Events

The premise that the Earth was originally given to all men in common and the implications drawn from it is one of the most vexed parts of John Locke's political thought. Particularly divisive is the question of whether Locke was using it primarily to defend the accumulation of property, and if so, what the limits on this accumulation were. In this article, I provide a new perspective on this issue by comparing Locke's employment of the premise to theological texts from his time which use it in a similar fashion. This, I suggest, shows that Locke was in fact using it to argue about questions of property, but that he was doing so in a religious way that implied an extensive set of duties, meaning that it cannot be reduced to a mere defence of appropriation or colonialism.