Apart from philosophizing on the rights of citizens in a commonwealth and on the limits to the power of the kings who seek to rule them, Locke was an economic revolutionary. He grounded his notion of what constitutes legitimate rule in individual property rights, without which there can be no economic liberalism, no separation of the state from the market, and no capitalism as we know it today. Locke's vision is outlined in his Second Treatise of Government (1690). To create the separation of state and market he wanted, Locke had to make several moves: naturalize income and wealth inequality, legitimate the private ownership of land, explain the emergence of labor markets, and depoliticize the invention of the device called money that made all these things possible. At base, Locke's liberalism is an economic liberalism that pits the individual against the state. Austerity's intellectual history starts here.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 278