- Email: [email protected]
Property, liberty and the category
Geoforum 41 (2010) 353–355
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Editorial
Property, liberty and the category
‘[A]ll roads lead to property’ (Macpherson, 1973, p. 121). That a number of geographers are taking both the ethical and analytical dimensions of property seriously is good news for those of us who recognize its social and political significance. For example, a recent edited collection (Mansfield, 2008) underscored the propertied dimensions of privatization, and its political effects. Yet property, it was noted, is far from a straightforward concept. What, then, do we mean by property? And how does property effect social justice? To answer such questions, scholars have tended to adopt one of two opposed positions. Put crudely, we can distinguish between internal analyses, that argue from within liberalism, and external commentaries, that draw from alternative theoretical engagements. Both can be insightful, yet both are partial. An internal critique, drawing from liberalism, is in many senses already constrained by the categorical domain that it inhabits. An external critique, conversely, may be guilty of preaching to the choir, unable to deploy the persuasive rhetoric of the insider. Canadian political economist Charles Brough Macpherson (1911–1987), who made property an unwavering focus, refused this binary choice. Unusually, he moved consciously and capably between critical political economy (he was once described as ‘five-sixths of a Marxist’ [Svacek in Carter, 2005, p. 832]) and a liberalism committed to equality and democracy. Macpherson claimed that his central goal was to ‘work out a revision of liberal-democratic theory, a revision that clearly owed a great deal to Marx, in the hope of making that theory more democratic while rescuing that valuable part of the liberal tradition which is submerged when liberalism is identified as synonymous with capitalist market relations’ (quoted in Morrice, 1994, p. 646). His Marxism is clear in his analysis of the meaning of property. Rather than adopting a static, ahistorical conception of the term, Macpherson insists that property’s meaning is dialectically entangled with changing material conditions: ‘The meaning of property is not constant. The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time. . . The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve’ (1978a, p. 1). How people see property, he argues, is both effect and cause of what it is at any time. The dominance of the prevailing view of property as exclusive, private property, he argues, can be explained according to the political economy of ideas. The emergence of market capitalism, in particular, was both product of and helped naturalize a particular notion of property. This is more developed in his discussion of possessive individualism, which, as its name suggests, relies on an argument concerning property. From Hobbes onward, Macpherson argues, we can 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.01.006
trace the emergence of a view of ownership as constitutive of freedom and individuality, turning on the notion that the individual is essentially a proprietor of his or her own person. Society thus becomes imagined simply as relations of exchange between proprietors. As Carens (1993) notes, property is seen as constitutive of individuality, freedom and equality. To be an individual is to be an owner – initially of one’s own capacities, and also of what one acquires through the use of those capacities. Freedom is also seen as determined by ownership: when one can use one’s property as one chooses, one is free from dependence on the wills of others. To be equal is also to be an owner, as ownership is a status that all can enjoy equally. Such a view, Macpherson notes, reflects the emergence of capitalism: ‘The relations of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual’ (Macpherson, 1962, p. 3). Carter (2005) notes the obvious affinities to Marx’s concepts of commodity fetishism and reification, and their development by Lukacs, Adorno and Jameson. While Macpherson developed the concept of possessive individualism with reference to 17th century political theory, he regarded it as a far-reaching ideological construct, shaping ‘not only the legal-juridical definition of the individual but also the very understanding of what it means to be human’ (Carter, 2005, p. 837). He insisted that possessive individualism is still with us, structuring prevailing conceptions of the world. For Macpherson, such beliefs serve as ‘internalized impediments’ (1973, p. 76), rooted in external material conditions, and ‘backed up by all the resources of those who think it their interest to reduce men to infinite consumers’ (p. 76). Possessive individualism, as a form of legal consciousness, thus operates as a form of ideology. Yet while in one sense accurate, according to Macpherson, insofar as it provides an account of the place of the individual within actually-existing capitalist society, possessive individualism provides a deeply impoverished view of what it means to be human, and structures social relationships so as to deny many access to social benefits, and related opportunities for self-development and autonomy: ‘Denial or limitation of access is a means of maintaining class-divided societies, with a class domination which thwarts the humanity of the subordinate and perverts that of the dominant class; this is a condition which neither any amount of ‘‘consumers’ sovereignty”, nor the fairest system of distributive justice can offset or remedy. . .. The extent and distribution of that access is set by the system of property’ (1973, p. 120). Possessive individualism provides a powerful tool for making sense of, and challenging, prevailing ideologies of subjectivity and property which have, if anything, becoming more naturalized and pervasive since Macpherson’s time. While the centrality of individualism to liberalism is well-established, his particular con-
