C. B. Macpherson on Retrieving Liberal Radicalism

Left liberalism is having a moment. The last few weeks and months have seen the publication of a wide array of generally high-quality books, articles, and commentary (including in this magazine if I say so myself). A short list includes Samuel Moyn’s Liberalism Against Itself, Elizabeth Anderson’s Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, Dan Chandler’s Free And Equal, Helen McCabe’s John Stuart Mill: Socialist alongside forthcoming books by Alexandre Lefebvre and (shameless plug) myself. Much of this is a response to the widespread acknowledgement that liberalism has now spent a decade in crisis; though who are the villains in this saga are debated. 

For right-wing liberals like George Will or Jonah Goldberg, the enemies are radicals to the left and hard right who threaten the ordered liberty/classical liberal tradition they claim has served liberalism well. For left-liberals, the answer becomes considerably more complicated. Right-wing authoritarianism is the main danger to be confronted. But left liberals accept that winning this battle will require liberalism first win a battle within, through soul-searching for what went wrong and why.  How did liberalism, at least in its post-'80s neoliberal form, go from being the winning ideological contender atop the end of history to seeing monthly prognoses of its demise? 

Understanding where liberalism stepped wrong requires a look back at its history, and there are few better guides for left liberals than C. B. Macpherson. Macpherson was well known not long ago as one of the 20^th century’s premiere political theorists. A Professor at the University of Toronto, he had a loyal following including future stars of Canadian politics like the late NDP leader Ed Broadbent. However, times changed and for a while, it seemed like Macpherson’s work had become passe in a world where right-wing liberals were destined to be forever ascendant. 

There has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his work by scholars like Frank Cunningham, Philip Hansen, and Igor Shoikhedbrod. It is not hard to understand why. Being best known for his pioneering critique of “possessive individualism” in the classical liberal tradition led many to identify Macpherson with Marxism-though he never explicitly embraced the label.  Less well known is Macpherson’s longer-term project of “retrieval”—his attempt to recover a more emancipatory and egalitarian core to the liberal tradition which was worth carrying on in a more humane society. Left-liberals and liberals socialists in the 21^st century have much to learn from his pioneering efforts to show where liberalism went awry and where the possibilities of repairing it lie. For Macpherson, “retrieving” what is best in the liberal tradition means taking seriously classical liberalism’s principled commitments to equality and liberty for all, but realizing they can’t be successfully instantiated in a competitive, possessive society. Though what society could instantiate them is unclear from his work. 

Macpherson on classical liberalism’s promise 

Macpherson’s magnum opus was his 1962 book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. The text's relatively modest explicit ambition is outsized by its impact. A historical study of English political theory in the 17^th century, running the gamut from Hobbes to Locke shouldn’t make waves yet the implications are extraordinary. Macpherson explains many of the core assumptions and prejudices that were baked into the classical liberal tradition, even where he acknowledges its obvious improvement on past ideas. Macpherson notes how early liberal thought was distinctive in emphasizing a principle of human equality, which in turn bequeathed liberal notions of equal basic rights and liberties. 

This was radically different from antiquarian thought, which had often taken for granted the basic inequity of human beings. Leo Strauss noted this fact in The City and Man when he pointed out that for Aristotle (and other ancient thinkers):

...Political inequality is ultimately justified by the natural inequality among men. The fact that some men are by nature rulers and others by nature ruled points to the inequality pervading nature as a whole: the whole as an ordered whole consists of beings of different rank.

This argument for political and natural inequality came under serious pressure with the advent of Stoic and Christian philosophy, which militated against its elitism by stressing the common mortality and sinfulness of human beings. 

But as Macpherson notes it was liberal thinkers who successfully mobilized around ideals of equality enacting revolutionary ideological and structural changes, beginning with Hobbes, who mocked Aristotelian and ancient pretensions of asserting unequal right between unequals. Macpherson points out that Hobbes’ insistence on radical physical and moral equality between individuals was a “leap in political theory as radical as Galileo’s formulation of the law of uniform motion was in natural science, and not unrelated to it.” Hobbes reconceived human beings as essentially material and mechanical creatures who were not subject to rights and obligations imposed by some outside teleological force. Human beings had to assess their “own requirements” so there…

...Could be no question of imposing a system of values from outside or above. Hence there could be no question of finding a hierarchy of wants or of rights or of obligations. Everyone’s must be assumed to be equal. It was Hobbes refusal to impose moral difference on men’s wants, his acceptance of the equal need for continued motion as the sufficient source of rights, that constituted his revolution in moral and political theory. Hobbes was the first to deduce rights and obligations from facts without putting anything fanciful in the facts.

