ABSTRACT
American political culture is commonly portrayed, to borrow a phrase from Emerson as the lengthened shadow of John Locke. In recent years a debate over how best to interpret Locke's views on property has raged among students of political philosophy. According to some, Locke was the bourgeois philosopher of "possessive individualism" who sanctioned unlimited accumulation and competitive capitalism. Although Thomas Paine apparently never read Locke, there are obvious parallels in their political thought. Indeed so similar were their arguments in places that Paine was accused of having cribbed from Locke. The radicalizing of Locke evident in the political thought of Thomas Paine is even more pronounced in the thinking of radical jacksonians. Like Paine, they interpreted Locke to suit egalitarian ends. That the Civil War poses difficulties for the consensus thesis has long been recognized. Radical plan to confiscate slaveholder property as simply a manifestation of the emerging system of industrial capitalism.
