Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Locke; Ziel der Gesellschaft: Schutz des Eigentums

Kurzinhalt: ... if peace and safety are the indispensable conditions of plenty, and the public good of the people is identical with plenty ... if all this is true, it follows that the end of civil society is "the preservation of property."

Textausschnitt: 244a If the end of government is nothing but "the peace, the safety, and public good of the people"; if peace and safety are the indispensable conditions of plenty, and the public good of the people is identical with plenty; if the end of government is therefore plenty; if plenty requires the emancipation of acquisitiveness; and if acquisitiveness necessarily withers away whenever its rewards do not securely belong to those who deserve them--if all this is true, it follows that the end of civil society is "the preservation of property." "The great and chief end ... of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property." By this central statement Locke does not mean that men enter civil society in order to preserve those "narrow bounds of each man's small property" within which their desires were confined by "the simple, poor way of living" "in the beginning of things" or in the state of nature. Men enter society in order not so much to preserve as to enlarge their possessions. The property which is to be "preserved" by civil society is not "static" property--the small farm which one has inherited from one's fathers and which one will hand down to one's children--but "dynamic" property. Locke's thought is perfectly expressed by Madison's statement: "The protection of [different and unequal faculties of acquiring property] is the first object of government."1 (Fs) (notabene)

245a It is one thing to say that the end of government or of society is the preservation of property or the protection of the unequal acquisitive faculties; it is an entirely different thing and, as it would seem, an entirely superfluous thing to say, as Locke does, that property antedates society. Yet, by saying that property antedates civil society, Locke says that even civil property--the property owned on the basis of positive law--is in the decisive respect independent of society: it is not the creation of society. "Man," i.e., the individual, has "still in himself the great foundation of property." Property is created by the individual and in different degrees by different individuals. Civil society merely creates the conditions under which the individuals can pursue their productive-acquisitive activity without obstruction. (Fs)