A Liberal Socialist Tradition

While it doesn’t offer a blueprint for realizing it, Matthew McManus’s new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, makes it easier to imagine a more unified left. Using his substantial knowledge of political philosophy, along with his considerable gifts as a narrator of the history of political thought, McManus sets out to “retrieve” a tradition whose “key ethical commitments [have] become occluded, calcified, or perverted into ideology over time.” The hope is that by looking to a past when “liberal socialism” didn’t seem like an oxymoron, we might begin to see our way to a future in which the tradition flourishes once again.

Liberalism is a doctrine committed to the equal worth of all and to the right of liberty for each. Socialism is a doctrine that extends concern for equality and freedom into the economic realm, championing a more equal distribution of wealth and increased worker control over the workplace. Despite being formally compatible, however, liberalism has often been conscripted in the battle against socialist ideas.

Historically speaking, John Locke argued that a right to property licenses an individual to claim for himself, and to exclude others from, land that was otherwise gifted by God to all of mankind. Liberal rights thus take what was held in common and privatize it. More recently, libertarian-minded politicians and theorists have conceived of any redistributive taxation as an assault on an individual’s right to liberty, thereby reducing liberal freedom to laissez faire. It should not be too surprising, then, that many modern-day Marxists — as well as Karl Marx himself — develop their brand of socialism explicitly in terms of its supposed opposition to liberalism.

On McManus’s telling of the history, though, socialism isn’t the natural enemy of liberalism, but a strong candidate for its fullest and most faithful expression. An acquisitive liberalism defending the right to accumulate unlimited wealth while many suffer from lack of housing, health care, and employment could be nothing other than a perversion of a doctrine defined by its commitment to equal worth and freedom. On the other hand, a liberalism that ensures equitable distribution of society’s resources, along with the ability to collectively shape society’s economy and its institutions, is a liberalism that lives up to its billing.

McManus convincingly argues that the prehistory of such a liberalism is found in the writings of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. But in John Stuart Mill, the theory reaches maturation.

Mill’s political philosophy is representative of liberal socialism in three key respects. First, it treats the individual as the primary locus of ethical concern, while nevertheless highlighting the ways in which an individual’s ability to live well is determined by their society. While politics, Mill thinks, ought always to operate in service of individual persons (rather than collectivities or abstract ideologies), human beings are nevertheless dependent and socially embedded. Much of the individual activity we think of as worthwhile is only made possible by the collective establishment and maintenance of social practices. Knowledge is generated collectively and is bestowed through culture and educational institutions. Relationships — whether they be between family members, friends, employers, or market actors — are formed in the context of a social world that we create together. Communities are shaped by societal norms. By recognizing the character of the social world as a legitimate political concern, Mill’s liberalism takes a socialistic turn away from the sort of view — later dubbed “neoliberal” — on which (to quote Margaret Thatcher) “there is no such thing [as society]” but only “individual men and women [and their] families.”

The second way that Mill’s political philosophy represents liberal socialism is in its commitment to using shared resources to enable each individual to develop their human powers. Unlike neoliberals, for whom the purpose of wealth is simply to satisfy whatever preferences an individual market actor happens to have, Mill believes that the purpose of wealth is to facilitate human flourishing. By funding education, the arts, athletics, and communal activities, the individual is treated as more than a mere consumer. He’s treated as a creative and curious being, capable of experimenting with new and innovative ways of living, but also needing social support if his potential is to be achieved.

Finally, Mill’s political philosophy demands that people interact with one another on equal terms — not just in the realm of politics, the courtroom, and the marketplace, but also in the workplace and the home. It pushes back, for instance, on the idea that equal worth and freedom are compatible with employer domination of the worker between the hours of 9 and 5, or the subjugation of women in households headed by men. Such conditions are not simply a private matter between the boss and the worker, or a woman and her husband, but one of political concern to all. Mill himself suggested worker-run cooperative firms as an alternative to private firms run by capitalists, and a reformation of domestic relationships into something more egalitarian.

McManus demonstrates that these key features are present and receive further development in the work of later theorists — John Maynard Keynes, Chantal Mouffe, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer — all of whom either self-identify as liberal socialists or express sympathy with liberal socialist commitments. These authors see their socialism (or socialist-friendly views) as emerging from a liberalism committed to the equal worth of all and to the right of liberty for each, and all of them reject the more libertarian, neoliberal, possessive, and acquisitive variants of liberalism that have come to define the tradition in the eyes of many.

A Socialism of Principle

Socialism is often associated with a particular suite of economic and political arrangements, such as the eradication of private property, collective ownership of the means of production, and workplace democracy. Indeed, such arrangements are often taken to be essential to the doctrine. But McManus’s reconstruction of the liberal socialist tradition focuses first and foremost on ethical and political principles — principles that may or may not ultimately support those arrangements typically thought of as socialist. And while economic and political policies are mentioned throughout the book, they are not the fundamental focus of the tradition under discussion. For this reason, one might wonder whether what’s being described is really deserving of the name “socialism.”

