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The Political Theory of Social Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andrew Levine
Andrew Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

For more than two decades, C. B. Macpherson has waged a relentless campaign to expose and critize the ‘possessive individualist’ assumptions of classical and liberal democratictheory. This new book —a collection of essays, including several not previously published —gives a clear focus to this campaign and provides the fullest expression to date of its positive side: the elaboration of a social philosophy incorporating liberal values but free from possessive individualist assumptions. What is defective in the assumptions is less the internal theoretical problems they generate than that they have become historically outmoded. For Macpherson, liberal democracy is historically — even politically — inadequate, before it is theoretically inadequate. It is inadequate for us — now — because it rests on assumptions we no longer need, assumptions that have ceased to be historically progressive. However, liberal democracy is not, as surgeons would say, beyond operation. On Macpherson's view, nearly everything that is attractive in liberal theory can be salvaged. Democratic Theory is appropriately subtitled: Essays in Retrieval.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 1976 , pp. 183 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 Briefly, the claim is that traditional democratic theory presupposes that each person is the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities, and that each person has an infinite desire to appropriate resources (human, as well as natural). Society, then, “becomes a lot of free and equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise.” c.f. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, (Oxford: 1962), p. 3Google Scholar and, for a fuller account, pp. 263–264.

2 In the early days of capitalism, according to Macpherson, we needed these assumptions to justify institutions conducive to the development of the society's productive capacities and its store of wealth. Now, the argument runs, productive capacities are sufficiently developed and wealth sufficiently accumulated to render ‘this perverse, artificial and temporary concept of man’ obsolete. c.f. esp. Essay I, “The Maximization of Democracy,” pp. 19–23.

This identification of what is historically progressive with what develops a society's productive capacities (at least for the historical period in consideration) permeates a good deal of socialist theory; and not only social democracy. It is, at root, the theoretical basis for the Soviet model for the development of socialism, and, more generally, for what the Chinese today call ‘revisionism.’

3 By ‘human power’ is meant ‘a man's ability to use and develop his capacities” c.f. esp. DT pp. 41–42.

4 In contrast to the alternative account Macpherson proposes, this analysis of coercion at least has the advantage of sorting out cases with some precision. Were one to regard unintended, institutional interferences as coercive too, it would become quite difficult to distinguish cases of coercive interference from simple inabilitites—precisely because the line between inert nature and the world transformed by human practice is difficult, if not impossible, to draw. For example, a person's inability to run a mile in three minutes is very likely independent of other persons' activities and so of any institutional arrangements. However, one can with some justification attribute a person's inability to run a mile in six minutes—in most cases at least—to other persons' activities and society's institutional arrangements. But where draw the line? And, indeed, why regard these arrangements as coercive?

5 It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the goal of equal freedom from material impediments can be achieved by the market mechanism, perhaps more easily than in any other way. I have in mind the ‘simple market society’ model Macpherson proposes in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: where the products of labor exchange as commodities, but where there is no market in labor. Significantly, this is, roughly, the economic structure Rousseau advised for the de jure state. That state could exist, he thought, only in the framework of a society of small independent producers (predominantly rural) with “no one so rich as to be able to buy another,and none so poor as to have to sell himself.” However, a simple market society is plainly unstable: inevitably there will be concentrations of wealth and eventually expropriations, until a substantial section of the population is reduced to a propertyless proletariat. This tendency can be counteracted—say, by the massive interference of the state and public opinion—but not in ways consistent with liberal principles. Here, again, the example of Rousseau is instructive. To insure the continuation of this yeoman society, Rousseau advised a continual interference on the level of opinion, and a strict prohibition on the formation of groups that mediate between the individual and society. Obviously, these retrograde measures are the last thing Macpherson wants. Yet they do appear to be counter-extractive. The price paid for satisfying this requirement, however, is a thoroughgoing illiberalism.

6 In this claim, Macpherson does capture a strain of classical liberal theory that Berlin's division of liberty—perhaps because of its rigor—overlooks. Mill, for example, did defend liberty, at least in part, on the grounds that it develops a critical, idiosyncratic character-type that is conducive to the development of individual capacities. In “Problems of a Non-Market Theory of Democracy,” Macpherson contributes substantially to the precision of this claim.

7 Rousseau formulates this distinction between what one appears to want and what one really wants in the contrast between the private will and the general will. In The Critique of Practical Reason and elsewhere, Kant takes over this distinction—between Willkür and Wille—and adapts it to his own purpose.

8 Neither is it my intention to endorse Rousseau's advocacy of positive liberty; nor his political philosophy generally. However, that is another story.

9 This suggestion would be powerfully corroborated should it turn out that liberty can be analyzed quite adequately, and even in conformity with liberal intuitions, without recourse to the distinction between negative and positive liberty. Then Macpherson's attempt at a new division of the concept could not be accounted for as a theoretical exigency. This is not the place to propose another analysis of liberty; but c.f. MacCallum, Gerald “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Phil. Review, Vol. LXXVI, no. 3 (July 1967)Google Scholar.

10 It should be noted that Stalin, the apparent enemy of the liberals, shared this faith; as do some other models of Third World ‘development.’