Buckle Sobre Tully

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9(2) 2001: 245–281
ARTICLE
TULLY, LOCKE AND AMERICA

Stephen Buckle
Imperialism, said Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism.1 In the same

spirit, we might add that imperialist ideology is the highest stage of capital-
ist ideology. Therefore it can be no surprise to see an (alleged) archetype
of ‘bourgeois’ political theory elevated to a world-historic role, reborn as a
pillar of global imperialism. This is the fate now visited upon John Locke’s
political thought, in particular on the Two Treatises of Government. For,
after a conspicuous notoriety in the sixties and seventies as a species of capi-
talist ideology – a theory of ‘possessive individualism’2 – Locke’s theory has
been promoted, in the nineties, to capitalist ideology in its highest form:
Eurocentric colonialism. The case has been made, most notably, by the Can-
adian Locke scholar and political theorist, James Tully, in a number of
articles. The rst, and most detailed, of these is ‘Rediscovering America:
The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, a paper initially presented at a
conference to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Locke’s best-
known works, the Two Treatises and An Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing.3 In that paper, Tully argues that, although Locke’s delegation
theory of popular sovereignty retains considerable value for handling many
questions of modern-day politics, the two main pillars on which it is based
– the accounts of the nature and origins of political society and of property
1 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) (Moscow: Progress Publish-
ers, 1970).
2 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Notable responses to Macpherson include Alan Ryan,
‘Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie’, Political Studies XIII (1965), 219–30; and
John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969). Cf. also Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), ch. 3.
3 James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in G. A. J.
Rogers (ed.), Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994),
165–96. An extended version of the paper is published in James Tully, An Approach to Politi-
cal Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–76.
Cf. also ‘Placing the Two Treatises’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (ed.), Politi-
cal Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
253–80; and Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995).
British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online © 2001 BSHP
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0960878011004528 1
246 STEPHEN BUCKLE
– are nevertheless ‘inappropriate to and misrepresent two specic political

problems: the problems of aboriginal self-government and ecology’.4
The reason why this is so, he continues, is because Locke ‘constructed {his
concepts of political society and property} in contrast to Amerindian forms
of nationhood and property in such a way that they obscure and downgrade
the distinctive features of Amerindian polity and property’5. Both pillars of
Locke’s account are faulty in this respect: ‘First, Locke denes political
society in such a way that Amerindian government does not qualify as a
legitimate form of political society. . . . Second, Locke denes property in
such a way that Amerindian customary land use is not a legitimate form of
property.’ Locke’s theory thus served to justify the dispossession of the
American ‘Indians’ by afrming ‘the superiority of European, and specic-
ally English, forms of political society and property established in the New
World’; and for just this reason Locke’s theory was widely disseminated in
the American colonies, and precisely by those who sought to curtail or deny
Amerindian political or property rights. Moreover, Tully holds that Locke
knew what he was doing: ‘Locke was intervening in one of the major politi-
cal and ideological contests of the seventeenth century.’6
Tully’s interpretation is not only a higher stage revamping of the old
‘bourgeois’ Locke, it is also Canadian in more ways than one. It seems to
have established a new Canadian interpretation, not merely in the sense of
being the historical successor of the old Canadian interpretation of C. B.
Macpherson, but also in carrying on the Macphersonite tradition of seeking
an understanding of the aws of contemporary society by tracing them to
Lockean sources. Locke’s thought was certainly a powerful presence in the
constitution of the New World, so to cast light on its meaning and purpose
is simultaneously to illuminate North American political realities, past and
present. This seems to have been felt particularly keenly in Canada, not
least because of Macpherson’s inuence. It is not, then, too surprising to see
another Canadian, Barbara Arneil, take over and extend Tully’s analysis, in
her recent John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism.7
This paper will offer a response to the central aspects of Tully’s argument;
i.e. it will consider his main claims about Locke’s views on political society
and the origins of property and their implications for the Americas, and
offer some comments on his alleged Eurocentrism. The verdict it will offer
on these topics will not be wholly negative, but will be largely so. The paper
will not, however, consider the ecological issues, nor any other implications
4 Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in Rogers (ed.),
Locke’s Philosophy, 166.
5 Ibid., 166–7.
6 Ibid., 167. The same charge – of deliberate opposition to Amerindian views – is clearly
implied in the above-quoted remark that Locke constructed his position ‘in contrast to
Amerindian forms of nationhood and property’ (emphasis added).
7 Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
TULLY, LOCKE AND AMERICA 247
for contemporary debates. Nor will it, except in passing, address Arneil’s
extensions of the argument. Nevertheless, these further issues and exten-
sions of the argument are worth keeping in mind, since they indicate ways
in which the issues covered here serve to underpin a wider understanding
of Locke’s meaning for modern America: as emblematic of the European
encounter with the New World. To take issue with Tully’s Locke is, then, to
take issue with an instance of a broad – if not always sharply delineated –
conception of the global meaning of the European intellectual tradition: as
little, if anything, more than the intellectual wing of European colonialism.8
In this paper I aim to show, then, not only that Tully’s Locke is not the
genuine article, but also that the relation of the European intellectual tra-
dition to European colonial practice is considerably more complex and
ambivalent than Tully’s and similar studies suppose.
TULLY’S LOCKE: EUROCENTRIC DISPOSSESSOR OF THE

AMERINDIANS
Tully begins by showing Locke’s knowledge of the American situation: he

draws attention, rst, to Locke’s library, with its numerous travel books con-
cerned with the Americas; and secondly, to Locke’s extensive civil service
involvement with the edgling colony of Carolina, even to the extent of
having had a major hand in the writing of its constitution in 1669. The point
of these observations is to indicate that Locke knew full well the impli-
cations of his arguments for the American situation, and thereby to support
the conclusion that the implications of his theory for America and the
Amerindians are neither coincidental nor unintended.
Tully opens his case against Locke’s political doctrines by claiming that
Locke identies the Amerindians as living in a state of nature. The two
main implications of that state thus apply to the Americas: everyone has
the power of execution of the law of nature placed in their own individual
hands; and everyone exercises exclusive rights over all and only those things
which are the fruits of their labour. To these two features of the natural
state correspond two major conclusions Locke draws about the American
8 Montaigne’s essay ‘On the Cannibals’ is the most obvious problem for such a dismissive
view: see Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1991), 228ff. It is by no means the only one, however: the attacks on
Spanish behaviour in the New World by Bartolomé de Las Casas, and by Francisco Vitoria
and the School of Salamanca, are also notable. These dissenting views were well-known, at
least into the eighteenth century. Thus the young Boswell: ‘Mr Johnson persisted in advis-
ing me to go to Spain. I said it would divert him to get a letter from me dated at Salamanca.
‘‘I love the University of Salamanca’’, said he, ‘‘for when the Spaniards were in doubt if they
should conquer the West Indies, the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that
they should not’’.’ James Boswell, London Journal, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (London: Heine-
mann 1950), 28 July 1763 (327).
248 STEPHEN BUCKLE
situation: rst, the executive power of the law of nature means that Euro-
pean planters have the right to wage war against the Amerindians, and to
extract reparations from them, ‘without authorization from a constituted
political authority’;9 secondly, appropriation of land in America by Euro-
peans may take place without consent, that is, without the consent of the
Amerindians. Tully goes on to illustrate some of the uses made of Lockean
(or quasi-Lockean) arguments by colonists in the New World, showing how
they were indeed employed to override the Amerindians’ traditional claims
to the land. He concludes, then, that situating America in a state of nature
served two functions:
First, Amerindian political organization is disregarded and replaced by a so-

called natural system of individual self-government, thereby dispossessing
Amerindian governments of their authority and nationhood and permitting
Europeans to deal with them and punish them on an individual basis. Second,
the Amerindian system of property over their traditional territory is denied and
it is replaced by a so-called natural system of individual, labour-based property,
thereby dispossessing Amerindians of their traditional lands and positing a
vacancy which Europeans could and should use without the consent of the First
Nations.10
Tully allows that Locke does recognize that the Amerindian mode of life is
not wholly reducible to the individualized self-preservation envisaged in the
natural state. However, he argues that Locke misinterprets the differences,
and does so in a way which presupposes a European measuring stick, and
which consequently downgrades the Amerindian system. Thus, when
assessing the political structures, Locke focuses excessively on the war-
chief, comparing him to a European king, only immediately to emphasize
how decient a form of kingship this is, and all the while failing properly to
attend to the background structures of customary law within which the war-
chief’s role is dened. Similarly, when addressing property issues, Locke’s
preoccupation with industrious labour and its products blinds him to ‘the
native system of national territories, the bundle of property rights and
responsibilities in activities and their locales, and the customs governing
distribution’.11 In short, Locke privileges European structures and practices
in order to downgrade or dismiss Amerindian culture and social practice.
One feature of Locke’s theory appears to be exempt from this tendency:
he denies that there is a right of conquest. In rejecting this alleged right, he
appears to put himself at odds with colonialist theories – and he certainly
does put himself at odds with some very notable contemporary theorists
who had offered support to (at least some) colonial enterprises, such as
Hugo Grotius. However, Tully argues that even here Locke’s theory serves
9 Tully, ‘Rediscovering America’, 170.

10 Ibid., 178.
11 Ibid., 181.
a Eurocentric vision. His reasoning is as follows: on Locke’s theory of con-

quest, ‘written for another purpose’,12 conquest gives no right to the prop-
erty of the vanquished, so a right of conquest, if there were such, would not
deliver any property to the conqueror. Much better, then, to deny that the
vanquished possess any property at all. This result is achieved if the con-
quered are in the state of nature, because such a conquest is ‘where there
. . . {is} more Land, than the Inhabitants possess, and make use of’, and
which therefore leaves the conqueror at liberty ‘to make use of the waste’,
that is, of the unused land.13
This is a very strange piece of argumentation, because, on Locke’s theory,
anyone is at liberty to make use of the waste in the natural state, not con-
querors alone. Presumably, Tully means to imply that winning a battle or
two considerably strengthens one’s hand in making such claims, especially
when the question of exactly what is possessed, and why, are contested. True
enough; but this is only to say that in any given situation, the spoils go to
the strong. Tully’s conclusion, then, that Locke thereby brings ‘his theories
of conquest and appropriation into harmony’14 seems to be based on little
more than the fact that he does not need to appeal to a right of conquest to
establish a case for ownership of land in the natural state, together with the
insinuation that this is the outcome he quite deliberately seeks.15 Tully’s
Locke is a self-aware and deliberate dispossessor of the Amerindians; and,
where he appears to hold out concessions, is discovered to be giving with
one hand while taking back with the other.
This is certainly a serious charge. To assess its credentials, it will be best
to follow Tully’s organization, and to separate the distinctively political
questions from questions of ownership, especially ownership of land. It will
be found that, too often, Tully’s case depends on the hasty styles of argu-
mentation discernible above, in the question-begging treatment of the right
of conquest.
LOCKEAN STATE OF NATURE AND POLITICAL SOCIETY
Locke’s political theory begins, of course, from an hypothesized ‘state of

