My major aim in this book is to recover the meaning which John Locke intended to convey in his theory of property in the Two Treatises of Government. Such an exercise seems to me to require situating the text in two contexts. One is the range of normative vocabulary and conventions available to Locke and in terms of which his theory is written. This intellectual matrix is constituted by the seventeenth-century natural law and natural rights ‘discourse’ to which Locke is a contributor. Therefore, I have sought to use other natural law theories to throw light on Locke's work by illuminating their similarities and dissimilarities. By this method it is possible to make explicit the conventions normally employed in natural law writing and to answer three sorts of questions. First, it enables us to see which aspects of Locke's analysis of property are conventional; where he wishes to endorse or to reassert prevailing beliefs and assumptions. Second, it provides a framework against which to gauge where Locke diverges from the norm and presents his audience with something new and different. Third, this method furnishes the means of isolating the intersubjective beliefs which his audience had no reason to doubt and which thus could function as public criteria for justifying arguments. The second context is the group of social and political issues Locke addresses in the Two Treatises.