C.B. MacPherson – författare

By the beginning of 1964 public debate about the terms on which French and English culture could continue to co-exist within a single Canadian federal state had become intense. Many causes could be assigned for the intensity of the debate, but one of them evidently was the lack of clear formulation of the problems.It was in these circumstances that the Association of Canadian Law Teachers and the Canadian Political Science Association used their annual meeting at Charlottetown in 1964 to get, on each of four aspects of the current problem of Canadian federalism, a vigorously reasoned statement, by a French-Canadian and an English-Canadian scholar, of the essentials of the problem as he saw it and then, by way of invited commentaries, to bring the ideas more fully into play. The four aspects were: competing concepts of federalism, economic problems peculiar to our federal state, legal and political attitudes towards the BNA Act, and institutional problems of a revision of the Act.

The legitimate role of the state in relation to property and the justification of property institutions of various kinds are matters of increasing concern in the modern world. Political and social theorists, jurists, economists, and historians have taken positions for and against the property institutions upheld in their time by the state, and further dehate seems inevitable. This book brings together ten classic statements which set out the main arguments that are now appealed to and places them in historical and critical perspective.The extracts presented here – all substantial – are from Loeke, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Mill, Green, Veblen, Tawney, Morris Cohen, and Charles Reich. A note hy the editor at the head of each extract highlights the arguments in it and relates it to the time at which it was written. Professor Macpherson's introductory and concluding essays expose the roots of some common misconceptions of property, identify current changes in the concept of property, and predict future changes. Macpherson argues that a specific change in the concept (which now appears possible) is needed to rescue liberal democracy from its present impasse.Property is both a valuable text on a crucial topic in political and social theory and a significant contribution to the continuing debate

In his 1964 CBC Massey Lectures C. B. Macpherson examines the rival ideas of democracy - the communist, Third World, and Western-liberal variants - and their impact on one another. He suggests that the West need not fear any challenge to liberal democracy if it is prepared to re-examine and alter its own values.