ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by setting Locke in a historical context to understand his philosophical motivations and goes on to carefully reconstruct Locke’s theory of private property and explore the implications of his assumptions.
Locke’s assumptions about the value added by labour as defining property relations have shaped Western cultures to see nature as a set of resources to be turned into the valuable commodities created by human labour and ingenuity. Rarely acknowledged, nature is also held to be a “sink” for our wastes. The theory has also been taken to imply that wherever nature lies fallow and/or unoccupied, it has not yet fallen within private property relations, which has justified colonialism and expropriation of aboriginal lands for several centuries and arguably still does so. Intimately connected to this last point, Locke’s assumptions imply that any society organized by such private property relations is a meritocracy. That is, in a society defined by such private property relations, the wide disparities of wealth are, in principle, justifiable, at least where there is no coercion or fraudulent activity of any kind. This view continues to shape our narratives about indigenous citizens and the most disadvantaged members of our societies to this day.
