Private Property: John Locke And Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the sixteen to nineteenth centuries, philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had many opposing thoughts, opinions and very distinctive notions on obtaining and owning your own private property. Locke ultimately believes that private property is a vital necessity in society and has a positive effect on mankind. In contrast, Rousseau perceives property as the root of the corruption and ultimate disgrace of society. Private property is worthwhile and a right god gave to individuals according to Locke, meanwhile, to Rousseau it is only meaningful when society as a whole will benefit equally.

John Locke believes that man has a right to private property. According to Locke, God gave man this plentiful earth, with all of its plants and animals, to work on and nourish our bodies with. Locke credits god to

everything good that happens to us. He writes about god stating “he that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under and oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriates them to himself. Nobody can deny the nourishment is from him” (Locke, 269).God gave us this earth to “make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience” (Locke, 271). In this state of nature, according to Locke, men were born free and equal: free to do what they wished without being required to seek permission from any other man, and equal in the sense of there being no natural political authority of one man over another. Locke believed, which most writers and philosophers of his time agreed that God gave the earth and its fruits to all men and women for their own personal use. With that stance in mind, the problem he faced and wanted to challenge was a way to explain how all of these resources available can become someone’s valid private property which other men can be dismissed from. To claim one’s own private property, Locke argues that if you, your own person, labors over the land, removes and adds certain things to this estate, ultimately is distinguishes the rights of the other men. He believes that when one man works and labors over the property, then he becomes the soulful owner of the land fairly. Locke said, “The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men” (Smith,1).
Although Locke uses the term labor to characterize the act by which men create property, the meaning itself can be defined as many things and be very broad and differ on some opinions of labor of others.

For Locke, labor includes “picking up acorns from the ground, gathering apples from wild trees, tracking deer in the forest, and catching fish in the ocean” (Smith, 1). Labor can range from doing regular everyday actions to production of goods that involve effort and times. Under Locke’s opinion of what labor is, as long as it as an act consisting of purpose and determination, whether or not you produce a physical object, still counts as labor. When you want your own private property, putting in labor and effort, even if not for the greater good like creating means for production. In John Locke’s writings, ultimately the rich have an advantage, while he doesn’t focus too much on the greatest good for society, the rich and powerful seem to have an advantage and trump individuals not as wealthy. He focuses on the aspects of each individual, and doesn’t really focus on the side effects towards the society as a whole, which Rousseau will discuss

more.
For Rousseau, he talks a lot about the social contract regarding property. He believes that the invention of property is what was fall from grace for humanity. He argues “that a consequence of the luxuries brought about by civil society is the dissolution of morals” (Rousseau, 271). This is when private property was first being introduced, he found that conditions of inequality became way more prominent then ever because of claiming ones own property. Some have property and others are forced to work for them, which then started created social classes. He focuses on the social stance and how property was involved in that. Then from that, people who started owning private properties wanted a government to protect it. Rousseau agreed with that it was in the interest of everyone to provide social equality. Rousseau was a firm believer in social equality.
The invention of owning private property pretty much overwhelmed his underlying virtues of equality which is why he wrote a lot on the social contract and how property affects that. But, the interest is always in favor of the rich and strong, so whoever was richer and stronger mostly had private property. That led to having natural social contract favored to the rich, which Rousseau views as responsible for the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers. Rousseau wants to have social equality, but says inequality is “resulted from life within civilized society” (Rousseau, 272), meaning that civil society in his mind, is only doing that opposite of what should be happening.
Agreeing with John Locke statement of “The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (Locke, 269), Rousseau writes in common “it is impossible to conceive of the idea of property arising from anything except manual labor” (Rousseau, 275). They both agreed that with labor and own personal victories, private land should be granted and earned with hard work and determination. Everyone has a natural right, being born on this earth as a child of god, to bare private property, neither write disagrees with that. Locke is more about the nature and more natural stance while Rousseau focuses on the social impact, but still coming to this same conclusion when it comes to regarding private property and labor.
The difference between these two conceptions of owning private property and labor is that Rousseau’s idea of property places the common good, the good of a community, before the private particular good. He believes that there cannot be fair work, labor, or property until the common good is set. Locke’s idea of property gives the sense that property has priority over society. Society is of course very important, but property is granted and sanction by heavenly power. Despite what his intentions may or may not have been, Locke’s theory of property rights undermines a commitment to the common good by justifying one in placing the good of one’s private good over the good of society. Property for Locke was more based on the premise of every human has natural rights, when Rousseau was more concerned about society. Rousseau was far more concerned with limiting those rights if they threatened to interfere with what he saw as an orderly society, and with securing and protecting the rights of the rich to maintain their property.
Both philosophers had many valid and strong reasons supporting their stance, they had some points that were similar and some points that disagreed with each other. They both want the greater good for mankind, but ultimately the main point that separates the two is how Locke focused more on the individual level and Rousseau focused on the higher society level. Therefore, concluding that private property is worthwhile and a right god gave to individuals according to Locke, meanwhile, to Rousseau it is only meaningful when society as a whole will benefit equally.