Anarcissie
2015-07-05 14:48:32 UTC
John Locke Against Freedom
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/
John Locke’s classical liberalism isn’t a doctrine of freedom. It’s a defense of expropriation and enslavement.
by John Quiggin
For classical liberals (often called libertarians in
the US context), the founding documents of liberalism
are John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and
Letters on Toleration, which set out the case for a
limited government, respectful of private property
rights and tolerant of religious differences. Locke
lived in England (and for five years in exile in the
Netherlands) in the seventeenth century, and his work
is normally interpreted in terms of the struggles
between the English king and parliament from the
Civil War to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688,
in which the absolutist Stuart dynasty was overthrown.
For those who get around to actually reading the
Treatise, there are some unappealing passages in
which Locke justifies slavery (as applied to captives
taken in war) and denies that his theory of property
rights applies to hunter-gatherer societies such as
those of Native Americans. But these issues seem
so far removed from Locke’s social context in
seventeenth-century England as to be mere asides,
irrelevant to the main argument.
Considering both his own life and his historical
impact, however, Locke is more accurately regarded
as an American philosopher than an English one,
even though he never crossed the Atlantic in
person. Recent scholarship on Locke has focused on
facts that have always been well known but, like other
unpleasant historical facts, have been overlooked
or disregarded. This historical reappraisal implies
a new and radically different understanding of his
political philosophy.
In a career of fluctuating fortunes, Locke was
intimately involved with American affairs. As
secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, then chancellor
of the exchequer, Locke assisted in drafting the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. He was
secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations
(1673–74) and a member of the Board of Trade
(1696–1700), with responsibility for the American
colonies. He was a major investor in the English
slave trade through the Royal African Company and
the Bahama Adventurers company.
Thus, when Locke wrote about slavery and the
conditions under which property in land might be
acquired, American conditions were far more directly
relevant than those in England, where chattel slavery
was unknown, and where the original acquisition of
land was a historical fiction.
Given his reputation as a defender of property rights
and personal freedom, Locke has been accused of
hypocrisy for his role in promoting and benefiting
from slavery and the expropriation of indigenous
populations, actions that would seem to contradict
his philosophical position. This is too charitable.
The real contradictions are to be found within
Locke’s philosophical writings. These are designed
to fit his political positions both in England,
where he supported resistance to the absolutist
pretensions of the Catholic James II, and in America,
where he was part of the slave-owning ruling class
(albeit from afar).
An early example of Locke’s doctrinal
flexibility can be found in his Letters Concerning
Toleration. Although the argument for toleration
appears general, Locke manages to find reasons for
excluding both Catholics and atheists. So, in the
context of seventeenth-century England, the only
group who would benefit from Locke’s proposed
policy of toleration was Protestant dissenters from
the established Church of England. This was, not
surprisingly, the group to which Locke belonged.
Locke’s theory of property is similarly
self-serving. It’s generally seen as a historical
fiction, used to justify currently existing property
rights, despite the fact that they cannot really have
been acquired in the way that Locke suggests. As Hume
objected, “there is no property in durable objects,
such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in
passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period,
have been founded on fraud and injustice.”
That’s true of course. Considered in the American
context, however, Locke is not offering a theory of
original acquisition. Rather, his theory is one of
expropriation, designed specifically to justify the
“fraud and injustice” to which Hume refers.
Locke’s central idea is that agriculturalists, by
mixing their labor with the soil, thereby acquire
a title to it. He immediately faces the objection
that before the arrival of agriculture, hunters and
gatherers worked on the land and gained sustenance
from it. So, it would seem, the would-be farmer has
arrived too late. The obvious example, to which he
refers several times, is that of European colonists
arriving in America. Locke’s answer is twofold.
First, he invokes his usual claim that there is
plenty of land for everybody, so appropriating some
land for agriculture can’t be of any harm to the
hunter-gatherers. This is obviously silly. It might
conceivably be true for the first agriculturalist
(though on standard Malthusian grounds there is
no reason to suppose this), or the second or the
fiftieth, but at some point the land must cease to be
sufficient to support the preexisting hunter-gatherer
population. At this point, well before all land has
been acquired by agriculturalists, his theory fails.
