¹ “C. B. Macpherson's Conceptual Apparatus,” this JOURNAL, IV, no 4 (Dec. 1971), 526–40.

² The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 56; The Real World of Democracy, 43; “The Maximization of Democracy,” in P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, Third Series, 89–90.

³ I have made this change in an essay on “Problems of a Non-Market Theory of Democracy” which develops the concept of powers: this will appear in a new volume of essays which was completed and sent to press before I saw Professor Wand's article.

⁴ I have since then (in the new essays referred to in note 3) thought it best to make an even sharper distinction between power and capacities, by using power to mean not capacities plus the ability to use them but simply the ability to use them. But the distinction in each of the three published presentations with which Wand is dealing is surely explicit: power is different from, and more than, capacities.

⁵ “Maximization of Democracy,” 89–90.

⁶ For example, Mill's approving quotation of Humboldt's statement: “the end of men… is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole” (J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chap. 3); Green's treatment of men's powers as their essentially human capacities and as their ability to contribute to the common good: “When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others… When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to the social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves” (Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, Works, III, 371); compare his definition of “freedom in the positive sense” as “the liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to the common good” (ibid., 372), and his equation of “a free life” with “the free exercise of his powers” (Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, sect. 216). Although Green was not consistent in his use of “powers,” some-times using it to mean capacities and some-times the ability to exercise capacities, the only powers he was interested in were clearly not ethically neutral.

⁷ I discuss Isaiah Berlin's more temperate argument to the same effect in the forthcoming volume mentioned in note 3, so will not take time to deal with it here.

⁸ Cf. Patrick Corbett's point that “man” is an evaluative term: “‘Man’ does carry a charge of valuation… we are generally in favour of the existence of human beings, and ‘man’ carries with it that implication of a positive attitude, as well as descriptive implications of two-leggedness, rationality, or whatever else.” Corbett goes on to say that “if (consciously or unconsciously) we associate ‘man’ with one of its various descriptive meanings in particular, and dissociate it from the rest, we shall be tacitly approving and commending certain human qualities above the others, and in a powerful way.” Ideologies, (London, 1965), 185–6. Equally, however wide the range of descriptive qualities we put in “man,” we are tacitly commending them.

⁹ Possessive Individualism, 74–6. Wand notices only the first three (p. 531).

¹⁰ Ibid., 75.

¹¹ Ibid., 76.

¹² “… in general men do desire to live… this is reflected in whole structures of our thought and language, in terms of which we describe the world and each other. … acceptance of survival as an aim [is] necessary, in a sense more directly relevant to the discussion of human law and morals. We are committed to it as something presupposed by the terms of the discussion; for our concern is with social arrangements for continued existence, not with those of a suicide club…. To raise… any… question concerning how men should live together, we must assume that their aim, generally speaking, is to live. From this point the argument is a simple one. Reflection on some very obvious generalizations – indeed truisms – concerning human nature and the world in which men live, show that as long as these hold good, there are certain rules of conduct which any social organization must contain if it is to be viable… In considering the simple truisms… it is important to observe that in each case the facts mentioned afford a reason why, given survival as an aim, law and morals should include a specific content.” Hart, H. L. A., The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961), 188–9.Google Scholar

¹³ “The basic categories (with their corresponding concepts) in terms of which we define men – such notions as society, freedom, sense of time and change, suffering, happiness, productivity, good and bad, right and wrong, choice, effort, truth, illusion (to take them wholly at random) – are not matters of induction and hypothesis. To think of someone as a human being is ipso facto to bring all those notions into play: so that to say of someone that he is a man, but that choice, or the notion of truth, mean nothing to him, would be eccentric: it would clash with what we mean by ‘man’ not as a matter of verbal definition (which is alterable at will), but as intrinsic to the way in which we think, and (as a matter of ‘brute’ fact) evidently cannot but think. This will hold of values too (among them political ones) in terms of which men are defined… It is considerations such as these… that have shaken the faith of some devoted empiricists in the complete logical gulf between descriptive statements and statements of value, and have cast doubt on the celebrated distinction derived from Hume.” Berlin, Isaiah, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Laslett, P. and Runciman, W. G., eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series (Oxford, 1962), 26–7.Google Scholar