nature’. This state, says Locke, is a state of ‘perfect freedom’, in that
human beings in that state are subject only to the laws of nature, the basic
12 Ibid.
13 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1967), II. 184.
14 ‘Rediscovering America’, 182.
15 The insertion ‘written for another purpose’, quoted above, seems clearly intended to insin-
uate that the theory is an attempt to harmonise several different elements, each of them
opportunistic. The reader is entitled to ask, however, according to what criteria Tully dis-
cerns the different purposes pursued in the text. He offers no clue himself, despite the
importance of such claims for the general drift of his argument.
250 STEPHEN BUCKLE
moral principles discerned by reason. They are thus subject neither to the
haphazard control of individual others, nor to the organized control of
political authorities. In this state, there are no concentrations of power at
all, and in this sense it is also a state of equality: the constraints imposed by
the laws of nature not only apply equally to all, they also enjoin equality
amongst all. In the rst place, they teach that ‘being all equal and indepen-
dent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Posses-
sions’.16 The absolute bottom line is individual self-preservation, but
equality extends this to a requirement of mutual preservation: we are bound
to preserve ourselves, and where self-preservation is not thereby compro-
mised, are likewise bound to preserve all other human beings. This means
that we have certain rights and obligations with respect to one another in
the natural state. To be bound to preserve ourselves implies a right of self-
defence; to be bound to preserve others implies a right and duty to inter-
vene when others are subject to acts of violence, a right which extends to
imposing penalties for the purpose of restraining, both immediately and
with regard to the future, and for making reparation for past injuries.17
Preservation thus implies a natural right to act on what the natural law
enjoins: in the state of nature, the execution of the law of nature is in our
own hands. This is the right to punish injustices in the natural state, which
Locke calls the executive power of the law of nature.
The state of nature, says Locke, is a peaceful condition, as far removed
from a state of war as ‘a State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and
Preservation, and a State of Enmity, Malice, Violence, and Mutual Destruc-
tion are from one another’.18 It is true that ‘a declared design of force upon
the Person of another, where there is no common Superior on Earth to
appeal to for relief, is the State of War’. However, this state of affairs can
occur not only in the state of nature, but also in society. The attack of the
highwayman is one example, since such attacks are carefully designed to
take place where the authorities are unable to help, and because of their
absence one is entitled to defend oneself directly, as need dictates – even to
the extent of killing the attacker. More strikingly, there is also no common
superior to appeal to if the attack comes from the political authority itself
– the attack comes precisely from the superior to whom the subjects would
otherwise appeal – so in such a case the political authority has instigated a
state of war, and the subjects have the natural right to punish the attacker,
to the extent of killing if necessary, no less than if they were still in the
natural state. Not only is the state of nature not a condition of war, but the
state of war can arise indifferently in either natural or political states.
16 Two Treatises, II. 6.
17 This last right, of reparation, is, says Locke, possessed only by the injured party, and is the
origin of the private right to sue for damages. Since it attaches to individuals only in this
essentially private manner, it plays no role in the formation of political society. (See Two
Treatises, II. 11.)
However, the absence of a settled authority in the state of nature does

expose it to one important ‘inconvenience’: the state of war, once begun in
the state of nature, continues; that is, conicts, once begun, cannot readily
be resolved.19 Moreover, the liberty and equality of the natural state – ‘all
being Kings . . . and the greater part no strict Observers of Equity and
Justice’20 – means there are fewer obstacles to conicts arising, and so
renders the state of nature a condition of relative insecurity. This is the
reason for quitting the state of nature, and seeking a more secure life in
political society: governments are formed the better to secure ‘the mutual
Preservation of . . . Lives, Liberties, and Estates’. And, since life, liberty and
estate are those things the taking of which comprise injustice, they can all
be described under the general term, property.21 Hence Locke’s famous
conclusion: ‘The great and chief end, therefore, of Mens uniting into Com-
monwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation
of their Property.’22
The preservation of property, in this broad sense of the term, depends on
overcoming the three main ‘inconveniencies’ of the state of nature. These
‘inconveniencies’ are, rst, the fact that men are frequently ‘ignorant for
want of study’ of the law of nature, that law by which the state of nature is
regulated; second, they are ‘biassed by their Interest’, and so inclined to
interpret the provisions of the law of nature to their own advantage, and the
consequent disadvantage of others; and third, the individual’s natural right
to punish is an insufcient power effectively to deter those who seek to
subvert the law of nature. If the establishment of political society is effec-
tively to overcome these inconveniencies, then, it must provide solutions
corresponding to each of these problems. It must therefore provide ‘an
establish’d, settled, known Law’; ‘a known and indifferent Judge’; and
‘Power to back and support the Sentence when right, and to give it due Exe-
cution’.23 This, means, in turn, that each individual must give up the natural
rights enjoyed in the natural state. The rst of these rights, the right to do
‘whatsoever he thinks t for the preservation of himself and others within
the permission of the Law of Nature’ is given up only in part: ‘so far forth
as the preservation of himself, and the rest of that Society shall require’. In
contrast, the second right, the executive power of the law of nature, the right
to punish, is given up in its entirety: ‘the Power of punishing he wholly gives
19 Ibid., II. 20.

20 Ibid., II. 123.
21 This conclusion trades on, among other things, the scholastic adage, ‘Where there is no prop-
erty, there is no injustice’. For some early modern uses of this adage, see Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Ch. XV, 101;
and Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), IV. iii. 18. For discussion, see Natural Law and the Theory of Prop-
erty, 172–3, 179–83.
23 Ibid., II. 124–6.
252 STEPHEN BUCKLE
up, and engages his natural force . . . to assist the Executive Power of the
Society, as the Law thereof shall require’.24
Further, since the establishment of a political order is itself the creation
of a new potential threat to the peace and security of human beings, it is
also necessary that these powers should be embedded in distinct insti-
tutions, institutions which directly embody the three solutions to the ‘incon-
veniencies’ of the state of nature: a legislative, a judiciary, and an executive.
Of these institutions, the legislative is the supreme power, since it is by
means of the legislative that the rule of law is established, and the most
fundamental of the shortcomings of the natural state thereby addressed.25
However, the rule of law will descend into rule by arbitrary decrees unless
the powers of the legislative are rmly separated from the judicial and
executive powers. So civil government is established – the inconveniencies
of the state of nature decisively overcome – when the rule of law is created
through the institution, and separation, of the three fundamental powers of
political society: the legislative, judicial, and executive powers.
At this point we can return to Tully. Clearly, if political society is consti-
tuted by the presence of these three distinct arms of government, separated
from each other in the appropriate way, then it is equally clear that Ameri-
can forms of polity might not qualify as political societies in Locke’s sense.
Further, he is aware of the fact, since he points out that ‘the Kings of the
Indians in America . . . are little more than Generals of their Armies’, with
little power in peacetime; 26 and that this is so because their ‘simple poor
way of liveing’ limits their desires and possessions. This means, in turn, ‘few
Trespasses, and few Offenders’, and so ‘no need of many Laws to decide
them’.27 American society is thus dened by its simplicity, and, concludes
Tully, because of this simplicity is denied status as a properly political
society. Locke, he says, denies recognition to American political insti-
tutions, and does so because they fail to correspond to his Eurocentric stan-
dard.
The argument is too quick: in the rst place because it depends on a mis-
reading of Locke’s theory; and in the second because of the vagueness of
the appeal to ‘Eurocentrism’. The second point will be taken up more fully
below; the misreading is revealed when we remind ourselves just what it is
that Locke aims to achieve. He presents his constructive political theory in
the second of the Two Treatises, where it is presented as an (almost) entirely
free-standing work, with its own title: ‘An Essay concerning the True Orig-
inal, Extent, and End of Civil Government.’ The title is revealing: it
announces a concern to explain the origins, purposes, and consequent
bounds, not of government per se, but of civil government. The quali-
cation is vital. We are not to be offered a description of the origins and
24 Ibid., II. 128–30.
25 Ibid., II. 134ff.
26 Ibid., II. 108.
27 Ibid., II. 107.
development of modern (European) political institutions, but an account

of the necessary path by which a civil polity is constructed, and the bounds
which attach to such a polity if its civility is not to be lost.
What then is a civil polity? The short answer is that it is a republic, in the
historic and literal sense of a polity in which the political institutions are
public: that is, that they serve the public interest, rather than the sectional
(private) interests of the rulers. Locke does not use the term ‘republic’ itself,
but the overtones of ‘civil’ – from civitas, or (self-governing) city – would
not have been lost on an audience which knew its Latin. The same can be
said for Locke’s attachment to the term ‘political society’ itself: the source
this time is Greek – the organized society of the polis – but the message is
the same. Locke’s account of political society is an attempt to show that
political institutions must serve the public interest because they derive from
rights enjoyed by the people independently of the established order; to
specify what that public interest is; to show what institutional structure is
needed for that interest reliably to be served; and to identify which natural
powers the people must surrender and (not least) which retain, if that inter-
est is to be protected. The political message is equally plain: ‘it is evident,’
he observes, ‘that Absolute Monarchy, which by some Men is counted the
only Government in the World, is indeed inconsistent with Civil Society, and
so can be no form of Civil Government at all’.28 So, when Rousseau argued,
some eighty years later, that a republic, or ‘city’, implies the rule of law, that
such a rule depends on an active citizenry, and that only such a form of
political authority is legitimate, he is, in these respects at least, afrming pre-
cisely Locke’s message.29
Just how radical Locke understood his doctrine to be is not uncontro-
versial. Despite its plain intent to place sovereignty rmly and irrevocably
in the hands of the people – to derive authority from the governed, rather
than from divine election or sacred tradition – it was frequently understood,
at least in Britain in the eighteenth century, as a conservative doctrine.
Perhaps this reected its close connection with the political settlement of
1688 (the ‘Glorious Revolution’), which provided the implicit constitutional
framework for the Hanoverian regime. Perhaps other factors were brought
into play. 30 But, whatever the full story, the truth is that, on its face, Locke’s
theory denied the civility, and thus legitimacy, of much European political
authority. Those which escaped such wholesale rejection, such as the
England of Charles II, were left hanging by the thread of revocable popular
consent. In such circumstances, who might count as ‘the people’ was of
crucial importance in determining just how radical the theory’s implications
were. If restricted to fully independent actors with a ‘stake’ in the political
28 Ibid., II. 90.
29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968), I. 6, II. 6 (61, 82).
30 See John Dunn, ‘The Politics of Locke in England and America’, in John Yolton (ed.), John
Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
254 STEPHEN BUCKLE
alternatives, i.e. to adult male owners of landed property, the meaning was
less destabilizing than it might have been. Even interpreted thus narrowly,
however, it still put governments on notice: action at odds with the purposes
for which authority was established, purposes to be judged by (the relevant
sector of) the governed themselves, directly implied a loss of legitimacy. It
was precisely for this reason that Locke’s theory provided ammunition for
the subsequent political revolutions in America and France, exercising a
profound inuence on the rise of modern republicanism.31
Locke’s theory, then, is strikingly unsuited to the role Tully allots to it.
First, it neither mirrors nor privileges any then-existing European political
reality, and so in this sense is not Eurocentric at all. Of course, settlers, mag-
istrates, and monarchs took the rightness of their social order for granted
when dealing with foreign nations in the Americas; and (monarchs aside)
they did appeal, when convenient, to Locke’s views in the prosecution of
those certitudes; but the theory is not, for all that, the embodiment of their
settled convictions. That it undoubtedly appears to be so is, in large part, a
historical artefact, and a distorted one at that. It is the back-projection of
the theory’s subsequent inuence, its status as a preliminary sketch of what
were to become (culturally-speaking) European doctrines: in particular, the
Constitution of the United States of America, ratied in 1787, just over a
hundred years after the composition of the Two Treatises. In this respect,
Locke’s theory is Eurocentric in much the same way as are Leonardo da
Vinci’s sketches for a ying-machine.
Secondly, neither does the theory delegitimize American polities for
failing to be European, since, as already pointed out, it delegitimizes Euro-
pean political orders no less. In fact, Locke’s rather scanty remarks about
Amerindian polities pale into insignicance when compared with the overt
attack he mounts on European royal political privilege and powers. In this
respect, the work’s meaning is plain, and the dangers to its author more than
sufcient to focus the mind: the Two Treatises was a political hot potato
which Locke kept rmly under wraps, taking it with him into political exile
in Holland in the 1680s. Even after 1688, when the shift in the political winds
led him to return to England and to have it published – or what remained
of it, having, mercifully, lost more than half of the First Treatise on the way32
– he never acknowledged, and regularly denied, that it was his own work.
He even recommended its treatment of property to a young relative, all the
31 Arneil provides a worthwhile corrective to the recent tendency – displayed, not least, by
Dunn – to write Locke out of the American story (John Locke and America, 168–200).
32 Two Treatises, Preface (155).
while writing as if it was the work of another.33 This is a curious fate for a
work which Tully’s argument implies to be the distillation of the spirit of its
age: platitudes are not usually so dangerous. Locke’s political theory is
therefore not Eurocentric in the sense that Tully intends: that is, it does not
mirror existing European political realities, and so does not, in this sense,
measure Amerindian society by means of a privileged European measur-
ing-stick.
This conclusion may seem hard to swallow. If so, it is important to see just
what is, and what is not, being claimed. The point is not that Locke’s theory
cannot be described as ‘Eurocentric’ in any possible respect. It is, rather,
that the claim that Amerindian political structures are being dismissed as
the result of a prejudice in favour of European institutions cannot be main-
tained. Locke is formulating an ideal, and against this ideal he measures
both European and Amerindian political institutions. It is not entirely irrel-
evant that in this process the Amerindian institutions come out fairly well,
but that is not the point either. Even if the Amerindian institutions failed
the test very badly, it would still not add up to Eurocentrism in Tully’s sense.
European reality, European assumptions, are not the measuring-stick. But
this is a large issue, to which we will return.
LOCKE’S THEORY OF PROPERTY IN THINGS
Locke’s theory of property is not wholly separable from his account of

