Explain the Macpherson's view on power. (Answer in 150 words)

- Explain the Macpherson's view on power. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
C. B. Macpherson recast power as a question of human capacities rather than of command, which turns democratic theory into a critique of capitalism.

Body

1. Developmental power: The ability to use and develop one's own capacities. Macpherson takes the human essence to be a doer and exerter, not a consumer and appropriator.
2. Extractive power: The ability to use others' capacities for one's own benefit: power over persons, and what liberal market societies actually maximise.
3. The net transfer: Where the propertyless must sell their labour to live, developmental power is continuously converted into extractive power through the wage relation.
4. Possessive individualism: In The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism he traces this to Hobbes and Locke, who built market assumptions into the free individual itself.
5. The democratic test: Genuine democracy maximises equal developmental power; liberal democracy, measured against its own claims, fails it.

Conclusion
His reading of the seventeenth century is contested as anachronistic, but the distinction survives. It reframes power as a problem of distribution, not merely coercion.