John Locke’s career as a political economist, and more commonly as a philosopher of politics, seems to have been distilled down to the now famous Second Treatise on Government, but in light of recent criticism over his involvement with the slave trade, it seems that there is more illiberality to this man of ostensibly liberal disposition even if one does not engage the ad hominems and concentrates solely on the substance of Mr. Locke’s published works. The items in question are a small tract entitled ‘Venditio’ and a series of recommendations for the revival of Elizabethan Poor Laws.[1] The matter is substantially put into motion by Geraint Parry, who notes that: “Locke’s draconian proposals for the treatment of the poor and the unemployed are of a piece with his position on individuality and paternalism. Charity was inappropriate to adult men with the capacity to be industrious.”[2] We are faced with an inconsistent philosopher — though that is the domain of most human philosophers — one whose claims for the treatment of the poor are irreconcilable with the claims he makes, in my opinion, in his famed Second Treatise. I do not intend to be unfair to Locke, which is why I will omit discussion of the infamous constitution he drew up for South Carolina, for it is my understanding that the aforementioned document was merely written and executed by Locke as part of his responsibilities as a public servant. It is the crux of my contention that Locke’s philosophy, wholly excluding his more practical pursuits, is decidedly illiberal in tone and scope, for it does not commit to all men as having some sort of dignity by virtue of existence, but rather only in accordance with the dignity accorded to men by virtue of the possession of some degree of physical property that is distinct from the labour and enterprise that each possesses. In the introduction to his recommendations on the problem of poor relief, Locke writes:
“If the cause of this evil be well looked into …. The growth of the poor must therefore have some other cause, and it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners; virtue and industry being as constant companions on the one side as vice and idleness are on the other.
“The first step, therefore, towards the setting of the poor on work, we humbly conceive, ought to be a restraint of their debauchery by a strict execution of the laws provided against it, more particularly by the suppressing of superfluous brandy shops and unnecessary ale houses, especially in country parishes not lying upon great roads.”[3]
What does this mean in terms of Locke’s assessment of man? Is man’s humanity inalienable, or is it merely the consequence of industry, of exercising the spade instead of the sceptre over other peoples’ fortunes? For Locke, it is clear: not only is poverty “evil,” but those who are confined to such a state are always invariably so because of their “vice and idleness” or general “debauchery” and alcoholism. Even further is the claim that there ought not to be any poor people in England, for “it will be found to have proceeded neither from scarcity or provisions, nor from want of employment for the poor, since the goodness of God has blessed these times with plenty.”[4] Locke plays on the commonplace trope of the poor, lazy, good-for-nothing beggar who has nothing to offer society, and only seeks to take from it what he thinks himself to be worth but refuses to subject himself to the claims of industry. This is important because of Locke’s “juxtaposition of the spade and sceptre [which] suggests, however, that the evil to be righted is less the grim, freedom-constraining poverty of this estate than it is the use of force (rule without right) to ‘command [persons] to work’.”[5] Locke’s humanity is so deeply tied to the idea of work and industry that a lack of it is seen as the summum malum of human existence: it creates a propensity to dominate over others that may seek to appropriate what is not theirs. In turn, Locke proposes gang-pressing poor men from the “maritime counties” into the Royal Navy, or sending them to “the next house of correction, there to be kept at hard labour for three years.”[6] The latter provisio is particularly applicable to those who are “maimed, or above 50 years of age.”[7] Tacit in Locke’s claims here is the recognition of man’s bestiality when deprived of economic means and when faced with privation. But Locke, in seeking to liberate man from Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, turns to another dystopic nightmare: it is where man is without tether to land, where his misfortune is met not with charity and assistance but constant disapprobation and subjection to the will of others. The summum malum that Locke expresses, domination, is only recognisable as the true summum malum if one has the capacity to subvert it by some means — economic means, in this context — and if one loses the means, one ought to not be regarded as having substantial membership in the social contract. In leaving one’s labour unused and without means of securing someone else’s labour to cut up the turfs, man loses his humanity. This, at any rate, is John Locke’s contention.
