William Leiss-C.B.macpherson_ Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism-New World Perspectives (1989)

8/13/2019 William Leiss-C.B.macpherson_ Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism-New World Perspectives (1989)

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C. B. MacphersonDilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism


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NEW WORLD PERSPECTIVESGeneral Editors Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

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C. B. MacphersonDilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism

William Leiss

New World PerspectivesMontreal


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@ William Leiss, 1988New World PerspectivesAll rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means, electric,mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise without prior permission ofNew World Perspectives.

New World Perspective/Perspectives Nouveau Monde7141 Sberbrooke, 0.Montrbal, Quebec

Canadian Catalog g in Publication Da taLeiss, William, 1939-C.B. Macpherson : dilemmas of liberalism and socialism(New World perspectives)Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0-920393-41-l (bound) -ISBN 0-920393-39-X (pbk.)

1. Macpherson C.B. (Crawford Brough), 1911-872. Liberalism. 3. Socialism. I. Title. II. Series.JC253.M35L44 1988 320.50924 C88-090203-5Printed and bound in CanadaThis book has been published with the help of a grant from the SocialScience Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.


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To the memory of my teachersHerbert Gutman, historianHerbert Marcuse, philosopher


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CONTENTSPreface1Scope of the Work 112Formation (1930-1955)PreliminariesEducation and career

Trade unions and the stateFoundations (1936-1942)Development (1943-1955)3

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2025304557

Maturity (1955-1985)The scholar as protagonistFive themesEconomic sphere: the marketplace1. the institutional context2. the individual contextEconomic sphere: individuals as doersand consumersThe capitalist agendaPolitical sphere: property versus democracyConclusion: the liberal state

748185868993

101103109


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4Canada as a Quasi-Market SocietyLegacyThe nature of a quasi-market society

When did the transition from capitalismto socialism occur?OECD nations as quasi-market societies1. society: public sector economicactivity2. society: business regulation andsubsidies3. capital concentration4. individuals: income distribution5. transfer payments and the welfarefloorThree issues

3Epilogue: An AppreciationNotesReferences

112113115119124125127128130132, 134

143147150


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PrefaceJust as a biographer must allow his own life history topass before his eyes while detailing his subjects story, sotoo the author of an intellectual biography cannot helpbut conduct a self-examination while pursuing his topic.

The treatment of Brough Macphersons university educa-tion in this volume brought back warm memories of myown apprenticeship with gifted and generous teachers. Theupwelling of these recollections was a delightful and whol-, ly unexpected benefit that accrued to me during the writ-ing of this book, and I am deeply grateful for it.I was invited to write this contribution for the NewWorld Perspectives series some years ago by Arthur andMarilouise Kroker. Although the Krokers are responsiblefor its genesis, the project could not have been complet-ed without the expert assistance of Richard Smith, a doc-toral student in the Department of Communication atSimon Fraser University Richard assembled the bib-


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10 C. B. Macpherson

liographical resources and tracked down much lof thesecondary literature, and organized it all superbly In ad-dition, discussions with him helped to structure the bookand finally, his assistance with wordprocessing and elec-tronic communication systems was (and continues to be)indispensable. It is a pleasure to be associated with him.Every commentator on Macphersons work is indebt-ed to Victor Svacek for his comprehensive Macphersonbibliography, published in Powers, Possessions and Free-dom: Essays in Honour of C. B. Macpherson, edited byAlkis Kontos (University of Toronto Press, 1979). I ,wouldlike to thank Alkis Kontos for his invitation to me to con-tribute to that volume and the University of Toronto Pressfor permitting me to use some portions of my contribu-tion, Marx and Macpherson: Needs, Utilities an,d Self-Development, in this volume.Some years ago three anonymous evaluators warmlyrecommended this project for assistance to the- SocialSciencesand Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada,andthe SSHRCCvery kindly provided the tpvogrants that wererequested. Three readers of the first draft made sugges-tions for revisions, some of which have been incorporat-ed into the finished text. Most helpful of all was theadditional detailed commentary done at my request by myfriend and colleague at Simon Fraser, Professor HeribertAdam.

The collegial and intensely productive atmosphere inthe Department of Communication at Simon FraserUniversity provides a great stimulus for scholarly researchand writing, and it is my good fortune to partake of it.Only Marilyn Lawrence has shared all of my bookprojects, and I am very glad that she is willing to enter-tain still more. And finally, I am thankful that Brough Mac-pherson took the, time to discuss with me his earlyeducation and career during a long and pleasant oonver-sation at his home in the Summer of 1986.Vancouver, B. C.


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1Scope of the Work

All political theorists are utopians, more or less.Fewamong Platos successors could resist being seduced byhis bold scheme, but some were more willing than othersto display their infatuation. Thus there have been two basicforms of utopianism over the centuries, one in which aplan for a better world was proclaimed aloud and another,more reticent but not necessarily ess committed, in whichdiscreet allusions to the need for changing the world wereembedded in the critique of existing conditions.C. B. Macpherson was a political theorist of the lattersort. With extraordinary consistency and tenacity through-out a teaching and writing careerspanning more than fourdecades, he anchored his study of politics in a claim thata better society was possible. Although the nature of theclaim was clear enough it was never developed into a full-fledged argument, nor did its advocacy go beyond the gen-tle remonstrances of the printed page and the public ad-


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12 C. B. Macpherson

dress. Certainly his critical stance had enough in commonwith Marxism to make it easy for some to place him inthat camp; however, the methodically undogmatic charac-ter of his thought, together with an aversion to invoca-tions of specific remedies, clearly made him uncomfortablewith the notion of wearing ideological labels.All told his writings are marked clearly from the veryfirst with a utopian intent, yet another feature is equallyevident, namely a firm detachment from orthodoxies andan independence of purpose. As I see t, both arose simul-taneously out of his choosing political theory as a lifelongvocation during his undergraduate years. He was not pub-licly a notable activist in domains outside those of his aca-demic profession; by his own account, in the domesticdivision of labor agreed upon with his wife Kay, he wouldremain the theorist. Moreover, from the outset Macpher-son appeared to be content to express his views largelywithin the compass of the academic world, and in doingso he crafted a prose style marked by a directness and ele-gant simplicity that is rarely seen in academic discourse.To take up the serious pursuit of political theorys an-cient concerns in a university setting demanded adher-ence to the accepted canons of scholarly debate, andMacpherson never wavered in his allegiance to them. Hewas most fortunate in finding a faculty position in politi-cal theory at his alma mater just when he had completedhis postgraduate studies in England - although the yearwas 1935, not the most propitious of times; certainly thisuninterrupted attachment to a university setting helpedto cement his allegiance to it. The Canadian university sys-tem repaid that allegiance by bestowing unhindered careerprogress and, later, some of its highest honors on this un-repentant critic of contemporary institutions.The major purpose of this short study is to suggest hatMacphersons thought can be understood best as the out-come of his distinctive mode of practicing political the-ory as a vocation. Essentially, his practice consisted of anexamination of the origins and development of modernpolitical issues,an examination which has, at one and the


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Di lemmas of Liberalism and Social ism I3

same time and without internal inconsistency, a commit-ment to both scholarly forms of debate and to the causeof social improvement. A look at his earliest publishedwritings shows that this double-sided commitment wasalready fully formed then, and thus that it can be consi-dered to be a product of his university education. It be-came a lasting part of his career.In his commitment to the cause of social improvementMacpherson fits the description of the epic theorist givenby Sheldon Wolin in his essay, Political Theory as a Vo-cation. The epic theorist seeks to reassemble the wholepolitical world, including a reorientation of accepted waysof imagining and accounting for what we do (as well aswhat we ought to do) in everyday social life. The workof an epic theorist is also marked by the quality of car-ing for public things (res publicae), that is, an explicitcommitment to promoting the common good. Finally, andas a derivative of these two features, the epic theorist, whoentertains the possibility that the existing political orderis systematically flawed, constructs a political theory whichtakes the form of a symbolic picture of an ordered whole,that is, a vision of a better world which does not take thepresent-day facts of existence as an eternal conditionof humanity. lMacphersons contributions as an epic theorist are ex-pressed primarily in his lifelong preoccupation with thesuccesses and failures of liberal political thought, as wellas liberal political practice in the history of the modernstate. His studies of English liberalism emphasized its se-vere limitations (as well as its accomplishments) as a basisfor a fully acceptable theory and practice of democracy.For Macpherson liberalism had capitulated at its originsto the overriding requirements of bourgeois society, andthis subordination would have to be reversed sooner orlater. Yet he insisted that liberalisms achievements, no mat-ter how defective, were an indispensable starting-point forfurther social progress; for example, an essay publishedin 1985 states that without civi l liberties, democracy is atravesty.2 Among the thinkers of his generation who


