"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself"
About this Quote
Locke smuggles a revolution into the language of bookkeeping. By calling the self a "property", he turns the body from something ruled by kings, churches, or fathers into something owned, and ownership in his era wasn’t a vibe - it was a legal and moral trump card. "Every man" reads as sweeping and democratic, but it’s also a tell: the rights-bearing subject is imagined as an independent male proprietor, the kind of person who can stand in a court or sign a contract. The universality is aspirational; the social reality was selective.
The sentence works because it fuses intimacy with a hard boundary. "His own person" is visceral, not abstract: your labor, your skin, your conscience. Then Locke tightens the screw with "This nobody has a right to, but himself" - a blunt syntactic gate slammed in the face of coercion. It’s not pleading for compassion; it’s staking jurisdiction.
Context matters: Locke is writing in the long shadow of civil war, regicide, and the Glorious Revolution, when England is renegotiating where authority comes from. He’s building a theory where legitimate government starts with self-ownership and proceeds by consent, not divine inheritance. The subtext is anti-absolutist and anti-paternalist: if the self is already owned, rulers can’t claim it as their asset.
There’s also an uneasy afterlife in the metaphor. If personhood is property, politics starts to resemble a marketplace - empowering in its insistence on autonomy, but always flirting with the cold logic of possession.
The sentence works because it fuses intimacy with a hard boundary. "His own person" is visceral, not abstract: your labor, your skin, your conscience. Then Locke tightens the screw with "This nobody has a right to, but himself" - a blunt syntactic gate slammed in the face of coercion. It’s not pleading for compassion; it’s staking jurisdiction.
Context matters: Locke is writing in the long shadow of civil war, regicide, and the Glorious Revolution, when England is renegotiating where authority comes from. He’s building a theory where legitimate government starts with self-ownership and proceeds by consent, not divine inheritance. The subtext is anti-absolutist and anti-paternalist: if the self is already owned, rulers can’t claim it as their asset.
There’s also an uneasy afterlife in the metaphor. If personhood is property, politics starts to resemble a marketplace - empowering in its insistence on autonomy, but always flirting with the cold logic of possession.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), Second Treatise, Chapter V “Of Property”, §27 — contains the line “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” |
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