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Market Concepts in Political Theory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

C. B. Macpherson
C. B. Macpherson*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

If this paper were not too slight it might have been given a sub-title: a note on cultural lag in political science. For one of the things I want to suggest is that political scientists, whether out of envy or pure admiration for their economist colleagues, have in recent decades increasingly taken over an equilibrium-market concept from economics without realizing that they have been taking cast-off clothing. The epithet is perhaps unfair. But it does seem that just when economics has been moving away from its concept of the economy as a pure price system and turning to a notion of the economy as a system of power, carried on by power blocs rather than by maximizing individuals, political theory has been taking over the concept of the equilibrating price system and working it into a general theory of the political process. As economics adopts power concepts in a search for realism, political science adopts market concepts in a search for theoretical elegance. In this curious double process of transvestism I do not think political science has been the gainer. Economists may object that they have not abandoned marginal equilibrium analysis, and I would not insist that they have. Certainly they have not abandoned the search for elegance, and if their elegance is getting a little lumpier they are to be applauded for their greater realism. But the political scientists' use of market concepts is clear enough to be a matter of some concern.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 1961 , pp. 490 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

*

A paper given at the meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association in Montreal on June 9, 1961.

References

1 A theory which depends on the organization of individual wills into parties and pressure groups may seem to be rather a power-bloc theory than (as I have classified it) an atomized equilibrium theory. But while the desire of organizers to maintain their own power is not overlooked in the market theory of the political system, the assumption usually is (as it must be in order to make the system tolerably democratic) that parties and groups respond to the shifting autonomous wills of individuals who have highly pluralistic demand schedules.

2 The two propositions that follow are adapted from Anthony Downs's brilliant exercise in marginal analysis, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957)Google Scholar, chaps, VIII and XII.

3 Whether or not a general theory of the democratic process should be expected to cover communist systems, one-party or otherwise, is a matter of the definition of democracy. Since even in a one-party communist state there is necessarily some measure of intra-party democracy, and something approximating a system of interest groups operating in or on the party and the government, a case can be made for trying to bring such political systems within a general theory of the democratic process. But they cannot readily be assimilated to the equilibrium model. For they have issued from revolutionary rejection of its individualist assumptions, and their viability depends on the re-education of the mass of the citizens away from competitive individualist behaviour and outlook.

4 It is developed in my forthcoming The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.

5 Leviathan, chap. x.