Critically examine Macpherson’s views on Democracy. (2018, 15 Marks)
C. B. Macpherson (1911–1987), a Canadian critical liberal with socialist sympathies, set out to retrieve liberal democracy’s ethical promise, equal freedom for all to develop their capacities, from its market assumptions. His diagnosis is powerful; his remedy is less convincing.
The Market Root and the Three Concepts
- The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962) argued that theory from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke made the individual sole proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society. Liberal democracy inherited this utility-maximising citizen.
- The Real World of Democracy (1965) denied liberalism a monopoly of democracy. Beside the liberal concept stood the communist one, which could qualify through full intra-party democracy, and that of newly independent, often one-party states, which could qualify if genuinely legitimised by mass support. The test was purpose: serving the masses’ aspirations.
Four Models
The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977) traced four models, the classical ones normative but blind to class, the contemporary one empirical but hollow:
- Protective (Jeremy Bentham, James Mill): protecting propertied voters from government.
- Developmental (John Stuart Mill): democracy as self-improvement, compromised by plural voting and class blindness.
- Equilibrium (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Robert A. Dahl): elites compete like firms, voters choose like consumers, and apathy is treated as healthy. It reduces a humanist ideal to a market mechanism.
- Participatory, his own: a pyramid of direct democracy at the base and delegates above, working alongside competitive parties.
Developmental versus Extractive Power
Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973) supplies the core distinction. Developmental power is the ability to use and develop one’s own capacities; extractive power is the ability to use other people’s capacities for one’s own benefit. Workers without access to the means of labour must sell their capacities, so capitalism produces a continuous net transfer of powers from the many to the few, and equal votes do not register it. He would maximise developmental power yet keep civil liberties, which, he conceded, liberal democracies had guarded better than socialist regimes.
Critique
- Historical accuracy. Keith Thomas traced Hobbes’s ethics to aristocratic honour rather than the market. John Dunn and James Tully (A Discourse on Property, 1980) read Locke through natural law and theology.
- Method. Norman Barry objected that he judged real democracies against an ideal, not against real alternatives.
- Three concepts. The one-party regimes he excused never democratised themselves, and 1989 settled the communist case.
- Marxist. Ellen Meiksins Wood (1978) found him still inside the liberal framework, offering ethical retrieval in place of class struggle.
- Feasibility. He conceded a vicious circle: participation requires less inequality and a changed consciousness, yet each requires participation first. Robert Michels‘s iron law threatens every delegate pyramid, and elite capture of India’s gram sabhas (73rd Amendment, 1992) shows the danger.
Conclusion
Macpherson’s institutional blueprint is thin. His distinction between developmental and extractive power, however, remains the sharpest test of liberal democracy, because it shows unequal power surviving beside equal votes. Anticipating Amartya Sen‘s capability approach, it keeps democracy a moral project, not a procedure.