Notes on Locke's Social Contract: 7.1–7.5 (Ramgotsa-Chaotle chapter overview)

7.1 Introduction

  • The social contract story (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries) centers on two assumptions:
    • People in the state of nature are not political creatures; natural condition precedes political life.
    • People are free by nature, primarily freedom from coercion, and the social contract creates a bridge between natural freedom and political subjection via consent under certain conditions and limitations.
  • The state of nature is often theoretical rather than historical; its history matters mainly as a justificatory tool for a particular form of political organization or to critique others.
  • The act of entering a political community (the social contract) marks a transition from the state of nature to subjection under a sovereign, justified by consent.
  • Important questions in social contract theory (two core questions):
    1) What were the original conditions that push people to form a political body? (The original conditions that need political protections.)
    2) What are the derivative limitations upon government that those who contract would agree to in order to secure protections and rights?
  • If original conditions are harsh, contract may permit fewer limitations on the ruler; if the state of nature is relatively peaceful, sovereignty should be more limited (Hobbes is invoked as a point of contrast in this discussion).
  • Locke’s account foregrounds who the contracting agents are: not only the structure of rule and governance but also the people who consent, their needs, fears, gains, and losses.
  • Critical perspective: Charles Mills and Carole Pateman (and Macpherson) emphasize exclusions in Lockean contracting agents:
    • Contracting individuals are often imagined as men, white, and globally positioned within imperial/colonial power (Pateman; Mills).
    • The working class and the poor are excluded (Macpherson).
    • Women, non-whites, the propertyless, and the colonized are subordinated and their subjugation is justified before politics begins, allowing the contract to coexist with inequality.
  • This chapter presents Locke’s social contract through these marginalized perspectives, offering a schematic view and then unpacking it via class, gender, global positioning, and race.

7.2 Locke, sovereignty, and the state of nature

  • Locke’s state of nature is a pleasant, pastoral condition, unlike Hobbes’s fear-driven state of nature: there is mutual respect and tolerance (§4ff).
  • Humans are rational; even without a governing power, they can live in relative peace and regulate themselves by the Laws of Nature (§6).
  • The Laws of Nature forbid harming others or their property; they originate in God and in rational self-preservation within God’s creation. The state of nature thus contains a form of rule: religion, rationality, and self-rule intersect (§6).
  • State of nature = freedom, but not licence. It is freedom to order actions and dispose of possessions and persons within the bounds of the law of nature (§4).
  • The presence of natural law supports limiting state power in a social contract: consent becomes meaningful only if people retain their liberty and security; the state’s power must be constrained to protect liberty rather than undermine it.
  • Education is central to transforming natural freedom into autonomous, rational subjects (Locke’s broader writings, e.g., Thoughts Concerning Education). While the Treatise foregrounds political theory, education underpins the cultivation of rational subjects who can consent to governance; disability and unequal access (poor, Indigenous Americans) complicate this ascent to full reason and autonomy (§61).
  • The law of nature enables individuals not only to regulate their own conduct but also to judge and punish others who violate it (§§7–8).
  • The state of nature contains a social texture: outlaws, families, small societies, and property—and it is pre-contractual but still shaping the later contract. The pre-contract society helps justify a minimal state: protect original freedom while recognizing the state as a potential threat to liberty.
  • The Second Treatise argues for liberty from tyranny, while supporting limited state power. The text was published in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution (1688), and was read as a justification for limiting monarchic power, including an early version of separation of powers (judging authority), innate rights, and a right of rebellion.
  • Locke’s liberal aims include limiting sovereignty, promoting separation of powers (judiciary independent from the legislative and executive), innate rights, and a right of rebellion; he is not a liberal in the later eighteenth-century sense, but his Treatise provides foundational liberal ideas (as do his Letter Concerning Toleration).
  • Core ideas developed around Locke’s social contract include:
    • Critique of conquest as a political right.
    • Limits on power beyond the state (e.g., paternal power over wives, parents over children).
    • Religious toleration.
  • Key contextual note on property and the state: property and the law are central to Lockean state formation; the state’s raison d’être is to secure property and to provide a system of law that is visible, non-arbitrary, and egalitarian to protect against tyranny.
  • The contract is a political device to secure freedom and property, while acknowledging the risk the state poses to freedom. The law’s rule of law, not coercive rule, legitimates government.
  • Important definitions and connections:
    • Self-ownership: the idea that each person owns their body and person, which grounds freedom and recruitment into the social contract.
    • Consent as legitimacy: political authority is legitimate only insofar as it proceeds from the consent of the governed.
    • Separation of powers and rule of law: the state’s power is constrained by law and the right to judge is distinct from its legislative and executive functions.
  • Locke’s broader influence: his framework contributed to ideas about limiting absolute power, challenging patriarchy and parental power as absolute, and supporting religious toleration.

