"Land Enough in the World" - Locke's Golden Age and the Infinite Extension of "Use"

8/12/2019 "Land Enough in the World" - Locke's Golden Age and the Infinite Extension of "Use"

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Robert Markley

Land enough in the World: Lockes GoldenAge and the Infinite Extension of Use

God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is

the purest of human pleasures.Francis Bacon, Of Gardens

Gardens haunt the seventeenth-century imagi-nation. While images of the garden invoke

visions of the contemplative life in harmony

with nature, they also offer another kind of

pleasure. Cordoned off from the surrounding

land, Renaissance gardens are emblematic ofwhat humankind wants its environment to be:

sites to display mans control of the natural

world, emblems of sociopolitical order, and tes-

taments to their owners wealth, social status,

and aesthetic sensibility. Postlapsarian gardens,

however, are tiny. When Bacon envisioned his

platform of a princely garden of thirty acres,

he described what would have been the largest

garden in England.1 To imagine extending the

garden beyond such bounds is to change its

moral and totemic significance: no longer the

circumscribed Eden, it becomes a limitless ter-

ritory, a vast storehouse, infinitely exploitable

and therefore infinitely productive. Extended

TheSouth Atlantic Quarterly: , Fall .Copyright by Robert Markley.


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818 Robert Markley

to such an airy thinness, the seventeenth-century garden is figured his-

torically and poetically as an idealized existence of abundance and ease

the pagan account of the Golden Age incorporated, though often uneasily,

into Judeo-Christian historiography. The widespread fascination with the

Golden Age during the period cuts across political allegiances and theologi-

cal beliefs, and the image of a past free from scarcity and division assumes a

variety of generic forms: translations of Hesiod and Ovid, massive universal

histories, Arcadian romances, and political speculations.2 My interest here,

however, is not in traditional images of the Golden Age but in its signifi-

cance as an economic, a political, and a socio-ecological heuristic for John

Locke in the second of his Two Treatises of Government. In the century before

Locke, the Golden Age was treated not simply as a poetic fable but as a cru-cial part of the historical record through which a fallen humankind must try

to make sense of the political, economic, and ecological crises of its time.

In his efforts to justify a contractual basis for government, Locke recast

images of the Golden Age to champion a moral and political philosophy of

individual and property rights in a world that would remain forever open

to appropriation. The secondTreatise, in brief, theorizes conceptions of lib-erty, property, and economic productivity based on the vision of an infinitely

exploitable natural world. To render his political philosophy coherent, how-ever, Locke must reclaim the Golden Age as an economic metaphor from

generations of moralists and historians convinced that scarcity, warfare, and

factionalism were the irrevocable consequences of Original Sin. Because the

Golden Age was most often invoked by his predecessors as a lost ideal to con-

demn the corruption of both humankind and nature, Locke must strip away

an encrusted poetic and historical tradition to press the Golden Age into the

service of his radical politics.3 To understand the stakes in Lockes revision-

ist reading of the origins of civilization, then, we need to examine his sec-

ond Treatise both historically, within the context of the improving economicconditions of the s, and theoretically, within the framework entailed

by a sophisticated historical ecology that decenters man as the hierarchi-

cal master of a passive natural world. Such an eco-cultural approach allows

us to see the Golden Age, in brief, as the garden reimagined as the site of

complex negotiations between human desires and a natural world always

marked by the uses to which its resources are put.


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The fascination with the Golden Age in seventeenth-century England was

conditioned by more than a centurys experience of increasing demographicand ecological pressures, culminating in the upheavals of the Civil War and

Interregnum. Although most theologians and historians attacked pagan

myths of the rise of civilization, they often relied on conceptual paradigms

indebted to Polybiuss cyclical history of the rise and fall of empires and to

Hesiods and Ovids accounts of the degeneration of humankind from the

Golden to the Silver, the Brass, and finally the Iron Age.4 In their attempts to

defend the Old Testament account of ancient history and to demonstrate its

moral and material relevance to their own time, historians, political philoso-phers, and proto-economists had to contend with ecological, economic, and

political crises that overwhelmed the analytical vocabularies they inherited.5

Imagine reading Polybius on the fall of empires during the middle of

the seventeenth century. Between and , the population of En-

gland more than doubled to over five million; the increase in marginal

groupsyounger sons, sisters, and daughters among the upper and middle

classes and displaced agricultural laborers, who gravitated toward London

or retreated to the waste areas of fens and forests, among the property-

less classesexceeded the growth of the general population by severalfold.Grain prices during this century and a half rose by percent, while wages

rose by only percent. Fixed rents and a greater population of underem-

ployed laborers and younger sons of the gentry clamoring for government

positions intensified pressures on the Crown to raise duties and taxes to

meet expenditures, particularly to pay for military forces. Allowing for in-

flation and the discrepancy between rapidly rising food prices and the much

slower increase in land rents and other revenues, Jack Goldstone estimates

that the cost of running the government in was twelve times what ithad been for Henry VII. For Charles I, revenues were only percent higher

than Elizabeths had been in the s, but the population of England had

grown by two-thirds in this half century, and the gentry (always hungry

for patronage) had tripled.6 The costs of government in France, the Otto-

man Empire, and China as well as in England by the mid-seventeenth cen-

tury, Goldstone argues, had fragmented the elite classes, provoked rebellion

among workers, whose living standards were rapidly declining, and led to

fiscal crises that traditional state institutions and tax structures could not


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820 Robert Markley

resolve.The breakdown of the old order in those states halted only after war-

fare, civil unrest, disease, and declining birth rates had brought decades of

population growth to a dead stop. To writers such as Sir Walter Ralegh, who

lived through the vagaries of court politics and the financing of a would-be

empire, the age indeed seemed to have turned to iron.

