Matthew Cavedon (Emory University – Center for the Study of Law and Religion) has posted Eden America: John Locke and the School of Salamanca on Natural Property Rights (Cambridge University Press Elements in Law and Religion (under contract)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This book contends that there is a way to understand natural property rights that avoids the historical inaccuracy, imperialist imperatives, and anti-environmentalism of John Locke’s approach. Locke was not the only early-modern thinker to draw parallels between America and Eden, and some of his forebears took from this comparison very different conclusions about property. The scholastic theologians of the School of Salamanca beheld Spain’s arrival in the Americas and mostly accepted colonization as legitimate for a variety of reasons. However, unlike Locke, they determined that European expropriation of native lands and wealth was unjustifiable.
Americans tend to see the history of their political ideals beginning in the eighteenth century, with Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Madison its authors. It has proven easy to dismiss everything that came before as hopelessly benighted, mere rationalizations for inquisitorial torture and bearded conquistadores. In light of this historical amnesia, it is worth remembering the Salamancans for situating their very modern-sounding defense of freedom—of consensual government, personal liberty, universal human rationality, and Indigenous rights—as part of a continuous tradition going all the way back to Aristotle. Their theories of natural property rights should be recovered and celebrated.