Of Property and the Human; or, C.B.

Macpherson, Samuel Hearne,

and Contemporary Theory
Carter, Adam.

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 3, Summer

2005, pp. 829-844 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

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 ADAM CARTER

Of Property and the Human;

or, C.B. Macpherson, Samuel Hearne,
and Contemporary Theory

In a 1971 letter written to the Canadian political theorist and intellectual

historian Crawford Brough Macpherson, Isaiah Berlin praised Macpher-
son’s ‘rational and lucid and altogether admirable’ work and assured
Macpherson that ‘when the future generation sort things out the difference
between your kind of writing and the hideous inflated prose of the
Germans and their followers will be duly noted’ (qtd in Townsend, 5).
Many today would be unwilling to endorse Berlin’s characterization of
German, and more broadly Continental, theory, which has for the last
quarter-century at least been a productive source of ideas for the humani-
ties and social sciences. As well, we have become more suspicious in the
interim of the politics of a once much vaunted lucid English prose, its
combination of, in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, ‘tea and totality’ (236) in the
production of what David Simpson has called the ‘culture of British
commonsense’ (40). The ‘Germans and their followers’ have had a better
run of it than Berlin seems to have predicted and the ‘future generation’ to
which he refers has been guilty of hardly noticing C.B. Macpherson at all.
This present failure to notice Macpherson is, perhaps, nowhere more in
evidence than in the fields of literary and cultural criticism and theory
where one might most expect his legacy to have been taken up. Although
Macpherson had little enough to say directly about literature or the cultural
sphere outside the tradition of political theory to which he devoted his
career, he rightfully stands as one of the most significant historical-
materialist, critical theorists writing in English in the second half of the
twentieth century.1 His work provides a profound and challenging critique

1 Macpherson’s study of Burke is telling with respect to this lack of direct engagement with
issues narrowly cultural and aesthetic. The 1980s and early 1990s produced, in the work
of W.J.T. Mitchell, Frances Ferguson, and Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic) ,
influential studies of the crossings of aesthetics and ideology in Edmund Burke’s treatise
on the sublime and beautiful, but Macpherson’s brief but engaging study of Burke
published in 1980 in the Past Masters series declines to treat Burke’s aesthetics at all,
dismissing it in a sentence as ‘of little theoretical interest’ (19). There is, however, no
shortage of theorists who have been influential in literary and cultural criticism though not
primarily engaged with the cultural or aesthetic sphere and I contend that Macpherson
deserves stature among them.

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of the formation of the subject, the modern individual – a critique

concerned most centrally with the subject’s connections to property
relations and the commodity form within developing capitalist economies
from the seventeenth century to the later twentieth century. Yet, while
historical-materialist critical theory, Marxist and otherwise, has played a
prominent and productive role in literary and cultural studies since the
1970s, alongside a wide array of other texts and traditions from psycho-
analysis to linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and continental philosophy
which have all fallen under the expansive rubric of ‘theory,’ a search of the
mla International Bibliography for C.B. Macpherson turns up no refer-
ences, a telling indication of how little his work has been engaged within
these fields.
Macpherson has enjoyed a greater prominence among political theorists,
particularly in Canada throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when he engaged
his many critics in debates in academic journals. Although James Tully has
described Macpherson’s central thesis of possessive individualism as having
been for a time ‘the reigning orthodoxy’ among political theorists (19), Jules
Townsend’s recent study of Macpherson argues convincingly that this was
never the case. Macpherson was too Marxist for his liberal critics of the
Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, too liberal for younger more radical
Marxist critics of the later 1960s and 1970s, and too totalizing, teleological
and essentializing for the postmodern ethos of the 1980s and 1990s (Town-
send 3, 99–129, 143–53). Nonetheless, within the field of political theory
Macpherson enjoyed a prominent stature, even if, for many, it was as the
chief representative of wrong-headed viewpoints that needed to be coun-
tered.
One can come across scattered, brief but approving references to
Macpherson’s work in such influential studies as Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (38, 263) and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self
(196), as well as in an endnote of an essay of Gayatri Spivak’s from the mid-
1980s, which, by way of referring to three theories of subject formation that
have been influential upon her, lists Macpherson’s The Political Theory of
Possessive Individualism and thanks the philosopher Jonathan Rée for
alerting her to the study (‘Three Woman’s Texts’ 260), thus giving Mac-
pherson’s book the air of a neglected but quietly circulating classic. Such
passing references attest to the possibilities of more sustained engagements
with Macpherson in contemporary theory, but where one might most
expect such an engagement – in the works of influential, wide-ranging, and
widely read Marxist theorists such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson
– there is no mention. These theorists have, rather, contributed to a turn in
attention towards a twentieth-century tradition of Western European
Marxist cultural critique in such figures as Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, and
Althusser. For Jameson in particular, this turn is said to have been
necessitated by the lack, in Douglas Kellner’s words, ‘of a tradition at hand

