Publisher's Synopsis
Crawford Brough Macpherson has been teaching at the University of Toronto for some forty years, building an international reputation through his identification and critique of possessive individualism as a core concept in Western liberal democratic theory. The essays brought together here are from eminetn scholars all over the English-speaking world are independent statements on the issues that preoccupy Macpherson - powes, possessions, and freedom, the central problems in political theory. They are arranged in a historical sequence, touching on the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Macpherson himself, and facing with vigour and originality the dilemmas of liberal-democratic and Marxian theory of social and political life. It concludes with an explication by the editor of the inner parable of Durrenmatt's play, The Visit, as a profound critique of capitalism, and with a bibliography of Macpherson's published work.