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14 C. B. Macpherson

shared some form of the radical critique of capitalism,Macpherson stands out as perhaps the most important na-tive North American theorist, and a good deal of his im-portance lies in his consistent defense of liberal politicalvalues as an essential part of this critique.In my view this defense is a logical outcome of theother side of his dual commitment, that is, his commit-ment to scholarly pursuits. For the honest practice of thescholars trade demands explicit adherence to liberalvalues: freedom of expression, canons of fairness in ar-gument, equality of opportunity for participation, protec-tion against persecution for opinions, tolerance, and thesearch for truth. These, however, were never intended bytheir originators to be reserved exclusively for the scho-lars enclaves, and a demand to institute them as fully aspossible everywhere in society flows from their very na-ture; the theorists task is to name and expose the obsta-cles to their realization. In other words, to start not froma commitment to scholarship alone but rather from itscombination with the cause of social improvement meantthat one had to take the essential values of liberalism veryseriously indeed. This compelled one to explain why liber-alism had failed to realize its potentialities as a progres-sive force in society and to assist in a renewed endeavorto actualize those potentialities.

There was no unanimity on this point. Among Mac-phersons contemporaries many championed the cause ofsocial improvement - among Marxists and others of theLeft, and among the Right (which has its own version ofimprovements) as well - while scorning liberalism andall its works. Little surprise is occasioned when this viewis proclaimed and practiced by the Right. Alas, too littlesurprise occurred among some adherents of the Left insimilar circumstances, when charlatans proposed that themassesmust be led to their salvation by fair means or foul.Macphersons double-sided commitment ruled out thiscourse and required that liberalism, shorn of its incon-sistencies and false presuppositions, be a partner in


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I6 C. B. Macpherson

The manner in which he works this out constituteshis method as an epic theorist. He begins by present-ing an opposition between a pair of mutually exclusivemodels of behavior, patterns of thinking, or paths ofsocial development. Then the claim is made that the choiceof one model, pattern, or path will result over time inresolving the tension previously described. A number ofinstances in which Macpherson used this method effec-tively will be mentioned in the chapters that follow.The commentary on Macphersons writings offered inthis essay wil l be guided by the interpretive scheme out-lined above. In other words, I will set out the nature ofhis double-sided commitment and trace its impact on theintellectual content of his output. The task of expositionis made simple by virtue of Macphersons extraordinaryconsistency: the guiding perspective in his work is nota-ble for its fixity rather than for its evolution. Macphersongripped the image of society he wished to undermine withremarkable tenacity; having affixed that grip early in lifeand refusing to change it thereafter, he remained very closeto his original conception of his antagonist, with the resultthat his critique misses the implications of some major so-cial transformations that occurred during his lifetime.Yet one must also admit that a portrait of society com-posed of images of mutually exclusive choices is not meantto be read literally. Rather, the point is to forcefully drawthe readers attention to what is claimed to be the essen-tial features in the picture as a whole (for Macpherson theessential feature is the role of the marketplace in modernsociety), and to do so repeatedly, if need be, so as to over-come the natural tendency of readers and audiences to be-come distracted and inattentive. Once accomplished, thepatterns in events can be seen more clearly. I count my-self among those who have benefited from encounteringhis work.Like his guiding perspective Macphersons life andcareer is also notable for its fixity: forty-five years of unin-terrupted university appointment in the same departmentat a university located in the city where he was born, with


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Dilemm as of Liberalism and Social ism 17

only one brief leave taken in a nonacademic setting Thecommitment to scholarly pursuits and liberal values thatsustained this career shows itself in both the form and con-tent of his published writings. Rarely was an opportunityto engage in debate missed, it must be noted, as a longseries of replies to critics attests. Another indicator is theextraordinary string of book reviews he wrote in a widevariety of journals: beginning in I936 and continuingalmost uninterrupted thereafter hardly a year elapsedwithout such a review being published. The titles of thebooks he reviewed are about evenly distributed betweenmainstream and critical works, mostly of the academicsort, and the reviews provide some interesting clues toMacphersons interests and outlook, especially since thecitation of secondary literature in his own books and arti-cles tends to be rather sparse.This book begins with a detailed look at the periodwhich runs from his undergraduate days at the Universi-ty of Toronto (1929-1932) o 1955. I take a close look athis masters thesis, a 325-pageopus presented n 1935. Thephase extending from I936 to 1942 contains the solid ba-sis for the interpretive scheme I wish to defend, namelythat the core of Macphersons contribution lies in his dualcommitment to social improvement and scholarly pursuits,as unified in the notion of political theory as a vocation.The next phase in my scheme includes 1943 to 1955and encompasses Democracy in Alberta (1953) and thefirst mention (in a 1954 essayentitled The Deceptive Taskof Political Theory) of the phrase possessive individu-alism. The events during this period are significant. Inthe nineteen-forties Macpherson had set out a major rolefor political theory within the discipline of politicalscience: theory was to serve as a principle of unity forthe discipline as a whole and was to do so by concentrat-ing on the interaction of political ideas and concrete po-litical facts. Nevertheless, the analysis presented inDemocracy in AZberta, with its attempted integration ofinstitutional and theoretical analysis, did not fulfill the mis-sion for political theory that had been articulated by Mac-


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18 C. B. Macpherson /

pherson himself. IIn fact his grand project for theory was largely aban-

doned thereafter. Instead, understanding liberalisms am-biguous heritage through the concept of. possessiveindividualism, together with a major elaboration ,of thecritique of capitalist society that is based on this concept,occupied most of Macphersons time and effort withoutinterruption from 1955 and thirty years onwards:I do not intend to recapitulate Macphersons under-standing of liberal thought - except insofar as it bears onhis.critique of capitalism - or the academic controver-sies touched off by it. Certainly I do not mean therebyto belittle his significant contribution to scholarly debateson political theory in the past quarter-century: The num-ber of conference papers and published articles and spe-cial conference sessions devoted to his work testify amplyto the scope and challenge of Macphersons spirited fo-rays into this domain. Nevertheless, such debates, howeverlearned and influential they may be, are the conventionalstuff of academic life, clouds of interpretation perbetual-ly swirling over the intellectual landscape: Some iforma-tions are more interesting than others in the same sky, andall wil l be succeeded in turn by fresher ones in the new dayTo my mind that which is truly distinctive about Mac-phersons thought and career is not the battles overHobbes, Locke and the rest, but rather his steadfast ad-herence to the double-sided commitment outlinedabove,or to what I have called his practice of political theory asa vocation. A biographical treatment might attempt to fillout this portrait with documents and anecdotes drawnfrom his university career, interviews with former col-leagues and students, and passages from his correspon-dence; for the present project, however, I have ;had toconfine myself primarily to published writings. The im-portant materials for this project, then, are first the sub-sidiary comments in book reviews, articles, and: bookswhich reveal Macphersons personal and intellectual,stance,and second the theoretical apparatus that he crafted forthe critique of capitalism and the imagining of a better


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Dilemm as of Liberalism and Social ism I9society.Thus the focus of the interpretation offered in the fol-lowing pagesmay be summarized as follows. Macphersonspractice of political theory as a vocation has two intercon-nected dimensions. One is his commitment to the scho-lars craft, which considered in terms of its social contextleads to his lifelong defense of liberal political values. Theother is his commitment to social justice, and it leads tohis conception of modern society as founded upon whatappears to be a permanent state of tension between polit-ical freedom and property rights. Macphersons methodis to seek to break free of this underlying tension or dilem-ma by posing a series of choices between mutually exclu-sive options for future social development (which are inturn based upon mutually exclusive ways of seeing the so-cial world), and by suggesting that choosing one optionover another will enable us to overcome the dilemma andto achieve both freedom and justice. Finally, it is suggest-ed that we are not meant to take literally this posing ofoptions, but rather to make use of the clarification it bringsin order to identify the essential,features of actual politi-cal and social choices now.


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2Formation: 1930 to 1955Preliminaries ,

Crawford Brough Macphersons life spanned a periodof extraordinary social change. He began his universitytraining within months of the stock-market debacle in 1929and finished that training while the Great Depression per-sisted. He took up professional writing at a time when thesti ll vibrant ideological currents inherited from thenineteenth century - capitalism versus socialism and com-munism - had been amplified by the special circum-stances of the day: the long economic crisis of capitalistnations, the sporadic militancy of working-class organi-zations, the rise of European fascism, and the hopies andiilusions bound with the fate of the Soviet Union. He wasfortunate to be able to embark upon his chosen career im-mediately upon completion of his graduate studies, andgradually he attained national and international promi-


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Di lemmas of Liberalism and Social ism 21

nence in academic circles during that unusual period inthe quarter-century after 1945 when Western capitalismattained a level of general economic prosperity that mostsocial commentators writing in the 1930s could not haveimagined to be possible.His first publications were a few short book reviewsin a left-wing journal dedicated to influencing socialchange. This was only a brief foray, however, and withina few years he had begun to publish almost exclusivelyin academic and semi-academic journals; thereafter henever wrote more that an occasional short piece in anyother venue. In no sense did he trim his outlook to fitan academic mold. Rather, it seems clear that he set forhimself the mission of winning recognition for his view-point within the Canadian university system and havingit accepted there permanently as a legitimate contenderin academic debates. n this he succeeded brilliantly: therecan be little doubt that in the postwar period Macpher-son was one of a small group of influential thinkers in theEnglish-speaking world who widened the boundaries ofacademic discourse in the social sciences, by requiring thekeepers of the then-prevailing orthodoxies to admit intothe fold what we might loosely call a socialist per-spective.For a short period during the Second World War hetook a leave from his university position to work at a minorgovernment task, but this was the only interruption in anacademic career that spanned forty-five years. During thewar he also published his first strictly academic piece ofscholarship, and by 1945 he was fully committed toproducing the stream of essaysand books that eventuallywould bring him worldwide recognition asa scholar. Boththe interpretive slant of his scholarly contributions, andthe explicit concerns of the essayshe devoted to contem-porary social issues put himunmistakably on the leftside of the ideological spectrum throughout his career.Certainly Macpherson can be regarded as a socialistthinker, although such appellations should be used withcaution, since he refused to apply them publicly to him-


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22 C. B. Macpherson

self. What is undeniable is his lifelong interest in the ad-vancement of a set of goals for social change that are usual-ly identified with the cause of democratic socialism. Thiscommitment, forged early in his intellectual development,was unaffected by the progress of his academic career. Itwas also unaffected by the social changes occurring inWestern societies in the period after 1945 - and this factprompts me to undertake at the end of this book someretouching of the picture he painted of contemporary so-ciety and its problems.

Western societies (the nations of North America andWestern Europe) moved from what was still (in 1930)primarily a laissez-faire political economy in the late-nineteenth-century mold to what now has been called byMacpherson and others managed capitalism or a mixedeconomy. Yet where ideological debates about socialchange persist (always more so in Europe than in NorthAmerica), the enormous changes n political economy areoften poorly reflected in those debates. Much ideologicalstruggle still revolves majestically around the classicalnineteenth-century polarization between capitalism andsocialism, with the participants in this struggle seeming-ly unaware that a qualitatively different social order -representing a kind of compromise or convergence of thetwo older models - has taken root. Furthermore this istrue not only of the somewhat esoteric debates conduct-ed in academic circles and among the adherents of vari-ous sects: whenever strong polarization occurs in politicallife in the West (such as happens often in Great Britain orBritish Columbia, for example), the same representationsemerge and the public is confronted by the allegedlymomentous choice between free enterprise and so-cialism.In other words, a good deal of ideological debate aboutpolitics and society has lagged behind actual social de-velopment during the past half-century and indeed hasnot yet succeeded in coming to terms with it. Some in-sight into this situation and the reasons for its persistencecan be found in Macphersonswritings. Like other thinkers


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before him, Macpherson sought to understand the peculiardynamic of capitalism, a form of political economy thatembodied for so long such an enormous disparity betweenthe social benefits - primarily genuine democracy andeconomic well-being - it promised on the one hand, andthe insufficient measure of those benefits actually deliveredto date on the other, Macpherson believed that capitalismsfoundations remained intact up to the present day and alsothat this system was inherently incapable of delivering thatgenuine democracy and well-being. Therefore, the termsin which he presented his pairs of mutually exclusive op-tions for future social change essentially stayed bound tothe classical ideological polarization between capitalismand socialism.Certainly, the basic analytical categories fashioned forthe socialist critique of capitalism in the nineteenth cen-tury (the property system, social classes, wage labor, thecommodity form) remain serviceable,since many basic fea-tures in the institutional structures of a capitalist form ofpolitical economy persist. In a dynamic social system suchas modern capitalism, however, the object of analysisfor the commentator - that is, the form of political econ-omy - does not sit still for the operation. Rather it mu-tates whilst being observed, thus challenging analysts toretool their conceptual armory regularly. Marx himself,who had described capitalism as a permanently revolu-tionary social form, failed to see the full impact of thisobservation on his own concepts. Macpherson too did notsee with sufficient clarity that capitalism, although it is likemany others a class-based orm of political economy, hasa peculiarly dynamic character that distinguishes it fromits relatively more static predecessors. This feature sets abasic requirement for those who seek to analyze its lawsof movement, namely to trace its continuous institutionaltransformations in detail and to ensure that the conceptsdesigned to grasp those laws are regularly refined. I willtry to show that Macphersons key pairs of options,although they were always presented in an elegant and in-cisive fashion, failed in part the test of this requirement.


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24 C. B. Macpherson

In my treatment of Macpherson as a political theoristof the epic sort - that is, as one who in Wolins, termscares for public things and draws a picture of an orderedwhole - I will focus on this point, namely the relationbetween his key categories and the society they compre-hend. For example, I will track what he has to say aboutproperty from his first extensive use of it in his 1935masters thesis to his last publications. I will ask what hisuse of this term is intended to do and to what extentthe effort succeeds. This type of judgement is appropri-ate for the work of epic theorists, who set for themselvesthe pragmatic objective of reorienting the accepted waysof imagining both what we do and what we ought to doin politics and society.The concept of property in which his theory of so-cial institutions is embodied is one of the three central andinterrelated themes in Macpliersons writings that will befollowed in this book. The second is democracy or thetheory of politics, including such institutionalized formsas the party system. As mentioned earlier, I will not com-ment directly on the scholarly controversies triggered byMacphersons interpretation of the history of liberal po-litical theory; rather, my discussion of democracy will fo-cus on the relation between political systems and socialinstitutions. The third theme is the individual, or moreprecisely the connection between individuals and socie-ty. The best illustration of this theme is the contrast be-tween developmental and acquisitive powers; and ingeneral this is the utopian element in Macphersonsthought, the one which shows most clearly his acceptance >of political theory as a vocation.Macpherson was a perceptive and forceful critic of con-temporary society, as well as a writer whose masterfulprose style earned him a permanent place in the traditionof epic theory in politics. It should be obvious that hishigh standing in this regard is not diminished by any dis-cussion that deals with the weaknesses, n addition to thestrengths, to be found in his outlook. For in theoreticalmatters just as in material life, the successesof preceding


