Evolution of C.B. Macpherson’s Views on Liberal and Socialist Democracy: Critical Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the political thought of the Canadian theorist Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–1987), with particular emphasis on his critique of liberal democracy and advocacy for a socialist democratic alternative. Drawing on his key works, ranging from early essays of the 1930s to late monographs of the 1980s, the study traces the evolution of Macpherson’s ideas from the concept of possessive individualism as a fundamental flaw in liberal systems to a vision of developmental, participatory democracy designed to incorporate the core tenets of Marxist critique and reconcile them with liberal values. To assess strengths and weaknesses, the article includes critiques and commentaries from scholars such as William Leiss, Phillip Hansen, Frank Cunningham, Ian McKay, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and others. The article argues that Macpherson’s ideas remain relevant to contemporary debates on inequality, democratic participation, and al-ternatives to neoliberalism, despite criticisms of their abstractness, insufficient attention to class relations, and human nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".