Do states exist to protect private property? It’s a familiar idea, especially in the English-speaking world, and often credited to philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). In the Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, Locke outlined his version of the social contract: individuals give up freedoms and submit to government because the anarchic alternative endangers their ‘lives, liberties, and estates’. Notwithstanding the radical elements in his thought – including a right to revolt against tyrannical rulers – Locke’s posthumous influence has usually elevated personal autonomy over collective aims and private acquisition over public authority. The ideal of a state limited in its power to restrict the individual has made his work foundational to what is sometimes called the classical liberal tradition.

Whether Locke was either as liberal or as influential as long assumed is another question. The theological background to his political theory left room for conceptions of the common good. Recent research has shown that his ideas did not play a particularly important role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the American Revolution of 1776 (despite the Lockean phraseology of Thomas Jefferson’s famous ode to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’). It was only much later that scholars (re)discovered Locke as a master explanation for the Anglo-American – and particularly the American – sensibility that made the accumulation and defence of wealth the raison d’être of politics. To the question of why socialism never cohered as a mass movement in the United States, social scientist Louis Hartz in 1955 pointed the finger at ‘mass Lockeanism’.

This search for the origins of property-centred political culture is understandable. After all, haven’t the core functions of the modern state – policing criminals, settling disputes, managing currency, creating corporations, facilitating inheritances – operated quite clearly for the benefit of property holders? Whether one thinks that’s commendable or lamentable is,