Explain the Macpherson’s view on power. (2025, 10 Marks)
Most political science treats power as power over, the ability to make others act as one wishes. C. B. Macpherson, the Canadian critical liberal, argued that liberal theory had mixed up two different ideas under this one word. In Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973) he pulled them apart in order to retrieve liberalism’s ethical promise from its market assumptions.
Two Concepts of Power
| Developmental power | Extractive power | |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Ability to use and develop one’s own human capacities | Ability to use other people’s capacities for one’s own benefit |
| Nature | Ethical: what a person needs to live a fully human life | Descriptive: control over others, as the market measures it |
| Logic | Positive-sum; one person’s growth need not reduce another’s | Zero-sum; one person’s gain is another’s loss |
He measured developmental power by the absence of impediments: lack of adequate means of life, lack of access to the means of labour, and lack of protection against invasion by others.
The Market Root: Net Transfer of Powers
- In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), Macpherson traced the fusion of the two concepts to Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes a man’s value, or worth is his price, and power is a quantity measured against the power of others. Possessive individualism treated each person as proprietor of his own capacities, owing nothing to society.
- Under capitalism, those without access to land and capital must sell their capacities. The outcome is a continuous net transfer of powers from non-owners to owners. Formal market equality hides a real loss of developmental power.
- Liberal democracy’s equal votes do not register this transfer, so its own economic base undercuts its ethical aim of equal self-development.
Normative Programme
A good society maximises developmental power and minimises extractive power. Macpherson added counter-extractive liberty, freedom from others’ extraction, to Isaiah Berlin‘s negative and positive liberty. India’s Directive Principles echo this. Article 39(c) directs the State to prevent the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment, and the statutory right to work under MGNREGA (2005, replaced in 2025) widened access to the means of labour.
Limits
- The ethical concept stretches “power” until it becomes almost the same thing as freedom or well-being, and it rests on a contestable account of truly human capacities.
- Extraction is not unique to capitalism: party-bureaucratic states also extract.
- Marxists reply that retrieval remains ethical exhortation without a political agent.
Conclusion
Macpherson recast power as the question of who can develop their capacities, not merely who commands. His account anticipates Amartya Sen‘s capability approach, and it remains a sharp standard for judging whether democracy empowers citizens or only counts them.