ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social thinking of John Locke in texts that remained in manuscript in his lifetime and in the Two Treatises of Government. This discussion takes place in the chapter because Locke captures the quintessential modernity of social thought at the end of the period. Locke's vision of society was remarkable in a number of ways. It was modern looking in being labor and production based, perhaps even anticipating a labor theory of value, but backward looking in adhering to the principle of the legal obligation to work. Locke's vision was neither purely secular nor solely economic in character, but it was a significant move in several respects. It broke with the long-established paradigm of mutual aid as expressed in the charitable relationships of the Franciscan model and the body social. Like Edward Chamberlayne and others, Locke's treatise made little mention of charity as a possible alternative form of relief.
