Download capitalism, contextualisation and the political theory of possessive

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CAPITALISM, CONTEXTUALISATION AND THE POLITICAL
THEORY OF POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM
Geoff Kennedy
Durham University
Abstract:
This article critically assesses C. B. Macpherson’s contribution to historical
approaches to the study of political theory and his thesis of ‘possessive
individualism’ in seventeenth-century English political thought. While
Macpherson’s work remains highly problematic on both counts, the spirit of his
interpretation remains significant. The article concludes with some
methodological principles necessary to reinvigorate a social interpretation of
political thought that seeks to contextualise seventeenth-century English political
theory within the context of capitalist development.
Keywords: capitalism, property, individualism, bourgeois, liberty.
C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
enjoys a similar status to that of Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of
Liberty: both theses have been subjected to substantive and
sustained criticism to the point where few scholars unconditionally
associate themselves with them anymore; but both theses continue
to serve as the thematic entry-point for many studies in the history
of English political thought and in studies in concepts of liberty.
Published in 1962, Macpherson’s thesis of possessive
individualism presented a provocative interpretation of seventeenthcentury English political thought. The basic thesis argues that most
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of the major political thought of the seventeenth century rests upon
a foundational ‘bourgeois’ ontology, which is said to form the ‘root’
of nineteenth century liberal-democratic theory. These ontological
roots are contained in a conception of freedom stemming from the
notion of ‘self-propriety’ that was understood to refer to one’s
ownership over themselves and the fruits of their labour. A series of
‘rights’ were then deduced from this conception of self-propriety
that are invested within the individual in ways that ‘freed’ them
from any moral obligation to the society within which that
individual lived. As a result of this, Macpherson argues,
Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other
as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have
acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange
between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device
for the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an
orderly relation of exchange.1
This ‘possessive individualism’ leads to the creation of a ‘thin’
bourgeois subject that is motivated by nothing other than narrow
self-interest, and doctrines of morality and virtue become
meaningless.
In terms of the political theory of the period, all of the major
contributions fall under this rubric of possessive individualism. The
seventeenth century is characterised by a kind of bourgeois
consensus that anticipates the Lockean liberal consensus articulated
by Louis Hartz for eighteenth-century America.2 The difference, of
course, is that Macpherson’s possessive individualism reflects – yet
obscures – the underlying class relations constitutive of England’s
possessive market society. What is more, English political thought
of the seventeenth century lays the foundation for the problems
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1
2
Macpherson 1962, p. 3.
Hartz 1955.
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faced by nineteenth-century British liberalism: namely, how to
ensure social cohesion in a possessive market society in the context
of the enfranchisement of the working class. Thus, Macpherson
draws a lineage of ‘bourgeois’ political thought from the protoliberal work of Hobbes to the bourgeois utilitarianism of Bentham.
The differences between Hobbesian absolutism and materialism,
Harringtonian republicanism, Leveller radicalism and Lockean
liberalism are flattened out, and a line of continuity is drawn
between them and Benthamite utilitarianism: all of these different
forms of political thought are essentially different variations of an
underlying political theory of possessive individualism.3
Macpherson’s critics are legion, and most aspects of his thesis of
possessive individualism have been subject to substantive critiques.4
Indeed, the unpopularity of Macpherson’s work today fits within a
larger context of the repudiation of ‘social interpretations’ of
historical phenomena altogether, be they the great revolutions of
the early modern and modern periods, or the development of
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3 Macpherson writes: ‘Locke completed an edifice that rested on Hobbes’s
sure foundations. Locke’s other contribution, his attaching to this structure
a façade of traditional natural law, was by comparison unimportant. It
made the structure more attractive to the taste of his contemporaries. But
when tastes changed, as they did in the eighteenth century, the façade of
natural law could be removed, by Hume and Bentham, without damage to
the strong and well-built utilitarian structure that lay within. Hobbes, as
amended by Locke in the matter of the self-perpetuating sovereign, thus
provided the main structure of English liberty theory’. Macpherson 1962,
p. 270.
