PROPERTY, SPACE AND SACRED HISTORY IN JOHN LOCKE'STWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT

Abstract

Historians have recently begun to gather round imperial, and lately “global,” contexts in which Western political thought might be better understood. John Locke has been pulled along behind them; the contours of his account of private property have increasingly been explained by his personal connections to the colonies. But in his case, the imperial context does less interpretive work than it appears to. This article attempts to show why: it tells a different, more explicitly intellectual, story about why Locke's depiction of property took the shape that it did. It does so by underlining the extent to which seventeenth-century property debates took place in the spatial and temporal dimensions inhabited by sacred history. It then tries to explain why this might have mattered to Locke.