7.2 Key Points

  • Locke presents a liberal version of social contract theory with:
    • Limits on sovereign power
    • Mixed or divided government (divided sovereignty)
    • Rule of law
    • Self-ownership
    • Equality before the law
  • Because the Lockean state of nature is relatively peaceful, limitless sovereignty is not justified; people would not have agreed to it in originary moments.
  • Our freedom is regulated by the law of nature, which confines both behavior and the sovereign’s permitted actions.

7.3 Social and sexual identities and hierarchies

  • The contracting agents are not universal in practice; Lockean theory constructs a specific subset as contracting individuals: propertied, European (often English) men.
  • Wage laborers without property (the servant) are excluded from the social contract and are thus outside the political sovereignty that the contract creates.
  • Women are confined to the private, domestic sphere and excluded from the political contracting process.
  • The chapter’s analysis groups class, gender, and race to show how universalist liberal claims coexist with entrenched forms of domination.

7.3.1 Class: labour, accumulation, and Locke's 'individual'

  • Locke’s On Property opens with common use of the world and moves to private property through labor: "what I have laboured on is mine". Property arises when labor is applied to resources, attaching value to the laborer’s body and work (§27–§28).
  • The transformation from body-based property to possession by others (e.g., servants, horses) shows the divergence between the labourer and the property owner.
  • Two trajectories of equality in Locke’s account:
    • First trajectory: a sequence of limitations on material accumulation, maintaining natural equality and carrying it into the social contract; formal equality in the political community.
    • Second trajectory: a shift toward radical inequality, where property accumulates via households (husbands/fathers/landlords) and wage laborers become propertyless; money allows accumulation beyond spoilage, expanding inequality (Macpherson’s lens).
  • Before the contract, the laborer’s work can be enclosed and owned; the servant’s labor power is owned by the landowner, which means the servant is excluded from contracting as an agent.
  • Money changes the spoilage limit and enables indefinite accumulation, deepening inequality prior to the contract.
  • The contracting individual, therefore, is not truly universal: servants and propertyless workers are absent from the contracting process.
  • Macpherson’s critique: Locke’s property theory enables “unlimited accumulation” through money, reshaping the class structure and enabling vast inequality even as the contract promises equal rights before law.
  • Indigenous peoples in America are depicted through a European model of land use, ignoring Indigenous agricultural practices and sovereignty; this supports a territorial logic of enclosure and colonization.

7.3.2 Gender: the questions of limited rule and forced subjection

  • The household becomes the primary unit of property and contracting; the wife (and children) are subsumed under the husband/father within the contracting unit.
  • Carole Pateman argues that the wife can be read as another servant within Locke’s framework; domestic labor and reproductive work are central to shaping the polity, but women are not included in the contracting process.
  • Although Locke’s discussion of paternal power attempts to refute absolute sovereignty by showing that parental power is distributed between mother and father, this equality does not translate into political equality. The contract proceeds with the male head of household as the representative.
  • The private sphere becomes the border of political power; the private realm remains outside the political contract, reinforcing gendered exclusions in political life.
  • Pateman’s provocative claim: the foundation of the social contract rests on male domination (and arguably rape) that provides the historical preconditions for political authority to emerge.
  • The private/public separation allows domination to persist within the private sphere without political recognition or protection.

7.3 Social and sexual identities and hierarchies: Key Points

  • The contracting agents are propertied, European (often English) men; wage laborers without property are excluded through the figure of the servant.
  • Women are confined to the private, domestic sphere and thus excluded from the social contract.

7.4 Global considerations

  • The global frame questions liberal universalism by considering colonization, race, and slavery.

7.4.1 Place: colonization and the establishment of European access to the world’s resources

  • Locke’s property theory intersects with England’s enclosure and the colonization of America. He served in colonial administration roles and drafted constitutions for Carolina’s colonial entity, including provisions that supported slavery as a form of property.
  • The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina anchored slavery in law and guaranteed domination over enslaved people, aligning with Locke’s property logic despite his broader anti-slavery stance in the Treatises.
  • Locke’s property theory justified colonization through a logic of “vacant” land and terra nullius, rendering Indigenous lands as open for European settlement. Indigenous agricultural practices were de-emphasized or misrepresented as hunting-gathering, thereby legitimizing encroachment.
  • The colonization project used Locke’s theory to argue that enclosing land and cultivating it increased the common good, even as it displaced Indigenous peoples and facilitated the accumulation of wealth by European settlers.
  • The narrative of property thus becomes a tool to justify taking land and extending political power through colonization.