But the question arises: what must be done to those who leave the contract? How does once leave the contract? Before we delve into this, some key points from the Second Treatise, considered by many to be the definitive statement of Locke’s philosophical system, are worth reiterating, if only to emphasise the stark contrast between the principles of ‘An Essay on the Poor Law’ and the Second Treatise. Locke does not permit slavery in his Second Treatise because slavery attempts to alienate that which cannot be alienated, man’s freedom. He argues that “the Natural Liberty of man is to be free from any superior Power on Earth”[8] — that man cannot have the capacity to enslave himself. He later posits that “this Freedom from absolute, arbitrary Power, is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together.”[9] If man is not a slave, then, what is he? Locke says, without any qualification, that for all men: “every Man has a Property in his own Person: This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”[10] This leads us to the next question, namely, what separates a slave from a servant; this distinction is important because of Locke’s recommendations for the confinement of children between 3–14 to working schools and then to unpaid jobs until they are 23.[11]
The key passage, I content, is at §85 of the Second Treatise, where Locke argues that “a Freeman makes himself a Servant to another, by selling him for a certain time, the Service he undertakes to do, in exchange for Wages he is to receive.”[12] The definition of a servant is someone who alienates that which is the sole proprietor over, his time, in exchange for money: it is a commercial transaction. But there are limits upon this exchange: one must perform a specific task for a previously specified amount of time, outside of which said individual is free to pursue whatever ends he may so desire. “But,” Locke writes, “there is another sort of Servants, which by a peculiar Name we call Slaves, who being Captives taken in a just War, are by Right of Nature subjected to the absolute Dominion and arbitrary Power of their Masters. These Men, as I say, forfeited their Lives, and with it their Liberties, and lost their Estates; and being in the State of Slavery, not capable of any Property, cannot in that State be considered as any part of Civil Society; the chief End whereof is the Preservation of Property.”[13]
From the aforementioned passage, we get the following key considerations: that men are free, but their freedom is modified by losing a ‘just War’. Locke’s account of slavery here is not Aristotelian insofar as it does not endorse slavery as part of nature, but rather that it exists through the law of war. Those captured in a just war are slaves. The next thing we learn is that these men cannot own property, are always subject to the absolute will of their masters (for Locke, the summum malum is domination), and cannot bear the fruits of their labour. They are explicitly outside the pale of ‘Civil Society,’ and as such they loose their humanity to their status as captives. It is an endorsement of an account of man that is wholly inconsistent with his position as eternally and intrinsically free, for he cannot alienate his own nature, but even if we are to admit Locke’s account of slavery, we shall see that he has no qualms in enslaving the poor to achieve the alienation of their ‘evil’. The poor man, for Locke, is no different from a slave because, as Booth notes:
“What is contracted for is not, in Locke’s view, submission to an arbitrary will, and if we add other features of his contract theory, that power established by contract is restricted in magnitude, in purpose, and in time, we may conclude that though contractual slavery is impermissible for Locke the contactual sale of a finite amount of labour time under supervision is not.”[14]
Locke rules out the possibility for a free man who is not a captive in some just war[15] to voluntarily enslave himself. Contractual slavery, as Booth reminds us, is impermissible for Locke. But what does Locke recommend for the poor? Let us examine a few clauses from his recommendations:
“[40] That every master of the king’s ships shall be bound to receive without money, once every year … one boy, sound of limb, above 13 years of age, who shall be his apprentice for nine years.”[16]
“[10] That if any poor man, otherwise unemployed, refuse to work according to such order (if it be in a maritime county), he shall be sent to the next port, and there put on board some of his majesty’s ships, to serve there three years as before proposed; and that what pay shall accrue to him for his service there, above his diet and clothes, be paid to the overseers of the poor of the parish to which he belongs … toward the relied of other poor of the same parish ….”[17]
Locke is generally sceptical of the humane treatment of prisoners and other such persons who are committed to “hard labour” in “houses of corrections,” especially “since those houses are now in most counties complained of to be rather places of ease and preferment to the masters thereof than of correction and reformation to those who are sent tither.”[18] His solution is simple: to send, without pay, men away to prison if they are not from the maritime counties for three years of hard labour if they are poor and refuse to submit themselves to the penury and indignation of the slavish ‘working-schools’ or other such employment. He does not intend to pay them, as seen by [10]; no money save for the bare expenses due to the Navy are the poor man’s, whose labour will be taken by him but without recompense. The Navy is to further receive a bonded slave — Locke euphemistically refers to such an individual as an “apprentice” — to do anything as is demanded of him, for no pay and no choice whatsoever, such that it can profit off the poor. Recount Locke’s definition of a justly accorded slave, without the necessary condition of having being captured in a just war — “These Men, as I say, forfeited their Lives, and with it their Liberties, and lost their Estates; and being in the State of Slavery, not capable of any Property”[19] — and it becomes apparent that Locke fully intends to enslave the poor, who he is clear are incapable of living in ‘Civil Society’. Locke remarks, quite tellingly, that “the true and proper relief of the poor” lies in “taking care they do not live like drones upon the labour of others.”[20] Poverty is a moral issue: Locke thinks that it is the inexorable result of vice, and that is contributes to “the same of Christianity.”[21] It is the same brand of indifference and disenfranchisement that is so prevalent today, and is commonly blamed upon some version of neoliberalism or conservatism, whereas the failures of countries who embrace Lockeanism are by necessity forced to embrace it as a whole, and are therefore incompatible with the substantial political equality of all men.
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But this is not all there is to Locke, the economist. I will venture to point out that even though Locke was a mercantilist, he was only nominally so, and that the real effect of Locke’s political economy is the pursuit of some unencumbered, self-maximising being who is not bound by anything but a bare minimum set of expectations that Locke falsely conflates with the ‘Law of Nature.’[22] Let us take an example he provides in the short, infamous essay ‘Venditio,’ which deals with the nature of transactions:
“To have a fuller view of the matter, let us suppose a merchant of Danzig sends two ships laden with corn whereof the one puts into Dunkirk where there is almost a famine for want of corn and there he sellers his wheat for 20s a bushel whilst the other ship sells his at Ostend just [near]by for 5s. Here it will be demanded whether it not be oppression and injustice to make such an advantage of their necessity at Dunkirk to sell to them the same commodity at 20s per bushel which he sells for a quarter of the price but twenty miles off? I answer no. Because he sells at the market rate at the place where he is, but sells there no dearer to Thomas than he would to Richard.”[23]
This is Locke’s own writing, not the interpolation of some interpretation and its projection onto the original. Locke found that it was just to price gouge, especially when a small difference in place made a significant difference in price. The only condition was that some one ought not to take advantage of the customer in front of him, but that the merchant was wholly justified in selling four times over if it were only the ‘market’ price. How precisely this is in accordance with a more substantive definition of just price — such as that which John Duns Scotus or other scholastics would hold, a reasonable profit added upon costs — is not completely comprehensible. It is acceptable to force people to part with most of the means of their subsistence, but not all: there is little difference between the two, especially considering Locke’s understanding of the exploitative sale. As such, if selling in Dunkirk is just — the corollary to such a line of thought is merely this, that the institution of market controls, for eg., a price ceiling, is wholly unjust because it presents “the laws of the ‘invisible hand’ [which] are invisible precisely because they are not the emanations of someone’s will, so that in turn, the power they have over agents in the economy is not coercive.”[24] Thus, we are faced with the view in Locke’s ‘Venditio’ that can be summarised as follows: “the laws of the ‘invisible hand’ are invisible precisely because they are not the emanations of someone’s will, so that in turn, the power they have over agents in the economy is not coercive.”[25] Locke may have intended the liberation of man from the domination of other men — I like to think that he intended to remove from man the assistance of other men by recognising autonomous existence for the zoon politikon, the alienation of man from that which was fundamental to him — but he only managed in securing that part of man which seeks to be left alone to do as he pleases, without the constraints of a common moral system or a series of shared values that went beyond the bare minimum of respect for the individual in his own sphere of operations.
