Pre-Modern Property and Self-Ownership Before and After Locke
| Author | Janet Coleman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885105050446 |
| Published date | 01 April 2005 |
| Date | 01 April 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Pre-Modern Property and
Self-Ownership Before
and After Locke
Or, When did Common Decency Become a
Private rather than a Public Virtue?
Janet Coleman London School of Economics and Political Science
abstract: Self-ownership is a central concept not only in Anglo-American
liberal/libertarian discourse but also in Marxism. This article investigates what it
means to say that a person has fundamental entitlement to full property in himself. It
looks at possible moments when pre-modern concepts of the self became modern
ones, examining Locke’s Second Treatise and his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. The aim is to focus on continuities and discontinuities in the transition
from pre-modern to modern concepts and practices of identity and agency and the
role that attitudes to property played within this transition. It also seeks to alert
historians to the pitfalls of accepting contemporary conceptions of moral and civic
agency found in normative political theory when they study pre-modern contexts and
the people who lived their lives within them. It also attempts to expose certain
modern limits on our understanding of society and people’s obligations to one
another by rejecting the laws of the oikos as currently applied to the political domain.
key words: Aristotle, Hobbes, identity, liberal, libertarian, Locke, Marxism, obligations,
property, self-ownership
In German, it is not common to speak of oneself as ein Besitzer where what one
owns is oneself. Similarly in French, it would be odd to say ‘que j’ai une propriété
en moi-même’ and to see self-ownership as central to personal identity. However,
it seems relatively unproblematic to speak of owning oneself in contemporary
English. Indeed, self-ownership is a central concept in a certain kind of liberal as
well as right-wing libertarian discourse in the Anglo-American world. In fact, it is
something of an a priori concept. Once self-ownership is claimed as a funda-
mental right, ownership of material things like property is said naturally to follow
from it. From the legitimate claims to people’s ownership of themselves is
thought to follow their claims to legitimately acquired external resources.
125
article
Contact address: Janet Coleman, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Department of Government, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE.
Email: j.coleman@lse.ac.uk
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 4(2)125–145
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885105050446]
Furthermore, liberals and libertarians think that if you reject the thesis of self-
ownership then you are prepared not only to license slavery, but you are also pre-
pared intolerably to restrict individual autonomy and to endorse the treatment of
people as mere means and not as ends in themselves.1
Indeed, recent defences of organ sales propose that freedom of occupational
choice, the freedom to choose how one earns a living, is a central value in liberal
moral and political philosophy. Insofar as we all use our body to work, freedom of
occupational choice ought to mean freedom to use our body as we wish so as to
earn a living. Liberal discomfort is observed concerning an argument about using
our body to raise income; many deny we ought to be left free to sell parts of our
body. The argument insists, however, that we have a moral right to do so.2
Strictly, this does not emerge from an explicit argument of self-ownership
although it seems it is implied as a right.
Now this prior notion of self-ownership is also central to Marxism on the left
because it is appealed to in the standard Marxist condemnation of the exploitation
of the worker’s ownership of his labour power by capitalist owners of the means
of production.3In Marx’s good society, productive resources are available free to
all but the individual remains sovereign over himself, conducting himself ‘just as
he has a mind to’.4That there is an easy contemporary conflation of sovereignty
over oneself and ownership of that self is of crucial significance and it will be
further highlighted in what follows. What is being pointed out by Marx in the
German Ideology is a vision of individuals fulfilling themselves alone within a
group, where the individual has basic interests in his own self-enactment and
fulfilment and not basic interests in that of the whole, even though he fulfils
himself only to the extent that each of the others is allowed to do so. This is
achieved against a backdrop of natural resource abundance, there to be exploited
by each and all, so that we get the principle: from each according to his ability, to
each according to his needs. The Marxian model of the person can be, and has
been, interpreted as a self-regarder of his own goals where no one takes promot-
ing the fulfilment of others as any kind of obligation. A spin-off yes, but not an
obligation. Instead, the presumption of material endowment ensures that ‘the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.5Indeed, as
Marx said in the German Ideology, ‘only within the community has each individual
the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions’6and, therefore, Marx can be
interpreted as seeing the community as a means to the independently specified
goal of personal development: hunting in the morning, reading in the evening,
etc., despite the temptation to read this as irony. While some interpret Marx to
have meant that in the final stages of communism individual motivation will
wither away, people no longer thinking in terms of mine and thine, others inter-
pret him as having described what looks like an over-socialization of the still
self-owning individual. When he spoke of an overcoming of the antagonism
between the individual and the social interest, according to Cohen, he did not
appear to mean that the individual would make the social interest his own, but
European Journal of Political Theory 4(2)
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