Greece, Rome, and the Bill of Rights (50 page)

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Authors: Susan Ford Wiltshire

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39. Early in his career Locke wrote that people take on ideas as they do spouses and, left to their own devices, probably find divorce of the latter easier than of the former: "Truth is seldom allowed a fair hearing, and the generality of men conducted either by change or advantage take to themselves their opinions as they do their wives, which when

 

page_197<br/>
Page 197
they have once espoused them think themselves concerned to maintain, though for no other reason but because they are theirs, being as tender of the credit of one as of the other, and if 'twere left to their own choice, 'tis not improbable that this would be the more difficult divorce." Abrams,
John Locke
, p. 117.
40. Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, vol. 1, ch. 3, section 13.
41. Sigmund,
Natural Law in Political Thought
, p. 81.
42. James Tully,
A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 53, 54.
43. Quentin Skinner,
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. xiv.
44. Skinner,
Foundations of Modern Political Thought
, vol. 2, p. 122.
45. Locke,
Two Treatises of Government, The Second Treatise
, sections 19 and 4.
46. Locke,
Two Treatises of Government, The Second Treatise
, section 190.
47. Rapaczynski,
Nature and Politics
, p. 14.
48. Rapaczynski,
Nature and Politics
, pp. 120, 121.
49. C. B. Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) takes the opposite view, that Locke wrote not to justify private ownership as a means of assuring individual rights but to justify a transition to the unrestrained acquisitiveness of a new capitalism. From the other side of the political spectrum, Leo Strauss in
Natural Right and History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) takes a similar position, arguing that Locke was really a hidden Hobbesian. Rapaczynski counters these arguments persuasively in
Nature and Politics
, ch. 4, "Locke on Property," pp. 177217.
50. Rommen,
Natural Law
, p. 233.

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