7.4.2 Race: slavery and the question of freedom

  • Indigenous Americans are depicted as pre-political agents in two ways: by their relationship to land, and by their social structures; they are not treated as contracting individuals.
  • Slaves, as property, are likewise not defined as political agents and are largely invisible within Locke’s political theory.
  • Locke’s theory both condemns slavery philosophically (as a violation of natural freedom) and participates in real-world practice by supporting slaveholding and involvement with colonial slave economies.
  • Scholarly debate centers on whether Locke’s anti-slavery stance within the Treatise is consistent with his support for slavery in practice. Some view his positions as paradoxical or historically contingent; others argue a shift over time or a distinction between abstract rights and real-ended practices.
  • Locke’s just-war framework is sometimes invoked to justify slavery in New World contexts, though scholars debate the strength and applicability of that link.
  • The “race” analysis shows how liberal universal claims can coexist with and enable systemic racial domination and colonization.

7.4 Global considerations: Key Points

  • Indigenous peoples are not treated as political agents within Locke’s social contract framework; they are marginalized as pre-political or non-contracting subjects.
  • Slaves are treated as property and largely excluded from political agency within Lockean theory.
  • Locke’s life and works intersect with colonization and slave-trading projects, providing ideological support for these practices while containing anti-slavery arguments within the abstract theory of natural rights.

7.5 Conclusion

  • Through figures such as the servant (wage laborer), the wife, the Indigenous American, and the slave, Locke’s theory reveals tensions between formal equality and material forms of inequality (racial, gender, class).
  • The universalist language of liberalism masks fragmented or fragile universality, as marginalized groups are excluded in practice, not merely in theory.
  • Locke’s real-world governance and writings contributed to the entrenchment of world orders that persist in various forms today.
  • Reading marginalized voices back into the story exposes tensions in the liberal project and can be productive for critical democratic thinking rather than a call for resolution of these tensions.

Key Concepts and Thinkers

  • Key Concept: Rationality
    • Rationality underpins the autonomous, self-governing individual in liberal thought, yet critics argue that access to and development of rationality depend on material conditions (property, education, gender, race).
    • Locke’s rationality grounds political freedom and economic prosperity for those who are able to achieve it; marginalized groups may lack the material means to fully realize rational autonomy.
  • Key Thinker: C.B. Macpherson
    • Macpherson’s concept of possessive individualism argues that Locke’s theory supports early capitalism by enabling unlimited accumulation and privatization of labor power and property through money and private property.
    • This analysis helps explain how Locke’s property framework can justify significant inequality and the expansion of capitalist practices.
  • Key Thinker/Voice: Pateman
    • Pateman’s Sexual Contract challenges the exclusive masculine, patriarchal character of the social contract and emphasizes how gendered subordination is embedded in the contract’s foundations.
  • Key Controversy: Private Sphere and Public Sphere
    • The private/public distinction in liberalism can shield domination within the private sphere (household, gender roles) from political scrutiny, thus allowing inequality to persist under the banner of universal rights.

Study questions

  1. What are Locke's main critiques of absolute power?
  2. In what ways can we identify in Locke's theory the foundation for liberal thought and politics?
  3. What are the different historical backdrops and political projects against which Locke's story of the social contract should be read?
  4. Why can the servant be thought of as a prototype of the wage labourer and why does this status exclude them from the contract?
  5. Why does Locke seek to replace 'paternal' power with 'parental' power and what are the different implications this has on political institutions and structures in his theory?
  6. How is Locke's theory of property relevant to his justification of colonialism?
  7. What are the links and tensions between Locke's critique of tyranny and his account of slavery?
  8. What are the intersections and meeting points between the exclusion or marginalization of women, the poor, the colonized and the enslaved subjects in Locke's story?

Further reading

  • Primary sources
    • Locke, J. (1693) Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and J. Churchill.
    • Locke, J. (1854) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Philadelphia: Hayes and Zell.
    • Locke, J. (1997) Political Essays. Ed. M. Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Locke, J. (2003) Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration. Ed. I. Shapiro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  • Secondary sources
    • Armitage, D. (2000) The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Armitage, D. (2004) 'John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government'. Political Theory, 32(5): 602-627.
    • Arneil, B. (1996a) John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    • Arneil, B. (1996b) 'The Wild Indian's Venison: Locke's Theory of Property and English Colonialism in America'. Political Studies, 44(1): 60-74.
    • Macpherson, C.B. (2011 [1962]) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Mehta, U.S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Seth, V. (2010) Europe’s Indians. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Tully, J. (1993) An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Tully, J. (1994) 'Aboriginal Property and Western Theory: Recovering a Middle Ground'. Social Philosophy and Policy, 11(2): 153-180.
  • Note: The above references provide broader context for the intersections of Locke’s theory with colonialism, race, gender, and modern liberalism.