Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [49]
It is also noteworthy that James Madison—a close Jefferson ally who later worked with Jefferson to create the Democratic-Republican Party, served as Jefferson’s secretary of state, replaced Jefferson as rector of the University of Virginia, and is considered by most the Father of the Constitution—was also significantly influenced by Locke, as were others.
Explaining why men transition from the state of nature to the commonwealth, Locke observed, as he did repeatedly in the Second Treatise, that liberty, labor, and property are part of a whole. He wrote that “it is not without reason that [man] seeks out and is willing to join in society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name—property” (9, 123). Furthermore, “the great and chief end … of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.…” (9, 124) Locke also explained that there is inevitably an unequal distribution of property resulting from the manner in which a man applies his labor. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labor does, as it were, enclose it from the common” (5, 31). “He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labor was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious” (5, 33).
In Federalist 10, which is among the many essays comprising the Federalist Papers—the most prominent and brilliant advocacy for the Constitution’s ratification—Madison wrote, “The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of Government.…”
In 1792, writing in the National Gazette, Madison underscored his embrace of Locke’s broad view of the mutual dependency of individual and property rights. Madison began his essay by arguing that the term property “means ‘that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.’”4 Madison borrows nearly the exact wording from William Blackstone, the great eighteenth-century British legal scholar.5 However, as Madison surely knew, and as is clear on the surface, Blackstone’s words reflect Locke’s concept of property rights.
Madison wrote further that property “in its larger and juster meaning … embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.… Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to