The Role of Property

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The Role of Property In the seventeenth-century, England was recovering from the "Glorious Revolution" and political thought centered on the issues of nature and the limits of government. Two great political thinkers, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes took a scientific approach to analyze government and focused on the state of nature and natural rights of individuals. Locke was particularly interested in property and governments role in the protection of property. He believed that God gave the world to men to use common, but also gave them reason to make the best use of it (Locke 17). According to Locke, the best use of the land and resources involved gaining property, using the word in a narrow sense. He also used the term 'property' in a broad sense, which he defined as people's "lives, liberties, and estates" (75). A French thinker in the eighteenth-century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau basically agreed with Locke on the definition of property in a narrow sense, but took an opposing view to Locke's regarding the effects property had on society. Rousseau was a Romanticist and believed that property was the first aspect of injustice. The opposing views of Locke and Rousseau are obvious in their respective works, Second Treatise of Government and Discourse of the Origin of Inequality. Locke uses the term property in two ways in the Second Treatise of Government. Locke usually uses the term in a broad sense, which includes anything that belongs to a person. This includes their own life and liberty as well as their material possessions. In this sense, Locke calls these natural rights 'property'. Under this definition, Locke says the main reason people leave the state of nature is the preservation of their property. The se... ... middle of paper ... ...situation that did not exist in the state of nature…" (Rousseau 59). Therefore, Rousseau says that the first man who claimed a piece of land his own could have saved the human race from "crimes, wars, murders, …miseries and horrors" if he would only have realized that the earth belonged to everyone (60). It is ironic that Rousseau even uses an axiom of Locke's in his argument, "where there is no property, there is no injury" (64). Rousseau applies this literally but it seems that Locke believes the advantages of society outweigh these injuries he mentions. The preservation of property is one of Locke's fundamental political principles. Unlike Aristotle, Locke doesn't believe that the purpose of government is to make people moral. Locke is very concerned with the limits of government, such as making laws public and no taxation without consent.

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