John Locke and Private Property

The fallout from Tyndale's Bible translation led to possibly the first time in history when commoners took center stage.  Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, and John Bunyan were all inheritors of this educated middle class of yeomen farmers, which was something in which Puritan theology reveled.  One of the main points of the Reformation included the concept of vocation, which honored the calling of every man to his labor, not just those who served in the church.

Another Puritan writer of the 17th century was the young John Locke.  Educated at Oxford as well, Locke didn't enjoy much of his studies there, especially his education in the classics of Greece and Rome.  Locke found the new philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, far more interesting.  He also enjoyed politics and wrote a treatise against absolute monarchy, forming the idea that government must be by the consent of the governed.  In his Two Treatises of Government he argued that everyone had the right to defend his "life, liberty, health, and possession," which is likely the source for Thomas Jefferson's line in the Declaration of Independence to state the human rights as "life, liberty, and happiness."  In fact, Jefferson says in his letters that "Bacon, Locke, and Newton...I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception."

Locke has also been credited with forming the first argument for private property.  Once again in his Two Treatises he reasons that only a king can possess land.  Therefore, since God created the earth and gave it to the king of the human race, Adam, the land is given to all his descendants by right.  In one way, this is merely applying the Puritan doctrine of vocation to the owning of property.  This property, Locke states, was given to man by God for him to enjoy.  Man does not have the right to spoil or destroy property that was given to him for enjoyment.

What, then, makes man entitled to a specific piece of property, as opposed to land held in the "common state of nature?"  Locke argues that labor is what makes private property.  If a man picks acorns off a tree in the forest, by what right does he eat them?  What makes them his acorns?  Locke states that his labor for the acorns constitutes ownership.  In the same way, Locke also insists that the Native Americans had private property.  When a man went hunting, what made the deer his own property to dispense with as he pleased?  Again, Locke answers, his labor.  Therefore, what nature has in common (land), can be owned by a particular individual through labor.  This argument was still used up through the U.S. Homestead Act, and even our current eminent domain laws in determining the ownership of property.