Readers are hereby warned that the authors of the present book hold fairly strong views on these matters. We have already explained our conception of agrarian capitalism' in Chapter 1. While the bibliography at the end will draw attention to opposing interpretations of Locke's work, we believe to put it briefly that Locke is indeed a theorist of a ‘rising' capitalism and that the argument of the Two Treatises was ideally suited to the class interests of a progressive' landed aristocracy engaged in capitalist agriculture and colonial trade: in short, to the interests of men like Shaftesbury This does not mean that Locke was not, in the context of his time and place, some kind of radical', but his radicalism, as we shall see, had more politically in common with Cromwell or Ireton than with the Levellers. What makes his political theory especially complex and interesting is that he arrives at Ireton's conclusions (though without any hint of repudiating monarchy) while starting from Leveller premises. He adopts radical ideas to make the strongest possible case against absolutism but is always careful to limit their most democratic implications.