C. B. Macpherson: Capitalism, Human Nature and Contemporary Democratic Theory

Abstract

This chapter aims to do two things: first, to delineate Macpherson’s relation to Marx and his ‘ethical Marxism’ through the prism of his democratic theory; and second, to demonstrate the contemporary importance of his Marxist informed democratic theory. Here the argument will be that current ‘deliberative’ and ‘radical’ democratic thinking, in not going beyond the existing liberal democratic capitalist order and in not being prepared to take ontological questions with sufficient seriousness, produces an impoverished emancipatory theory. This is because either the values or the practices of this order are explicitly or implicitly endorsed, thereby undermining the requirements of a ‘deliberative’ ontology. In the case of ‘radical’ democracy, its inveterate proceduralism, stemming from the ontology of ‘contingency’, calls into question the very possibility of democratic sustainability. Further, there is little analysis of how liberal democracy, owing to its very nature, thwarts the ‘democratic imaginary’. Recent democratic thought is theoretically disarming for anyone who sees the relation between capitalism and human emancipation as profoundly problematic.