Liberal Democracy and Socialist Democracy: The Antinomies of C.B. Macpherson

Abstract

There are two different ways in which creative intellectuals, who seek to make use of Marxism in their life's work, locate themselves in terms of Marxism. One way is for the intellectual to see himself in his work as part of the revolutionary socialist movement. It means taking one's standpoint and judging the contribution one makes in terms of maximising the human potentialities of man as expressed in the revolutionary potentialities of the socialist movement taken as a whole. The role of the intellectual, on this view, is to help develop the strategy and tactics of the socialist movement in terms of his understanding of Marxism (and of the world through it); and to help develop Marxism in terms of the changing world and the needs of the socialist movement as it confronts this world. A second way of locating oneself in terms of one's knowledge of Marxism, entails taking a standpoint, locating oneself, outside of both Marxism and the revolutionary socialist movement. Here one seeks to bring the insight of Marxism to some other set of ideals or social entity and enrich them thereby. This second approach has been one which may be said to characterise the work of such intellectuals as Reinhard Bendix or C. Wright Mills or Barrington Moore Jr. It has been epitomised most clearly, perhaps, in the work of C.B. Macpherson.