Specters and possession of neoliberal democracy: Contemporary critical political philosophies and the legacy of C.B. Macpherson

The paper is a part of the project of retrieving C.B. Macpherson’s thesis of possessive individualism and his contribution to investigations about democratic theory and the “Western political ontology” valuable especially in today’s context of expansion, crisis and – arguably – subsequent, experienced today, revival of the project of “neoliberal democracy”. The aim of my paper is to present theory of possessive individualism as the missing center of critical theory of democracy. The task is conducted through a brief reconstruction of Macpherson’s investigations into the history of liberal doctrine and argumentation about the continuing validity and firmness of this approach despite its alleged “definitive refutation” in contemporary historiography of modern social and political thought.