Lyons and Tygers and Wolves,Oh My! Human Equality and the “Dominion Covenant” in Locke’s Two Treatises

Locke and the Problematic of Human Equality

The character of Locke’s humanism, his declaration of what John Dunn calls “the normative creaturely equality of all men in virtue of their shared species-membership,” appears rather straightforward. ⁷ Locke declares that natural law primarily entails preserving mankind (TT II.7), ⁸ and that nothing is more “evident” than “that Creatures of the same species and rank . . . should also be equal” (TT II.4). Whereas, for example, early modern critics of Hobbes charged him with bestializing humans by depicting them as “abandoned by God to a brutish and animalistic existence,” Locke frankly decrees that humans have a privileged position in the world. ⁹ Rather than base humanity’s natural condition on descriptive characteristics inferred from concrete human behavior, Locke presents an image of humanity divinely “constructed within and in relation to a larger created cosmos.” ¹⁰

However, Locke’s work also features crossings between humans and other animals that complicate this stark divide. Locke’s thought therefore travels along two tracks; he simultaneously founds human equality on a decisive break from nonhumans while also doubting the strict coherence of this break. This doubt partly emerges when he contemplates the many ethically relevant similarities between human and nonhuman animals. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding denies that animals are Cartesian machines and asserts that they use “some reason” (E 2.11.11); ¹¹ they partake, to some extent, in faculties like perception, memory, comparison, and compounding (E 2.9–2.11). Locke even credits rumors that some nonhuman animals can speak and that humans can interbreed with mandrills (E 3.6.22–23). In his Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke criticizes the “custom of eating too much flesh” and suggests that children learn to care for animals and read from Aesop’s animal fables in order to build a sense of compassion. ¹² This text thus affectively entangles humans and animals by presenting animals as similar enough to impart ethical lessons. ¹³ Even Locke’s description of human equality in the Two Treatises—that “Creatures of the same species and rank” are “promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties” (TT II.4; my italics)—seems confusing given the wide differentiation in faculties he describes in this text and elsewhere. Finally, some animal studies scholars find that Locke’s theory of labor justifies animals’ property rights, like a squirrel’s right to its gathered acorns. ¹⁴

While these examples suggest a blurrier line between human and nonhuman animal life, they still leave Lockean human exceptionalism largely intact. However, other parts of the Essay do vitiate Locke’s foundationalist commitment to equality within the human species. These arguments suggest that “species”—both in the broad sense of “types of things” and in the narrow sense of what we now call biological species—might not really exist. ¹⁵

First, distinctions between species are merely constructed attempts to order the varied substances that humans encounter. Categorizations of this manifold of things are contrived “nominal” essences with no necessary relationship to “real” essences. Though nature produces a wide variety of similar beings and Locke believes in a hierarchy of creatures, “the sorting of them under names is the workmanship of the understanding” (E 3.3.13; italics in original). He commonly uses the category of “man” and other creaturely species as an example. To say “this is a man, that a horse,” only “rank[s] things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which we have made those names the signs” (E 3.3.13). One may bundle “voluntary motion, with sense and reason, joined to a body of a certain shape” to form the idea of “man,” but this is not “the real essence and source of all those operations which are to be found in any individual of that sort” (E 3.6.3). Further, there is no definitive way to judge among different definitions of man—whether rational animal or featherless biped (E 3.10.17).

Second, border cases confound extant species categorizations. Nature does not allow “gaps” but only blurry lines between animals, plants, and inanimate objects (E 3.6.12). Locke refutes the idea that nature produces a clear set of essences given the “irregular and monstrous births, that in divers sorts of animals have been observed” (E 3.6.16). Finally, the ostensible existence of “changelings” and “monsters” muddles any hard lines drawn around the human species (E 3.6.22).

Locke therefore faces a dilemma: whereas the Two Treatises roots politics in a foundationalist account of human equality, his account of species elsewhere “appears to knock away the foundation on which [he] purports to be building.” ¹⁶ He thus confronts one version of a challenge that contemporary defenders of human equality must face: How do you root equality in a foundation that secures it for all humans in the face of empiricist and other challenges to human exceptionalism? How do you found a political order on a species-based equality when the object of equality may not, strictly speaking, exist?

Lockean scholars try to resolve this issue by setting aside the question of the moral relevance of species in favor of a capacity-based approach. Jeremy Waldron’s defense and elaboration of Lockean human equality perhaps most fully attempts this move, and so I will spend some time with it in order to demonstrate problems with this solution. This move reverses the usual order of operations; rather than looking at those we call human to discern shared faculties, one starts instead from “a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough” to support political equality and then attempts to find “what class of creatures that applies to.” ¹⁷ The crux of this solution revolves around the following passage from the Essay:

when we say that Man is subject to Law: We mean nothing by Man, but a corporeal rational Creature: What the real Essence or other Qualities of that Creature are in this Case, is no way considered. . . . For were there a Monkey, or any other Creature to be found, that had the use of Reason, to such a degree, as to be able to understand general Signs . . . he would no doubt be subject to Law, and, in that Sense, be a Man. . . . The Names of Substances, if they be used in them, as they should, can no more disturb Moral than they do Mathematical Discourses: Where, if the Mathematicians speak of a Cube or Globe of Gold, or any other Body, he has his clear settled Idea, which varies not, though it may, by mistake, be applied to a particular Body . . . (E 3.11.16)

Thus, whether “Man” corresponds to a real essence matters no more for moral discourse than a cube’s real existence does for mathematics. “Man” simply refers to the quality of corporeal rationality, as Ruth Grant puts it, that enables the being to respond to law. For Grant, corporeal rationality establishes human equality, not as an account of the biological species “but with respect to the purpose and meaning of particular moral propositions.” ¹⁸ She concedes, however, the inevitability of gray areas; applying this idea to specific cases inevitably creates ambiguity, especially given Locke’s intimation that rationality exists by degree.

