John Locke’s (1632-1704) theory of property rights has had a profound impact in understandings of property worldwide. In the Two Treatises of Government, the great late-seventeenth century English philosopher gave a twofold explanation of what property rights are: dividing them into natural and consensual. This division loosely corresponded with the state of nature of those states: those that have not entered into leagues and agreements and those states that had done so, having consented ‘to the use of money’. A few years after the anonymous publication of his book on political theory, the country saw some radical changes in the political and economic system, such as the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the rise of the London Stock Market with the birth of significant companies such as the Bank of England and the new East India Company. In this seminar I contextualize Locke’s legal and economic theory on property rights in this momentous period of British history and try to interpret his ambivalent commitment to nature and capital.
Mónica García-Salmones is an Adjunct Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki where she currently teaches ‘History, Theory and Philosophy of International Law’. She is also a senior researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights and fellow of the Finnish Cultural Foundation (2017-2020). During the year 2017/18 she was a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in International Law (University of Helsinki) and an LLM in Company Law-Gesellschaftsrecht (University of Augsburg), and has recently participated in the first Executive Arbitration and Investment Law Course at the Lauterpacht Center of International Law. During her post-doc on the ‘Intellectual History of International Law: Between Religion and Empire’ in Helsinki, she studied the theological foundations of secularist international law, a project she is currently finalizing. Her monograph, The Project of Positivism in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2013), was awarded the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2015.