Having sought to take account of distinctions that are all too frequently overlooked, we now move to an assessment of Locke's theory of property. Here we again need to disentangle various concepts that are easily run together, but now my purpose is to highlight the problematic reversals that upend a crucial distinction which is in fact often made: the distinction between political individualism and political communitarianism. This final group of chapters will hold that Locke's theory does deserve to be labeled as “individualistic” – but just because it deserves also to be characterized as “communitarian.” In setting forth the conditions for the appropriation of material goods by individual human subjects, and in hoping thus to ground the entitlements of the individual, Locke transformed all acts of appropriation into functions or consequences of humanity's needs. With his recountal of the paths by which human beings qua autonomous agents could procure things as owned possessions, he revealed quite inadvertently that autonomous agents would strip themselves of autonomy by dint of exercising it.