Part I covers the natural-law writers who framed the property question before political economy existed: how can anyone come to own part of a world given to all? Grotius and Pufendorf answer by agreement, Locke by labor, and Paine and Spence turn Locke's premises against private property in land. Entry 9 sets out critics who rejected the natural-law framework itself: Hume, Bentham and the young Marx. Unconfirmed details are flagged inline.
Entry 6. Grotius and Pufendorf: property by agreement
Entry 7. Locke: property by labor
Entry 8. Paine and Spence: land as a common inheritance
Entry 9. Critics of natural law: Hume, Bentham and the young Marx
Entry 6. Grotius and Pufendorf: property by agreement
Overview. Before labor became the standard answer to how private property can arise from a world held in common, the leading answer was agreement. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) wrote in the natural-law tradition, which derives rights and duties from human nature and reason rather than from the statutes of any one state. Both start from an original community, a condition in which things were open to everyone's use. Both explain private ownership as a later human institution introduced by consent, express or tacit. Occupation, meaning first taking, matters in their accounts, but it gives title because people have agreed that it should. Neither makes labor the title by which things first leave the common, though Grotius gives a maker a share in what he makes from another's material (below). This entry sets out what each wrote, what follows for wages, interest, rent and prices, and why Locke treated the consent account as both his starting point and his target.
Grotius. Text: De iure belli ac pacis (1625), Book II, ch. 2, §2, begins from God's grant to humankind of a general right over lower things. Each person could take what he needed, and taking from another what he had taken was unjust; Grotius illustrates this with Cicero's theater, whose seats are common though each spectator holds his own while seated. Common holding broke down as arts and wants multiplied, people dispersed, and justice and goodwill proved too weak to keep equality in both the labor of producing and the consuming of goods. Ownership then arose not by a mental act alone, which others could not know, but by agreement: express, as in a division, or tacit, as in occupation [C]. Labor enters this story as a source of the unfairness that ended community, not as a title.
The agreement carried a reservation. In extreme necessity the original right to use things as if common revives, because those who first divided things are presumed to have reserved it. The right lapses where the owner is in equal need, and restitution is owed when possible (II.2.6–9) [N]. Where something is made from another's material, Grotius holds that by the law of nature it becomes common to maker and owner, as when properties are mixed, in proportion to the value each has contributed, against the Roman rules that award it to one side (II.8.19; Kelsey, pp. 306–307). Awarding the less valuable thing to the owner of the more valuable, he adds, is civil law adopted for convenience, not law of nature (II.8.21, p. 307); planting or building on another's land likewise produces co-ownership, since the soil's nourishment is only part of what grows and the owner of the seed or plant does not naturally lose his right (II.8.22, p. 308) [N]. A good-faith possessor of another's thing may not keep its income but may charge for expenses and useful labor (II.8.23, p. 308) [N].
Book II, ch. 12, treats contracts under a requirement of equality. Its sections ask how the price of a thing should be estimated and why it may justly rise or fall (§14), which monopolies are contrary to natural law (§16), what governs the rent of things (§18), how a just payment for services may rise or fall (§19), by what right interest is forbidden (§20), what advantages do not count as interest (§21), and what force civil laws have here (§22). Wage labor thus appears as one form of hire, priced like the hire of things. On price, Grotius makes need the most natural measure of value but adds desire, which prices luxuries above their use, and abundance, which makes the most necessary things cheap. The current price follows common estimation within a range, takes account of the dealers' labor and expenditure, and moves with the abundance or scarcity of buyers, money and goods (II.12.14; Kelsey, pp. 351–352) [E]. On interest, he reports the common opinion that the law of nature forbids it but finds its arguments unpersuasive, rejecting for instance the claim that money is by nature unproductive, since houses and other naturally unfruitful things are made productive by industry (II.12.20, p. 355) [C]. The right to repay only after a time can itself be valued, he adds, since whoever pays later pays less, and the ancient attacks on interest concern its usual accompaniments more than its nature (§20.2). He rests the prohibition instead on divine law: the Mosaic ban on Jews lending at interest to Jews suffices, and it binds Christians because the Gospel widened the meaning of neighbor (§20.3, p. 356) [N]. Compensation for loss suffered, for gain forgone, for the lender's expenses and for risk to the principal is not interest (§21, p. 357). Civil laws allowing a fixed return, such as Holland's 8 per cent, or 12 for merchants, are consistent with natural and divine law while they stay within compensation; beyond it they may grant impunity but cannot give a right (§22, p. 358) [N]. Grotius also allowed a person or a people to pass into subjection by consent (rights over slaves, II.5.27; kinds of slavery, II.5.30; voluntary subjection of a people, I.3.8). Reading: Ellerman treats this voluntary-subjection argument as the ancestor of modern defenses of the employment contract (location in Property and Contract in Economics, 1992, ch. 7; searchable edition on ellerman.org, pp. 77–79). He places Grotius in what he calls the "alienist" tradition of natural rights, which treats liberty as transferable by consent, and argues that its pact of subjection survived the democratic revolutions as the employment contract. Grotius's own text gives that Reading a foothold: lifelong service in return for maintenance, he says, is not too harsh within natural bounds, since it brings a certainty of provision that those who hire themselves out by the day often lack (II.5.27) [N]. Beside this complete slavery he lists varieties of incomplete slavery, temporary, conditional or for certain purposes, which depend on laws or agreements: freedmen, debt bondsmen, serfs bound to the land, the Jewish seven-year servitude, tenants in mortmain, and men hired for pay (II.5.30; Kelsey, p. 258) [C]. Reading: Richard Tuck reads these passages as consequences of Grotius's minimal theory of rights rather than as a theory of hired labor. The right of self-preservation licenses voluntary slavery where only that course keeps a person alive; the master gains no right to kill; and the doctrine was common to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rights theories, which is one main reason Rousseau turned against the Grotian tradition. Its chief political use, on Tuck's account, is I.3.8, where Grotius argues that a free people may hand over the whole right of governing, as a person may engage himself as a slave, against the view that sovereignty always remains with the people (editor's introduction to The Rights of War and Peace, Liberty Fund, 2005, vol. 1) [C]. The two Readings are not exclusive: Tuck locates the argument's payoff in political absolutism, Ellerman follows its later use for the employment contract, and himself cites Tuck's Natural Rights Theories (1979) for the same tradition.
