Hobbes and Locke on Human Nature; Locke on Property Rights

Parvini, Neema

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-39452-3_3

Neema Parvini²

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Abstract

This chapter argues that Thomas Hobbes and John Locke share Niccolò Machiavelli’s tragic vision of humanity. It has two parts. The first demonstrates how Hobbes is often misunderstood as presenting humans as fundamentally asocial and incapable of genuine altruism, which is to say, wholly selfish. His view is much more fully rounded than this, ultimately deriving from a view of humans as being driven more by their passions than by reason. The view of Locke as being generally more optimistic about his fellow man than Hobbes is also erroneous, and he is, if anything, more cynical and less trusting, especially of those in power. The second part defends Locke’s theory of property rights from several misinterpretations that have persisted over the centuries (e.g. that it is proto-socialist or arbitrary). It argues that these are based on a linguistic misunderstanding of what Locke meant by such fundamental terms as ‘labour’.

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Notes

1.
See Neema Parvini, Shakespeare’s Moral Compass (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 139–78, 201–23.
2.
Stephen Broadberry, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth: 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 29, 97–9.
3.
Ibid., pp. 344, 299, 236–9, 310–14.
4.
Ibid., p. 311.
5.
To help navigate this enormous and somewhat daunting field, I have found it useful to consult John Dunn and Ian Harris’s robust compilations of the landmark essays and articles: Hobbes: Great Political Thinkers 8, 3 vols (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997) and Locke: Great Political Thinkers 9, 2 vols (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997). Also useful: D.D. Raphael, Hobbes: Morals and Politics (1977; New York and London: Routledge, 2004); R.E.R. Bunce, Thomas Hobbes (New York and London: Continuum, 2009); and Eric Mack, John Locke (New York and London: Continuum, 2009).
6.
George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd edn. (1937; London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1963), p. 475.
7.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (1651; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.13.9, p. 84.
8.
Ibid., 1.13.8, p. 84.
9.
Ibid., 1.6.22, p. 37.
10.
Paul Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and The Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 27n.
11.
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, rev. ed. (1987; New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 162.
12.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 4th edn. (1976; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 181.
13.
Patricia Funk, ‘How Accurate Are Surveyed Preferences for Public Policies? Evidence from a Unique Institutional Setup’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 98:3 (July 2016), pp. 452–4.
14.
Hobbes, 1.3.7, p. 83.
15.
Samuel H. Kye, ‘The Persistence of White Flight in Middle-Class Suburbia’, Social Science Research, 72 (May 2018), pp. 35–52.
16.
Maria Sobolewska, Silvia Galandini and Laurence Lessard-Phillips, ‘The Public View of Immigrant Integration: Multidimensional and Consensual’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43:1 (2017), p. 58.
17.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.10.16, p. 59.
18.
Sagar, The Opinion of Mankind, p. 35.
19.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13.5, p. 83.
20.
Ibid., 2.19.5, p. 125.
21.
C.B. Macpherson, ‘Introduction’, in Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (New York and London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 30–9.
22.
Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 97.
23.
The first and most famous attempt to apply game theory to Hobbes was David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); for an overview of developments since then see Daniel Eggers, ‘Hobbes and Game Theory Revisited: Zero-Sum Games in the State of Nature’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 49:3 (September 2011), pp. 193–226.
24.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13.4, p. 83.
25.
I have in mind George H. Smith, Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2017), pp. 51–60. Here Smith seems unusually hostile to Hobbes and the careful intellectual charity which marks that much of his other work is missing. This leads Smith to make several errors which this chapter partly sets out to correct.
26.
W.M. Muir, ‘Group Selection for Adaptation to Multiple-Hen Cages: Selection Program and Direct Responses’, Poultry Science, 75 (1996), pp. 447–58.
27.
See also Patrick Neal, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 46.
28.
Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 5.
29.
Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), pp. 27–8.
30.
Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 213–56.
31.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics (New York: Random House, 2012).
32.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 60 vols (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969).
33.
Note that in making this argument, I explicitly disagree with interpretations which attempt to make Hobbes a Christian moralist. The most famous Christian interpretations of Hobbes, often called ‘the Taylor-Warrender thesis’, are: A. E. Taylor, ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes’, Philosophy, 13:52 (October 1938), pp. 406–24; Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); and F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). My view on this is strongly informed by Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes’s Leviathan’, The Historical Journal, 7:2 (1964), pp. 321–33.
34.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.6.7, p. 35.
35.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (1690; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2.7.92–3, pp. 327–8.
36.
Ibid, 2.7.93, p. 328.
37.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 165–251.
38.
See Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, pp. 1–126, and John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1969), pp. 77–83.
39.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.9.123, p. 350.
40.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1689; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 104–8. For an especially illuminating exposition of this, which dispels many myths, see Robert Dushinsky, ‘“Tabula Rasa” and Human Nature’, Philosophy, 87:342 (October 2012), pp. 515–18.
41.
See Haidt, The Righteous Mind; David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (London: Abacus, 1994); Robert L. Trivers, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46:1 (March 1971), pp. 35–57. For a systematic attempt to use evolutionary research to rebut Hobbes’s chief contentions, see Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 51–63.
42.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.18.199–220, pp. 398–405.
43.
Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 238.
44.
Mack, John Locke, p. 76.
45.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (1517; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.2.3, p. 12.
46.
Ibid., 1.2.3, p. 11.
47.
John Alroy, ‘A Multispecies Overkill Simulation of the End-Pleistocene Megafaunal Mass Extinction’, Science, 292: 5523 (8 June 2001), pp. 1893–6.
48.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.5.37, p. 294.
49.
Mack, John Locke, pp. 61–2.
50.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), p. 175.
51.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1.4.42, p. 170.
52.
James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 137.
53.
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 232–8.
54.
For an exceptionally clear map of this hopelessly confused terrain see Gerard Casey, Freedom’s Progress: A History of Political Thought (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017), p. 474.
55.
Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 97.
56.
See, for example, G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
57.
Stephen Kinsella, ‘Locke, Smith, Marx and the Labor Theory of Value’, Mises Wire (23 June 2010), available at: https://mises.org/wire/locke-smith-marx-and-labor-theory-value.
58.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.5.46, p. 300.
59.
Ibid., 2.5.46, p. 300.
60.
Ibid., 2.5.46–7, p. 300.
61.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; New York: Modern Library, 2000), 1.4, pp. 24–32; Frédéric Bastiat, ‘What is Money’, in Essays on Political Economy, trans. David A. Wells (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877), pp. 174–220; Carl Menger, The Principles of Economics, trans James Dingwell and Bert F. Hoselitz (1871; Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), pp. 257–61; Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, trans. H.E. Batson (1912; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 30–3; Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking (1983; Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), pp. 1–14; Jörg Guido Hülsmann, The Ethics of Money Production (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), pp. 22–3; Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), pp. 277–98.
62.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 176.
63.
Michael Makovi, ‘The “Self-Defeating Morality” of the Lockean Proviso’, Homo Oeconomicus, 32:2 (2015), p. 237. See also David Schmidtz, The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 21–3.
64.
Adam Mossoff, ‘Saving Locke from Marx: The Labor Theory of Value in Intellectual Property Theory’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 29:2 (2012), pp. 294–5.
65.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 175.
66.
Mossoff, ‘Saving Locke from Marx’, p. 317.
67.
Nat Berman, ‘How Much is Walt Disney World Worth?’, Money Inc. (2016) available at: https://moneyinc.com/disney-world-worth/.
68.
Richard E. Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando (Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 41–2.
69.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (1982; Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2016), p. 64.
70.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.5.50, p. 301.
71.
Ibid., 2.5.28, p. 289.
72.
Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, pp. 124–5.
73.
Tully, A Discourse on Property, p. 137. As I noted earlier, Tully errs in his subsequent analysis because he seems to think that a ‘capitalist-worker’ relationship is coercive in some way—this is patent nonsense for which he offers no justification: the relationship functions in exactly the same manner as ‘master-servant’ in the passage I have quoted from him.
74.
Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 36.
75.
For a very thorough account of Locke on inheritance see Jeremy Waldron, ‘Locke’s Account of Inheritance and Bequest’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19:1 (January 1981), pp. 39–51.

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School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Neema Parvini

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Parvini, N. (2020). Hobbes and Locke on Human Nature; Locke on Property Rights. In: The Defenders of Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39452-3_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39452-3_3
Published: 01 May 2020
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