This chapter will try to disentangle some key issues which Locke persistently ran together. By contrast with the investigation of the labor theory of property in my subsequent chapters, this chapter does not seek to highlight a profound overturning of Locke's ideals. Rather, the chief aim here is to show that answers to certain questions do not entail specific answers to various other questions. We shall find that Locke went astray in presupposing that an insistence on equality is necessarily bound up with an insistence on other specified values.

One main caveat deserves to be registered at the outset. The complaints here about Locke's vision of equality do not aspire to prevent all linking of disjoinable questions; instead, my target consists in the belief that such questions are ineluctably yoked together in certain ways. Purportedly automatic associations, not explicitly contingent associations, come under fire. Nothing stated here will deny the obvious fact that sundry values which can be separated are often found together (perhaps in modern discourses or perhaps in the discourses from some bygone age). To rebut the notion of unavoidable ties between particular values is decidedly not to overlook the welter of avoidable ties that have emerged during any number of periods throughout history. We indeed should acknowledge that avoidable ties can well prove strong and lasting and broadly influential, even while we insist that they are in fact avoidable.