Pufendorf. Text: De jure naturae et gentium (1672) and its abridgement for students, De officio hominis et civis (1673). Pufendorf holds that community of goods (communion, in Kennett's translation) is taken either negatively or positively. Taken negatively, things are common because no human act or agreement has yet assigned them to anyone, so they lie free for any taker; taken positively, common things belong to many persons together, in the same manner in which owned things belong to one. He places the original condition in the negative sense ("not such as we have before term'd Positive, but a Negative Communion") and holds that property flowed immediately from the compact of men, tacit or express (De jure naturae, Book IV, ch. 4, §§2, 4–5; trans. Kennett, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1710, pp. 289–292) [C].
He treats value in a chapter of its own (De officio, Book I, ch. 14, "On Value"). Value is introduced by convention once ownership and exchange exist. Its foundation is a thing's aptitude to serve the needs or comforts of life, yet the most necessary things are often cheap because nature supplies them abundantly, and scarcity raises value [E]. For manufactured goods, price rises with fine workmanship, the difficulty of the work and the scarcity of workers; for services, with difficulty, skill, utility and the scarcity of those who perform them. Labor therefore enters as cost and difficulty among several factors; it does not regulate value [C]. In states there is a legal price fixed by law and a common price set by the custom of the market, which allows latitude, takes account of merchants' labor and expense, and moves with the numbers of buyers, money and wares; time, as in credit, is part of the price [E]. Where laborers' wages are rated by law in favor of employers, the laborer may not demand more but may take less. A free person has no price, since free persons are not articles of commerce [N].
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Grotius | Pufendorf |
|---|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | No; title by agreement, express or tacit [C] | No; title by pact from negative community [C] |
| Labor theory of value | No; price by need, desire and common estimation, moving with scarcity, and counting the dealers' labor and expenditure (II.12.14) | No; usefulness and scarcity, with labor as cost and difficulty [E] |
| Wage labor | A hire of services within contract law (II.12.19) | A hire whose price may be set by law or market (De officio I.14) |
| Interest | Treated under "by what right interest is forbidden" ; doubts that the law of nature forbids it but holds it forbidden by divine law; compensation for loss or forgone gain is not interest; civil law may permit a return within compensation (II.12.20–22) | Time is part of price; usury not contrary to natural law (De jure naturae V.7.9, per its section heading) |
| Rent | Rent of things governed by contract equality (II.12.18) | Not examined here |
| Markets | Exchange under equality; not all monopolies contrary to natural law; a sovereign may allow one for just cause at a fixed price, and private ones at a fair price, but combining to sell above the current range of prices, or blocking supply by force or fraud, is a wrong requiring restitution (II.12.16) | Common price by market custom, legal price by authority |
| Drew from | Roman law, Cicero, scholastic contract theory | Grotius, Hobbes |
| Argued against | Roman-law rules on accession (II.8) | Hobbes's right of all to all things (De jure naturae III.5.3; also Hobbes on the state of nature as war, II.2.6–8) |
Readings. Nicolaus Tideman reads Pufendorf's account of property as a positive theory of how ownership institutions arise, and argues that Locke mistook it for a normative claim that rightful ownership requires consent ("Pufendorf's Theory of the Origin of Property Rights and Its Relationship to Locke's Ideas," in Jürgen G. Backhaus, Günther Chaloupek and Hans A. Frambach, eds., Samuel Pufendorf and the Emergence of Economics as a Social Science (Cham: Springer, 2021), pp. 135–142). James Tully reads Locke's chapter on property as a direct reply to the Grotian and Pufendorfian consent theories (A Discourse on Property, 1980, ch. 4, "The background to chapter five of the Second Treatise," pp. 80–94).
Objections. The best-known objection is Locke's: if the express consent of every commoner were needed before anyone could take an acorn, humanity would have starved amid plenty (Second Treatise §28) [N]. Defenders reply that tacit agreement is not a historical meeting but a standing convention, inferred from practice, and that property is a social institution whose terms answer to its function [C]. Critics from the other side note that a title resting on agreement is only as firm as the agreement's presumed terms; Grotius's own necessity reservation shows that the original grant can revive [N]. On value, neither writer holds a labor theory [C]. Pufendorf's natural law was taught at Glasgow by Gershom Carmichael and Francis Hutcheson before Smith, so whether Smith's value theory, and the labor theories later built on it, descend from Locke or also from Pufendorf is itself disputed. Note: Entry 10 (Part II — Classical political economy) sets out the rival Readings.
In context. In colonial Massachusetts, John Wise, pastor of a church at Ipswich, defended the congregational government of the New England churches in A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (Boston, 1717), a book reprinted in Boston in 1772. In its argument from the light of nature he took Pufendorf as his chief guide, deriving natural liberty, natural equality and government by compact, and he judged democracy the form of government that the light of nature most values (1772 Boston edition, pp. 22, 39) [C]. In February 1775 Alexander Hamilton, answering a Loyalist critic in The Farmer Refuted (New York, 1775), likened his opponent's account of the state of nature to Hobbes's and recommended Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Montesquieu and Burlamaqui as the writers to study on the law of nature. Both writers drew on the natural-law tradition in disputes over church and civil government; neither passage cited here takes up Grotius's or Pufendorf's account of how property arose.
Where to read it
- Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, in quibus ius naturae & gentium: item iuris publici praecipua explicantur (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1625), Book II, ch. 2, §§2 and 6–9; ch. 8, §§19 and 22; ch. 5, §§27 and 30; ch. 12, §§14–22; Book I, ch. 3, §8. English: De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, vol. 2, The Translation, trans. Francis W. Kelsey with Arthur E. R. Boak, Henry A. Sanders and Jesse S. Reeves (Classics of International Law; Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), Book II at pp. 186–190 (ch. 2, §2), 193–195 (§§6–9), 255–256 (ch. 5, §27), 258 (ch. 5, §30), 306–308 (ch. 8, §§19, 22), 351–358 (ch. 12, §§14–22). Also The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 3 vols., the 1738 English translation with Barbeyrac's notes; Tuck's introduction in vol. 1 gives the rival Reading of Grotius on voluntary slavery and subjection.
- Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo (Lund [Londini Scanorum]: Adam Junghans, printed by Vitus Haberegger, 1672), Book IV, ch. 4 (to verify). English: Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett and others (Oxford: L. Lichfield for A. and J. Churchil, 1703).
- Samuel Pufendorf, De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem libri duo (Lund [Londini Scanorum]: Adam Junghans, printed by Vitus Haberegger, 1673), Book I, ch. 12 (acquisition of ownership), ch. 14, "On Value", ch. 15 (contracts that presuppose the prices of things). English: De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo, vol. 2, trans. Frank Gardner Moore (Classics of International Law, no. 10; New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), a translation of the 1682 edition, ch. 14 from p. 70; and On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law, ed. James Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
- Reading: David P. Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 7, on the "alienist" tradition from Suárez and Grotius to the employment contract; cited from the searchable edition on ellerman.org, pp. 76–79, whose pagination differs from the printed book's.
Entry 7. Locke: property by labor
Overview. John Locke (1632–1704) gave the labor theory of property its classic form. Setting out to show how property could arise without any express compact of all the commoners (§25), he argued that a person who has property in his own person (Locke's phrase; later writers call it self-ownership), and so in his labor, makes things God gave to mankind in common his own by working on them, within limits set by natural law. Two of those limits matter most: enough and as good must be left for others, and nothing may be taken only to spoil. Locke also argued that labor creates most of the value of useful things, and in a separate pamphlet that interest on money is as lawful as rent on land. This entry separates those claims, shows how money and wage service enter the argument, and sets out the main rival readings of what Locke was defending.
The acquisition argument. Text: Locke states his aim in the Second Treatise, ch. V, §25: to show how people could come to own parts of what God gave to mankind in common without any express compact of all the commoners. In §27 every man has a property in his own person, and the labor of his body and work of his hands are properly his. Whatever he removes from its natural state he has mixed his labor with, and so made his property, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others [N]. In §28 he asks when gathered acorns became the gatherer's and answers that it was the gathering; if the consent of all mankind were needed, men would have starved [N]. In the same section the grass his horse has bitten and the turfs his servant has cut become his property without anyone's consent.
The spoilage limit follows in §31: one may fix property by labor in as much as one can use before it spoils, and whatever is beyond this belongs to others [N]. Land is acquired the same way: as much as a man tills, plants, improves and can use the product of (§32), and God gave the world to the industrious and rational, with labor as their title (§34). Where land is held in common by compact, as in English commons, no one may enclose without the consent of the fellow commoners (§35).
Money and unequal possession. Money changes the scale. Gold and silver keep without spoiling, so a person may hoard them without wasting anything (§46). By agreeing to give value to money, people tacitly consented to disproportionate and unequal possession of land, because a man may fairly hold more land than he can use by exchanging its surplus product for metal that does not decay (§§47–50) [N]. Within civil society, laws regulate property, and communities have settled by compact the property that labor began (§§45, 50).
Labor and value. Text: In §40 Locke estimates that of the products of the earth useful to life nine-tenths are the effects of labor, and on closer reckoning ninety-nine hundredths. In §43 an uncultivated acre yields not a thousandth of the benefit of a cultivated one. In §37 he says that the intrinsic value of things depends only on their usefulness to the life of man. A passage absent from the first edition and added to §37 in later ones argues that enclosed and cultivated land yields ten, and more nearly a hundred, times what common waste yields, so the encloser may be said to give acres to mankind [E]. Note: it is one of the additions Locke wrote into his own annotated copy of the 1698 third edition, the Christ's copy that Laslett used as his copy-text (Laslett, ed., 2nd ed., 1967, p. 312, note to §37, ll. 10–29; Delphine Soulard, Historical Journal, 2015, nn. 72, 79, 105); it is absent from all three editions printed in his lifetime, 1690, 1694 and 1698 (Laslett, Collation, pp. 470, 476), and first printed in the posthumous fourth edition (London: John Churchill, 1713, p. 208). Reading: Karen Vaughn holds that these claims concern the share of useful goods that labor brings about, not what regulates exchange ratios (1978, pp. 312, 315–317) [C]; the rival Reading, Marx's, is set out under Readings below. Where Locke does discuss prices, he explains them by quantity in proportion to vent, that is, supply relative to demand (Some Considerations, 1692, p. 44) [E].
Wage labor. Text: in the Second Treatise, ch. V, §28 counts a servant's work as the master's acquisition. In ch. VII, §85, a free man makes himself a servant by selling, for a certain time, the service he undertakes, in exchange for wages; this gives the master only a temporary power, no greater than the contract contains, and it differs in kind from slavery [C]. Locke denies elsewhere that anyone can enslave himself by consent, since no one has power over his own life to give (Second Treatise ch. IV, §23). The property a man has in his own person, in Locke's sense, therefore stops short of a power to sell himself outright, which separates it from later self-ownership theories that allow voluntary slavery [C]. Locke grounds the limit in his premise that persons are the workmanship and property of their maker, sent into the world on his business, so that no one may destroy himself or another (§6) [N]. Where people did sell themselves, as among the Jews, he says it was to drudgery, not to slavery, since the master had no power over the servant's life (§24). Note: David Ellerman's reading of §§23–24, and its bearing on wage labor, is set out in Part IX. Nozick, for one, holds that a free system would allow a person to sell himself into slavery, and also to bind himself never to do so, while noting that other writers disagree (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 331) [N]. Part VIII sets out the later positions.
Interest, rent and profit. Text: Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (1692) argues that the price of money cannot be fixed by law. Land produces something new, Locke says, whereas money produces nothing except by compact, transferring the reward of one man's labor into another's pocket. The cause is unequal distribution: as unequal holdings of land bring a landowner a tenant, unequal holdings of money bring a lender a borrower. Interest is therefore as equitable and lawful as rent, and less burdensome, since the borrowing trader gains more above his interest than a tenant gains above his rent (1692 edition, pp. 53–56) [N]. Profit appears as the trader's return above the interest he pays, for example a merchant who borrows at four per cent and makes twelve (p. 13) [E].
