Locke and Natural Rights

Last updated: 2026-09-29

This article is part of the Basic Course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Module 2: Libertarianism and its ethical foundations

The Starting Point: State of Nature and Natural Law

John Locke (1632-1704) is the modern starting point of the natural rights tradition that later feeds deontological libertarianism (what ought to be).

For Locke, the state of nature is not a war of all against all (as in Hobbes), but a state of liberty and equality governed by a natural law that reason allows us to discover.

That law states, in essence, that no one ought to harm another in their "life, health, liberty, or possessions." Natural rights are prior to the State and, therefore, act as limits on what any government can legitimately do.

He does not start from an invented social contract designed to justify the State, but from a state of nature that is already morally ordered: individuals are free and equal, and that liberty is bounded by a natural law that forbids harming another's life, health, liberty, or possessions. From this emerge these three core components:

Self-Ownership

In Chapter V of the Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke formulates the thesis that Rothbard and Nozick would later adopt almost verbatim:

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

Self-ownership is not a metaphor. It means that a person's body, faculties, and labor do not belong to the community, the sovereign, or the species.

No one may use another as a means without their consent, except in self-defense against aggression.

From that jurisdiction over oneself derive the freedom to act and the right to the fruits of one's actions.

Locke does not deduce self-ownership from a formal axiom in the style of Rothbard; he presents it as a moral fact of the state of nature, prior to any political convention.

The internal limit is natural law: one cannot destroy oneself nor aggress against another, because both exist under the same moral order.

From this thesis derive the libertarian objections to forced labor, conscription, and redistributive taxation (which Nozick equates to partial forced labor).

Locke, however, did not go that far. Being God's property, a person could neither sell themselves into slavery nor commit suicide. The "full" self-ownership of Nozick or Rothbard is a radicalization of Locke, not a literal reading.

Original Appropriation

This is the core of the argument for private property. If initially the Earth belongs to everyone in common (or to no one), how can anyone legitimately make something their own without the consent of others?

Locke's answer is labor: by mixing one's labor with something that was held in common (gathering acorns, fencing and cultivating a plot of land), one joins it to what is already one's own—one's person and effort—and acquires a right to it. Locke adds that labor is what creates the vast majority of the value of things.

This appropriation has conditions, known as the Lockean provisos:

Sufficiency proviso: there must be "enough, and as good" left for others.
Spoilage proviso (non-waste): one cannot appropriate more than one can use before it spoils.

Locke argues that the invention of money (which does not spoil) makes it possible to accumulate beyond the limit of spoilage, and that human beings tacitly consented to inequality of possessions by accepting it. Furthermore, he argues that private ownership of cultivated land increases productivity so dramatically that even an English day-laborer lives better than a king in the Americas, so the sufficiency proviso would be satisfied in practice.

Libertarians are divided on how to treat these provisos. Nozick maintains a weak version (appropriation must not worsen the situation of others relative to where they would be without appropriation), while Rothbard virtually discards it: whoever is first to mix their labor with an unowned resource keeps it.

Government, for Locke, does not arise from conquest or divine right. It arises from the consent of those who already possess natural rights.

If we are all free and equal by nature, no one has natural authority over another. The only legitimate source of political authority is, therefore, consent.

Individuals agree to form a political society to better protect their rights (life, liberty, and property), and delegate limited power to the government: government is a "trust", not an owner.

Several consequences follow from this:

Government is limited by natural law and by the purpose for which it was created.
The majority may decide, but it cannot violate the basic rights of individuals.
If the government betrays that trust, the people have the right of resistance and revolution.
Taxation requires consent (either personal or through representatives of the majority).

The weak point is what qualifies as consent. Locke resorts to tacit consent (whoever inherits land or travels on the highways of the State implicitly consents), which Hume immediately criticized: someone who cannot reasonably leave is not truly consenting. More radical libertarians (anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard) seize upon precisely that weakness and conclude that no existing State meets the Lockean standard, since no one signed anything.

What Libertarianism Inherits and What It Disputes

Taken as a whole, Locke contributes to the libertarian tradition:

individual rights prior to the State
property as an extension of the person
limited government and legitimacy based on consent.

However, modern libertarians eliminate or diminish what functioned as counterweights in Locke: the theological foundation, the sufficiency proviso, and obligations of charity (Locke maintained that the wealthy have a duty to assist those in extreme need).

The internal divergences are well known.

Locke accepts a proviso and a fairly broad notion of tacit consent.

Nozick retains a weak version of the proviso within his entitlement theory (acquisition, transfer, rectification).

Rothbard radicalizes self-ownership, treats homesteading as sufficient without an egalitarian proviso, and rejects the notion that mere residency counts as consent for taxes or regulations.

The Austrian school is not uniform here: Mises and Hayek distrust natural rights as a foundation and prefer consequentialist or evolutionary arguments.

The Rothbardian branch adopts them as a deontological foundation and uses economics to demonstrate the consequences of violating them.

6. Main Critiques

On labor as title: Nozick himself asks whether pouring tomato juice into the ocean makes the ocean mine, or merely loses me my tomato juice. It is not self-evident why mixing labor generates property rather than simply losing labor.
On self-ownership: G. A. Cohen argues that self-ownership, combined with unequal original appropriation, produces results that few would accept (whoever finds no unowned resources left is at the mercy of property owners).
Georgist and left-libertarian current: Henry George, and later Hillel Steiner or Peter Vallentyne, accept self-ownership but maintain that natural resources belong equally to everyone, meaning whoever uses them must compensate the community (land value tax, citizen dividend).
Colonial context: Locke's theory served historically to justify the appropriation of indigenous lands in the Americas under the argument that they were not "cultivated." This is a subject of debate among scholars (such as James Tully and Barbara Arneil) and affects the moral evaluation of the theory.
On consent: As noted, tacit consent is a fragile foundation, and hypothetical consent ("they would consent if they were rational") ceases to be genuine consent.

In Summary

For this tradition, political ethics does not begin when a constitution is voted upon. It begins when a person has jurisdiction over their own body, makes unowned resources their own through labor, and can only become subject to an authority that they themselves consented to in order to protect those entitlements.

This article is part of the Basic Course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> Module 2: Libertarianism and its ethical foundations

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