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[Art Vandelay]

I was hoping to get some thoughts on an essay I have to write within the next couple days, as I am trying to finish up my schooling through distance classes. I have to work most of the weekend and since I am a pretty bad procrastinator I do not have much time left. Luckily the topic of my essay is private property so I already have a lot of stuff I can write about, but was hoping to get more info from some of the more knowledgeable members. Anyways here is the question and I would appreciate any answers I receive, in particular if anyone has read either the second treatise of government or discourse on the origins of inequality and knows good ways to either support or discredit the conclusions drawn from the works, I beg you to help me:crying:

In the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke defends a natural right to acquire private property, along with all of the predictable economic inequalities that follow from the exercise of that right. In fact, the Second Treatise still contains one of the most powerful moral arguments for capitalism. Locke’s claim that private property is a natural (and therefore pre-political) right has the important implication that the state has no authority to alter the existing distribution of wealth.
In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau characterizes private property as one of the worst innovations in human history, since it is responsible for so much dependence, subservience, dehumanization and, ultimately, unfreedom.

a) Why do you think that Locke (in the Second Treatise) and Rousseau (in the Discourse and in the Social Contract) reach such different conclusions about economic inequality?

(b) Explain and critically evaluate their arguments

[Zealot]

I haven't read either but Locke's claim that private property is natural is straight up bs now that we know humans spent a great part of its history without the concept.

[The Intransigent Faction]

I have extensive notes on Locke, so I'll try to post back later when I have more time. Unfortunately my extensive notes on Rousseau apparently evaporated some time ago, but I do have an essay involving him/notes from a friend, so I'll do what I can...

Locke's notion of private property as a natural right (as Exoprism said, bs, but more on that later) is based on his notion (borrowed from Hobbes but tweaked) of a "state of nature", in part of which private property arose because persons mixed their labour with the land (i.e. i believe he gives an example of picking apples or somesuch from a tree). In this earlier state, a person only "owns" what he or she can mix labour with, and it would be an injustice to hoard an abundant resource and thus control more than one needs.

The key for Locke is the invention of money as embodying the value of larger quantities of whatever (i.e. land) which he alleges allows for "fair" possession of more than one can use. This invention of money, while still in the state of nature, allows use of larger and therefore much more unequal amounts of property---civil (liberal) society is established through a social contract in order to protect this "life, liberty and property".

Rousseau is tricky in the sense that while he felt private property was based on a deception and coercion when it started, he thinks we passed a point of no return since which we've been and will be unavoidably stuck with the concept of private property. Not to complicate things for you, but if you read his "Discourse on Political Economy" he goes as far as to say that private property is "the most sacred of all the citizens' rights"---but he conceives of it as something to be heavily regulated by the "general will" in terms of alleviating inequality to some degree. Of course he also is wary of a wealthy oligarchy claiming to rule in everyone's interest.

There are probably historical materialistic explanations for why Rousseau and Locke each had the opinions that they did that I'm not so familiar with, but theoretically speaking, Locke feels that private property grew out of man's right to things with which he mixed his labour, and money expanded this right to larger quantities and to what you paid others to produce (the old "equivalent exchange" nonsense, I believe).

For Rousseau, check for his mentioning of "the right of the first occupant", which I think is in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (think he also talks about a state of nature). In short what you need to know is really that private property's introduction was in a sense tragic to Rousseau but he claims it can't be undone---just have its worst effects mitigated to avoid corruption or people getting, well, pissed off about inequality.

So you could pretty much say both Locke and Rousseau wrongly treat private property as an inevitability, even though Rousseau is at least less enthusiastic about where it came from.

Anywho I don't know how I've typed this much. Gotta go. Hope it helped a little.