Philosophy

Philosophy

Answer 1

The second great western philosophic tradition provided new justification and densely reasoned rationale for a “property-based individualism.” Locke and his predecessors elaborated an aggressive theory of individualism and of empiricism. Cartesian doubt had regressed old assumptions to the elemental, irreducible center of the self: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. Hume cast doubt on all causation; Hobbes took that process and procedure of doubt into re-constructing the nature and origins of society. Locke articulated the most elaborate rationale for property-based individualism. His thought centers on the primacy of property rights. Building upon the basic assertions of freedom and equality in the state of nature, Locke almost immediately begins to account for the actions of men in accumulating property. Improvement of land is the key; Locke's reasoning is a labor theory of value: when a man adds labor to the value of the land, he improves it exponentially because the greater part of the value of the property rests in the labor and in the improvements wrought by labor. Implicit in this argument are the justification of barter, then trade, and the accumulation of capital. The argument is liberating for the individual. He contemplates the benefits for the individual of the possibility for the common individual of accumulating capital in a money economy. So you can see how Locke and the other philosophers are synthesizing all the European inheritance of difference that stemmed from geography (Locke, 1690).

Locke also moves almost immediately to the establishment of the state as a means of protecting the right to keep possession of what labor has made of the value of the land. That is, Locke's analysis of the formation of society grants explicitly to the state many of the rights of the individual. In the compact (contract) between the people governed and the authority which governs (the state), the individual willingly grants to the state the right to act in his stead. When the individual makes a compact for the preservation of “life, liberty, and estate,” he gives up some freedom and some executive equality for security.

Answer 2

The [English] nation had learnt by bitter experience that when a Roman Catholic monarch is upon the throne, religious and civil liberty is lost. This was the experience under their monarchs until the Reformation, and revisited under Mary Tudor and the Stuarts, principally because the Roman Church decrees that her adherents' first loyalty is to the ...