Nirma University Institute of Law

VII Semester B.A.LL.B. (Hons.)Course

A Term Assignment in the subject of Legal Philosophy for the Academic Year 2011-12 on

John Lockes Justification of Liberalism

SUBMITTED BY: Jay Solanki 08BAL069

Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, "of freedom") is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but most liberals support such fundamental ideas as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights, capitalism, free trade, and the freedom of religion. These ideas are widely accepted, even by political groups that do not openly profess a liberal ideological orientation. Liberalism encompasses

several intellectual trends and traditions, but the dominant variants are classical liberalism, which became popular in the eighteenth century, and social liberalism, which became popular in the twentieth century. John Locke (16321704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. Much of Locke's work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This opposition is both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church

In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better insure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and the separation of legislative and executive powers.

According to Locke, people are born free and equal; but he thought that it was fine for males to rule in the state as well as the family; he said nothing to suggest that he wanted women to share in political power. Filmer himself pointed out that genuine democratic principles (which he rejected) involved empowering women (and, he added, children too; he also claimed that a real democrat would want to take a new vote every time someone is born or dies). If you argue that women and children are subordinate to men, he suggested, you have to admit that Adam was superior to everyone else who lived while he did; but if that is so, there can be no grounds for supposing that at first power was in the hands of the people as a whole, and that it was only later transferred to kings. Nowadays, some people argue that giving women political rights is of limited significance as long as patriarchalist ideas continue to dominate in the family and in society at large. They claim that it is impossible to draw any neat and rigid distinctions between the spheres of the private and the political. It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that such people regard Filmer as a hero of their movement; but they do claim that much of Locke's critique of Filmer is ineffective. In their opinion, liberalism of the sort that Locke advocated (and which has been extremely influential) is hypocritical and inconsistent; it claims that people are by nature free and equal, and that inequalities result from agreements into which we freely enter, but it also tacitly assumes that some people are naturally more equal than others (for instance, that men are superior to women, and perhaps that the social elite is naturally superior to the working class). Some people have argued that another sign of Locke's hypocrisy is that his political theory strongly condemns slavery (discussed especially in chapter 4 of the second treatise), while he himself did nothing to oppose English participation in the slave trade, and in fact invested in it.

Locke in its 2nd Treatise of Government states that, the state of nature vests each reasonable individual with an independent right and responsibility to enforce the natural law by punishing those few who irrationally choose to violate it. Everything changes with the gradual introduction of private property. Originally, Locke supposed, the earth and everything on it belongs to all of us in common; among perfectly equal inhabitants, all have the same right to make use of whatever they find and can use. The only exception to this rule is that each of us has an exclusive

right to her/his own body and its actions. But applying these actions to natural objects by mixing our labor with them, Locke argued, provides a clear means for appropriating them as an extension of our own personal property. Since our bodies and their movements are our own, whenever we use our own effort to improve the natural world the resulting products belong to us as well. The same principle of appropriation by the investment of labor can be extended to control over the surface of the earth as well, on Locke's view. Individuals who pour themselves into the landimproving its productivity by spending their own time and effort on its cultivation acquire a property interest in the result. The plowed field is worth more than the virgin prairie precisely because I have invested my labor in plowing it; so even if the prairie was held in common by all, the plowed field is mine. This personal appropriation of natural resources can continue indefinitely, Locke held, so long as there is"enough, and as good" left for others with the gumption to do the same. Locke treats the right to private property as if it were the paradigmatic case of what it means for a person to possess freedom as if freedom itself were just another possession. Locke derives his justly famous argument on behalf of the naturalness from the axiom an individual do have right to the property for himself. Locke aims to establish two major points. First, the right to property is a natural right, a right that preexists the establishment of government and in fact limits the power of government once established. Secondly, the acquisition of private property would not have led to the violence and competitive warfare.