354
Editorial / Geoforum 41 (2010) 353–355
tribution was to carefully trace the connection between property and individuality. For Carter,‘[a]ny continuation of such a project of comprehending and critiquing the logic and rhetoric of capital could be enriched by an extended engagement with the insights and exemplary critical model his work provides’ (2005, p. 842). It would be tempting to stop here, reliant upon an essentially external critique of liberalism and property. Yet Macpherson takes a different path, reflecting his own normative commitments to democracy and liberty. He expressly rejected those who derided his Marxist ‘apostolic fervour’ (Leiss, 1988, p. 76). For while clearly informed by Marxism, and a lifelong socialist, he also embraced the normative values of Millian liberalism, with its commitment to liberty. Yet liberty, for Macpherson, must be understood in capacious terms as the freedom to express and develop uniquely human capacities and agencies. Private property, of course, is conventionally justified as a means by which individual human liberties can be sustained and advanced. Yet private property routinely negates liberty. The waged worker, for example, is no longer a free citizen, but an employee, subject to the property rights of the owner. This creates a particularly challenging tension: that of ‘reconciling the liberal property right with the equal effective right of all individuals to use and develop their capacities which is the essential ethical principle of liberal democracy’ (MacPherson 1978b, p. 199). This takes us to an essential paradox: ‘If, as liberal theory asserts, an individual property right is required by the very necessities of man’s [sic] nature and condition, it ought not to be infringed or denied. But unless it is seriously infringed or denied, it leads to an effective denial of the equal possibility of individual human fulfillment’ (p. 200). Liberalism, for Macpherson, would continue to be contradictory until it recognized and resolved this paradox. Without this, it would merely legitimate inequality. The solution of Jefferson and Rousseau – to narrow private property so that individual owners have access only to land sufficient for self-preservation – is rejected, given capitalism’s requirement for unlimited appropriation. On the contrary, what is needed is not to narrow property, but to broaden it, he insists. We have been misled, he argues, by our uncritical use of an overly narrow definition of property itself. This alerts us to another valuable dimension of Macpherson’s strategy. Not only is he able to creatively deploy the insights of both Marxism and liberalism, he also engages in what we can term a categorical politics. Categorization, it has been noted, is a frequently overlooked social and political activity. Yet if the world and our relationship to it is constituted, in large part, through categorical frames of meaning, it is a crucial consideration (Bowker and Star 1999). As I have noted elsewhere (Blomley 2004) we live in the thrall of a particularly deeply rooted categorical model in which property is defined as almost exclusively private property, that being the right of an individual to exclude others from the use or benefit of something. More careful reflection reveals the categorical work at play here, such that private property is clearly distinguished from other forms, such as state or common property, which are treated as marginal, even deformatory. This, in turn, relies on other categorical distinctions, such as that between the public and private sphere, or the liberty exercised by the individual and the coercion threatened by the collective. That such a categorical construction of property has ideological and practical effects is clearly an understatement. Put very crudely, such a categorical logic invests certain initiatives or configurations with an aura of plausibility, coherence and apparent objectivity while rendering other arrangements marginal or faintly lunatic. It also serves to constitute people’s relative status in significant and often invidious ways while constraining our normative evaluations of property (Blomley, 2004). Refreshingly, however, Macpherson does not take such categories for granted, but subjects them to careful critique. The category ‘liberty’, as noted above, need not be reduced to the freedom sim-
ply to exercise what he terms the individual’s ‘extractive capacities’ as a consumer and producer, but can and should include a richer set of ‘developmental’ capacities, he insists. Similarly, the way property is categorized is a central concern. Possessive individualism, we have noted, rests on a particular set of categorical delimitations of property (property as a thing, held exclusively, serving particular ends). This he confronts, seeking to open up the category and ‘to restore to the term the complexity of which modern Western societies had stripped it’ (Townsend, 2000, p. 123). In particular, he challenges the view that the category ‘property’ is coterminous with private property, that being an ‘exclusive individual right, my right to exclude you from some use or benefit of something’ (1978a, p. 2, emphasis in original). Property, he argues, in general terms is an