The Virtues of Commerce

I have conjoined the discussion of the historical meaning of the concept of the state of nature with the examination of Locke’s treatment of property because his account of the origins and development of property presupposes the historical existence of individuals in the state of nature. Locke’s justification for the right to own property and his assertion that political society is created in order to protect that right necessarily presuppose, as he notes in paragraph 138, that individuals ‘have property’ , and this empirical observation requires an argument grounded in the evidence supplied by history. It is important to Locke to prove that there is a temporal precedence to the institution of private property in relation to the origins of political society during ‘the first ages of the world’ (II, 36). Locke therefore sets out to show how individuals come to have property in the state of nature, how their claims to that property precede the existence of political society, and how the form of the latter is shaped by the particular nature of the property they possess. Since these arguments rest upon appeals to historical, demographic and sociological evidence derived from records of voyages to the New World, this aspect of Locke’s discussion of the state of nature has a distinctly empirical cast to it. 1