political society, of course, but there is sufcient independence for Tully’s
separation of the two to be useful and instructive. Locke does tie them
together, but only at the top end, and his political argument requires that,
even then, the tie be not too tight. The ties that do and do not exist can be
made clear once the bare bones of the property argument have been set out.
In the beginnings of human society, God gave the world to mankind in
common, ‘for the Support and Comfort of their being’.34 The earliest human
beings, being not very numerous, enjoyed a great natural bounty which
enabled them immediately to appropriate whatever they needed. Although
such appropriations removed things from the original common, this was no
injustice to anyone because things were held in common only in the sense
33 Locke to the Rev. Richard King: ‘Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained,
than in a book entitled Two Treatises of Government’. Peter Laslett comments:
It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of his own works as a guide to
a young gentleman anxious to acquire ‘an insight into the constitution of the govern-
ment, and real interest of his country’. It must be even rarer for a man who was pre-
pared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle’s Politics and Hooker’s
Ecclesiastical Polity, to write as if the work were written by somebody else, somebody
whom he did not know. Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative.
Two Treatises, Editor’s Introduction, 3.
256 STEPHEN BUCKLE
that they belonged to nobody in particular, and so they became the prop-
erty of whoever took them to use for sustaining life. In this way, labour –
understood not as any and every kind of activity, but as self-directed
rational activity in the service of self-preservation35 – directly brought
exclusive property into being, without any need for mutual consent. Self-
preservation also set the bounds to property, since the ability to use for sus-
taining oneself determined what any person could legitimately appropriate,
and such appropriations were legitimate because they were taken for such
use. To take from what others had taken for their use was to interfere with
their self-preserving activity, and thus to do them injury. Such takings were
not necessary, because of the natural bounty; and, because injurious, could
be punished.
This state continued until men established, by convention or agreement,
money in the form of precious metals. This brought about a profound
change. No longer was appropriation limited to immediate use, since the
produce of labour could now be changed for metal which did not decay, and
hence could be stored indenitely. This made large properties possible,
especially large estates which could produce a saleable surplus. By allowing
large estates to develop, the introduction of money thus greatly accelerated
the rate at which land was occupied, and thereby also allowed the develop-
ment of great inequalities of wealth. This was no harm to the poor, however,
since by working on the estates of the rich they could be better clothed and
fed than was possible in the independent but poorer state in the pre-money
society. The improvement in general living standards was due to the great
increase in productivity brought about by liberating the immense capacities
of human labour from the constraint of satisfying only immediate needs.
The increase in the size of estates, and also of population, made possible
by the money economy also made land scarce in various parts of the world.
Land therefore became considerably more valuable, leading the different
societies to settle on boundaries for their distinct territories, and to estab-
lish legislatures in order to regulate the property of their members. So,
although in some parts of the world a natural common, or a state not too
far removed from it, may still obtain, in other parts of the world property
in things has come to be regulated by laws established by governments.
These laws settle not only the distinct bounds of possessions, but also the
35 And thus not simply one’s possession which one then ‘mixes’ with other things not one’s own
– despite Locke’s misleading remarks to the contrary at II. 27–8. See Buckle, Natural Law
and the Theory of Property, 149–61; and, more generally, the ‘workmanship’ model, as
expounded by Tully, A Discourse on Property, Part I, and Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of
Lockean Rights in Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Ch. 3. This interpre-
tation also allows Locke to meet Hume’s objections, that talk of ‘mixing’ our labour with
something is irreducibly ‘gurative’, since ‘properly speaking, we only make an alteration
on it by our labour’; and that to ground acquisition by joining something owned to some-
thing else ‘accounts for the matter by means of accession; which is taking a needless circuit’.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 505n.
meaning of ‘property’ itself, by specifying the rights which do or do not fall

within its domain.36 Such developments are rational if driven by changed
material circumstances, and legitimate if consented to by the citizens.
The moral of Locke’s story is that property arises naturally through the
self-preserving activities of human beings, and that the development of the
money economy frees acquisition from its original constraints and creates
the conditions for substantial improvements in productivity and thus
wealth. In so doing, it also drives the transition to political society, since the
unequal holdings which develop are a source of instability which the rule of
law can overcome. Political society itself then brings about further changes,
by allowing the development of more complex forms and concepts of prop-
erty. These changes are, however, the continuation of the natural processes
which began property, because they are simply adaptations to changed
circumstances or renements introduced for the further improvement of
human life.
There is no doubt that this account implies that European economies are
more advanced than their Amerindian equivalents. They are more
advanced both in the sense that they are more complexly ordered, and in
the sense that they deliver a better living to those who live under their
regimen. I take it that the rst of these claims is plainly true, while the
second is equally disputable. However, neither issue is particularly relevant,
since neither greater socio-economic complexity nor greater wealth are
grounds for dispossessing the less well off. If they were, it would follow that
dispossessions could be justied within Britain or Europe on exactly the
same grounds. Nor does Locke show any inclination to go down this road:
in fact, his own explicit criterion for the superiority of the European
economies – the condition of the day-labourer – implies a concern for the
welfare of the worst off, not the callous disregard for life’s victims not
unknown in complex and afuent present-day polities.
Even so, one central feature of Locke’s account does have far-reaching
implications for Amerindian life: his claim that it is labour which begins
property in the state of nature. This claim is frequently misunderstood,
however, so we need to determine its signicance. It is not the rejection and
replacement of the time-honoured (Roman) legal criterion of occupation.
It is, rather, an attempt to specify what counts as occupation. To occupy is
to seize or take hold of something, and the Roman principle is that such
taking establishes a right where there is no prior claimant. But what must
one do in order to take hold of a thing – especially in those cases where
there are other claims, not least claims to a share, as in the natural state?
This is the problem Locke’s labour criterion is designed to answer. The sig-
nicance of the answer, however, is that it makes natural appropriation
wholly non-conventional, and thus removes any need for consent, despite
36 This is implicit rather than explicit in Locke’s account. See Natural Law and the Theory of
Property, 179–90.
258 STEPHEN BUCKLE
afrming that, in the natural state, there is a form of common right. Locke
emphasizes this feature of his account: ‘I shall endeavour to shew, how Men
might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to
Mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of all the Com-
moners’.37
Locke’s immediate purpose is to rebut the patriarchalist theory of Sir
Robert Filmer, which seeks to defend ‘The Naturall Power of Kinges . . .
against the Unnatural Liberties of the People’38 by demolishing then-inu-
ential ideas, specically Grotius’s, of common rights grounded in original
consent. The ramications of his theory are, however, considerably wider.
When he adds the further claim that much of America is vacant land – he
speaks of the ‘in-land, vacant places of America’, and of ‘the wild woods and
uncultivated wast of America left to Nature’39 – it is plain that he under-
stands his labour criterion to imply that much of America remains un-
appropriated. If the Amerindians are in the natural state, then it follows that
any individual can go to the American ‘uncultivated wast’ and make it their
own, without needing to gain the consent of any others, Amerindians, not
least, included. Tully argues that Locke does regard the Amerindians to be
in the state of nature, and therefore that Europeans are free to appropriate
land for themselves by working on it. So the key question is, does Locke
place the Amerindians in the state of nature?
AN AMERICAN STATE OF NATURE?
The implications of Locke’s theory for the Americas can be discerned if we

draw out the relation between the two aspects of Locke’s account, the politi-
cal and the economic. The important point to note is that the development
of the political order and the growth of economic sophistication are related,
but only contingently. On the one hand, Locke regards the effects of the
introduction of money – inequality and scarcity of land – as the primary
factors which drive human beings into political society. On the other hand,
it is crucial to his political purposes – as expressed in his insistence that the
natural state is a peaceful condition – that this not be understood as an
inevitable, nor an irreversible, development. Political authorities who irt
with tyranny can and will be thrown out by the citizens, whatever the stage
of economic development, because returning to the state of nature is
nothing to fear; at least, it is nothing to fear when compared to the evils that
can be visited on them by tyrants who put themselves into a state of war

38 This is the sub-title of Filmer’s best-known work, Patriarcha. See Sir Robert Filmer, Patri-
archa and Other Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 1.
39 Two Treatises, II. 36, 37.
with the people. Economic sophistication and the natural state can co-exist;
‘the state of nature’ is not code for economic backwardness.
Neither, on the other hand, does Locke deny that political society can
arise at an earlier economic stage. Political society will arise when human
beings decide to establish it; and they will so decide when circumstances
make it advantageous. In fact, it is possible to predict that it will indeed arise
in a situation of economic simplicity if circumstances are such that there is
a local scarcity, or for any other reason capable of generating sufcient fric-
tion between different social groups to make life insecure. So not only is
‘the state of nature’ not code for economic backwardness; neither is ‘politi-
cal society’ code for economic sophistication. Any argument, then, which
seeks to proceed by contraposing a state of nature, simultaneously con-
ceived as a condition of economic simplicity, to a political state, simul-
taneously conceived as a condition of economic sophistication, will
obfuscate rather than enlighten. This point had been well recognized by C.
B. Macpherson, who had stressed the extent to which Locke’s natural state
allows considerably more sophistication than may immediately be appar-
ent. 40 His successors are not so sensitive to the point.41
Perhaps the fault is ultimately Locke’s own, because it is a striking feature
of his account of the natural or quasi-natural state, to which he contrasts
more sophisticated systems of property and politics in the course of his argu-
ment, that it is consistently exemplied by the New World of the Americas.
Further, the particular activities which throw light on the natural condition
are exemplied by the activities of the Amerindian. Thus Locke illustrates
his account of original acquisition in the natural state by observing that ‘this
Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it’; similarly,
he illustrates the benets, for the poor, of the money economy over the
primitive economy by claiming that ‘a King of a large and fruitful Territory
there {in America} feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in
England’; and he summarizes the broad outlines of the natural state both in
the famous remark that ‘in the beginning all the World was America’, and
also in another passage, in which he claims that ‘America . . . is still a Pattern
of the rst Ages in Asia and Europe’.42 It is undeniable that Locke’s text
relies on a contrast between sophisticated and undeveloped economies and
polities, and that this contrast is repeatedly illustrated by the differences
between English or European (or even Asian) conditions of life and those
of the Amerindians.
40 Macpherson saw that Locke allowed sophisticated forms of commerce in the natural state,
and accordingly criticised him for (allegedly) reading back into that state his own ‘bourgeois’
assumptions. See The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 209.
41 The problem is more pronounced in Arneil than in Tully. She argues that, by placing the
Amerindians in the state of nature, Locke thereby ‘incorporated into his own theory . . . the
fundamental division between the “savagism” of the new world and the “civility” of the old’.
John Locke and America, 201–2.
42 Two Treatises, II. 30, 41, 49, 108.
260 STEPHEN BUCKLE
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that, despite appearances, the