4 Some of the more influential criticisms of Macpherson’s thesis are:
Thomas 1965; Wood 1980; Hampsher-Monk 1976; Davis 1968; Wood
and Wood 1997; Pocock 1977; Tully 1980; Wood 1984. This list is by no
means exhaustive.
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‘modern’ society, in either its bourgeois or capitalist manifestations.5
In general, attempts to situate political ideas within a social context
have been associated with forms of ‘reductionism’, treating ideas as
functional responses to underlying social forces that have no causal
role to play in politics.6
I would like to assess two aspects of Macpherson’s work: his
approach to historical contextualisation in the history of political
thought and his conceptualisation of a seventeenth-century England
as a ‘possessive market society’. While both aspects of Macpherson’s
work suffer from some serious shortcomings, the subsequent
abandonment of a social history of political thought that eschews
any attempt to situate political thought within a social context
constituted by social property relations, is throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. The problem with Macpherson’s work I argue,
does not inherently stem from a general attempt to relate the
development of seventeenth-century political theory to its social
context, but rather, from his attempt to define the relationship
between capitalism and political theory as an ontological one based
on what he considers to be the essential subjective criteria derived
from an abstractly defined possessive market society. This is a
problem because, as I argue below, the seventeenth century remains
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On challenges to the social interpretation of the English Revolution/Civil
War, see: Zagorin 1959; Russell 1973; Maclachlan 1996. On the
refutation of the development of a ‘bourgeois’ or capitalist society in
seventeenth century England, see Clark 1985; 1986; Pocock 1985. On
historical ‘revisionism’ that rejects social history in general, see Burgess
1990. In the history of political thought, the challenge to the social
interpretation has come largely from the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ that
stresses the autonomy of political language. See Skinner 1969; Pocock
1971.
6 Skinner includes Marxism in his critique of Namierite approaches that
treat political ideas as mere rationalisations of material interests and
motives, thereby denuding political ideas of any causal role in political life.
5
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a period of social transition that is best understood empirically and
historically; one in which intellectual constructs and discourses were
contested and re-articulated. More specifically, it is the way in
which Macpherson attempts to socially contextualise seventeenthcentury political thought and the way he characterises his possessive
market society that is the fundamental problem. His approach to
the issue of capitalism and political thought ultimately leads him to
subordinate a variety of different contributions to seventeenthcentury political discourse to the totalising rubric of ‘possessive
individualism.’
Contextualising Political Thought
Macpherson’s approach to historical context seeks to relate political
thought to the tacit ‘social assumptions’ of the author, assumptions
that were shared with the intended audience but were never
explicitly elaborated in the text. In order to uncover the real
meaning of a text, therefore, a historical analysis of the relationship
between prevailing ideological assumptions and the social relations
of that society is necessary. Meaning, therefore, cannot be
understood solely in terms of references to the text itself. At the
time, at least within the North American context of political theory,
this was a rather provocative statement to make, as the ‘history’ of
political thought firmly ensconced within the sub-field of political
theory, which defined itself increasingly in relation to the discipline
of political philosophy and largely dismissed the significance of
history.7 Macpherson’s claim that the persuasiveness of a political
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John Gunnell has argued that political theory, as a subfield of American
political science, was largely the creation of German émigré intellectuals
working within the tradition of German idealist philosophy (e.g., Strauss,
Voeglin, Arendt, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer) who migrated to the
United States during the rise to power of the Nazis. Political theory as a
sub-discipline was created after 1945 and provoked the behaviouralist
7
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argument does not rely solely on logic – and that the standards of
‘logic’ must also be subject to historicisation – but rather on the
ability to tap into unstated social assumptions that are necessarily
historically specific, was a significant challenge to those who
believed that the meaning of political theory is intrinsic to the text
itself.8
The question remains: how do we excavate the unstated
assumptions upon which this approach to contextualisation
depends? Macpherson provides us with some insights. The first two
conditions are necessary but insufficient for imputing to a theorist a
particular social assumption. The first is that it was a common
assumption of the period to the extent that the theorist feels that it
does not need to be explicitly stated, or that it has become a kind of
‘common sense’ to the point that he is unconscious of holding that
assumption (of course, how we ascertain whether something has
attained the status of ‘common sense’ is not sufficiently addressed).
The second is that it fills a logical gap in the argument, thereby
reconciling a contradiction or redressing an incoherent sequence of
argumentation. But these two conditions are not enough; the third
condition is that the social assumption is ‘mentioned or used by the
writer in some context other than the one in which we think it is
required’.9
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revolution as a response. The increasingly philosophical identity of
‘political theory’ represented a qualitative break from the more historically
informed approaches of the pre-war period, such as the work of George
Sabine and J. W. Allen. These earlier approaches blended together the
study of political ideas and the historical development of political
institutions. As a consequence, historical context was essential to the study
of the discipline.
8 The ‘textualist’ position was most notably represented by the ‘esoteric’
method of Leo Strauss and his followers, as well as those working within
the tradition of analytical political philosophy.
9 Macpherson 1962, p. 5.
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Yet, Macpherson never successfully articulated or executed an
historical approach to contextualisation. The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism contains little in the way of methodological guidelines;
there is no real discussion of the significance of history, nor is there
any discussion of the historical method as a tool of interpretation.
Indeed, there is very little discussion of how to go about excavating
the tacit ‘social assumptions’ that are so crucial to interpreting the
text.10 While the last condition of Macpherson’s criteria may
require straightforward methods of research (e.g., assessing the
entire corpus of a political theorist and subjecting them to rigorous
analytical critique), it remains unclear how we go about ascertaining
whether a social assumption is in fact commonly held within a
particular historical period. To be able to identify a social
assumption requires us to engage in the kind of historical
contextualisation that allows us to construct a body of meaning that
is shared by the relevant audience. It needs to be evidence based. At
the very least, this requires the kind of intellectual history conducted
by proponents of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’. Without an
understanding of the dominant intellectual context, we cannot
know what social assumptions are common enough to be
assumptions in the first place. This kind of intellectual
contextualisation is lacking in Macpherson’s work. The problem
with emphasising the importance of unstated assumptions as the
basis of the context lies precisely in the fact that they are unstated:
an absence of evidence is not enough to disprove the connection
between the theory and the assumption, and the argument relies
largely on the strength of the logic employed to make the argument
in the first place. Ironically, Macpherson falls victim to the same
kind of problem that applies to the esoteric method of Strauss: the
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Indeed, Macpherson does not seriously engage with the insights of the
social historians (Marxist and non-Marxist alike) writing in the same
period. See Hobsbawm 1997.
10
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235!
lack of empirical evidence proves the existence of the hidden
meaning, and in the end, we are convinced on the basis of the
persuasiveness of the logic as opposed to the evidence.11
Indeed, one of the problems with Macpherson’s method of
contextualisation – to which I will return below – is that it relies for
its context on a self-acknowledged ideal type of a possessive market
society that precludes our ability to establish any concrete
relationships between the political thought being studied and that
social context. One of the virtues of Skinner’s methodological forays
of the late 60s and early 70s was to emphasise the importance, not
of the unstated assumptions of political theorists or the hidden
meaning in their text, but rather of the stated intentions of the
authors themselves.
More problematically, however, is the idea that a political theory
can be rendered coherent or complete by reference to an un-stated
social assumption. Filling in the gaps and addressing the ‘silences’ of
a political theorist’s work can be a very problematic methodological
precept and result in the creation of associations that cannot be
supported by the evidence. This is a point that was initially made by
Skinner.12 To presume an overarching coherence to a political
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The irony here is that, although one of Macpherson’s methodological
targets is the ‘textualist’ political philosophy of Leo Strauss that is
predicated upon the idea that all political theorists conceal their true
meaning due to the prospect of persecution – a practice referred to as
‘esoteric writing’ – Macpherson is making a similar case that the meaning
of political thought is to be found not in what is said, but what is hidden
from view. The difference between the two is that for Strauss, the meaning
of the theory is deliberately hidden within the text, for Macpherson it is
unintentionally concealed due to the belief that the intended audience
already knows what is being said. In both cases, it is extremely difficult to
empirically verify the interpretation being produced (indeed, Macpherson
is somewhat sympathetic to Strauss’s notion of esoteric writing).
12 Skinner 1969.
11
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theorist’s work is – in a sense – to imply that their work is immune
to the contingent political conflicts and developments of their own
time; it is to imply a certain detachment that a historical approach
to contextualisation is meant to reject.13
Having said all this, I think there is something significant in the
attempt to historicise political thought within a social context as
opposed to merely an intellectual context. Those who sympathise
with Macpherson’s work remain convinced that – despite the
problems of the thesis itself – there is value in attempting to relate
the meaning of political theory to a larger social context defined by
social relationships that form an integral part of the relations of
power that are constitutive of politics in any particular society. The
task, however, is to articulate and practice an approach to
contextualisation that doesn’t collapse political thought into the
social in ways that are reductionist. Thus, a more historically
informed approach to social contextualisation needs to go further
beyond the text than Macpherson is willing to go: it needs to
establish evidence-based linkages between the ideas being
articulated and the social processes at work within the social
context. This is no small feat, and will be discussed further in the
final section.
Capitalism as ‘Possessive Market Society’
The second aspect of Macpherson’s work I want to discuss is his
conceptualisation of a ‘possessive market society’ as the requisite
context of seventeenth century English political thought.
Macpherson characterised England as a ‘possessive market society’,
distinguishing it – on the basis of a number of significant factors –
from what he called a ‘status’ or ‘customary’ society on the one
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See Hampsher-Monk’s critique of Macpherson’s reading of the Levellers
for an example of this point.
13
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237!
hand, and a ‘simple market society’ on the other. A customary
society is characterised by a number of factors that make it
antithetical to a modern, possessive market society: all producers
are tied to the land; labour – and the rewards stemming from
labour – is authoritatively allocated on the basis of status; and
absolute and unconditional rights to private property are absent
from the economy, preventing the development of a market in land.
A simple market economy – while possessing some of the necessary
conditions for the development of a possessive market economy – is
not sufficient for its development and existence; it remains a society
dominated by petty commodity producers who remain in possession
or ownership of their own means of subsistence despite the fact that
their economic activity is oriented towards the market. In other
words, while a simple market economy is characterised by a market
in goods, it lacks a market in land and labour. In contrast to this, a
possessive market society is characterised by the full development of
markets in land and labour, thereby resulting in the polarisation of
society along the lines of owners of capital and owners of labour
power. Thus, the existence of proletarianisation is a key factor in
defining the nature of a possessive market society.
Given this presumption, Macpherson then argues that English
society –!being a possessive market society –!was primarily divided
along class lines that pitted a class of proletarianised wage-labourers
(constituting the majority) against the small class of capitalists. In
the context of this possessive market society, a number of social
assumptions are then prevalent amongst the elite. First, that the
labour of the wage-labourer is not rightly considered to be his
property despite the prevalence of conceptions of self-propriety.
Secondly, that the working class lacks the rational capacity to make
informed political decisions that allow them to be considered part of
the body politic. Given that wage-labourers are dependent on the
wills of others as a means of selling their labour power in return for
the wages necessary to procure their means of subsistence, they
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cannot be said to be ‘free’ in the sense articulated in the discourse of
self-propriety prevalent in the seventeenth century. These social
assumptions about labour and the labouring class are identical to
those shared by nineteenth-century liberals writing within the
context of the development of industrial capitalism and constitute
the most enduring problem of liberalism.
The problem with Macpherson’s ideal type of possessive market
society, however, is precisely its idealism: it represents an ideal type
of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism superimposed on
seventeenth-century England. What is striking about Macpherson’s
discussion of possessive market society is the extent to which it is
understood as an abstraction rather than as a depiction of the
characteristics of an actually existing market society. Macpherson is
aware of this, pointing out that the models employed in his study
‘would not be sufficient or appropriate for general sociological or
historical analysis’.14 Indeed, the model of a ‘possessive market
society’ is derived from the works of Sombart, Weber and Marx and
identified within the works of Hobbes, the Levellers, Harrington
and Locke. In fact, Macpherson argues that his model of a
possessive market society ‘does not require any particular theory of
the origin or development of such society. It is not concerned about
the primacy or relative importance of various factors such as Marx’s
primary accumulation, Weber’s rational capital accounting, or
Sombart’s spirit of enterprise. Its use does not require acceptance of
the whole of any of these contentious theories’.15
The significance of this is that the possessive market society –
despite Macpherson’s allusions to the contrary –! is depicted in
rather static terms and is divorced from the politics of the period.