Goldstones demographic/structural model of history brings the seem-

ingly arcane debates of the seventeenth century within the realm of a cul-

tural anthropology which allows us to consider that centurys crises in terms

ofintensification. As Marvin Harris describes it, intensificationthe invest-ment of more soil, water, minerals, or energy per unit of time or area

is humankinds recurrent response to threats against living standards. 7

But even if it raises living standards temporarily, intensification invariablyproves counterproductive over time because the increased effort sooner or

later must be applied to more remote, less reliable, and less bountiful ani-

mals, plants, soils, minerals, and sources of energy. As resources become

scarcer, living standards decline and unrest spreads until cultures collapse

into anarchy or invent new and more efficient means of production which

sooner or later again lead to the depletion of the natural environment. 8

Harriss description calls attention to the complex interactions among popu-

lation pressures, technological developments, rates of resource extraction,environmental degradation, fluctuations in living standards, distribution

networks for food and water, communication, labor, political power, tax

structures, and the creation of symbolic systems of value that favor those in

positions of authority. These interdependent factors, in turn, cannot be de-

tached from larger ecological considerations. Intensification must be under-

stood in the context of recent work in historical ecology, which emphasizes,

as Carole Crumley maintains, that the landscape itself is a manifestation of

ongoing dialectical relations between human acts and acts of nature. 9 In

this regard, to appreciate the efforts of writers such as Ralegh and Locke to

think through seemingly intractable economic and ecological problems, we

need to jettison our anthropocentric tendencies to think and act as though

the natural world can be reduced to a thirty-acre garden susceptible to infi-

nite manipulation and predictive control.

In different ways, Goldstone, Harris, and Crumley offer fundamental

challenges to after-the-fact theorizing that attributes sociohistorical change

to ideas, discourses, ideologies, philosophies, or, more generally, to human

intentions imposed on a feminized natural world.10 Modern explanations of


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seventeenth-century cultural and conceptual transformations characteris-

tically downplay the technological developments, demographic pressures,

and unintentional consequences of intensification, casting in stone the

divorce between nature and culture and celebrating (or castigating) a

techno-scientific mastery of nature that distinguishes modern culture

from its devalued and under-technologized past.11 By treating nature as a

coherent entity or system, such histories ignore basic environmental sci-

ence and its fundamental insight that, because the components of all eco-

logical systems vary among individuals and groups, landscapes cannot be

studied in their totalities. 12 In place of the deterministic, evolutionary, and

ontogenetic analogies that dominated nineteenth-century biology, histori-

cal ecology offers complex analysis based on models of heterarchya sys-tem in which elements are unranked . . . or ranked in a variety of ways

depending on conditionsor scalar hierarchies, in which any level of

organization can affect or control others temporarily.13 The complex changes

that occurred between and , as Goldstone, Harris, Crumley, and

others demonstrate, cannot be surgically excised from their socio-ecological

and political contexts. Eco-cultural materialism may be a mouthful, but

it is an approach that offers us a powerful analytic by which to explain a

wider range of phenomena than conventional intellectual history and tobring a higher standard of interdisciplinary accountability to bear on the lit-

erary culture of the seventeenth century. Rather than rehearse the point that

Ralegh, Locke, and their contemporaries were caught between a credulous

antiquarianism and an incipient modernity, then, I suggest that their multi-

valent histories can be read as powerful efforts, within the analytic vocabu-

laries of their era, to make sense of contemporary crises of intensification.

In their examinations of the moral and conceptual foundations of human

society, both Ralegh and Locke, like other Renaissance historians and myth-

ographers, confronted competing historiographic methodologies and nar-

rative modes: a Judeo-Christian perception of history as the mysterious

unfolding of Gods will and a pagan view that human experience resists

teleological explanation.14 History as ideal form would be set against his-

tory as contingent experience, particularly when writers in the seventeenth

century tried to reconcile what seemed antithetical views of the origins of

corruption. In Genesis (:), humankind is exiled from Paradise into

a world of scarcity, labor, and death because Eve and Adam sin. The cor-

ruption of nature becomes an effect of human disobedience. In expelling


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Adam and Eve from Eden, God states: Cursed is the ground for thy sake;

in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles

shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the

sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for

out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou re-

turn. Gods cursing of the ground forges an identity between humankind

and nature: we have, in other words, only ourselves to blame for a hostile

or recalcitrant natural world. Pagan myths, in contrast, emphasize the ma-

terial prosperity of the Golden Age and suggest that virtue is a by-product

of living in a world of abundance. They offer no hard-and-fast account of

why humankind degenerated from virtue. The Fall of Nature is explained,

or explained away, by organic analogieslife is tough because the earth isgrowing old and its productive capacity is decaying. Confronted by these

competing narratives, seventeenth-century historians tend to finesse rather

than resolve the contradictions between Christian and pagan narratives.15

The Golden Age, consequently, internalizes tensions between the Judeo-

Christian view that history has a beginning, middle, and millenarian end

and pagan assumptions that the world cycles through epochs of prosperity

and corruption or is locked into a process of irreversible decline. Ironically,

it is precisely this ambiguity that enables an indefinite era (often halfheart-edly identified with the early years after the Flood) to function for writers

as a device to explore the relationships between sin and scarcity, between

human desires and an environment that seemed to offer, in the long term,

only diminishing returns.

For Ralegh, intent on defending Mosaic history, the Golden Age provides

a means to lament the corruption of a social and natural world far gone in

successive cycles of sin and deprivation. It becomes to some extent a foil in

his efforts to defend the historical reality of the Garden of Eden. Arguing

vehemently against the view that Eden is a figure or Sacrament only, or else

. . . seated out of this sensible world, Ralegh insists that it is no Utopiabut a Garden or Orchard filled with Plants, and Trees, of the most excellent

kindes, pleasant to behold, and (withall) good for meate. 16 Eden is a realm

of abundant produce and virtuous consumptionthe antithesis of a post-

lapsarian nature defined by economic hardship, war, and ecological devasta-

tion. Its existence confirms the Old Testaments yoking of virtue and abun-

dance, of sin and scarcity. In part, then, to safeguard Eden against being read

as a figure, Ralegh turns the Golden Age into an elaborate metaphor for


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the cycles of postlapsarian history.17AftertheFall,thenaturalworldissocor-

rupt that it cannot be cleansed by the purifying waters of the Flood. A world

suffering perpetuall Eclipse of spirituall light, Ralegh asserts, produce[s]

plants of such imperfection and harmefull qualitie, [that] the waters of the

generall floud could not so wash out or depure, but that the same defection

hath had contrivance in the very generation and nature of mankinde. The

plants and crops that sustain human existence are linked to the moral cor-

ruption of humankind. The first Age after the floud, consequently, exists

not as a new beginning for Noah and his sons but as the sprouting of another

age of defection: Ambition and Covetousnesse [were] as then but greene,

and newly growne up, the seedes and effects whereof were as yet but po-

tentiall, and in the blowth and budde. 18 Such images of a corrupted naturetranslate the verities of biblical history into terms resonant with the grim

consequences of intensification.

In a sinful world, the Golden Age can be imagined in two ways: as a time

of ancient simplicity, against which the corruption of the present may be

judged, and as the recurring periods of raised expectation that follow the

transfer of political power:

If we understand by that Age (which was called Golden) the ancient

simplicity of our forefathers, this name may then truly be cast uponthose elder times: but if it be taken otherwise, then, whether the same

may be attributed more to any one time then to another . . . it may be

doubted. For good and golden Kings make good and golden Ages: . . .

so may the beginning of all Princes times bee truly called golden for

be it then that men affect honour it is then best purchased; or if hon-

our affect men, it is then that good deservings have commonly the least

impediments.19

Raleghs identification of the Golden Age as a time when a low-density

population existed peacefully by subsistence agriculture is thoroughly tra-

ditional. So too is his rhetoric in defining those elder times by the absence

of familiar vices: While the Law of Nature was the rule of mans life, [men]

then sought no larger Territorie then themselve[s] could compasse and ma-

nure: they erected no other magnificent buildings, then sufficient to defend

them from cold and tempest: they cared for no other delicacie of fare, or

curiositie of dyet, then to maintayne life: nor for any other apparell then to

cover them from the cold, the Raine and the Sunne. 20 The insistent nega-


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tive constructions define the Golden Age as a time marked not by virtue but

by the immaturity of vice. As Raleghs images of the degeneration of plants

suggest, the natural world is the source as well as an effect of corruption.

In his mind, no golden age of simplicity and subsistence can ever be truly

edenic because its principles are fated to metastasize into the excesses of

ambition and luxury.

Corruption, for Ralegh, is less a theological given than an experiential

state reinscribed within each subsequent historical age and within each in-

dividuals life. His description of the ongoing disillusionment of politics

echoes with the disappointments of his own career, and the Golden Age be-

comes transmuted into a projection of humankinds insatiable desires. After

the glorious beginnings of their reigns, he asserts, Age and Time . . . lay-eth Princes torne estates before their eyes. Beset by incessant demands for

patronage and preferment that strain their limited resources, these princes

find themselves unable to satisfy their subjects desires: Although there bee

no Kings vnder the Sunne whose meanes are answerable unto other mens

desires; yet such [men] as value all things by their own respects, doe no

sooner finde their appetites unanswered, but they complain of alteration,

and account the times iniurious and yron. 21 The degeneration within each

reign is described as a principle of diminishing returns, and the infighting atcourt in Jacobean England is generalized to a condition of governance itself.

