The Political Thought of C.B. Macpherson

Contemporary Applications

Frank Cunningham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319949208
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Central to the thought of C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987) are his critique of the culture of'possessive individualism' and his defence of liberal-democratic socialism. Resurgence ofinterest in his works is in reaction to the rise of neoliberalism and efforts to find an alternativeto societies dominated by capitalist markets. Macpherson's theories are explained and applied to 21st century challenges.

Part IMacpherson’s Project

© The Author(s) 2019

Frank CunninghamThe Political Thought of C.B. MacphersonCritical Political Theory and Radical Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94920-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Overview of Macpherson’s Works

Frank Cunningham¹

(1)

Departments of Philosophy & Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Frank Cunningham

End Abstract

Consumerism, commodification of nearly everything, unbounded acquisitiveness, fixation on private property—C.B. Macpherson saw all these things as distinctive features of life and work in the modern world. Contrary to those who think that they have their roots in human nature, Macpherson devoted his entire scholarly career to showing that they are products of a specific sort of society, namely, one dominated by a capitalist market, to which he proposed an alternative mode of life and work based on a form of robust democracy.

In the often appropriated term coined by him, Macpherson describes the world view he opposes as one of ‘possessive individualism.’ By the twentieth century this had become an explicit and dominant political orientation. It also implicitly informed the major political theorists in the early capitalism of the seventeenth century, especially Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. On this world view:

The human essence is freedom from any relations other than those a man enters with a view to his own interest. The individual’s freedom is rightfully limited only by the requirements of others’ freedom. The individual is proprietor of his own person, for which he owes nothing to society. He is free to alienate his capacity to labour, but not his whole person. Society is a series of relations between proprietors. Political society is a contractual device for the protection of proprietors and the orderly regulations of their relations. (PI, 269, and see ibid., 3, 263–264)

Macpherson came to designate this perspective an ‘ontology.’ By this he means a conception of human nature presupposed, if not always explicitly expressed, by political theorists and in popular political cultures that carries with it judgments about what is morally desirable, or at least acceptable, and realistic. A possessive-individualist ontology is both engendered by and sustains a capitalist ‘market society’ where ‘exchange of commodities through the price-making mechanism of the market permeates the relations between individuals, for in this market all possessions, including men’s energies, are commodities.’ (ibid., 55)

Publication in the early 1960s of his analyses of Hobbes, Locke, and others of their times in terms of this world view almost immediately established Macpherson’s reputation as an innovative scholar of political-theoretical history. His subsequent articulation of a rival ontology to possessive individualism (‘developmental democracy’) attracted an international following among left-wing theorists and a broader public through the 1980s, and, with the rise of neoliberalism, his theories are currently experiencing a revival.

Macpherson subjected an early version of neoliberalism to sustained critique (recounted in this book’s chapter six), in which, as in all his other writings, his stance was not as a detached scholar. Rather, he wished to contribute to efforts on the political left to combat conservative orientations. He pursues this task not by offering an answer to the ‘what is to be done’ question, that is, not by making detailed institutional recommendations or prescriptions about activist politics, but by interventions in political culture to articulate a progressive vision and to counter claims that such a vision flies in the face of human nature. After a biographical sketch, an overview of Macpherson’s works will be given. Then his stances on liberal democracy and on socialism will be reviewed, and in Part II of the book theoretical complexities of these stances will be examined. Part III will apply Macpherson’s theories to a selection of current challenging topics.

C.B. Macpherson

Crawford Brough Macpherson was born in Toronto in 1911 to a comfortable though not wealthy family. His father was a teacher of education, his mother of music. The family’s religion was Presbyterian, though Brough (as he was called) never exhibited any strong religious commitments. His secondary school education was at the prestigious University of Toronto Schools. He pursued his undergraduate work in the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Economy and his graduate work at the London School of Economics (LSE) under Harold Laski. While at the LSE (from 1932 to 1935) he also interacted with R.H. Tawney and other scholars whose Fabian and other progressive views would have a lasting influence on him. He then returned to the University of Toronto, where, with the exception of some visiting positions, he taught in the Department of Political Economy from 1935 to his retirement in 1982.

The Department of Political Economy (established in 1924) included the largest number and among the best known of political economists in Canada and perhaps in North America. The head of the department from 1937 to 1952 was Harold Innis, whose studies of the political and economic importance of the staples trades was a defining accomplishment of Canadian political economy and who was also a pioneer in communications studies. Other leading political-economic colleagues of Macpherson included E.J. Urwick, Vincent Baden, W.J. Easterbrook, Harry Easton, Abraham Rotstein, and Mel Watkins. Macpherson saw himself as in the tradition of political-economic theory dating from Adam Smith and including Karl Marx and J.S. Mill, all of whom ‘thought of economic analysis as valuable for what it could contribute to the development of social and political principles’ (EJ, 134). In the year Macpherson retired, his department was disbanded and replaced by the separate departments of Political Science and Economics.

Though Macpherson interacted with political activists, especially in his capacity as a founder of a Faculty Committee on Vietnam at the University of Toronto, which participated in demonstrations, lobbying campaigns, and an international teach-in against the war, his activities outside the study and the classroom were, with the exception of a stint as Secretary to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, academically oriented: lead author of a report in 1968 resulting in dismantlement of an elitist division of students in the Faculty of Arts and Science in the University of Toronto and introduction of formal student input to the Faculty’s governance and curricular decision making; a founding member of a faculty group in support of students in these matters (the Faculty Reform Caucus); head of the University’s Faculty Association (an analogue of a faculty union); President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers; and President of the Canadian Political Science Association.

Brough Macpherson with Kay and Alkis Kontos, 1979. (Photo courtesy of University of Toronto Archives. Taken by David Lloyd.)

