Vice or Virtue John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are two highly influential philosophers who individually wrote pieces on what they believe would be the correct form of governing, both advocated the only way to govern people is to do so with their willing consent. Despite their agreement on that, their foundations to reach this ultimate goal is starkly different, they view the people who are giving this consent with different lens. Locke considered the assurance of one’s private property a positive and prosperous for man, and motivated the ability to attain more than what is needed as long as it is not taken by force or gone to waste. Rousseau blatantly viewed it as an evil phenomenon that would begin the domino effect for the decline in …show more content…
Rousseau views property as the root of corruption, the start of the decline in human happiness, virtue, and sincerity. In the Discourse of Inequality he asserts, “the first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society” (Rousseau). Property in a sense is the catalyst for civilisation and government, was the root cause of the degeneration of the human condition, the final fence enclosing true human freedom. In evident contrast, Locke praises property as a positive contribution to humankind and the gains that come along with it. “Yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person’” (Locke 116), ownership of property is among everyone’s natural God-given right, which can not create corruption as Rousseau claims because of greed developing from it, Locke counteracts this because as long as there is an abundance of goods that can be used without their spoiling, then people have a natural right to those goods, no one is being left with nothing, nothing is being acquired by force and if it is there are laws to punish it. Rousseau’s approach and negative interpretation to property is limiting man’s potential to just scavenging for his needs and nothing more, but Locke’s approach expands and motivates man’s capacity to do more. Property, gained through labour, was the method by which wealth could be increased: a wealth that Locke believed unquestioningly benefited human existence. People were obliged to work the land because “God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (Locke 118). Any land left uncultivated is considered land gone to waste,