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Dilem ma s of Liberal ism and Social ism 25

generations become their bequest to us and require noth-ing save suitable appreciation on our part; more valuableare their artful deficiencies, since we can exercise and de-velop our own powers in striving to ferret out and over-come them.Education and Career

C. B. Macpherson entered the University of Torontofor undergraduate studies in 1929 at the age of eighteenand was graduated in 1932. He began to read modernpolitical theory at this time but took no other formal train-ing in the history of political thought, apart from attend-ing some lectures on Plato by a philosopher, FultonAnderson. He also studied the economic theory of Mar-shall and others with Professor E. J. Urwick, who had re-tired from the London School of Economics before goingto Toronto; Macpherson later taught this subject for a num-ber of years during the early part of his academic career.It was during his undergraduate days that Macphersonmade a firm choice about pursuing academic life as acareer.At this point he also had decided upon political the-ory as his chief intellectual interest and academic speciali-zation Almost certainly this was the result of the teacherwho had influenced him most as an undergraduate, OttoB. van der Sprenkel, who must have been someone quitedifferent from most other professors at the University ofToronto then. Van der Sprenkel was one of the growingnumber of left-wing intellectuals who were fleeing the Eu-ropean continent in the early 1930s before the rising tideof fascism; he had first gone to England and had been astudent of Harold Laskis at the London School of Eco-nomics. He then secured a post as a lecturer in the Univer-sity of Torontos Department of Political Economy for twoyears, before leaving Canada and settling in Australia,whereupon he became a Sinologist, because (as Macpher-son recalls him saying) he found political theory too easyI have not been able to find much trace of van der


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2G C. B. Macpherson

Sprenkels outlook and work, but a few notes onthem maybe of interest, since Macpherson remembered his teach-ing as a major factor in forming his own orientatron as ay.oung scholar. Van der Sprenkel published a short piecein the Canadian Forum in June 1932 entitled The Fan-tasies of Mr. Havelock in which he stated: We are livingin a time when, on the one hand, there is a vast move-ment of dissatisfaction among the masses, on the otherhand, hysterical fear and a growing lack of self confidenceamongst those who live by owning, and who direct com-merce and industry. He concluded with what appears tobe an oblique defense of the Communist Party. He resur-faced again as one of three authors of a book entitled NewChina: Three Views, published in 1951. A reviewer in thejournal Pacij ic Affairs noted that all three authors had hadfirst-hand experience of China after 1949; according tohim, van der Sprenkels chapter argues that China,will beable to achieve economic development without #foreignaid, and moreover that,China will pursue an independentcourse in relation to the Soviet Union. These views arealso aired in a series of short essays which van der Sprenkelwrote for the Spectator in 1955, which show a solid ac-quaintance with past history and current events inChina.2Macpherson was introduced to modern politicalthought by van der Sprenkel. He read some work by Marxfor the first time then - volume I of Capital and parts .of what would later become known as TbeEconoyzic andPhilosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (which Macphersonhad in an English translation reproduced in mimko by aTrotskyist group in New York). Macpherson recalled dur-ing our conversation in 1986 that he had found kapitalrather confused and that Marxs work as a whole wasnever a major influence on his own thinking. Van derSprenkels frequent references to Laski, however, togetherwith a first reading of some of Laskis books, convincedMacpherson that he should try to do graduate study withLaski at the London School of Economics; he was acceptedand moved to London in 1932.


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Harold Joseph Laski (1893-1950), native of Manchester,was a prolific writer of both academic and semi-populartreatises, a major figure in the development of the LabourParty (as well as the.Fabian Society) - he was the LabourPartys chairman in 1945 when it formed a governmentin Britain for the first time - and a well-known publicspeaker, as well as an influential university teacher. Hetaught briefly at McGill University in 1915, then at Har-vard, before returning to Britain and taking up a post atthe London School of Economics in 1920, where he re-mained on the staff until his death. He authored upwardsof thirty books (including the remarkable published cor-respondence with the American jurist Oliver Wendell Hol-mes, Jr.) and hundreds of articles and pamphlets. By the1920s Laski was firmly committed to democratic social-ism of a non-dogmatic sort and to its achievement bypeaceful means. But as the economic crisis deepenedthroughout the 1920s and 193Os,and as the rise of fas-cism began to threaten the social progress achieved up tothen, he became convinced that some degree of violencewould inevitably accompany the transition from capital-ism to socialism; only the end of the war and the elector-al victory of the Labour Party modified this stance.3Macpherson attended Laskis lectures on sixteenth-century French political theory and developed a broad in-terest in the history of ideas, including the history of Eu-ropean social thought, under his influence. He and othergraduate students frequently were invited to tea at Laskishome, which had become a kind of way-station for Euro-pean intellectuals in flight from fascism. There he met theother two members of a small circle comprised of Laski,R. H. Tawney, and the sociologist Morris Ginsberg.

Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962) also exerted a stronginfluence on the young Macpherson. Tawney was an eco-nomic historian and social reformer whose first book, TheAgrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912),madehim famous. After teaching for many years n workers edu-cation forums and advocating Christian Socialism in


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speeches and writings, he became a professor at the Lon-don School of Economics in 1931. His two best-knownbooks were published in the 1920s: The Acquisitive Soci-ety (1920)and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).The former, which he had first published as a Fabian So-ciety pamphlet under the title The Sicknessof an Acquisi-tive Society, is a powerful tract, its critique of capitalismand market relations grounded in an ethical position thatwas drawn from the elements of social radicalism in Chris-tianity. Macpherson remarked in his 1986 conversationwith me that his concept of possessive individualismwas developed out of his search for a more precise ex-pression for Tawneys notion of acquisitiveness.Macpherson completed his graduate studies in April1935 at the London School of Economics with a mastersthesis, prepared under Laskissupervision, entitled Volun-tary Associations within the State, 1900-1934,with specialreference to the Place of Trade Unions in relation to theState in Great Britain. In that same year Macphersonsought a teaching position and wrote to Urwick, who wasthen Chair of the Department of Political Economy at theUniversity of Toronto, and it was his great good fortuneto find, amidst those terrible economic times, an open-ing in the field of political theory He was appointed asa lecturer in political.theory, beginning an uninterruptedassociation with the University of Toronto that would lastuntil his retirement about forty-five years later.He took a leave of absence from the University forthirty months in the years 1941 o 1943, first on a second-ment to the Wartime Information Board in Ottawa. TheBoard was headed by John Grierson, and Macphersonsjob was to review and write reports on the coverage bythe Canadian press of the federal governments conductand policies. The task included both the establishedEnglish- and French-languagenewspapersand a collectionof papers from what conventionally is called the fethnicpress, that is, small-circulation newspapers published- inlanguages other than English or French. Macpherson hadother officials doing the translations of articles from the


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latter for him. In his own words, his work as a wartimebureaucrat was totally uneventful.He then went to the University of New Brunswick forone academic year, in response to a request from some-one he had met at the Wartime Information Board, toreplace a professor who had left on short notice; he servedthere (in his own terms) as professor of everything, teach-ing courses on introduction to economics, labor econom-ics, British government, and comparative government. Hereturned to the University of Toronto in 1943. By that time

he was married to Kay, who was already campaigning (asshe would do throughout the 1940s) in federal and provin-cial ridings as a womens candidate for the Co-operativeCommonwealth Federation. According to Macpherson theypracticed a domestic division of labor between theoryand practice for the entirety of their careers and livestogether.*When he returned to the University of Toronto Mac-pherson remained a lecturer for about six years before be-ing promoted to the rank of assistant professor. No tenuredor permanent appointment was granted in those days un-til promotion to associate professor was made, and nor-mally this was dependent upon the publication of a book(in his case Democracy in Alberta, 1953). Harold Innis washis department chair by this time and Macpherson oftenjoined him, the political economist V. W. Bladen, and thesociologist SD. Clark at an informal lunch table groupat the Faculty Club. Macpherson had attended a few of In-niss lectures on economic history as an undergraduate buthad found them rather tedious: He went on and on aboutthe bloody fur traders, he remarked during our conver-sation in 1986.While Macpherson was sti ll an untenured assistantprofessor in the early 195Os, McCarthyism was taking itstoll among universities and the professoriate in the Unit-ed States. Macpherson could later recall no spillover intoCanadian university life, however, and according to his owntestimony he never experienced any detrimental effectresulting from the socialist orientation of his work during


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his entire career.He remembered only one minor episodein the early 1950s n which Innis told him that he CInnis]had had to listen to some offhand complaint about Mac-phersons presumed political stance- but the matter wentno further than that.A final note on style. All readersof Macphersonsworkscan appreciate the limpid and jargon-free prose that makesthem such a pleasure to read. Macpherson said that he hadresolved from the beginning to write with clarity of ex-pression and uncomplicated grammatical structure and thathis model was Voltaire. His choice of this literary modelsays a great deal about what he hoped to accomplish bya lifetime of effort within a universitys walls.

