Abstract
In Locke Among the Radicals, Daniel Layman undertakes an ambitious historical and constructive endeavor: to settle the unresolved conflict in John Locke’s theory of property between everyone’s common right to a shared world and each person’s individual rights to themselves and their private property. For Layman, Locke’s proprietary arrangement fails to meet the standards of world-sharing he stipulates in the Second Treatise. By allowing land to be appropriated through labor and accumulated through money, Locke consequently curtails the common right of all people to the world as well as the relational equality upon which that right is founded. Layman observes that, although an alternative property regime could have made world-sharing compatible with appropriation and monetization, Locke never suggests one. Instead, he reads our tacit consent to money as a sign of our consent to its consequences, which—as Layman rightly discerns—legitimizes “relations of dependence that would otherwise be unacceptable” (60). Layman convincingly argues that Locke’s reliance on consent here is inadequate to the moral task he assigns it, for our consent to money cannot be taken as a sign of our consent to any of its ramifications (61).
In the ensuing chapters Layman sets out to find elements of a natural rights theory of property that might succeed where Locke’s failed. His goal is to arrive at an egalitarian Lockean framework that not only reconciles our individual property rights in what we create with our equal right to a common world, but that does so within the conditions of monetization and appropriation that define a modern capitalist economy. Before arriving at his own left-Lockean solution to Locke’s conundrum (Chapter 6), Layman engages in a richly detailed and rigorous reading of the widely neglected yet fascinating moral and political ideas of four nineteenth-century radical Lockeans: the libertarians Thomas Hodgskin (Chapter 2) and Lysander Spooner (Chapter 3), and the egalitarians John Bray (Chapter 4) and Henry George (Chapter 5).
Layman’s journey into nineteenth-century Lockean thought begins with Hodgskin, whose radicalism inheres in deploying a Lockean theory of natural property rights as a moral critique of capitalist property relations, the injustices of which he attributes to the coercive extraction and violent conquest promoted by capitalists, landowners, and the state. In contrast to the moral evils propagated by capital and the state, Hodgskin contends that a society based solely on natural property rights—without any interference from political legislation—would be more just: capital would be exclusively owned by workers and the size of private estates would be relatively equal and modest (84, 93). Continuing on the libertarian track, Layman then turns to Spooner. In Spooner’s account, state power and political relationships are illegitimate, even when consensual, insofar as they constrain our natural rights, which must remain inalienable and untransferable in order to fulfill their purpose of securing relational equality (125). Rather than summoning the state to secure our equality and liberty, Spooner supports his commitment to freedom from arbitrary power with a claim for the noncoercive redistribution of wealth. Yet, given Layman’s intent to find a Lockean theory of natural property rights able to accommodate self-ownership and world-sharing, his quest must extend beyond Hodgskin and Spooner seeing that their models exclude the possibility of common world-ownership altogether (92, 109–110, 129).
Unlike Hodgskin and Spooner, Layman’s two ensuing radicals, Bray and George, offer conclusive correctives to Locke through egalitarian models of natural rights that frame everyone’s equal and common claim to the world as a universal human right. As Layman demonstrates, both thinkers pursue this goal by banning private ownership of land and capital tout court while limiting private property to the direct fruits of individual labor. Their most significant condemnation of private ownership in land and capital is that, by promoting inequalities in material possessions, it fundamentally undermines relational equality and nondomination by placing the working many at the arbitrary whims of the propertied few. Layman’s account of these egalitarian Lockeans includes a thorough assessment of their visions for a just social order. In Bray’s communitarian utopia, workers would purchase all national capital from capitalists in order to set up a system of collective production, the means of which they would own in common (161–163). In George’s ideal society, landowners would be reduced to tenants by being forced to pay a rent directly to the community for productively using their land (192, 198–199). Taking stock of their respective models, Layman concludes that George enhances the egalitarian Lockean framework by absolving it from Bray’s flawed economic reasoning and recasting the market as a source of prosperity and liberty (204–205).
In the final chapter, Layman articulates a contemporary, left-leaning solution to Locke’s property paradox. He sides with the radical egalitarian vision of world-sharing, which he dubs “Public Positive Community,” on account of its ability to accommodate moral equality, self-ownership, and nondomination by granting each person positive rights to use the world in common while holding the community and its members accountable to one another (207, 214, 221). Layman also acknowledges the significant challenges of rendering a left-Lockean view of Public Positive Community workable under present socioeconomic conditions. For one, the categories used by the egalitarian radicals to distinguish common from private property—such as land and wealth, productive and unproductive assets—are more tenuous now than ever before (235). And although the question of justice within a world-sharing paradigm is necessarily global, the Lockean constructs of “public,” “common,” and “community” are fatefully reliant on national borders and state sovereignty (239). While Layman carefully probes these hurdles, he offers no definitive solutions. This is in part because, when it comes to contending with the complex issues of our present, Layman’s unyielding allegiance to a Lockean framework is restrictive, so much so that, as he concedes, “someone who is not even tempted by that framework will find little to appreciate in the arguments to come” (217). The narrow appeal of his constructive effort raises the question of why we should be invested in the best version of Locke’s theory of property if the problems it must confront push us beyond the boundaries of a strictly Lockean schema. This is not to say that Layman’s theory should be universally pleasing; it is rather to reflect on whether his commitments to natural rights, world-sharing, nondomination, and relational equality might be better suited to overcome contemporary obstacles by relinquishing his hardline commitment to Locke.
