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Models Of The Person
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Over the last several years, C. B. Macpherson has attempted to present a far-reaching critique of the theories underlying and justifying capitalist social systems. Beginning with a critique of the classical theories of capitalism, he has extended it to the later formulations offered by j. S. Mill and T. H. Green, along with the most recent formulation offered by john Rawls. The guiding thread throughout his writing has been the critique of the model of persons which underpin the various formulations of capitalist theory. What I would like to do in this paper is to present what I think to be a stronger defense of Macpherson's argument than Macpherson has himself given, since I think it can be shown that at certain crucial points his argument is necessarily flawed for the point which he is trying to make.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1980
References
1 Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar
2 Macpherson, C. B. Democratic Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar
3 Macpherson, C. B.. “Rawls's Models of Man and Society,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3 (1973), pp. 341–347.Google Scholar
4 Thomas Hill Green would be an example of this type of theorist: cf. Green, T. H. The Principles of Political Obligation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).Google Scholar
5 cf. Macpherson, Democratic Theory, pp. 40-52.
6 Ibid., p. 75.
7 This distinction is taken from Dworkin, Ronald “Justice and Rights”, in his Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 150–183.Google Scholar
8 Ronald Dworkin, for example, argues that Rawls's theory does this. For Dworkin, the basic right for Rawls's theory is the right to equality, and the “original position” in Rawls is a “device for testing these competing arguments” vis à vis competing conceptions of equality: cf. Dworkin, Ibid.
9 This distinction is taken from Puccetti, Roland Persons (London: MacMillan, 1968).Google Scholar
10 Cf. Rawls, John. “The Independence of Moral Theory” in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 58 (1974-5), pp. 5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Macpherson, C. B. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): cf. especially pp. 50–64.Google Scholar
12 C. B. Macpherson, “Rawls's Models of Man and Society”.
13 This distinguishes him from Marx. Marx is not concerned so much with Justice or even with the ideal social order as much as he is concerned with a flourishing of a particular kind of person, i.e., the person who produces free from need to satisfy human needs. Marx's major concern is with this — the flourishing of the “species” — and his approval of a particular form of social order (communism) derives from his belief that only in such an order will the development of the species flourish. For a very good explication and defense of this reading of Marx, cf. Rainone, Francine Marx and !he Classical Tradition in Moral Philosophy (Dissertation, Georgetown University, 1978).Google Scholar
14 C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, p. 114.
15 Ibid., p. 100.
16 C. B. Macpherson, “Rawls's Models of Man and Society”, p. 347.
17 Ibid., p. 345.
18 “Can we say that his model of the well-ordered or Just society is what it is because his model of man is a bourgeois model? We are brought back to the question of his model of man”, Ibid., p. 345.
19 This is Dworkin's conception of equality: cf. Dworkin, “What Rights Do We Have” in Dworkin, op. cit., pp. 266-278.