Something must be said now about the relationship of classical liberalism to republican theory. Republicans idealized the independent armed proprietor as citizen and basis of the social balance, which in turn preserves the constitution. They worried little about the origin and justification of the state (which Locke sought to supply), but provided a world‐​outlook and language useful to various property‐​owning opposition movements. If pressed, a knowledgeable republican thinker might have fallen back on Aristotle, who rooted the political community in man’s social nature.

For liberalism (by which we mean classical liberalism) the point of departure is different. The liberal begins with the “natural” individual in full ownership of his natural rights who cooperates with others in “civil society” before the creation of any government (state). The liberal is not unaware—as is so often suggested—that families and social relations exist, but has noticed that only individuals can act.

Already in the Puritan Revolution, 1642–1658, so‐​called “Levellers” like John Lilburne and William Walwyn developed a radical program based on individuals’ ownership of themselves, natural rights, and equal access to unappropriated resources. (They did not actually want to “level men’s estates”—as their enemies charged—but merely wished to open up the market.) Unlike Locke, these “Lockeans before Locke” did appeal to history; but theirs was not the conventional “Country party” argument from an Ancient Constitution of Liberties but a denunciation of the “Norman Yoke” fastened on the free Saxons at the Conquest in 1066 and which must be swept away.

In the Second Treatise of Government John Locke derived individual rights from natural law and made a case for government by consent that stood independent of historical specifics. Men’s rights in a “state of nature” included self‐​ownership, acquisition of property by “mixing” one’s labor with resources (“homesteading”), and the right to defend oneself and one’s justly acquired property from aggression by others. With the “invention” of money by tacit universal consent (a notion that anticipates Ludwig von Mises’s “regression theorem”), a wider division of labor and bigger marketplace comes into being that allows inequalities to arise but only along the lines of differing natural ability. Owing to the inconvenience of each man’s being judge in his own cause, these pre‐​political individuals establish government mainly to overcome the lack of judicial services and common defense of their properties. This is the “social contract.” Men do not actually give up their natural rights for all time, but merely put them in trust. Property and self‐​ownership cannot be transferred for Locke even by conquest and change of regime. (One doubts he had the Irish case in mind.)

The “applied” portion of Locke’s system is less liberal than his discussion of pre‐​state civil society. From the high ground of reason and justice we arrive at the actual distribution of property in England. Locke persuasively sketches out a highly libertarian theory of property rights and then pretends that the actual distribution of English properties rests on labor title (homesteading) rather than on conquest, enclosure, force, fraud, and (frequent) expropriation of real homesteading peasant farmers. (Marx, of course, pointed this out before wandering into his own erroneous conclusions.) As Murray Rothbard observed, it is critical when applying the Lockean theory to criticize pre‐​existing titles in the light of the theory. The difference is between apology for a semifeudal status quo, as in England, or assertion of popular rights to property as in revolutionary North America.3

Whatever the limitations of Locke’s writings, liberal ideas were broadly compatible with republicanism, and the new English opposition that arose after the Revolution of 1688 (which Locke’s writings served to justify before the fact) employed both sets of ideas rather interchangeably. Republicans and liberals believed in property rights, however they derived them, and Locke’s pre‐​state proprietors looked a lot like the ideal republican citizen, armed and on his own land. In the end, natural and historically prescriptive rights (“the rights of Englishmen,” the Common Law, and even Saxon freedoms) coexisted with little difficulty in the minds of Anglo‐​American radical Whigs on both sides of the water, and led to the same program of republican politics, freer markets, and (potentially) revolution. English opposition writers—the “Commonwealthmen” or “True Whigs”—placed side by side, and began mixing, two separate traditions into a potent new outlook: liberal republicanism. The writings of Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon (the latter two writing under the name “Cato”) made their way across the Atlantic in a broad stream alongside those of the Tory Bolingbroke and early liberals like Locke, Richard Price, and Joseph Priestley. Stifled by moderate Whigs who turned to political capitalism once the Catholic Stuarts were deposed, liberalism and republicanism took on new meaning and life across the water. English opposition ideology entered into and helped frame the debates that preceded the American Revolution. George III and his ministers, by their intrusive policies, unwittingly set fire to this ideological tinder.