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 c.b. macpherson, samuel hearne, and theory 831

which could be brought to bear on its [the New Left’s] cultural concerns,
or which could politically mobilize it or offer models of radical self-
identification’ (9) – as well as by a desire to disrupt established modes of
thinking in English by a style and syntax of thought foreign to it (Homer,
14-16).2
Significantly, Spivak’s endnote invites readers to look into Macpherson
if they want ‘a “straight” analysis of the roots and ramifications of English
“individualism”’ (‘Three Woman’s Texts’ 260). Spivak apparently means
that the analysis is not filtered through her own triumvirate of continental
theory of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, and belongs rather
within the mainstream of Anglo-American scholarship. Macpherson’s
interlocutors, however, recognized his affinities with Marxism,3 albeit a
Marxism cast in an interestingly displaced vocabulary: he did the Marxists
in different voices.4 Undoubtedly Spivak’s ‘straight’ also signals that
Macpherson’s work is comprehensible and seemingly perspicuous –
another version of Berlin’s ‘rational and lucid,’ although from a theorist
and an era that have become more suspicious of these values. But if
continental theory has had a productively bent or estranging influence on
the empiricist, positivistic modes of thought that continue to dominate in
the English language, by passing over Macpherson we risk missing the
stranger within – one whose critical practice may be all the more disruptive
for appearing so ‘lucid’ and familiar as to be unnoticeable. Furthermore,
one risks missing the important parallels between Macpherson’s work and
these strands of continental theory, particularly the Freudian Marxism and
proto-deconstruction of the Frankfurt School.5
Macpherson described the careful, rigorously close, dialectical reading
he performed upon the tradition of political theory in the English language
from Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century to Isaiah Berlin and

2 The lack of familiarity with Macpherson’s work, or the failure to note him in this context,
is remarkable. Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction, a work that early on attempted
both to trace the affinities of these two modes of critique and to demonstrate how they
might productively supplement each other, devotes some six pages of the introduction to
outlining a deconstruction of Hobbes. Macpherson’s central concept of ‘possessive
individualism’ is employed by Ryan (2), and his point that Hobbes ‘cloaks class interests
in the assumption of universal reason’ (3) very much recalls Macpherson’s reading of
Hobbes, yet Macpherson is nowhere cited.
3 See Svacek for an excellent treatment of the question of Macpherson’s Marxism. As Svacek
comments: ‘there is a nearly uniform concern among Macpherson’s critical commentators
either to mask or unmask him as a Marxist’ (395). For many liberal critics of the Cold War
years, to label Macpherson a Marxist was sufficient for dismissing his ideas.
4 Townsend comments suggestively on the displaced Marxist vocabulary in Macpherson’s
work and the possible strategies involved in choosing to employ such a vocabulary (12).
5 The figures associated with this school, most centrally Benjamin and Adorno, have been
intensively engaged by Anglo-American criticism and theory over the last three decades
and I thus treat them as ‘contemporary.’

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Milton Friedman in the twentieth century as ‘Essays in Retrieval’ – essays

aimed at determining and separating out what was, for the purposes of the
emancipation of greater numbers of people, useful, insightful, and
progressive in this theoretical tradition from what was outmoded, deluded,
contradiction-ridden, even deceptive and dominating. Like Townsend, I
would suggest that contemporary literary and cultural criticism and theory
would benefit from ‘Retrieving Macpherson’ (Townsend, 189) – encounter-
ing and engaging Macpherson’s critical practice and considering its
anticipations of and parallels and general relevance to our current concerns
and practices.6 To begin retrieving Macpherson I need first to outline the
argument of his major study, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.
I want to draw out his productively dialectical reading of individualism
and to suggest its parallels with the thought of Theodor Adorno and to
consider Macpherson’s problematic of possessive individualism in relation
to a passage of a text that has been of greater concern to literary scholars
and historians: Samuel Hearne’s A Journey to the Northern Ocean.

ii

Macpherson was once described as being ‘five-sixths of a Marxist’ (Svacek,

419), and his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, published in
1962, is indeed a broadly Marxist critique of seventeenth-century English
political theory. The work challenged the mainstream of Anglo-American
scholarship in political theory (then and now) in arguing that the origins
of contemporary liberal democratic theory, in John Locke and others, are
indelibly tied to the emergent capitalism – ‘possessive market society’ in
Macpherson’s displaced Marxist vocabulary – of the seventeenth century.
Macpherson’s central argument is that underlying and informing the
political theories of Thomas Hobbes, the Levellers, James Harrington, and
John Locke – theories that had traditionally been interpreted as running the
gamut from authoritarianism through liberalism to proto-socialism–is a
shared and unquestioned assumption concerning the nature of the
individual. This conception of the individual unifies the apparently diverse
theories of the seventeenth century within the closure of an ideological
horizon and, at times, even subverts or defeats the potentially democratic
impulses of certain of these statements. In Fredric Jameson’s terminology,
this concept forms the basic, shared ‘ideologeme’ (76, 87–88), a fundamen-

6 A fuller consideration of this topic would also need to consider how Macpherson’s
practice and its underlying assumptions conflict with our contemporary assumptions and
concerns and what we might learn from such conflicts. While I touch on these issues here
in examining and defending Macpherson’s dialectical approach to liberal individualism,
I plan to treat such conflicts, or differences, at greater length in a separate essay devoted
to Macpherson’s critical method in relation to Adorno’s negative dialectics and Derrida’s
deconstruction.

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 c.b. macpherson, samuel hearne, and theory 833

tal unit of thought that is at the same time ideological, beyond which no
thinking penetrates. Furthermore, this conception of the individual
provides the central difficulty for the tradition of democratic theory that
has attempted to build upon the seventeenth-century basis.
The central difficulty in the concept of the individual in seventeenth-
century political theory, Macpherson argues, lies in its ‘possessive quality’
(Political Theory, 3). In a passage worth quoting at length, he puts very
forcefully both his conception of ‘possessive individualism’ and the
concomitant view of society that this assumption entails:

[The] possessive quality [of seventeenth-century individualism] is found in its

conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or
capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as
a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The
relations of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically
important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of
realizing their full potentialities, was read back in to the nature of the individual.
The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person
and capacities. The human essence is freedom from dependence of the wills of
others, and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free
equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and
of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of
exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for
the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of
exchange. (3; emphasis added)7

In keeping with a tradition of Marxist and related forms of critique,

what Macpherson argues throughout the work is that the social, historical
characteristics of the individual within a possessive market economy are
universalized, or ontologized, as being naturally characteristic of individu-
als as such. As Macpherson succinctly put his argument in ‘The Deceptive
Task of Political Theory,’ first published in 1954: ‘The limit of bourgeois
vision with respect to political theory lay ... in the assumption that bour-
geois human nature is the final form (or, more usually, the universal form
except for some supposed primitive age) of human nature’ (Democratic,
198).
Although he rarely used the terms, the interrelated concepts of com-
modity fetishism and reification are, as commentators like William Leiss

7 We have here the antinomy of T.S. Eliot’s characterization of seventeenth-century England

as an organic society – a characterization still influential when Macpherson’s study was
published, which might partly explain why Macpherson would not serve as an influential
intellectual historian like A.O. Lovejoy for the main line of literary scholars of the mid-
twentieth century.

