|
Product Description
This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality"--"its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property.As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians. . . Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed."
A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development
- The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014
- Classics of Moral And Political Theory
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin Classics)
- Hobbes's 'Leviathan' (Reader's Guides)
- Classics of Moral and Political Theory
- The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
- The Souls of Black Folk (Dover Thrift Editions)
- Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings: Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on Political Economy, ... Contract, The State of War (Hackett Classics)
- Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
*If this is not the "The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Wynford Books)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Dec 15, 2024 15:20 +08.