Man [in commercial society] is sometimes found a detached and solitary being; he has found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow creatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the profits they bring; the mighty engine which we suppose to have formed society, only tends to set its members at variance, or to continue their intercourse after the bonds of affection are broken.1.

In Property Rights and Poverty, / argued that seventeenth? to mid?nineteenth?century liberal theories of the natural right to property included both the ability to exclude others from resources lawfully acquired and the ability to claim as property the resources necessary for life and livelihood. Virtually every defense of the right to exclude written during this period carried limits which allowed and even required the government to enforce the rights of those without resources to the property of others. But although Locke, (...) among others, was a theorist of welfare rights, it is a mistake to describe him as a radical, as Richard Ashcraft does, which identifies Locke's purposes too closely with the legitimately radical theorists of the early nineteenth century who were deeply influenced by his work. (shrink)