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All over the world, alarm bells are ringing for democracy. Everywhere we find strongmen in charge, enraged citizens and a desperate search for explanations and remedies. Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Maybe something’s even going wrong in the United States.

In 1992, political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared there was finally a solution to the riddle: “Who should rule, and why?” The answer: liberal democracy.

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A generation later, Fukuyama’s declaration is not wearing well.

As it turns out, the structural flaw that would hobble liberal democracy had actually been identified 30 years earlier, in a study called Possessive Individualism by University of Toronto political scientist Crawford Brough Macpherson.

He pointed out that liberal democracy was a contradiction in terms. From the 16th century to the 20th, classical liberals of the British tradition had argued for the rights of the “individual.” In theory and practice, though, they only counted a person as an individual (almost always male) who had command over himself and his possessions, including human ones.