The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism Hobbes to Locke

by Macpherson, C.B.; Cunningham, Frank

• ISBN13: 9780195444018
• ISBN10: 0195444019
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism thatunderpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on thewills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property.As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians. . . . Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemedunlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed."A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context.

Author Biography

C.B. Macpherson was professor of political economy at the University of Toronto from 1935 to 1982. His other books include Democratic Theory (1973) and The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977). He died in 1987.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Roots of Liberal-Democratic Theory	p. 1
Problems of Interpretation	p. 4
Hobbes: The Political Obligation of the Market	p. 9
Philosophy and Political Theory	p. 9
Human Nature and the State of Nature	p. 17
Abstraction from Society	p. 17
The State of Nature	p. 19
From Physiological to Social Motion	p. 29
Models of Society:	p. 46
The Use of Models	p. 46
Customary or Status Society	p. 49
Simple Market Society	p. 51
Possessive Market Society	p. 53
Hobbes and the Possessive Model	p. 61
The Inadequacy of the State of Nature	p. 68
Political Obligation	p. 70
From Motivation to Obligation	p. 70
Moral or Prudential Obligation?	p. 72
The Postulate of Equality	p. 74
Morality, Science, and the Market	p. 78
The Presumption of Obligation from Fact	p. 81
Penetration and Limits of Hobbes's Political Theory	p. 87
Historical Prerequisites of the Deduction	p. 87
The Self-perpetuating Sovereign	p. 90
Congruence of Sovereignty and Market Society	p. 95
Some Objections Reconsidered	p. 100
The Levellers: Franchise and Freedom	p. 107
The Problem of the Franchise	p. 107
Types of Franchise	p. 111
The Record	p. 117
The Chronology	p. 117
Putney and After	p. 120
Before Putney	p. 129
Summing-up	p. 136
Theoretical Implications	p. 137
The Property in One's Person	p. 137
The Deduction of Rights and the Grounds for Exclusion	p. 142
Levellers' and Independents' Individualism	p. 148
Limits and Direction of the Levellers' Individualism	p. 154
Harrington: The Opportunity State	p. 160
Unexamined Ambiguities	p. 160
The Balance and the Gentry	p. 162
The Bourgeois Society	p. 174
The Equal Commonwealth and the Equal Agrarian	p. 182
The Self-Cancelling Balance Principle	p. 188
Harrington's Stature	p. 191
Locke: The Political Theory of Appropriation	p. 194
Interpretations	p. 194
The Theory of Property Right	p. 197
Locke's Purpose	p. 197
The Initial Limited Right	p. 199
The Limitations Transcended	p. 203
The spoilage limitation	p. 204
The sufficiency limitation	p. 211
The supposed labour limitation	p. 214
Locke's Achievement	p. 220
Class Differentials in Natural Rights and Rationality	p. 221
Locke's Assumption of the Differentials in Seventeenth-Century England	p. 222
Differential Rights and Rationality Generalized	p. 229
Differential rights	p. 230
Differential rationality	p. 232
The Ambiguous State of Nature	p. 238
The Ambiguous Civil Society	p. 247
Unsettled Problems Reconsidered	p. 251
The Joint-stock Theory	p. 251
Majority Rule v. Property Right	p. 252
The Equation of Individual and Majority Consent	p. 252
Individualism v. Collectivism	p. 255
Locke's Constitutionalism	p. 257
Possessive Individualism and Liberal Democracy	p. 263
The Seventeenth-Century Foundations	p. 263
The Twentieth-Century Dilemma	p. 271
Appendix: Social Classes and Franchise Classes in England, circa 1648	p. 279
Notes	p. 293
Works and Editions Cited	p. 302
Index	p. 305
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