ke that God gave the earth to Adam and all his descendants, who were all entitled to a share in its bounty, providing they earned their bread by the sweat of their brows and laboured to make the world even more fruitful.The basis for understanding Locke is that he sees all people as having natural God given rights. As God’s creations, this denotes a certain equality, at least in an abstract sense. This religious back drop acts as the foundation for all of Locke’s theories, including his theories of individuality, private property, and the state. He believed that humans were autonomous individuals who, although lived in a social setting, could not be articulated as a herd or social animal. Locke believed a person to stand for, “… a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it only does by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking.” This ability to reflect, think, and reason intelligibly is one of the many gifts from God and is that gift which separates us from the realm of the beast. The ability to reason and reflect acts as an explanation for individuality. All reason and reflection is based on personal experience and reference. In the state of nature, man has a natural liberty ‘… to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit.... (II:4). Such freedom is not freedom to do anything at all; it is freedom to do anything that does not break the law of nature. Freedom in society, Locke argued, can only exist where people act socially. I can only be free if I respect your freedom and vice versa and if we both respect the law of nature. Locke believed that the state of nature would be peaceful, overall. Such a view is the opposite of that expressed by Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). That book holds that in a state of nature peopl...
