I must admit that I have not read a whole lot of Locke myself. I have read the excerpts where he explains the Lockean Proviso, but not the whole Second Treatise of Government in which it is found. I looked at it at my local library, but they don't have it. (The closest they come is a commentary on cassette tapes. ) I now found it for free online at Project Guttenburg.
The one work by Locke which I tried to read straight through was An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I didn't get all that far in it. I had checked it out at the same time as a lot of other books which I read first, and I was only a 90 pages or so into it before it was due and I wasn't allowed to renew it. It seemed pretty well written, but was not a particularly interesting read. I believe that this was because the then revolutionary ideas Locke was proposing have been almost universally accepted and considered common sense for centuries.
(Speaking of Common Sense, Thomas Paine was actually the first writer to explicitly call for a land value tax used to provide a guaranteed income for the poor. This was not in the pamphlet called Common Sense, but in another one called Agrarian Justice.)
Before learning of Locke's actual position I had already come to agree with it, after reading about half of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. That is further than most readers get. It is an important but very poorly written book. It is very redundant and depends heavily on presenting examples which Smith assumed would be familiar to his readers but which are extremely obscure today.
If you want a more succinct text with a stronger focus on the subject of my recent post, I would recommend Henry George's Progress and Poverty.
The one work by Locke which I tried to read straight through was An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I didn't get all that far in it. I had checked it out at the same time as a lot of other books which I read first, and I was only a 90 pages or so into it before it was due and I wasn't allowed to renew it. It seemed pretty well written, but was not a particularly interesting read. I believe that this was because the then revolutionary ideas Locke was proposing have been almost universally accepted and considered common sense for centuries.
(Speaking of Common Sense, Thomas Paine was actually the first writer to explicitly call for a land value tax used to provide a guaranteed income for the poor. This was not in the pamphlet called Common Sense, but in another one called Agrarian Justice.)
Before learning of Locke's actual position I had already come to agree with it, after reading about half of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. That is further than most readers get. It is an important but very poorly written book. It is very redundant and depends heavily on presenting examples which Smith assumed would be familiar to his readers but which are extremely obscure today.
If you want a more succinct text with a stronger focus on the subject of my recent post, I would recommend Henry George's Progress and Poverty.