Locke must surely have known his claim to be false,
not as a matter of abstract reasoning, distant
history, but in terms of contemporary fact. His
Treatises on Government were published in 1689,
a year after the outbreak of King William’s War
(the North American theatre of the Nine Years
War). The core issue in this war, as in a string
of earlier conflicts, was control of the fur
trade, the most economically significant form of
hunter-gatherer activity. But underlying that was the
general pressure arising from the steady expansion
of European agriculture into lands previously owned
by Indian tribes.
As a capitalist, and shareholder in American
businesses such as the (slaveholding) Bahama
Adventurers, Locke could scarcely have been unaware
of these facts. Indeed he refers in the Treatise to
American contacts who gave him his information.
Locke’s real defense is that regardless of
whether there is a lot or a little, uncultivated
land is essentially valueless. All, or nearly all,
the value, he says, comes from the efforts of the
farmers who improve the land. Since God gave us the
land to improve, it rightfully belongs to those who
improve it.
This is exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court
majority in Kelo v. City of New London. Ms Kelo
and her neighbors were indeed occupying the land in
question, but, so the Court concluded, they weren’t
able or willing to make the best use of it. So, the
only way the city could ensure the best economic use
of the land in question was to use its eminent domain
power of compulsory acquisition.
All of this relates back to the point I’ve raised
before, that the credibility of any Lockean theory
defending established property rights from the
state that established them depends on the existence
of a frontier, beyond which lies boundless usable
land. This in turn requires the erasure (mentally and
usually in brutal reality) of the people already
living beyond the frontier and drawing their
sustenance from the land in question.
Now for Locke on slavery. Locke’s reputation as an
opponent of slavery rests in part on misunderstanding
and in part on the fact that he offered a more limited
justification of slavery than earlier writers.
As regards misunderstanding, Locke’s oft-quoted
statement that “SLAVERY is so vile and miserable
an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the
generous temper and courage of our nation; that
it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman,
much less a gentleman, should plead for it” sounds
like a statement of absolute condemnation. In fact,
however, it is more appropriately understood as an
early rendition of the jingoism expressed in the
sentiment that “Britons never, never, never, shall
be slaves.”
Locke’s intention, in this passage, was to demolish
the idea of Sir Robert Filmer that Englishmen
(including English Americans) could voluntarily agree
to submit to a government with the absolutist claims
of the Stuarts — it was this submission to which
the term “slavery” referred. At the same time,
he allowed for absolute chattel slavery, with power
of life and death, in the case of “prisoners taken
in a just war.” In his work on the Constitution
of the Carolinas, Locke extended the same absolute
power to the owners of African-American slaves.
There’s an obvious contradiction here. While
Africans were frequently enslaved as a result of war,
there was no reason to suppose this war to be just,
and it was obviously impossible to extend this
justification to their children.
Some Locke scholars have concluded, as a result,
that his political position was in hypocritical
contradiction of his theoretical views. That seems
too generous to Locke as a theorist.
As we’ve seen, his theory of property in general has
precisely the same characteristics: a liberal-sounding
defense of the rights of Englishmen to property and
freedom, used to justify their deprivation of those
rights from indigenous people. Similarly, in his
much-vaunted Letters on Toleration, he managed to
find reasons to exclude Catholics and atheists, so
that the only proposed beneficiaries of toleration
were dissenting Protestants like himself.
Locke is American in another crucial respect. His
writings were largely ignored in England, and gained
their prominence almost entirely from their influence
on the founders of the United States.
More precisely, Locke’s principles perfectly suited
the Southern Federalists who dominated the early years
of the United States. On the one hand, they justified
rebellion against the British Crown. On the other
hand, they rejected any interference with property
rights, including slave ownership. More broadly,
Locke’s theory stood in opposition to the radical
democratic possibilities of the American Revolution,
represented by figures like Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Paine.
