Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T14:58:38.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Macpherson's Developmental Liberalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Ian H. Angus
Ian H. Angus
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The work of C. B. Macpherson is extremely significant for those seeking to understand the cul-de-sac which liberal political theory and institutions have entered. Considering the experience of socialist societies in this century, the necessity for a nonmarket political theory to retain a positive connection to Western liberal values should be beyond dispute. Any postmarket society requires, not pious reassurances, but institutional support for individual rights that are the most vehemently defended in the liberal tradition. But of course this is not enough. Contemporary society is already undermining liberal individualism through massive organizations and manipulated consumption. The inability of liberal theory to analyze effectively and propose alternatives to the contemporary decline of the individual suggests that the cul-de-sac is rooted in the conceptual foundations of liberalism itself. Macpherson's rigorous analysis of the market assumptions of liberal theory pinpoints this conceptual inadequacy and attempts to maintain a commitment to liberal values in a postmarket society.

Type
Note
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 145 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l' Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 2 and 270–72;Google Scholar and Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 4.Google Scholar

2 The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 45–48;Google ScholarPossessive Individualism, 275; and Democratic Theory, 5.Google Scholar

3 Life and Times, 51 and 99ff.; Democratic Theory, 22–23; and Possessive Individualism, 275.Google Scholar

4 Utilitarianism (London: Everyman's Library, 1968), 32.Google ScholarPubMed

5 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans, by Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 15.Google Scholar

6 Kant, Immanuel, Metaphysical Elements of Justice (part one of The Metaphysics of Morals,) trans, by John Ladd (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1965), 61.Google Scholar

7 Kant, Immanuel, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Reiss, Hans (ed.), Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 139–40. Kant includes as property owners tradesmen who produce objects for public sale.Google Scholar

8 Democratic Theory, 5; and Possessive Individualism, 270.Google Scholar

9 Life and Times, 21–22.Google Scholar

10 possessive Individualism, 263.Google Scholar

11 Democratic Theory, 19–23, 30–38, 55, 62–63, 72, and footnote 19 on 139.Google Scholar