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(58–59) and Jules Townsend (19) have noted, at the root of Macpherson’s
theorization and critique of possessive individualism. These concepts were
first outlined by Marx but were more elaborately developed by Lukács,
with notable and lasting influence on theorists such as Adorno and
Jameson. Lukács built upon Marx to suggest that – with the increasingly
complex and fragmenting division of labour under capitalism, and the
increasing reduction of social relations to abstract, distanced economic
relations of exchange – the individual was increasingly incapable of
grasping the totality of social relations, of grasping his or her fragmented
world as social process and social relation between humans. The world
appears, rather, as pre-made, a world of disassociated things that the
subject stands outside of and confronts as an object (Lukács, 83–149).
Macpherson’s central thrust was to argue how such a reified world-view
was ‘read back into the nature of the individual,’ so that the individual
human being comes to be seen as an isolated thing – and, more to the point,
a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. I am my own property,
a least common denominator of ownership justifying all other property
relations. If, with Descartes, modern philosophy seeks a stable origin in the
presence of a self-conscious cogito, then modern political theory, Macpher-
son argues, posits its origin to be self-ownership.8 A ‘subject-effect’ of
capitalist social relations is substituted as origin or cause of such relations.
With his suggestive reference to the act of reading in the formation of the
subject, Macpherson subtly draws attention to the kind of rhetorical
metalepsis that has engaged deconstructive critics in more recent years in
their own critique of the subject.9
Let me draw briefly two further parallels between Macpherson’s
concerns and those of other twentieth-century continental theorists who
have played a more central role in contemporary theory: Roland Barthes’s
essays from the 1950s, collected in Mythologies, offer a familiar, somewhat
parallel, argument about how ideology naturalizes or ontologizes the
historical to serve particular ideological ends; Adorno’s critique of the
German philosophical tradition up to and including Heidegger is in places
even more strikingly parallel to Macpherson’s concern with possessive
individualism and, more generally, with how the logic and rhetoric of the
xxxxxxx

8 The existentialist problematic of Heidegger and Sartre engages in a somewhat parallel

critique of the inauthenticity of equating Being with the thing-like characteristics of objects
in nature. Through Paul de Man such a problematic becomes influential for literary theory
and is later transformed, through a linguistic turn, into a critique of identifying the
linguistic and empirical selves, of reading the one back into the other (Blindness, 216).
9 Spivak provides a good summary of the ‘subject-effect’ as metalepsis in ‘Deconstructing
Historiography’ (213). The work of Judith Butler has influentially continued such
investigations. See her Psychic Life of Power, particularly the chapter on Louis Althusser
(106–31).

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capitalist market pervades thinking. In The Jargon of Authenticity, for

example, Adorno critiques Heidegger’s conception of the ‘mineness’ of
Dasein for unwittingly rehearsing the very logic of capitalist property
relations which Heidegger’s philosophy seeks to escape. ‘The jargon [of
authenticity, i.e., the existentialist philosophy of Heidegger and his
followers] cures Dasein from the wound of meaninglessness and summons
salvation from the world of ideas into Dasein. Heidegger lays this down
once and for all in the title deed, which declares that the person own himself
... The subject, the concept of which was once created in contrast to
reification, thus becomes reified’ (Jargon, 114–15; emphasis added). Further-
more, in a footnote to Negative Dialectics, Adorno hits passingly upon
Macpherson’s central thesis in critically engaging throughout his career the
tradition of English, social-contract theory: ‘The imaginary social contract,’
Adorno maintains, ‘was so welcome to the early bourgeois thinkers
because its fundament, its formal legal a priori, was the barter relationship
of bourgeois rationality’ (321).
In a rigorously dialectical fashion, Macpherson maintains that posses-
sive individualism is simultaneously true and untrue – albeit a dialectics
not, by the standards of contemporary critical theory and the figures that
it has retrieved, elaborately thematized or stylized. Because Macpherson’s
prose appears so lucid, one must remain all the more carefully attuned to
the text to perceive its turns of dialectic thought. Thus in demonstrating
Macpherson’s dialectical working through of possessive individualism I
will make the parallels with Adorno explicit by quoting the latter in
conjunction with Macpherson.
Possessive individualism is a valid concept, according to Macpherson,
insofar as it provides an accurate depiction of the individual’s real relations
within a capitalist society, which operates to a great extent as a vast market-
place where the individual will be defined by property relations and where
he or she must act, and will function, as property to be bought and sold.
‘However much he may wish it to be otherwise,’ Macpherson writes, ‘his
humanity does depend on his freedom from any but self-interested
contractual relations with others. His society does consist of a series of
market relations ... the assumptions are factually accurate’ (Political, 275).
Likewise, Adorno asserts, echoing Marx in the German Ideology, that ‘if the
standard structure of society is the exchange form, its rationality constitutes
people: what they are for themselves, what they think they are, is second-
ary’ (‘Subject,’ 248). Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno argues in Negative
Dialectics, is guided by ‘the picture of the individual in individualist
society’ (343), a picture which within its historic context ‘is adequate,
because the principle of the barter society was realized only through the
individuation of the several contracting parties – because, in other words
the principium individuationis literally was the principle of that society, its
universal’ (343).