Trade Unions and the State: The Masters ThesisI have devoted a special section to Macphersonk M.A.thesis for a number of reasons. First, it is the only sub-

stantial piece of his lifes work that is generally unknown.Second, Macpherson embarked on his career at a timewhen Ph.D. programs in the social sciences were uncom-mon in the British system, so that he did no doctoral pro-gram and Ph.D. thesis. Instead, he took the normal routeof submitting a collection of published papers (sixteen inall) some twenty yearsafter completing his graduate work,and was awarded the DSc(Econ) degree by the LondonSchool of Economics in 1955. Third, it is a substantialwork, with 322 pages of text, and he did not use thematerial later in his publications. Finally, in the subject-matter I find a weird resonance with local current events:as I write, the trade unions and the government of BritishColumbia are caught up in the latest of their regularprovince-wide confrontations, including the announce-ment of a general strike.

Most of Macphersons thesis is focussed on the Jheoryand practice of the trade union movement in England inrelation to the legal structure imposed on it by the statethrough legislation and judicial decisions. In their originstrade unions are of course voluntary associations, like


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churches and religious movements, businesses, sports andother clubs, political parties, charitable agencies, and as-sociations of professionals such as doctors and lawyers.Some of these eventually receive legal recognition bygovernments which then impose certain requirements onthem, but many others continue as unincorporated bod-ies; trade unions attained legal standing in Britain uponthe passage of the Trade Union Act, 1876. Macpherson addsa briefer discussion of another type of legally-recognizedvoluntary association (the British Medical Association) atthe end, to provide some contrasting elements for his ar-gument.His emphasis on the workings of the state reflects theinfluence of his teacher, Harold Laski, who had writtena long series of well-known books on the concepts ofsovereignty and the state, concentrating on the history ofthe development of these doctrines since the sixteenthcentury, including a general work called The State in The-ory and Practice (1935). Macphersons list of referencesin his thesis includes, in addition to the directly relevantacademic literature, a number of contemporary tracts, suchas Tawneys The Choice before the Labour Party (1933),a Socialist League pamphlet, and Franz Neumanns TradeUnionism, Democracy, Dictatorship (1934) a WorkersEducational Trade Union Committee pamphlet. The themeof the relation between voluntary associations and thestate, however, had been raised somewhat earlier in theacademic literature on legal and political theory by twoeminent British scholars, J. N. Figgis and F. W. Maitland,whose views are mentioned briefly.Macphersons approach to the relation between tradeunions and the state in Britain is to look at the main pointsin the most important pieces of legislation and the key ju-dicial decisions after 1871. The aim of the thesis is statedclearly; it is to show

that both the general tendency of the law andits variation at different times are intelligible onlyon the assumption that in regulating the pow-


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ers and status of trade unions the State has act-ed consistently on only one principle.This principle is found to be the maintenanceof the essential basis of the existing industrialsystem, that is, the structure of property relationsin it and, more broadly, the preservation.of thesocial institutions which serve to maintain thoseproperty relations throughout the society.5

The key terms are used quite consistently throughout thethesis: social institutions and the social system, the eco-nomic or industrial system, and the patterns of ownershipare all said to be based on the system [or structure] ofproperty relations. IBy the tim.e we reach the endof the work the con-nections between the key terms are clear. The state is theagent for dominant social interests which are determinedby the pattern of property relations; therefore, in its ac-tions the state will be motivated by one overriding objec-tive, namely the protection of existing property relations.It is also clear that in his thesis Macpherson does not in-tend to put the propositions comprising the preceding sen-tence to the test of an argument, either theoretical orempirical in nature. Rather, they will serve together as thepresupposition or postulate for his examination of tradeunions and the state. Moreover, his examination does notand cannot demonstrate in any acceptable fashion that thestate has acted on only one principle (my italics), sincehe does not survey a range of possible candidates and thengive reasons why the one singled out, that is the preser-.vation of existing property relations, is the most deserving.There is a straightforward explanation for these omis-sions: Macphersons exposition is dominated by a prag-matic objective, namely, the attempt to ascertain, on thebasis of his historical investigation, where the unions willstand on the political choices to be made in the nextphaseof the perilous times during which he wrote. This was stat-ed in his opening pages: [I will] consider the probablefuture development of trade unions both in the capitalist


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Di lemmas of Liberalism and Soc ialism 33

State and in tthe socialist State at which the unions are aim-ing.6 As we shall see, the choice of either capitalism orsocialism frames the entirety of Macphersons expositionin his thesis; and of course it was something he sharedwith many European leftist intellectuals at that time, forwhom the coming of fascism simply made urgent and in-escapable the long-sought deliverance from capitalismthrough the mass-based socialist movements (for a smallminority, through the Communist Party).In developing his central theme, Macpherson focussedon what he called the anomalous position of the un-ions resulting from the application to them of laws andjudicial decisions since 1871, the upshot of which was toleave the unions in a nether world somewhere betweenunincorporated voluntary associations and corporations.Before 1871, when only the common law was applicable,most unions and their activities were illegal pro forma,as combinations in restraint of trade, for under the com-mon law freedom of trade was interpreted as the unfet-tered operation of labor markets between the buyers andsellers of labor power. The Trade Union Act of 1871 ex-empted unions from these strictures of the common lawwhen they were pursuing certain recognized (statutory)objectives, for example striking for better wages. Unionsattained legal recognition as voluntary associations, whichalso allowed them to hold property and administer trustfunds; the Act of 1913 formalized this procedure by grant-ing the Registrar of Friendly Societies the authority toregister or certify a trade union for the purposes of theAct. There was, however, no legal compulsion to beregistered or certified; those unions that were not soregistered continued to be treated under the law as unin-corporated voluntary associations, and in fact the legalprivileges pertaining to registered status were quite minor.

In the forty years after 1871, however, union member-ship and the economic power of unions grew rapidly, andin the period before World War I the government wasforced to recognize for the first time the political powerof the union movement and the Labour Party. During the


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parliamentary debates on the Trades Disputes Act (1906),Macpherson observes, the Opposition as well as theGovernment agreed that trade unions were nowlan in-dispensable part of the industrial system and were a forcefor order and peace in industry. The main reason forthis revelation was that the unions had begun to show thatthey could provide an institutional mechanism for ireach-ing agreements on wages and working conditions and forcontrolling the outbreak of strikes and walkouts,:The Act of 1913addresseda number of specific issues,especially the formulation of rules for the collection anduse by unions of their members dues for political causes.More important, however, was the official recognition ofthe principles behind the Act of 1906, namely that.in thenegotiation among social interests the working class(represented by the trade union movement) would: be in-cluded as an acknowledged member. The parliamentarydebates at the time reveal, in Macphersons words, theconviction shared by all parties that the trade unions werenot only a necessary and accepted part of the industrialstructure but also a valuable stabilizing element amongworkers. He gives a splendid extract from a speech bythe Attorney-General of the moment on this point:

I do not think anyone who knows anything ofthe conditions of labour in this country will dis-pute that in trade unions you will find your bestclass of working men, and the more support a&lstrength you give to the bodies which unitethose men, the better it is for the stability of theindustries of this country.*