By contrast, Layman’s narrative of Lockean radicalism is at once more persuasive and cogent than his attempt to rehabilitate it. This is largely thanks to Layman’s captivating portrayal of capitalism as a shared topos of reflection among all nineteenth-century thinkers in his book. But although capitalism was a prominent motif in the moral and political theories of the radicals, Layman is less concerned with bringing his interpretation of their ideas to bear on the social circumstances under which these ideas were conceived. This is not surprising since his primary aim is “not to understand the Lockean radicals in terms of their social and political settings, but rather to make sense of their arguments as contributions to broadly Lockean property theory” (9). At the same time, Layman is equally determined to disclose how Locke’s property problem took on “a life of its own in a quite different social, cultural, economic, and philosophical milieu” (13). It is unclear how one should make sense of the new milieu in which nineteenth-century radicals took up Locke’s dilemma without recourse to the specific social setting in which they reinterpreted Locke’s thought and strived to resolve its tension. Layman’s disavowal of social context is especially puzzling given that his most salient justification for launching a book-length study of these thinkers is that, unlike earlier Lockeans living in “less aggressively capitalist times,” nineteenth-century Lockeans were “directly and explicitly concerned with the problem of equal liberty under capitalism” (7–8). If this is the case, then it is plausible that the history of nineteenth-century capitalism may help us not only to explain why equal liberty under capitalism became a concern at this juncture, but also, and more in line with Layman’s aspirations, to understand the arguments Lockean radicals contrived to address this concern. Such an approach would resonate with Layman’s conviction that “our ideas are embedded in their histories” insofar as they “carry their dialectical and textual development with them as part of the content that makes them comprehensible and, sometimes, useful to us” (14). This could not be better said. And if part of what makes these radical ideas comprehensible and useful to us is how their authors adapted Locke’s thought to amend newly rampant injustices within the capitalist societies of their day, then a crucial interpretive step should be to grasp the role played by these societies in setting the terms of Locke’s theory and its adjoining tension in a new, radical key.
One instance where the history of capitalism could have widened the horizon of interpretive possibilities at Layman’s disposal occurs in his critique of Bray’s theory of class domination. Layman doubts that capitalists could have exercised the kind of collective ascendancy that worried Bray because, under competitive markets, owners of capital tend to compete rather than cooperate (145). But competitive markets were never an unsurmountable constraint to the prodigious concentration of capital and its concerted command over labor, from the East India Company and Carnegie Steel to Amazon and Google. Moreover, from where Bray stood, the collective agency of emerging monopolies would have appeared less as a benign anomaly than a pervasive and menacing development of industrial capitalism. Indeed, the accumulation of capital by nineteenth-century monopolies attested to the triumph of concentration over competition; it was the result of what Marx called the “expropriation of capitalist by capitalist” and the “transformation of many small into few large capitals.” 1 Historically, capital’s drive to agglomerate in increasingly large organizational units has been, and continues to be, most commonly purveyed by eradicating competition through a collusion that, in Harry Braverman’s words, “severs the direct link between capital and its individual owner.” 2 It is possible, then, that Bray’s worry about class domination was animated by the historical rise of monopoly capital and the indelible threat its collective authority posed to the liberty of workers. And since monopolies remain a dominant form of hypercapitalist enterprise, exploring this account of class domination as a historically situated concern over capital’s corporate form would strengthen Layman’s vindication of egalitarian Lockeanism as the basis for a left-Lockean theory of property in our present.
Ultimately, my reservations about Layman’s rehabilitation of Locke and his use of history do nothing to diminish the impressive achievements of his exegetical pursuits. Among the book’s most compelling interpretive moves is the imaginative republican thread tying Locke and his radical successors to a shared ideal of freedom as nondomination. Layman contends that, unlike contemporary neo-republicans for whom rights are a secondary addendum to nondomination, Locke’s rival republican theory centers natural rights as a foundational instrument for securing individual autonomy and liberty from arbitrary power (31–32). Layman convincingly reveals how Locke’s conceptions of liberty, rights, and law—despite being naturalist—are moored in a thick institutional framework in which political laws derive from a common legislative will. In Layman’s original republican reading of Locke, the state of nature emerges as a juridical community comprised of legal institutions of accountability among moral equals, whereas nondomination figures as a robust institutional safeguard of natural rights (35–38).
In a more fundamental way, Layman’s republican angle imparts a broader appeal to his interpretive exercise than a book on Locke and Lockeans might otherwise elicit. This makes sense since Locke Among the Radicals is emphatically not a book about the nineteenth-century reception of Locke’s texts; it is a book about how four radical thinkers took up Locke’s commitments to self-ownership, nondomination, and relational equality in order to formulate alternative theories of natural property rights fit to the task of correcting the injustices of what they saw as a capitalist society gone awry. What brings these radicals together most decisively is not the fact that they were Lockeans, but that they each advanced distinct moral critiques of capitalism on the basis of equality and liberty from an assortment of political persuasions and ideological orientations often seen as antagonistic to a “radical” critique of capitalism. By meaningfully enriching our historical sources for understanding and critiquing capitalist society, Layman’s book makes a timely and important contribution to political thought.