enforceable claim of a person to some use or benefit of something. This, of course, can clearly include private property. However, it may logically entail at least two other forms of property. State property, such as that exercised over the airwaves, or a rail system entails a corporate right to exclude others. In effect, Macpherson suggests, state property is a form of corporate private property. Common property, however, must also be recognized as a form of property, in which society or the state declares certain assets as for common use. Such rights, moreover, are vested in individuals, in that each member of a society or group has an enforceable right to use them. Thus, some agency, such as the state, must be in a position to sustain these rights. As an individual, enforceable right, common property, for MacPherson, is logically akin to private property, the only difference, seemingly, being that while the latter is premised on the right to exclude others, common property ‘is created by the guarantee to each individual that he (sic) will not be excluded from the use or benefit of something’ (1978a, p. 5). Macpherson thus insists that we treat prevailing categorizations as logically incomplete: ‘We have treated as the very paradigm of property what is really only a special case. . . [P]roperty . . . need not be confined, as liberal theory has confined it, to a right to exclude others . . . but may equally be an individual right not to be excluded’ (1978b, p. 201). Such a recognition, he notes, also returns us to the original notion of property as more than a right to material things and revenues. For Locke and Hobbes, one could have a property in one’s life and liberties for example, as well as one’s estates. Property rights, therefore, logically entail not only the right to exclude others from the use or benefit of a resource, but also are manifested as the right to not be excluded. This is not only a descriptive reality, but also a prescriptive one, for Macpherson. ‘When property is so understood,’ he argues,’ the problem of liberal-democratic theory is no longer a problem of putting limits on the property right, but of supplementing the individual right to exclude others by the individual right not to be excluded by others’ (1978b, p. 201). And, to be clear, his justification for so doing draws from liberalism, albeit a richer liberalism. The right not to be excluded, he insists ‘. . . may be held to be the one that is most required by the liberal-democratic ethic, and most implied in a liberal concept of the human essence’ (1978b, p. 201). As such, he insists, property should be thought of as an essential human right: ‘Property can and should become again a right to life and liberty . . . a right to a fuller and freer life. . . And the right to live fully cannot be less than the right to share in the determination of the power relations that prevail in the society’ (1973, p. 140). But is such a reformulation feasible? If the narrowing of property to mean the right to exclude was predicated upon a particular set of material conditions, the possibilities of its broadening must also rest on prevailing circumstances. The Macpherson of the 1970s and 80s was optimistic, pointing to such changing dynamics as the emergent welfare state or trade unionism, in which citizens can lay claim to certain entitlements as a right of access, and growing public concern at air and water pollution such that environmental amenities are seen as common property to which no one
Editorial / Geoforum 41 (2010) 353–355
should be excluded. As we confront a neoliberal world, predicated on the privatization of everything, we may feel rather more pessimistic. Yet popular appeals to the right to the city (which rely upon very similar claims concerning human capacities, although in their Lefebvrean manifestation, overtly opposing property rights), or invocations of the commons, surely constitute powerful counterclaims, similarly premised on the right to not be excluded. Macpherson’s account is far from complete or perfect. Yet it offers suggestive insights for geographers. Over and beyond the broader analysis of property that he offers, one crucial consideration, for me, concerns the categorical logics that underpin property, to which Macpherson devotes considerable energy. Prevailing conceptions of property, he reveals to us, are dependent upon the construction and maintenance of particular categories. Such formations are not simply abstract, free-floating ideas, he indicates, but are materialized and socialized. And, a geographer would note, property’s categories are spatialized, and made manifest in the lived social world. To understand how property is put together, therefore, and the ways in which its internal contradictions are negotiated or compromised requires careful attention to the geographies of property and the way in which they sustain, manifest, or complicate prevailing categorical logics. And finally, Macpherson provides a powerful example of the critical intellectual. He took his scholarship immensely seriously, while demonstrating a commitment to informed social engagement. Scholars, he made clear, had to choose between sustaining a manifestly unequal social order or challenging it. In choosing the latter, he relied upon a Socratic ‘immanent critique’ that sought to demonstrate the internally contradictory nature of prevailing ideas. In particular, he argued, one cannot be both a Millian liberal, and be committed to the free market and prevailing forms of property. If human flourishing is the end of a liberal democracy, it cannot be sustained by capitalist property relations.
355
References Blomley, N., 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. Routledge, New York. Bowker, G.C., Star, S.L., 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Carens, J.H., 1993. Possessive individualism and democratic theory: Macpherson’s legacy. In: Carens, J. (Ed.), Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C.B. Macpherson. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 1–18. Carter, A., 2005. Of property and the human: or, C.B. Macpherson, Samuel Hearne and contemporary theory. University of Toronto Quarterly 74 (3), 829–844. Leiss, W., 1988. C.B. Macpherson: dilemmas of liberalism and socialism. New World Perspectives, Montreal. Macpherson, C.B., 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Macpherson, C.B., 1973. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Macpherson, C.B., 1978a. The meaning of property. In: Macpherson, C.B. (Ed.), Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 1–14. Macpherson, C.B., 1978b. Liberal-democracy and property. In: Macpherson, C.B. (Ed.), Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 199–207. Mansfield, B. (Ed.), 2008. Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature– Society Relations. Blackwell, Malden. Morrice, D., 1994. C.B. Macpherson’s critique of liberal democracy and capitalism. Political Studies 42 (4), 646–661. Townsend, J., 2000. C.B. Macpherson and the problem of liberal democracy. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Nicholas Blomley Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada BC V5A 1S6 E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Editorial
Property, liberty and the category
‘[A]ll roads lead to property’ (Macpherson, 1973, p. 121). That a number of geographers are taking both the ethical and analytical dimensions of property seriously is good news for those of us who recognize its social and political significance. For example, a recent edited collection (Mansfield, 2008) underscored the propertied dimensions of privatization, and its political effects. Yet property, it was noted, is far from a straightforward concept. What, then, do we mean by property? And how does property effect social justice? To answer such questions, scholars have tended to adopt one of two opposed positions. Put crudely, we can distinguish between internal analyses, that argue from within liberalism, and external commentaries, that draw from alternative theoretical engagements. Both can be insightful, yet both are partial. An internal critique, drawing from liberalism, is in many senses already constrained by the categorical domain that it inhabits. An external critique, conversely, may be guilty of preaching to the choir, unable to deploy the persuasive rhetoric of the insider. Canadian political economist Charles Brough Macpherson (1911–1987), who made property an unwavering focus, refused this binary choice. Unusually, he moved consciously and capably between critical political economy (he was once described as ‘five-sixths of a Marxist’ [Svacek in Carter, 2005, p. 832]) and a liberalism committed to equality and democracy. Macpherson claimed that his central goal was to ‘work out a revision of liberal-democratic theory, a revision that clearly owed a great deal to Marx, in the hope of making that theory more democratic while rescuing that valuable part of the liberal tradition which is submerged when liberalism is identified as synonymous with capitalist market relations’ (quoted in Morrice, 1994, p. 646). His Marxism is clear in his analysis of the meaning of property. Rather than adopting a static, ahistorical conception of the term, Macpherson insists that property’s meaning is dialectically entangled with changing material conditions: ‘The meaning of property is not constant. The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time. . . The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve’ (1978a, p. 1). How people see property, he argues, is both effect and cause of what it is at any time. The dominance of the prevailing view of property as exclusive, private property, he argues, can be explained according to the political economy of ideas. The emergence of market capitalism, in particular, was both product of and helped naturalize a particular notion of property. This is more developed in his discussion of possessive individualism, which, as its name suggests, relies on an argument concerning property. From Hobbes onward, Macpherson argues, we can 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.01.006