In effect, a new social contract was being fashioned.Thus another social interest had been identified, athird term, as it were, to stand between the two perma-nently warring parties of capital and labor: the public in-terest. Promoting the idea of a public interest to achievethe basis for a certain orderliness in industrial relations at-tained some prominence in the 1906parliamentary debates


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Dilemm as of Liberalism and Social ism 35on the Trade Disputes Act, where it was mooted that(inview of labors growing economic and political power) acondition of permanent and unrestrained antagonism be-tween capitalists and workers would likely destroy muchof the social and economic progress made in Britain todate. In 1906 it was not plainly stated that the solution tothis dilemma would be to have the government act as anarbiter in this matter - that would come later; but theseeds of such an idea had been planted. Macpherson in-terprets this development as ust another instance of theStateacting out of consideration for the interestsof thosewho controlled the industrial structure.At this point Macphersons routine, vague reference tothe preservation of the structure of property relationsbegins to lose its usefulness. Why is it, that in advancingthe notion of the public interest against the unrestrainedcontest between capital and labor, the state is serving theinterests of the former? Would it not have served capitalsinterests better simply to crush labors growing powers?Who could say with assurance that such an offensivewould have failed at that time? Further, looking at this fromanother angle, why was this development - which con-ceded to organized labor a permanent place at the tablewhere interest-group negotiations would occur - not alsoin the interest of both organized labor and the other typesof social interests? Certainly it would not be in labors in-terest if we presume that (1) he only truly worthy objec-tive for the labor movement consisted in becoming thedominant social interest in accordance with the traditionalsocialist vision, and (2) the new developments wouldhinder the attainment of this objective. Should we,however, consider those to be reasonable presumptions?Macphersons own text shows that over the followingquarter-century in Britain the idea of the public interestas something separate from and superior to the aims ofany other social group took hold in the theory and prac-tice of the union movement and its political arm, theLabour Party.For example, during the debateson the Emer-gency Powers Act of 1920 almost the entire Labour Party


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supported the view that the public was to be (in Mac-phersons words) looked on as a third party apart fromemployers and workers, a third party whose interest it wasthe primary duty of the State to protect.rO During thissame period the actions and policies of the trade unionmovement in Britain showed their increasingly firm com-mitment to the same path, namely, forcing the state(through their economic and political power) to ac-knowledge a duty to uphold and gradually improve a mini-mum standard of socio-economic benefits - minimumwages and working condition standards, pensions andhealth benefits, unemployment insurance,a welfare floor,greaterpublic amenities, and so forth - and to make manyof these benefits universally applicable. In other words,labor would not seek to replace capital as the dominantsocial interest, but rather gradually seek to diminish thelatters previously unchallengeable sway over the condi-tions of social life.

As Macpherson indicates, this strategy obtained evenduring the General Strike in 1926, which was not direct-ed in any way to the.supersessionof capitalism. The strikewas another tactic, an extreme one justified by the circum-stances of the moment; but it was not meant to call intoquestion labors overall strategy,which was based on co-operation with the employers organizations with a viewto rationalizing industries on a national scale and secur-ing for the workers a share in the control of industry.r*This meant participation on nationwide boards for ongo-ing consultation between capital and labor, including meas-ures to improve the economic efficiency of certainindustries. In the minds of many this was still consistentwith the eventual triumph of socialism, but in terms ofpriorities this long-term goal clearly was to be subordinateto the more immediate aims of first, protecting workersachieved standards of living and levels of social benefits,and second, bringing about further improvements in thesame.Allied to this principle was another of equal impor-tance, namely eschewing violence as a means to social


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change.With economic collapse clearly evident, the mem-bers of the annual meeting of the Trades Union Congressin 1934 passeda resolution pledging the movement to up-hold democracy and political freedoms and to work againstviolence and dictatorship. Macpherson even wonders howfirm the union movements support of the Labour Partyprogram of that period was for centralized economic plan-ning and the nationalization of basic industries and thefinancial system.Another side of this social contract is the willing-ness of the state step by step to assume responsibility foran increasing number of matters relevant to the workerssituation for which the unions themselves earlier had hadto provide, such as unemployment and health benefits,labor exchanges, legal enforcement of collective agree-ments, accident insurance, and so forth. Macpherson ob-serves that inevitably such undertakings by the stateweaken the union movement in equivalent measure,sincethe interest of the individual worker in protecting andenhancing such benefits is transferred from one arena(un-ions) to another (the political process).The great underlying significance of this step is as fol-lows. When the state,as the agent of the general interestin society, accepts responsibility for a set of conditions(for example, working conditions) which plays a large partin the lives of the citizenry, and which formerly was regard-ed from a legal standpoint as a private matter, that setof conditions is transferred from the private to the publicrealm, thereafter to become an element in the politicalprocess. While other institutions such as unions might re-tain their own commitment to improved working condi-tions, expressed by pressure-group tactics on politicians,their own members discover that now they have in manyrespects a direct interest in the outcome of political eventsbut only an indirect interest in the fate of the union move-ment. Writing in 1935 Macpherson states: The drivingforce and active spirit of the unions will not survive thischange undiminished.12There is a convenient and brief way of highlighting this


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38 C. B. Macphersonkind of development. Regarding the case at hand, we cansay that society has politicized the issue of working con-ditions. Although Macpherson does not say it in this way,the observation is consistent with his discussion. Further-more, in politicizing working conditions, society tb someextent also politicizes the issue of property relations, be-cause the former (society) acts as a limitation on the scopeof the discretionary power and authority formerly enjoyedby the latter (property relations). To be sure, one can re-ply that it is actually in the best interest of the proper-tied classes or the state to get them to go along, willinglyor not (that is, whether or not those classesare consciousof what is objectively in their own interests). This reply will hold as long as it is thought that thechoice facing all social classes s, in the final analysis, astraightforward either-or: capitalism or socialism.: In theformer, the means of production - and thus (accordingto an influential way of thinking) the determining iaspectof social and political life - are appropriated by a smallgroup as private property. The essential program in thelatter, on the other hand, is to socialize the means ofproduction, as a set of collective goods held for the benefitof all citizens, in some appropriate form - ownershipand/or management of all such goods by the state,by wor-kers co-operatives, by local communes, or in the anar-chist version by means of spontaneous associationswithout the exercise of state authority. 1Nevertheless, his either-or, so self-evident to so manymembers of various social classes in many parts Iof theglobe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hasperhaps vanished for good within much of the sphere ofadvanced or managed capitalism (WesternEurope andNorth America). If so, in contemporary society we haveneither private property in the means of production, norsocializedproperty, but rather$oliticizedproperty. Thismeans that we have neither capitalism nor socialism in thetraditional nineteenth-century senses nor are we likely tohave either in the future), but rather a hybrid form creat-ed by the long historical tension between the other two.


