Through a patently circular argument, Locke maintains
that private property emerges through the fact that the
means of appropriation are themselves private: “the labor of
his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly
his . . . this nobody has any right to but himself” (ibid.).
In the context of European expansion to the Americas in the
seventeenth century, Locke’s argument served to justify the
colonial appropriation of the land precisely with the claim that
the earth, being given to all “in common,” could then be justifiably
appropriated by the industrious and the thrifty, without
harming existing inhabitants and, in fact, for the benefit of all
(Tully 1993).