Waldron, in turn, also focuses on capacities rather than species but finds corporeal rationality insufficient. First, admitting borderline cases entails an “open texture” that problematically imbues “a fundamental indeterminacy in what one is trying to say about equality.” ¹⁹ Rationality is not an adequate threshold, partly because Locke concedes that animals have some share of reason. More fundamentally, Locke’s description of rationality as existing on a spectrum jars against equality’s need for “a binary distinction” between those inside and outside the given class. ²⁰ The challenge consists not only in discovering a distinguishing quality but finding one that matters in moral terms. Not all humans have to possess it equally; it can be a “range property” that enables consideration as long as the being exists within this particular latitude. ²¹ Waldron finds such a quality in Locke’s attribution of the ability to abstract to humans—that is, when “ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind” (E 2.11.9). This faculty “puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes” because Locke sees no evidence that animals use symbolic language (E 2.11.10). Abstraction matters morally because it enables one to have an idea of God, allowing a distinct relation to Him.

But does this solution resolve the problem? It is unclear to me how abstraction acts as a human universal, given that, on Locke’s terms, several groups of people do not meet this standard, a charge that Waldron already levied at Grant’s broader “corporeal rationality” solution—certain fetuses do not differ significantly from vegetables (E 2.1.21); at a certain point in old age one’s capacities are not much better than an oyster’s (E 2.9.14); and “Lunatics” and “Idiots” cannot enjoy freedom because they lack understanding (TT II.60). ²² Waldron admits that the narrower capacity for abstraction, too, excludes some humans: “[Locke] quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiots or naturals ‘cannot distinguish, compare, and abstract’” (E 2.11.120). Waldron then tries to recuperate Locke, arguing that he invokes this capacity only as a nominal claim useful for moral purposes—so it does not need to cover all cases.

However, the issue seems less like a rounding error than a significant problem for Waldron’s, and Locke’s, account. As Stacey Clifford’s work on the “capacity contract” and the role of disability in Locke’s work shows, not only is the excluded category of “Idiocy” historically malleable and indeterminate, but basing political inclusion on cognitive capacity “empowers some men with the examination and removal of defective others.” ²³ Moreover, this capacity-based version of human equality occludes the ways that cognitive and other vulnerabilities afflict all humans at various points in their lives. Thus, range properties aside, differential capacity among those considered human will haunt attempts to shape equality around some essential moral capacity. Another problem, from the animal side, is that while Locke does claim that abstraction perfectly divides man from brute, he also admits that a speaking, reasoning nonhuman animal that “partaked not of the usual shape of a Man,” would still not count within the taxonomic category (E 3.6.29). ²⁴ In sum, it seems puzzling that Waldron should rightly note that the binary character of human equality precludes “open textures” but then lean on a capacity with such momentous gray areas.

There is an additional, much deeper issue if we attend to an aspect of the Essay that Waldron overlooks—its thoroughgoing modesty and skepticism about our ability to know other creatures’ capacities: “There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding” (E 3.6.9). Locke cautions against those who “think their span the measure of all things,” given our “few and narrow inlets” of perception that are “disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings” (E 4.3.23). He even opens the possibility of a nonhuman-centered universe in which hitherto unknown creatures with “assistance of senses and faculties more or perfecter than we have, or different from ours” might exist (E 4.3.23). Even further, a remarkable passage suggests that even mere matter might think:

We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think. . . . GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power . . . (E 4.3.6)

We simply do not know whether matter can think, because God’s design is inscrutable. Moreover, we do not know what “thinking” actually is, and we especially do not know which substances God has given this power. If Locke’s modest skepticism goes as far as opening the possibility of mentality in matter, it ought to imperil the surety of founding human equality and distinctiveness on abstraction or any other capacity.

On what, then, is human equality founded? The next section argues that Lockean human equality relies on the sheer fact of dominion over animals, which operates as a sign of human superiority that retroactively grounds equality. The ambiguity between human and animal does not end up softening Lockean civil society’s tack toward nonhumans so much as produce a particular sort of humanism.

The Dominion Covenant

Dominion plays a crucial role in structuring Locke’s political theory. Dominion bridges his existential, cosmological concerns, the question of God’s dominion and its earthly manifestation, and his political ones, the question of dominion as legitimate order. Locke uses the word in multiple ways but all usages tend to center on the scope of proper rule. The dominion covenant spans two such senses: first, the divinely ordained rule that humans exert over nonhumans, and second, the broader sense of the universe’s intrinsic order. However, I will show that dominion is both more fragile than it first appears and yet still indispensable for Locke’s political and existential commitments.

