Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Locke 2; Hobbes: Streben nach Macht (Gut) - L.: Flucht vor Hunger (Übel); Individuum: Recht auf Eigentum von Natur aus; Beziehung zu Natur durch Arbeit; Natur: Wert durch Arbeit, nicht aus sich selbst; L.: Individuum "einsamer" als jenes Hobbes'

Kurzinhalt: Locke's analysis: the individual has a natural right to a property that has no natural limits. It has no natural limits because the invention of money allows us to make any corruptible goods incorruptible ... From this fact, a paradoxical consequence ...

Textausschnitt: 42a The man about whom Locke speaks in his political Treatises is simpler and poorer than Hobbesian man. But, as we have seen, this simplification is in a sense authorized by Hobbes himself: the man who makes a contract prefers security to power. One could even say that Lockean man is more Hobbesian than Hobbes's man. The one who is driven by the desire for power is driven by the desire for a specifically human good, even if the pursuit of this "good" has disastrous consequences; the one who is driven by hunger is driven simply by the desire to flee from evil.1 In simplifying Hobbes, Locke makes him more coherent. (Fs)

42b Of course, making Hobbes coherent was not Locke's primary intention. It was rather to attach rights directly to the solitary individual from the state of nature. If man fundamentally is hungry man, he is radically separated from his fellow man; his only relationships are with his body and with nature. If Locke succeeds in basing individual rights solely on hunger, on the relationship of the solitary individual with nature, he will have shown how human rights can be an attribute of the lone individual. (Fs)

42c Take then the individual in the state of nature who goes off in search of food.2 He gathers plums from a tree and eats them. To say that he eats them means that he appropriates them. He has the right to eat them because, if he did not, he would die. This right is thus independent of any consent of other individuals. Locke observes that if everyone had to wait for others' consent to appropriate the fruits of the earth, humanity would have disappeared long ago. Since our man appropriates the plums legitimately, he is legitimately their owner. The decisive question then is the following: at what point does he become their legitimate owner? Answer: when he takes them from the common domain to use them for satisfying his needs; in other words, when he picks them from the tree. What distinguishes the picked plums from those remaining on the tree? The former have been transformed by the labor of the individual, who has combined them with the work of his hands. Every man being naturally the owner of his person and hence of his labor, previously common property can become his own because he has mixed his labor with it. He has become its legitimate owner. Property enters the world through labor, and each individual has within himself the greatest source of property; because he is a laborer and owns himself, he is the owner of his labor as well. (Fs)

42d Thanks to this simple analysis, Locke established two important propositions. The right to property is essentially prior to the institution of society, independent of others' consent or political law; in other words, the right to property is a right belonging to the lone individual and closely linked to the urgent necessity of nourishing oneself. Property is natural and not conventional. The second proposition is this: the relationship of man to nature is defined by labor. Man is not naturally a political animal; he is an owning and laboring animal, owning because he is laboring, laboring in order to own. (Fs) (notabene)

43a Thus Locke solidly established the right to property. He broke with tradition in making it a strictly individual right. Certainly, tradition considered it as a natural right, but it emphasized the "social" aspect of property, its being regulated by law or social duty. It is true that on this point Locke at first seems to accept a natural limitation to the natural right to property. The right to property in this first stage of the state of nature is, according to Locke, limited by two obligations. On the one hand, I have no right to appropriate more than I can consume, since that would be wasteful. If I gather more plums than I can eat, the ones left over will rot. On the other hand, I must leave some plums for others, so that they can appropriate in their turn the fruits of the earth. (Fs)

43b But Locke then abolishes these two limits that he initially posed. As for the first, one cannot exactly speak of an obligation, of a moral or political limit. Gathering fruit to let it rot is simply irrational, absurd conduct. The limit which at first seems moral is in fact a physical one. I have no right to appropriate more than I can consume, simply because I cannot. I do not have the means to do it. Furthermore, anything "appropriated" in this way would not be appropriated but wasted, hence lost. Now, suppose I find a means of avoiding this waste, by agreeing with my fellow men to exchange the naturally corruptible goods for an equivalent of incorruptible ones, for example, gold and silver. Then the accumulation will be limitless because it will no longer involve waste. (Fs)

43c As for the second limit, it seems that the difficulty is greater. What actually guarantees that, once I have stripped the plum tree, another plum tree will be available for my neighbor? After all, Hobbes saw in such a rivalry for goods one of the sources of the war of all against all, in which each person has a right over everything and everyone. In response, Locke appears initially to suggest that, in the original state of nature, the fruits of the earth being overabundant, each person could appropriate them for his consumption without wronging others. But that is only a historical hypothesis, and a contestable one at that. Therefore Locke, unlike Rousseau, scarcely insists on it. (For Rousseau this hypothesis will become an essential element in his interpretation of the human condition.) Locke introduces a consideration that changes the terms of the problem: the plums are a less significant form of available property than land. Ownership of land is also born from labor: I am naturally the legitimate owner of the land I cultivate with my labor. Now, tilling the land makes it produce much more than it would produce spontaneously. Therefore, by appropriating a portion of land through labor, far from reducing humanity's common good, I add to it: I add the fruits of the earth that owe their existence to my labor. And it is obvious that no one else has a right to these goods, since they are not given by nature but produced by my labor. Locke insists on this point: it is human labor, and not nature, that gives things their value. The natural state of nature, so to speak, is not abundance but scarcity. (Fs)

44a To sum of Locke's analysis: the individual has a natural right to a property that has no natural limits. It has no natural limits because the invention of money allows us to make any corruptible goods incorruptible, and because the value of things comes from human labor and not from nature's bounty. From this fact, a paradoxical consequence ensues: the right of property is naturally separated from the labor that is at its origin. From the moment that money makes it possible to represent and preserve quantities of labor, the legitimate owner is no longer necessarily the laborer. It suffices that the exchange be free for the property to preserve its value, and thus continue to represent the quantity of labor that it incorporates. For example, an individual who lives from the buying and selling of goods without producing them is a legitimate owner. He robs no one, takes nothing away of value in the society, but rather preserves value, putting it into circulation and making it work and thereby increasing it. Once property, which enters the world through labor, becomes a value represented by money, the owner's right is legitimately separated from the laborer's right. (Fs)