Philosophy—The second great western philosophic tradition provided new justification and densely reasoned rationale for a “property-based individualism.”  Locke and his predecessors (Descartes, Hume, Hobbes) elaborated an aggressive theory of individualism and of empiricism.  Cartesian doubt had regressed old assumptions to the elemental, irreducible center of the self: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.  Hume   cast doubt on all causation; Hobbes took that process and procedure of doubt into re-constructing the nature and origins of society.  Locke articulated the most elaborate rationale for property-based individualism.  His thought centers around the primacy of property rights.  Building upon the basic assertions of freedom and equality in the state of nature, Locke almost immediately begins to account for the actions of men in accumulating property.  Improvement of land is the key; Locke’s reasoning is a labor theory of value: when a man adds labor to the value of the land, he improves it exponentially because the greater part of the value of the property rests in the labor and in the improvements wrought by labor.  Implicit in this argument is the justification of barter, then trade, and the accumulation of capital.  The argument is liberating for the individual.  he contemplates the benefits for the individual of the possibility for the common individual of accumulating capital in a money economy.  So you can see how Locke and the other philosophers are synthesizing all the European inheritance of difference that stemmed from geography. 

Locke also moves almost immediately to the establishment of the state as a means of protecting the right to keep possession of what labor has made of the value of the land.  That is, Locke’s analysis of the formation of society grants explicitly to the state many of the rights of the individual.  In the compact (contract) between the people governed and the authority which governs (the state), the individual willingly grants to the state the right to act in his stead.  When the individual makes a compact for the preservation of “life, liberty, and estate,” he gives up some freedom and some executive equality for security. 

The compact is, of course, provisional and can be rescinded.  But the important point is made.  Land is valuable because of labor.  Unimproved land is land in a state of nature.  The formation of civil society means that land in common is subject to agreement within the compact. That is, without express designation of land held in common, land is open for the improvement of labor.

It is then, a scenario for disaster when two such different societies as Native American and Spanish/French/English meet on the unimproved land in the New World.  One society holds that land is held in common forever, but such compacts are understood in the consensus authority of band/tribe/chiefdom, not in the hierarchical written authority of state societies.  The dynamic was not only the old one of displacing peoples in order to house an exploding population.  It was also the new one of having a fully-articulated philosophical justification for seeing the acquisition of land not as a power move but as something justified by the very nature of the formation of civil society.  Both motives work, of course.  Natives resisted the constant encroachment of massive populations of Europeans, and so the old motive of conquest by force operates from the beginning.  But behind that exercise of power lay philosophic justification.  Europeans simply understood the land from the perspective of the state society and through the lens of property-based individualism.  Property was, of course, forever and justifiably, owned by individuals.  That was the European state-society assumption as surely as the Native hunter-gatherer or early agricultural assumption was that the land was held in common for all.  But Europeans brought also expectations of written agreements. 

            A flyer for an Ignacio land sale anatomizes all these elements.  Because the Indian had not improved the land, because he had not fenced it and planted it, the land was held in common.   Land in common, however, did not mean the same thing to Natives and to Euroamericans.  If anyone had consulted the Utes, they would have agreed that the land had been and should continue to be held in common, possessed by no one, free for those whose range it was to hunt and fish.  For Lockean Euroamericans, land in common is open to be claimed by anyone who will, by labor, improve it.  Hence the land sale. 

The Six Characteristics

Politics
Economics
Technology
Biology
Philosophy
Dominance