OPPapers.com

4) Explain And Evaluate The Way In Which Locke Related His Theory Of Property To His Theory Of Government.

John Locke¡¦s labour theory of property and government has won attention from a staggering range of interpreters. Some analysts have hailed the theory as the greatest achievement of Locke¡¦s political writing, whereas others have scorned it as critically misdirected and shallow. For numerous analysts both friendly and hostile, the labour theory functions as the core of Lockean individualism, but for others the theory serves as the foundation of Locke¡¦s Communitarianism. Many critics and supporters of Locke have found his reasoning to be firm, but some admirers and some detractors have found it to be insubstantial. Therefore our task is to critically evaluate this theory in terms of explaining what it is, how the two premises are interrelated and to consider justifications for inequality and private property.
Firstly what must be addressed is the problem of property. The difficulty is we don¡¦t know what initial view of property Locke was using when he wrote his thesis. If we take the liberal view it means that Government is based on consent, monarchy and the rule of law. An alternative is the opinion of bourgeois property rights, meaning that property is given by natural rights and the government ultimately owns it. However, it is generally agreed today that the interpretation of property is the Christian view, which opens up the debate between John Locke and Robert Filmer, the main reason being that the two disagree over the notion of the Christian view. ¡§Filmer¡¦s claims were claims about the God-given rights of the crown. What he appears to have gouged out of Locke in his implicitly radical response was not just a prudential judgement about how extensive the rights of the crown should be but a horror at the idea that limitless royal power should be construed as a gift God.¡¨ This is also known as the divine right of kings. In this way Filmer rejects the existence of private property, because the monarch owns all property. In what you could call a...