2 - John Locke’s Liberal Politics of Money

Summary

John Locke and Thomas Hobbes are mirror images of the seventeenth- century English natural rights tradition. Both started from a doctrine of individual natural rights and a comparable state of nature account, but they nonetheless concluded with very different political visions. For Hobbes, natural equality produced the need for a radically conventional politics; that is, only with the construction of an all-powerful, omnicompetent sovereign power is it possible to protect the individual's natural right to self-preservation. Locke believed that Hobbes’ theory of absolute sovereignty was a terrible misstep. The central difference between them related to property. Hobbes famously argued that in the chaotic state of nature, there is no right of property for ‘where there is no commonwealth, here is no propriety, all men having right to all things’, including, quite graphically, the right ‘even to one another's body’. For Locke, on the other hand, the constitutional requirement of limited government derived its normative imperative precisely from the primordial moral fact that every individual owns his or her own person. Thus, contra Hobbes, Locke insisted that by nature human beings do not have a right to each other's bodies. This conception of self-ownership provides the logic behind perhaps the two most characteristic Lockean teachings: namely, that the powers of the civil government derive from the natural power of individuals to execute the law of nature; and that the natural right of property derives from an individual's labour, the products of which ‘nobody has any right to but himself’.

Unsurprisingly, the political implications of Locke's propertycentric natural rights theory revolve around the notion of the purpose of civil government being primarily to secure individuals in the enjoyment of their property, a goal presupposing a high degree of liberty rendered impossible in the Hobbesian ideal of absolute monarchy. Thus, in Lockean liberalism the individual right of property supplies both the object of civil government and the rationale for its intrinsic limitations.