Of course Hobbes’ own political convictions led him to conclude that natural equality had to give way to a more authoritarian system which citizens would be obliged to obey (unless, as David Dyzenhaus reminds us, the sovereign threatened one’s life and violated the social contract. It is just these movements from defending staunch natural equality to upholding more hierarchical visions that so grasps Macpherson’s attention.

Macpherson had a great deal of respect for this liberal “revolution” in political thought; both for its realistic denunciation of “fanciful” notions of hierarchy that postulated some naked apes were mysteriously to others, and for its moral egalitarianism. The key question of the book therefore became how a doctrine as foundationally egalitarian and liberalism became aligned with the dramatic inequalities of wealth and power emblematic of capitalism.

Possessive individualism and neoliberalism 

This is where Macpherson’s core idea of “possessive individualism” arrived. He as especially fascinated by Locke’s claims about how the basic equality of human beings linked with a distinctively bourgeois conception of property. They projected back onto the state of nature principles and contexts which were specific to the natal capitalism emerging in 17^th century England. Here is where classical liberal thought shifted from realistic materialism stressing our biological similarities and drawing plausible notions of equality therein to more ideological forms of mythmaking. The individual in the state of nature was conceived not just as a moral equal to all her fellows, but as owning her body and her labour capacity.  As Macpherson observed in Possessive Individualism: 

[The present study] suggests that the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory lie deeper than had been thought, that the original seventeenth-century individualism contained the central difficulty, which lay in its possessive quality. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange.

Then, though mixing her labour with the matter of the universe she came to own external forms of property which could not be expropriated without violating natural rights.  As Locke put it in the Second Treatise of Government: 

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience….Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

These rights to the fruit of one’s labour were held to be natural and inviolable. Unless, and this is key, an individual chose to alienate her rights to the fruit her labour by offering it to another as part of a contract. On a vulgar Lockean reading this would become more likely as the originally free land of the earth became private property, depriving many of the opportunity to obtain agrarian independence through their efforts. Locke himself seemed aware of this and insisted that one could obtain natural rights to property, but only by leaving “as much, and as good” in common for others. 

Many later classical liberals would not be so generous in their sensitivity to egalitarian demands and the need to innoculate people against the dangers of deprivation.. Authors like Ludwig von Mises even chastised authors like Locke and the “liberals of the eighteenth century” for their “ill founded…assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.” On his telling the market enabled superior persons to make it rich and rise up the social hierarchy, and there could be very few, if any legitimate arguments for redistributing their status or wealth which didn’t lead to authoritarianism.

Through these modes of reasoning early classical liberals were able to justify a system of thought that began with a commitment to radical equality and ownership of one’s labour before ending with a defence of wage labour where the wealthy could reap enormous rewards by living off the contracted labour of others. Aligned with this was a realization on the part of classical liberals that such a system might lead to widespread inequality and anger. This is part of the reason the state became necessary to protect property rights and the inequities which resulted from them. In one of his more stinging passages Macpherson notes the irony of an “individualist” doctrine like classical liberalism calling for a state to enforce stratified property rights over and against the potential wishes of the mass of people. 

The notion that individualism and ‘collectivism’ are the opposite ends of a scale along which states and theories of the state can be arranged, regardless of the stage of social development in which they appear, is superficial and misleading. Locke’s individualism, that of an emerging capitalist society, does not exclude but on the contrary demands the supremacy of the state over the individual. It is not a question of the more thorough-going the individualism, the less collectivism; rather the more thorough-going the individualism, the more complete the collectivism.

This critique of classical liberal thinking beginning from radical equality and individualism and ending in a kind of despotic collectivism managed in the interest of property owners is hardly a fable. It is emblematic of the neoliberal era in which we live. As Frank Cunnigham points out in The Political Thought of C. B. Macpherson neoliberalism was a distinctly vicious form of possessive individualism defined by offering “justifications for the subordination of societies to the mandates of an economic market.” This subordination was quite complete by the 2010s. As social scientists have repeatedly shown neoliberal states were characterized by plutocratic rule where ordinary citizens had little influence on laws and policies, even in nominally democratic states. The elites adopted many of the core tenets of possessive individualism by conceiving the market as a sorting mechanism in which each person had a chance to deploy their capacity to labor to advance themselves. The fact that it was a wildly unequal chance was either ignored or naturalized as a necessary feature of market society. What emerged, as Michael Sandel reminds us, was a ruling elite which for the first time in history felt it entirely merited its affluence and consequently owed nothing to those at the bottom. Inversely the mass of people left behind by neoliberalism were characterized as lazy failures who deserved their lot. It should be no surprise that a figure like Trump dividing the world into winners and losers should emerge from such an uninspiring nullity which fantasized that it was the apex of human accomplishment.

