Crawford Brough Macpherson Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–1987) was a Canadian political theorist educated at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics. After completing his studies in London, he returned to the University of Toronto, where he spent his academic career. Each year the Canadian Political Science Association awards the C. B. Macpherson Award for the best book written by a Canadian political theorist.

Macpherson, who wrote from a democratic socialist perspective, was a strong critic of liberalism and liberal democracy, particularly of their historical conflation with capitalist markets. In his political theory, he sought to retrieve the democratic elements of liberalism from the excessive influence of individual rights and commodification of social life.

Macpherson’s most well-known contribution to political theory is his notion of “possessive individualism,” which he contrasted with a more radical vision of democracy. By studying English political thought from the seventeenth century onward—particularly that of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—Macpherson attempted to uncover an “underlying unity” of a view of humanity as possessive individuals. The tensions in liberal democratic thought and problems of legitimacy in liberal political systems are, Macpherson argued, due to the underlying assumption that individuals are fundamentally possessive.

Working from this critique, Macpherson developed a novel and controversial interpretation of Hobbes and Locke. Both, Macpherson contended, thought they could observe the characteristics and motivation of individuals in a market and infer from them the characteristics of the state of nature. The possessive picture of individuals entails that the individual owns himself and his capacities, owes nothing to society, and is free so long as this ownership is respected. Society is, thus, an aggregate of self-owning individuals, which reduces social relations to exchange relations. The purpose of the state is to protect property and provide a framework for exchanging. From this concept of independent and self-interested individuals, free of society, justice, and natural law, the extent of political rights and obligations are deduced. Thus, the constitutive elements of liberal democracy—freedom, rights, obligation, and justice— bear the influence of the unifying foundation of possessive individuals.

According to Macpherson’s theory of political obligation, the self-interest of possessive individuals held until the middle of the nineteenth century, when growing socioeconomic inequality undermined the possibility of shared perceptions of some fundamental equality. The opportunity to vote was extended to the working classes, who experienced a growth in class consciousness and visions of alternate forms of social organization. These changes undermined the stability of institutions based on the self-interest of possessive individuals.

Macpherson contrasted the political culture of possessive individualism and competitive theories of democracy with a view of democracy freed from its liberal baggage. He advocated a neorepublican view of life and politics in which the development of “truly” human capacities, such as rational understanding, moral judgment, aesthetic appreciation, and emotional ties, was the primary goal. With this sort of democratization, Macpherson believed society could acknowledge its interdependence and replace competition with social cooperation.

Bibliography:

Carnes, Joseph, ed. Democracy and Possessive Individualism: the Intellectual Legacy of C. B. Macpherson. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993.
Macpherson, C. B. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
The Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Townshend, Jules. C. B. Macpherson and the Problems of Liberal Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

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