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Di lemmas of Liberalism and Socialism 39

I wil l outline the essential features of this hybrid in thelast chapter.It was not unreasonable for Macpherson, writing in1935, to assume that the polarized opposition betweencapitalism and socialism represented the limits of actualpolitical choices and that no other possibilities were athand. Although this is not stated directly in his thesis, itis implied throughout; for example, in the section on theBrit ish Medical Association he writes: Wherever their realinterest may lie in the future as between a capitalist or a

socialist society, it is not surprising that they should nowbelieve their interest to be with the maintenance of acapitalist society.3 Nonetheless, a third way indeed hademerged in the preceding decade, and he could hardly ig-nore the model of fascism as another arrangement forresolving the opposition between capital and labor. AsMacphersons analysis proceeds it becomes clear that thepossibility of a fascist solution in Britain is the basis forhis evident concern about the emerging social contractbetween capital, labor, and the state.As we have seen, for some time before 1935 the tradeunion movement had sought to become a full partner ina social contract whereby it would negotiate the futurestate of industrial development with the representativesof capital, under the broad authority of the state, whilethe state assumed direct responsibility for a wide rangeof programs affecting working conditions and socialbenefits. Furthermore, had the Labour Party program beensuccessful, it would have brought large sections of financeand industry under the direct ownership or control of thestate, further strengthening (through the union movementsinfluence on the party) labors hand in the tripartite rela-tion. Macpherson believed strongly that this would be anintrinsically highly unstable state of affairs, however: thiswould constitute in his terms a semi-socialist state, a po-litical order that would be unlikely to accomplish a tran-sition to full socialism.It would be unstable largely because it would enactmeasures sufficient to thoroughly frighten the existing


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Dilem ma s of Liberal ism and Social ism 41

different reasons. In the first place, it is interesting that inhis very first foray (as a young man of twenty-four years)as a commentator on issues in social and political theory,he directed his theoretical exposition so explicitly towardsa pragmatic end, namely a reckoning of the likelihood offascisms success in Britain. Second, the presuppositionsinherent in his own standpoint, as well as the way in whichhis key concepts are employed in this first major venture,are indicative of much of his later work.The main presupposition in his standpoint is the exis-tence of an either-or choice between polarized oppo-sites in so far as the basic direction of social change isconcerned. As suggested earlier, it is unsurprising that ayoung, politically-aware theorist of humane inclinationsshould, in 1935, define the issue of future directions insocial change as a choice between capitalism and social-ism. Perhaps it is equally unsurprising, given the great perilin which Western societies stood then, that a commitmentto a certain standpoint cast under such circumstancesshould form the secure and unquestioned framework fora lifetimes effort. In any case, a form of argument groundedin polarized choices is a hallmark of all of Macphersonslater work.For instance, there is the well-known contrast betweenacquisitive and developmental powers. To take another ex-ample, the title essay in his book The Rise and Fall of Eco-nomic Justice (1985) presents the present possibilities forfuture social development in terms of two basic options:a corporatist state that would destroy the democraticprocess, on the one hand, and a state based on democrat-ic forces which would take control of the capitalist stateand transcend or transform our present managed capital-ism, on the other (but we are not told what it would betransformed into). l5 Or, in the marvelous essay entitledThe Economic Penetration of Political Theory first pub-lished in 1978, the choice is represented as being betweena market-dominated versus a non-market-dominatedsociety; the former is evidently the one we live in now,but once again the nature of the latter is unspecified. To


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be sure, this type of exposition often is nothing more thanthe work of the theorists bulldozer, which is used to clearquickly the intellectual landscape so that the operatorsown new growth may flourish. Fair enough: but in the ex-amples just cited the characteristics of the alternative so-ciety indicated by his contrasting pairs are so sketchilydrawn that one scarcely knows whether it is worth nur-turing.There is another aspect in which the form and sub-stance of Macphersons masters thesis presages the dis-tinctive intellectual style of all his later work. The conceptof property relations, which is the cornerstone of his the-sis, is a theme that he returned to again and again duringhis career; for example, there are short essayson this sub-ject,written in the late 1970s.His treatment of this notionin the thesis is interesting largely as an early illustrationof how Macpherson as a political theorist would put a keyconcept into play, employing it as a touchstone orreference-point rather than as a specimen to be dissectedand minutely examined for the argument he wished to ad-vance. Despite the repeated use of the structure ofproperty relations and similar phrases throughout thethree hundred pages of the thesis, we are no closer at theend .than we were at the beginning to discovering whatthe author thinks are the constituents of this structureThere is no mention of the type of property that is beingreferred to, the relative importance of different types ofholdings (land, securities, etc.), the actual social distribu-tion of wealth, patterns of inheritance, capital investmentflows in Britain or elsewhere, or of changes over time inall these and other dimensions.Eventually his blithe indifference to detail proves:costly,In the concluding chapter Macpherson statespointedly thatthe underlying property structure . . . makes the socie-ty what it is, and then rephrases once again his;majorpresupposition: For the States rimary function is the pro-tection of the society it knows, a society based on a cer-tain structure of property relations. Until this pointreference had been made only to modern Britain. But now


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Dilem ma s of Liberalism and Social ism 43we learn that this presupposition is a general one:

It is not only in a capitalist society that the Stateexists chiefly to safeguard he existing system ofproperty relations. That is equally the functionof the State n any other type of society that wehave yet known. It is not less true of Russia to-day than of any country where society is basedon the institution of private ownership of themeans of production. l6There follows an elliptical, teasing reference to the utopi-an possibility of a future society of universal fairness inwhich no one would have an interest in altering the dis-tribution of property rights.Now, a proposition of such generality (applying to allknown types of human societies) is liable to be of limitedutility In fact, if it were to be takenat facevalue the authorsown labors in the preceding 300 pages would have beena tedious and quite unnecessary elaboration of an alreadyknown and established truth. The fact that it is neithera truth nor a truism, but rather a presupposition againstwhich the theorist, who wishes to put it into play first,should have mounted a skeptical assault, is shown soonthereafter by the author himself:

The example of the U.S.S.R. shows that thetotalitarian form is no less necessary in a newand still insecure socialist society than in a threa-tened capitalist society [such as Italy, Germany,and Austria]. For, as we have said, the State inany society is primarily the guardian of the sys-tem of property relationships in that society, andwill therefore in any society need power to theexclusion of all other associations to the extentthat that structure is threatened.

Obviously it is not self-evident that, whatever the struc-ture of property relations was in the Soviet Union in the


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19305 such a structure, whether is was menaced from out-side its borders or not, absolutely required a totalitarianstate o protect it: on the contrary, the Stalinist statecameclose to destroying the economy and society of the SovietUnion.Once again, I want to reiterate that I am not askingwhether Macpherson is right or wrong in either his ap-proach to his subject or his conclusions. Indeed it wouldbe churlish to endeavor to find fault with a graduate-schoolcomposition that the author never sought to publishRather, t is the orm of the argument itself to which I callattention. That is to say, he concept of property relations,although it appears to be the centerpiece of the argumenthere, is instead the backdrop against which the real issueof concern to him - the implications of the theory andpractice of the trade union movement for the future ofsocialism in Britain - is presented. This does not meanthat the concept itself is unimportant to the author; as not-ed earlier, Macpherson returns to the notion of propertyagain and again later. The point is, this concept is presentin the text to serve a specific function, namely to put intoplay an argument about what the history of the relationsbetween the trade unions and the state in Britain meantfor the prospects of socialism.In his thesis Macpherson was practicing the craft ofthe political theorist, a craft at which he would becomeexceptionally skillful in later years.The essenceof his tech-nique, as developed there, was to employ a key conceptor a set of polarized appositions which themselves are onlysketchily explained as a backdrop against which to exa-mine a whole range of familiar figures and ideas n the his-tory of modern political thought. The best example occursin the book which made him famous, The Political Tbe-or-y of Possessive ndividualism: the key concept of pos-sessive ndividualism is defined in only two pages owardsthe end, but in his foregoing disquisition on seventeenth-century English political thought that concept had servedas a touchstone by which to take a new measure of whatwas thought by most observers to be an already well-


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surveyed terrain.Foundations 1936-1942

Macphersons name first appeared in print in a seriesof four or five brief book reviews written for a short-livedradical magazine published in Toronto. New Frontier, amonthly magazine of literature and social criticism, wasinaugurated in April 1936 and was edited by Dorothy Live-say,Leo Kennedy, and others; a successor to Musses, t last-ed little more than a year. It was an attempt to form aunited front movement in Canada among the writersand artists communities. And it seems to have beendoomed from the start, judging from the blast of criticismagainst the whole orientation of the magazine from Gra-ham Spry, then the editor of the Canadian Forum, whichthe editors of New Frontier had the courage to publishin their inaugural issue. Spry clearly thought that any so-called united front venture sooner or later would windup under the control of the Communist PartyThe first issue also contains, among other things, shortstories about depression-era themes by A. M. Klein andMary Quayle Innis, and ashort piece by Felix Walter enti-tled The Universities and the Depression. Walter referredto a wholesale persecution of professors for ideologi-cal reasons n the United Statesat placessuch as he Univer-sity of Pittsburgh, but he also remarked that fewprofessors n Canadahave actually suffered for their teach-ing, although some have been warned and gagged.Walter says hat on the whole Canadian professors are notlikely to be radicals - but even less so are the studentsthey encounterCertainly the young Macpherson does not appear tohave been concerned about the company he was keep-ing in those days, despite the fact that he was in the firstyear of his academic career. He had a review of a bookabout Mussolini (written for a popular audience) in thefirst issue, another dealing with a pamphlet consisting ofspeeches by Soviet leaders (he did not find this to be par-


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46 C. B. Macpherson

titularly useful), and two or three others before the maga-zines demise in 1937.Of interest, if the published biblio-graphic record is accurate, Macpherson changed theorientation of his writing in 1937 and remained faithfulthereafter to this decision. After 1937 almost all his out-put dealt with matters of academic interest and was writ-ten for an academic audience; also about ninety percentof his book reviews after 1937 were published in estab-lished academic journals, the remainder appearing most-ly in established semi-academic periodicals.

