Hodgskin’s Libertarian Groundwork
Thomas Hodgskin, an Englishman who wrote widely in political economy during the first half of the nineteenth century, professed almost slavish devotion to Locke. In following in what he took to be Locke’s footsteps, he devoted his scholarly life to a polemic against “idle” capitalists and landowners. But he simultaneously defended an unflinchingly individualist interpretation of the Lockean project. According to Hodgskin, the world is common only in the sense of being originally unowned, and everyone has a right to anything he can create by laboring on it. He argues that the crushing inequality he observed around him in the fields and cities of the industrial revolution was attributable solely to the violence and cupidity of governments and their cronies. In working out this theory, Hodgskin sketched the principle features of a distinctly libertarian resolution of Locke’s property problem. According to this resolution, there is no problem about reconciling the common right to the world with the growth of private property because the common right is simply a liberty for each person to make use of the world as he might see fit. Thus, despite his left-leaning criticisms of capitalism and absentee landownership, Hodgskin planted seeds that would develop, in Spooner’s later work, into the core of the right-libertarianism we know today.