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John Locke considers the state of nature in his Second Treatise on Civil Government written around the time of the Exclusion Crisis in England during the 1680s. For Locke, in the state of nature all men are free "to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature."
Locke assures his readers that the state of nature is a state of plenty: one may take from communal store if one leaves a) enough and b) as good for others, and since nature is bountiful, one can take all that one can use without taking anything from someone else. Moreover, one can take only so much as one can use before it spoils.
In addition to the theoretical deficiencies of Locke's theory of property, Wood also argues that Locke also provides a justification for the dispossession of indigenous land. The idea that making land productive serves as the basis of property rights establishes the corollary that the failure to improve land could mean forfeiting property ...
Like Hobbes, Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society. However, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day. [66]
Locke defines the state of nature as a condition in which humans are rational and follow natural law, in which all men are born equal and with the right to life, liberty, and property. However, when one citizen breaks the law of nature both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, from which it is virtually impossible to break ...
The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic (without leadership). Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereigns and thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-interest in competition with each other.
and proclaimed "From the beginning all men by nature were created alike". [12] In his 1690 work Second Treatise of Government the philosopher John Locke argues that in the "state of nature" that existed before the formation of governments all men were created equal. [13]
The phrase Lockean proviso was coined by American libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. [2] It is based on the ideas elaborated by Locke in his Second Treatise of Government, namely that self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, converting common property into private property.