Early in the First Treatise, it becomes clear that much of Locke’s primary task—refuting Robert Filmer’s justification of divine right and denial of human equality—turns on how humanity relates to nonhuman creation. For Filmer, the biblical directive in Genesis 1.28, to subdue the earth and exert “Dominion over the Fish of the Sea, and over the Fowl of the Air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” (TT I.23; italics in original), applies exclusively to Adam and his heirs. Dominion, here, entails a private right in a thing that includes total freedom to use it and exclude others from use. Locke, in contrast, argues that Genesis 1.28 gives Adam “not Private Dominion over the Inferior Creatures, but right in common with all Mankind” (TT I.24). Locke thus reformulates dominion not as an exclusive right in but a claim to a thing. If the Lockean world were a theater, as James Tully explains with this Ciceronian metaphor, every individual could claim a seat even if they were not directly occupying it. ²⁵ One may not take so many seats so as to deny others’ claims, and if there are more theater-goers than seats, the theater should be modified to accommodate everyone. In other words, people may appropriate the world for their own use, but this appropriation is regulated by the fundamental condition that the world belongs to humanity in common.

This shift in conceptualizing dominion proves foundational for Locke’s political theory because it establishes the prior conditions of politics and property writ large. As Joshua Mitchell puts it, Locke claims that Filmer misses how political power “must derive from the justification that all human beings have to rule over other created things.” ²⁶ The crux of Locke’s disagreement with Filmer, though, lies in whether authority over nonhuman creatures rightfully belongs to few or all. In reformulating dominion, Locke extends its reach by softening its edge: to “occupy a theater seat,” of course, means subduing the Earth and its creatures for the sake of human convenience. Stated otherwise, Lockean humanism democratizes the power to subjugate nonhuman creation.

Locke extends dominion beyond biblical interpretation in an underread chapter of the First Treatise—Ch. IX: Of Monarchy, by Inheritance from Adam—in a move that has momentous implications for his political theory. Locke begins by noting another problem in Filmer’s account of private dominion: because it comes from an explicit verbal grant, one cannot know who inherits Adam’s power in the present. And “if there be no Marks to know him by,” then “it may be my self, as well as any other” (TT I.81). Instead of solely rooting his own theory of dominion from this explicit “Verbal Donation,” Locke argues that it comes from a prior law of nature (TT I.86). Its basis lies in the fact that God planted in both humans and “all other Animals” a “strong desire for Self-preservation,” and filled the world with things fit for their survival and convenience. God then “spoke” to Man, meaning he “directed [Man] by his Senses and Reason,” and did the same to “inferior Animals by their Sense, and Instinct.” Natural dominion arises because this “Reason, which was the Voice of God in him, could not but teach him and assure him . . . that he followed the Will of his Maker, and therefore had a right to make use of those Creatures, which by his Reason or Senses he could discover would be serviceable thereunto.” Man therefore has “a right to a use of these Creatures, by the Will and Grant of God” TT II.86). This right, in turn, founds the right to property, which has its “Original” in “the Right a Man has to use any of the Inferior Creatures” (TT I.92; italics in original). Unlike Filmer’s murky lines of inheritance, then, Locke explains dominion’s continuity via this naturalistic, originary account of humanity’s primary intercourse with the world.

Locke’s account places humans and animals in a state of “primordial equality,” as Dinesh Wadiwel puts it, because both have potentially clashing desires for self-preservation in this originary state. ²⁷ From this initial equality, though, Locke implies that humanity prevails due to its access to reason. Although, Locke abstains from the language of conflict or conquest, the fact that Man finds inferior creatures “serviceable” for his preservation suggests a process of annulling animals’ simultaneous desires for self-preservation.

But a straightforward reading of this process, in which Man uses the inherent voice of reason to rise above the fray of animal existence, raises epistemological problems. Locke slips quite quickly from man’s “desire” for self-preservation to his certain knowledge that reason or God permits turning it into a “right.” Without revelation, how can Man know that God endorses his victory and that this thing called reason is its cause? This problem is compounded given that Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature argues that the power to reason does not entail having intrinsic ideas (like dominion or human superiority). Reason does not pronounce natural law but only allows a situated power of reasoning that enables humans to discover and interpret it. So how then could it initially declare humanity’s right to nonhumans? ²⁸ Moreover, if the beings Man encounters in the world are, as Torrey Shanks writes, “a bundle of perceptions,” then “[w]hat category they belong to—species of plant, animal, or object,” remain a matter of judgment and not some innate feature of the natural world readily apparent to the understanding. ²⁹ How battles for self-preservation in these originary encounters turn into such clear lines of dominion that place humanity on one side and animality on the other remains a mystery.

I argue that the basis of this “right” to use other creatures is the sheer fact of their domination. Because humans “won” the battle—that is, found inferior creatures “serviceable unto” their desire for preservation—they thereby have a right to them. Douglas Casson’s explanation of Locke’s turn to the “great book of nature” to interpret revelation and natural law helps here; the fact that subordinated nonhumans “lost” is a sign of human superiority written in nature’s book. ³⁰ Locke’s concern in this chapter, to determine the “Marks” that signal who rules thus takes on special relevance. That is, the existence of livestock, and therefore the process of rendering animals captive, signs and seals the dominion covenant, assuring man of his fundamental identity as a superior being with the ear of God.