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Locke |
|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | Yes: property in one's own person (later termed self-ownership) plus mixing, limited where enough and as good is not left for others and by the ban on spoiling (later called the sufficiency and spoilage provisos) (§§27, 31) [N] |
| Labor theory of value | Labor creates most of the usefulness of goods (§§40–43); prices follow quantity and vent [E] |
| Wage labor | A time-limited sale of service for wages; the servant's work counts as the master's (§§28, 85) |
| Interest | Lawful hire of money, explained by unequal distribution, like rent (Some Considerations) |
| Rent | Payment for use of land that the tenant's labor makes productive (Some Considerations) |
| Profit | Return of trade above the interest paid |
| Markets | Prices set by quantity and vent; legal ceilings on interest fail |
| Drew from | Grotius and Pufendorf (natural-law frame), Richard Hooker (cited in ch. VII) |
| Argued against | Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (First Treatise); the requirement of universal consent (§§25, 28) |
Readings. Whether Locke's chapter is a defense of capitalist appropriation is the central dispute. C. B. Macpherson reads Locke as removing the natural limits on accumulation through money and as assuming that labor is alienable for a wage, so that the servant's turfs belong to the master as a matter of course (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962, chapter "Locke: the political theory of appropriation", section "The theory of property right"; on wage labor and the turfs, pp. 215–216; on the removal of the two initial limitations, leaving a natural right to unlimited individual appropriation, p. 221; on money transcending those limits, pp. 203–204). Ellerman endorses Macpherson's reading and holds that Tully's exegesis has not significantly shaken it (searchable edition on ellerman.org, p. 33). James Tully reads the same chapter as a theory of individual use rights within inclusive claim rights to the means of preservation, not a justification of unlimited private property (A Discourse on Property, 1980, ch. 3, "Inclusive natural rights," pp. 53–79, and ch. 5, "Exclusive rights," pp. 95–130). On interest, Marx read Locke's rent analogy as treating interest and rent alike as appropriated surplus labor (Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, Addenda, §4, "Locke", trans. Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 365–367), while the rival Reading, Karen I. Vaughn's, holds that Locke made labor the main source of the use-value of goods but explained prices, interest and rent included, by quantity and vent, that is, by supply and demand. On her account interest and rent are market prices that allocate resources to the more enterprising and reward past labor, not deductions from present labor's product (Vaughn, 1978, pp. 312, 315–317, 321–322; full reference in Where to read it). Reading: Jeremy Waldron holds that Locke's political theory rests on an idea of basic human equality whose foundations are religious: equality, on Locke's account, cannot be understood apart from seeing men and women as creatures of God, made to last during his pleasure and not one another's (God, Locke, and Equality, 2002, per the publisher's description) [C]. Since the property argument begins from the same premises (§§6, 25), this Reading bears on how far secular theories of self-ownership can claim Locke's authority.
Objections. Robert Nozick asks why mixing what one owns with what one does not gains the thing rather than losing the labor, using the example of tomato juice poured into the sea, and why the gain extends to the whole thing rather than the value added (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, ch. 7, p. 175) [C]. A second objection targets the provisos: once money removes the spoilage limit and land is scarce, "enough and as good" cannot be met, so either the argument fails or later owners owe compensation; left-libertarians take the second route (Part VIII) [N]. Reading: Nozick reads the proviso as a no-worsening test: appropriation removes others' liberty to use the thing, and the proviso is meant to ensure that their situation is not worsened by it (p. 175) [C]. Georgists add that labor cannot create land itself, so even a sound labor title covers improvements only; Paine draws this line explicitly (Entry 8) [N]. Nozick doubts that alternative too: no workable or coherent scheme of property in added value has been devised, he says, and any such scheme would presumably fall to objections like those that defeat Henry George's theory (p. 175; George is treated in Part VII) [C]. A third objection, pressed by Ellerman, concerns §28. On his reading, Locke's "the labour that was mine" means labor the master owns, not labor he performs: the servant cuts the turfs, but the master owns the labor and so takes them. Locke's theory therefore rests on a pun on "one's labour" and is not a labor theory of property at all; Locke imported the employment relation into the state of nature and described the laissez-faire appropriation of positive law, which has no moral force (Property and Contract in Economics, ch. 4, "Labor Theory of Property: Intellectual History," section "A Re-examination of Locke's Theory"; searchable edition on ellerman.org, pp. 32–33) [C]. Reading: Karen Vaughn, answering the earlier forms of this objection by Pascal Larkin and Macpherson, reads §28 together with §85 as a wage contract. The servant negotiates a wage that represents his entire claim to what his work creates, settling his reward in advance in exchange for giving up any property in the product, so the master's title rests on the servant's own exchange (1978, pp. 319–320, 323) [C]. Her Reading predates Ellerman's and overlaps with it on what Locke said: she too holds that Locke made the property-creating labor that of the person directing production (p. 323). They divide over whether a title passed by wage contract is consistent with a labor theory of property. Against the proviso objection, defenders also invoke Locke's own claim that enclosure and cultivation increase the common stock of mankind (§37, in the passage added after the first edition) [E].
In context. Locke's chapter on property takes America as its standing example of land held in common and left unimproved, and concludes that in the beginning all the world was America, since money was then nowhere known (Second Treatise §§26, 36, 41, 43, 48–49) [E]. From 1669 to 1675 Locke served as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, whose Fundamental Constitutions, in the first printed version (1670), gave every freeman of the colony absolute power and authority over his Black slaves (art. 110). How far the Constitutions were Locke's is disputed. Reading: David Armitage holds that Locke had at least a major hand in drafting them and helped revise them in the summer of 1682, when he most likely wrote the property chapter, so that Carolina supplied that chapter's immediate colonial context ("John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government," Political Theory 32, 2004, pp. 602, 607–609, 613–619) [C]. Reading: Holly Brewer, re-examining the manuscripts, holds that the words strengthening the slavery clause in the 1670 draft are not in Locke's hand, that the clause is absent from the revision the Proprietors signed in August 1682, and that the document was theirs rather than his ("Whose Fundamental Constitutions? Locke, Slavery, and Manuscript Evidence," Locke Studies 24, 2024, pp. 16–19, 27–35) [C]. The two Readings conflict on the manuscript evidence but agree that Locke served as secretary and had some hand in the text. In 1825 Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration of Independence copied no particular writing but rested on the shared sentiments of the day, found in conversation, letters, essays and the elementary books of public right, naming Aristotle, Cicero, Locke and Sidney (letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825).