The contradictions inherent in Locke’s position
were pointed out by critics at the time, and summed
up by that old-fashioned Tory, Dr Samuel Johnson,
who remarked, “How is it that we hear the loudest
yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
(Johnson’s friendship with his Jamaican servant,
Francis Barber, a former slave, was a striking
testimony to his character.)
But history is written by the winners. Locke
benefitted from the same historical amnesia that has
absolved all the US founders, most notably Jefferson
and Madison, along with antebellum leaders like
Calhoun and Clay, from their role in maintaining
and extending slavery. This amnesia was reinforced
by the dominance of the pro-slavery Dunning School
in historical discussion of the Civil War and
Reconstruction Era. It is only since the emergence
of the Civil Rights Movement that these questions
have been reopened.
If Locke is viewed, correctly, as an advocate
of expropriation and enslavement, what are
the implications for classical liberalism and
libertarianism? The most important is that there
is no justification for treating property rights
as fundamental human rights, on par with personal
liberty and freedom of speech.
The true liberal tradition is represented not by
Locke, but by John Stuart Mill, whose wholehearted
commitment to political freedom was consistent with
his eventual adoption of socialism (admittedly in a
rather refined and abstract form).
Mill wasn’t perfect, as is evidenced by his
support of British imperialism, for which he worked
as an official of the East India Company, and more
generally by his support for limitations on democratic
majorities. But Mill’s version of liberalism became
more democratic as experience showed that fears about
dictatorial majorities were unfounded. By contrast,
Locke’s classical liberalism has hardened into
propertarian dogma.
As Mill recognized, markets and property rights are
institutions that are justified by their usefulness,
not by any fundamental human right. Where markets
work well, governments should not interfere with
them. But, when they fail, as they so often do, it
is entirely appropriate to modify property rights
and market outcomes, or to replace them altogether
with direct public control.
Received ideas change only slowly, and the standard
view of Locke as a defender of liberty is likely to
persist for years to come. Still, the reassessment is
underway, and the outcome is inevitable. Locke was a
theoretical advocate of, and a personal participant
in, expropriation and enslavement. His classical
liberalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone
except owners of capitalist private property.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/
John Locke’s classical liberalism isn’t a doctrine of freedom. It’s a defense of expropriation and enslavement.
by John Quiggin
For classical liberals (often called libertarians in
the US context), the founding documents of liberalism
are John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and
Letters on Toleration, which set out the case for a
limited government, respectful of private property
rights and tolerant of religious differences. Locke
lived in England (and for five years in exile in the
Netherlands) in the seventeenth century, and his work
is normally interpreted in terms of the struggles
between the English king and parliament from the
Civil War to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688,
in which the absolutist Stuart dynasty was overthrown.
For those who get around to actually reading the
Treatise, there are some unappealing passages in
which Locke justifies slavery (as applied to captives
taken in war) and denies that his theory of property
rights applies to hunter-gatherer societies such as
those of Native Americans. But these issues seem
so far removed from Locke’s social context in
seventeenth-century England as to be mere asides,
irrelevant to the main argument.
Considering both his own life and his historical
impact, however, Locke is more accurately regarded
as an American philosopher than an English one,
even though he never crossed the Atlantic in
person. Recent scholarship on Locke has focused on
facts that have always been well known but, like other
unpleasant historical facts, have been overlooked
or disregarded. This historical reappraisal implies
a new and radically different understanding of his
political philosophy.
In a career of fluctuating fortunes, Locke was
intimately involved with American affairs. As
secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, then chancellor
of the exchequer, Locke assisted in drafting the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. He was
secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations
(1673–74) and a member of the Board of Trade
(1696–1700), with responsibility for the American
colonies. He was a major investor in the English
slave trade through the Royal African Company and
the Bahama Adventurers company.
Thus, when Locke wrote about slavery and the
conditions under which property in land might be
acquired, American conditions were far more directly
relevant than those in England, where chattel slavery
was unknown, and where the original acquisition of
land was a historical fiction.
Given his reputation as a defender of property rights
and personal freedom, Locke has been accused of
hypocrisy for his role in promoting and benefiting
from slavery and the expropriation of indigenous
populations, actions that would seem to contradict
his philosophical position. This is too charitable.