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Yet for Macpherson such possessive individualism is not valid in so far

as it provides a limited, even deceptive, view of what it means to be an
individual. As Joseph Carens has succinctly put it, the limitations for
Macpherson are twofold:

First it generates an impoverished view of life, making acquisition and

consumption central and obscuring deeper human purposes and capacities ...
Second, possessive individualism holds out a false promise. Most people cannot
really enjoy even the impoverished individuality, freedom, and equality that
possessive individualism ostensibly offers to all, because a system based on
private property and so called free exchange inevitably generates a concentra-
tion of ownership of all the means of production except labor. Most people are
compelled to sell their labor to gain access to the means of life. They are free and
equal individuals in name only ... (3)

To the two central deficiencies in possessive individualism should be

added at least a third, which is that the individual is not seen therein ‘as
part of a larger social whole’ (Macpherson, Political, 3) but, rather, owes
‘nothing to society’ (3) for his or her capacities: in other words, its denial of
the communal basis of the individual.10 Adorno concurs that individualism
and freedom are, simultaneously, deceptive ideologies in capitalist society.
Again of Hegel’s philosophy he asserts that its guiding ‘picture’ of ‘the
individual in individualist society ... is inadequate because, in the total
functional context which requires the form of individuation, individuals
are relegated to the role of mere executive organs of the universal’ (Nega-
tive, 343): they are free in name only; in actuality they are subordinated
functions within the rigorously structured and hierarchical totality of
society.
But in a further moment of dialectical reversal and sublation, Macpher-
son maintains that possessive individualism contains, negatively, the seeds
of a more utopian truth. Liberal individualism’s conception of being one’s
own possession, and in this respect being fundamentally equal to others,
opens up genuine possibilities of freedom, creativity, and fulfilment that
potentially mark an advance over the hierarchical and static social
structures of the past. In this respect Macpherson could even champion the
progressive elements in the otherwise authoritarian politics of Thomas
Hobbes. Macpherson’s position again parallels Adorno, who regarded the
notions of equivalence produced by ‘barter society’ as ‘ideology but also
promise’ (Negative, 146) and who, in confronting the theoretical urge to

10 As Townsend notes (138–40), though critiqued by communitarian theorists such as

Alasdair MacIntyre for remaining too individualistic in his theory, Macpherson was
clearly critical of the asocial definition of the individual within the main line of liberal
political theory.

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 c.b. macpherson, samuel hearne, and theory 837

dismantle the subject represented by both scientific positivism and

Heideggerian existentialism, warned: ‘Were it [i.e., the subject] liquidated
instead of sublated into a higher form, the result would be not merely a
regression of consciousness but a regression to real barbarism’ (‘Subject,’
247).
Any pretension, however, that the utopian seeds of individualism could
be realized within the property relations of a possessive market economy,
where the great majority of individuals possess neither the leisure nor the
material means for creative self development, is ideological deception
(Macpherson, Democratic, 24–38). Macpherson went so far as to suggest that
the mainstream of liberal political thought from John Stuart Mill to the
twentieth century had been, however consciously or unconsciously, largely
engaged in such a ‘deceptive task’ (Democratic, 195–203). Again the
parallels with Adorno here are striking. Of the elevation of the subject
within the tradition of German idealist philosophy Adorno argued: ‘The
ideological function of the thesis cannot be overlooked. The more
individuals are in effect degraded into functions within the societal totality
as they are connected up to the system, the more the person pure and
simple, and as a principle, is consoled and exalted with the attributes of
creative power, absolute rule, and spirit’ (‘Subject,’ 248). Thus the utopian
element of individualism must be regarded as untrue, insofar as it might
purport to give a ‘factually accurate’ depiction of the possibilities character-
izing current social and economic organization. The recognition of this
falsity, however, may stand in a productively critical relationship to the
current social economic order as a recognition of the potentialities it does
not allow.
What never seems to have been contemplated in the commentary on
Macpherson, much less worked through in critical studies that might take
up and extend his legacy, is just how thoroughly in his view such a reified
conception of the individual as property penetrated not only the legal-
juridical definition of the individual but also the very understanding of
what it means to be human. The inability to grasp this extent may partially
be attributable to the fact that while, as William Leiss has observed,
possessive individualism centrally informed much of Macpherson’s theory,
he never provided a particularly sustained analysis of the concept (44).Yet
references in various parts of Macpherson’s work tantalizingly suggest just
how far down he thought the assumptions of possessive individualism
might go. In arguing, in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, that
the seventeenth-century Levellers, who had generally been read, prior to
Macpherson, as supporters of a universal franchise, in fact shared the same
limiting possessive individualist conceptions as their political opponents,
Macpherson asserts that for the Levellers ‘it is this property [one’s owner-
ship of one’s self], this exclusion of others, that makes a man human’ (142;
emphasis added). In the concluding chapter of the same work Macpherson