Where to read it
- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, the False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, Are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter Is an Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government (London: Printed for Awnsham Churchill, at the Black Swan in Ave-Mary-Lane, by Amen-Corner; title page dated 1690, licensed 23 August 1689, issued October 1689). Second Treatise, ch. V, "Of Property," §§25–51 (key sections 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 43, 45–50); ch. VII, §85 (servants); ch. II, §6 (persons as their maker's workmanship); ch. IV, §§23–24 (no self-enslavement; selling oneself to drudgery, not slavery). Critical edition: ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
- John Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money: In a Letter to a Member of Parliament (London: Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, at the Black-Swan in Pater-Noster-Row, 1692; licensed 27 November 1691): the opening argument on whether interest can be regulated by law, and the passage comparing interest with rent (1692 edition, pp. 1–2 and 53–56).
- Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (London: printed for Ric. Chiswell, Matthew Gillyflower and William Henchman, 1680), the target of the First Treatise.
- Rival Readings: C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), chapter "Locke: the political theory of appropriation"; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 3, "Inclusive natural rights," pp. 53–79; ch. 4, "The background to chapter five of the Second Treatise," pp. 80–94; ch. 5, "Exclusive rights," pp. 95–130.
- Rival Reading on value, interest and rent: Karen I. Vaughn, "John Locke and the Labor Theory of Value," Journal of Libertarian Studies 2, no. 4 (1978): 311–326, esp. pp. 312, 315–317 (prices by quantity and vent), 319–320 and 323 (the servant's turfs and §85 read as a wage contract) and 320–322 (against Marx's reading of interest and rent); developed in Karen Iversen Vaughn, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), ch. 2, "Theory of Value".
- Theological Reading: Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. ch. 6, "'Disproportionate and Unequal Possession'," pp. 151–187, on basic equality as premise and constraint in Locke's theory of property.
- Reading on §§23–24: David P. Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics (Blackwell, 1992), ch. 7; searchable edition on ellerman.org, p. 78; on §28 and the servant's turfs, ch. 4, "Labor Theory of Property: Intellectual History," section "A Re-examination of Locke's Theory," pp. 32–33.
- Objection: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), ch. 7, "Distributive Justice," section "Locke's Theory of Acquisition," beginning p. 174; the tomato-juice passage and the question of whole object versus added value at p. 175; on selling oneself into slavery, p. 331.
Entry 8. Paine and Spence: land as a common inheritance
Overview. Labor-based arguments for property can be turned against private ownership of land. If labor is what gives title, then it can justify owning a harvest, a house or the improvement of a field, but not the land itself, which no one made. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) drew a conclusion of this kind, and Thomas Spence (1750–1814) reached a more radical one from a natural right to land rather than from labor, both within the radical politics of the 1790s. Spence's 1793 edition quotes Locke's §25 directly; Agrarian Justice does not mention Locke, so any debt of Paine's to him is a matter of interpretation (Robert Lamb's Reading is set out below). Paine kept private landholding but argued that landholders owe the community a ground-rent, a payment for holding what was once everyone's. Spence went further and proposed that land be owned by local communities, with rents paid to the parish. This entry notes both positions as the bridge from natural-law theory to the later land-value and land-reform traditions treated in Part VII.
Paine. Text: Agrarian Justice (1797; written, by Paine's own account in the preface to the English edition, in the winter of 1795–96) begins from the claim that the earth in its natural, uncultivated state was the common property of the human race, so that everyone born in that state would have been born to property [N]. Cultivation raised the earth's yield greatly, and because the improvement could not be separated from the soil, the idea of landed property arose with it. Yet only the value of the improvement is individual property, not the earth itself [C]. Every holder of cultivated land therefore owes the community a ground-rent, and Paine insists that what he claims for the dispossessed is a right, not charity [N]. He rejects "agrarian law", meaning redivision of land, as unjust in a country improved by cultivation, and defends the possessor's right to the part that is his.
The plan is a national fund raised by taking a tenth of property passing at death, with more where it passes to distant heirs. It pays every person fifteen pounds sterling at twenty-one, as partial compensation for the loss of the natural inheritance, and ten pounds a year from fifty [N]. Paine also counts personal property, on a different principle: beyond what a person's own hands produce, accumulation comes from living in society and is often the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it [E/N].
Spence. Text: Spence read a lecture to the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on 8 November 1775 arguing that property in land and liberty ought to be equal and that to deny people their share of land is in effect to deny them a right to live [N]. He reprinted it many times; a 1793 London edition appeared as The Rights of Man, as exhibited in a lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle (the fourth edition; London: printed for the author, 1793), and the original 1775 printing, not reprinted until 2014, appeared as Property in Land Every One's Right. The remedy he proposed was that each parish become a corporation owning its land, letting it to tenants and spending the rents on public purposes (1793 edition, pp. 11–13) [N]. In The Rights of Infants (1797) he attacked Paine's plan directly; the pamphlet's subtitle announces "strictures on Paine's Agrarian justice" [N]. Spence's own editions state that the society expelled him for printing the lecture: the 1793 edition in the heading of the lecture, and the 1796 reprint, The Meridian Sun of Liberty, on its title page. Eneas Mackenzie's history of Newcastle (1827, p. 400) repeats Spence's statement and adds that "it has been alleged, that 'the expulsion was not for printing it only, but for printing it in the manner of a halfpenny ballad, and having it hawked about the streets.'"
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Paine | Spence |
|---|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | Yes for improvements; no for land itself [N] | Land is a common right; labor's role not developed here |
| Labor theory of value | Not developed; cultivation multiplies yield [E] | Not developed |
| Wage labor | Accumulation often reflects paying labor too little | Not treated here |
| Interest | Not treated in Agrarian Justice | Not treated here |
| Rent | Ground-rent owed to the community, collected at inheritance | Rents paid to the parish as landowner (1793 edition, pp. 11–13) |
| Markets | Accepts commerce and private improvement | Retains letting of land; parish replaces landlord |
| Drew from | Natural-rights doctrine of an original common (a variation on Locke's labor argument, on Lamb's Reading); natural-rights republicanism | Natural rights; Leviticus 25 (the jubilee), Locke §25 and Pufendorf, all quoted in the 1793 edition; local defense of commons: the Newcastle Town Moor case, from which he "took a Lesson" (The Restorer of Society, 1801, Letter V, n. 1) |
| Argued against | Agrarian law (redivision); landed monopoly | Paine's compensation scheme (Rights of Infants) |
Readings and objections. Each is now claimed as an ancestor by later movements: Paine by basic-income and stakeholder-grant advocates and by Georgists, Spence by land nationalizers and socialists. These are later claims of descent, not Text, and the guide treats them with their own sources in Parts VII and VIII. Spence's own objection to Paine is that the fund leaves the landholders' title intact and returns to the dispossessed only a fraction of what they lost. Paine allows the public a tenth of landed value because proprietors have made the land ten times more valuable; Spence replies that the laboring classes did most of that improving, and that compensation without common ownership leaves the aristocracy, its placemen and its rising rents in place (The Rights of Infants, 1797, Preface, Appendix and its Conclusion) [N]. From the other side, defenders of private landholding object that Paine's baseline, the condition of a person born before cultivation, is a speculative counterfactual that cannot be measured, so the size of any compensation is arbitrary [E]. Lockean defenders add Locke's own estimate that labor accounts for nine-tenths or more of the value of the products of the earth (Second Treatise §40), so that the unimproved share Paine claims for the dispossessed would be small [E]. Georgists accept Paine's distinction between land and improvements but object that taxing inheritance is a poor proxy for the annual rental value of land (Part VII) [C].
Reading: Robert Lamb holds that Paine moves from common to private ownership through a variation on Locke's labor argument, but without Locke's divine command to labor. For Paine, on this Reading, cultivation gives title because it creates value that had no prior owner, not because labor is meritorious; the title therefore extends only to the value added, which leaves the original value of the land common and grounds the ground-rent. Lamb presents this as Paine's answer to Nozick's question why labor should give title to the whole object rather than the added value (Entry 7), where Locke gives the laborer the whole ("Liberty, Equality, and the Boundaries of Ownership: Thomas Paine's Theory of Property Rights," The Review of Politics 72, 2010, pp. 485, 501–506) [C].
In context. Agrarian Justice takes the Indians of North America in Paine's own day as its picture of the natural state: free of the poverty seen in every European town, but without the advantages of agriculture, arts and science (Conway, ed., vol. III, pp. 322–344) [E]. An American edition appeared in Philadelphia in 1797, printed for Benjamin Franklin Bache, and Jefferson owned a copy (Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, vol. III, p. 293, no. 3187). In New York in 1829 Thomas Skidmore, active in the city's labor movement, published The Rights of Man to Property!, which, unlike Paine's plan, proposed dividing property equally among adults and ending inheritance so that each new adult would receive an equal share; he denied that either labor or first occupancy could give title to any part of a world held in common. Reading: Jean-Fabien Spitz reads the book as drawing out principles Paine set forth in Agrarian Justice, and notes that Skidmore quotes Paine's Rights of Man against one generation's claim to govern the next ("Thomas Skidmore et le droit de transmettre et d'hériter," Daimon 81, 2020, pp. 115–125) [C]. Text: Skidmore also faults Paine, "a writer so sagacious," for the Dissertations on Government (1786), which assures rich and poor alike that "what each man has is his own"; to confirm that, he writes, was "such a blunder, as that of attempting to erect an equal government, upon a foundation where inequality had already found an existence" (The Rights of Man to Property!, 1829, pp. 63–67) [N]. Spitz's Reading and this Text overlap rather than conflict: Skidmore takes up Paine's principles and turns them against Paine's defense of existing property.
Where to read it
- Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, Opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly; Being a Plan for Meliorating the Condition of Man, by Creating in Every Nation a National Fund (Paris: printed by W. Adlard; London: re-printed for T. Williams, 1797). First published in French in Paris, 1797, as Thomas Payne à la législature et au directoire, ou La justice agraire opposée à la loi agraire et aux priviléges agraires. The argument on the natural common and ground-rent, the plan, and the passage on personal property are all in this short pamphlet (pp. 322–344 in Conway's edition below; pages for the individual passages not located). Edition with editor's introduction: The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, vol. III (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895; the set 1894–96), "Agrarian Justice," pp. 322–344, with Conway's introduction.
- Reading on Paine and Locke: Robert Lamb, "Liberty, Equality, and the Boundaries of Ownership: Thomas Paine's Theory of Property Rights," The Review of Politics 72 (2010): 483–511, esp. pp. 485 and 499–506 (Paine's acquisition argument compared with Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke).
- Thomas Spence, lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle, 8 November 1775. Fourth edition: The Rights of Man, as Exhibited in a Lecture, Read at the Philosophical Society, in Newcastle (London: printed for the author, and sold at the corner of Chancery-Lane, Holborn, 1793; ESTC T69870), parish plan at pp. 11–13. Reprinted as The Meridian Sun of Liberty (London: printed for the author, 1796; ESTC T5299). The original printing, Property in Land Every One's Right (1775), is reprinted in Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong, eds., Thomas Spence: The Poor Man's Revolutionary (London: Breviary Stuff, 2014).
- Thomas Spence, The Rights of Infants; or, The Imprescriptable Right of Mothers to Such a Share of the Elements as Is Sufficient to Enable Them to Suckle and Bring Up Their Young … To Which Are Added, by Way of Preface and Appendix, Strictures on Paine's Agrarian Justice (London: printed for the author, 1797), 16 pp.
