Of Property

Chapter 5 opens with the apparent paradox of private property: God gave the earth to mankind in common. How then does any individual come to own anything in particular, without the consent of all the rest? Locke's answer begins with self-ownership. Every person has a property in their own person — a property to which no one else has any right. From self-ownership flows ownership of one's own labour. And from ownership of labour flows ownership of whatever one mixes one's labour with — the acorns picked up under an oak, the land tilled from a state of waste, the game killed in the field. Labour removes things from the common stock of nature and makes them particular. The appropriation is legitimate because it is the extension of the one uncontestable ownership: the ownership of oneself.

Locke sets two limits on acquisition in the state of nature. The sufficiency proviso: one may appropriate only while there is enough and as good left in common for others. The spoilage proviso: one may take only as much as one can use before it perishes; God made nothing for man to spoil or destroy. Within these limits, private property is natural and just, and no further consent of the community is required.

The decisive move comes when Locke introduces money — a durable, non-perishable medium of exchange that men have agreed by tacit consent to use as a store of value. Money dissolves the spoilage limit: one can accumulate without waste by converting perishable goods into durable currency. This, Locke argues, is the historical origin of unequal property holdings, and since men consented to money, they consented implicitly to the inequality it produces. Whether chapter 5 is the philosophical foundation of capitalism or a careful account of natural limits on accumulation — depending on which paragraph one stops at — has been the most argued question in Locke studies ever since.