Locke naturalized market creation as inevitable to defend his class’s property project

Evidence

In the context of a country racked by war, regicide, and rebellion, this view may seem rather bloodless: unlimited inequality in property naturalized by virtue of God’s lack of foresight on the issue of spoilage. But it does allow Locke to explain as inevitable, and therefore good, the creation of markets in land, labor, and capital, which happened to be the very political project that people of his class were engaged in at that moment. His next step was to protect these new institutions of the market from this emergent capitalism’s nemesis: the state. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 281

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader austerity intellectual-history theme and to how liberalism’s property fetish underwrites later anti-state austerity claims. — connects to: Locke grounded legitimate rule in individual property rights, separating state from market — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 278; Claims about European identity rest on a Lockean theory of property and cultivation. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 811; Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Locke’s improvement doctrine undergirded neoliberal justifications of colonial appropriation. #expands (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 399
• Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence #contradicts (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 364
• Locke justified colonial expropriation via labor theory, not natural racial inferiority #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 28
• Claims about European identity rest on a Lockean theory of property and cultivation. #expands (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 811
• The meritocratic promise of market society disguised its classist foundations. #expands (0.76) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1571
• Neoliberals marketed the market as natural by borrowing early evolutionary science metaphors #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2127
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #expands (0.74) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600
• Seventeenth-century financial volatility shaped Locke’s doctrine of natural right as self-stabilization. #complicates (0.72)