Europe's Indians

Seth, Vanita

doi:10.1215/9780822392941

Cited by 114 publications

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“…Rationality, alongside freedom, is but a potential, Mehta shows; a universal kernel which needs to actualize, but sometimes fails to do so fully or properly. 46 And in the spaces of the colonies, this failure seems to be the normal order of things. 47 The state of nature thus entails two models of individuality, separated by a temporal trajectory of actualization encapsulated in the transition outlined in the previous paragraph: one, whose ability to accumulate is limited-the "Indian" who "knows no enclosure"; and another, for whom picking-up can fully take on the logic of incorporation, given that it takes place within a unit that is an extension of his own corporeality-the settler, who, as Mills and Pateman have argued, is ultimately the political agent of the social contract imagined through the case of America.…”

Section: Mixingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

Kotef¹

2022

Theory & Event

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This article proposes that Locke's basic property-making unit, and thus also contracting unit, is the household rather than the individual. Progressing through two parallel arguments concerning Locke's theory of property-one focuses on the theory of mixing in Roman law and the other on more traditional understanding of labor-it shows how a plurality of people and animals is united under the rule of a single person, allowing the formal category of the individual to expand beyond its corporal limits, into the domestic domain. In some sense, this is an extended version of Pateman's argument concerning the sexual contract, placing the latter within an intersectional framework that moves beyond the question of kinship and the family to the economic questions of class and production, as well as colonial questions of expansion and racial hierarchization.Locke's concept of property begins with the body. The first principle from which private property can be deduced is the idea of one's "property in his own person": 1 the idea, common at the time, that the body "belongs" to the "I," and thus should be seen as an extension of the person. 2 Moreover, the first right (the right to self-preservation) emerges from natality itself, from our existence as corporeal creatures. "Men, once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence" ( §25). 3 We will soon see that the body's nourishment-eating and consuming the world's goods-is indeed key to Locke's theory of property. And finally, the body is what makes private property: "The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his" ( §27). But how does the body make private property? Many readers of Locke have focused on the effect of removal from nature which immediately follows the above words: "whatever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided" is his property ( §27, my italics). 4 Some have further tied "removal" to the notion of improvement, linking this argument to Locke's emphasis on the value that can be added to things through labor. 5 But equally significant is the claim that Locke makes here about mixing: the mixing of labor with the thing that thereby becomes property. Or, in Locke's words, "Whatever… he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own" becomes his property ( §27, my italics). The idea that property emerges from the mixing of labor and object is far from clear, however, and the principal argument of this article is developed through unpacking it.I offer two main propositions. First, I argue that this idea of mixing should be understood as rooted in Roman law (a link which has been overlooked also by those who worked to identify the influence of Roman law on Locke's theory), thereby offering a revisited interpretation of the legal traditions underpinning Locke's theory of property. Second, and as a broader conceptual intervention, I argue that if we follow this idea of mixing-and, as I show, even if w...

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Section: Mixingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

Kotef¹

2022

Theory & Event

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Gidwani¹

2012

The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography

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Race

Seth

2014

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought

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The etymology of the word “race” traces its history back to the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century it had entered most European languages. Its meanings included rage ( razen in Dutch), a species, kind, stock descent, lineage ( razza in Italian), horse breeding ( raza in Spanish), power, authority, kingship, and kingdom ( rīce in Old English), and in Middle English ras denoted swift course, speed, or current. By the nineteenth century “race” had come to take on the meaning we commonly associate it with today.

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Europe's Indians

Cited by 114 publications

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Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

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Europe's Indians

Cited by 114 publications

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Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

Locke's Consuming Individual: A Theory of the Mixing Body

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Race

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