The condition upon which Locke seems to have advocated for his nuova scienza, of man’s contractual existence, is in effect no different from the Hobbesian view in effect. While the Leviathan provides a rather full view of man, however horrific and terrifying it may be, the Second Treatise leaves the uncomfortable bits, the praxis of principles, to other ‘minor’ essays that have been reflective of the Lockean principles upon which much of liberal democratic principles rest. The moral standpoints it presupposes as absolutes are not truly so; they are constantly open to revision. As we see in Locke’s ‘Essay on the Poor Laws,’ not merely political existence but virtue and vice are intrinsically linked to wealth. If the poor man is inherently vicious, prone to the sceptre, then for Locke the rich man’s industry is virtue. We see this attitude extended to the extreme in the ‘Venditio’, which shares, much like Locke’s natural jurisprudence, only a common name with the philosophy of the various schoolmen, and a similar language. But it is not concerned with what is right or virtuous for its own sake, but merely removes from virtue the demands of the whole, of improvement. That each man be sovereign in his own stead is a principle that may seem appropriate in limited measure escapes Locke; he turns the disenfranchised, the poor, and those without means not to the resources best inclined to help them, but to turn a profit for the state: if his principles were enacted, Locke reckons, “this would gain to England £130,000 per annum, which, in eight years, would make England above a million of pounds richer.”[26] It is this that man is reduced to: profit, and profit motives. And it is precisely this that the state is, too, for if we are to understand the spirit of Locke’s suggestions and recommendations, the sole plausible principle behind it is of singular standing: that the state ought to be engaged not in the pursuit of the summum bonum but engage in such enterprises as poor relief if it were to prove to be a sufficient return upon investment.
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In merely one essay, it is seen that Locke’s words in the Second Treatise are just that: words. They are not strongly held principles for Locke, and the extent to which we must hold Locke’s principles in the Second Treatise is open to question. It is not very often that we see a contractarian who is substantially so, who uses the foundational contract to render everything based upon a contract and not merely use the contract as a convenient device to explain away certain important aspects of the polis, like Socrates does in Crito. Locke thinks everything to be a question of contract: a Lockean life, then, is a thoroughly commercial life where all substantive relations are merely expressions of their commercial standing, and the world is reduced to the common measure that takes away all other sense of worth. The value of Plato’s dialogues — $60 for the Hackett edition — is to be understand as significantly less than, let us say, a Louis Vuitton handbag — ~$2,500. At any rate, that is the Lockean estimation of value. Booth notes that in Locke’s thought, the impersonality of the market “was taken as emancipatory.”[27] If Locke’s contractarinism is based on a series of inalienable rights, his own writings lead us to believe that declarations of inalienability are not to be taken seriously, that things considered insoluble may be dissolved in some liquid with a degree of contortion and distortion is such is demanded of it. Booth notes that contractarianism, and particularly Lockeanism, “ seeks to reconstruct the idea of community on egalitarian and voluntarist foundations; and that reconstruction, in turn, leads it to offer a new vision of the purposiveness of the community and so ultimately to a theory of the free and in a sense uncontained economy.”[28] To dismantle the household’s natural nature uproots the organicist approach to politics that Aristotle, and later Cicero, would take; it removes from the realm of politics any indication that the polis is to be aimed at the highest sovereign good, but introduces the perversity of the state as a “night-watchman.”[29]
This, then, is the substantiation of the difference between Locke and his pre-Hobbesian predecessors. Locke and Hobbes give expression to a man who is constantly yearning for more, seeking felicity and approbation. Their man is the necessary foundation for any science of economics divorced from more pressing concerns, namely, that one must do what is right before what is profitable, that what is inherently beneficial is what is right, not what expediency demands in the moment. Coercion takes upon a new definition: man is not coerced by privation, as we see in ‘Venditio’ — it is explicitly in accordance with justice that the merchant sell at the misdirected price of the market and engage in price gouging — but even such a strong-blooded libertarian as Hayek denounces such free-market bona fides in the Road to Serfdom. Geraint Parry notes that
“The analogy between religion and economic activity is a very exact one for Locke and one which he believes should be pursued in practice. The proper attention to religious concerns is “profitable” to the individual. Religion is “commerce” between the individual and God with which the government has no concern.”[30]
