e freedom, and thus something has been taken away from the state of nature. Actually, Locke does not see this freedom as having been taken away but rather ceded to society as a whole in the form of the government. Locke sees human beings as having agreed to give up certain rights and powers through some form of agreement. Society is thus formed when the people cede certain powers to a central authority.
Property was an essential element in Locke's thinking, and he considered the relationship of the individual to his or her property as paramount. The ownership of property was seen as a fundamental right and thus as one that was born in the state of nature. Locke was therefore an early theorist of capitalism. He saw people as belonging to God because God had created them, and in turn he thought that what individuals owned was what they had created with their own labor. Locke based his views on a "labor theory of value" in which raw materials acquire a higher value as labor turns them into finished commodities.
Locke's constitutionalism was based on the idea of a social contract, and idea taken up by other theorists and modified according to their views of government and its relationship to the people. The idea of the social contract holds that political society rests ultimately on a voluntary agreement whereby people in a state of nature agree to give up some of the freedom they enjoy in nature as a way of assuring their own security and other advantages in a social structure under law. A contrast is set up between the state of nature and society, though the precise difference depends on one's view of what the state of nature actually entails. For Locke, the state of nature was a state of full natural rights so that there had to be a compelling advantage in any
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