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twice repeats, italicizing the predicate for emphasis, that the ‘individual in
a possessive market society is human in his capacity as proprietor of his
own person’ (271, 275). In Democratic Theory, a later collection of essays,
Macpherson likewise suggests that the seventeenth-century political
writers ‘did not think of the propertyless labouring classes as fully human,
or at least not as full citizens’ (28).
The alternative that Macpherson provides in this last example is not
insignificant; there is potentially a considerable difference between not
being a full citizen and not being fully human. Macpherson’s hesitancy
here may point to a genuine and non-dogmatic uncertainty with respect to
just how deeply the assumptions of possessive individualism penetrate.
Just far enough down to deny others the vote, and thus full participation
in civil society? Or far enough down to conceive of others as less than, or
other than, human? Nonetheless, the way these references provide ample
evidence that he believed the assumptions of possessive individualism
might go very far down indeed suggests that his thought might produc-
tively be placed in relation with a body of more recent poststructuralist and
postcolonial theory and criticism that has variously been concerned with
the construction of the human and the boundaries of the human and non-
human as defined in contexts of power and knowledge.11
In drawing this essay to a conclusion I would like to gesture towards
making such a relation by briefly attempting a reading of a passage of a
text that has engaged literary critics, particularly in Canada. This brief
analysis might begin to show some of the directions and possibilities
opened up by Macpherson’s problematic. That the reading might not
appear unfamiliar within the current ethos of literary criticism perhaps
further suggests that Macpherson’s concerns are current ones. And while
Macpherson’s own theory does not directly address such key contempo-
rary issues such as race, colonialism, and postcolonialism, this example
suggests how his work might be brought into a productive dialogue with
such concerns. At the same time, to read for the assumptions of possessive
individualism within more broadly cultural texts promises to advance
Macpherson’s own goals insofar as such a reading might begin to address
the question implicitly posed by Macpherson: How far do the assumptions
of possessive individualism permeate thinking in English and European
thought of the last four centuries?

iii

The passage I wish to consider, from Samuel Hearne’s late eighteenth-

century exploration narrative A Journey From Prince of Wales’s Fort in

11 For an exemplary exploration, from a poststructuralist perspective, of the limits of the

human within the context of power and knowledge, see Clark and Myser.

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 c.b. macpherson, samuel hearne, and theory 839

Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, is part of the infamous narration of the
ambush and slaughter of a group of Inuit by the Chipewyans with whom
Hearne travelled. In fascinatingly ambiguous and contradictory ways
Hearne is constructed within the text as an innocent bystander to these
events, one who morally condemns the attack and refuses active participa-
tion in it, yet who is at the same time compelled in the interests of his own
life to accompany the group and to witness the massacre. While the author-
ship and historical veracity of this part of the narrative are uncertain – it
being the practice of publishers of that period to supplement and embellish
exploration narratives in the interests of brisker sales (MacLaren, ‘Massa-
cre’) – such questions need not detain us, as I am concerned with broadly
shared cultural assumptions.
Throughout Hearne’s exploration narrative, an understated but per-
sistent question the text returns to are the limits and boundaries not only
of civilization and barbarism but of the human and the inhuman, and the
extent to which the European can judge the Native to be human.12 The
position of an earlier generation of historians and literary scholars, such as
Maurice Hodgson – namely, that Hearne in several instances sympatheti-
cally and sensitively upholds the underlying humanity of the Native
peoples – often strikes the reader as valid. Thus, for example, Hearne
contextualizes a practice such as cannibalism both by noting that it is only
practised under the most acutely life-threatening conditions and by
emphasizing that anyone who has engaged in the practice is thereafter
shunned by the others for having transgressed the most basic of social
prohibitions (22). In contrast, in the context of the Inuit slaughter Hearne’s
rhetoric tends towards description of the Natives as ‘bloody’ (96, 99),
‘barbaric’ (99), ‘brutish’ (100), ‘savage’ (100) and ‘inhuman’ (74).
Manifestly, this judgment derives from a moral condemnation of what
is judged to be unwarranted violence perpetrated by the Chipewyans upon
the Inuit. But in Hearne’s intricate descriptions of his party’s preparations
for the attack which, as I.S. MacLaren has pointed out, function as skilful
tactics in narrative delay to build suspense (‘Landscapes’ 33), Hearne
makes a suggestive reference not to morally condemnable behaviour but
to the simultaneous breakdown in both individuality and private property
among the war party he accompanies.

It is perhaps worth remarking, that my crew, though an undisciplined rabble,

and by no means accustomed to war or command, seemingly acted on this
horrid occasion with the utmost uniformity of sentiment. There was not among
them the least altercation or separate opinion; all were united in the general
cause, and as ready to follow where Matonabbee led, as he appeared to be ready

12 An informative overview of, and contribution to, the critical interpretations of this
question is provided by Hutchings.

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to lead ... Never was reciprocity of interest more generally regarded among a
number of people, than it was on the present occasion by my crew, for not one
was a moment in want of any thing that another could spare; and if ever the
spirit of disinterested friendship expanded the heart of a Northern Indian, it was
here exhibited in the most extensive meaning of the word. Property of every kind
that could be of general use now ceased to be private, and every one who had any
thing which came under the description, seemed proud of an opportunity of
giving it, or lending it to those who had none, or were most in want of it.
(97–98; emphasis added)

What is happening here? The passage evokes a poignant paradox of the

kind that recurs in the literature of the West from the Iliad to those
contemporary Hollywood films that narrate the horrors and the heroism
of America’s involvement in two centuries of war. According to this
paradox we are most ‘human’ – as in the most communal, loving,
sacrificing of ourselves, and giving towards others – at the moment of our
greatest ‘inhumanity,’ our violent, even senseless, destruction of others.
Using Macpherson’s terms of analysis, however, another reading
suggests itself. We become attuned to the conflation in the text of the loss
of individuality, the collapse of private property, and the group’s ‘inhuman
design’ (Hearne, 74). In this reading, the text, in a manner that is doubtless
less than fully conscious, compellingly articulates and reads back into
Native peoples the concept of ‘possessive individualism,’ the view that, as
Macpherson writes, ‘the individual is human in his capacity as proprietor
of his own person’ (Political, 271), and thus, whatever the deceptive
appearances of sociality might suggest to the contrary, inhuman to the
extent that such self-propriety and the private property that stems from it
break down. Hearne’s reference to the group’s ‘inhuman design’ becomes
not merely a figure of speech for morally reprehensible violence but a
suggestion also that the divestment of private property is in fact commen-
surate with the divestment of individuality and humanity. In one of the
several instances in the text in which he exonerates himself from blame in
the massacre, Hearne insists that it would have been ‘the highest folly for
an individual like me, and in my situation, to attempt to turn the current of
a national prejudice which had subsisted between those two nations from
the earliest periods, or at least as long as they had been acquainted with the
existence of each other’ (75; emphasis added). One senses here, in addition
to Hearne’s prudent recognition of the potential folly of one person
speaking out against the will of the many, the hint that it is precisely his
individualism, anchored in his self-possession, that rescues him from
partaking in the barbaric actions of the herd.
In this representation of the massacre the loss of individuality and
humanity is thus intricately associated with the divestment of private
property. To represent such a loss, however, is to suggest that the Natives

