Response: Not So…

Abstract

It was not the exquisite self-consciousness of a Henry James that I had in mind when I wondered about equality and hierarchy in Locke, but the assertive self-consciousness or—what is for Locke ultimately the same—self-interestedness of an Andrew Carnegie, as exemplified both in the acquisition and the dispersion of his fortune. After all, it was Locke's genius in chapter five of the Second Treatise to make the case for private property on different grounds than had Aristotle because he conceived of property in a different way: as the fruit, not of nature, but of human creativity, less interesting for its use in leisure than for its origin in labor. As Strauss and even Zuckert have suggested, the brilliance of Locke's argument does not eclipse its underlying contradiction, that on the one hand the initial right to acquire seems to depend on there being “enough and as good” left for others, as though man lived amidst natural plenty, while on the other hand the account of the progressive rise in value consequent to enclosure (and the post hoc justification for property rights that it implies) describes natural scarcity. Holding that “a man may deliberately contradict himself in order to indicate his thought rather than to reveal it,” Strauss takes Locke's “revolutionary” teaching about “‘dynamic’ property” to indicate his true intention: