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It was not the exquisite self-consciousness of a Henry James that I had in mind when I wondered about equality and hierarchy in Locke, but the assertive self-consciousness or—what is for Locke ultimately the same—self-interestedness of an Andrew Carnegie, as exemplified both in the acquisition and the dispersion of his fortune. After all, it was Locke's genius in chapter five of the Second Treatise to make the case for private property on different grounds than had Aristotle because he conceived of property in a different way: as the fruit, not of nature, but of human creativity, less interesting for its use in leisure than for its origin in labor. As Strauss and even Zuckert have suggested, the brilliance of Locke's argument does not eclipse its underlying contradiction, that on the one hand the initial right to acquire seems to depend on there being “enough and as good” left for others, as though man lived amidst natural plenty, while on the other hand the account of the progressive rise in value consequent to enclosure (and the post hoc justification for property rights that it implies) describes natural scarcity. Holding that “a man may deliberately contradict himself in order to indicate his thought rather than to reveal it,” Strauss takes Locke's “revolutionary” teaching about “‘dynamic’ property” to indicate his true intention:
1. Two Treatises of Government, II, chap. 5, cf. sect. 31, 33 with sect. 37, 40, 42–43Google Scholar. See Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 234 ff.Google Scholar; Zuckert, , Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, chap. 9, p. 252 ff.Google Scholar
2. Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 206Google Scholar; Natural Right and History, pp. 247, 245, 242, 245–46.Google Scholar
3. Cf. above, pp. 566–67.Google Scholar
4. Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 26, p. 188Google Scholar; Strauss, , The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, pp. 23–25.Google Scholar
5. See Zuckert, , Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, chap. 9, esp. p. 275 ff.Google Scholar
6. “Locke is closer to Machiavelli than he is generally said or thought to be” (Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy?, p. 218Google Scholar); “economism is Machiavellianism come of age” (ibid., p. 49).
7. See Zuckert, , above, pp. 566, 569.Google Scholar
8. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, p. 248.Google Scholar
9. Strauss, , What Is Political Philosophy?, chap. 7, 8; chap. 1, pp. 38–39, 55.Google Scholar See also “Social Science and Humanism,” in Pangle, Thomas L., ed., The Rebirth of Classical Political Activism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 7.Google Scholar
10. See Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, eds., History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 2–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar