5. When the leaders of the American Revolution later changed Locke's identification of 'life, liberty and property' to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', were they distorting Locke's meaning?
I think that Thomas Jefferson did distort Locke’s meaning in changing “property” to the “pursuit of happiness,” if only because property plays an important role in Locke’s social contract—he devotes all of Chapter Five in his Second Treatise to discussing it. Locke states that private property “begins” when people apply their labor to nature—for example, the ore that one digs up becomes private property. He also provides the example of “the turfs my servant has cut,” which raises more questions—I’d like to think the servant has some claim to the turf. Nonetheless, according to the Law of Nature, one cannot take more than one’s fair share of property from nature. Property is quite important—more central than the “pursuit of happiness,” certainly—to Locke’s argument because people are supposed to turn to civil government for the protection of their property. I believe the civil government is also supposed to protect one’s well-being, but I don’t think that promises as much as protecting one’s ability to pursue happiness. I’d imagine that well-being has more to do with being well-fed than being happy, but I suppose that’s contestable. Still, property is an essential part of Locke’s social contract theory, and so the theory becomes distorted when you remove it from the phrase.
I don't think that the founding fathers distorted Locke's meaning because Locke understood the acquisition of property as the key to happiness. It was the every man's right to the property which they labored over that the government was supposed to protect. He thought men strove to own property in life and that through this property they created wealth and prosperity--land upon which to build a life. Locke may disagree with the word happiness meaning the exact same thing as property but I think from the founding father's point of view it was similar. The founding father's were more concerned with the pursuit of happiness in any legal form that it took, rather than specifically property. Locke was vague on a number of this and perhaps "the pursuit of happiness" was how the founding fathers chose to be vague.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Emma; I don’t think that the leaders of the American Revolution distorted Locke’s meaning by switching the word “property” to the “pursuit of happiness” because I think these ideas are almost analogous in Locke’s writing. For Locke, property is the key to everything - it is theoretically the biggest equalizer since everyone has access to it- it can enable social mobility. The fundamental reason that men join societies is to be able to preserve their property, and thus, this hope of this upwards mobility reminiscent of the idea of the ‘American Dream.’ The whole need to create government rests on preserving this idea- here is where I see the most distinct parallel. The one thing I would add is that this pursuit of happiness is restricted in some ways according to Locke. Referred to as the Lockean proviso, people can only have right to claim property from nature by working on it so long as “there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
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