Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.
This article is based in part on a paper prepared for the XIII World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, July 1985. I would like to thank Norman Cloutier, Mark Kann. Thomas Moore, and Raymond Plant for their suggestions in writing this article.
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