However, in his book The Idea of Socialism, Axel Honneth argues that socialism has often been conceived of as a moral doctrine, defined by its commitment to certain ethical values. The socialist’s preferred institutional and economic arrangements are preferred not because of their inherent worth, but because of the ethical values they serve to realize. Honneth writes, for instance, that in the work of early socialist Charles Fourier, “the collectivization of the means of production [is never treated as] an end in itself.” Insofar as it is necessary, such a step is seen as a “precondition for entirely different, moral demands.” The liberal socialist, it would seem, sees things similarly.

Since McManus is interested in retrieving a tradition, rather than defending it or establishing its contemporary relevance, he says little about why we should favor this morality-based understanding. Nevertheless, its attractions are substantial. To adopt such an understanding is to keep in view the ultimate goal of socialism, which is living together in a way that evinces equal concern for the freedom and flourishing of each.

This outlook serves to guard against a tendency to fixate narrowly on one’s preferred economic policies and institutional arrangements. Socialists, then, are free to debate about and experiment with different policies and institutions that seem conducive to their values. Making it easier to start a cooperative firm, offering a basic minimum income, making free preschool and college available to all, building social housing, strengthening worker rights and the ability to unionize — without necessarily a radical, comprehensive overhaul of the entire social order (and all the danger and unanticipated harm that might come with it), the pursuit of such policies can be understood as tentative and gradual attempts to work toward the socialist ideal.

The outlook also allows for such policies to be framed in terms of a coherent vision. And this is where, I suspect, McManus’s retrieval of the tradition is its most valuable. The neoliberal tradition that has set the parameters for political discourse since the 1970s has encouraged the view that the core liberal commitments are rights to private property, to accumulate wealth, and to consume. In tension with this, it is thought, are commitments to equality of social standing, fairness in distribution of wealth, and creating a society that enables all to flourish as creative and curious beings. Politics then becomes an arena for making trade-offs between neoliberal and more socialistic values.

Left-of-center politicians in our day have struggled to talk coherently and convincingly about these supposed trade-offs — they lack a vision that allows them to articulate why we should be forced to buy health insurance but be free to gamble on sports, or why a 37 percent marginal tax rate is just while confiscating and redistributing a billionaire’s wealth is not, or why the arts but not yacht clubs should be publicly funded. Listening to your average Democrat, their policy program can sound like a grab bag of ideas supported haphazardly through ad hoc appeals to equality or liberty (when they appeal to these values at all).

The liberal socialist tradition, on the other hand, unifies the values of freedom and equality into a single coherent vision, while eschewing the neoliberal’s restricted view of what liberty entails. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism introduces readers to a way of thinking and speaking that allows them to grasp this vision and its appeal and to talk about it more comfortably and convincingly.

Of course, monied elites have a substantial interest in obscuring the substantial overlap between liberal and socialist values. If the liberal commitment to freedom can be perverted into something that appears utterly incompatible with the socialist vision, then the left-of-center side of the political spectrum will find itself bitterly divided. But if enough left-of-center forces can internalize the idea that one can belong to both churches simultaneously, its effect on real-world politics could be transformational. By removing the ideological roadblock to left-liberal unity, we not only gain allies, but gain access to a more compelling and expansive political worldview. Just as right-wing politicians in the late twentieth century turned to Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman for ideological inspiration and sustenance, so too might we hope that the contemporary left turn to liberal socialism’s many defenders.

This would be especially welcome at this particular political moment. At present, the Right has turned away from many of the liberal commitments it once had — Donald Trump rarely mentions freedom or equality, and he has risen to power by promising to neuter institutions most closely associated with liberal democracy. The conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen has attributed Trump’s rise to the failure of liberalism — the nihilism it inspires by equating freedom with consumer choice, the atomization and isolation it encourages through its commitment to individualism, and the cultural decline wrought by unconstrained capitalism.

Deneen’s proposed solution is a return to traditional gender roles, encouragement of public prayer, tax policies that incentivize families to have more children, and shaming media outlets for encouraging libertinism. It’s a reactionary and illiberal program, aimed at providing meaning at a moment when a hollow liberalism seems incapable of doing so. It’s also one that appeals to many — J. D. Vance cites Deneen as an influence, for instance, and has learned to speak his language.

But for those who share Deneen’s dissatisfaction with liberalism as it is but are nevertheless inspired by liberalism as it might be, a liberal socialism may be the way forward. If we’re uninspired by a liberal politics that promises mostly to cater to people as consumers while blunting capitalism’s hard edges, then perhaps we might breathe life into the Left by talking about housing, education, the arts, and the workplace in more socialistic terms — that is, talking about them as cooperatively produced for the purpose of creating a community of equals, in which we all strive to help each other realize our human powers.