Comment: “No man can be deprived of his property without his consent.” (Locke) (1996)
The statement condenses §§138–140 of John Locke‘s Second Treatise of Government (1689), in the chapter “Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”: the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. All turns on “his consent”: read as consent through a representative legislature, it founds limited government; read as an individual veto, it makes every public purpose hostage to private title.
Locke’s Reasoning
- Property precedes the state. It arises from labour before government, whose great and chief end is its preservation (§124). A government able to take it at will defeats its own purpose, for I have truly no property in that which another can by right take from me when he pleases (§138).
- Power bounded by its end. A sergeant may order a soldier to the mouth of a cannon yet cannot take one penny of his money (§139): even absolute command is bounded by its purpose.
- Taxation. Revenue may be raised only with his own consent, i.e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives (§140). Levying taxes on one’s own authority invades the fundamental law of property.
- Sanction. A ruler who seizes estates breaches the trust; government dissolves and the people may resist (§222).
Historical Significance
The principle runs from Magna Carta (1215), through John Hampden‘s resistance to ship money (1637), to the Bill of Rights (1689), which outlawed levies without Parliament’s grant. American colonists made it no taxation without representation.
India writes it into Article 265 (no tax except by authority of law) and Article 300A (no deprivation of property save by authority of law). Vidya Devi v. State of Himachal Pradesh (2020) called property a constitutional and human right; Kolkata Municipal Corporation v. Bimal Kumar Shah (2024) read notice, hearing, public purpose and fair compensation into Article 300A. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 requires the consent of 80 per cent of affected families for private projects and 70 per cent for public-private ones.
Critiques
- Consent as fiction. “His own consent” becomes the majority’s, and residence becomes tacit consent (§119). David Hume (“Of the Original Contract”, 1748) likened this to a man carried aboard a ship asleep. The outvoted minority is taxed regardless.
- Class. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx property is social and historical; shielding it entrenches inequality. C. B. Macpherson (1962) read the chapter as the charter of possessive individualism.
- Social function. Leonard T. Hobhouse and Harold J. Laski held that society, which secures every title, has claims on it. India’s zamindari abolition overrode owners’ assent, and the 44th Amendment (1978) demoted the right itself.
- Libertarian overreach. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) likened taxing earnings to forced labour, going beyond Locke, who accepted majority taxation. Locke even conceded that in governments the laws regulate the right of property (§50).
Conclusion
The statement survives as a procedural truth: no deprivation without representative law, due process and compensation. As a substantive bar on redistribution it fails, and India’s constitutional history shows that the consent that counts is the community’s, exercised through law and bounded by rights.