We can also bury Newton's revolutionary significance if we decide to give as much weight to his interest in alchemy as to his epochal develpment of a scientific and mathematical physics, including of course (to recall my high school education) the tools that made it possible, viz. the calculus without which the very concept of acceleration as a derivative of velocity would have been unimaginable (even Einstein didn't have to invent the tensor calculus or non Euclidean geometry out of whole cloth--not to suggest I know what I am talking about?). And it would be horrible to just to dimiss action at a distance as the positing of occult forces that Newton carried over from his alchemy, instead of the revolutionary move to a mathematical physics.
In Locke's case, there may be a similar danger of drowning out the revolutionary significance of his thought (his contract theory, his empiricism or materialistic monism, his right to revolution) by focus on the hold feudalistic ideas still had on him. Yet if I had reminded James of Locke's slippage on the right to property (he allows the employer to claim as his own the 'turf' (?) that his hire had produced), I imagine he would have been more open to discussing the contradictions in Locke's thought--not that I would have been an interlocutor for such a discussion. I read Locke and CB Macpherson almost as long as ago as I did calculus homework (and I haven't read Ellen Wood, Richard Ashcraft and Chris Arthur on Locke). There is also the question of the horrifying punitive treatment Locke recommended for unemployed youth.
Moreover, what solutions Locke was willing to entertain to overcome labor shortages in the Carolinas and how he squared those solutions with his theoretical writings seems to me an interesting question--it is raised by TJ Byres, editor of Journal of Peasant Studies, in *Capitalism from Above and Capitalism From Below*.
The formal unfreedom in the Americas for slaves and the unformal freedom of those turf producing hires of course circumscribed who those "we the people" were. For Marx, the achievement of the 8 hour day on behalf of "we proletariat" was a greater blow for human freedom than the pompous declaration of the rights of man.
Yours, Rakesh