trace the emergence of a view of ownership as constitutive of freedom and individuality, turning on the notion that the individual is essentially a proprietor of his or her own person. Society thus becomes imagined simply as relations of exchange between proprietors. As Carens (1993) notes, property is seen as constitutive of individuality, freedom and equality. To be an individual is to be an owner – initially of one’s own capacities, and also of what one acquires through the use of those capacities. Freedom is also seen as determined by ownership: when one can use one’s property as one chooses, one is free from dependence on the wills of others. To be equal is also to be an owner, as ownership is a status that all can enjoy equally. Such a view, Macpherson notes, reflects the emergence of capitalism: ‘The relations of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual’ (Macpherson, 1962, p. 3). Carter (2005) notes the obvious affinities to Marx’s concepts of commodity fetishism and reification, and their development by Lukacs, Adorno and Jameson. While Macpherson developed the concept of possessive individualism with reference to 17th century political theory, he regarded it as a far-reaching ideological construct, shaping ‘not only the legal-juridical definition of the individual but also the very understanding of what it means to be human’ (Carter, 2005, p. 837). He insisted that possessive individualism is still with us, structuring prevailing conceptions of the world. For Macpherson, such beliefs serve as ‘internalized impediments’ (1973, p. 76), rooted in external material conditions, and ‘backed up by all the resources of those who think it their interest to reduce men to infinite consumers’ (p. 76). Possessive individualism, as a form of legal consciousness, thus operates as a form of ideology. Yet while in one sense accurate, according to Macpherson, insofar as it provides an account of the place of the individual within actually-existing capitalist society, possessive individualism provides a deeply impoverished view of what it means to be human, and structures social relationships so as to deny many access to social benefits, and related opportunities for self-development and autonomy: ‘Denial or limitation of access is a means of maintaining class-divided societies, with a class domination which thwarts the humanity of the subordinate and perverts that of the dominant class; this is a condition which neither any amount of ‘‘consumers’ sovereignty”, nor the fairest system of distributive justice can offset or remedy. . .. The extent and distribution of that access is set by the system of property’ (1973, p. 120). Possessive individualism provides a powerful tool for making sense of, and challenging, prevailing ideologies of subjectivity and property which have, if anything, becoming more naturalized and pervasive since Macpherson’s time. While the centrality of individualism to liberalism is well-established, his particular con-
354
Editorial / Geoforum 41 (2010) 353–355
tribution was to carefully trace the connection between property and individuality. For Carter,‘[a]ny continuation of such a project of comprehending and critiquing the logic and rhetoric of capital could be enriched by an extended engagement with the insights and exemplary critical model his work provides’ (2005, p. 842). It would be tempting to stop here, reliant upon an essentially external critique of liberalism and property. Yet Macpherson takes a different path, reflecting his own normative commitments to democracy and liberty. He expressly rejected those who derided his Marxist ‘apostolic fervour’ (Leiss, 1988, p. 76). For while clearly informed by Marxism, and a lifelong socialist, he also embraced the normative values of Millian liberalism, with its commitment to liberty. Yet liberty, for Macpherson, must be understood in capacious terms as the freedom to express and develop uniquely human capacities and agencies. Private property, of course, is conventionally justified as a means by which individual human liberties can be sustained and advanced. Yet private property routinely negates liberty. The waged worker, for example, is no longer a free citizen, but an employee, subject to the property rights of the owner. This creates a particularly challenging tension: that of ‘reconciling the liberal property right with the equal effective right of all individuals to use and develop their capacities which is the essential ethical principle of liberal democracy’ (MacPherson 1978b, p. 199). This takes us to an essential paradox: ‘If, as liberal theory asserts, an individual property right is required by the very necessities of man’s [sic] nature and condition, it ought not to be infringed or denied. But unless it is seriously infringed or denied, it leads to an effective denial of the equal possibility of individual human fulfillment’ (p. 200). Liberalism, for Macpherson, would continue to be contradictory until it recognized and resolved this paradox. Without this, it would merely legitimate inequality. The solution of Jefferson and Rousseau – to narrow private property so that individual owners have access only to land sufficient for self-preservation – is rejected, given capitalism’s requirement for unlimited appropriation. On the contrary, what is needed is not to narrow property, but to broaden it, he insists. We have been misled, he argues, by our uncritical use of an overly narrow definition of