contrast does not map directly onto the organizing polarities of Locke’s
theory: the contrast is not between political society and state of nature; nor
is it between money economy and primitive economy. Locke acknowledges,
rst, that Amerindian society is not reducible to the state of nature, since it
does have some political structures, even if ill-formed; and, secondly, that it
is a form of money economy, even if only a rudimentary version.
In the rst place, he recognizes that Amerindian society is a society, not
merely an aggregation, and that it does possess political structures. Thus,
although he observes that the ‘kings’ in America are in reality ‘little more
than Generals of their Armies’ – because the exercise of their authority is
limited to times of war, and authority in battle does not imply more exten-
sive rights to command – he does recognize them to be part of a political
system. This is because there are recognized authorities other than these
‘kings’: the fundamental decisions to go to war, or to sue for peace, are not
themselves made by the generals, but are ‘ordinarily in the People, or in a
Council’.43 This does suppose some publicly recognized authorities and pro-
cedures for addressing threats to safety. Of course, the bodies at issue are
not constantly in session, but Locke could not be tempted to discount them
on this basis: he explicitly recommends, in the Two Treatises, that the legis-
lative body not always be in session, since it would then be inclined to aggre-
gate too much power to itself.44
The Amerindian system is, then, a form of political authority, even
though it falls short of Locke’s prescriptions for civil government. The
shortfall, however, is because the tribal councils do not appear to be law-
making bodies sufciently specialized to embody the rule of law, nor to sep-
arate law-making from judicial functions. Pace Tully, it is not at all because
the ‘kings’ are so much less powerful than European kings,45 since, as
argued above, limiting the power of kings is entirely congenial to the thrust
of Locke’s political thought.46 The fact is that, no matter how rudimentary
its character (or characterization), Locke does treat Amerindian society as
possessing a form of authority – a combination of kings and councils, not
unlike Britain – established to protect the group from external threats. Sec-
ondly, because these authorities are recognized by the Amerindians, in that
the authority is not contested, they can reasonably be regarded as estab-
lished and maintained by (implicit) consent, and thus by the transference of
43 Ibid., II. 108.

44 Ibid., II. 143.
45 ‘Rediscovering America’, 178–9.
46 In fact, Locke limits not only arbitrary power, but political power itself, in the sense of con-
straining it within bounds which leave it constantly vulnerable to extinction by the governed.
The point is well brought out in the title of a recent study of Locke’s political thought: A.
John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
natural liberties for the sake of security and thus preservation.47 This is what
it is to leave the state of nature behind, so it can be concluded that the
Amerindians are not in the state of nature.
A closer examination conrms this conclusion. The very existence of such
authorities implies that the natural individuals (or perhaps families) have
brought themselves together as a people, and with procedures and insti-
tutions, even if rudimentary, for acting on their interests as a people. Of
course, it is arguable whether one should call these institutions a rudimen-
tary government, or a proto-government, or something else, but it is note-
worthy that Locke himself does accept it as a form of government. He
observes that, ‘in the beginning of things’, it is commonly fear of strangers
and the threats they may imply which motivates the shift to political order.
So the natural move is to set up a government designed primarily to secure
against external threats. This is precisely the Amerindian case: ‘Twas
natural for them to put themselves under a Frame of Government, which
might best serve to that end; and chuse the wisest and bravest Man to
conduct them in their Wars, and lead them out against their Enemies, and
in this chiey be their Ruler.’48 Locke goes on to stress how limited this par-
ticular form of authority is, but even so, his point is that people invent politi-
cal structures to serve their needs, not that such limited structures are not
really to be thought of as government at all. He refers to it explicitly as ‘a
Frame of Government’, which surely makes it, from his point of view,
government enough, even if not a fully civil authority. So, although he con-
sistently thinks of their mode of life to be close to a non-political natural
state, Locke does not consign the Amerindians to the state of nature. On
the contrary: he denies it.
A similar conclusion holds for the economic situation. This is readily
revealed by returning to what is perhaps the most famous of the American
references, and placing it in its context: ‘in the beginning all the World was
America,’ says Locke, and he continues: ‘and more so than that is now; for
no such thing as Money was anywhere known’.49 The message is clear:
America is as close as we can get to an actually-existing example of the
primitive economy, but nevertheless it is not that state. The Amerindians do
have money, which did not exist in the original condition in which human
beings were placed by God at the Creation; and, given the importance of the
invention of money in Locke’s story of economic transformation, this is no
trivial concession. The Amerindians are indeed, Locke observes, hampered
by ‘want of People and Money’,50 but since this want is, in the case of people,
a relative shortage rather than a complete absence, the same, presumably,
is his point concerning money. Amerindian economy is a rudimentary case
47 The point is not that the Amerindians themselves so regarded their authorities, but that
Locke could reasonably have regarded them so.
49 Ibid., II. 49.
50 Ibid., II. 108.
262 STEPHEN BUCKLE
of a money economy; but it is genuinely a case of such an economy; it is not

a theoretically awkward or embarrassing ‘transitional’ phase. The
Amerindians are not, then – politically or economically – the simple
embodiment of Locke’s theory’s posited primitives, despite their important
place in the organization of his argument.
One possibility might be thought to remain, an alternative route by which
Tully could reach a comparable conclusion. For even if Locke does not place
the Amerindians in the state of nature, it is still true that relations between
Amerindians and colonizers are in the natural state. Hobbes had argued
that relations between states existed in the natural condition,51 and Locke
followed suit: ‘all Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments all
through the World, are in a State of Nature’. 52 So it may seem that, even if
the Amerindians are not themselves in the natural state, in practice it comes
to the same thing, since with respect to the Europeans they are, and can be
treated accordingly.53
This argument fails, however, because it forgets that there is nothing here
to distinguish the colonial situation from intra-European relations. The only
obvious difference between the intra-European and colonial cases is that,
in the former but not the latter, relations may have come to be regulated by
treaties. Treaties, however, although sufcient grounds for denying the
existence of a state of war between the treating parties,54 do not mean that
the state of nature has been overcome. Locke is explicit on the point: an
independent nation ‘in League with others’, is still in the natural state with
respect to them because ‘‘tis not every Compact that puts an end to the State
of Nature between Men, but only . . . one of agreeing together mutually to
enter into one Community, and make one Body Politic’.55 The upshot is
that, on Locke’s account, there is nothing about the political realities of the
colonial situation to distinguish it from international relations between
European states. So, although English colonists in America may have
employed Lockean arguments to place the Amerindians in the natural state,
or otherwise to deny them political recognition, the Two Treatises does not
sanction any such conclusions.
51 He had also, of course, argued that this meant international relations to be a state of war:
independent states maintain, towards each other, ‘the posture of Gladiators’. Leviathan, Ch.
XIII, 90.
53 Tully conates this point with the quite different claim that the Amerindians are themselves
in the natural state. Thus he says – quoting from Two Treatises, II. 14 – that ‘Amerindians
and Europeans who make contact with them “are perfectly in a State of Nature” ’ (‘Redis-
covering America’, 169). But this passage is entirely concerned with relations between differ-
ent groups, and has nothing to do with the situation of the Amerindians themselves.
54 This point had been argued, against Hobbes, by Samuel Pufendorf. He held that inter-
national treaties, even if they did not guarantee lasting peace, nevertheless were not nothing:
‘an insufciently trustworthy peace is not immediately equivalent to no peace at all’. On the
Law of Nature and Nations, 2. 2. 8; in Craig L. Carr (ed.), Michael J. Seidler (trans.), The
Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 146.
THE NATURAL RIGHT TO PUNISH
Locke does not place the Amerindians in the state of nature. But what if he
had? Why does Tully think the issue so important? The state of nature is
not, in Locke’s theory, either primitive or savage; indeed, it is a condition
much to be preferred to rule by Catholic kings, and therefore preferable to
the state of the France and Spain of his day. So wherein lies the problem?
Tully’s view is that the problem is Locke’s ‘strange Doctrine’, the right to
punish in the state of nature. He attempts to show that this natural right is
a threat to Amerindian society and safety, and is even (apparently) intended
as such. The attempt is not successful.
Tully begins by claiming that the right to punish justies individuals
waging war against the Amerindians, ‘without authorization from a consti-
tuted political authority’.56 This is much too sweeping. First of all, it ignores
the fact that, because others are in the state of nature, it does not follow that
those who are not can act simply as individuals, and exercise the natural
right to punish, no matter what the circumstances. Locke makes it plain that,
in the formation of political society, the right to punish is handed over
wholesale to the constituted political authority.57 This means that acts of
aggression from those outside the political order should, wherever possible,
be met with an organized group response, rather than with merely indi-
vidual acts. The exception is when one is directly attacked; but here the issue
is immediate defence or self-defence, and applies to those within political
orders no less than to those who are not.58
Secondly, it ignores all the qualications Locke applies to the doctrine: it
is plain that the right is to serve the purposes of peace, to be used only
against those who violate the peace by acts of aggression against others, and
to be limited to what ‘calm reason and conscience dictates . . . which is so
much as may serve for Reparation and Restraint’.59 Further, although Tully
acknowledges that this right is an adaptation of the right of self-defence,60
he treats the fact as of no signicance. He even goes on to argue as if,
because colonists in Carolina attempted to justify acts of aggression against
the Indians by claims of self-defence, and (I take it) because such claims
56 ‘Rediscovering America’, 170. Tully’s use of Locke’s text not infrequently raises as many
questions as it answers, and this is a case in point. The passage from the Two Treatises to
which he refers here (I. 131) is merely concerned to establish the possibility of waging war
in the natural state, not with its justication – and thus does not depend on the right to
punish. Secondly, in this passage it is the colonizers who are treated as in the natural state;
the Amerindians’ situation is not discussed.
58 Ibid., II. 17–20.
59 Ibid., II. 8.
60 ‘Rediscovering America’, 171. Locke’s right to punish is in fact the generalization of the
natural right of self-defence, the generalization itself being grounded in the natural equality
of human beings: cf. in particular the passage quoted from Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity at
the beginning of the Second Treatise; Two Treatises, II. 5.
264 STEPHEN BUCKLE
were made during the period Locke was responsible for colonial policy
there, the right to punish is precisely to be understood as justication for
those acts of aggression.61 Is it too difcult to ask whether such claims might
not be an abuse of the natural right of self-defence? Tully himself provides
plenty of evidence for the fact that, when the colonial administrators formu-
lated unpopular policies, the colonists suited themselves – that, in effect, the
colony was out of control.62 He provides no evidence that Locke’s doctrine
was in any way designed to excuse the colonists’ actions. And, since the
period of Locke’s close involvement with Carolina – the 1670s – precedes
the composition of the Two Treatises, it cannot be supposed that the right
to punish was in any way responsible for them. Tully’s whole argument here
seems to be little more than an attempt to establish guilt by association.
Tully’s further argument, that Locke’s discussion of the natural right to
punish dehumanizes the Amerindians, is no more convincing. He notes that
those who are to be punished are described in subhuman terms: ‘Offenders
are characterized as “wild Savage Beasts” who “may be destroyed as a Lyon
or a Tyger” ’, and these are ‘the terms used to describe, and so dehumanize,
Amerindians in the books in Locke’s library’.63 The inference is somewhat
hasty, but will be considered below. The obvious objection, however, is that
Locke is not the author of the books in his library, and so not to be held
accountable for what is said in them. Dehumanized Amerindians need to
be found in Locke’s text; and the passages Tully cites provide no convinc-
ing evidence. First of all, the people referred to in these bestial terms are
explicitly identied in the text by means of their actions, and not by any
other feature. It is murderers, and those guilty of other forms of ‘unjust vio-
lence and slaughter’, who are being considered at this point; and Locke
makes this focus plainly visible with a Biblical quotation to explain his point:
‘Who so sheddeth Mans Blood, by Man shall his Blood be shed’.64 Further,
in speaking of those who act this way as akin to wild beasts, Locke is
employing an idiom commonly applied to all those who abandon the ways
of reason and peace for violence, and not merely to indigenous peoples.
Thus, for example, Bartolomé de Las Casas, the great defender of the
61 It is difcult to know how else we are to meant to take the following passage:
When either slavery failed or all other means of dealing with the Amerindians proved
ineffective, the practice in the colonies was to make war against the local tribes in a piece-
meal fashion . . . The usual justication for wars of this type was that the Indians had
resisted the settlers in some way or stolen something, and so violated natural law, acti-
vating the settlers’ right to defend themselves and avail themselves of the rights of war.
(‘Rediscovering America’, 172)
62 He provides such evidence even in the passage omitted from the quotation in the preceding
footnote. The omitted sentence reads: ‘For example, the colonists in Carolina revolted
against the proprietors’ monopoly on Indian trade, declared war on the Westos in 1679, and
killed those they were unable to enslave.’ (Emphasis added.)
64 Two Treatises, II. 11 (Genesis, 9. 6).
Indians against the Spaniards, explicitly refers to the conquistadores in just

such terms: they are ‘wild beasts rather than human beings’, ‘more vicious
than savage tigers, more ferocious than lions or than ravening wolves’.65
Secondly, Locke’s point is that murderers can justly be treated as if they
are wild beasts who threaten us with their lives, not that they are, intrinsi-
cally, nothing more than such beasts. It is the danger they pose which justi-
es the response: they are those ‘with whom Men can have no Society nor
Security’; and so it is legitimate for any man to treat them ‘as Beasts of Prey,
those dangerous and noxious Creatures, that will be sure to destroy him,
whenever he falls into their Power’.66 Locke’s language is, in other words,
designed to explain why it is legitimate in such cases to treat human beings
in ways which would not normally be acceptable; it is legitimate to act thus
because the aggressors have dehumanized themselves; they have turned
themselves into ‘Beasts of Prey’, and so it is necessary for the endangered
to treat them accordingly. Moreover, the vigorous use of violent or fright-
ening images to express profound moral disapproval seems not to have been
an uncommon practice; and Locke’s language seems quite unremarkable –
if anything, rather restrained – when compared with Las Casas’s denuncia-
tions.
Thirdly, the context makes it very plain that Locke’s concern in these pas-
sages is with justifying resistance, and violent resistance if necessary, to any
king who attempts to set himself up as an absolute monarch over his sub-
jects. The right to punish can be exercised over anyone who institutes a state
of war, and the state of war can arise in political society no less than in the
state of nature. Anyone who attempts to place others in their absolute
power begins a state of war, whether in the natural state or not:
Force without Right, upon a Man’s Person, makes a State of War, both where
there is, and is not, a common Judge . . . For wherever violence is used, and
injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence
and injury, however colour’d with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law.67
It is political authority overreaching its proper bounds that is in Locke’s

mind in these passages, and not anything to do with the New World. In fact,
the central point of Locke’s chapter on the state of war is to turn the tables
on Hobbes’s argument that we must escape the state of war by establishing
absolute authority: Locke counters by arguing that, not only is the state of
nature not a state of war, but absolute authority can be no solution to the
‘inconveniences’ of the natural state because the establishment of such
authority amounts precisely to the creation of a state of war.
65 Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. Nigel Grifn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), 103, 96.
66 Two Treatises, II. 11, 16 (emphasis added).
67 Ibid., II. 19, 20.
266 STEPHEN BUCKLE
It is surprising indeed to see Tully observe in passing that Locke’s argu-

ment is standardly interpreted in just this way, immediately to set the fact
aside and hang his hat on the imsy threads discussed above. The expla-
nation, I think, is that he regards the natural right to punish as intrinsically
implausible; as nothing more than a prop for colonialist views, and thus per-
suasive only to those already disposed to accept colonialist conclusions. This
appears to be why he describes it, despite Locke’s restrictions on its proper
scope, as a ‘violent doctrine’, and why he thinks Locke illustrates it by refer-
ring to the colonial powers of England, France and Holland.68 If this is why
he is so keen to nd fault with Locke’s position, then it must be concluded
that he is so preoccupied with the possible uses or abuses of the doctrine in
the Americas that he has simply failed to see that it is, in fact, extremely
plausible; that few who would think carefully about Locke’s point, and its
implications for international relations, would be inclined to reject it.
The plausibility of the doctrine can be supported either by theoretical
means, or by example. The theoretical defence is that the existence of the
right follows from the right of self-preservation and the doctrine of equal-
ity. That is, just as I am entitled to do what is necessary to remove threats
to my safety, not merely by opposing violent attacks on my person, but also
by addressing the causes of such attacks; so, by the principle of equality, am
I entitled to do the same for others. I have a natural right, then, not only to
preserve myself, but to act to preserve all; that is, to protect peace. And in
so far as this requires not only resisting threats when they occur, but also
discouraging, through punishment, repeat offences from proven aggressors,
to that extent I have a right to punish. Of course abuses are possible; but,
as Locke observes, the right extends as far as ‘calm reason and conscience
dictates . . . which is so much as may serve for Reparation and Restraint’.69
The plausibility of the doctrine can also be illustrated by example, of
which there is no shortage. To take a recent case: only a few years ago,
Bosnian Serb guns occupied positions in the hills above Sarajevo, and sub-
jected the citizens of that city to periodic shelling, some episodes of which
caused appalling atrocities subsequently denounced the world over.
Eventually, after a particularly horric massacre in a market place caused
by a single shell, NATO jets attacked the Bosnian Serb guns, forced a pull-
back from the hills overlooking the city, and thereby brought safety to the
streets.
Was this attack justied? The legal answer is that it was, because the
legally-constituted government of Bosnia–Herzegovina, headed by Presi-
dent Izetbegovic, had called for the NATO action; furthermore, the UN
Security Council, which had been hopelessly hamstrung over the issue,
came, in the end, to nod its support. From a moral point of view, this cuts
68 ‘Rediscovering America’, 172. (We might wonder what has happened to the Portuguese and,
in particular, the Spanish.)
rather little ice.70 The central moral issue is that innocent people were being
subjected to systematic terror and random murder, and so – politicians and
diplomats aside – moral judgement of the NATO action is unlikely to have
been affected if the legal structures had not been in place. More recent
events testify to the fact, since much more extensive NATO actions in Serbia
and Kosovo wholly lacked such legal supports. Nevertheless, the common
opinion is and was that those actions were justied.71 But on what basis
could such justication be established, if legal support was non-existent?
This is to ask the following question: on what grounds is it justifable to inter-
fere in the affairs of other peoples when there are no binding agreements
with them; that is, when one is, with respect to them, in the state of nature?
The only answer is that such action is justied by the moral necessity of pre-
venting the death of innocent people, wherever it is in one’s power to do so.
If we further ask, to what extent is such action justiable?, it is not unrea-
sonable to reply: as far as ‘calm reason and conscience dictates . . . which is
so much as may serve for Reparation and Restraint’.
Pace Tully, then, Locke’s claim that there is a natural right to punish is an
eminently plausible doctrine. It is not a strange doctrine trumped up by, and
plausible only to, colonialists seeking to justify acts of violence against inno-
cent and harmless indigenous peoples. Whatever Locke’s vices, he is not, in
propounding this doctrine, guilty of subordinating theory to the dictates of
self-interest, or to the interests of colonialist masters. He is not showing
himself to be a mere party hack, promoting party interests. Rather, the
natural right to punish confers legitimacy on actions to protect the safety of
ourselves or others, in those situations where no legal system has jurisdic-
tion, and so where the only possible source of justication is by means of
natural right.
LOCKEAN LABOUR AND AMERINDIAN TITLE TO LAND
If Locke does not place the Amerindians in the state of nature, and his doc-
trine of the natural right to punish is not an apologia for the conducting of
private war against them, what remains of Tully’s critique? The short
answer is that the case against Locke boils down to the extent that his theory
dispossesses the Amerindians of their legitimate lands. Perhaps surpris-
ingly, this is not so easily settled.
70 Of course, acting within the framework of international agreements has one important moral
feature: it maintains the framework itself, and thereby keeps in place mechanisms which are
expected to have future benecial effects. In this respect, international justice is, as Hume
put it in the second Enquiry, comparable to ‘a vault, where . . . the whole fabric {is} sup-
ported . . . by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts’. Enquiries
concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, Third Edition,
ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 305.
71 Whether this common opinion is itself justied is of course controversial, but is not my
concern here.
268 STEPHEN BUCKLE
In the rst place, it is certainly not true, as Tully claims, that Locke’s
account implies that ‘Amerindians had no property in their traditional
lands’.72 The claim is simplistic. It is plainly not true that, on Lockean
grounds, the Amerindians had no claim on those parts of their traditional
lands on which they had built habitations, or on those plots of ground which
they had cultivated (enclosed or not). Plainly, both are the fruit of labour
expended on the earth for the purposes of preservation.73 The crucial issue
concerns traditional hunting territories. Does Locke’s theory rule out recog-
nition of such territories?
It might seem that it does. After all, he explicitly states that, in the natural
state, hunting animals generate property in, and only in, the animals one
successfully kills – ‘this Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who
hath killed it’ – whereas property in land is established by what ‘a Man Tills,
Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of’.74 Further, it is
plain that he believes that much of America is up for grabs: he speaks, for
example, of the ‘in-land, vacant places of America’, and of ‘the wild woods
and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature’.75 So isn’t it because he
denies that hunting generates a right to land, and so also denies that the
Amerindians have taken possession of their traditional lands, that he is able
to conclude that America’s ‘in-land’ is ‘uncultivated wast’?
No, it is not. There is no doubt that Locke believed the conclusion to be
true, but little if any evidence that he thought so on the basis of the argu-
ment thus outlined. The argument depends on the common error of sup-
posing that Locke’s account of the origin of property in the state of nature
is his whole justication for property rights: the error summed up in the
claim that he advances a ‘labour theory of property’. He does not. If he had
done so, then wherever one could discover ‘wild woods and uncultivated
wast’, one would ipso facto have discovered unclaimed land waiting to be
appropriated by industrious labour. Since this would have denied the rights
of the aristocracy to all their vast hunting territories, Locke’s theory would
have prompted nothing short of a peasant revolution. That such a possibility
did not occur to him seems sufcient evidence that it is not what he meant.
It is not, however, necessary to rest with this observation alone. For he tells
us himself that the story about labour is the story about the beginnings of
property, before political institutions have come into being; and that once
such institutions have come into being, property is governed by the rules

