wow wow wow (maybe that should be bow wow wow: *i want candy*)...
hmmm, in one corner glowing with optimism - francis fukayama...in the other corner, brooding with pessimism - louis hartz...
hey, maybe there's a dialectical synthesis - glowing pessimism - or how about: brooding optimism...
while i fall on the side of those who see locke as *possessive [competitive] individualist*, some have held him to be a radical egalitarian (see richard ashcraft's stuff)...
however, more relevant here than locke's political philosophy is the extent to which folks in the u.s. have pursued variations on an individualist-egalitarian synthesis rooted in distinction between *producers* and *non-producers*: thomas paine, radical jacksonians, radical republicans, populists, participatory new left...
radical jacksonians called for redistribution of existing landed and non-landed private property, in terms of the latter, they promoted a society in which wealth would remain in the hands of wage-earners (check out george evans, thomas skidmore)...
radical republicans not only wanted to break the power of the slavocracy, they also fought land concentration in the hands of northern capitalists, financiers, speculators (check out benjamin butler, george julian, wendell phillipsm thaddeus stevens, benjamin wade)...
re. populism, numbers of them invoked lockean principles to justify public ownership (on this matter, check out the kansas trio of frank doster (served as state supreme court chief justice), lorenzo lewelling (served as governor), willam peffer (served as u.s. senator)...
while it is certainly true that populist notion of public ownership stemmed from anti-monopolism and it is quite correct to say that populists remained private property advocates, their take on this issue was essentially a call for guaranteed housing that generally included opposition to unlimited accumulation as well...
yeah, yeah, that's all in the past and, anyway, those folks lost/failed (and we can't forget how racist and sexist some were) but...
admitting to a certain skepticism - something i think is actually healthy - when it comes to opinion polliing, contemporary survery research/polling data is pretty consistent in indicating that americans, by and large, prefer private propertry *and* they frown upon existing distributions of income and wealth (minorities and women are more likely than white men to favor an appreciably more equitable slicing of the pice)...
not conventionally understood socialism, certainly not marxism, but not stuck in the collectivist/individualist dichotomy either...
hegemony is never monolithic, hegemony is never monolithic, hegemony is never monolithic (toto too)... mh