John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism

John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism by Neal Wood reframes Locke’s political and economic thought by situating it in the profound agrarian changes of seventeenth-century England. Rather than reading Locke as a theorist of emerging mercantile or industrial capitalism, Wood presents him as an interpreter of agrarian capitalism—the transformation of English countryside through enclosures, competitive tenancy, and the triadic structure of landlord, tenant farmer, and wage laborer. Through close r...