73 It should further be emphasized that it is preservation, and not labour, which is the bottom
line. Thus Locke acknowledges that Cain, who cultivated the soil, was still obliged to ‘leave
enough to Abel’s sheep to feed on’ (Two Treatises, II. 38). He must do so, not because Abel
had enclosed ground or improved pasture, like a modern English farmer, and so had come
to have a property in land; rather, he is so obliged simply because Abel’s preservation
required it.
74 Two Treatises, II. 30, 32.
75 Ibid., II. 36, 37.
they then establish: ‘in Governments the Laws regulate the right of prop-
erty, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions’.76
Locke’s theory does not, then, deny property in hunting territories, where
those territories are dened by political authority. And, as has been argued
above, neither does he deny that Amerindian society is political society. So
there is no bar in his theory to the recognition of Amerindian hunting terri-
tories. It seems, then, that he thought that much of (‘in-land’) America was
vacant, not because he refused to recognize hunting lands, but because he
thought that much of it was not such politically-established hunting lands –
that the land was so vast, and the populations which lived on it so small and
scattered, that the available land far exceeded any claim to territory which
could reasonably be made by any political society.
What does this mean? It does not mean that Locke rejects occupation as
the original foundation for property, and thereby denies original occupation
by the Amerindians.77 It does mean, however, that his theory provides
grounds for denying that the extent of such occupation is identical with the
established boundaries recognized by the various indigenous groups. To see
this, it is useful to compare Locke’s position with Grotius’s inuential views.
Grotius founds an initial right to use things – land included – on grounds
similar to Lockean arguments for beginning property, but he maintains that
legal property is distinct from such use-rights, being established only
through agreement. Admittedly, the agreement he has in mind is not a full-
blown social compact, since he allows that tacit agreements also entitle –
and picks out occupation as a case in point. So the difference between his
and Locke’s positions are not as dramatic as may at rst appear; the wider
ramications do, however, differ markedly.
The fact that, in the Grotian scheme, it is mutual consent which estab-
lishes title by occupation means that there is no natural limit placed on the
possible extent of any given claim. The boundaries established are simply
those settled upon, explicitly or implicitly, by the affected parties them-
selves. Grotius’s account thus allows a people to lay claim to a large terri-
tory, even if the territory has not been brought under direct use by the
people themselves. As he puts it, lands unoccupied in any narrower sense
can nevertheless be ‘taken over as a whole by a people’.78 For Grotius, then,
the formation of individuals into a society can prepare the way for a terri-
torial claim by that society as a whole, as long as the claim is publicly sig-
nalled in some fashion. The test for legitimacy will be whether the claim is
accepted by other individuals or groups; and failure to oppose will be taken
as tacit consent. In this way, Grotius’s theory allows for the establishment
of very extensive traditional lands, even if those lands are not directly
76 Ibid., II. 50.
77 Cf. Arneil’s claim that Locke ‘allowed land to be appropriated only through cultivation
rather than occupation’, John Locke and America, 204.
78 Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis {On the Law of War and Peace}, trans. F. W. Kelsey
(New York: Oceana Publications, 1964), 2. 2. 4 (191).
270 STEPHEN BUCKLE
appropriated by individuals. The rules governing the use of such lands

would therefore be a matter of societal decision, and of inter-societal (or
international) treaties.
Locke’s account is less congenial to such developments, because,
although individual labour is supplanted by political decision-making in his
account, there is good reason to think that one factor of which he stresses
the signicance in the state of nature continues to apply in the political state.
This is the requirement that appropriation of land be limited by what one
‘can use the Product of’. In the state of nature, this constraint bans the
taking of more than one can use before it spoils, in the case of the fruits of
the earth, and, in the case of the earth itself, of more than one needs for the
cultivation of such fruits. Thus Locke’s theory imposes a standard which is
lacking in Grotius’s: for Grotius, agreements bind; for Locke, agreements
can (and no doubt, in the normal case, should) be honoured, but where they
go beyond legitimate claims based in need, they do not bind. You and I may
agree to divide up Paradise between us, by drawing a line down the middle,
in order to prevent quarrels arising; and by so doing we do no wrong. But
should a third party come on the scene, we have no right to exclude them
from the natural bounty because of our past agreements. This will include
all those cases where agreements are merely tacit, i.e. where they are tra-
ditional claims. It is not, then, that Locke denies traditional claims per se;
rather, he imposes a standard which typically limits claims, traditional or
not.
For this reason, Locke is committed to the view that the formation of
political societies is not a basis for dramatic extensions to territorial claims.
He illustrates this in his account of the process by which political societies
naturally arise: the development of the money economy leads human
beings into political society, because, by allowing the development of large
estates, land is rendered scarce, and systems of public regulation of prop-
erty holdings are then brought into being to prevent controversies about
title.79 Thus his account implies that land is rst appropriated naturally, and
then political societies are formed to settle the property ‘which Labour and
Industry began’.80 Political societies do not normally make territorial claims
which go substantially beyond the private holdings of the individuals within
them, because there is, in the normal case, very little such land to claim.
Nevertheless, Locke’s account leaves room for the division, between the
various societies, of any remaining unclaimed lands. Thus he says, for
example, that the rst peoples ‘by consent . . . came in time, to set out the
bounds of their distinct Territories, and agree on limits between them and
their Neighbours’.81 His theory requires, however, that he think of this
process to involve little more than the tying-up of loose ends – acts of
79 Cf. Two Treatises, II. 51, where the point is implied.

80 Ibid., II. 45.
81 Ibid., II. 38; cf. also II. 45.
mutual accommodation between immediate neighbours. That he thinks

America to fall outside this typical situation is shown by the contrast he
draws between it and those other parts of the world where this has not hap-
pened, because there (as in America, although this time he does not name
it) ‘there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found’.82
In contrast to more-or-less contractual theories like Grotius’s, then,
Locke’s theory has an inbuilt tendency to limit claims to territory to that
amount which is relatively intensively used, or, what comes to much the
same thing, that amount which is necessary for survival. It is clear that, in
doing so, it calls into question the legitimacy of very extensive traditional
land claims. Is this therefore evidence of a colonialist cast to the theory?
Less than might hastily be imagined, since it is not only the indigenous
peoples who are put on notice by this requirement, but the colonialists
themselves. The point is later noted, and insisted on, by Rousseau. He
accepts a markedly Lockean account of ownership through rst possession,
where such ownership is established ‘not by an idle ceremony, but by actu-
ally working and cultivating the soil – the only sign of ownership which need
be respected by other people in the absence of a legal title’. He then offers
the following defence of this constraint:
How could a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep out the rest of the
human race except by a criminal usurpation – since the action would rob the
rest of mankind of the shelter and the food that nature has given them all in
common? When Nunez Balboa stood on the shore and took possession of the
southern seas and of South America in the name of the crown of Castille, was
that enough to dispossess all the inhabitants and to exclude all the other princes
of the world? If so, such idle ceremonies would have had no end; and the
Catholic King might without leaving his royal chamber have taken possession
of the whole universe, only excepting afterwards those parts of his empire
already belonging to other princes.83
82 Ibid., II. 45. There is some tension in Locke’s account at this point, since the reason there is
such land available he explicitly identies as the absence of money, despite his having
acknowledged that the Amerindians do have money. The simplest solution is to suggest that
Locke saw some difference between the coastal Indians and the ‘middle of the in-land Parts
of America’, where there were ‘no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World’ (II.
48). It is worth noting, in this light, that the famous remark, ‘in the beginning all the World
was America’, follows directly after this discussion of the ‘in-land Parts’. So it is reasonable
to conclude that it is these parts, not the whole of America, which best indicate the original
state of the world. Locke’s reference to the signicance of commerce with other parts of the
world also indicates why the Amerindian money economy has not led to the appropriation
of all available land: it is not money per se which leads to dramatically increased levels of
appropriation, but the use of ‘Gold and Silver’ as money (II. 50). The use of gold and silver
would transform the Amerindian economy not because of any intrinsic virtues of these
metals – they are, indeed, ‘little useful to the Life of Man’ – but because they are the stuff
of international trade. To put it anachronistically – if not wholly misleadingly – Locke’s point
is that the constraint on the Amerindian economy is that it is not effectively integrated into
the global economy.
83 Rousseau, The Social Contract, op. cit., I. 9 (67).
272 STEPHEN BUCKLE
This is no mere idle observation. The history of the Americas would have
been sharply different if the Old World monarchs had limited their claims
according to Lockean principles. The same is true of Australia, where the
planting of a ag in Sydney Cove was taken to establish not merely British
sovereignty over New South Wales (as it then was, i.e. the entire Australian
east coast and hinterland), but also to render this vast territory as the prop-
erty of the Crown. The same is also true of some of the nineteenth-century
carve-up of Africa by the European powers, most notably the (aptly-
named) Belgian Congo. On Lockean principles, none of these land-grabs
were justied. This is a strange consequence for a theory allegedly designed
to justify colonialist dispossession of indigenous peoples, and must render
the claim highly implausible; an implausibility not removed by the fact that
the theory also raised the same question about the vast territories in which
the ‘in-land’ Amerindians lived and moved. A principled account of the
origins of property must cut across all claims otherwise based, whether that
basis is tradition or naked power – so it is only to be expected that Lockean
principles raise questions about the extent of Amerindian title. But it is only
a very blinkered application which detects this, while failing to notice that
the theory is a two-edged sword which cuts uncomfortably into British over-
seas territorial claims. It is precisely this blinkered application which
upholds the idea that Locke’s theory is imperialist ideology.
In conclusion, then, Locke’s theory does not deny Amerindian traditional
land per se, even though it does implicitly deny that such land-holdings are
as extensive as the Amerindians themselves may believe. It denies this not
because Locke deliberately dehumanizes them to the level of wild animals;
nor because, blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, he disqualies the legiti-
macy of their political institutions. Rather, the theory denies the extent of
traditional ownership of land because Locke believes that the Amerindians
live in the midst of a natural bounty which is far in excess of their needs –
of their ability to use for the purposes of life – and for this reason he con-
cludes that they cannot justiably exclude others from the use of that
bounty. That Locke is blind to the signicance of the cultural and religious
ties to land characteristic of indigenous societies, and that his theory must
be judged seriously decient for just these reasons, is to state the obvious;
but neither the man nor the theory is guilty of failure to recognize the full
humanity of the Amerindians, nor of offering a justication – overt or covert
– for their dispossession.
In establishing this conclusion, a curious fact stands out. The passages of
the Two Treatises which must be addressed to settle these questions are not
the central, familiar parts of the text: in digging them out, one is conscious
of reading around the margins. Is this sense itself the result of a colonialist
view of the text, in which the references to the New World have been rele-
gated to only marginal signicance by the prejudiced eye of the reader? Or
is that sense rmly grounded in a real feature of the text – that for Locke
himself the New World examples are only of marginal importance for the
theory? If the latter alternative is accepted – and the sheer paucity of detail
about the situation of the Americans strongly supports it – the conclusion
to be drawn is not that Locke marginalizes the Americans because of Euro-
centric prejudice, but that in the Two Treatises he is not attempting to estab-
lish anything about America: that his gaze is xed rmly elsewhere, and
America and the Americans enter the story only to provide illustrations for
an argument not concerned with them. This is a familiar (it is now tempt-
ing to say ‘old-fashioned’) view of Locke’s purposes in writing the Two Trea-
tises – that it is an English work written for domestic English purposes – but
it is a view well worth re-afrming.
LOCKE’S ENGLISH PURPOSES
To identify Locke’s primary targets as domestic is to conform to the estab-

