Locke and Property Locke's Second Essay

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Money can only be hoarded because it has no real use; it will not feed or cloth someone who is starving or cold. This implies that things like food and clothing, which have obvious and immediate intrinsic values, cannot be rightfully hoarded in most societies because this will cause injury to someone else.

This places a severe limit on the power of money in Locke's construct; though it is deemed acceptable to hoard any amount of gold and silver, and though this gold and silver can be used to purchase things of real value like land and other property, it is not acceptable to maintain control of vast amounts of this property at the expense of others. A lord may own the land, therefore, but only because men have agreed on the value of the money that the land was purchased with, and only as long as the landowner continues to let others use the land to maintain a livelihood for themselves and their families.

Other passages in the Second Treatise of Government support this interpretation of Locke's meaning. Even the closing statement of the first chapter, which outlines the various rights of governments as Locke sees them -- including "the regulating and preserving of property" -- claims that all government actions must be undertaken "only for the public good."

As the government mandate to rule derived from public consent, it must be assumed that the definition of the public good must also be derived from that same public, and thus Locke's conclusion that men have consented to an unequal distribution of land and property is self-evident. This does not mean that men may not attempt to create more equality through established means -- earning money and buying their own land, for example -- and in no way should the passage in section fifty of the treatise be interpreted as making the protection of private property against any and all intrusions the essential or primary duty or even right of a governing body.

Further evidence of the unimportance of money and the monetary system in Locke's description of government and the way it ought to operate is found in the eight chapter of his Second Treatise.

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here, Locke maintains that in the establishment of a government or society, "every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation, to every one of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority."

Thus, if the majority of a society determined that an individual was using their wealth and/or property inappropriately, it would be the right of that majority to deny property and even to redistribute wealth.

Though the right to property is one of the essential foundations of government according to Locke, it like everything else must derive from the consent of the majority. that is, societies have consented to protect personal property for the benefit of the entire society (it reduces theft and ensures against despotism to a degree). If these publicly consented aims are not being adequately met by one individual's disproportionate ownership/stewardship of land or property, they can rightfully expect to lose it. Though this is not generally how Locke's theories are applied, it seems very likely given his work as a whole that this is what he intended.

Reference

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Civil Government. 1690. Accessed 12 July 2009. http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm

John Locke. The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. V, sec. 50. 1690. Accessed 12 July 2009. http://www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid, Chapter 1, sec. 3.

Ibid, Chapter 8, sec. 97.....

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