In a fallen world, the torne estates of all monarchs testify to the gap be-

tween the hunger for patronage and the resources available to satisfy it.This

gap, in effect, is the history of intensification. Writing at the beginning of

the century, with his bid to reach El Dorado foiled, Ralegh perceives the de-

cay of nature in apocalyptic terms because he cannot foresee any means to

increase productivity in a circumscribed world. Once population pressures

eased and new resources became available, it would be possible to recon-

struct the natural world in the image of an endlessly exploitable Golden Age.

By the time Locke wroteTwo Treatisesin , the ecological and economiccrises of the first half of the seventeenth century had abated; by the time of

its publication in , England was more prosperous than it had been for

centuries. After peaking at about ,, in , the population of En-

gland (including Wales) declined to ,, in and would not reach

its seventeenth-century peak again until about .22 Taxes for the middle


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classes and the gentry were not burdensome. In , total tax revenues

stood at ,,; in , they had fallen by ,. The situation

changed dramatically after James fled. Williams introduction of the Land

Tax to fund his Continental wars raised total tax revenues to ,,

in and to ,, by the turn of the century. With some yearly

fluctuations, particularly during the Dutch Wars, overall prices in England

dropped steadily after . The average price of grain in the decade from

to was percent higher than it had been between and .

In the s, prices fell to about what they had been a generation earlier. Be-

tween and harvests were particularly good, and prices declined

in the s to percent of their Interregnum level, percent lower than

they had been in the s. As a result of the war and a series of bad har-vests between and , they rose percent during the last decade

of the century. Overall, prices in the early s were approximately

percent lower than at the Restoration; between and they fell

another percent. Meanwhile, wages rose after the s; the s were,

on average, the best whole decade in the seventeenth century for the ordi-

nary mans living standards. 23 Real wages, percent higher in the s

than in the s, rose another percent between and .

For all the political uncertainty of the Exclusion Crisis, then, conditionsin were far less grim than they had been for the generation who had

lived through the Civil War and the inflation of the s. But the con-

ceptual paradigms and analytic vocabularies of earlier eras had long half-

lives. Locke and his contemporaries inheritand write withina tradition

of scholarship championing the Mosaic account of the origins of civilization

and insisting on the continuity of moral and historical traditions. Notions

of modernity and even technological progress were cast within the frame-

work of recovering an ancient wisdom and restoring the principles of a pris-

tine monotheism, as the example of Isaac Newtons sprawling, unpublished

histories demonstrates.24 Even such iconoclasts as John Milton and Newton

do not perceive radical breaks between current and past social, economic,

and agricultural practices, but take the Polybian patterns of corruption, con-

sumption, and intensification described by Ralegh, in large measure, as un-

assailable verities of history.25 For Locke, intent on justifying property as

the bulwark against tyranny, the challenge becomes finding a vocabulary to

counter a moralistic tradition thaton principlecondemns humankind

to labor in a world of scarcity.


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826 Robert Markley

In order to reimagine the Golden Age as the contractual basis for the secu-

rity of mens Lives, Liberties, and Estates, Locke must seek to reconcile

paradoxical images of nature: on the one hand, nature is the fallen, postlap-

sarian realm of hard work; on the other, nature is the divinely ordered work

of a beneficent God that can be made to yield infinite profits. As Andrew

McRae demonstrates, the agricultural-improvement literature of the mid-

seventeenth century contains precisely this sort of idealization: the creation

of an abstract, mathematicized space in which resources can be extended

indefinitely.26 The landscape of England, in treatise after treatise, is trans-

formed conceptually from waste areas and mismanaged estates into an

econometric tabula rasa that may, with reformist zeal, be converted to un-

ending productivity. In the compendium published under the titleSamuelHartlib His Legacy of Husbandry, William Potter claims that the capacity ofinriching this Nation, is in a sort infinite, and another contributor offers a

surefire means to prosperity for the enterprising landowner:

One hundred and fifty pound will plant (I mean in the most excel-

lent way, and consider also the dearnesse of the present time) about

forty acres with wheat, which (by the ordinary blessing of God) can-

not be lesse worth than eight pound one Acre with another, which in

all amounts to three hundred and twenty pound; which again the nextyear according to the like account will advance it self to six hundred and

forty pound, that is to say, it will plant eighty Acres worth eight pound,

a piece at Harvest. And from thence forward, if you deduct one hun-

dred pounds yearly, for an increase of present maintenance. Yet your

stock will increase far more than by Interest upon Interest.27

The abundance of the Golden Age is reimagined in the virtual space of geo-

metric progression. The dearnesse of the present time is bracketed paren-

thetically and, with it, the ecological consequences of soil exhaustion, the

difficulty of finding land to buy and plant, the vagaries of the weather, and

all other contingencies that would complicate the endless productivity of

the authors abstract political economy.28 The land itself seems almost de-

void of distinguishing characteristics because it has been reimagined as an

effect of insatiable human desires for wheat, money, and the good times of

expanding estates and rising property values.

