Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

themselves to be oppressed ... by the injustice, cruelty, and malice of an ill
magistrate. . . ."*
If liberty found its martyr in Algernon Sidney, it found its elaborated
systematic defense in the Essay Concerning Civil Government of the noted
philosopher John Locke. The Essay, we now know, was written in the early
1680s at about the same time as Sidney's Discourses; it was therefore written
when Locke too was a revolutionary plotter against Stuart rule, and not,
as had been assumed, as a conservative ex post facto rationale for the
Glorious Revolution of 1688.**
There were two strains in Locke's Essay: the individualist and libertarian,
and the conservative and majoritarian, and examples of caution and inconsistency
are easy to find. But the individualist view is the core of the philosophic
argument, while the majoritarian and statist strain appears more in
the later, applied portions of the theory. We know, furthermore, that Locke
was an extraordinarily secretive and timorous writer on political affairs, even
for an age when criticism could and did lead to exile and death. Hence, it is
not unreasonable to assume that the conservative strain in Locke was a
camouflage for the radically libertarian core of his position; certainly it was
not difficult to concentrate on that core and make it the groundwork of a
libertarian creed. And Locke's Essay was particularly worthwhile in that it
soared above the usual narrowly parochial concern of the day for time and
place: from English liberty, ancient privileges, and the common law, to a
universal abstract political philosophy grounded on the nature of man.
Locke began his analysis with the "state of nature"—not as an historical
hypothesis but as a logical construct—a world without government, to penetrate
to the proper foundation of the state. In the state of nature, each man
as a natural fact has complete ownership or property over his own person.
These persons confront unused natural resources or "land," and they are able
to maintain and advance themselves by "mixing their labor with the land."
Through this mixing, the hitherto unowned and unused natural resources
become the property of the individual mixer. The individual thereby acquires
a property right not only in his own person but also in the land that he has
brought into use and transformed by his labor.*** The individual, then, may
*The dying words of another contemporaneous martyr of the Stuarts, the Cromwellian
Colonel Richard Rumbold, also served as inspiration to such revolutionary
Americans as Thomas Jefferson: "I am sure there was no man born . . . with a saddle
on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him."
"•''See the Peter Laslett edition of John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge:
At the University Press, 1960).
***Locke adopted the curious, theologically oriented view that the original unused land
was given to mankind in common and was then taken out of this common stock by individual
labor. Actually, in fact, original land being unused was therefore unowned by
anyone, individual or communal. It should be mentioned that, contrary to some historians,
Locke's "labor theory of property" has no relation to the "labor theory of value"
of Karl Marx and other socialist authors.
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