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 c.b. macpherson, samuel hearne, and theory 841

do hold a concept of private property – ‘property ... now ceased to be

private’ (98). That is, the text suggests in some respects that private
property is natural to Native peoples – just as Locke, as Macpherson notes,
posits private property as existing in a state of nature, albeit vulnerable to
appropriation by others and thus in need of stable political and judicial
authority to protect it (Political, 197–203). One might see, therefore, the
familiar logic of empire operating within the text, which asserts that the
Natives have a capacity to be human, as exhibited in their crude concep-
tions of private property, but simultaneously asserts their capacity to be
inhuman in their loss of such a conception. By the terms of such a logic, to
develop this tenuous sense of private property so that it will be less readily
given up will be to develop individuality, reasonableness, and humanity.13
What is lacking, therefore, is a fully developed possessive market economy,
a lack that Hearne, as an agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, of explora-
tion and trade, exists in part to fill.
Thus by reading Hearne through Macpherson, the narration of the
massacre becomes an allegory of self-possession and self-dispossession in
the context of the expansion of a European market and its property
relations. That the representation of the massacre should contain the single
most powerful instance in the narrative of the figure of Hearne himself –
the description of his almost losing his own self-possession as a dying Inuit
girl entwines herself around his leg – attests to the stakes involved here.
‘My situation and the terror of my mind at beholding this butchery, cannot
easily be conceived, much less described; though I summoned up all the
fortitude I was master of on the occasion, it was with difficulty that I could
refrain from tears’ (100). As MacLaren has also observed, the aesthetics of
the sublime are central to the representation of the Inuit massacre (‘Land-
scapes,’ 30–34), which tantalizingly suggests the possibility of reading the
interconnections of the sublime, the divestment of property, and the
potential loss of self-possession, a threat that, if successfully mastered,
stands as the strongest possible affirmation of the individual and his self-
possession.14

iv

In his own contribution to the various efforts over the last two decades to
retrieve Adorno for contemporary criticism and theory, Fredric Jameson
has suggested that among other things, Adorno’s work could allow an

13 Perhaps the most pertinent form of such a logic in this context was the theory of the four
stages of civilization prevalent in the ethnography of the time whereby civilizations were
believed to progress from the depths of savagery to the heights of commercial society (see
MacLaren, ‘Massacre,’ 39–40).
14 For a reading of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime that ties aesthetic theory into
individuation, see Ferguson.

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 842 adam carter

understanding and critique of the operations of ‘Capital-logic’ (Late Marx-

ism, 239) – how the underlying structure of capitalist exchange society
comes to be intricately entwined with our most basic thinking on funda-
mental issues such as human equality and identity (Late Marxism, 239–41).
Such a critique, Jameson suggests, is indispensable to criticism in the
postmodern era of global capitalism because such a logic penetrates ever
more deeply and pervasively. Other reconsiderations of the Frankfurt
School theorists, notably that undertaken by Peter Dews, have emphasized
how their theory might provide a politicized deconstruction, one that,
while subjecting the values of an Enlightenment tradition such as reason,
liberty, and individualism to a thoroughgoing immanent critique, redeems
such values rather than dispenses with them. The retrieval of Macpherson’s
work holds similar potential. A study of ‘Capital-logic,’ specifically how
property relations and the commodity form have infiltrated and structured
the understanding of what it means to be an individual, even what it
means to be human, is compellingly pursued in his writing. Alongside this
central theme are other tantalizing insights, such as his suggestion that in
Locke the very structure of reason comes to be equated with the industri-
ous appropriation of a possessive market society. Any continuation of such
a project of comprehending and critiquing the logic and rhetoric of capital
could be enriched by an extended engagement with the insights and the
exemplary critical model his work provides.
Critical models taken from the Frankfurt School and deconstruction
have necessarily entailed an engagement with continental philosophy and
an adoption of its often dense vocabularies. Macpherson’s work demon-
strates compellingly the extent to which criticism can penetrate its object
without departing from a relatively normative Anglo-American academic
vocabulary and structure of argument. As critical vocabularies continue to
proliferate, it is worthwhile to hold on to this lesson as a counterbalance to
the more generally acknowledged suggestion that no such apparently
normative vocabulary and structure of argument can be taken as natural
or absolute. Indeed, Macpherson’s criticism may be all the more immanent
and disruptive for moving with such apparent ease within the structures
and values it seeks to critique.

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