Lockes description of the Golden Age in Two Treatisesis, in large mea-

sure, a function of the three intertwined strands of his polemic: he must


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convert the Legacys geometry of infinite productivity into a consensualbasis for individual rights; he must reimagine postlapsarian nature as infi-

nitely divisible into property; and he must redeem labor as a form of limit-

less productivity rather than as the consequence of humankinds banish-

ment from Eden. Like Ralegh, Locke treats the Golden Age as though it can

be extended to times and situations after the Fall, but for different reasons

and to very different ends. Instead of rehearsing the traditional argument

that labor reenacts humankinds fall into anxiety, uncertainty, and a self-

awareness of its sinful nature, Locke seeks to justify a history of property

by ballooning Bacons thirty acres into a natural world that allows every-

one the opportunity to profit from his or her labor.29 Ironically, in two trea-

tises that take the conventional form of theological controversy, the GoldenAge must remain conceptually distinct from Judeo-Christian accounts of

the Fall in order for labor to be made the basis of property, and property

the basis of political and social identity.30 Rather than describing the Golden

Age as a negation of the corrupt and repressive conditions of Hobbesian

nature, Locke projects a vision of its characteristic abundance and pros-

perity into the s. By transmuting moral questions into socioeconomic

ones, he downplays the political and theological fissures among the land-

owning classes of late Stuart England. To build a consensus against the per-ceived tyranny of the Crown, he offers a shared vision of productivity and

profit that supplants monarchical authority with a security guaranteed by a

bountiful nature.

In his secondTreatise, Locke describes a Golden Age which exists after theexpulsion from Eden, one that assures each individual the right to property

in a natural world open to endless cultivation: Thus in the beginning, he

declares, all the World wasAmerica. 31 If the extent of property in the be-ginning is regulated by labor, the capacity to work productively depends on

two key abstractions: the body itself becomes a reliable machine, capable of

raising the threshold of its useful labor, and the land becomes a repository

of potential value that can be mined, refashioned, and exploited without suf-

fering any diminution in either extent or productivity. Because the fruits of

ones labor cannot exceed a normative notion of physiological sufficiency,

the natural world becomes aneffectof humankinds use. The measure of

Property, Locke asserts,


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828 Robert Markley

Nature has well set, by the extent of MensLabour, and the Conveniencyof Life: No Mans Labour could subdue, or appropriate all: nor could hisEnjoyment consume more than a small part; so that it was impossible

for any Man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another, or acquire,

to himself, a Property, to the Prejudice of his Neighbour, who would

still have room, for as good, and as large a Possession (after the other

had taken out his) as before it was appropriated.32

Lockes view of a self-regulating Conveniency of Life explicitly rejects

Hobbesian constructions that pit individuals against each other in a con-

tinual struggle for limited resources.33 Because the natural world in the

Golden Age imposes no limits on the exercise of property rights, it suf-fers no consequences from human labor; no shortages of land or produce

exist to provoke conflicts between the haves and the have-nots. The Law

of Nature thus rests on the ability of individuals who have equal access

to raw materials to provide themselves with sufficient food, clothing, shel-

ter, and transportation to generate the sociable conditions, including trade,

that underwrite a stable social order.34 Use-value in the Golden Age is an

idealizationan absolute balance between physical needs and psychical and

ideological desirethat renders the exploitation of nature always sufficient,

never excessive.AttheheartofTwo Treatises,then,liesthenecessaryfictionthatwecanuse

natures resources to raise our standard of living, but we can never use them

up. Without this fiction, Locke cannot guarantee that the Law of Nature

of essential physical needs met and good neighborly relations maintained

will triumph over unchecked desire. The idealization of use-value thus

provides Locke with a means to establish a pristine origin for property that

rejects Hobbesian constructions of the war of all against all. To counter

Filmers absolutist argument that God made Noah sole Heir of theWorld,Locke contends that God gave his Sons a Right to make use of a part of

the Earth for the support of themselves and Families, when the whole was

not only more thanNoahhimself, but infinitely more than they all couldmake use of, and the Possessions of one could not at all Prejudice, or, as

to any use streighten that of the other. 35 In contrast to Raleghs view of

natures defection, Locke maintains that labor and consent can refashion a

world cleansed by the Flood to provide for the infinite extension of property

rights. As Noahs descendants repopulate the earth, use-value regulates the


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growth of a renewed prosperity. This depiction of the Golden Age as a time

of Noachian rectitude and the enjoyment of ever-expanding property may

seem a far cry from the partisan politics of the Exclusion Crisis, but Lockes

strategy is a shrewd one: the increasing prosperity of the s becomes

the implicit backdrop for a seductive vision of Englands potential wealth

and sociopolitical stabilitya vision threatened only by arbitrary authority.