lished interpretation of the Two Treatises: that it was written in the heat of
the Exclusion Crisis – the Parliamentary attempt, in 1680–1, to exclude
Catholics from ascending to the throne, after the death of the Protestant
heir made the future James II the heir apparent – and that its primary aims
are to be understood by reference to the central political issues surround-
ing that crisis; that its publication in 1689 reects a resolution of those issues
favourable to Locke’s concerns; and that the anonymity of the work –
ercely maintained – reects the lack of assurance that that resolution
would last. These broad lines of interpretation seem to me unassailable.
They do not, however, thereby exclude all other angles on Locke’s enter-
prise. The great virtue of the colonialist interpretation offered by Tully (and
others) is the evidence it marshals to show that Locke’s contrast between
the simple Amerindian ways and the ways of developed economies and
polities, a contrast which runs through the Two Treatises, is not merely acci-
dental or off-the-cuff. Locke’s employment with Shaftesbury brought him
into direct contact with colonial issues, even to the extent of helping to for-
mulate colonial policies and institutions. Moreover, his labour argument
had antecedents in colonial arguments which were designed to deny
Amerindians possession of their lands, not merely in distant inland parts,
but precisely where they were in competition with colonists; and if his
theory was the sort of simple labour theory his critics are often inclined to
suppose, or if he had claimed the Amerindians to be in the state of nature,
then he would likewise have been committed to their dispossession, and
knowingly so. The evidence is strong that Locke knew full well that his
argument concerning the origin and extent of property was not without
consequences for the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
It is the further claim, however – that Locke not only knew these things,
but wrote the Two Treatises in order to defend the English interests to the
extent of dispossessing the Amerindians – that is the great weakness of
Tully’s interpretation, and which leads it into forced and distorting
274 STEPHEN BUCKLE
interpretations of the text. It is the thought that the natural right to punish
must have an American (or, more generally, colonial) purpose; that the
state of nature must be designed to accommodate the Amerindians, or,
what amounts to the same thing, that the institutions of political society
must be designed to exclude them; that the afrmation of industry and the
agrarian ideal, etc, are all theses which reect the prejudices, and are
designed to serve the interests, of the colonial paymasters; it is all these
attempts to accommodate the text to a colonial purpose which, in the end,
do violence to its meaning. The reality is that, even for Locke – a man far
better informed than most about the colonial situation – when the domes-
tic crisis erupted, America was a very long way away. America belongs only
at the margins of his main concerns in the Two Treatises.
The point is best shown by an example. Locke develops his theory
through a contrast between the state of nature and political society, on the
one hand, and between pre-money and money economies, on the other. To
illustrate his argument, he frequently refers to Amerindian ways of life. At
the same time, however, he acknowledges that those ways do not corre-
spond to the primitive state in either politics or economics. If his theory is
intended to address the American situation, then, it must be regarded not
merely as a failure, but as spectacularly ham-sted: he must be judged con-
stantly to be undermining his own case. If Locke does aim deliberately to
justify colonialist dispossession of the Amerindians, he primarily succeeds
in showing himself to be a philosopher of mediocre abilities. If this seems
extreme, too global a judgement, might it be a case of an otherwise great
thinker having an off-day? Perhaps; but this would still leave completely
mysterious how the theory could ever have exercised such a wide inuence.
There is a better solution. The traditional view, that Locke’s purposes are
not colonial and American, but domestic and English, allows, in contrast, a
coherent and sophisticated story. It can be set out as follows: Locke employs
his American examples in order to give an English readership some grip on
his hypothesized natural state. His political message is that property is
acquired by natural right, and so not freely disposable by political authori-
ties; his economic message is that the prosperity enjoyed by Englishmen is
due to the benets which ow from a system where the fruits of value-adding
labour, compounded by the investment and trade made possible by the inven-
tion of the money economy, are thus guaranteed against arbitrary incursions.
To get his point across, he needs to argue that property is naturally acquired
by human beings independently of any agreements or political contracts, and
to nd some vivid examples to show that prosperity is not directly a function
of natural resources. His audience of English Protestants have a sketchy
knowledge of the Amerindian way of life, but need to be brought to see the
lessons that that way of life contains for contemporary English realities.
For this reason, it is no problem for Locke that the Amerindians do not
map precisely onto his categories. They give an idea of how natural appro-
priation can occur, and clearly illustrate how one can be rich in resources
but not rich in material life.84 English prosperity depends on security of

property and the industry such security releases. No domination by (absol-
ute) arbitrary will, and therefore no taxation without consent, is the explicit
message; 85 no Catholic kings is the subtext. On this account, then, Locke
has no need to situate the Amerindians in the state of nature, nor is he under
any pressure to deny them economic or political rationality. The purpose
they serve is illustrative only. For this purpose their condition need only
approximate to the theory’s posited primitives, the state of nature and the
pre-money economy. Further, their response to their almost-primitive
circumstances must be regarded as rational, not defective: otherwise their
illustrative value would be lost. This is how Locke presents them: as rational
actors in Arcadian, but not wholly primitive, circumstances. The coherence
of this interpretation is sufcient to conrm that the primary purposes of
the Two Treatises are English and domestic; they are not American.
EUROCENTRISM
Once its English purposes are brought to the fore, the coherence of Locke’s
argument is plain. His central doctrines can no longer be viewed merely as
a cover for colonial interests, as wholly lacking in any intrinsic merit. What
remains, then, of his alleged Eurocentrism? This is a question far more dif-
cult to settle than Tully imagines. It has already been argued that Locke
does not disqualify Amerindian political forms by privileging European
political realities. Whatever his nal judgement on Amerindian politics (a
judgement concerning which the Two Treatises provides no solid evidence),
he does not privilege existing European institutions: all political systems,
near and far, are to be judged by the principled requirements of his theory.
This is not the beginning and end of the difculties, however: other notable
aspects of Locke’s position are similarly resistant to explanation in terms of
Eurocentric prejudice.
For example, it might be thought that some of the principled require-
ments of the theory are themselves mere Eurocentrism: most notably, the
theory’s emphasis on labour, embedded as it is within a wider religious
story. Thus Locke supports his argument at crucial stages by appeal to Bib-
lical quotations: God commanded us to labour, on a world he had given to
us in common, and to do so because he ‘has given us all things richly to
enjoy’.86 The presence of such quotations is not enough to establish the
charge, however, because he also insists that these claims are in accord with
natural reason.87 The mere presence of Biblical appeals cannot therefore be
84 He observes that ‘the Americans . . . are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life’;
Two Treatises, II. 41.
85 Ibid., II. 138–40, 142.
86 Ibid., II. 35, 25, 31 (cf. Genesis 1–2; Psalm 95. 16; I Timothy 6. 17).
87 Ibid., II. 25, 31, in particular.
276 STEPHEN BUCKLE
presumed to be evidence of an irreducibly Christian, let alone Euro-

centric88, viewpoint. Once this is conceded, however, the objection does not
collapse, but can be deepened. The point can be put as follows: Locke’s
claim to have based his arguments on natural reason is, in the case of his
labour principle, no more than self-delusion, since the attractiveness, for
him, of the labour principle directly reects his own religious heritage.
Why? Because it is just the Protestant ‘work ethic’ in disguise.
This is an important objection, but it will not succeed. It is true that Locke
recognizes that the Amerindians are not overly taken by the ideal of
rational industriousness – their circumstances dictate, he observes, that they
have ‘no Temptation to enlarge their Possessions’89 – and so he must
acknowledge that the ideal is not held universally. This will not, however,
sufce to show his attachment to the ideal to be due to the unrecognized
effect of a purely Protestant ethic: it may have another source. In fact it
does. Locke’s attachment to the value of rational labour is not plausibly
attributed to the background effect of his religious culture, for the simple
reason that it is a conviction he acquires only in his maturity, and after a
study of economic thought. Thus his earlier discussion of property rights
and justice, in the Essays on the Law of Nature, makes no appeal to the
special signicance of labour, instead proceeding along orthodox Thomistic
lines. The contrast with the Two Treatises could not be more profound; and
this difference is sufciently explained by Locke’s study of economic argu-
ments in the intervening period, study which convinced him of the signi-
cance of productive, value-adding labour. It is the recognition that the
productive power of labour overthrows the ‘zero-sum’ assumption on which
orthodox Christian social thought was built which explains his emphasis on
labour.90 That emphasis is not explained by appeal to the effect of unex-
amined assumptions embedded in his cultural outlook. Quite the opposite,
in fact: it marks his departure from the orthodox religious social views of his
day. Locke’s appeal to rational labour cannot, therefore, be plausibly attrib-
uted to Eurocentric prejudice.
Much the same will have to be concluded with respect to the less contro-
versial aspects of Locke’s theory, because accusations of Eurocentrism in
such cases will tend to saw off the branch on which the accuser is sitting.
Thus, for example, if Locke’s account of the source of political authority –
the ‘delegation’ theory, by which authority derives from the consent of the
governed – becomes a target, the price will be high. That account is designed
to make the rule of law effective in a complex society, and to protect such
rule from degenerating into centralized, arbitrary power. It corresponds so
closely to modern conceptions of political legitimacy that, to the extent that
88 The two viewpoints are not, after all, identical, notwithstanding the long history of Euro-
pean Christianity.
90 The signicance of this shift for his account of property is spelt out more fully in Natural
Law and the Theory of Property, 149ff.
it calls the legitimacy of traditional political orders into question, to that

