John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism

John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism by Neal Wood reframes Locke’s political and economic thought by situating it in the profound agrarian changes of seventeenth-century England. Rather than reading Locke as a theorist of emerging mercantile or industrial capitalism, Wood presents him as an interpreter of agrarian capitalism—the transformation of English countryside through enclosures, competitive tenancy, and the triadic structure of landlord, tenant farmer, and wage laborer. Through close readings of Locke’s economic memoranda, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest (1692), and the pivotal “Of Property” chapter in the Second Treatise, Wood demonstrates how Locke’s reflections on property, labor, and improvement directly expressed the social relations of an agricultural economy in transition. By grounding Locke’s political philosophy in the economic realities of landholding and husbandry, Wood challenges the prevailing interpretations of Locke as the spokesman of bourgeois possessive individualism. He shows instead how Locke’s insistence on industry, frugality, and improvement, his valorization of the productive tenant, and his critique of unproductive brokers and idlers reflected the values of a gentry class grappling with the imperatives of capitalist farming. Linking Locke to the Baconian natural historians and agricultural improvers, the book repositions Locke’s thought within the material processes of agrarian transformation that prepared the way for political economy and, ultimately, industrial capitalism. The result is a provocative reassessment that bridges the history of ideas and social history, restoring Locke to the world of fields, rents, and labor from which his most influential political categories emerged. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.