George

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, did for left-Lockeanism what Spooner’s contemporaneous mature work did for right-Lockeanism: It took up and developed a line of thought that an earlier author pioneered and, in the process, established a conceptual framework that would survive into the twentieth century. Like Bray, George attempts to solve Locke’s property problem by arguing that people are required to form and maintain political arrangements that protect our common positive right to share the world as equals. But unlike Bray, he does not lean heavily on a labor theory of value. He argues instead that traditional landownership subjects the landless to landowners’ arbitrary power, even when labor exchanges between the two parties leave everyone richer than they were before. In order to respect our common right to the world and the freedom from domination it mandates, governments need not, as Bray argues, seize the means of production and subject them to direct collective control. Rather, they need only require landholders to rent their land from the community at competitive market rates. Once governments pool these rents into a public fund, citizens can enjoy their natural common right within an otherwise competitive market economy. This blueprint would inspire the left-libertarian property theory that has recently emerged to challenge right-libertarianism around turn of the twenty-first century.

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.

Bray’s Lockean Socialism

John Bray, whose transatlantic career reached its height around 1840, follows Locke in arguing that all people have a natural common right to the world and a natural private right to the fruits of their labor. But unlike the libertarian radicals, Hodgskin and Spooner, Bray interprets our common right to the world in strongly positive terms. According to him, the world is common in much the way that a public library is common: We all have an equal right to use it for our own purposes so long as everyone else is equally able to use it for their own. In practice, this requires people to form political communities wherein the means of production are public, but in which people maintain private ownership in their share of what the community produces. Thus, Bray attempts to solves Locke’s property problem through socialist political economy, which provides an avenue to reconstitute common ownership under advanced economic conditions. Although Bray’s left-Lockean picture has several attractive features, it stumbles on Bray’s implausible conception of economic value, on which he relies in his argument against incorporating market competition into his left-Lockean picture. According to Bray, all economic value is accumulated labor, which in turn means that economic transactions are zero-sum and that someone (usually workers) must leave market exchanges worse off. Thus, Bray’s Lockean socialism raises, but does not answer, an important question: Is there room for an egalitarian resolution of Locke’s property problem that does not rely on a mistake about economic value?

Locke’s Property Problem

According to Locke, all people are free and equal. Consequently, the natural world belongs to all people in common. But each person, along with his labor, belongs only to himself. Thus, although all people share a common right to use the world, each person acquires a private right to resources he “mixes” with his labor. Before large-scale economic development, there was no problem with each person appropriating as much as he could use, because this left “enough, and as good” for others. But once money spurred development, people could efficiently use far more. Under these new conditions, there was no longer enough and as good lying in common. Consequently, although everyone got richer through economic development, the world divided into resource owners and employees working on others’ resources. All of this posed a dilemma for Locke. On the one hand, people could be required to leave the world lying in common, preserving equal standing but sacrificing well-being for all. On the other, people could be permitted to develop the world into a network of private plots, greatly increasing well-being for all but sacrificing equal standing. Locke notices the tension, but he lacks an adequate solution. He implausibly appeals to our purported consent to money and its consequences before ending the chapter, thus leaving his property problem for others to solve.

Introduction

According to John Locke, all people are morally equal self-owners. This commitment introduces a tension at the heart of Locke’s property theory. Since all people own themselves and, consequently, their labor, individuals have the moral power to acquire private property from the common world. But the use of this moral power threatens to generate concentrations of economic power capable of subjecting some people to others’ wills, in violation of equal moral standing. The thesis of this book is that four largely forgotten nineteenth-century Lockeans developed two distinct, internally consistent, and mutually incompatible resolutions to this tension within Lockean property theory. In one camp, Thomas Hodgskin and Lysander Spooner—the libertarian radicals—argued that although we each hold an equal negative liberty to claim pieces of the world, there is no positive common right to the world. Consequently, the demands of moral equality can be satisfied under conditions of enormous economic inequalities. In the other camp, John Bray and Henry George—the egalitarian radicals—argued that since all people are morally equal, each of us has a positive right to share the world with everyone else. Consequently, the demands of moral equality cannot be met except under substantially (though not totally) egalitarian economic conditions. It is important to work through the argumentative successes and failures of these relatively unknown thinkers in order to understand how contemporary arguments about equality and property developed and, consequently, how we might apply them to contemporary problems.

Toward a New Left-Lockeanism

The Lockean radicals developed two internally consistent resolutions to Locke’s property problem. But what should we draw from the radicals as we seek to address that problem today? The chapter argues that we should reject the right-wing solution offered by Hodgskin and Spooner in favor of a version of the left-wing solution crafted by Bray and George. It begins by showing why Lockeans reject the Hobbesian interpretation of natural rights, according to which everyone has a liberty to everything but a claim to nothing: If Hobbes were right, we would not enjoy equal high status, but rather equal susceptibility to one another’s arbitrary impositions. The reasons that count against the Hobbesian conception of natural rights, however, also count against a right-wing interpretation of Lockean natural rights. For if we are not common world-owners, we are liable to be subject to the arbitrary impositions of those who do come to own the world. But does this mean we should follow contemporary left-libertarians in interpreting our common right to the world as a right to own privately an equal division of the world? Or should we follow Bray and George in interpreting our common right as a right to share equally in governing and using the world as a permanently public resource? The chapter argues that the left-libertarian picture cannot accommodate an adequate conception of equality, and that we must develop a left-Lockean political economy on the assumption that the world is a permanently public common resource.

Spooner

More than any other thinker, Lysander Spooner has a plausible claim to the title of founder of libertarianism. In his mature works, he developed the conception of Lockean rights that began to emerge in Hodgskin into a nearly anarcho-capitalist vision that would later reemerge in the philosophy of twentieth-century libertarians like Robert Nozick. But Spooner did not begin his scholarly life in quite this vein. In his early works, Spooner defends a version of liberal republicanism that has room for collective rights and is by no means anarchistic. As his career wore on, however, he began to argue that political morality is a kind of a priori natural science—or, perhaps, mathematics—of individual rights, complete and determinate in all its details and innately knowable by all who reflect on it. This conception of justice left little room for legitimate political legislation (since there is no facet of human life it does not govern on its own), let alone collective political rights. So, in the end, Spooner, more clearly than his philosophical forbear Hodgskin, developed a right-libertarian solution to Locke’s property problem. According to this solution, there is no positive common right to the world, so there is no tension between a natural common right to the world and natural private property rights.