own labour is, according to Locke, a political invention which contradicts the law of nature on which private property, the right to private property, [XX-1292a] is founded.//For Hobbes too labour is the sole source of...
- Mossoff, Adam
- "Locke's labor lost" (2002)
(p.16) In producing these goods and creating an advanced industrial society, the industrious and rational are those people who fulfill their basic moral obligation: self-preservation and the preservation of mankind. They live in accord with the fundamental moral duty of natural law. 35 In this respect, Locke's "labor" is not recreation, it is not purposeless action, and, most important, it is never an action that destroys or wastes goods.
- "Locke's labor lost" (2002)
(p.160) Locke makes the moral connection between life and production even more explicit about midway through his chapter on property: "God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour.' Labor is the means by which each individual fulfills his fundamental moral obligation because it is "labor"-production-that creates the products necessary for him to live.
- "Locke's labor lost" (2002)
- "Saving Locke from Marx: The Labor Theory of Value in Intellectual Property Theory" (2012)
(p.3) In their assault on Locke’s labor theory of value, philosophers construe Locke’s concept of labor in purely physical terms and they construe his concept of value in purely economic terms, but these are not Locke’s concepts of labor or value. His concept of labor refers to production, which has intellectual as well asphysical characteristics, and his concept of value serves his moral ideal of human flourishing, which is a conception of the good that is more robust than merely physical status or economic wealth.
- "Saving Locke from Marx: The Labor Theory of Value in Intellectual Property Theory" (2012)
(p.50) The products of value-creating, productive labor comprise both intellectual and physical values—and thus they represent the dominion that follows from man’s nature as an “intellectual creature.” This is why Locke recognizes the moral validity of an author’s property right in controlling copies of books. In his full-throated defense of property rights in the Second Treatise, he identifies “Inventions and Arts,” as exemplars of his theory of how property arises from the value-creating, productive labor of the “Rational and Industrious.” His approval of what we now call intellectual property rights is no more tenuous than it is oblique. It is for...
- "Saving Locke from Marx: The Labor Theory of Value in Intellectual Property Theory" (2012)
(p.6) Without explaining why Locke is not Marx, one is unable to get past the widespread belief that Locke’s labor theory of value has been rightly relegated to the dustbin of the history of philosophy.
- "Saving Locke from Marx: The Labor Theory of Value in Intellectual Property Theory" (2012)
- Russell, Daniel
- "Locke on Land and Labor" (2004)
(p.311) Labor and materials both make necessary contributions to our resources, but their contributions are radically different in kind: labor is not one factor among the many that go into the production of some good, but the very special factor that directs, coordinates, and organizes all the other factors in order to meet goals that they cannot meet on their own. Locke's point is that some of bread's necessary conditions are quite different from others, since there is something special about actually making it. For this reason labor is not just "working" on something. Notice that in Locke's bread example the products...
- "Locke on Land and Labor" (2004)
(p.317) It is because so many others have labored, and appropriated through their labor, that so many people can have projects far beyond mere subsistence. Indeed, for Locke the need to leave sufficient goods available to others is the best news about labor.
- "Locke on Land and Labor" (2004)
(p.318) For Locke, labor is a directive principle. It is what enables us to meet our needs by giving the right kind of direction to materials that do not supply that direction for themselves. As such, the contribution of labor - of creativity and direction - to the resources we produce is unique, and different in kind from the contribution that materials make. The point is not allocations, rewards, or exoneration. The point is to find a way to live together. The demand for a directive principle is a reality of the world in which we must find a way to...
- "Locke on Land and Labor" (2004)
- Vaughn, Karen I
- "John Locke and the labor theory of value" (1978)
(p.313) Those who have interpreted Locke's labor theory of property as implying some kind of labor theory of value usually support their interpretation by citing Locke's many statements about the relative unimportance of land compared to labor in the production of valuable goods. Locke's basic premise is that nature by itself provides very little that is of value to mankind unless it is combined with labor.
- "John Locke and the labor theory of value" (1978)
(p.320) Although Locke certainly did not envision any consistent exploitation of poor wage earners by malevolent wage payers, Karl Marx nevertheless saw in Locke the beginnings of a theory of surplus value. To Marx, one didn't have to postulate the existence of evil employers in order for labor to be exploited; exploitation was inherent in the system which permitted unequal property ownership. [...] According to Marx, the source of exploitation in Locke's system is the unequal distribution of wealth that arose in the state of nature and was perpetuated in civil society.
- "John Locke and the labor theory of value" (1978)
(p.323) In a flash of tantalizing insight (which, unfortunately, he never elaborated upon), Marx epitomized Locke's philosophy as "the expression of the bourgeois concept of right as against feudal privilege", and claimed that it sewed as the "basis for all the ideas of the whole of subsequent English political economy"
- "John Locke and the labor theory of value" (1978)
How to contribute.
