ABSTRACT
Property, says Locke, originates in each individual’s ‘own person’ in their natural possessions. It lies first in ‘the “labour” of his body and the “work” of his hands’ (Locke 1924: 130). (This second category, being distinguished from mere physical labour, implies that the mental energy used in generating ideas is as much a property as the physical energy used in their application.) Through labour and work, this energy is passed into the natural environment, even as it changes it into artificial products. For example, by cutting up a tree and redesigning its parts into furniture, a person destroys its raw natural state and imposes an artificial form upon it. The mental energy of the person is embedded in the form of the crafted objects –the form of a chair, for example, is the idea (design) imposed on to an object. The physical energy of the craftsmen is embedded in the new shapes and textures of the wooden objects by their labour – the rubbing, pulling, bending and cutting of the wood. The creator and the natural elements are combined in the artificial form of the new objects, and so the objects mark out the presence of their creator in the world in the form of territory: ‘look’, says the artisan, ‘here are my chairs; I built them’. Locke puts it this way: ‘the labour that was mine, having removed them out of the common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them’(Locke 1924: 130). Making things out of nature makes them the property of their maker and the property marks out their maker’s terrain in the world. ‘His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature where it was common . . . and hath thereby appropriated it to himself’ (Locke 1924: 131). So the artisan can say, ‘As these chairs are mine, I get to say who can and who can’t sit in them’.