property itself. This alerts us to another valuable dimension of Macpherson’s strategy. Not only is he able to creatively deploy the insights of both Marxism and liberalism, he also engages in what we can term a categorical politics. Categorization, it has been noted, is a frequently overlooked social and political activity. Yet if the world and our relationship to it is constituted, in large part, through categorical frames of meaning, it is a crucial consideration (Bowker and Star 1999). As I have noted elsewhere (Blomley 2004) we live in the thrall of a particularly deeply rooted categorical model in which property is defined as almost exclusively private property, that being the right of an individual to exclude others from the use or benefit of something. More careful reflection reveals the categorical work at play here, such that private property is clearly distinguished from other forms, such as state or common property, which are treated as marginal, even deformatory. This, in turn, relies on other categorical distinctions, such as that between the public and private sphere, or the liberty exercised by the individual and the coercion threatened by the collective. That such a categorical construction of property has ideological and practical effects is clearly an understatement. Put very crudely, such a categorical logic invests certain initiatives or configurations with an aura of plausibility, coherence and apparent objectivity while rendering other arrangements marginal or faintly lunatic. It also serves to constitute people’s relative status in significant and often invidious ways while constraining our normative evaluations of property (Blomley, 2004). Refreshingly, however, Macpherson does not take such categories for granted, but subjects them to careful critique. The category ‘liberty’, as noted above, need not be reduced to the freedom sim-
ply to exercise what he terms the individual’s ‘extractive capacities’ as a consumer and producer, but can and should include a richer set of ‘developmental’ capacities, he insists. Similarly, the way property is categorized is a central concern. Possessive individualism, we have noted, rests on a particular set of categorical delimitations of property (property as a thing, held exclusively, serving particular ends). This he confronts, seeking to open up the category and ‘to restore to the term the complexity of which modern Western societies had stripped it’ (Townsend, 2000, p. 123). In particular, he challenges the view that the category ‘property’ is coterminous with private property, that being an ‘exclusive individual right, my right to exclude you from some use or benefit of something’ (1978a, p. 2, emphasis in original). Property, he argues, in general terms is an enforceable claim of a person to some use or benefit of something. This, of course, can clearly include private property. However, it may logically entail at least two other forms of property. State property, such as that exercised over the airwaves, or a rail system entails a corporate right to exclude others. In effect, Macpherson suggests, state property is a form of corporate private property. Common property, however, must also be recognized as a form of property, in which society or the state declares certain assets as for common use. Such rights, moreover, are vested in individuals, in that each member of a society or group has an enforceable right to use them. Thus, some agency, such as the state, must be in a position to sustain these rights. As an individual, enforceable right, common property, for MacPherson, is logically akin to private property, the only difference, seemingly, being that while the latter is premised on the right to exclude others, common property ‘is created by the guarantee to each individual that he (sic) will not be excluded from the use or benefit of something’ (1978a, p. 5). Macpherson thus insists that we treat prevailing categorizations as logically incomplete: ‘We have treated as the very paradigm of property what is really only a special case. . . [P]roperty . . . need not be confined, as liberal theory has confined it, to a right to exclude others . . . but may equally be an individual right not to be excluded’ (1978b, p. 201). Such a recognition, he notes, also returns us to the original notion of property as more than a right to material things and revenues. For Locke and Hobbes, one could have a property in one’s life and liberties for example, as well as one’s estates. Property rights, therefore, logically entail not only the right to exclude others from the use or benefit of a resource, but also are manifested as the right to not be excluded. This is not only a descriptive reality, but also a prescriptive one, for Macpherson. ‘When property is so understood,’ he argues,’ the problem of liberal-democratic theory is no longer a problem of putting limits on the property right, but of supplementing the individual right to exclude others by the individual right not to be excluded by others’ (1978b, p. 201). And, to be clear, his justification for so doing draws from liberalism, albeit a richer liberalism. The right not to be excluded, he insists ‘. . . may be held to be the one that is most required by the liberal-democratic ethic, and most implied in a liberal concept of the human essence’ (1978b, p. 201). As such, he insists, property should be thought of as an essential human right: ‘Property can and should become again a right to life and liberty . . . a right to a fuller and freer life. . . And the right to live fully cannot be less than the right to share in the determination of the power relations that prevail in the society’ (1973, p. 140). But is such a reformulation feasible? If the narrowing of property to mean the right to exclude was predicated upon a particular set of material conditions, the possibilities of its broadening must also rest on prevailing circumstances. The Macpherson of the 1970s and 80s was optimistic, pointing to such changing dynamics as the emergent welfare state or trade unionism, in which citizens can lay claim to certain entitlements as a right of access, and growing public concern at air and water pollution such that environmental amenities are seen as common property to which no one
Editorial / Geoforum 41 (2010) 353–355
should be excluded. As we confront a neoliberal world, predicated on the privatization of everything, we may feel rather more pessimistic. Yet popular appeals to the right to the city (which rely upon very similar claims concerning human capacities, although in their Lefebvrean manifestation, overtly opposing property rights), or invocations of the commons, surely constitute powerful counterclaims, similarly premised on the right to not be excluded. Macpherson’s account is far from complete or perfect. Yet it offers suggestive insights for geographers. Over and beyond the broader analysis of property that he offers, one crucial consideration, for me, concerns the categorical logics that underpin property, to which Macpherson devotes considerable energy. Prevailing conceptions of property, he reveals to us, are dependent upon the construction and maintenance of particular categories. Such formations are not simply abstract, free-floating ideas, he indicates, but are materialized and socialized. And, a geographer would note, property’s categories are spatialized, and made manifest in the lived social world. To understand how property is put together, therefore, and the ways in which its internal contradictions are negotiated or compromised requires careful attention to the geographies of property and the way in which they sustain, manifest, or complicate prevailing categorical logics. And finally, Macpherson provides a powerful example of the critical intellectual. He took his scholarship immensely seriously, while demonstrating a commitment to informed social engagement. Scholars, he made clear, had to choose between sustaining a manifestly unequal social order or challenging it. In choosing the latter, he relied upon a Socratic ‘immanent critique’ that sought to demonstrate the internally contradictory nature of prevailing ideas. In particular, he argued, one cannot be both a Millian liberal, and be committed to the free market and prevailing forms of property. If human flourishing is the end of a liberal democracy, it cannot be sustained by capitalist property relations.
355
References Blomley, N., 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. Routledge, New York. Bowker, G.C., Star, S.L., 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Carens, J.H., 1993. Possessive individualism and democratic theory: Macpherson’s legacy. In: Carens, J. (Ed.), Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C.B. Macpherson. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 1–18. Carter, A., 2005. Of property and the human: or, C.B. Macpherson, Samuel Hearne and contemporary theory. University of Toronto Quarterly 74 (3), 829–844. Leiss, W., 1988. C.B. Macpherson: dilemmas of liberalism and socialism. New World Perspectives, Montreal. Macpherson, C.B., 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Macpherson, C.B., 1973. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Macpherson, C.B., 1978a. The meaning of property. In: Macpherson, C.B. (Ed.), Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 1–14. Macpherson, C.B., 1978b. Liberal-democracy and property. In: Macpherson, C.B. (Ed.), Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 199–207. Mansfield, B. (Ed.), 2008. Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature– Society Relations. Blackwell, Malden. Morrice, D., 1994. C.B. Macpherson’s critique of liberal democracy and capitalism. Political Studies 42 (4), 646–661. Townsend, J., 2000. C.B. Macpherson and the problem of liberal democracy. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Nicholas Blomley Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada BC V5A 1S6 E-mail address: [email protected]