These mainly university-centred activities contrast with the prodigious and influential grass-root endeavours of his wife, Kay. Originally from England, she met her husband early in his career when he was a guest lecturer at the University of New Brunswick. Their marriage issued in a son (who predeceased his mother, shortly after Brough’s death in 1987) and two daughters. In addition to (unsuccessfully) running for Parliament for Canada’s social-democratic, New Democratic Party and for a short-lived Feminist Party, Kay Macpherson was a founder and for periods of time president of an influential and still extant organization of women for peace, the Voice of Women, and of an equally influential organization campaigning for women’s rights, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, as well as several other ventures recounted in her autobiographical book When in Doubt, Do Both (1994). Kay died in Toronto in 1999. Her interests were not in political theory but in activism. Brough often expressed pride in his wife’s political life, and his understanding of the importance of ground-level, participatory politics was largely gained in virtue of it.

Fuller descriptions of Macpherson’s life and the early development of his thinking may be found in Townshend (2000, ch. 1), Ray (1996, ch. 2), Leiss (2009, ch. 2), and McKay (forthcoming).

Synopses of Macpherson’s Books

Macpherson’s first book-length publication, Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Political Party System (1953), sought to explain the dominant strength of a right-wing populist political party, Social Credit, which had formed the government of the Province of Alberta for 18 years before Macpherson published his book and was to continue in power for another 18 years. His explanation was by reference to that party’s appeal to its large agricultural population. This class of petit bourgeois, independent entrepreneurs who, though champions of the private property system, were hostile to Eastern Canadian capitalism and receptive to Social Credit’s attacks on it. (218–224) Although Macpherson did not pursue such Marxist-like class analysis in subsequent works, two themes in this early one (summarized in its chapter eight) were to be taken up in his last writings: the danger of a ‘corporatist or plebiscitarian state’ displacing democracy in hard times (EJ, 16) and anti-democratic features of politics dominated political parties. (L&T, 64–69, 86–91)

In his 1962 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Macpherson saw in the capitalism gelling at the time of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and eventually subsuming all aspects of society a growing acquiescence to market forces and a concomitant, possessive-individualist conception in popular culture of one’s society and of one’s self. He lamented the absence in twentieth-century Western societies of an equally persuasive alternative world view in keeping with non-capitalistic social, political, and technological potentials but still ‘consistent with the maintenance of liberal institutions and values.’ (PI, 276)

Macpherson challenges the conventional reading of Hobbes as deriving political norms from a supposed prehistoric human state, arguing instead that the society for which Hobbes was seeking legitimate state comportment was the nascent capitalist one contemporary to him: ‘Natural man,’ on Macpherson’s interpretation of Hobbes, ‘is civilized man with only the restraint of law removed’ (PI, 29). His treatment of John Locke focuses on the latter’s enthusiasm for property, conceived of as the right of owners to exclude others from the use of what they own, and of Locke’s violation of his own, natural law-based injunction against unfettered acquisitiveness. Macpherson similarly exposes possessive-individualist suppositions in the theories of James Harrington (the seventeenth-century English essayist who defended a gentry-led republic) and even in the otherwise progressive Leveller movement of the 1640s, in both cases contrary to conventional understanding. Later he takes the same approach to the views of the prominent eighteenth-century Whig, Edmund Burke (1980).

In Possessive Individualism, Macpherson’s own political-theoretical ideas were advanced in the course of interpreting the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and others. While he certainly believed that he had successfully exposed dominant dimensions of these thinkers orientations, Macpherson’s expositions are part of a project with contemporary political intent, and it is therefore misleading to classify him as primarily an historian of ideas. The nature of his efforts as an intellectual historian is addressed in an appendix to this chapter.

In The Real World of Democracy—a series of public lectures published in 1965 and receiving a very wide international readership—Macpherson contrasts the liberal-democratic ‘first world,’ the socialist ‘second world,’ and the developing or ‘third world’ countries with respect to their different, but he thought potentially complementary, values of, respectively, liberal rights, economic equality, and communalism. Though he had not yet explicitly advanced a conception of developmental democracy, Macpherson is here proposing the combination of these three things as essential for full democracy, where liberal-democratic principles and institutions of the first world would be conjoined with socialist material equality and third-world community values.

The question of whether Macpherson’s positive attitude towards existing socialism and his endorsement (albeit circumscribed) of vanguard leadership in some third-world national liberation struggles detract from his liberal-democratic credentials will be taken up in the next chapter. Here it is appropriate to identify the context within which he delivered the lectures. In 1965 there was pressure both in the leadership of the Soviet Union and in the West to relax the pressures of the Cold War, which had come dangerously close to becoming hot with the earlier Cuban Missile Crisis and which resulted a few years later in arms reduction pacts. Khrushchev had denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union, and the (short-lived) Kosygin economic reforms had begun there. African national liberation movements had formed and resulted in the gains associated with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1958 and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960. In this environment The Real World of Democracy, as Ian McKay puts it: ‘was a plea for détente and the recognition of the dignity and complexity of decolonizing states’ (2014, 317). Macpherson’s description of his guiding question in these lectures is: ‘Can we keep what is really valuable in our democracy while adjusting ourselves sufficiently to the new world to acknowledge their claims to co-exist with us?’ (RWD, 3)

In his next major work, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973), Macpherson returns to the challenge he put to himself at the end of Possessive Individualism to identify an alternative to possessive individualism, and he proposes ‘developmental democracy’ as his candidate. On this conception a person is regarded ‘as a doer, a creator, an enjoyer of his human attributes’ (DT, 4), and a good society maximizes the development and exertion of these attribu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Macpherson’s Project
• Part II
• Part III
• Back Matter