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Locke’s property in historical perspective: Natural law and the shaping of modern political common sense
Abstract
The conceptual and theoretical change in nineteenth century political philosophy entailed a deep recategorization of inherited traditions of thought that moulded modern political “common sense”, making our intellectual past to some extent either invisible or incomprehensible. This recategorization led to what might be called a new “interpretive conjuncture”. In this regard, it is important to note that in twentieth century political philosophy the dominant framework for understanding the past was a liberal one. This work will explore some of the conceptual and philosophical consequences of this issue by considering some misunderstandings of the work of John Locke. It is argued that some of Locke’s characteristic ideas, such as property, were rooted, among others, in a longstanding tradition of natural law thought, even though we now often encounter these ideas in distorted forms.
... Esta cláusula, a menudo definida como de "autopropiedad" ("every man has a property in his own person", II.27), reconoce la potestad de cada persona sobre sí misma por derecho propio (sui iuris), algo muy distinto a tener una propiedad absoluta de sí misma (sui dominus). Para Locke, no sólo las personas no pueden disponer ilimitadamente de sí mismas por ser criaturas de dios ("yet he has no liberty to destroy himself", II.6), sino que además esto es indeseable por cuanto legitimaría la alienación de la libertad política (Mundó, 2005(Mundó, , 2017a(Mundó, , 2017b(Mundó, , 2018. ...
... Esta noción de propiedad ha sido interpretada por una parte de la filosofía política contemporánea como mera posesión absoluta, exclusiva y excluyente, hurtándole el significado complejo que deliberadamente le otorgaba Locke(Mundó, 2017a;2017b; cf. II.173). ...
... Esta interpretación de la teoría política de Locke ha sido preterida por una parte de la filosofía política contemporánea, contribuyendo a proyectar un sesgo muy estable sobre su propuesta normativa, reduciéndola a un mero individualismo posesivo(Mundó, 2017a(Mundó, , 2017b(Mundó, , 2018. 6 Locke reproduce aquí una noción que, salvando diferencias substanciales de contexto e intencionalidad normativa, retrotrae a la estructura fiduciaria de la tutela ciceroniana. ...
La teoría republicana moderna de la concepción revolucionaria de la soberanía popular tuvo un eslabón fundamental en la filosofía política de John Locke, quien elaboró un argumento en favor de la libertad natural y de la autonomía de juicio de los individuos, y en contra de la sujeción natural y la alienación de la libertad política. Concibe la autoridad política como un poder político fiduciario instituido para el fin del bien público. Cuando los gobernantes actúan para fines distintos de los encomendados, arbitrariamente o por su interés propio, la confianza se pierde y el ejercicio del poder político regresa a las manos del pueblo libre.
Modern republican theory of the revolutionary conception of popular sovereignty had a fundamental link in the political philosophy of John Locke, who elaborated an argument in favour of the natural freedom and autonomy of judgment of individuals, and against the natural subjection and alienation of political freedom. He conceives of political authority as a fiduciary political power instituted for the end of public good. When the trustees act for ends other than those entrusted, arbitrarily or for his own interest, trust is forfeited and the exercise of political power returns to the hands of the free people.
... Malgrat el fet que ofereix un relat històric enganyós (completament o parcialment) sobre un assumpte, aquesta perspectiva persisteix en el temps, beneficiada per la diversitat de suports que rep. comú que emmarca la qüestió de la propietat (MUNDÓ, 2017a(MUNDÓ, , 2021. Com observa Robert W. Gordon: [...] la imatge per antonomàsia del domini absolut, amb el propietari gaudint de les coses materials sense interferències, segueix essent molt seductora. ...
... 7 For a critique of Nozick's stance in this same line of argument, cf. Mundó (2005). 8 Locke says, in addition, that if "man" were free to harm himself, he "would be a god to himself" (1997: 328). ...
Historically, there is a wide variety of political, legal, and economic processes by which the commons became private resources. For the last two centuries, the development of capitalism features intertwined processes of material dispossession and the proliferation of an absolutist conception of private property. In the last 50 years, the debate on the best management of the commons has limited itself to a narrow defense of the virtues of privatization or the need for social capital and co-evolution. While the former seeks to avoid the “tragedy of the commons,” the latter is based on proposals as fertile as Ostrom’s approaches to the governance of common-pool resources (CPR), involving the participation of other actors in addition to the state or the private sector. In this chapter, we analyze how the rhetoric of the absolutist conception of private property limits our understanding of the plurality and complexity of allocating these CPR into private hands in the real world. Through an in-depth case study of Chile, we reveal how the rules of the game, embedded in a neoliberal setting, have promoted a new wave of dispossession of the commons by way of the exclusive and excluding conception of property. Our main goal is to refresh the discussion of the “good governance” of the commons. To that end, we pursue a critical debate based on an interdisciplinary approach towards reconfiguring the concept of property (public, private, or in common) that may always be in harmony with the limits imposed by Nature and subject to legal protection to preserve humankind as the ultimate goal.
Keywords: Commons, Common-pool resources, Property, Intellectual property, Privatization, Capitalism, Neoliberalism
... This was the case in early modern popular political economies advocating for democratic control of common and public resources (Bosc 2019;Casassas and Wispelaere 2016;Casassas and Guerrero 2022). In the same sense, fiduciary conceptions of property served the purpose of connecting public sovereignty with the legitimation of property rights, acting as an argument for the social embeddedness of wealth and property (Bosc 2020;Laín 2020;Manjarín 2020;Mundó 2017). Lastly, the relationship between republicanism, property and democracy has been the focus of researchers looking for the continuities between republicanism and the socialist movement (Domènech 2004;Gourevitch 2015;Martínez-Cava 2020;Muldoon 2022;O'Shea 2020;Popp-Madsen 2021;Scotto 2020). ...
Over the last two decades republican thought has attracted a growing interest from political, moral and legal scholars. These contemporary theoretical syntheses of ‘neo-republican’ thought have been closely related to intellectual history and the idea of recovering an overshadowed tradition of political thought. In this vein, a classical set of historical moments and places (e.g., ancient Rome, renaissance Italy, civil-war England or revolutionary America among others) and specific political practices within those contexts appear to be the main source of what republicanism meant – and what it could mean today.
During the last two centuries, property understood as an exclusive and unlimited dominion became common sense. Before, the idea of property as a fiduciary relationship, which is still present in contemporary social constitutionalism, was closely linked to the view that the exercise of freedom entails the capacity to shape those property rights that channel socioeconomic life. Today, new ways to operation-alise such an approach must be found. This article explores the scope of 'direct strategies' (the state as proprietor, democratically limited forms of private property, and common property) and 'indirect strategies' (the distribution of 'social power' through the introduction of unconditional public policy schemes such as basic income) in the recovery of the idea and the practice of collective fiduciary control over the economic realm.
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