Everyone Poops

Consumer Virtues and Excretory Anxieties in Locke’s Theory of Property

Bibliographic Data

ID6350348
AuthorsLaura Ephraim (0000-0003-2583-5568, Associate Professor of Political Science, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume50
Issue5
Pages673-699
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00905917211048420
OpenAlexW3210139767
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited23

It is a problem that the environment is often seen and treated as a reservoir of resources awaiting human use. How did this outlook arise? This essay analyzes a formative moment in the constitution of the environment as a buffet of goods to be consumed: seventeenth-century efforts by agricultural improvers, including John Locke, to eradicate waste. Locke’s theory of property prohibits the wasteful spoilage of food and charges mankind with a responsibility to cultivate, incorporate, and thereby appropriate earth’s nonhuman eatables—what I call his “partition of the digestible.” But eating both underwrites and unhinges Lockean property rights, for all food contains materials that cannot be used by the body and must be excreted from it. Poop and pee serve as visible (and smelly) reminders that consumption is inhabited by, and thus cannot resolve, waste. Even the improvers’ ostensible solution of repurposing excrement as manure to produce more food just creates more waste: this “peristaltic circle,” as I describe it, is voracious and expansive. Circular waste-eradication projects are best understood as enabling preconditions for the wastefulness of linear, take-make-waste political economies, not their antidote

Economics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Property (philosophy · Property rights · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics