The Political Thought of C.B. Macpherson by Frank Cunningham

Author:Frank Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319949208
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

All-Encompassing Marketization

Just as markets have a way of spilling out of economic transactions to influence people’s values and interactions with one another, so do they expand, cancer like, to affect all aspects of society. An obvious example is the transformation of what had once been thought of as amenities or social services valuable in themselves into commodities: university students become clients; homes become real estate investments; cities become global competitors; ideas become marketable possessions. Macpherson addresses two other ways that market conceptions extend beyond simple exchange, one at the dawn of capitalism, the other a twentieth-century development.

Self-ownership. The first of these is the notion that among the marketable commodities people possess are themselves, that is, the notion discussed in chapter five of self-ownership. This has its origins in the seventeenth century as part of a justification for the conception of property as a universal right of exclusion. One consequence of belief in self-ownership is to encourage an atomistic picture of humanity. Macpherson sees it as a central component of the culture of possessive individualism: ‘The individual is proprietor of his own person, for which he owes nothing to society.’ (PI, 269) Bowles notes the affinity of this idea with Hobbes’s metaphor of people as ‘sprung out of the earth and suddenly (like mushrooms), come to full maturity, without any kind of engagement with each other’ (Hobbes 1968 [1642], viii.1), which in the manner of neoclassical economic theory ‘abstracts from the ways that society shapes the development of its members in favor of “taking individuals as they are.”’ (Bowles 1998, 75)

The most far-reaching effect of this self-conception is that people come to see their talents not as abilities the exercise of which is intrinsically rewarding and potentially useful to the societies that produce them but as instruments to serve their self-interest. This displaces an alternative orientation where people see themselves as trustees of their abilities rather than their private owners. This conception represents a shift in how people regard their endeavours. Arguing this case, Bowles maintains that people enjoy the exercise of their talents less when they engage in activities ‘as a means toward an extrinsic good, such as being paid’ than when they engage in it with no such reward. (ibid., 91) A related effect is that ‘the relations of dependence between persons have the appearance of impersonal relations between things,’ that is, people as property are subject to what Marx called commodity fetishism. (DT, 241; Marx 1996, 81–93)

Catallaxy. The second main spill over is in the realm of politics. The universal franchise is threatening to a capitalist market since a majority may insist on constraining markets in the interests of promoting social services or imposing regulations on capitalist production and exchange. This danger is averted when the equilibrium-market model is imported into democratic politics: ‘The democratic political system is typically presented … as a mechanism whose function is to reconcile or balance or hold in adjustment a multitude of diverse and conflicting individual interests.’ (DT, 187) Macpherson is here

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