John Locke's use of classical legal theory

Abstract

John Locke's chapter on property in the Second Treatise of Government undermines the feudal theory of tenure and liegnancy prevailing in English law and restores classical allodial natural property rights to all individuals. Then, in order to explain the transformation of common property into private property, Locke proposes his “labor theory” of appropriation: whatever common property I “mix” my labor with becomes private property. This is a rather strained adaptation of the classical legal theory of the ownership of mixtures and merged entities, which can be found in Justinian's Institutes and Digest. Although Locke's earlier writings show no familiarity with legal literature except for Grotius and Pufendorf, at the end of his life he consciously applied classical theory while avoiding the appearance of doing so by adapting it to the Protestant concept of labor as an intrinsically valuable activity and transforming that activity into a quasi-material entity capable of combination with other material entities.