The real contradictions are to be found within
Locke’s philosophical writings. These are designed
to fit his political positions both in England,
where he supported resistance to the absolutist
pretensions of the Catholic James II, and in America,
where he was part of the slave-owning ruling class
(albeit from afar).
An early example of Locke’s doctrinal
flexibility can be found in his Letters Concerning
Toleration. Although the argument for toleration
appears general, Locke manages to find reasons for
excluding both Catholics and atheists. So, in the
context of seventeenth-century England, the only
group who would benefit from Locke’s proposed
policy of toleration was Protestant dissenters from
the established Church of England. This was, not
surprisingly, the group to which Locke belonged.
Locke’s theory of property is similarly
self-serving. It’s generally seen as a historical
fiction, used to justify currently existing property
rights, despite the fact that they cannot really have
been acquired in the way that Locke suggests. As Hume
objected, “there is no property in durable objects,
such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in
passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period,
have been founded on fraud and injustice.”
That’s true of course. Considered in the American
context, however, Locke is not offering a theory of
original acquisition. Rather, his theory is one of
expropriation, designed specifically to justify the
“fraud and injustice” to which Hume refers.
Locke’s central idea is that agriculturalists, by
mixing their labor with the soil, thereby acquire
a title to it. He immediately faces the objection
that before the arrival of agriculture, hunters and
gatherers worked on the land and gained sustenance
from it. So, it would seem, the would-be farmer has
arrived too late. The obvious example, to which he
refers several times, is that of European colonists
arriving in America. Locke’s answer is twofold.
First, he invokes his usual claim that there is
plenty of land for everybody, so appropriating some
land for agriculture can’t be of any harm to the
hunter-gatherers. This is obviously silly. It might
conceivably be true for the first agriculturalist
(though on standard Malthusian grounds there is
no reason to suppose this), or the second or the
fiftieth, but at some point the land must cease to be
sufficient to support the preexisting hunter-gatherer
population. At this point, well before all land has
been acquired by agriculturalists, his theory fails.
Locke must surely have known his claim to be false,
not as a matter of abstract reasoning, distant
history, but in terms of contemporary fact. His
Treatises on Government were published in 1689,
a year after the outbreak of King William’s War
(the North American theatre of the Nine Years
War). The core issue in this war, as in a string
of earlier conflicts, was control of the fur
trade, the most economically significant form of
hunter-gatherer activity. But underlying that was the
general pressure arising from the steady expansion
of European agriculture into lands previously owned
by Indian tribes.
As a capitalist, and shareholder in American
businesses such as the (slaveholding) Bahama
Adventurers, Locke could scarcely have been unaware
of these facts. Indeed he refers in the Treatise to
American contacts who gave him his information.
Locke’s real defense is that regardless of
whether there is a lot or a little, uncultivated
land is essentially valueless. All, or nearly all,
the value, he says, comes from the efforts of the
farmers who improve the land. Since God gave us the
land to improve, it rightfully belongs to those who
improve it.
This is exactly the reasoning of the Supreme Court
majority in Kelo v. City of New London. Ms Kelo
and her neighbors were indeed occupying the land in
question, but, so the Court concluded, they weren’t
able or willing to make the best use of it. So, the
only way the city could ensure the best economic use
of the land in question was to use its eminent domain
power of compulsory acquisition.
All of this relates back to the point I’ve raised
before, that the credibility of any Lockean theory
defending established property rights from the
state that established them depends on the existence
of a frontier, beyond which lies boundless usable
land. This in turn requires the erasure (mentally and
usually in brutal reality) of the people already
living beyond the frontier and drawing their
sustenance from the land in question.
Now for Locke on slavery. Locke’s reputation as an
opponent of slavery rests in part on misunderstanding
and in part on the fact that he offered a more limited
justification of slavery than earlier writers.
