PROPERTY AND JOHN LOCKE

Standish O'Grady said that James Fintan Lalor, whose brother, Peter, made his own notable contribution to Australian history, was the first to proclaim in the nineteenth century that the land of the world belongs to the people of the world. That doctrine, said the populariser of the Irish Heroic Cycle, was one that would more and more be heard of in the coming times. Right or wrong, it will. As has been written: "The cardinal importance of property for social and political analysis" is becoming more and more "a distinguishing characteristic of the modern world." The trend of the times is towards an examination, or, rather, towards a re-examination, of theories of property; and analysis always made in the truest light. Any work that may assist to a spread of the truth in this matter of cardinal moment must be welcomed. Such a work is Fr. Paschal Larkin's accomplished treatise.*

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In this work, a thesis approved for the degree of Ph.D. in the University of London, its author treats of the theory of property as it operated in three countries during the eighteenth century, and centres his work around a study of John Locke, Or, rather, around the influence of the "Essay Concerning the True, Original Extent and End of Civil Government" in its relation to the theory of property. Perhaps it is not quite adequate to say that the distinguished Capuchin thus centres his work, for he "looks before and after'' Locke, the weaknesses of whose influential theory he discovers to the reader, and there is more than a suggestion that lie pines for "what is not" in relation to the justice of the subject. Locke's theory, accepted or rejected as it may be, and definite enough as it was, has been used to prove many things. In the different schools of thought arising out of the development in the social and economic structure since Locke's day there is endless variety. And there is endless variety in the uses to which these schools have put Locke's doctrine. As Professor J. L. Stocks says in an illuminating preface to the book:

 . . . the theory is available for all parties. One will jump at the absolute guarantee .of property which seems to be inserted in the very definition of the State; another, seeing how Nature is said to give a man property in the product of his labour, condemns the society in which he lives for refusing this natural right; while a third, taking "estate" as the external condition of "life" and "liberty," sees a blow struck at State-absolutism, and rejoiced in the cause of freedom.

 Thus the capitalist apologist applies Locke in one way, the communist in another, especially in that part of Locke's complementary theory of man's natural right to that "he hath mixed his labour with." It is this that Marx had in mind when he formulated his untenable "Theory of Values."

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 Locke's claim is that the right of private property is not dependent upon the will of the State. He rejected wholly Hobbes' doctrine, as propounded in ”The Leviathan," that all elements of private ownership, all rights of property, flow from the State; that they are a concession by the civil authority. He was right. He did not, however, accept St. Thomas Aquinas' view that, "the temporal goods which God commits to a man are his indeed in regard to property, but in regard to use, they are not his alone, but belong to others also, who can be sustained by what is superfluous for him." Fr. Paschal says that Locke's views were less individualistic than is commonly supposed, and many writers in the past have neglected the human and democratic elements in his theory. 

But he adds that Locke's

 main object was to insist on the individual's right to his property, as against the arbitrary, interference of the State; and, possibly, that prevented him from recognising more explicitly than he does that private property is a social function as well as an individual right. He nowhere puts the responsibility which should accompany ownership on the same plane as the right to private property itself. He does not. like some previous writers, distinguish between the right to property in general and the right to specific pieces or forms of property. One might almost say that he tends to confuse the fact of private property with the right to private property. This weakness in his theory of property appears to be directly due to the subjective character of his ethical philosophy, or to his lack of faith in social ideals.

 Right throughout his book, poised and impartially reasoned as it is, Fr. Paschal makes clear what that 'ethical philosophy" in relation to his subject should be.

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 When the colonists in what is now the United States broke with England, the landowners, whose ideas of freedom did not carry the logic of applying it in the matter of personal possessions, interpreted Locke in similar fashion to that in which he was applied in England. The rights of property were by them "glorified" as greatly as they were by the landowners and the wealthy in Britain. At the Virginia Convention in 1776, those with "a stake in the country" were prompt to assert that "all men having a permanent interest in the community"

 cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for publick uses, without their own consent or that of their representatives.

 Locke's philosophy, as Fr. Paschal shows, had no little to do with the economic views of leaders of the American Revolution.

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 In a brilliant chapter, "The French Contrast," Fr. Paschal shows that, while the French peasantry were the chattels of the monarch and the nobility, the Church's teaching of the succour of the poor was not forgotten, if not always acted upon. In France the view that interest was unlawful was not accepted generally until long after it had been accepted in England. In France there were restrictions associated with the connection of the many with the land. It was not so in England. Locke's individualism there prevailed; the "established classes" were safeguarded in their ownership of land and other property even against the King. But the Church, not always as boldly as it might, asserted the rights of the commonalty of France. "But, while denying that the right of private property was a mere social convention, the Church continued to emphasise the social character of .wealth, the right of the poor to succour from the rich, and the unlawfulness of excessive wealth accumulation." Later, the Code Napoleon confirmed the peasants of France in the possession of their holdings; and that peasantry is one of the main strengths of France to-day. 

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 In the twentieth century, because of  movements in the eighteenth and the succeeding century, it would appear that "property was made to govern natural rights, rather than natural rights to govern property." This has led to the present condition of society in all supposed civilised lands, where, because of the prevalence of false principles applied to property, something approaching chaos has arisen. Our industrial system and our social order, because of unrepressed individualistic tendencies, gives us to-day "a world groaning under burdens of its own making, and unable to find a method of dislodging them. Those of little property have been absorbed by those with greater possessions, and the unpropertied masses number more and more, while the thousand and one dreadful accompaniments of the soulless business intensify hourly. This, is because property has not been used in accordance with the teaching of the Catholic Church. Even in this favoured country we witness' the spectacle of people in want and poverty, and that in the face of plenty. Says Fr. Paschal:

 Every right-minded person must admit that if property due to personal effort and initiative is a progressive and stabilising influence in society, property divorced from labour, and labour which remains merely potential property, tend to be subversive of national, as they sometimes are of individual and family, life.

 This is dispassionately phrased, but its meaning is evident. That meaning touches the general sociological problem to-day. 

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 Too much praise cannot be given to Fr. Paschal for the easy readability of his work. It is written in a clear, nervous English, with a most felicitous style, from which even the luminous epigram is not absent. "The dismal science" -in his pages is anything but dismal. His meaning is always as clear as noonday.. But it is the substance of the work which is most important. The formidable bibliography which Fr. Paschal publishes at the end of his book shows how thorough has been his search for light on this difficult subject. This is an important work, which, supplying a need, cannot be too highly valued. The book is splendidly printed and produced and its reference and footnotes are admirably complete.

"Throughout this modern period there has been a predominant tendency to conceive property in terms of a theory which early found its classic expression in a short chapter of John Locke's Essay. . . Of this doctrine a careful account will be found in the following pages, marked by an evident desire to do justice to a great thinker. Locke remains the child of his time, and from such a study as this we come to understand him better by seeing him in this light. …

 "We are now in a position to do justice to the eighteenth century. The historian in every reader is anxious to do it justice, and welcomes a careful study of facts and tendencies, like the present, as an effort in this direction. But, as a citizen, the reader will also expect from it, in accordance with an ancient tradition, some enlightenment in regard to the problems of his own day; and he will not be disappointed." —Extract from the Preface, written by Prof. J. L. Stocks.

—P. I. O'L

*"Property In the Eighteenth Century." By the Rev. Paschal Larkin. O.S.F.C., M.A., Ph.D. With a preface by Professor J.L. Stocks. Cork University Press.

Advocate (Melbourne, Vic. : 1868 - 1954), Thursday 5 February 1931, page 3