These papers were then published in 1953 edition as the book, Democracy in Alberta: The Theory and Practice of a Quasi-Party System.
In response, he claimed that what he had always been trying to do was to "work out a revision of liberal-democratic theory, a revision that clearly owed a great deal to [Karl] Marx, in the hope of making that theory more democratic while rescuing that valuable part of the liberal tradition which is submerged when liberalism is identified as synonymous with capitalist market relations.
"[8] According to Robert Meynell, Macpherson's combination of Marx's political economy with T. H. Green's ethical liberalism is best understood as left-leaning neo-Hegelian Canadian idealism.
[9] In the 1980s, democratic socialism seemed to be in retreat with the rise of New Right–inspired governments that challenged and undermined the mixed economy and welfare state.
These skills (and those of others) are a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market, and in such a society is demonstrated a selfish and unending thirst for consumption which is considered the crucial core of human nature.
Macpherson spent most of his career battling these premises, but perhaps the greatest single exposition of this view can be found in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, where Macpherson examines the function of this particular kind of individualism in Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Locke (and several writers in between, including the Levellers) and its resulting pervasiveness throughout most liberal literature of the period.
[11] His thesis that Hobbes gave birth to the culture of possessive individualism has been challenged in different ways by Keith Thomas[12] and David Lay Williams.
[18] Friedman appeals to historical examples that demonstrate where the largest amount of political freedom is found the economic model has been capitalist.
"At any rate", Macpherson contends, this "historical correlation scarcely suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.
[21] Macpherson argues that most of the "classical liberals" of previous centuries, which Friedman claims to represent, would have rejected this idea outright.