View source for Homesteadin' Is the Place for Me
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
Jump to:
navigation
,
search
<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Gene Callahan]] [[Category:Homesteading]] [[Category:John Locke]] [[Category:The Lockean Fable of Initial Acquisition]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://gene-callahan.blogspot.com/2010/05/homesteadin-is-place-for-me.html}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{End URL}} {{DES | des = How the homesteading idea was an excellent excuse for the theft of lands by the 17th-century English landowning class. | show=}} <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- normally, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{Quotations|Homesteadin' Is the Place for Me|quotes=true}} {{Text | So, let's take a look at John Locke's famous homesteading principle, the foundation of many libertarian theories of property rights. Locke begins by stating that in the commons, whatever one has mixed one's labor with is his: "Thus the law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who hath killed it." Well, the law of reason may make it thus, but this is not the way hunter-gatherer societies work. Instead, we find a traditional manner of dividing up the deer amongst the tribe, with the hunter perhaps getting a prize portion, or something of the sort. And this traditional division might cite a "law of reason" of its own: without the tribe, the hunter wouldn't have lived past a day. Without the tribe, he would have no idea how to hunt. Without the tribe, he would not have a bow and arrow. I could go on, but you get the point. Furthermore, ownership in land almost never came about in the way Locke contends give the institution its justification. Hunter-gatherers did not have private land ownership. And when it came about, it certainly did not pop up the day someone first planted a seed. No, private ownership evolved slowly out of communal ownership, an institution created by the community in question (although never with the intention of creating some desired endstate of ownership, but in response to the contingent situation). Ownership in private property is created by communities. But the 17th-century English landowning class had a problem. They had been busy robbing both the English peasant and the American Indian of their land. To their credit, they couldn't admit openly to themselves that they had been doing so. While the Athenians could just say to the Melians that it was natural for the powerful to dominate the weak, or the Israelites could simply claim a land as God's chosen people, these options were not open to 17th-century English Christians. They needed a good justification for their theft. And Locke's homesteading doctrine is formulated very precisely to give them one: only when a man "tills, plants, improves, cultivates" some piece of land does he actually gain ownership of it. So, there you go! Just because some English peasants had grazed a pasture for a thousand years, or some "naked savages" had hunted it for five thousand years, that land wasn't really theirs, because they hadn't done with it what a member of the landed gentry would, which was to enclose it and farm it (or at least the part not reserved for the folly and the decorative fish pond). So, there's the basis of the homesteading "principle": it's a good way to justify taking things from the weak! (And here, in what is surely a slyly ironic article by Jeff Tucker and Manuel Lora, they note how, after several hundred years of being taught that grabbing things first is the just way to get them, people actually start to act like this is natural!) }}
Template:DES
(
view source
)
Template:End URL
(
view source
)
Template:Extension DPL
(
view source
)
Template:Quotations
(
view source
)
Template:Text
(
view source
)
Template:URL
(
view source
)
Return to
Homesteadin' Is the Place for Me
.
Navigation menu
Views
Page
Discussion
View source
History
Personal tools
3.14.82.208
Talk for this IP address
Log in
Search
Search For Page Title
in Wikipedia
with Google
Translate This Page
Google Translate
Navigation
Main Page (fast)
Main Page (long)
Blog
Original Critiques site
What's new
Current events
Recent changes
Bibliography
List of all indexes
All indexed pages
All unindexed pages
All external links
Random page
Under Construction
To Be Added
Site Information
About This Site
About The Author
How You Can Help
Support us at Patreon!
Site Features
Site Status
Credits
Notes
Help
Toolbox
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Page information
Guidelines To Create
Indexable Page/Quote
Indexable Book/Quote
Indexable Quote
Unindexed
Templates
Edit Sidebar
Purge cache this page