I had intended to start the week with a different post. But last week during a lecture, I confidently asserted that for Locke the people remain sovereign. In support I quoted the following passage: “the legislative being only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.” The problem was I had with equal confidence — quoting “there can be but one supreme power, which is the legislative, to which all the rest are and must be subordinate,” — asserted that parliament is sovereign about forty minutes earlier on another slide. An alert student caught the inconsistency. Sheepishly, I had to use ‘bubu’ in the technical sense (as in, ‘I made a bubu’). But I saw that I couldn’t improvise may way to a solution, so I promised to think about it.
Nobody denies (I made the point myself) that Locke's account of property may be used to justify settler colonialism in the Americas. But that's compatible with everything I claim.
Reading that in pre-conquest America "the inhabitants were too few for the country, and want of people and money gave men no temptation to enlarge their possessions of land, or contest for wider extent of ground," I don't see respect, rather the groundwork for Locke's theory of just expropriation https://johnquiggin.com/2015/04/20/lockes-theory-of-just-expropriation-crosspost-from-crooked-timber/
Nobody denies (I made the point myself) that Locke's account of property may be used to justify settler colonialism in the Americas. But that's compatible with everything I claim.