Mixing Labour and Mixed Property: The Law of Locke's Original Appropriation.

Authors

Joshua Freed

Published in

Journal of the history of ideas. Volume 87. Issue 3. Pages 461-496.

Abstract

Locke's famous account of labor-mixing in acquiring property is often treated as a metaphor: labor cannot be literally mixed with objects. This article situates Locke's vocabulary and argument of "mixing," "joining," and "annexing" in a long legal tradition of writing about mixed, joined, and fused substances in property acquisition. It suggests that Locke's account can be textually and contextually interpreted as an example of accession and specification-civil and common legal modes of original acquisition through mixing properties-and that this account solves many of the famous criticisms of Locke's theory of property.

PMID:
42572884
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 10 Aug 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.