¹ Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. In the same year, a little-noticed article by Richard Ashcraft also argued for the importance of religion in understanding Locke's political thought. See Ashcraft, Richard, “Faith and Knowledge in Locke's Philosophy,” in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Yolton, John W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 194–223.Google Scholar

² Sigmund, Paul E., “Jeremy Waldron and the Religious Turn in Locke Scholarship,” Review of Politics 67, no. 3 (2005): 407–18Google Scholar. Ironically, this turn, which did so much to reanimate discussion of Locke's political thought in recent decades, received its initial impulse from the intellectual historians of the Cambridge School. These writers argue that the religious (and political, intellectual, and economic) context of Locke's writings is indispensable to properly understanding them but, at the same time, they contend that this very fact makes these texts irrelevant to contemporary philosophical debates. See Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke, ix–xi; “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke,” in Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981–1989, ed. Dunn, John (Oxford: Polity, 1990), 9–25Google Scholar. Curiously, the neo-Lockean philosophers who, beginning in the 1970s, gave Locke's political theory greater relevance in contemporary discussions left to one side those elements which come from religion (and from natural law). See Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)Google Scholar; Steiner, Hillel, “The Natural Right to the Means of Production,” Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1977): 41–99Google Scholar; Otsuka, Michael, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. In this sense, both historians and philosophers implicitly agreed in their assessment of Locke's contemporary significance: the religious Locke has nothing to do with our concerns, questions, or problems.

³ Locke, John, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, §31 and §27.

⁴ Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 178–82. Gauthier, David did something similar in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986)Google Scholar, chap. 7. Nozick considered that literally understood, Locke's “enough and as good” condition was impossible to fulfill (even in conditions of abundance).

⁵ Waldron, Jeremy, “Enough and as Good Left for Others,” Philosophical Quarterly 29, no. 117 (1979): 319–28Google Scholar. In his paper, Waldron argued that the “enough and as good” proviso was not really restrictive but only descriptive and advanced the idea that “Locke has a stronger constraint limiting the property of the rich in favour of those who have been left incapable of providing for themselves” (328).

⁶ Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sreenivasan, Gopal, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

⁷ Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winfrey, J. C., “Charity versus Justice in Locke's Theory of Justice,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 3 (1981): 423–38Google Scholar; Simmons, Lockean Theory; Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

⁸ John Locke, First Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, §42. Strictly speaking, the duty of charity is not a limitation to appropriation, that is, a principle which discriminates between those things which are appropriable by an individual and those which, in contrast, must remain common or belong to others. It is rather a condition which operates by limiting the exercise of property rights legitimately acquired in accordance with independent standards (the mixing of one's labor and the spoilage and sufficiency limitations). The surplus which a person A is expected to donate to a needy person B belongs to A without any doubt. The duty of charity does not circumvent the ownership of goods legitimately acquired, nor does it stipulate whether resources which still remain common are appropriable. In this sense, the nature of the duty of charity is quite different from that of the Second Treatise limitations.

⁹ Lamb, Robert and Thompson, Benjamin, “The Meaning of Charity in Locke's Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 2 (2009): 229–52Google Scholar; Forde, Steven, “The Charitable John Locke,” Review of Politics 71, no. 3 (2009): 428–58.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Its original title was A Report to the Board of Trade to the Lords Justices 1697, Respecting the Relief and Unemployment of the Poor. The text was first published in An Account of the Origin, Proceedings, and Intentions of the Society for the Promotion of Industry (Louth: Lincolnshire, 1789), 101–49Google Scholar. Mark Goldie included it in a compilation of Locke's political essays with the title “An Essay on the Poor Law.” See Locke, John, Political Essays, ed. Goldie, Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182–98Google Scholar. Hereafter, I will refer to this document as Report.

¹¹ Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar. At first, this interpretation was considered “alternative” or “nontraditional.” See Gough, John W., John Locke's Political Philosophy: Eight Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950)Google Scholar, 80; Monson, Charles H., “Locke and his Interpreters,” Political Studies 6, no. 2 (1958): 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But it soon became dominant.

¹² Strauss and Macpherson shaped the standard interpretation in a series of conferences and articles which were published almost simultaneously. Strauss's book Natural Right and History is based on his Walgreen Foundation lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949. A condensed version of the book section dedicated to Locke had previously been published in Philosophical Review in October 1952. See Strauss, Leo, “On Locke's Doctrine of Natural Law,” Philosophical Review 61, no. 4 (1952): 475–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a footnote in the book Strauss declares that it was only after finishing his chapter on Locke's conception of natural right that he read one of Macpherson's articles about the subject and admits to find “a considerable agreement between Mr. Macpherson's interpretation of the chapter on property” and his own. See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 234n106.

