John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government remains a foundational text today. His understanding of property rights has shaped our contemporary liberal societal framework. Personal property is the basis for Lock’s argument. Thus, by understanding the Lockean property rights, we can understand how they have shaped our current society.
Locke uses two principles to justify private property. Firstly, “God gave the world to men in common,” and—or perhaps rather but—secondly, “individual man has a property in his own person; […] the labour of his body [is] strictly his” (Locke 13, 11). These two principles drive his understanding of property, both as they stand alone and how they conflict with one another. Through the first principle, Locke rebukes the sole ownership of property by monarchs. While prior theorists had limited property rights to the king, Locke believes “God gave the world to Adam and his posterity in common” (Locke 10).
This is true for the expansive and “unworked” land in the Americas. Yet, because bodily labor has individual ownership, so does the products of that labor. For example, once a man gathers acorns, they become his. While Locke does not explain precisely why when personal labor and communal (natural) property are mixed together they become solely private, it appears to be a part of his rationale that spatial productivity must be maximized. He explains that “[God] gave it them for their benefit and for the greatest conveniences of life they could get from it” and because labor contributes so much to value, it is the determinant of (Locke 13, 15). This is seen in land. As it becomes cultivated, it becomes private property for the cultivator, who, in turn, becomes the owner of the land. In doing so, they add value to the land. Unworked land has little value, according to Locke—this does not necessarily hold true today—compared the value of cultivated land.
In the natural state, one’s own land ownership does not affect other’s ability to own land. Again, looking towards the Americas, the land seemed limitlessly expansive. Thus, everyone has the ability to attain land. Property thus is a right for all people through both their bodily ownership and the land itself. Because God gave man land for their greatest conveniences vis a vis private ownership, land and bodily ownership become the basis of all forms of ownership. In industrial cases, like London, the government exists to maintain these property rights for the people and ensure that these “natural” property rights are maintained.
When considering the built environment today, Locke’s schemes are paramount with the vast majority of land held privately and the notion of private ownership appearing pre-political, as it is within the Lockean schema. Yet three questions I had of Locke’s rationalization pertaining to New York are, first, how does it rationalize one’s own labor as not a right but rather a commodity? From slavery to contemporary construction workers, the owners of New York City are not the builders, but rather the owners of labor. Second, land appears to have a value determined by neither the person who works the land nor in the land itself. An undeveloped parcel of land in New York City would have immense value compared to the same land in the 1970s or the early colonial era. How does Locke compensate for these external market forces? Finally, I was struck by Locke’s understanding of money corrupting property rights because now people could own more than they could consume. With land being the ultimate commodity in New York City, how would Locke understand this?
Very good summary of Locke. My take on the labor-mixed-with-land premise is that one’s labor is an extension of one’s self and so, through the ephemeral symbiosis that occurs between the hand, the till, and the soil (to be literal), the person’s spirit or being-ness becomes part of the soil and maybe even vice-versa. In some ways this is a spiritual transference similar to the way we think the Lenape related to the land, only the Lenape did not, of course, translate that relationship of converging spirits into one of ownership. On the topic of NYC, I think the answers to your questions are way outside the epistemological world of Locke, except insofar as he understood the invention of money as a proxy system that replaced the direct relationship of labor and land. In this way, money has given way to other kinds of proxy systems, like credit/debt, speculation, mutual funds, bonds, etc. So while material conditions — indeed, actual materials — exist underneath our systems of valuation, they are nearly invisible because of the layers of proxy valuations that determine our lives. And those proxy valuations are seemingly limitless such that we can empty our bank accounts (which contain money we never see, which counts for gold we never see) to pay rent (via check or direct deposit) to a landlord we never see while laboring in a job, the pay for which is deposited in our bank accounts and determined by a person we never see. And yet that whole invisible operation determines our ability to live in a very material way.