Entry 9. Critics of natural law: Hume, Bentham and the young Marx
Overview. Entries 6–8 share a premise: there is a law of nature, knowable by reason, that fixes rights before any government does, so that a holding can be rightful or wrongful whatever the law of the land says. Many writers reject that premise. This entry sets out three of the most influential rejections. David Hume (1711–1776) explains property as a human convention arising from self-interest and the imagination. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) holds that there is no property except what law creates, and judges laws by their consequences for happiness (utility). The young Karl Marx (1818–1883) reads the "rights of man" as the rights of the self-interested member of commercial society, presented as if they were natural. Rejecting natural law does not settle the property question: each critic still had to say who should own what and why, and their answers differ sharply. Natural-law theorists reply, and their replies are set out under Objections.
Hume. Text: A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Of Morals (1740), Part II. For Hume, justice is an artificial virtue: the three fundamental rules of society (stability of possession, its transfer by consent, and the keeping of promises) are human inventions, adopted because self-interested people found that society could not survive without them (T 3.2.6.1, 3.2.6.6) [C]. Before human conventions there is no such thing as property (T 3.2.6.4) [C]. Property is a stable possession derived from those conventions (T 3.2.3.7); and since long possession alone can create title, property is not anything real in objects but a product of human sentiments (T 3.2.3.9) [C]. Which particular rules settle who owns what (present possession, occupation, prescription, accession, succession) is fixed chiefly by the imagination and partly by public utility (T 3.2.3.4 n. 71, 3.2.3.5) [E].
Hume addresses the labor argument directly in a note. Some philosophers, he writes, explain occupation by saying that everyone has a property in his own labor and acquires what he joins it to. He replies that much occupation involves no labor, as when cattle graze a meadow; that the argument takes a needless detour through accession; and that we join labor to things only in a figurative sense, since properly we only alter them, which creates a relation from which property follows by the ordinary rules (T 3.2.3.6 n. 72) [C]. Note what Hume does not say. He keeps the phrase "laws of nature" for his three fundamental rules, meaning rules so necessary that every society invents them, not rules reason discovers apart from convention (T 3.2.6.1) [C]. His target is natural law as a foundation independent of convention, not stable property, which he regards as indispensable.
Bentham. Text: Bentham's attack on the French declarations of rights, written in the 1790s, first appeared in French in Étienne Dumont's edition of 1816, then in English as "Anarchical Fallacies" in John Bowring's edition of the Works (1838–43), and in definitive form as "Nonsense upon Stilts" in the Collected Works (2002). Its target is the claim that rights exist before and independently of law, so that laws contradicting them are void [C]. In the Principles of the Civil Code, a text Bowring edited from Dumont's French redaction and Bentham's manuscripts, Bentham holds that there is no natural property: property is entirely the creature of law. It is an established expectation of deriving advantage from a thing, and only the law's guarantee turns the weak, momentary expectations of a lawless condition into secure ones; property and law are born together and die together (Part I, ch. 8) [C]. The same chapter draws a conservative consequence: the legislator owes the greatest respect to expectations the law has created, and disappointing them always produces a proportionate evil [N]. Reading: Philip Schofield, editor of the critical text, reads Bentham's objection as ontological, that natural rights have no existence beyond the desires of those who assert them. He adds that Bentham accepted rights understood as moral claims grounded in utility, preferring the term "securities against misrule" ("Jeremy Bentham's 'Nonsense upon Stilts'," Utilitas 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–26, per its abstract) [C].
Marx. Text: "On the Jewish Question" (written 1843, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844) replies to Bruno Bauer. In Part I Marx distinguishes the rights of the citizen, exercised in the political community, from the "rights of man," which he reads as the rights of the member of civil society, the self-interested individual separated from others [C]. Taking the French Constitution of 1793 as his example, he reads its right of property as the right to enjoy and dispose of one's goods at one's discretion, without regard to others and independently of society: the right of self-interest [C]. These rights present themselves as natural, he argues, because the political revolution dissolved feudal society into individuals and took the resulting civil society of needs, labor and private interests as its given basis, needing no justification. The self-interested individual therefore appears as natural man, and his rights as natural rights [C]. Marx's objection thus differs from Hume's and Bentham's. He does not deny that such rights are real in law; he denies that they are natural rather than historical, and that securing them amounts to human emancipation [N]. His later treatment of "equal right" as bourgeois right in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (Entry 1) can be read as continuing this line. Note: how far the early and the later Marx are continuous is disputed; Entry 18 (Part IV — Marx and Engels) sets out the rival Readings (to verify). Part II of the essay, which identifies Judaism with commerce and money, is a separate and much-criticized matter on which this entry does not draw.
What follows for labor and property. Rejecting natural law removes one ground for the labor theory of property but does not by itself decide for or against it [C]. Hume grants labor a role only as one source of the relations that conventions track, and argues it is not the main one [C]. For Bentham, a worker's claim to the product holds so far as law secures it and utility recommends securing it; security of established expectations, not desert, is the ground (Civil Code, Part I, ch. 8) [N]. Marx rejects the framing in which the worker's claim is a natural right of an individual proprietor, and locates exploitation in relations of production instead (Entry 1; Entry 20, Part IV — Marx and Engels) [C]. The same move recurs among anarchists: Stirner rejected natural rights altogether, and Tucker's circle, after its turn to Stirner's egoism, abandoned natural rights while still defending occupancy and use as a standard of title (Part V; to verify there) [C]. Post-anarchist writers extend Stirner's critique to essentialist claims about human nature in general (Part X). Twentieth-century critics of natural rights, including the attack by L. A. Rollins and Robert Anton Wilson on the natural-law libertarianism of Murray Rothbard and George H. Smith, and the wider philosophical case that there are no objective moral facts, are taken up in Part VIII (details to verify there).
