ABSTRACT
In 1740, just over fifty years after Locke's Two Treatises on Government, Hume published the Treatise on Human Nature. Book III of the Treatise, where David Hume's most significant treatment of the relationship between justice and property occurs, opens with a rejection of the natural lawyers' attempts to grasp issues of justice through recourse to divine or 'natural' universals. The essential shape of Hume's argument is identical to Locke's in that it arises from a comparison between a state of nature and commercial society, but the terms upon which each is understood is radically altered. Where Hume establishes private property as a guarantor of individual freedom, Adam Smith acknowledges that it must coexist with structures able to defend each from all, which are essentially power relations in that they rely upon subordination. As such, Smith's system of private property and price emerges from the moral need to manage power within the context of a society of essentially free individuals.
