Locke's Labour and Community Property — Epoche B2
Not the Proviso: Where Locke Limits Property in the Common Good The wrong candidate Ask a well-taught undergraduate where John Locke limits private property in the interest of others and the answer comes back at once [1] : the proviso. Appropriation is legitimate, Locke writes in the Second Treatise , at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others (II, §27). Robert Nozick made this clause famous as "the Lockean proviso" in Anarchy [2] , State, and Utopia (1974), and it has since carried almost the whole weight of the claim that Locke's individualism has a social conscience. This essay argues that the clause cannot bear that weight, and that the constraint everyone is looking for is somewhere else in the text. Two claims follow. First, "enough, and as good" is not stated by Locke as a necessary condition on legitimate appropriation; it is stated as a fact about the circumstances in which appropriation first occurs, and it is used to show that appropriation harms no one. Second, the passage that does constrain property in the common good is in the First Treatise , where Locke says the needy have a right to the surplus of another's goods. Relocating the constraint is not a scholarly tidying operation. A proviso bites once, at the moment of acquisition, and lapses when the circumstances change; a right in the needy attaches to holdings continuously and cannot be extinguished by anything that happens to the conditions of acquisition. That difference decides whether Locke's theory survives his own argument about money, and a specialist can deny it. The problem Locke set himself Locke begins where his opponents leave him: with the earth given to mankind in common (II, §25). That premise creates a puzzle he must solve before any of his politics can proceed. If everything is held in common, then taking anything for one's exclusive use looks like taking from everyone, and would require everyone's consent. Locke observes that this consent could never be obtained, and that a rule requiring it would leave men to starve amid plenty. So there must be a way of acquiring private property that does not depend on the agreement of all. His solution is the one every reader remembers. Each person has a property in his own person, and therefore in the labour of his body; so when he removes something from the state nature left it in and mixes his labour with it, he joins to it something that is already his, and thereby makes it his own (II, §27). Property arises before government and independently of it. The state does not create property rights; it protects rights that already exist. What the famous clause is doing Now look at how the "enough, and as good" clause sits in the sentence. Locke's claim is that no one but the labourer can have a right to what his labour is joined to — at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others. The clause is introduced by "at least where", which is the grammar of a sufficient condition being stated modestly, not of a restriction being imposed. The use Locke makes of it a few sections later settles the matter. At II, §33 he says that appropriating a parcel of land by improving it was no prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the unprovided could use. The clause appears there as the premise of an argument that nobody is wronged. It is not a condition the appropriator must satisfy; it is Locke's answer to the objection that appropriation must wrong the rest. He is arguing that in the early conditions he describes, the objection has no purchase, because the world was empty and the taking cost nobody anything. This reading, defended in detail by Jeremy Waldron [3] , has a consequence that is often felt as a scandal. If the clause is not a necessary condition, then a Lockean appropriation in a full world is not thereby illegitimate, and the standard socially-minded reading of Locke loses its textual footing. I accept the consequence. The mistake is to think that Locke's theory therefore has no social constraint. It has one, and it is a stronger one. The passage that does the work The First Treatise is usually skipped, because its target — Robert Filmer's argument that political authority descends from Adam's dominion — is dead [4] . But Locke's refutation required him to say what property can and cannot do, and at §42 he says this: He has given his needy Brother a Right to the Surplusage of his Goods; so that it cannot justly be denied him, when his pressing Wants call for it. Three features of that sentence matter. It is a right , held by the person in need, not a virtue exercised by the person with the surplus; Locke's word is deliberate and the surrounding argument depends on it. It attaches to the surplus of goods, so it presupposes rather than denies private holdings. And it is stated as a matter of justice — it cannot justly be denied — which places it among enforceable claims rather than among the things a good man does. Locke needs the claim to be that strong because of the use he makes of it. Filmer's argument, as Locke reconstructs it, would let a man who controls the means of subsistence turn that control into authority over other men's wills. Locke blocks this by denying that property extends that far: a man cannot use his holdings to make another his subject, because the other has a claim on the surplus as of right. The passage is not a piece of moralising appended to the property theory. It is load-bearing in the argument against Filmer. Why the difference between the two constraints matters A proviso and a right in the needy do different work, and this is where the relocation earns its keep. A proviso qualifies acquisition: it says which takings are valid. Once a taking is valid, the proviso has nothing further to say, and if circumstances change so that the condition no longer holds, past acquisitions are not thereby undone. That is why proviso-based readings of Locke run