Rocco D’Ambrosca: 03/09/2010
In the, Second Treatise on Civil Government, John Locke lays out an elaborate argument for the existence of natural rights possessed by every man in an attempt to outline and defend his vision for a harmonious and well functioning government. Using natural reason as his weapon, Locke creates an argument for the existence of these natural rights, specifically that of property rights. It will be shown that Locke’s belief in our natural rights is correct and how this belief sets up a far superior theory of civil government than that of Thomas Hobbes in his book, Leviathan.
As his contemporaries, Locke, starts his argument using the authority of God. However, unlike his contemporaries, he elaborates further than the limits of the Bible, using reason to complete and fulfill his argument. Locke begins his argument for natural rights saying that natural reason, “tells us that men, once they are born, have a right to survive and thus a right to food and drink and such other things as nature provides for their subsistence” (Locke10). Drawing from Genesis, Locke continues saying that, “The earth and everything in it is given to men for the support and comfort of their existence. All the fruits it naturally produces and animals that it feeds, as produced by the spontaneous hand of nature, belong to mankind in common; nobody has a basic right—a private right that excludes the rest of mankind—over any of them as they are in their natural state” (Locke11). From here, Locke moves forward using reason to say that before any of those gifts from God, “can be useful or beneficial to any particular man there must be some way for a particular man to appropriate them” (Locke11).
Thus, using reason, Locke outlines the means in which man claims property as his own, and by doing so creates property rights. “Though men as a whole own the earth and all inferior creatures, every individual man has property in his own person; this is something that nobody else has any right to. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are strictly his. So when he takes something from the state that nature has provided and left it in, he mixes his labour with it, thus joining to it something that is his own; and in that way he makes it his property” (Locke11). Here, Locke has used reason to define man’s ownership of himself, and from that self-ownership, the extension of labor and therefore anything affected by his labor is his as well. Locke puts it bluntly concrete when he says, “Thus this law of reason makes it the case that the Indian who kills a deer owns it; it is agreed to belong to the person who put his labour into it, even though until then it was the common right of everyone” (Locke12). To further cement the logic and reason behind this type of ownership system, Locke immediately addresses possible criticisms, saying that, “the very law of nature that in this way gives us property also sets limits to that property,” and further that, “anyone can through his labour come to own as much as he can use in a beneficial way before it spoils; anything beyond this is more than his share and belongs to others,” with the rational that, “nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy” (Locke12).
This type of natural limit upon an accumulation of wealth creates the necessity for trading and further towards the establishment of a common currency that could never spoil or lose value. This establishment of common currency can only be created through an established society, which would first have been created to protect this natural right to property. Locke addresses this head on saying, “the chief purpose of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property,” since in the state of nature, “all men are kings as much as he is, every man is his equal, and most men are not strict observers of fairness and justice; so his hold on the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very insecure” (Locke40).
The principal source of Locke’s theory’s superiority over Hobbes’s theory is that unlike Hobbes, Locke does not confuse the state of nature and the state of war. In Leviathan, Hobbes wrongly asserts that the state of nature is by definition a state of war. Locke however, correctly sees the state of war as separate from the state of nature, and not mutually exclusive, in that the state of war occurs with and without a state of nature or an established society. Locke in fact, challenges Hobbes directly by name in this confusion. Locke expresses there is a distinct difference between these two states and defines them as such that: the state of nature is, “men living together according to reason, with no-one on earth who stands above them both and has authority to judge between them,” while in the state of war, “a man uses or declares his intention to use force against another man, with no-one on earth to whom the other can appeal for relief” (Locke8). Further, “it is the lack of such an appeal that gives a man the right of war against an aggressor, not only in a state of nature but even if they are both subjects in a single society” (Locke8). Therefore, Locke can say that, “what puts men into a state of nature is the lack of a common judge who has authority”, and that there is a “plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war” (Locke8).
It is this confusion that has caused Hobbes to have the notion that there cannot be justice without peace. We have seen that Hobbes wrongly believes that the state of nature is the state of war and that there is never any peace. The state of war can occur both within an established society just as it can within the state of nature. A thief could just as easily challenge your property rights, creating a state of war with you, as a member of the state of nature or the member of an established civil state. But the state of war is not omnipresent within the state of nature. The state of peace can occur just the same as the state of war when within the state of nature or within an established civil state. The difference between a state of nature and an established civil state being the longevity of an established peace; that with a set of laws and an executive to enforce, the state of war is created and sustained with far less frequency. But again, this is not to say that the state of peace cannot occur within a state of nature, it is simply more fleeting and rare. In fact, the members of a state of nature, in awareness of their natural rights, will create the self-aware community goal to establish and maintain peace after having experienced the horrors of the state of war.
This is why the theory put forth by Locke is so far superior from that of Hobbes. The focus upon natural rights creates the mutual self-interest of each member to create a society in their own best interest separate from the need of an arbitrary king or authoritarian father who dominates his will for their supposed own good. The people, in awareness of their natural rights, will want to establish a limited government to protect those rights from the abuse of others. They only enter into a social contract of government to create an impartial authoritarian judge that they may appeal to when the state of war is brought upon them by another. It is this right to appeal that makes living in society preferable to a state of nature. Being a part of Hobbes’s vision of society you are simply in a state of war with the ruler, rather than part of a community that creates its own laws for their own benefit, always reserving the right to change those laws and the government if it ever challenges or creates a state of war with them the people.
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