On this interpretation, dominating animals in particular becomes key. If the right to property derives from human self-preservation, why should the animals, in particular, form the “Original” of property, rather than, say, “the Herbs” that Locke believes a vegetarian Adam to have subsisted on (§I.39), or any other nonhuman entity? ³¹ It is because Locke perceives animals’ unique proximity to humans via their desire for self-preservation that they become property’s privileged locus. Lockean property, the appropriation of the earth through mixing one’s labor with it, relies on overcoming resistance, even the “resistance” of the tensile strength of an apple’s attachment to the tree branch before being plucked. As Wadiwel writes, property exists because the “[h]are does not simply give [itself] to the human, but must be chased and appropriated through labour, in a risky process where the animal may easily evade capture.” ³² If a thing was merely given over to human consumption, no real appropriation would occur. For Locke, animals present the greatest powers of resistance via their shared desires for self-preservation. The primordial equality of self-preservation makes humanity’s subsequent victory more noble. It therefore seems less that Locke objectifies animals as property than that he animalizes objects. Dominion founds property because once humanity annuls animals’ wills, the rest of existence follows like a line of dominos. If, as Locke later argues, labor is the origin of value, dominion over animals is its ante-origin.

In sum, dominion over nonhuman animals founds Lockean human equality but itself rests on an unstable base; it depends on the sheer fact of conquest over animals to annul their primordial, shared condition. I propose the frame of a dominion covenant, prior and essential to the social compact, to interpret this dynamic. The dominion covenant is a presumed “pact” amongst humanity, God, and the rest of existence where humans, privileged stakeholders in God’s world, rule over “Inferior Creatures”—and any challenge to this order requires punishment. The term covenant, rather than compact or contract, signals the presence of a more originary, almost mystical, “agreement” subtending the possibility of consensual exchange. Unlike earthly compacts, agreements with God involve parties with radically different ontological statuses. God therefore shares something important with animals; as Jacques Derrida notes, neither respond in our language, as understood in the terms of Western humanism. Locke’s God may reveal some things but, fundamentally, He is inscrutable. Neither God nor beast takes part in the “exchange, shared speech, question and response” that contract requires. ³³ Whereas the formation of the social compact is often referred to as a conjectural history, the covenant is closer to the retroactive presumption of an origin from which all history proceeds.

The dominion covenant is not overtly named but works as a heuristic device to discern that which consistently structures Locke’s political theory and to help understand its contemporary relevance. ³⁴ It shares this feature with the domination contract tradition—Mill’s “racial contract,” Carole Pateman’s “sexual contract,” or Clifford’s “capacity contract.” Unlike these devices, though, the dominion covenant does not signify a reciprocal, consensual agreement to exclude certain people but rather concerns the existential underpinnings of such a reciprocal system. Further, whereas the domination contract highlights the social contract’s failure to achieve its universal ideals, the dominion covenant works just as it should. That is, the domination contract works through the ruse of inclusion and equality but animals present a different case because they are meant to be unequal.

The covenant, then, bridges the gap between pure theological presumption and actually extant agreement. On one hand, Locke believes in a divinely ordained, harmoniously interconnected, and hierarchically structured cosmos, in which God assigns every portion of creation to its appropriate realm with the capacities necessary for its purpose. Humans can neither build nor rearrange this order, but they hold a unique, privileged position within it because only they can bear witness to creation. ³⁵ On the other hand, Locke conveys an “anxious skepticism” about how far one can know the inner workings or full scope of this order. ³⁶ At various times in Locke’s work, God appears as a principle of inscrutability: “The workmanship of the all-wise and powerful God in the great fabric of the universe, and every part thereof, further exceeds the capacity and comprehension of the most inquisitive and intelligent man” (E 3.6.9). Locke grappled with this epistemological question throughout his life but never truly answered it. ³⁷ This predicament intertwines with that posed by human equality; Locke’s affirmation of human equality stems from his faith in a God-given order in the universe where humans have an assigned role, but his anxious skepticism gives rise to species nominalism and epistemological modesty toward other beings.

To stabilize this divine hierarchy that humans can never know with certainty, Lockean human equality, I argue, requires an ongoing practice of dominating animals. The combination of Locke’s strong faith in this hierarchical order and his anxious skepticism creates the need for a sort of ground. Locke does not simply declare human superiority and then organize politics around that claim. Rather, because the dominion covenant is something both cosmologically presumed and something to be achieved and enforced, human superiority requires continual enactment. As McClure writes in a different context, humans do not simply possess human nature, for Locke, but “they perform [it] insofar as they adopt the appropriate rules of action in the proper context.” ³⁸ Here, that performance requires dominating animals; if the right to dominion rests on nullifying animals’ desire for self-preservation, then its continual existence depends on constantly annulling that desire.

The fragility underlying this continual enactment not only affects nonhumans but sweeps up the humans that the covenant promises to protect. This occurs because the core of the humanity protected by the covenant only superficially appears as a similarity of capacities but more fully lies in dominating animals. Hence, failure to properly respect this distance becomes the grounds for legitimized domination in the name of equality. The rest of this article traces this form of domination in the two key avenues through which Locke declares political power to operate: property and punishment (TT II.171). ³⁹ The next section examines property and the following one punishment.

“. . . the Labour of those who Broke the Oxen”: Property and the Dominion Covenant

Locke’s theory of property has been a touchstone for left critics of Locke; here I focus on readings that emphasize its relationship to indigenous dispossession. ⁴⁰ These interpretations often highlight Locke’s valorization of sedentary agriculture over other modes of subsistence among indigenous peoples. My reading of “Of Property” will highlight another dimension of Lockean colonization that the dominion covenant foregrounds; Locke not only presumed sedentary agriculture superior to indigenous ways of life, but thought so specifically of sedentary agriculture with tamed livestock. Lockean human equality does not protect indigenous people from dispossession because equality is rooted in subjugating animals. Colonization occurs not from a failure to live up to Lockean human equality but rather expresses its inner logic.