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Hume | Bentham | Marx (1843–44) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Natural law and natural rights | Rejected as a foundation independent of convention; keeps "laws of nature" for necessary conventions (T 3.2.6.1) | Rejected: no rights or property prior to law ("Nonsense upon Stilts") | Rejected as naturalizing the rights of civil society's self-interested individual |
| Source of property | Convention, from self-interest and imagination (T 3.2.6.4; 3.2.3.4 n. 71) | Law: property is legally secured expectation (Civil Code I.8) | Historical social relations; legal right of the post-feudal order |
| Labor theory of property | No: labor-mixing is figurative (T 3.2.3.6 n. 72) [C] | No natural title; labor protected so far as law and utility secure it [N] | Rejected as a natural right; critique of exploitation is separate (Entry 20, Part IV — Marx and Engels) |
| Labor theory of value | Not in the passages used here | Not in the passages used here | Not in this essay (Entry 19, Part IV — Marx and Engels) |
| Wage labor, interest, rent, profit | Essays on interest and commerce (Political Discourses, Edinburgh, 1752: "Of Commerce," "Of Money," "Of Interest") | Opposed legal limits on interest (Defence of Usury, London, 1787) | Not in this essay (Entry 20, Part IV — Marx and Engels) |
| Markets | Transfer by consent is one of three fundamental rules (T 3.2.6.1) | Not examined here | Civil society as the sphere of need and private interest |
| Drew from | Roman civil law on accession and commixtion (T 3.2.3.10 n. 75) | Principle of utility | Hegel's Philosophy of Right, quoted in the essay |
| Argued against | The labor-mixing account of occupation, unnamed but Lockean in form (T 3.2.3.6 n. 72) | The French declarations of rights | Bruno Bauer; the French declarations of 1791 and 1793 |
Objections. Natural-law theorists reply that the standard objections misdescribe their tradition. John Finnis devotes part of his restatement to the charge of an illicit inference from facts to norms and to Hume's remarks on "is" and "ought," arguing that classical natural law does not rest on such an inference (Natural Law and Natural Rights, 1980; 2nd ed. 2011, ch. II, §4, "The Illicit Inference from Facts to Norms," pp. 33–36, and §5, "Hume and Clarke on 'Is' and 'Ought'," from p. 36; pages from the 2011 edition) [C]. Hume's own paragraph on "is" and "ought" (T 3.1.1.27, SBN 469–70, the last paragraph of Book III, Part I, §1) is often cited against natural law, and how far it reaches classical writers is part of that dispute. Against conventionalism, critics ask what standard condemns a bad convention or an unjust law; Hume answers with general usefulness and Bentham with utility, so neither treats existing law as beyond criticism [C]. Natural-rights libertarians reply that utility can license overriding individuals, which rights exist to prevent (Part VIII) [N]. Against Marx, defenders of rights reply that the liberties he calls egoistic, such as freedom of conscience and security of the person, protect dissenters and minorities against the community; Jeremy Waldron's concluding essay in his 1987 anthology, "Nonsense upon Stilts? – a reply," asks whether the objections of Bentham, Burke and Marx, revived by communitarian critics of liberalism, have been answered, and what a defender of rights can say in response [N]. Lockeans reply to Hume's note that "mixing" was always a metaphor for purposive transformation, which Hume himself concedes creates a relation; the dispute is whether that relation carries normative force before any convention [C].
In context. In 1843 Marx took the North American states as the one place where political emancipation was complete, so that the Jewish question there became wholly secular while religion still flourished, and he drew his examples of the rights of man from the constitutions of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as well as from the French declarations ("Zur Judenfrage," Part I, MEW vol. 1, from p. 347) [C]. In the same Part he read the abolition of property qualifications for voting in several American states as abolishing private property politically, in the state, while presupposing it in civil society [C]. Bentham's American link runs the other way: a "Short Review of the Declaration" appended to John Lind's An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London, 1776), pp. 120–132, argued that unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be squared with the powers every government must use, asking how, on that view, thieves, murderers and rebels could be restrained. Most of that Review is established as Bentham's from the draft he sent Lind on 2 September 1776, though his authorship of the whole remains a highly probable conjecture (H. L. A. Hart, "Bentham and the United States of America," Journal of Law and Economics 19, 1976, p. 555 and n. 37). In June 1829, during the British debate over abolishing slavery, Bentham attacked Locke for making property the sole concern of government and its holders alone entitled to representation, citing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (manuscript note reported by Armitage, Political Theory 32, 2004, p. 620; on whether the Constitutions were Locke's, see Entry 7).
Where to read it
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, 3 vols. (London: printed for John Noon, 1739–40; vol. III, Of Morals, printed for Thomas Longman, at the Ship in Pater-noster-Row, 1740; ESTC T4002), Book III, Part II, §3 with notes 71, 72 and 75, and §6. Cited by paragraph (T) with Selby-Bigge–Nidditch pages (SBN): T 3.2.3.6 n. 72 is SBN 505–6; T 3.2.6.1–6 is SBN 526–9. Online text with both numberings: Hume Texts Online (davidhume.org).
- Jeremy Bentham, "Nonsense upon Stilts," in Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Cyprian Blamires (Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 317–401. Earlier versions: "Sophismes anarchiques," in Étienne Dumont, ed., Tactique des assemblées législatives (Geneva and Paris, 1816), ii. 269–392; "Anarchical Fallacies," in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1838–43), ii. 489–534.
- Jeremy Bentham, Principles of the Civil Code, Part I, ch. 8, "Of Property," in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, vol. 1 (1843), edited from Dumont's Traités de législation and Bentham's manuscripts.
- Karl Marx, "Zur Judenfrage," Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (Paris, 1844), Part I; standard German text in Marx-Engels Werke, vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), pp. 347–377. English: "On the Jewish Question," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, digital edition), pp. 146–174.
- Anthology of all three critiques of rights: Jeremy Waldron, ed., 'Nonsense upon Stilts': Bentham, Burke, and Marx on the Rights of Man (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), with texts of Bentham's Anarchical Fallacies, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Marx's On the Jewish Question, and Waldron's introductory and concluding essays.
- Reading: Philip Schofield, "Jeremy Bentham's 'Nonsense upon Stilts'," Utilitas 15, no. 1 (March 2003): 1–26.
- Reply: John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Clarendon Law Series; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), ch. II, "Images and Objections," §4, "The Illicit Inference from Facts to Norms," and §5, "Hume and Clarke on 'Is' and 'Ought'" (pp. 33 and 36 in the 2nd edition, 2011; 1980 pagination to verify).