Macpherson's Project
In 1976 Macpherson was criticized from both those on the left and the right. 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 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." His combination of Marx's political economy with T.H. Green's ethical liberalism is best understood as left-leaning neo-Hegelian Canadian idealism. In the 1980s and the rise of the New Right-inspired governments, which challenged and undermined the mixed economy and welfare state, democratic socialism has seemed to be in retreat.
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