Although the references to animals in “Of Property” are fleeting, they deserve attention for a few reasons. First, Locke continually reasserts dominion throughout the chapter, either in the language of subduing the earth or noting that it belongs to all humanity in common (TT II.25–27, 32, 34 35, 39). Indeed, he begins the property chapter by straightaway affirming humanity’s right to other creatures. Similar to the First Treatise’s derivation of property from dominion, he notes that this right emerges from both revelation and natural reason, the latter telling men that preservation entails, pointedly, a right to “Meat and Drink” (II.25; my italics). Hence, Wadiwel notes, “animals are not merely just one example of what might be considered property, but sit at the very centre of the property right itself.” ⁴¹ Furthermore, livestock culture’s hold on England contextually suggests that agriculturalist colonial arguments must have assumed animal husbandry. The value extracted from livestock is “literally incalculable”; without them, England would have followed a wholly different trajectory. ⁴²

“Of Property” outlines a series of historical stages from a primitive state of nature to commercial civil society. In the beginning, property originates when man mixes his labor with the products of the earth. Locke aligns this first stage with the “wild Indian,” and initiates an oft-overlooked rhetorical association between the Indian and a particular animal— deer. Locke characterizes this hunter-gatherer stage, which “knows no Inclosure,” via the “Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian” (TT II.26). Later, he concludes the initial explanation of his labor theory of value by reaffirming that the “Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it” (TT II.30). Later, Locke intimates the limits of relying on deer for subsistence. Articulating the idea that appropriating more than what one can consume steals from the common stock of mankind, Locke says that if “the Venison putrified, before he could spend it, he . . . was liable to be punished” (TT II.37). Though Indians are not named, the prior chain of association makes clear who he has in mind. These references, in addition to the other named animal figures of the caught fish and the hunted hare (TT II.29), link Indians to a particular relationship to animal life, where they hunt wild creatures but do not properly control them.

Property’s second stage, and its primary mode, is appropriating the earth. One claims property in land insofar as one encloses it and “Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates” it—the beginning of sedentary agriculture (TT II.32). For critics of Lockean colonialism, this stage is essential because setting cultivation as the standard for property disregards the labor value of the skills involved in hunting, gathering, and nonsedentary agriculture, as well as the immense amount of time required to develop those skills. ⁴³ Consequently, colonists can ignore indigenous land claims insofar as indigenous people do not act in a properly “Industrious and Rational” manner (TT II.34). This emphasis on land does not displace animals’ significance, though, and at this stage a new animal appears for the first time: “whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed, and make use of, the Cattle and Product was also his” (TT II.38; my italics). In the First Treatise, Locke defined cattle as “such Creature as were or might be tame, and so be the Private possession of Particular Men” (TT I.25). With landed property, then, comes property in animals, requiring a special sort of labor that Locke buries amongst a list of others—“the Labour of those who broke the Oxen” (TT II.43).

When Locke introduces cattle, he cites a number of biblical episodes that inadvertently demonstrate the unique role of animal property for colonization. His citation of Genesis 13 follows English colonial apologists who frequently used it to justify moving to “empty” places like the “new” world. ⁴⁴ This chapter tells the story of Lot moving away from Abraham, who was “wealthy in livestock,” because the land could no longer sustain them, and in particular, both their “flocks and herds.” Abraham thus says to Lot, “Let’s not have any quarreling between you and me, or your herders and mine,” and they part ways. ⁴⁵ Locke uses this passage to claim that, in the beginning, people “wandered with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their substance.” However, the greater peopling of the earth meant that they would have “separated and inlarged their pasture” just as Lot and Abraham did. Locke then cites Genesis 36 to the same effect: “for the same Reason Esau went from his Father, and his Brother, and planted in Mount Seir” (TT II.38). Here, the bible is quite explicit that Esau moves because the land could not support them both “because of their livestock.” Animal property, then, drives colonizing expansion because, unlike any other type of property in Locke, they are sentient property on the move.

Another reason that animal chattel presents a special sort of property concerns Locke’s statement that “the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut . . . become my Property” (TT II.28; italics in original). Scholars, most famously C. B. Macpherson, have focused on the servant, but in this context the horse signals animals’ unique status. Both servants and horses extend the will of man, expanding his labor’s ambit. However, unlike the way a plow might extend one’s labor, domesticated animals do so due to their recognized sentience. Although Locke typically depicts labor as the province of humanity, the horse complicates this division. Horses are not full agents that carry out labor, but nor are they without agency; they perform a certain actancy—an effectivity not quite considered as sovereign action. Animals become especially valuable extensions of human labor because they require some but not constant control. Whether this grazing entitles the owner to the land or just the grass remains unknown, though introducing livestock to what would be called the Americas did drastically change ecological landscapes. ⁴⁶

What is known, though, is that colonization proceeded precisely through this process of settlers vampirically extending their desire through livestock. Without England’s social architecture for enclosing farm animals, settlers had to allow livestock more latitude to roam. ⁴⁷ Though it might seem strange that colonists who so valorized fixed settlement would rely on mobile chattel, they “fully expected to harness their animals’ movements to serve the cause of permanence.” ⁴⁸ Livestock upkeep “overshadowed every other factor driving the colonists’ insatiable quest for land.” ⁴⁹ When livestock trespassed onto indigenous land, indigenous peoples sometimes killed or kept the creatures; in turn settlers punished this “disrespect” for property. The appearance of livestock told indigenous people that a veritable “juggernaut of English people and animals” would soon follow. ⁵⁰ Cattle thus crucially figured in colonial processes that Locke’s critics associate with landed property.