¹³ Marx, Karl, Werke, vol. 26, Theorien über den Mehrwert, Teil 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965)Google Scholar, 343 (translation from the German is my own).

¹⁴ Stephen, Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Harbinger, 1962)Google Scholar; Laski, Harold J., Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932)Google Scholar; Tawney, Richard H., The Acquisitive Society (London: Bell, 1952)Google Scholar; Vaughan, C. E., Studies in the History of Political Philosophy before and after Rousseau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, these authors conceive Locke as an advocate of constitutionalism, an interpretation that, in Macpherson's view, leaves unexplained too many contradictory aspects of Locke's theory.

¹⁵ In this sense, Strauss contended that Locke concealed the extent to which he was departing from a religious view. Recently, this very controversial approach to Locke was revived by Zuckert, Michael in Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002)Google Scholar. Echoes of Strauss's esotericism thesis are also evident in Corbett, Ross, “Locke's Biblical Critique,” Review of Politics 74 (2012): 27–51Google Scholar; and in Brubaker, Stanley C., “Coming into One's Own: John Locke's Theory of Property, God, and Politics,” Review of Politics 74 (2012): 207–32Google Scholar. Brubaker, however, contends that “despite the severity of Locke's critique of Christianity, one need not conclude he was an atheist,” and that “Locke inclined towards a deism of sorts” (231). A similar stand is taken by Faulkner, Robert in “Preface to Liberalism: Locke's First Treatise and the Bible,” Review of Politics 67, no. 3 (2005): 451–72.Google Scholar

¹⁶ In this sense, Strauss notes, “the terrors of the natural law” no longer strike the covetous but the waster. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 236–37.

¹⁷ Misery is not the same as scarcity. “In the first ages of the world,” says Locke, “Men were more in danger to be lost by wandering from their Company, in the then vast Wilderness of the Earth, than to be straitened for want of room to plant in” (Second Treatise, §36).

¹⁸ Strauss, Natural Right and History, 242.

¹⁹ Ibid., 246–47. The view that Locke was simply erratic or inconsistent in his use of traditional conceptions had also been challenged by Cox, R. H., Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960)Google Scholar. For Cox, Locke's use of Hooker was rather part of a highly systematic attempt to disguise or soften his real Hobbesian position and Locke's contradictory statements about the state of nature were deliberately contrived as part of this attempt.

²⁰ Locke, Second Treatise, §37.

²¹ Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 203–14.

²² Locke, Second Treatise, §28.

²³ Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 199.

²⁴ Ibid., 246–47.

²⁵ Ibid., 269–70.

²⁶ Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 176–82. In fact, Nozick believes that a literal understanding of Locke's “enough and as good” clause would render it so restrictive as to make illegitimate every single act of appropriation, as he intended to show with his well-known retrospective argument.

²⁷ Ibid., 7.

²⁸ Ibid., 44.

²⁹ I call this interpretation of the self-ownership thesis “strong” because it presupposes that the unlimited liberty to benefit from one's own capacities is intrinsic to self-ownership.

³⁰ It is well known that in Anarchy, State and Utopia Nozick claimed that “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor” (ibid., 169).

³¹ See, for example, Corbett, Ross J., The Lockean Commonwealth (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009)Google Scholar; “Locke's Biblical Critique”; Brubaker, “Coming into One's Own”; Zuckert, Michael P., “Locke—Religion—Equality,” Review of Politics 67, no. 3 (2005): 419–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brubaker, for instance, highlights “the severity of Locke's critique of Christianity” and considers, furthermore, that “Locke coherently justifies a right to property that is unlimited in scope but not rapacious” (216). In any case, Macpherson's influence seems to have remained more powerful outside Lockean scholarship narrowly construed. A good example of this would be the posthumous publishing of Rawls, John's Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 138–55Google Scholar, where Rawls reanimated key elements of the possessive individualist reading of Locke.

³² “But though he that sells his corn in a town pressed with famine at the utmost rate he can get for it does no injustice against the common rule of traffic, yet if he carry it away unless they will give him more than they are able, or extorts so much from their present necessity as not to leave them the means of subsistence afterwards, he offends against the common rule of charity as a man and if they perish any of them by reason of his extortion is no doubt guilty of murder” (Dunn, John, “Justice and the Interpretation of Locke's Political Theory,” Political Studies 6, no. 1 [1968]: 68–87Google Scholar).

³³ Tully, Approach to Political Philosophy, 131.

³⁴ Simmons, Lockean Theory, 327–36. The authors challenged by Simmons, defenders of the idea that Locke does not give importance to rights and duties of charity, are Strauss, Natural Right and History, 236–39, 242–44; Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 221; Cox, Locke on War and Peace, 170–71; Goldwin, R. A., “John Locke,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 484–85Google Scholar; Andrew, Edward, Shylock's Rights: A Grammar of Lockian Claims (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 56–65Google Scholar; Pangle, Thomas L., The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 143–44Google Scholar, 161, 306–7; Cohen, Gerald, “Marx and Locke on Land and Labour,” in Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, ed. Cohen, Gerald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 165–94.Google Scholar

³⁵ Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 177.