The infinite exploitability of the earth, the calculus of infinite produc-

tivity, allows Locke to project the conditions that existed in the first Ages of

the World onto the present. This strategy becomes crucial for his polemic

by implying that factionalism can be transcended by expanding Englands

agro-political order to the American colonies:

The samemeasure[of land that existed for Noah] may be allowed still,without prejudice to any Body, as full as the World seems. For suppos-

ing a Man, or Family, in the state they were, at first peopling of the

World by the Children ofAdam, orNoah; let him plant in some in-land, vacant places ofAmerica,weshallfindthatthe Possessions he couldmake himself upon the measures wehavegiven,wouldnotbeverylarge,nor, even to this day, prejudice the rest of Mankind, or give them reason

to complain, or think themselves injured by this Mans incroachment,

though the Race of Men have now spread themselves to all corners of

the World, and do infinitely exceed the small number [which] was at the

beginning. . . . This I dare boldly affirm, That the same Rule ofPropri-ety, (viz.) that every Man should have as much as he could make use of,would still hold in the World, without straitning any body, since there

is Land enough in the World, to suffice double the Inhabitants had not

the Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a value

on it, introduced (by Consent), larger Possession, and a Right to them.36

By reducing America to largely vacant places, Locke erases not only the

rights of indigenous peoples but also complex ecologies.37 Unendowed with

specific features of the sort discussed endlessly in seventeenth-century ge-

ographies and traveloguesnavigable rivers, precious metals, fertile soil,

trees, fisheries, and gamethe vacant land becomes an abstract space

waiting to be defined by the boundary lines of property. In this regard, the

unsettled land has been marked irrevocably as a resource, a place of seem-

ingly unfettered exchange where the primary relationships among men are


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830 Robert Markley

defined by labor and commodities.The vacant places of Americaexcised

from a historical time of ecological degradation, technological development,

and potential scarcitybecome virtual constructs. The New World is de-

materialized in the interests of Lockes inclusive vision of Land enough in

the World to sustain the ongoing development that heralds a contractual

return to the Golden Age.

Although Lockes view of the natural world often has been conflated with

a masculinist, Baconian tradition emphasizing mans dominion over the

earth, his characterization of America suggests that his perception differs

radically from, say, Raleghs. Locke does not project onto nature an endemic

corruption, but rather devalues nature by rendering it endlessly malleable,

a function of human desire and intervention.38 In order to make labor thesource of value, Locke defines the relationship between labor and nature as

accretive: whatever a man removes out of the State that Nature hath pro-

vided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labourwith, and joyned to it some-thing that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. 39 The key meta-

phor in this passage is removal. By defining property as anything taken from

its common state and annexed to what man already ownshis ability to

workLocke emphasizes labor itself as the be-all and end-all of value, gloss-

ing over the dialectical transformations of humankind and landscape. Hisaccretive model is the basis of a theory of value in which there is no explicit

means to describe the prospect of diminishing returns and the potential for

social conflict. The land itself becomes largely a function of labor:

Tis Labourthen whichputs the greatest part of Value upon Land, withoutwhich it would scarcely be worth any thing: tis to that we owe the great-

est part of all its useful Products. . . . For tis not barely the Plough-mans

Sweat, is to be counted into theBreadwe eat; the Labour of those who

broke the Stones, who felled and framed the Timber imployed aboutthe Plough, Mill,Oven, or any other Utensils, which are a vast Number,

requisite to this Corn, from its being seed to be sown to its being made

Bread, must all be charged on the account ofLabour, and received asan effect of that: Nature and Earth furnished only the almost worthless

Materials, as in themselves.40

This passage, in one respect, is the logical extension of the assumptions and

values that characterize the agricultural-improvement manuals of the mid-

seventeenth century. Labor and technology become the sources of value that


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can be added indefinitely without the consequences of intensification. As

men work, profits multiply exponentially. Lockes account of value black-

boxes the natural world so that the almost worthless Materials on which

human labor operates have no internal structure, no qualities that escape or

resist abstract calculations of productivity. The infinite elasticity of use, in

short, fosters a view of nature as capacious but effectively featureless.

In the course ofTwo Treatises, use becomes protean. It allows Locke toemploy labor to secure political identity, but justifies as well a tacitly con-

sensual marketing of labor that transforms a theoretical equality among

men into elaborate systems of social hierarchy and economic appropriation.

When labor is itself commodified as use, a landowner such as Locke could

claim property rights over the Grass my Horse has bit, the Turfs my Ser-vant has cut, and the Ore I have diggd in any place where I have a right to

them in common with others. This appropriation of others labor can be

justified because the right to use the earths resources must be secured by

a continuing productivity best left to those already invested in maintaining

property rights. For Locke, the difference between legitimate use and excess

lies not in an ethic of conservation or responsibility but in the efficiency of

production. Excess is theexceeding of the bounds of[a mans]just Property;

it does not lie in the largeness of his Possession, but [in] the perishing ofany thing uselessly in it. 41 Simply put, use is always justified as long as it is

usefora specific good, namely, the legitimate enjoyment of the rights con-ferred by ownership. In this respect, expenditures of time, labor, energy,

and capital that stave off the consequences of intensification offer a de facto

guarantee that this use-for can always exceed the unintended or corollary

effects of cutting down trees, polluting rivers, or hunting animal species to

extinction.

