Personhood, Property Rights, and the Child in John Locke‘s <i>Two Treatises of Government</i> and Daniel Defoe‘s Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most scholarship that links John Locke’s ideas with eighteenth-century representations of childhood approaches children as Lockean peda gogic subjects ready for moral and intellectual education. This article instead brings to bear on Daniel Defoe’s representation of children Locke the political thinker, who articulates in Two Treatises of Government (1689) a person’s right to “liberty and property.” Locke’s influential theories of owner ship are partly responsible for the eighteenth-century investment in distinguishing between property and persons, and often reduce children to a state of compromised personhood. The numerous children who lurk in Defoe’s densely textured narrative worlds are evidence of a cultural sidelining of the child in new models of selfood based on property rights. The child in Defoe’s fiction is persistently framed as a problematic economic entity. Such reduction of children to a bare economic function is of a piece with emergent notions of Lockean Man as a bearer of fundamental property rights. The many children born in the course of Defoe’s narratives are consistently marginalized, pointing to their complex narrative function in stories about protagonists who are intent on property accumulation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".