John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism

Scholars are divided in their interpretation of Locke as a political thinker. Some hold that he was a 'bourgeois theorist'; others, a traditionalist and constitutionalist. From either perspective, however, little has been done to relate the Two Treatises on Government in a detailed and concrete way to vital 17th-century social and economic developments or to discover a unifying thread in Locke's apparently disparate political, economic, and philosophic works.

Neal Wood challenges current evaluations of Locke's political thought and seeks to remedy some of their deficiencies. The central argument is that Locke was an early theorist of agrarian capitalism, then beginning to dominate and transform parts of rural England. Locke's seldom-recognized concern for husbandry is convincingly established, and the conception of landed property in the crucial Chapter V of his classic Second Treatise is analyzed in the context of his economic writings. Wood's study stunningly demonstrates Chapter V to be a Baconian natural history employing the language and notions of the Baconian agricultural improvers of the period.

This novel social history of Locke's political theory reveals unsuspected elements and dimensions of his thought in general by relocating many of his social and political ideas where they originated--in the urgent practical problems of everyday life during the late Stuart era.