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This chapter details the life and career of C. B. Macpherson. Macpherson was born in Toronto in November 1911, and died there in July 1987 of emphysema. He was born into a comfortable middle-class family. Both parents were teachers. His book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism was the making of his international reputation. In received enormous critical acclaim in the Anglophone world and was soon translated into many languages. The discussion also covers his early influences and his concerns before and after possessive individualism.

This chapter discusses the research design of the study. It first discusses the concept of possessive individualism, an ideology that is sustained and brought into being by techniques which are considered the technologies of the self. The chapter then addresses the issue of freedom and poverty, before discussing the three materials that make the case for the power of ideology and those who modified it. These are the landscapes, printing, and ceramics. The chapter also takes a look at the Maryland Gazette and explains the portrayal of Annapolis as a capital city.

This Introduction shows how this book contributes to the emerging field of postcolonial book history and cultural historiography. By demonstrating its relevance to the capitalism and slavery thesis, it shows how books, too, were industrial goods capitalized by slave labor. It explains that early American proprietary subscription libraries were centers for revolutionary leadership development, and one location where colonials imbibed British political thought. In challenging the civic republicanism thesis of Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, and Bernard Bailyn it argues that ownership of slaves was the proprietorship formative of the virtue of the republican citizen and that C. B. MacPherson’s theory of possessive individualism more accurately describes their citizenship. It maps the networks through which colonials purchased books, and gives a history of early American reading. The most popular genres among early Americans are documented, and anti-slavery is shown to be both a product of revolutionary thinking and an inspiration for it.

The conclusion aims to situate the book's arguments in a larger context of contemporary concern with “Confucianism” in various senses. “Confucianism” has been—and may continue to be, or become again—more than a philosophical tradition. It bears complicated relations to Chinese (and broader East Asian) cultural identity and political, religious, and spiritual practices. These are highly contested matters at the present moment, with no likelihood of a simple solution. It is important for philosophers to recognize these complexities, and not to claim to be able to solve every question related to the status of “contemporary Confucianism” simply by looking at texts or making arguments. Still, progress can be made even in these broader debates if we come to see the value of a contemporary Confucian philosophy based in Neo-Confucianism. The chapter also seeks to reply to readers who may be very skeptical about the relevance of Neo-Confucianism's talk of harmony in our present day. Building on an argument made by Liang Shuming a century ago, the book concludes by sketching reasons that even a “possessive individualist” should see, in Neo-Confucianism, both a significant challenge and suggestions of a way forward.

Chapter two examines the rhetorical and social construction of bilingual personhood as part of the American Dream through the debates on public bilingualism. The debates on bilingual education and bilingualism as civil right in the 1960s and 1970s centered on what language befitted an American citizen concordant with the vision of the American Dream. The argument against public bilingualism viewed English as the colorblind language of the American Dream whereas the argument for public bilingualism presented the idea that the American Dream can be in many languages. While these two poles of opposition and advocacy are well-rehearsed positions in the social debates on bilingualism, both positions presuppose possessive individualism in the construction of bilingual personhood, which limits the parameters of public bilingualism.

Despite the contrasting political fates of the study's focal traditions examined above, social class and bourgeois sentiment nonetheless influence the politics of Indocentrists and Afrocentrists across the ethnoracial spectrum. Indocentrists have generally embraced a gentrified form of “mainstream” Hinduism that looks down upon ecstatic religious practices such as spirit mediumship, firewalking, or animal sacrifice as “backward” or “premodern.” Afrocentrists, by contrast, and despite their political embrace of a subaltern tradition centered on trance ceremonialism, nonetheless tend to be less involved in the everyday activities of grassroots shrines and shy away from the theatrical dramaturgy of trance performance toward more middle-class-inflected forms of devotion, including their politics itself. An Epilogue considers the ways these materials substantiate the theory that religious charisma in the context of modernity may be understood as a dialectical counterpoint to the liberal bourgeois ethic of possessive individualism. The fate of trance in modernity is re-examined in contradistinction to conventional assumptions regarding secularization; the idea of spirits as sites of transculturation is elaborated; the politics of liberalism and religion clarified in relation to structural marginalization of trance and popular ecstasy; and the ludic themes in these materials understood as forms of “deep play.”

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

In the Arapesh communities of northern Papua New Guinea, where language shift to Tok Pisin is now advanced, villagers express regret about the loss of their local language. However, they do not seem motivated to actively reclaim it. This chapter illustrates how the ideological stances that bear on this situation derive from a distinctively Melanesian cultural logic that assigns value to, and works to attract, items and activities that are associated with distant others, via what has been called an ‘openness of attitude’, or an ‘importing culture’. For Arapesh people, this desire for importation is elaborated through talk about and practices involving ‘roads’, which are both real physical pathways and metaphors for social interaction and exchange. The Arapesh case points to the importance of exploring the full range of cultural ideas that lead even people who positively value their languages to nevertheless act in ways that diminish their use.

Chapter 3 considers how women who had never viewed body weight as a matter of personal control were learning to diet. I illustrate how public health outreach projects directed at the “crisis” of obesity were teaching people to move and exercise not only for the good of their own health but also for the health of their country. I analyze reactions to the preponderance of deeply gendered messages that framed dieting as a moral responsibility to highlight the new forms of sociality produced by concern for dietary self-care. Finally, I suggest that the concept of possession—rather than individualization—more accurately describes the dietary transitions underway in Guatemala today.

This chapter discusses how socialist writers responded to the growing political and economic significance of the consumer in a period which saw a dramatic improvement in living standards. Affluence posed the problem of a capitalism that was delivering the goods and delivering them in ever increasing variety and at prices that made them widely accessible. For some this necessitated a more positive attitude to consumption and the consumer and an attempt to integrate them more positively into their envisioned socialisms. Others were more critical, viewing consumer affluence as making for social squalor, jeopardizing the pursuit of collective objectives, engendering social rivalry, encouraging a possessive individualism and threatening social solidarity. Discussion revolved around such issues as the rationality of consumers, the reality of choice and consumer sovereignty, the moral and social consequences of consumption, its liberating potentialities and the relative merits of private affluence and social expenditure.