This chapter has two aims. The first is to throw light on one aspect of the theory of property which John Locke intended to convey in the Two treatises of government. The second is to recommend a way in which we might come to understand political writing in past time. The two aims come together in that my interpretation of Locke is an application of the way of approaching texts which I present and defend in the chapter. The relevance of the chapter for contemporary discussions of property is indirect and chiefly by way of contrast. Locke conceptualizes property in a manner different from our mutually exclusive concepts of private property and common property. He does not use the modern concept of private property, which, like its modern antithesis of common property, emerged in the eighteenth century. Understanding Locke's thought will help us to see the limits of the way in which we normally think about property.

It is now well known that Locke's immediate audience received his work predominantly with silence, and, when noted, with abuse. The first point at which it became an important element in an English political movement was in the early nineteenth century. Locke was read as the father of modern socialism in England by the ‘Lockean’ socialists. This was paralleled by a socialist reading of Locke in France by Etienne Cabet and in Germany by Karl Grün.