Can the ‘Debased People’ Reform Themselves? A Re-examination of the Political Thought of C.B. Macpherson

This paper will argue that Macpherson is certainly a materialist in much of his analysis, and this materialism clearly has roots in Marx's class-centred method. But when it comes to explaining historical transition – either from feudalism to capitalism or capitalism to socialism or a post-capitalist radical-democracy – Macpherson frequently jumps from materialism to idealism. The Marxism with which Macpherson was in dialogue was a Marxism vitiated by Stalinism, leading to a failure by Macpherson to incorporate class struggle into his theory of classes, and actually-existing mass forms of participatory democracy into his theory of democracy. Macpherson believes that “the debased people are, by definition, incapable of reforming themselves.” What this leaves him with is a kind of elitism making his thought, when it bends towards political change, oscillate between a deterministic materialism and a voluntarist idealism. Without a deep engagement with the actual, concrete and historical institutions of participatory democracy and the other lived forms of “from below” democracy that have developed periodically since the 19th century, any attempts to renovate notions of participatory democracy as Macpherson struggles to do, necessarily remain an abstraction.