Retrieving the best in liberalism 

What made Macpherson’s left critique of the liberal tradition distinctive was that he never abandoned hope that one could retrieve its better and more human nature. As William Leiss putt it in C. B. Macpherson: Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism the mature Macpherson always emphasized the many “virtues of the liberal-democratic tradition, and especially the great importance of the commitment to civil liberties within it…” Much of his mature work was centered around what Macpherson referred to as “retrieval” in his classic collection Democratic Theory. The goal was to “retrieve” the egalitarian and humanist core of liberalism that had fired the imagination of millions through a careful analysis of subsumed but not yet lost modes of thinking within the tradition. 

Core to this was Macpherson’s claim that a possessive individualist anthropology and attendant acquisitive ethic weren’t ubiquitous across the liberal tradition. Possessive individualists saw man as an “infinite appropriator” concerned to acquire as much as possible within circumscribed rules in order to gratify his appetites. But by the 19^th century Macpherson though many liberals came to reject this notion as both too crude and too anti-egalitarian. Chief amongst them was the quintessential liberal (and socialist) John Stuart Mill, whom in The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Essays Macpherson describes as enacting a “watershed” transition in liberal thought. This is because Mill was “concerned to rescue human values from their then subordination to the market.” The Millsean state was not intended to “facilitate an endless increase in the production of wealth but to fashion a society with higher ends. {Mill} was thus, we might say, opposed in principle to the economic penetration of political theory.” 

Here we need to emphasize the importance of this transition more forcefully than Macpherson himself, who acknowledged the accomplishment of left-liberals like Mill but was rarely able to express much more than ambivalence about it. Mill rejected possessive individualism and the acquisitive ethic characteristic of classical liberals, while taking up the tradition’s defense of liberty, equality, and solidarity more forcefully than before. Mill acknowledged our individuality was often the fruit of our interactions with other people, and in Socialism noted how capitalism very often inhibited its full realization. It articulated a bad principle of “individualism” as possessive and acquisitive leading to 

competition, each one for himself and against all the rest. It is grounded of opposition of interests, not harmony of interests, and under it every one is required to find his place by a struggle, by pushing others back or being pushed back by them. Socialists consider this system of private war (as it may be termed) between every one and every one, especially fatal in an economical points of view and in a moral. Morally considered, its evils are obvious. It is the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it makes every one the natural enemy of all others who cross his path.

By contrast, following Macpherson, we can recognize how Mill’s liberal socialism emphasized that our individualism could only flourish in the right social settings where our the human capacities of all could be developed thoroughly. Macpherson was highly attracted to this ideal. In The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy he described it as a liberal “developmental” democracy which recognized that the

 moral vision of the possibility of the improvement of mankind, an of a free and equal society {is} not yet achieved. A democratic political system is valued as a means to that improvement-a necessary though not a sufficient means; and a democratic society is seen as both a result of that improvement and a means to further improvement. The improvement that is expected is an increase in the amount of self-development of all the members of the society, or in John Stuart Mill’s phrase the ‘advancement of community…in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency.

This Millsean ideal of a liberal socialist developmental democracy, or something rather like it, is an inspiring one. It takes more seriously than possessive individualist neoliberalism the importance of liberty and equality for all, and connects it to a developmental ethic insisting we  enable each person a more robust opportunity to lead a good life through the development of their human capacities. This developmental ethic was also defended as an “Aristotelean principle” by Rawls in Theory of Justice. Rawls notes that “other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.” Unfortunately under current conditions the least well off will struggle to develop their “realized capacities” and employ them in truly satisfying enterprises. Indeed millions in rich states will wind up working for Jeff Bezos and at best aspire to realize their capacity to pee freely whenever they wish. 

If liberals are going to retain or regain the trust of those disappointed in its promises we need to offer much more than a replay of possessive individualism and its enormous and vapid range of failures. Macpherson was right to warn 20th-century liberals that if they didn’t live up to the best in their tradition they would live down to the worse and see it end. Liberals in the 21^st century would be wise to heed his lesson and do better than our predecessors. 

Featured Image is Avignon - Place de l'Horloge - Hotel de Ville - Liberte Egalite Fraternite, by Elliott Brown