Because it is implicated in a network of socioeconomic relationships,

however, use-value has no positive, nonrelational meaning. Horses, serv-

ants, and ore can be valued only within a complex of differential assessments

of what human labor and its products can bring on a constantly changing

market. In this regard, a natural world effectively defined by human labor

is irrevocably marked by the negotiations that characterize exchange-value;

its useful products are valued not in the satisfaction of discrete needs but

by the mediations of money. Locke maintains that money originates as a

symbolic repository of value for the truly useful but perishable Supports

of Life. 42 Because accumulating money, in Lockes account, does not di-


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832 Robert Markley

minish the supplies of useful commodities available to others, it has what

seems a purely symbolic function in helping to secure property rights when

society slips from abundance to scarcity, from a Golden Age of profitable

labor, in other words, to law:

Men at first, for the most part, contented themselves with what un-

assisted Nature offered to their Necessities; and though afterwards, in

some parts of the World, (where the Increase of People and Stock, with

the Use of Money) had made Land scarce, and so of some Value, the sev-eralCommunitiessettled the Bounds of their distinct Territories, and,by Laws within themselves, regulated the Properties of private Men of

their Society, and so, by Compactand Agreement,settled the Propertywhich Labour and Industry began.43

As this passage suggests, however, money itself has its use in settling prop-

erty rights so that a society governed by Compact and Agreement can sus-

tain the supply of resourceshorses, servants, and goldneeded to ensure

an ongoing prosperity. Both James Thompson and Joyce Oldham Appleby

note that Locke equates the value of minted coins with their specie content,

a value given to gold by universal consent long before people began clipping

coins.44

In this respect, money is the tangible guarantee of the stability of thesystems of value based on the labor, property, and use that it conserves. This

need to secure a set of interlocking valuesproperty, identity, use, and con-

sentmay explain why, in the debates of the s over recoinage, Locke

is so insistent that gold has an intrinsic value and that no symbolic stamp

can alter the value determined by its weight. Put bluntly, money and use

are mutually constitutive. While money locks in use-value for the future,

the ideal of use projects onto the natural world the properties of money as

Locke understands them: liquidity, a compounding of interest, predictable

returns on investments, and, in short, an alchemical expansion that could

enshrine the transcendent virtue of limitless growth. The blank spaces on

seventeenth-century maps of the Americas could be filled with imaginary

gold mines and plantations precisely because the nature they represent has

been marked already by the processes of exchange.

Because use is finally a retrospective projection of what we might call a

capitalist strategy onto an originary past, Locke is able to redefine the prob-

lem of how and why humankind fell from the Golden Age. Rather than a

cyclical history of political disappointments, Locke adapts a Judeo-Christian


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vocabulary to provide a political solution to the moral problem of corruption.

The Golden Age exists until vain Ambition, andamor sceleratus habendi,evil Concupiscence, . . . corrupted Mens minds. 45 Like Behn, Locke must

patch together elements of Christian and pagan historiography to suggest

that sin was latent in the Golden Age and somehow irrupted into the ambi-

tion and excess that disfigure the socio-natural world of the late seventeenth

century. The measure of such vain Ambition and corruption, not surpris-

ingly, is the transgression of use-value and its reflection in the sanctity of

property. But to explain the fall from the Golden Age and justify resistance

to tyranny, Locke must admit that his foundational concepts of property

and use are inherently insecure: The Enjoyment of [freedom], he declares,

is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the Invasion of others. For allbeing Kings as much as he, every Man his Equal, and the greater part no

strict Observers of Equity and Justice, the enjoyment of the property he has

in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. 46 In effect, Locke must acknowl-

edge that the formation of government is a response to a structural anxiety

built into humankinds relationship to the natural world: the perception of

scarcity, the fear that usealways in the process of being extended to en-

joymentis the source of contention as well as value. This insecurity jus-

tifies a government that will keep property rights intact against the threatposed by the very equality of access, of the capacity to labor, that is the basis

for social organization. Locke can guarantee everybody (in theory) access

to property, freedom, and at least a tacit consent to being governed only by

invoking the limitless expansion of use-value, by offering the prospect of a

return to Golden Age virtues. The fiction of endless production is the only

means hehas available to finesse the problem that troubled Ralegh: in a zero-

sum world, the origins of corruption and the origins of property, identity,

and law are effectively the same.

What theTwo Treatisesoffers, ultimately, is the trade-off represented byBacons thirty acres: one can secure propertylife, liberty, and an estate

only by making oneself a function of the logic of capital, the processes of

dislocation, appropriation, and exchange that define value in terms of inten-

sification. In such a worldview, Nature measures the gap between the ideal

of infinite productivity and the realities of intensification; it must be both

abundance and constraint. It becomes less a normative ideal than a strategy

of mediation. Yet default assumptions that idealize a nature somehow dis-

tinct from human intervention persist. Susan Buck-Morss has called atten-


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834 Robert Markley

tion to the break between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic

theory in imagining the economy as an abstract, self-regulating set of laws

and principles that operate regardless of individual desire and human ne-

cessities.47 In an important sense, the economy is an abstraction predi-

cated on the suppression of humankinds dependence on and interventions

in complex ecosystems. The dream of a Golden Age, however compelling

a polemic it forms in LockesTwo Treatises, betrays a profound anxiety atthe heart of humankinds relationship to the natural worldan anxiety that

Locke mediates brilliantly by offering his readers what may be the late seven-

teenth centurys most powerful fiction: a new rationale for faith in the va-

cant spaces of yet unexploited frontiers. For such a deterritorialization to

take place, however, nature must be reinvented continually and the calcula-tion of environmental costs ignored or externalized. This dematerialization

of the natural world into abstract systems of valuation can be read as part of

humankinds ongoing efforts to stake out new properties and design new

versions of Bacons imagined garden. But this dream of recovering a mana-

gerial stability outside of nature, in the seventeenth century or the twenty-

first, can never quite finesse the ongoing pressures of intensification. It can

only substitute fictions of productivity for the heterarchies of life.