The glossing over of the differences between Marx’s and Weber’s
accounts of the development of capitalism removes from the picture
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14
15
Macpherson 1962, p. 47.
Macpherson 1962, p. 48.
Capitalism, Contextualism and Possessive Individualism
239!
the profound social and political struggles that were bound up with
the transition to capitalism –! both at the level of class conflict
between landlords and peasants and at the level of intra-class
conflict between members of the landed class itself. For Weber, the
development of ‘modern’ capitalism resulted from the development
of a particular ethic peculiar to forms of Puritanism; it resulted in a
particular kind of attitude towards time, work and reward, one that
rested on a religiously inspired form of asceticism.16 For Marx, the
origin of capitalism was an intrinsically violent process entailing the
dispossession of the peasantry. This history, Marx wrote in Capital,
‘the history of their [the peasants] expropriation, is written in the
annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’.17 Thus, despite
seventeenth century England being a century characterised by a
civil war, two revolutions and persistent forms of social conflict over
landed property in the form of enclosures, none of these play a
prominent role in Macpherson’s model of a possessive market
society.
There is another sense, however, in which the relationship
between the context of a possessive market society and the political
theory of possessive individualism is rather static. While the context
of a possessive market society is crucial for an understanding of the
theory, the assessment of the theory remains a largely philosophical
and intra-textual analysis with very little sustained relationship to
the history that is considered to be important for illuminating the
meaning of the theory. A possessive market society is referred to
only to validate the existence of unstated social assumptions; there is
little, if any, reference made to the actual historical process of
capitalist development. One critic has gone so far as to argue that
Macpherson’s ‘basic argument tends to be circular, for the initial
premise of a market society seems to be derived from those very
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16
17
Weber 2002.
Marx 1973, p. 875.
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Intellectual History and Political Thought
traits of the political thought of Hobbes and Locke that he proposes
to identify, namely characteristics of a market mentality, “possessive
individualism”’.18
The bracketing off from the analysis of the actual social struggles
and power relations bound up with the development of capitalism
leads Macpherson to attempt to define the relationship between
capitalism and political theory as an ontological one, based on what
he considers to be the essential criteria of an abstractly defined
possessive market society.19 As mentioned above, Macpherson
underscored the significance of conceptions of ‘self-propriety’ or
‘self-ownership’ as the foundation for this market conception of
man. This conception of self-propriety enjoyed a dual status in
Macpherson’s thesis: it could exist either as an independent
postulate, or it could be deduced from two other propositions –!
namely that one’s ‘humanity’ stems from ‘freedom from
dependence on the wills of others’ which subsequently entails a
conception of freedom defined in terms of engagement in voluntary
relations out of self-interest. From this basis, Macpherson makes a
number of theoretical moves. First, he suggests that conceptions of
freedom as independence, voluntary self-interest, self-propriety and
the freedom to alienate one’s labour are all contained –!explicitly or
implicitly –! within a conception of society as a ‘series of market
relations’. The ‘concept of market relations necessarily implies
individual freedom as defined in terms of voluntary self-interest,’
conceptions of self-propriety and alienable labour; and finally, the
‘postulate that human society consists of market relations necessarily
implies that an individual’s humanity is a function of his freedom’ as
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Wood 1984, p. 8.
This is a problem because the seventeenth century remains a period of
social transition that is best understood empirically and historically; one in
which intellectual constructs and discourses were contested and rearticulated.
18
19
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241!
independence from the wills of others.20 The second move is
therefore to reduce morality to a function of market relations.
