SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This article proposes that Locke’s basic property-making unit, and thus also contracting unit, is the household rather than the individual. Progressing through two parallel arguments concerning Locke’s theory of property—one focuses on the theory of mixing in Roman law and the other on more traditional understanding of labor—it shows how a plurality of people and animals is united under the rule of a single person, allowing the formal category of the individual to expand beyond its corporal limits, into the domestic domain. In some sense, this is an extended version of Pateman’s argument concerning the sexual contract, placing the latter within an intersectional framework that moves beyond the question of kinship and the family to the economic questions of class and production, as well as colonial questions of expansion and racial hierarchization.