After decades on the margins of political life, the last few years have seen socialism make a comeback as a topic for serious deliberation. Among contemporary political theorists, there is now a maturing debate about whether market socialism, universal basic income, property-owning democracy, council communism, or a post-work utopia should be our vision of the postcapitalist future. But this debate is too rarely grounded in a political philosophy.

What I mean by “political philosophy” is a theory of justice, a systematic ethics, or a widely shared conception of human freedom. What political philosophers do is develop concepts that help us to distinguish the right from the wrong, the good from the bad, the just from the unjust. Socialists have historically had a complicated relationship to this project. We suspect that it is bourgeois, reifying of the status quo, or simply reformist.

It’s time to turn the page on this set of suspicions. We need not only diagnoses of systematic injustice but prescriptions for justice, freedom, and the good life. We need these prescriptions to be universalist, unsectarian, compelling to the unconverted, and hopeful about the future. We also need to restore our own conviction that socialism is possible, desirable, and just.