In reducing the polis to a night-watchman, Locke has replaced morality with a commercial ethic. The relationship between God and Man is not a substantial relation — it is a relation founded on give and take, on the vagaries of commerce. It is not a faith that is based upon conviction, belief, moral or theological concerns, or other, more pressing principles, but a faith contingent upon what Adam Smith thinks is the natural propensity of man: if, for Adam Smith, the division of labour is “the necessary, through very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility: the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,”[31] for Locke, this propensity exists not merely in the realm of commerce but far beyond it. Locke’s man is truly Homo Economicus, the rational, self-maximising individual. This is surprisingly prominent in A Letter Concerning Toleration,[32] as Parry emphasises.[33] Locke writes:
“In private domestick Affairs, in the management of Estates, in the conservation of Bodily Health, every man may consider what suits his own conveniency, and follow what course he likes best. No man complains of the ill management of his Neighbour’s Affairs. No man is angry with another for an Error committed in sowing his Land, or in marrying his Daughter. No body corrects a Spend-thrift for consuming his Substance in Taverns. …The Care therefore of every man’s Soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself.”[34]
Leaving aside the fact that Locke clearly denigrates “Spendthrift[s] for consuming his Substance in Taverns”[35] in his essay on the Poor Laws or forces the poor into draconian conditions, we must understand that Locke is advocating for a government that does not have as its aim the common weal, the pursuit of the common good, but quite literally the job of a night-watchman. The best leader, for Locke, does not care about virtue or vice, and is not appalled by public health crises — he would do nothing in the midst of the pandemic we are faced with, or push solely for the enforcement of the laws, and nothing else. The only thing that matters, Locke states, in both spiritual and temporal affairs, then, is man’s “own conveniency.”[36] Locke would not enforce vaccination, mask-wearing, or such necessary measures as may be reasonably demanded to control a pandemic; he would squarely lay all the responsibility upon the individual. This is a theme that is far too prominent across Locke’s work.
Is Locke more humane than Hobbes? Most emphatically not. Both are cut from the same cloth, and whilst the former has been in vogue for some time now, we cannot escape the inevitable. The contractarian approach to politics is rotten, spoilt, and despicable. It conjures a manifestly unjust state that strays from what nature demands of man. It countenances injustice and vice for the sake of prosperity and individual autonomy. Locke may write multiple letters on intolerance and more tracts and treatises on government, but it is amply clear that he is a deeply intolerant man whose specialisation in the Dark Arts is the pursuit and development of tyrannical governments that do not have as their aim the pursuit of the common good.
[1] Both texts are to be found in: John Locke, Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ‘Venditio’ is at 339–43; ‘An Essay on the Poor Law’ is at 182–200. I owe some debt to William James Booth’s Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), for pointing out Locke’s world beyond the realm of the Second Treatise, and for addressing significant chunks of this argument.
[2] Geraint Parry, ‘Individuality, Politics and the Critique of Paternalism in John Locke’, Political Studies 12, no. 2 (1964): 163–77, at 175.
[3] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 183.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Booth, Households, 150.
[6] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 185–86.
[7] Ibid, 186.
[8] Locke, Second Treatise, §22; hereinafter 2T.§.
[9] 2T.23.
[10] 2T.27.
[11] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 191–92.
[12] 2T.85.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Booth, Households, 165.
[15] How he reconciled the Atlantic slave trade to his concept of the ‘Just War’ is rather puzzling for me. It was by no means a ‘just war’ conventionally understood.
[16] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 198.
[17] Ibid, 188.
[18] Ibid, 185.
[19] 2T.85.
[20] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 189.
[21] Ibid, 190.
[22] I must hesitate in calling Locke’s ‘Law of Nature’ the same as the venerable natural law of the Scholastics.
[23] Locke, ‘Venditio,’ 341–42.
[24] Booth, Households, 155.
[25] Ibid, 156.
[26] Locke, ‘Essay on the Poor Law,’ 189.
[27] Booth, Households, 153.
[28] Ibid, 97.
[29] Ibid, 143.
[30] Parry, ‘The Critique of Paternalism in John Locke,’ 174.
[31] Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 1.2.1.
[32] John Locke, ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration,’ in John Locke, Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–68.
[33] I was led to this part of the letter by Parry, who mentions some parts of it in passing.Parry, ‘The Critique of Paternalism in John Locke,’ 174–75.
[34] Locke, ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration,’ 138, 139.
[35] Ibid, 138.
[36] Ibid.