Establishing an essentialist relationship between the political
theory of possessive individualism and capitalism opens him up for
the severe criticism levelled at him by his critics: and breaking the
link between the two denies the relationship, thereby necessitating
the abandonment of any social interpretation of political thought.
For example, the inclusion of the idea of freedom as independence
from the will of others into the notion of possessive individualism
neglects to take into account the contested nature of
‘independence.’ Freedom as independence need not imply the
bourgeois notion of being free to voluntarily pursue one’s own
interest; it is also perfectly compatible with oligarchic notions of
‘republicanism’ that can trace their lineage back to Roman
antiquity and are perfectly compatible with the existence of a
traditional landowning aristocracy.21 But freedom as independence
also has a place in the popular struggles of peasants against the
exploitation of that very same landowning aristocracy; the idea of
being free from dependent forms of labour –! be it corvée labour,
labour services stemming from ‘servile tenures’ and even wagelabour –! has a long tradition dating back to the Athenian
democracy.22 Indeed, the ideological significance of the social
struggles between peasants seeking their freedom and the landlords
attempting to maintain their dominance over those very peasants
was noted by Rodney Hilton –! the Marxist social historian of the
medieval period –! as a key development in the history of English
conceptions of freedom.23
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Macpherson 1962, pp. 263-4.
Skinner 1998; Pettit 1997.
22 Wood 1988.
23 Hilton 1973.
20
21
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Intellectual History and Political Thought
This approach to the issue of capitalism and political theory also
leads Macpherson to downplay certain aspects of seventeenthcentury political thought that do not fit the model of possessive
individualism or that may indeed be antithetical to the ‘bourgeois’
society that it represents. For example, the emphasis that
Macpherson places on the role of individualistic notions of selfinterest at the expense of civic-minded values leads him to
downplay the enduring significance of conceptions of virtue and
‘manners’ as an antidote to vice and corruption. As Pocock
demonstrates, there exists within seventeenth-century English
political thought a political language rooted in the civic humanism
of Renaissance republicanism that exalts the civic mindedness of the
virtuous citizen acting in the interests of the common good often
against his own interest.24 Not only is this not a manifestation of
possessive individualism, it is, according to Pocock, fundamentally
anti-bourgeois.
There is also a sense in which, as James Tully has pointed out,
the thesis of possessive individualism ‘misidentifies the primary
problems’ that were being addressed by seventeenth century
English theorists.25 Even if we accept that aspects of Macpherson’s
possessive market society were reflective of English society in the
seventeenth century, it is not necessarily the case that the political
theorists of Macpherson’s study were primarily concerned with the
socio-economic problems identified by him (e.g., Hobbes and
obligation in a capitalist society, Locke and unlimited accumulation,
etc). Reliance on an abstract model of a possessive market society as
opposed to an historical examination of English society leads
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Pocock 1975. However, Pocock’s work is equally problematic in the
way in which he has relegated any vestiges of a ‘bourgeois’ political
thought to the insignificant margins of English society during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
25 Tully 1993.
24
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243!
Macpherson to focus on particular problems that may not have
been of primary concern amongst theorists of the time. By
overstating the extent to which capitalism had developed in the
seventeenth century (as well as the ways in which it developed),
Macpherson may have been throwing up the wrong issues –!or, to
put it more accurately, framing the issues in the wrong way. As
historians working within the Cambridge tradition have
demonstrated, it is more often the case that seventeenth-century
political theorists were concerned with political problems that were
thrown up by more contingent and immediately identifiable
political crises such as the Civil War, the Regicide, the Engagement
Controversy of the Revolution, the Protectorate, the Restoration,
the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution.
To say this, however, is not to suggest that these political events
are disconnected from a broader social context. To do so would be
to embrace what one scholar has referred to as an ‘episodic’
conception of history, in which a series of contingent political events
exist independently of any notion of long term socio-historical
processes of development.26 This is the task of a renewed social
interpretation: connecting the social to the political in a way in
which the former forms part of the context in non-reductionist, and
non-teleological ways.