Finally, Locke’s chapter moves onto its last stage—money—with its own relationship to animality. People invent money because it enables more appropriation with less spoilage. Money produces a properly human community by creating a common market for exchange, and so places where “the Inhabitants thereof not having joined with the rest of Mankind, in . . . the Use of their common Money” risk producing unnecessary waste (TT II.45). The money stage also references cattle, but now as stock (and the shared etymological roots of cattle, chattel, and capital becomes especially striking here). When Locke famously claims that “Thus in the beginning all the World was America” (TT II.49), the antecedent characterization of America implied by the “thus” describes a land without cattle. A few lines before, he asks with a sardonic tinge:

What would a Man value Ten Thousand, or an Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce . . . to draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product? (TT II.48; my italics)

No money, no livestock, no improvement. Cattle, in contrast to the Indian’s spoiled venison, are more appropriate for a monied age because one “stores” value in their bodies, and control over their reproduction makes them indefinitely multipliable for the world market. To join the properly human community, then, nations must give up lifestyles oriented around venison in favor of keeping cattle on a massive scale.

The path to civil society thus requires a progressive vision of human–animal relationality, where owning more livestock correlates with civilizational improvement. The penurious Indian must make do with hunted venison while developed societies keep meat ready-to-hand. Locke thus voices an old European narrative that measures proper human civilization in terms of the capability to engineer life-forms. ⁵¹ This attitude mirrored less systematic but structurally similar on-the-ground political justifications for land expropriation in America. ⁵² Early colonists often interpreted indigenous peoples’ lack of domesticated farm animals as civilizational backwardness. ⁵³ (Some indigenous peoples did relate to some animals in ways that could be described as domestication, but those relationships bore scant resemblance to the intensive, large-scale systems of English livestock.) ⁵⁴ Neither Locke nor the colonists could countenance the reasonableness of alternate cosmologies that rendered animate chattel an incoherent concept, as Anderson argues was true for many Algonquian peoples. ⁵⁵ Colonists, however, believed that only such technologies could maximize the land’s potential in ways unavailable to indigenous people lacking cattle. ⁵⁶

This reading suggests an alternative understanding of human equality. By way of contrast, Waldron accepts that Locke’s property chapter has troubling colonial implications, but concludes that Locke at least still sees indigenous people as people. Partly this is because Locke encourages religious tolerance of indigenous “paganism” and condemns using religious difference to justify expropriation. ⁵⁷ But perhaps Waldron has proven too much. That is, his insistence that Locke remains committed to human equality hints at the paucity of human equality’s protections. One can be equally human and still suffer dispossession—dispossession, in fact, in the name of humanity. The ontotheological dimension of the dominion covenant overrides more surface-level claims of religious toleration. The dominion covenant makes clear that human equality requires falling into line with a particularized model of human superiority that declares itself as universal and casts alternative ecological relationships as deviant. “The Labour of those who broke the Oxen” therefore bears more weight than Locke admits—it is the only mode of labor that both expands material property and expresses human lordship.

Propertied humanity is the dominion covenant’s “carrot” in that following the covenant’s demand for dominion offers the promise of recognized property. But the covenant also threatens with the “stick” of punishment and slavery for those who seem to ally with brute animality, as the next section shows. If property expands dominion’s ambit, punishment wards off encroachments against this fragile order. Human equality’s purported foundationalism, its need for a binary distinction between those within and without the order of equality, requires a harsh response against equality’s gray zones.

“Noxious Creatures” and the State of War

Punishment poses a unique problem for Lockean human equality: it both makes it possible and presents the only way to act against humans in ways otherwise prohibited by that very equality. Punishment makes human equality possible because it enables recourse against infringements on others’ humanity. If natural law maintains mankind as “one Society distinct from all other Creatures,” punishment wards off slippages into the creaturely realm. On the other side, punishment not only allows “one Man” to have “a Power over another” (TT II.8) but it also provides the only legitimate avenue by which to enslave another. ⁵⁸ Lockean punishment, in short, works as follows: in the state of nature, the power to punish activates when one person tries to harm another’s life and thereby inaugurates a state of war (TT II.18). The aggrieved may “destroy” the aggressor (TT II.16), and this power applies beyond murders and enslavers; the innocent one may “kill a Thief” even if the latter “has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his Life” because, in using “Force, so to get him into his power,” the thief might also take everything else (TT II.18). What’s more, the “innocent” may enslave aggressors because, as personae non-grata, they lose nothing from becoming slaves. Slavery is “the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive” (TT II.24; italics in original). This captivity entails despotic power, “an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take away his Life, whenever he pleases” (TT II.172).

