Book Review: Locke Among the Radicals: Liberty and Property in the Nineteenth Century, by Daniel Layman

• Author: Lucas G. Pinheiro
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211053896
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 651

feminism, it also pushes us to conduct and engage more interdisciplinary

research. Bracewell’s deeply researched and clearly written book demon-

strates how political theorists may also produce rich works of political history

that inform contemporary feminist and other debates. For all of these reasons,

Why We Lost the Sex Wars is a must read for scholars of liberalism, feminist

political theory, and sexuality and politics.

Locke Among the Radicals: Liberty and Property in the Nineteenth Century by Daniel

Layman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, xiii + 255 pp.

Reviewed by: Lucas G. Pinheiro, Department of Government and Political Economy

Project, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211053896

In Locke Among the Radicals, Daniel Layman undertakes an ambitious his-

torical and constructive endeavor: to settle the unresolved conflict in John

Locke’s theory of property between everyone’s common right to a shared

world and each person’s individual rights to themselves and their private

property. For Layman, Locke’s proprietary arrangement fails to meet the

standards of world-sharing he stipulates in the Second Treatise. By allowing

land to be appropriated through labor and accumulated through money, Locke

consequently curtails the common right of all people to the world as well as

the relational equality upon which that right is founded. Layman observes

that, although an alternative property regime could have made world-sharing

compatible with appropriation and monetization, Locke never suggests one.

Instead, he reads our tacit consent to money as a sign of our consent to its

consequences, which—as Layman rightly discerns—legitimizes “relations of

dependence that would otherwise be unacceptable” (60). Layman convinc-

ingly argues that Locke’s reliance on consent here is inadequate to the moral

task he assigns it, for our consent to money cannot be taken as a sign of our

consent to any of its ramifications (61).

In the ensuing chapters Layman sets out to find elements of a natural rights

theory of property that might succeed where Locke’s failed. His goal is to

arrive at an egalitarian Lockean framework that not only reconciles our indi-

vidual property rights in what we create with our equal right to a common

world, but that does so within the conditions of monetization and appropria-

tion that define a modern capitalist economy. Before arriving at his own