Agrarian Capitalism and the Social History of
Political Thought
In the broader context of the history of political thought,
Macpherson’s thesis represents an influential contribution to the
prevailing ‘bourgeois paradigm’ that seeks to explain and interpret
the development of European ‘modernity’. The general outline of
the bourgeois paradigm is one that associates the development of
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26
Nederman 1985.
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capitalism with the ‘rise’ of a commercially oriented bourgeoisie
(either mercantilist or industrial, depending upon the particular
contribution) against the entrenched interests of the landed, feudal
aristocracy. From this a number of dichotomies are brought to the
forefront of the analysis: the tensions between feudal landed
property and mobile bourgeois property; the socio-economic
tensions between commercially oriented town and agrarian oriented
countryside; and, in Macpherson’s case, the ideological
confrontation between traditional doctrines of communitarianism
versus the liberal doctrines of bourgeois individualism.27 Given the
agricultural aspects of capitalist development that made England
unique in Europe, England has always occupied a distinctive
position within this paradigm. Yet, persistent attempts have been
made to incorporate the English case into this larger pan-European
framework of bourgeois social, economic and political development.
In this sense, Macpherson’s Marxian thesis accorded well with the
prevailing liberal interpretations of European modernity at the
time, and were subsequently subject to the same revisionist critique
from which it has never fully recovered. Indeed, as one sympathetic
critic has observed, despite the new ground that Macpherson broke,
the book ‘proved to be little more than a detour from the
mainstream of Anglo-American scholarship’.28
However, sympathetic critics of Macpherson have sought to
further pursue the importance of the development of capitalism on
the character of seventeenth-century English political thought. I
would argue that despite all of the flaws, Macpherson was right to
emphasise the importance of the development of something we
would today identify as ‘capitalism’ to the development of
seventeenth century English political theory. As Gordon Schochet
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For a critical overview of the ‘bourgeois paradigm’, see Wood 2002 and
Comninel 1987.
28 Wood 2008, p. 6.
27
Capitalism, Contextualism and Possessive Individualism
245!
once wrote, Macpherson was ‘almost right –! but not at all for the
right reasons.’29 The task then, is to move beyond Macpherson
while working within the broad themes that motivated his work. To
start with, the entry point needs to be reframed: it is not a matter of
attempting to demonstrate how unstated bourgeois assumptions
illuminate the political thought of the period, but rather, raising a
number of questions that treats both capitalist development and
political theorising as historical and politically contested
phenomena. The questions become: how did capitalism develop as
a form of socio-economic organisation? How did it engender new
forms of social conflict? How did the struggles around this
development result in the re-articulation of pre-existing concepts
and discourses as well as the introduction of new concepts and
discourses? Can we then identify what is ideologically requisite for
the development and reproduction of capitalism?
The point is that we do need a conceptualisation of capitalist
development –! as the relevant social context –! that is not just
‘sufficient or appropriate for general sociological or historical
analysis’, but the product of sociological and historical analysis, if we
are to engage in the kind of social interpretation of the history of
political thought proposed by Macpherson. It is here that I would
like to conclude with some suggestions as to how to reinvigorate a
social interpretation of (English) political thought after the
methodological challenge of the so-called Cambridge School.
First, any method of historical contextualisation must be
evidence based, building on the intentions of the authors. Unstated
assumptions must be rejected as being unverifiable and potentially
dangerously misleading. Political associations between political
theorists and relevant ideological movements must be established
through historical and biographical research. The same must be
said for conceptualising the social context: the use of ideal types
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29
Schochet 1989, p. 506.
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Intellectual History and Political Thought
constructed from a variety of different theoretical sources is not a
sufficient method of historical contextualisation. Rather, an
engagement with social history is necessary if we are to have a more
accurate picture of the complexity of the social context as well as its
conflictual nature.
Secondly, building on the first point, historical contextualisation
must treat mediating political institutions (such as the state) and
social conflicts as constitutive of the context of social relations. It is not
enough to treat them merely as a backdrop, as contingent events
that serve to motivate the writing of political thought; nor is it
acceptable to neglect them outright as Macpherson tends to do.
The point is to conceptualise a social context that brings together
political institutions, social conflicts and social property relations in
a way that emphasises their interrelationships.
