Locke Quote on Property: Labor and Self-Ownership

Quote

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet 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. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V (1689)

Author

John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher and physician, one of the founders of empiricism and of liberal political thought. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) established the empiricist theory of knowledge — the mind as a blank slate furnished by experience — and his Two Treatises of Government (1689) provided the philosophical justification of limited government, natural rights, and revolution against tyranny. His ideas shaped the American and French revolutions and remain the foundation of liberal constitutionalism.

Source

The quotation comes from Chapter V, "Of Property," of the Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690 (with 1689 on the title page). The chapter is Locke's answer to a problem that had occupied the natural law tradition since the middle ages: how private property can be reconciled with the biblical and Stoic teaching that the earth belongs to all. Locke's solution — labor as the origin of property — became the standard account of property in the liberal tradition and the starting point for both classical liberalism and, later, libertarianism.

Context

Locke wrote the Second Treatise in the 1680s, during the crisis over the succession to the English throne, and published it after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 to justify the deposition of James II. The chapter on property is his answer to the absolutist political theory of Robert Filmer, who had argued that all property and all authority derive from Adam's original dominion. Against Filmer, Locke argues that God gave the earth to humankind in common — but that common ownership is compatible with individual property, because each person owns his own person and his own labor. When a person works on what nature provides — gathering acorns, cultivating land, drawing water — he mixes his labor with it and makes it his. The argument is thus at once an answer to Filmer, a justification of the emerging market economy, and a defense of the working individual against the claims of sovereigns.

Meaning

The quotation contains the three premises of Locke's labor theory of property. First, the earth is originally common: "the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men." Second, the person is self-owned: "every man has a property in his own person." Third, labor transfers ownership to its product: what a person "removes out of the state that nature hath provided" and "hath mixed his labour with" becomes "his property." The argument's power lies in its combination of premises: because I own myself, I own my labor; because I own my labor, I own what it is mixed with. Locke immediately adds the famous proviso — a person may appropriate "as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils" — which limits acquisition to what can be used without waste. The theory has been enormously influential and enormously contested: it grounds the classical liberal defense of property, it was invoked by Robert Nozick's entitlement theory in the twentieth century, and its critics have asked why mixing labor with something owned in common should give ownership rather than destroy the labor.

Related Wisdom

Locke's account of property belongs to the philosophical exploration of rights and justice. His premise of self-ownership has become a cornerstone of both liberal and libertarian thought, while his proviso has been used by egalitarians to argue that appropriation is legitimate only when it leaves "enough and as good" for others — a principle with far-reaching implications for distributive justice. The passage also stands in the tradition of social contract theory, in which the legitimacy of government is derived from the consent of individuals with natural rights — a tradition that runs from Hobbes through Locke to the present.