extent those orders will indeed be thought to be genuinely questionable. If
the political doctrine suffers from a Eurocentric bias, then, it is a bias which
runs deep, and which therefore cannot readily be jettisoned.
If, on the other hand, its very appeal is taken as a reason for excusing it
from charges of bias, as Tully suggests91, plausibility is strained. This is
because the Eurocentric aspects of the theory are not identical with those
parts that (cultural) Europeans once believed, but believe no longer. This
would be just too convenient, not to say unconvincing; and the unconvinc-
ingness would not be eased by restricting the protected class only to those
Europeans who are ‘right-thinking’ or ‘progressive’ (by European stan-
dards, of course). The fact is, the delegation theory looks as vulnerable to
the charge of Eurocentrism as does any other part of Locke’s position. After
all, it does not ground legitimacy in any kind of tradition, and in this sense
is not a theory congenial to any traditionalist society. In another sense, of
course, it is traditional: traditionally western, in being an appeal to the free
choice of individuals whose equality is independent of their social standing.
The delegation theory thus has profound debts to the Augustinian tradition
of western Christendom. How then can it be insulated from the taint (if such
it is) of Eurocentrism?
This brings us to the nub of the issue. If Eurocentrism is a prejudice which
we need to avoid, it must indeed be a prejudice, and be possible to avoid.
The charge will then need to be proven by reference to specic elements in
a theory which reect unthinking distortions. If, however, it is another term
for ‘the way Europeans think’, it is neither a prejudice nor avoidable; and
the same holds true if it stands for ‘the way (past) Europeans used to think
but we now judge to be false’. This is because the two are, in the relevant
respect, pretty much equivalent: none of us has a mortgage on infallibility,
and in any case error does not imply prejudice. Once this is recognized and
factored in, the difference between the two cases reduces to temporal refer-
ence – and prejudice is not a function of time.
If this seems obscure, the point can be put in other ways. Suppose, for
example, it is said, not without impatience, that of course Locke is guilty of
applying Eurocentric standards, that of course he relies on European
assumptions; and that this is so because he cannot hope to escape the dis-
tortions implied by his whole way of encountering the world: his very con-
cepts, his entire outlook, are ineluctably European, and cannot escape the
limitations and distortions that those facts imply.
This kind of response is not, I think, entirely unfamiliar. It is, however,
seriously awed. The sense of ineluctability, and therefore also the im-
patience, stems from conation of different senses of the term ‘Eurocentric’.
91 Tully insulates Locke’s ‘delegation’ theory of authority from the charge of Eurocentrism,
reserving the charge for aspects of Locke’s views that he rejects: ‘Rediscovering America’,
165–6.
278 STEPHEN BUCKLE
One sense concerns a specic and identiable error; the other an (alleged)
global condition for which criticism is inappropriate. To take the specic
sense rst: the charge that Locke is guilty of Eurocentric assumptions is the
charge that he has privileged his own world, that in doing so he is guilty of
prejudice. The charge therefore has to be advanced, and indeed assessed, on
the basis of specic evidence provided either by the text itself, or by omis-
sions attributable to distorting assumptions. It is a discoverable intellectual
failing which is, in principle, avoidable. We must ourselves suppose, when
advancing such a charge, that we are not similarly guilty – at least in respect
of the point at issue – and that is why we think the issue to be settled by the
evidence brought.
In contrast, the belief that Eurocentrism is unavoidable for European
thinkers like Locke depends not on any evidence derived from Locke’s text,
but, ultimately, on the very general conviction that everyone is the product
of their cultural background, in the sense of being doomed to repeat, at
some fundamental level, the assumptions embedded in that culture’s ‘point
of view’. This view may be true, but it is not undeniably so. No less import-
antly, it is not observably so: it is not an empirical claim, but a priori. It is
the assertion of the nitude and boundedness of concepts, languages, and
cultures, and of the passivity of minds which faithfully reect these bound-
aries. As such it is an explanation for, not a necessary implication of, the
observable diversity of those concepts, languages, cultures and minds.92
And, if Europeans are necessarily bound by their culture, then to be so
bound is not a prejudice in any familar sense – not an intellectual vice we
can overcome by ridding ourselves of distorting assumptions. Furthermore,
because Eurocentrism in this sense depends on a general claim about the
workings of (all) cultures and minds, it applies without exception to all
points of view similarly situated: all (culturally) European-sourced views
must, in this sense, be Eurocentric. So Eurocentrism in this sense will apply
not only to Locke’s theory, but equally to any argument able to understand
it and to engage with it – even to reject it.93
This shows why Eurocentrism, thus conceived, is not a taint or a preju-
dice. Since it applies equally to all views held by Europeans, even of views
highly critical of dominant European opinions, it cannot be regarded as
problematic or undesirable. It turns out to be just a term for what Euro-
peans think and say and do, whatever they think and say and do. As such,
92 It is probably worth reminding ourselves, at this point, that the assertion is not incontestable.
It supposes, without good reason, that – in terms of a distinction familiar to lawyers – con-
cepts and languages constrain, rather than enable. The supposition does not look overly
compelling. To possess one set of concepts is not, of course, to possess another, incommen-
surable, set. But neither is it a bar to coming to understand that other set: it is no barrier to
learning a language that one knows one already. Even concepts and rules which are incom-
mensurable are not, for that reason, best approached without some ladder which later will
need to be thrown away. But this is a large subject which leads wide of our main purposes.
93 And comparable forms of cultural boundedness will apply to all other cultures. Thus any
Amerindian point of view will be a species of Amerocentrism – whatever its content.
it is a harmless term of maximal generality – and therefore entirely useless

– unless wedded to the relativist thesis that all concepts and indeed minds
are bound by their cultures. The notion thus has no point outside of a rela-
tivist context. This has a curious consequence, since the relativist view that
all thinking and saying and doing is a function of the essential boundedness
of concepts and minds and cultures is itself a European (although not
necessarily exclusively European) theory, and so is itself Eurocentric in pre-
cisely the relevant sense.
We thus have two quite distinct notions, one of them with a clear and
useful meaning, and another, global, sense of the word built on an untested
(indeed, untestable) thesis with strongly relativist tendencies. When the two
are not kept clearly distinct, good sense is an immediate casualty, with
empirical and a priori claims being run together to form a view which seems
to appeal to empirical evidence, but which is constantly being reinforced
(and protected) by a sense of necessity. Has this happened in Tully’s case?
I believe it has. One clue is that he shows no sense of the traps abounding
here, instead announcing his conclusions with untroubled conviction. More
tellingly, his whole way of constructing his case against Locke proceeds on
the assumption that Locke’s views simply reect the social reality of his day,
and therefore are bounded by his culture and by its limitations. It is for this
reason that any element in Locke’s text (rightly or wrongly) taken to indi-
cate a critical stance towards an aspect of Amerindian culture is, to Tully’s
eye, evidence of Eurocentric privileging. The possibility that Locke might
be right – or even innocently wrong – has been ruled out from the start. This
makes perfect sense if it is being assumed that cultures are impenetrable to
each other because of the essential boundedness of each other’s concepts
and categories, and that therefore criticism of another culture can be
nothing other than the imposition of one’s own cultural viewpoint. Tully’s
argument is thus infected with an a priori relativism, and it is this which
leads him to his swift conclusion that Locke’s views are tainted with anti-
Amerindian prejudice. It may be that Locke can sensibly be charged with
some form or other of Eurocentric prejudice, but Tully has not shown it.
What he has shown is rather different: that he has himself been beguiled by
the charms of textbook cultural relativism, and has thereby been led into
hasty and unreliable conclusions.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
None of the arguments above shows that there is not some important sense
in which Locke’s political theory can rightly be judged, and criticized, as
Eurocentric prejudice. They do show, however, that making such charges
stick is much harder than may be – than has been – supposed. This is not
because Locke’s theory, including its implications for America, is beyond
criticism, but because of all-too-familiar philosophical pitfalls which entrap
280 STEPHEN BUCKLE
the bold but careless reasoner about cross-cultural relations. It might have
been thought that these lessons have been too well-learnt to catch up
sophisticated modern thinkers, but it is precisely the condence in one’s
sophistication which makes for carelessness; and, where that condence is
augmented by the reformer’s sense of good intentions, the consequence,
intellectually speaking, is an accident waiting to happen. Relativism, in
some form, might be true, but its familiar version is a two-edged sword
which is very likely to wound its bearer, and certain to do so if boldly
wielded by one unaware of the danger.
Of course, one can avoid the double edge of relativism consistently
applied by importing a strong Hegelian premise about history’s self-over-
coming, of historical progression from darkness to light, from intellectual
limitation to rational freedom. Then it will be that past thinkers, in virtue
of being past, will be proven to be victims of intellectual prejudice or limi-
tation simply by the fact of our disagreeing with them. It would be gratify-
ing to believe that such self-attering mythologies are ercely resisted by
modern social thinkers, but one cannot be certain. Is Tully tempted by this
siren song? I do not know. What is clear is that such stories, unless demon-
strably true, ought to be resisted, because they sanction the unlimited use
of argumentum ad hominem against any past (or even ‘backward’ contem-
porary) thinker with whom we disagree. The implications for intellectual
rigour are plainly appalling. I will close with a suggestion why it would also
be particularly unconvincing in the case under consideration.
Any reader of Locke’s work soon sees him to have been uncommonly
well-informed about the Americas. It should therefore be something of a
surprise to see his critics so willing to resort to a form of ad hominem, by
accusing him of imposing his own prejudices upon the societies of the New
World. This would be less surprising if he had defended comfortable
epistemological views which implied his own essential correctness about far-
ung scenes with which he had no acquaintance. But his whole epistem-
ology is devoted to insisting on the absence of any certain standards for
natural knowledge, of how much we cannot hope to know, and, in particu-
lar, of how misguided are the convictions of those who will not look beyond
‘the Smoak of their own Chimneys’.94 It is no less surprising to charge him
with a specic prejudice against the ways of the New World, because he
shows by his own practice that he is not. He shows this by his willingness to
rely on the views of one who is, in sufcient degree, himself an Amerindian.
For Locke’s frequent references, in An Essay concerning Human Under-
standing, to the History of the Indies by Garcilaso de la Vega, is to a work
written by an Inca prince, the child of a Spanish father and an Inca blue-
blood mother. This is not the practice of a man blindly prejudiced against
foreign ways, hopelessly enmeshed in the unreective orthodoxies of John
94 Locke, Essay, I. iii. 2. Cf. also Stephen Buckle, ‘British Sceptical Realism: A Fresh Look at
the British Tradition’, European Journal of Philosophy 7 (1999), 1–29.
Bull. It is difcult, therefore, to resist the conclusion that the Locke of much
popular criticism – the dully representative thinker of the banal orthodox-
ies of his day – is more an artefact of the critics’ own imaginings than an
accurate picture of the man himself.95
Australian Catholic University
95 An earlier version of this paper was delivered to my former colleagues in the Department
of General Philosophy, University of Sydney, in June, 1998. It met with a hostile reception,
and one week later I was out of a job – my contract not renewed – with this paper cited as
evidence of my unacceptability. I leave it to the reader to determine what that unaccept-
ability might have been; no-one familiar with the history of that department will nd them-
selves torn with doubt.
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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9(2) 2001: 245–281

TULLY, LOCKE AND AMERICA

Imperialism, said Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism.1 In the same

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

– are nevertheless ‘inappropriate to and misrepresent two specic political

TULLY’S LOCKE: EUROCENTRIC DISPOSSESSOR OF THE

Tully begins by showing Locke’s knowledge of the American situation: he

First, Amerindian political organization is disregarded and replaced by a so-

9 Tully, ‘Rediscovering America’, 170.

a Eurocentric vision. His reasoning is as follows: on Locke’s theory of con-

LOCKEAN STATE OF NATURE AND POLITICAL SOCIETY

Locke’s political theory begins, of course, from an hypothesized ‘state of

However, the absence of a settled authority in the state of nature does

19 Ibid., II. 20.

development of modern (European) political institutions, but an account

LOCKE’S THEORY OF PROPERTY IN THINGS

Locke’s theory of property is not wholly separable from his account of

meaning of ‘property’ itself, by specifying the rights which do or do not fall

AN AMERICAN STATE OF NATURE?

The implications of Locke’s theory for the Americas can be discerned if we

37 Two Treatises, II. 25.

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that, despite appearances, the

43 Ibid., II. 108.

of a money economy; but it is genuinely a case of such an economy; it is not

THE NATURAL RIGHT TO PUNISH

Indians against the Spaniards, explicitly refers to the conquistadores in just

It is political authority overreaching its proper bounds that is in Locke’s

It is surprising indeed to see Tully observe in passing that Locke’s argu-

LOCKEAN LABOUR AND AMERINDIAN TITLE TO LAND

72 ‘Rediscovering America’, 185.

appropriated by individuals. The rules governing the use of such lands

79 Cf. Two Treatises, II. 51, where the point is implied.

mutual accommodation between immediate neighbours. That he thinks

LOCKE’S ENGLISH PURPOSES

To identify Locke’s primary targets as domestic is to conform to the estab-

but not rich in material life.84 English prosperity depends on security of

presumed to be evidence of an irreducibly Christian, let alone Euro-

it calls the legitimacy of traditional political orders into question, to that

it is a harmless term of maximal generality – and therefore entirely useless

Australian Catholic University

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– are nevertheless ‘inappropriate to and misrepresent two specic political