Wynford Books Series

Political Theory of Possessive Individualism

by C B MacPherson

Published December 1962

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 that underpins 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 the wills 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 seemed unlikely 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.

Democratic Theory

by C B MacPherson

Published 25 January 1973

This important work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson explores the implications of the ideas about democracy that he offered in such previous books as The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Macpherson modifies, extends, and clarifies the concept of a man's power and that of the "transfer of powers," and argues that a liberal-democratic theory can be based on an adequate concept of human powers and capacities without insuperable
difficulties. Arguing that the neo-classical liberalisms of Chapman, Rawls, and Berlin fall short of providing an adequate basis for a twentieth-century liberal-democratic theory largely because, in different ways, they fail to see or understate the transfer of powers, Macpherson suggests that the liberal theory of
property should be, and can be, revised fundamentally to accommodate new democratic demands. In this manner Macpherson establishes the need for a theory of democracy that gets clear of the disabling central defect of current liberal-democratic theory, while recovering the humanistic values that liberal democracy has always claimed. The result is one of the seminal works of twentieth-century political philosophy. A new Introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century
context.