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

Abstract

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...