If cattle and deer dominate Locke’s account of property, the animal figure that governs punishment is the “noxious brute”—predatory animals like “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves. Lockean punishment thus raises deep problems for human equality not only because it sanctions slavery but because he outright seems to dehumanize criminals, constantly aligning them with these “noxious” creatures (TT II.10, II.11, II.16, II.172, II.181). Transgressing natural law violates not only individuals but humanity as a whole. As such, any human may punish such a “trespass against the whole Species” (TT II.8) for the same reason they may kill a “Wolf or a Lyon”—such criminals “are not under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence” and so are like “Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and noxious Creatures, that will be sure to destroy him, whenever he falls into their Power” (TT II.16).

The alignment between criminal and noxious brute has raised a question for defenders and critics of Locke alike, one representatively voiced by Mary Nyquist: “why does Locke so stress the transgressor’s monstrous subhumanity?” ⁵⁹ This question in turn raises the issue of why Lockean punishment seems so severe. Waldron’s defense of Locke notes that he does not know “how to reconcile it with the background theory of basic equality.” ⁶⁰ He does suggest a possible reading of punishment that ameliorates some of its severity—namely, Locke’s emphasis on proportionality and the power to pardon suggest that in most cases criminals are not totally cast out of moral consideration—but admits that “it is not necessarily an attractive account.” ⁶¹ More critical treatments of Lockean punishment do challenge his production of the criminal as subhuman. ⁶² However, none really examines the nonhuman referents that anchor this process, and thus the issue for both them and for defenders becomes rather one-dimensional: does Locke really intend to ontologically degrade criminals such that they functionally become animals? If Lockean humanism were simply a matter of degree, then this linear human–animal continuum makes sense. As it stands, though, it misses the complexity of Locke’s humanism. What role do noxious brutes play in the Lockean bestiary, as opposed to say, deer or cattle?

The dominion covenant, I will show, illuminates the role of “noxious brutes” in Locke’s system, which in turn explains the necessity of severe punishment. The paradoxical role of punishment as both guarantor of human equality and a key site of dehumanization emerges from the fact that the basis of human equality is the sheer fact of dominating animals. In this respect, wild predatory animals introduce instability and threaten the dominion covenant by their very existence, as I will argue. With regard to wild animals, Locke introduces a structure of criminality into existence that exceeds the human realm. The human criminal, in turn, must become subject to a sort of civil death insofar as they enter into a sort of alliance with these predatory animals and the broader sense of criminal animality they represent.

Of the three explicitly named creatures, we can start with wolves, even though they only appear three times in the Two Treatises (TT I.56; II.16; II.228). First, the white, Western political tradition attributes them with a peculiar ethno-symbology of treachery and evil, as I have noted. Moreover, only wolves would have come into contact with the average European or Euro-American. Finally, they pose a distinct problem in Locke’s work. The threat of lions and tigers in common folklore was their capability to kill humans, and they were sometimes regarded as valiant, if fearsome, figures. Wolves, by contrast, have been associated less with honor than, as Jacques Derrida notes, deception. ⁶³ And unlike tigers or lions, wolves rarely attack humans; in fact, they may have been the first nonhuman animals with whom humans had sustained social contact. ⁶⁴ Locke’s denial of the possibility of “Society nor Security” with wolves, then, seems peculiar (TT II.11).

This context illuminates the full significance of the fact that around 1500, a little more than a century before Locke’s birth, the English carried out the world’s first wolf extermination in a given territorial jurisdiction. ⁶⁵ Settlers then inherited anti-wolf attitudes when they once again encountered the creatures. The 1656 wolf bounty legislation, mentioned in the introduction, emerged in this setting. Settlers throughout the colonies initiated mass wolf-culling campaigns and often tortured wolves, embroidering their deaths with ritualistic symbolism. ⁶⁶ For wolves, then, English settlers were the true noxious creatures with whom one could have neither society nor security.

Why this fervor to slaughter, this ritualization of death as if torturing a prisoner of war, despite the absence of any significant threat to settler life? Wolves may not kill humans often, but they do “steal” livestock and thus ignore the covenant whereby humanity’s right to self-preservation entails privileged access to other forms of life. ⁶⁷ Like a nonhuman version of the Lockean thief, wolves threaten to violate the fundamental existential underpinnings of civil society. Unlike most human thieves, though, wolves steal not just any property but the foundation of property itself—livestock—intimately challenging the hegemonic sense of English identity as a civilized people distinct from savage primitives and nonhuman creatures. In this context, wolf-culling, like oxen-breaking, not only protects material wealth but reasserts human sovereignty.

The wolf offers a privileged example of the broader, unacknowledged shadow that beasts of prey cast on dominion. In the Two Treatises, in fact, these creatures seem to both have no right to exist while also being part of God’s creation. In the First Treatise, Locke avers that God’s benediction to Noah, that “the fear of you, and the dread of you . . . shall be upon every Beast,” expresses dominion “as fully as may be” (TT I.36; italics in original). In this respect, wild predatory animals pose a conundrum. If, in an orderly cosmos, humans appropriate inferior creatures when needed, what of the “Tygers” who, as Dunn puts it, “occasionally appropriate men for their consumption?” ⁶⁸ The mere existence of such creatures—disobedient and unafraid of humans—threatens this neat order with “a disturbing opacity in the divine purposes.” Locke’s insinuation that one may destroy noxious creatures gratuitously, without transgression, attempts to restore his presumed sense of dominion. Locke thus joins a European tradition that identifies the beginnings of human history with the act of combining forces to defeat wild beasts. ⁶⁹ Because wild beasts are a sort of existential criminal, humans come into the world at war, on a species level, with them. ⁷⁰

