Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: This article proposes that Locke's basic property-making unit, and thus also contracting unit, is the household rather than the individual.Progressing through two parallel arguments concerning Locke's theory of property-one focuses on the theory of mixing in Roman law and the other on more traditional understanding of labor-it shows how a plurality of people and animals is united under the rule of a single person, allowing the formal category of the individual to expand beyond its corporal limits, into the domestic domain.In some sense, this is an extended version of Pateman's argument concerning the sexual contract, placing the latter within an intersectional framework that moves beyond the question of kinship and the family to the economic questions of class and production, as well as colonial questions of expansion and racial hierarchization.Locke's concept of property begins with the body.The first principle from which private property can be deduced is the idea of one's "property in his own person": 1 the idea, common at the time, that the body "belongs" to the "I," and thus should be seen as an extension of the person.2 Moreover, the first right (the right to self-preservation) emerges from natality itself, from our existence as corporeal creatures."Men, once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence" ( §25). 3 We will soon see that the body's nourishment-eating and consuming the world's goods-is indeed key to Locke's theory of property.And finally, the body is what makes private property: "The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his" ( §27).But how does the body make private property?Many readers of Locke have focused on the effect of removal from nature which immediately follows the above words: "whatever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided" is his property ( §27, my italics).4 Some have further tied "removal" to the notion of improvement, linking this argument to Locke's emphasis on the value that can be added to things through labor.5 But equally significant is the claim that Locke makes here about mixing: the mixing of labor with the thing that thereby becomes property.Or, in Locke's words, "Whatever… he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own" becomes his property ( §27, my italics).The idea that property emerges from the mixing of labor and object is far from clear, however, and the principal argument of this article is developed through unpacking it.I offer two main propositions.First, I argue that this idea of mixing should be understood as rooted in Roman law (a link which has been overlooked also by those who worked to identify the influence of Roman law on Locke's theory), thereby offering a revisited interpretation of the legal traditions underpinning Locke's theory of property.Second, and as a broader conceptual intervention, I argue that if we follow this idea of mixing-and, as I show, even if we take other interpretational paths-we need to revisit the underlying conceptualization of "the body" as a property-making unit.I propose that the basic unit to which the right to property attaches, according to Locke, is eventually not the individual body but rather the household.I then propose that enclosure serves as the image and technique that allows this economic territorial unit to serve as an analogy of the individual body.In this argument, I follow Carole Pateman's argument in The Sexual Contract that it is the couple-rather than the individual-that enters into the contract as a single contracting unit.(That is: that the social contract is preceded by a sexual contract, through which the wife/woman is subjugated to the man/husband, and comes to be represented by him, as the sole "individual").However, because I situate my claims in a different domain-property rather than sex-I arrive at a somewhat different (albeit complementary) conclusion.Both arguments rest on a third proposition, now quite well-established in the literature, that Locke's theory of property sought to justify England's colonial expansion in America.6 The three arguments are linked in several ways; however, each stands on its own, offering different interventions into the literature concerning Locke.After a brief outline of the concept of property I work with here (section 1, Property: A Framework), the two main sections of this article progress through two frameworks Locke relied on to support his theory of property.Each section claims, from a different perspective, that chapter five of the Second Treatise entails a shift in its latent conceptualization of property-making units: from the individual body to the household.Because Locke's Social Contract is, to a large degree, a measure to protect property, this articulation of property-making units extends well This is the version of the article/chapter accepted for
Source: Theory & Event
Author: Hagar Kotef
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4223968045