³⁶ Forde, “The Charitable John Locke,” 429–30.

³⁷ Ibid., 456.

³⁸ John Locke, “Essays on the Law of Nature,” in Political Essays, ed. Goldie, 123.

³⁹ See Locke, John, “Some Thoughts concerning Education,” in The Educational Writings, ed. Axtell, James L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, §110. See also Tarcov, Nathan, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 141–45.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ John Locke, “Venditio,” in Political Essays, ed. Goldie, 339–43.

⁴¹ Locke, First Treatise, §42.

⁴² For a philosophical discussion of the standard liberal concept of charity, see Buchanan, Allen, “Justice and Charity,” Ethics 97 (1987): 558Google Scholar. See also Waldron, Jeremy, “Welfare and the Images of Charity,” in Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 225–49.Google Scholar

⁴³ Locke, First Treatise, §42 (emphasis added). It would be, then, a “claim right,” that is, a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on the part of other parties regarding the right-holder. See W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 38.

⁴⁴ Nevertheless, in §42 there are statements that can be taken as equivalent expressions. For instance, Locke's statement that “it would always be a Sin, in any Man of Estate, to let his Brother perish for want of affording him relief out of his Plenty,” or his reference to the “Relief, God requires him [who has plenty] to afford to the wants of his Brother.”

⁴⁵ Locke, First Treatise, §42. This idea is confirmed by the seventh of the “Essays on the Law of Nature” and by the Report.

⁴⁶ It was in this weaker way that Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf conceived the so-called right of necessity, a right that may be considered a precedent of Locke's right to charity. See Forde, “The Charitable John Locke,” 428–58; Salter, John, “Grotius and Pufendorf on the Right of Necessity,” History of Political Thought 26, no. 2 (2005): 284–302.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Brubaker, “Coming into One's Own,” 208n2.

⁴⁸ Whether Atlantis is really to be read as a utopian essay is, in fact, a matter of controversy. Mark Goldie asserts that it is not, arguing that “Locke's remarks [in Atlantis] are closely related to ideas expressed in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and in his essays on naturalisation and the Poor Law.” See Locke, Political Essays, ed. Goldie, 253. Whatever the merits of Goldie's argument, the important point here is that Atlantis is not a document written by Locke in the exercise of a public office.

⁴⁹ Hundert, E. J., “The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke between Ideology and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33, no. 1 (1972): 6.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Dang, “Fondements des politiques de la pauvreté,” Revue économique 45, no. 6 (1994): 1423Google Scholar (translation from the French is my own).

⁵¹ In fact, she begins her paper by presenting Locke's Report as “a supplementary milestone” on the way to contemporary welfarist proposals for a basic income policy.

⁵² Dang, “Fondements des politiques de la pauvreté,” 1430.

⁵³ Locke, Report, 189.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 184–88.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 197–98.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 195.

⁵⁷ Locke also agreed in tolerating the parallel subsistence of the old almsgiving practice, provided that it was strictly regulated by the political authority, which would be obliged to give passes to the authorized beggars and punish the infractors.

⁵⁸ See Jordan, Wilbur K., Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (New York: Routledge, 1959).Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Locke, Report, 189.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 198.

⁶¹ Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Sommerville, Johann P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 7.

⁶² Locke, First Treatise, §86.

⁶³ Locke, Second Treatise, §26.

⁶⁴ Locke, Second Treatise, §26. For Locke, “common” and “wasted” seem to be interchangeable expressions. See Second Treatise, §37 and §42.

⁶⁵ Locke, Second Treatise, §6. See also First Treatise, §42.

⁶⁶ Locke, First Treatise, §86.

⁶⁷ Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 28–29.

⁶⁸ Waldron, Jeremy, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).Google Scholar

⁶⁹ See Tully, Approach to Political Philosophy, 131–32; Ashcraft, Richard, Locke's Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987)Google Scholar, 127.

⁷⁰ Locke, Second Treatise, §25.

⁷¹ Tully, Approach to Political Philosophy, 131.

⁷² Locke, Second Treatise, §34.

⁷³ Ibid., §23.

⁷⁴ See Steiner, “The Natural Right to the Means of Production,” and Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality. See also Zuckert, Michael, “Two Paths from Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, and the Radicalization of Enlightenment Thought,” in Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Newman, Simon P. and Onuf, Peter S. (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 252–76Google Scholar. In this article, Zuckert shows how Paine derived a right to welfare on completely secular Lockean grounds, and explores the foundation for the assertion of such a right in Locke's own writings.