His very first academic piece is, of all things, a longreview-essay on Paretos General Sociology published inthe Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Sciencein 1937 (the largest single group of his reviews would bepublished in CJEPS and one of its successors, the Cuna-dian Journal of Political Science). Here we find the firstinstance of what would become a hallmark of Macpher-sons intellectual style in his reviews, namely an extensiveand careful paraphrase of another authors arguments fol-lowed by a critical assessment. The whole is marked bya judicious and evenhanded one, the sign of one who takesseriously the liberal values of the contest of opinion andfreedom of expression. Also, it is clear that Macphersonmade a division in his writing as a whole, concentratingin his essaysand books on the development of his ownviews, including a forceful give-and-take with the direct-ly relevant secondary literature, while evaluating tiorks ofa more general interest in his field in his regular bookreviews.The review of Paretosbook includes ten full pages ofparaphrase and analysis, written in the wonderfully clearand flowing prose style that Macpherson had perfectedalready (which is no simple task when Pareto is the sub-ject). This review is interesting for its strong concludingremarks on the nature of the social sciences, by way ofhis objecting to Paretos tendentious appeal to natural-science methodologies for the study of society For in thesocial sciences, Macpherson states,the observer is a partof the total social situation all or part of which he is ob-


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Dilem ma s of Liberalism and Social ism 47

serving. His whole attitude is shaped to some extent bythe mental climate of his group and his period,. . . Thereis no such thing as complete impartiality in the socialsciences, which depend on an explicit sense of purposeand on value judgements in order to give meaning andsignificance to their endeavors. He concludes this initialacademic sally with what is evidently a statement of hisown standpoint: For to understand social problems,which are human problems, one must be of them, not out-side them. And to be of them one must share some senseof purpose.i8His next piece is equally of interest, for it shows thatMacpherson had at the outset of his career a perceptionof the developing field of political science in Canada asa whole and the place of his own specialty (political the-ory) within it. The occasion was the publication in 1938of a Festschrift for the man who had hired him, E. J. Ur-wick, edited by Innis and also containing essays by Bladenand Clark. Entitled On the Study of Politics in Canada,Macphersons essay reviewed the development of the fieldin Canadian universities, with special reference to the Brit-ish traditions that heavily influenced Canada, and tracedits gradual emancipation from other disciplines(philosophy, history, law, and economics). When he drafted his essay, there were only three courses in politics offeredat the University of Toronto - a survey course in the his-tory of political ideas, advanced political theory (contem-porary theories of the state), and the relation between thestate and the economy - but shortly thereafter threecourses on government were added.Macphersons essay included references to a wide rangeof works written since 1875 on the government and con-stitutional history of Britain, the United States, and Cana-da. He noted the comparatively late appearance inCanada of the study of government and attributed thispartly to the late development of a Canadian nationalconsciousness and partly to the fact that the similarity ofthe Canadian to the English and United States systems ofgovernment made a specifically Canadian study seem rela-


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48 C. B. Macpherson

tively unnecessary. Likewise he explained the narrowrange of Canadian political science studies until then asthe result of the domination of the field by scholars trainedin Great Britain, who were interested - as far as iCanadawas concerned - mainly in Canadas distinctive constitu-tional features, those being first, the Canadian federal sys-tem of government, and second, the fact of Dominionself-government within British imperial unityl9,He welcomed recent trends in political science for theattention they were beginning to bestow on the more con-crete aspects of political structures and processes (not-ing the influence of American scholarship in this regard).He also urged specialists to concentrate on recent de-velopments in the Canadian political system, and the areashe mentioned just happened to be those on which he hadfocussed his masters thesis: the role of the state,and itsadministrative functions and the relation between the stateand voluntary associations. In the conclusion, however,he sought to go much further and to carve out a majorrole for political theory within the field of political scienceas a whole:

For nothing in the modern state is to be fullyunderstood unless that state is seen as a productof the interaction of mens ideas and mens ac-tions and the circumstances from which thesehave arisen and with which they have been con-fronted. This understanding must be sought inthe study of the history of political ideas, con-sidered not as abstract philosophies but as, ateach stage, both cause and effect of political, so-cial, and economic situations and activity.20In fact, this study of the development in interactionof political ideas and concrete political facts offers a newprinciple of unity for the discipline of political science.Macpherson demonstrates here a clear sense of missionas a young scholar who is committed not only to: an aca-demic career, but also to bring a sense of social purpose


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to his own discipline. It is political theory itself, properlyunderstood as the study of the interaction of ideas andevents, which is to inculcate this sense of purpose by lend-ing an element of unity to an otherwise disconnected setof researches. When this prospect was announced, polit-ical science in Canada had not yet emerged as a distinc-tive discipline (it was not until 1968 that the CanadianJournal of Political Science/Revuecanadienne de sciencepolitique separated from its economics partner in CJEPS,for example). The prominent position of theory withinCanadian political science today, I suspect, is due at leastin part to Macphersons lifelong dedication to his mission.His absorption in academic pursuits is shown clearlyhere, but Macpherson did not hesitate to state at about thesame time, and equally forcefully, his belief in the needfor social change. A review in 1941 in the Canadian Jour-nal of Economics and Political Science of what appearsto be a pedestrian volume on the role of public opinionin American politics afforded him the opportunity to makethe following straightforward comment:

Democracy and dictatorship are not the staticopposites which the authors emphasis on theimportance of their differences seems to imply.The basis of the democracy we have now wasestablished two and three centuries ago by peri-ods of dictatorship or something very like it, andanother such period may be required to makeour present democracy complete or to make itserve the ends which the people desire. Whethersuch dictatorship may be required or not de-pends presumably on whether or not the re-quirements of the capitalist economy becomeincompatible with the democratic expression ofthe demands of the classes which capitalism en-genders.21

This strikes me as an uncharacteristic remark, perhapsreflecting the strain occasioned by the outbreak of the


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long-threatened war following upon a long period of eco-nomic crisis. Considering especially the rather staid pub-lication in which it was offered, I cannot help but thinkthat there is a touch of deliberate bravado in this gesture.In any case a year later Macpherson, reviewing GaetanoMoscas The Ruling CZass, returned to the same forum todefend the prospect of socialism: There is nothing [inMoscas argument] to show that, given the socialist insti-tutions of property and the absenceof classeswhose pow-er is based on ownership of property, the existence of themechanically necessary governing class is incompatiblewith a greater measure of democracy and equality.Later- that same year he returned to CJEPS with areview-essay on seven new books on political thought.One or two remarks therein are important as a correctiveto the comment on dictatorship quoted above, and asanindication of Macphersons ongoing concern with the fateof liberalism. He writes: For those at least who value thebasic elements of the liberal and democratic philosophies,it is more important now than at any time in the lasthundred years to investigate the conditions for tlheir ef-fective maintenance. The context makes it clear tha

Documents

William Leiss-C.B.macpherson_ Dilemmas of Liberalism and Socialism-New World Perspectives (1989)