Notes

Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (New York, ), n.

See A. Bartlett Giamatti,The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic(New York,

[]); Harry Levin,The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance(Bloomington, );

and Robert Markley and Molly Rothenberg, The Contestations of Nature: Aphra Behns

The GoldenAge andtheSexualizing of Politics, in Rereading Aphra Behn:History,Theory,

and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville, ), .

My characterization of Lockes politics is indebted to Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Poli-

tics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government(Princeton, ). See also the exchange in

Political Studies (): David Wooton, John Locke and Richard AshcraftsRevolution-

ary Politics (); and Richard Ashcraft, Simple Objections and Complex Reality:

Theorizing Political Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century England (); and see Viv-

ienne Brown, The Figure of Good and the Limits of Liberalism: A Rereading of Lockes

EssayandTwo Treatises,Journal of the History of Ideas (): .

The Golden Age figures prominently in seventeenth-century universal histories. See An-

thony Grafton,Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship,Vol. (Oxford,

); Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of

Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, []); Kenneth

Knoespel, Milton and the Hermeneutics of Time: Seventeenth-Century Histories and


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the Science of History,Studies in the Literary Imagination (): ; Donald Wil-

cox, The Measures of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative

Time(Chicago, ); and Arthur B. Ferguson,Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and

Cultural Past in Renaissance England(Durham, NC, ). See Jack A. Goldstone,Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World(Berkeley and

Los Angeles, ), . For a more extended discussion than I can provide here, see

my Newton, Corruption, and the Tradition of Universal History, in Newton and Religion,

ed. James E. Force and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht, ), .

See Goldstone,Revolution and Rebellion, .

Marvin Harris,Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York, ), .

Ibid.

CaroleCrumley, Historical Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation, in His-

torical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole Crumley (Santa

Fe, ), ; quotation from . See, for example, Timothy Reiss,The Discourse of Modernism(Ithaca, ).

For a critique of the ideology of modernity, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,

trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA, []).

Crumley, Historical Ecology, . On the idea that socio-natural totalities are contin-

ually degrading the very conditions on which their survival depends, see Richard Lewon-

tin and Richard Levins,The Dialectical Biologist(Cambridge, MA, ), esp. and

.

Carole Crumley, The Ecology of Conquest: Contrasting Agropastoral and Agricultural

Societies Adaptation to Climactic Change, in Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology, ;

quotation from . See additionally, in this volume, Bruce Winterhalder, Concepts in

Historical Ecology: The View from Evolutionary Biology (); and Alice E. Ingerson,

Tracking and Testing the NatureCulture Divide (). See also Alfred W. Crosby,

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, (New York, ).

See Arnaldo Momigliano,On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, ), .

See Arthur B. Ferguson,Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England

(Durham, NC, ), .

Walter Ralegh, History of the World(London, ), , , . All quotations are from

this edition.

Ibid., .

Ibid., , .

Ibid., .

Ibid., .

Ibid., .

See Geoffrey Holmes,The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Brit-

ain (London, ), . The following discussion is drawn from Holmes, who

summarizes a wealth of economic data (). On taxation, see John Brewer, The Sinews

of Power: War, Money and the English State, (Cambridge, MA, ), ;

on inflation, see C.G. A.Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England ,

vols. (Cambridge, ), : .


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Locke,Two Treatises, : , .

Ibid., : , .

Ibid., : , .

See Barbara Arneil,John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism(Oxford,), ;Herman Lebovics, The Uses of America in Lockes SecondTreatise on Gov-

ernment,Journal of the History of Ideas (): ; Daniel Carey, Locke, Travel

Literature, and the Natural History of Man, Seventeenth Century (): ; and

Mark Michael, LockesSecond Treatiseand the Literature of Colonization,Interpretation

(): .

See Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought

from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, ); Carolyn Mer-

chant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (NewYork, );

and William Coleman, Providence, Capitalism, and Environmental Degradation: En-

glish Apologetics in an Era of Economic Revolution, Journal of the History of Ideas (): . See also Thomas, Man and the Natural World; and the valuable studies

by James Grantham Turner,The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English

Poetry (Cambridge, MA, ); Simon Schama,Landscape and Memory(New

York, ); and Richard H. Grove,Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island

Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, ).


Ibid., : , .

Ibid., : , ; , .

Ibid., : , .

Ibid., : , .

See James Thompson,Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel

(Durham, ), ; and Appleby,Economic Thought and Ideology, .


Ibid., : , .

Susan Buck-Morss, Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,Critical Inquiry

(): .

Documents

"Land Enough in the World" - Locke's Golden Age and the Infinite Extension of "Use"