"In the Beginning All the World Was . . .": Political Vision, Critical History, and the Possibilities of the Present

Herman Lebovics begins chapter 5 of Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies by noting that “John Locke was the greatest insurance agent in the history of capitalism” (p. 87). While scholars such as C. B. Macpherson and Uday Mehta have tied Locke’s understanding of human nature to a particularly capitalist “anthropology” and while David Armitage has demonstrated in great historical detail that Locke was preoccupied with, and invested in, the Carolinas as he wrote the property chapter of the Second Treatise, Lebovics’s “insurance agent” approach combines these insights.1 When Locke argued, “in the beginning all the World was America,” Lebovics observes, he was offering “Europe’s new colonial possessions as the guarantee of the future stability of the social system back home.” By Lebovics’s lights, Locke was selling security to a generation still rattled by the potential social effects of a theory of property that promised unlimited accumulation for the “industrious and the rational” with minimal outcry from the “quarrelsome and the contentious.” In other words, America’s vast tracts of “wasted” land would always provide opportunities for those whose ambitions outpaced the flows of property distribution back home. Thus, Lebovics contends that placing Locke in the context of his relationship to the American colonies deepens our understanding of the ideological complexities and tensions implicit in his political vision as well as demonstrating its intellectual dependence on the idea of “an empty new world”(p. 99).