Introduction

Though one of the most important and influential British pamphleteers of the 1790s, John Thelwall never composed a systematic political theory. The closest he came was probably his The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments, a work that has received increasing attention from historians of political and economic thought in recent years. Published in 1796, at a time when Britain had experienced almost famine conditions, the third of the four letters that comprise The Rights of Nature offers an impassioned, often indignant account of the economic oppression suffered by a labouring poor at the mercy of the tyranny of their employers and the state. But more than this, it – mainly through a neat twist on Locke's labour theory of value – makes an impressive and innovative case for the moral entitlement of individual workers to the fruits of their labour and thus for a significant redistribution of material resources. Indeed, as several scholars have noted, Thelwall's account would seem to have anticipated (if that is not too terribly Whiggish a term to use) the conceptualisation of worker exploitation later developed by socialist thinkers.

Thelwall's critical account of the distribution of material resources is thus regarded by historians as a crucial bridge from the eclipse of the eighteenth-century republican tradition by its radical liberal and socialist successors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it is the redistributive aspect of Thelwall's argument – the proto-socialist analysis of exploited workers and the corresponding case for the redistribution of resources – that has occupied the attention of most historians and political theorists. There has been far less interest in the theoretical case that Thelwall marshals for private property rights themselves: in other words, how he is able to argue that the right to private property ownership is an inviolable moral right in the first place; what his justification for that right is. This chapter explores this issue in order to raise an interpretive issue that concerns how historians of ideas can (or perhaps even should) understand Thelwall's political writing.