Arguing that Locke sees noxious brutes as existential criminals may seem inappropriate given that Locke thinks that beasts do not choose force but fundamentally incarnate it. If they were unreasoning automata, it would make little sense to say that they “violate” the dominion covenant. And while Locke does mostly present these creatures as solely ruled by instinctive force, without care or decency, he also complicates this picture. First, we already saw how the Essay Concerning Human Understanding considers many animals to have some reason rather than being purely driven by instinct. Second, the First Treatise favorably compares the behavior of lions and wolves to the human behavior that Filmer sanctions. Filmer’s claim that fathers have absolute power over their children justifies selling and killing them, but even “[t]he Dens of Lions and Nurseries of Wolves know no such Cruelty.” Here, Locke speaks almost glowingly of the tender parenting of creatures he later deems noxious: “They will Hunt, Watch, Fight, and almost Starve for the Preservation of their Young, never part with them, never forsake them.” Strikingly, he argues that they “obey God and Nature.” He then connects the duties of man with this animal obeisance: “And is it the Priviledge of Man alone to act more contrary to Nature than the Wild and most Untamed part of the Creation?” (TT I.57). Locke thus imbues beasts of prey with an ambiguous sense of agency. On one hand, they instinctively incarnate force and unreason. On the other, Locke cracks open a space for action in accordance with nature. This ambiguity accords with the covenant figure’s sense of indistinction between inherent presumption and consensual agreement. Noxious creatures can, then, violate the dominion covenant and be held responsible for it, even though they do not “choose” to do so.

In sum, “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves imbue the dominion covenant with a sense of frailty. They demonstrate indifference to human supremacy by threatening human lives and livestock, refusing to live in “fear and dread” of humanity. This frailty—what Dunn calls an embarrassing “opacity” in God’s intention—pushes the Lockean combination of faith in a harmonious cosmological order and skepticism about knowing that order at a tender spot. Locke thereby affirms the right to kill noxious creatures on sight to shore up the human community’s coherence, superiority, and right to inspire dread in animals.

We can now understand the severity of Lockean punishment. Nyquist notes that despite early modern political theory’s obsession with origins, Locke does not explain how the proper subject acquires despotic power. ⁷¹ I am suggesting, however, that the “Original” for despotic power stems from the wild beast’s violation of the dominion covenant. If natural law constitutes human community, and that community emerges via a war against noxious beasts, then violating natural law brings humanity’s war with disobedient animals inside the gates of human society—a wolf-man suddenly emerges in the center of the polis. The criminal is not so much exterior to humanity as a traitor to it. It is permissible to do whatever desired to one who, in crossing enemy lines and becoming a species-traitor, attacks something so fundamental. Moreover, punishment’s severity, its endpoint in slavery, does not contradict Lockean human equality but rather displays its autoimmune logic—the way its systems of defense rebound against the structure as a whole. Reifying humanity as a coherent entity requires guarding its borders against unruly human behavior. For a human equality founded on dominion, the metric for unruliness concerns one’s willingness to stay as far as possible from the noxious creatures nipping at the walls of Fortress Humanity.

Conclusion

I have argued that Locke resolves problems in his account of human equality via a dominion covenant, in which the substantive foundation of human equality is the sheer fact of dominating animals. Simultaneously given as an article of faith and something achieved and enforced as an “agreement,” the covenant requires an ongoing practice of dominating nonhumans, particularly animals, and humans that stray too far from this order. Thus, colonization and slavery proceed by the very same process meant to guarantee universal human regard. That is, Lockean racism fulfills, rather than deviates from, this vision of human equality. I traced this dynamic through two avenues. First, through livestock, which are the foundation of property and which help govern colonial dispossession and assimilation. Second, for those that do not submit to a proper image of humanity, Locke reserves the fate of wolves—violence without reserve. As prefigured by Virginia’s 1656 Act, Lockean civil society is the ongoing process of exterminating free-ranging wolves to develop supposedly tame cattle.

The challenges to human equality that Locke encountered are not quite the same as ours, and some he worried about may not worry us. But the difficulty of trying to establish an insuperable moral line that keeps all humans in and all nonhumans out have only intensified in the ensuing years. In the face of such challenges, some understandably wish to hold on to the idea of a foundational human equality because it seems difficult to find a language to condemn racism, sexism, ableism, etc. without it. ⁷² Radical critics of Locke, too, often implicitly hold on to his species-egalitarianism even if other aspects of his thought trouble them. While in this space I cannot offer an alternative language, my reading of Locke has shown how this human equality—reliant on an unstable foundation that requires constant reenactment—will not suffice. Even in one of the most venerated texts in this tradition, human equality and exceptionalism remain fragile.

John Dunn concludes his classic work on the importance of religion for Locke as follows: “We have, it seems, come to accept in the broadest of terms the politics of Locke but, while doing so, we have firmly discarded the reasons which alone made them seem acceptable even to Locke. It is hard to believe that this combination can be quite what we need today.” ⁷³ We can transpose Dunn’s concern into the terms of the dominion covenant; we live in an era with world-historical levels of violence toward humans and nonhumans, but one that does not explicitly invoke humanity’s theological privilege. So, what forms of the dominion covenant might lurk today under the guise of secular humanist belief, even in its most emancipatory articulations?