Thirdly, and this pertains specifically to the way Macpherson
approached the phenomenon of capitalism and its relationship to
political thought, we must avoid the tendency to conceptualise
capitalism at the ontological level, which then necessitates certain
essentialising conceptions of the self that become identified as
defining aspects of a bourgeois ideology. Macpherson tends to
deduce the meaning of English political thought from unstated
social assumptions that are reflective of a fully formed bourgeois
subjectivity that precludes an analysis based on the fact that
capitalism, as a form of social organisation, emerged out of an
open-ended process of social conflict and struggle. The bourgeois
subject is the result of these struggles.
Fourthly, and at a more general level, an attempt to relate
English political thought to the development of capitalism must
reject the ‘bourgeois paradigm’ and the forms of political thought
Capitalism, Contextualism and Possessive Individualism
247!
that have been associated with its ascent to dominance.30 In the case
of England, the agrarian origins of capitalism and its relationship to
the economic transformation of a section of the landed aristocracy
needs to be taken into account, along with the implications this has
for the development of possessive individualist conceptions of
society and the self; the persistence of traditional conceptions of
moral conduct, personal virtue, etc. and its compatibility with
aristocratic forms of agrarian capitalism. This is not the appropriate
place to discuss the debates regarding the agrarian capitalism thesis;
the point to be highlighted is that the development of capitalism
occurred not through a displacement of the aristocracy and landed
property, but rather through the transformation of a significant
fraction of the aristocracy and the transformation of the social
property relations existing between these landlords, their tenant
farmers and the growing class of wage-labourers that came to work
the land. What this means for any attempt to situate English
political thought within a social context of capitalism is that it
rejects the association of capitalist development with the rise to
dominance of a classic ‘bourgeoisie’ and the subsequent association
of capitalism with ‘liberal’ or ‘proto-liberal’ notions of political
thought.31 Rather, it accommodates the development of an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The most important contribution to this literature is Robert Brenner
1987a; 1987b. The thesis of agrarian capitalism has been most forcefully
articulated by Wood 2002. See also Comninel 2000.
31 It is a testament to the persistence of the ‘bourgeois paradigm’ that Perry
Anderson, in his account of the development of English capitalism, can
characterise it as the result of an incomplete bourgeois revolution that has
been ‘over-determined’ by aristocratic accretions. In a word, Anderson
argues that while the agrarian aspects of English capitalism are an
incontrovertible fact, they are the peculiar result of a bourgeois revolution
that deviates from the ‘norm’ of what a bourgeois revolution is supposed to
be (the model being the French revolution, which occurs after the English).
Anderson therefore spends most of his time characterising English
30
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‘aristocratic capitalism’ that can more effectively allow for the
persistence of aristocratic values and an aristocratic culture that has
remained dominant in English political culture up to the present
day (not to mention the persistent importance of landed property
within English political thought).32 At an empirical level, then, it can
more effectively account for the fact that ‘bourgeois political
economy’ did not supplant moral philosophy, but rather
supplemented it, insofar as the classic contributions to moral
philosophy were often penned by the same authors who broke new
ground in political economy.33
The work being done on the basis of this understanding of the
development of English capitalism has not only prompted a rethink
of the way in which political theory is related to an historical
context, it has prompted a rethink of the conceptual aspects of
capitalist development.34
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capitalism as an aberration, rather than as a socially specific process of
capitalist development. Aristocratic political culture and ideology,
therefore, are a testament to the ‘backward’ nature of English
development. This sparked the polemical response of Thompson.
32 A recent attempt to situate Hobbes within this context of aristocratic or
agrarian capitalism has been formulated by Michael Bray who argues that
‘the general trend of Macpherson’s argument only becomes more
compelling if the rise of a ‘bourgeois’, or ‘market’, society in England is
explained not simply the liberation of a nascent bourgeois class but by the
rise of a capitalist aristocracy’. Bray 2007, p. 60.
33 The classic example here is Adam Smith, who wrote both The Wealth of
Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments. For an account of Smith’s work
within the context of agrarian capitalism, see McNally 1988.
34 Wood 1991.
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249!
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