Locke on Territorial Rights

Authors

Bas van der Vossen, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-8-2014

Abstract

Most treatments of territorial rights include a discussion (and rejection) of Locke. There is a remarkable consensus about what Locke's views were. For him, states obtain territorial rights as the result of partial transfers of people's property rights. In this article, I reject this reading. I argue that (a) for Locke, transfers of property rights were neither necessary nor sufficient for territorial rights and that (b) Locke in fact held a two-part theory of territorial rights. I support this reading by appealing to textual and contextual evidence. I conclude by drawing a lesson from Locke's views for current debates on territorial rights.

Comments

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Political Studies, volume 63, issue 3, in 2015 following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12106

Recommended Citation

van der Vossen, Bas. “Locke on Territorial Rights.” Political Studies, vol. 63, no. 3, 2015, pp. 713–728. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12106

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.