As regards misunderstanding, Locke’s oft-quoted
statement that “SLAVERY is so vile and miserable
an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the
generous temper and courage of our nation; that
it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman,
much less a gentleman, should plead for it” sounds
like a statement of absolute condemnation. In fact,
however, it is more appropriately understood as an
early rendition of the jingoism expressed in the
sentiment that “Britons never, never, never, shall
be slaves.”
Locke’s intention, in this passage, was to demolish
the idea of Sir Robert Filmer that Englishmen
(including English Americans) could voluntarily agree
to submit to a government with the absolutist claims
of the Stuarts — it was this submission to which
the term “slavery” referred. At the same time,
he allowed for absolute chattel slavery, with power
of life and death, in the case of “prisoners taken
in a just war.” In his work on the Constitution
of the Carolinas, Locke extended the same absolute
power to the owners of African-American slaves.
There’s an obvious contradiction here. While
Africans were frequently enslaved as a result of war,
there was no reason to suppose this war to be just,
and it was obviously impossible to extend this
justification to their children.
Some Locke scholars have concluded, as a result,
that his political position was in hypocritical
contradiction of his theoretical views. That seems
too generous to Locke as a theorist.
As we’ve seen, his theory of property in general has
precisely the same characteristics: a liberal-sounding
defense of the rights of Englishmen to property and
freedom, used to justify their deprivation of those
rights from indigenous people. Similarly, in his
much-vaunted Letters on Toleration, he managed to
find reasons to exclude Catholics and atheists, so
that the only proposed beneficiaries of toleration
were dissenting Protestants like himself.
Locke is American in another crucial respect. His
writings were largely ignored in England, and gained
their prominence almost entirely from their influence
on the founders of the United States.
More precisely, Locke’s principles perfectly suited
the Southern Federalists who dominated the early years
of the United States. On the one hand, they justified
rebellion against the British Crown. On the other
hand, they rejected any interference with property
rights, including slave ownership. More broadly,
Locke’s theory stood in opposition to the radical
democratic possibilities of the American Revolution,
represented by figures like Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Paine.
The contradictions inherent in Locke’s position
were pointed out by critics at the time, and summed
up by that old-fashioned Tory, Dr Samuel Johnson,
who remarked, “How is it that we hear the loudest
yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”
(Johnson’s friendship with his Jamaican servant,
Francis Barber, a former slave, was a striking
testimony to his character.)
But history is written by the winners. Locke
benefitted from the same historical amnesia that has
absolved all the US founders, most notably Jefferson
and Madison, along with antebellum leaders like
Calhoun and Clay, from their role in maintaining
and extending slavery. This amnesia was reinforced
by the dominance of the pro-slavery Dunning School
in historical discussion of the Civil War and
Reconstruction Era. It is only since the emergence
of the Civil Rights Movement that these questions
have been reopened.
If Locke is viewed, correctly, as an advocate
of expropriation and enslavement, what are
the implications for classical liberalism and
libertarianism? The most important is that there
is no justification for treating property rights
as fundamental human rights, on par with personal
liberty and freedom of speech.
The true liberal tradition is represented not by
Locke, but by John Stuart Mill, whose wholehearted
commitment to political freedom was consistent with
his eventual adoption of socialism (admittedly in a
rather refined and abstract form).
Mill wasn’t perfect, as is evidenced by his
support of British imperialism, for which he worked
as an official of the East India Company, and more
generally by his support for limitations on democratic
majorities. But Mill’s version of liberalism became
more democratic as experience showed that fears about
dictatorial majorities were unfounded. By contrast,
Locke’s classical liberalism has hardened into
propertarian dogma.
As Mill recognized, markets and property rights are
institutions that are justified by their usefulness,
not by any fundamental human right. Where markets
work well, governments should not interfere with
them. But, when they fail, as they so often do, it
is entirely appropriate to modify property rights
and market outcomes, or to replace them altogether
with direct public control.
Received ideas change only slowly, and the standard
view of Locke as a defender of liberty is likely to
persist for years to come. Still, the reassessment is
underway, and the outcome is inevitable. Locke was a
theoretical advocate of, and a personal participant
in, expropriation and enslavement. His classical
liberalism offers no guarantee of freedom to anyone
except owners of capitalist private property.