Of Property and the Human; or, C.B. Macpherson, Samuel Hearne, and Contemporary Theory

I

In a 1971 letter written to the Canadian political theorist and intellectual historian Crawford Brough Macpherson, Isaiah Berlin praised Macpherson's 'rational and lucid and altogether admirable' work and assured Macpherson that 'when the future generation sort things out the difference between your kind of writing and the hideous inflated prose of the Germans and their followers will be duly noted' (qtd in Townsend, 5). Many today would be unwilling to endorse Berlin's characterization of German, and more broadly Continental, theory, which has for the last quarter-century at least been a productive source of ideas for the humanities and social sciences. As well, we have become more suspicious in the interim of the politics of a once much vaunted lucid English prose, its combination of, in Geoffrey Hartman's phrase, 'tea and totality' (236) in the production of what David Simpson has called the 'culture of British commonsense' (40). The 'Germans and their followers' have had a better run of it than Berlin seems to have predicted and the 'future generation' to which he refers has been guilty of hardly noticing C.B. Macpherson at all.

This present failure to notice Macpherson is, perhaps, nowhere more in evidence than in the fields of literary and cultural criticism and theory where one might most expect his legacy to have been taken up. Although Macpherson had little enough to say directly about literature or the cultural sphere outside the tradition of political theory to which he devoted his career, he rightfully stands as one of the most significant historical-materialist, critical theorists writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century.¹ His work provides a profound and challenging critique of the formation of the subject, the modern individual – a critique concerned most centrally with the subject's connections to property relations and the commodity form within developing capitalist economies from the seventeenth century to the later twentieth century. Yet, while historical-materialist critical theory, Marxist and otherwise, has played a prominent and productive role in literary and cultural studies since the 1970s, alongside a wide array of other texts and traditions from psychoanalysis to linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and continental philosophy which have all fallen under the expansive rubric of 'theory,' a search of the mla International Bibliography for C.B. Macpherson turns up no references, a telling indication of how little his work has been engaged within these fields.

Macpherson has enjoyed a greater prominence among political theorists, particularly in Canada throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when he engaged his many critics in debates in academic journals. Although James Tully has described Macpherson's central thesis of possessive individualism as having been for a time 'the reigning orthodoxy' among political theorists (19), Jules Townsend's recent study of Macpherson argues convincingly that this was never the case. Macpherson was too Marxist for his liberal critics of the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, too liberal for younger more radical Marxist critics of the later 1960s and 1970s, and too totalizing, teleological and essentializing for the postmodern ethos of the 1980s and 1990s (Townsend 3, 99–129, 143–53). Nonetheless, within the field of political theory Macpherson enjoyed a prominent stature, even if, for many, it was as the chief representative of wrong-headed viewpoints that needed to be countered.

One can come across scattered, brief but approving references to Macpherson's work in such influential studies as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (38, 263) and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (196), as well as in an endnote of an essay of Gayatri Spivak's from the mid-1980s, which, by way of referring to three theories of subject formation that have been influential upon her, lists Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism and thanks the philosopher Jonathan Rée for alerting her to the...