In Chapter 2 of Institutional Economics entitled "Methods", Commons spends a significant amount of time on the English philosopher and political thinker John Locke. It is important to spend with Commons thinking on Locke to understand his overall project.
Commons is keen to emphasize how Locke things about knowledge and the human brain. As a side point, I still think for those who claim Commons had no real theory of human cognition and human behavior just aren't actually reading Commons in full but only bits and parts or reading summaries of Commons.
Again for Commons context matters. Locke was writing in response to an absolute monarch and church and so wanted to emphasize the role of the individuals and not talk so much about collective action. Locke talks about reflections and sensations. Reflections are the external stimulus we take in from the outside world through our senses. Sensations are how our internal mind understands and thinks about these reflections. Ideas, both simple and complex, come out of this sensation process and reflect a passive mind that is simply copying the outside world. This is a critical point that Commons believes has had great influence on economics form the 17th to the 19th century.
According to Commons, Locke's ideas of the passive mind meant he had real trouble with ideas of choice and power. He fell back on the fact that choice was simply based on the sensation of pain and pleasure. This passive mind is a crucial concept that continues to rear its head in modern neoclassical minds. About Lockes individuals, a long quote from Commons is useful here,"We can thus see the basis of Locke's individualism. Human beings were not the product of habit and the customs of their time and place, but were rational units, like himself, who, by exercise of reason, could be certain of the infinite beneficent reason of the universe and the laws of nature designed to attain it. There is but one infinite reason, an infinite cause, which all individuals can know for certain because they themselves are the effects of that cause. This infinite reason is therefore Locke's own reason made eternal and unchangeable. He begins with his own individual mind as the center of the universe, and not with that repetition of events, practices, and transactions to which his mind had been so accustomed that they seemed natural, rational, and divine. " (pg. 22, IE). Again, we see that there is one truth and that truth can be uncovered by reason via Locke.
Building on these ideas, Locke then moved to labor and abundance. The only real source of economic wealth was labor power. Labor in his view was due to the punishment of the divine based on original sin*. Thus, for Commons, Locke was the originator of the labor theory of value. A second point to this was that Locke based his economics and political economy on abundance. This again means that one person could take something and not subtract from what others could take. This assumption may have made sense for a white englishman of means in that timeframe as even Commons acknowledges.
More to come....
* Commons writes about Locke saying that poverty was due to a lack of labor power and therefore a designation of a state of sin on those who failed to work certainly an idea that still exists today
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