Diverging Historical Trajectories

G.K. Chesterton once remarked of the Christian ideal that it is not so much that it has “been tried and found wanting” but that having “been found difficult” it has thus largely been “left untried.” Something similar could be said of the liberal socialist ideal, for if ever there was a theory in search of a practice, it is most certainly found here. Not so, of course, with the ideals of the distinctly Nordic form of socialism, which for nearly a century has been implemented to varying degrees across five separate countries. As Jürgen Kaube has observed, the manifestation of Nordic socialism in the welfare society has historically proceeded under the curious conditions of a Reflexionsdefizit, or theoretical deficit. If liberal socialist theory has run far out ahead of its praxis, the situation in Norden (i.e., in Scandinavia), where theory has never really caught up with events on the ground, is rather the inverse.

What explains this distinction — that is, why the project of anglophone liberal socialism largely remains stillborn while its Nordic equivalent, however unsatisfactory in its execution, is still very much alive — is a question of immense significance. While the differing historical conditions characterizing the Anglosphere and Norden certainly offer some measure of explanation, we must also consider the possibility that there is something inherent in the very intellectual foundations of liberal socialist theory that effectively hinders its implementation in the real world.

Here we might turn to Gunnar Myrdal, the principal political economist of the Nordic welfare society, whose 1930 history of economic thought constitutes a kind of “Stockholm School response” to the far more influential anglophone and Austrian traditions. Noting that liberalism and socialism share a common ancestor in Adam Smith, Myrdal stresses the inbuilt tension between Smith’s competing conceptions of liberty, the one mandating “non-interference under actual conditions,” the other emphasizing liberty in “the natural state only,” which in turn demands “interference with the actual state in order to restore the natural.” The former “conservative brand of liberalism” finds its first expression in classical liberal economics, while the latter “revolutionary” component of Smithian liberty is taken up by the early socialists and eventually by Marx himself. That liberal socialists, at least relative to their Nordic cousins, have struggled to navigate this divide is critical to understanding what separates them.

Both traditions, in contrast to competing ideologies, share the lack of a singular intellectual lodestar, i.e., no Edmund Burke, no Karl Marx, no Friedrich Hayek. Yet liberal socialism can at least claim a founder, for it is around the figure of John Stuart Mill that the entire drama of the troubled relationship between liberalism and socialism is staged. Here is Myrdal on the great philosopher of liberty:

Free competition and individualism formed the religion of Mill’s childhood. However much he desired, later, a more social form of organization, it had to be one which is capable of being part of an individualistic society. This was Mill’s insoluble dilemma.

McManus’s chapter on Mill, among the strongest of the volume, makes a convincing case that the philosopher did ultimately manage to square the circle — that late in his life he came to recognize that “liberalism’s purported aspirations to create a free and equal society” must be united with socialist concerns regarding “economic domination, the unfairness of inequality, and the need to ameliorate gross poverty.” And yet the fundamental difficulty of the liberal socialist project is manifest in the fact that the other side of the liberal tradition — all of those C.B. Macpherson aptly termed “possessive individualists” — very much claim Mill as the founder of their own school. Anyone who has mixed it up with this cast of characters, as McManus regularly does, is all too familiar with the wrath unleashed whenever it is suggested that there is at least some distance between Mill and Hayek.

The sophistry of market fundamentalists aside, the mere existence of this debate concerning so central a figure suggests that the foundation upon which liberal socialism rests is considerably less firm than that of its Nordic complement. We might say that Nordic socialism constitutes a social theory in which the positive values of liberalism have been sublated, that Nordics have enjoyed a much freer hand in building socialism from a liberal scaffolding, relatively (but hardly entirely) unburdened by the strictures imposed by the persistence of possessive individualism.

Socialism With Individualist Characteristics

Despite such historical divergences, there can be little doubt that liberal socialist theory has reached conclusions nearly indistinguishable from those of Nordic socialists. Indeed, any attempt to identify the many points of agreement would require a book-length study. Instead, we shall concentrate on the two shared aspects that reveal, on the one hand, where they are arguably at their strongest and, on the other, where they are comparatively weak.

It should come as no surprise that liberal socialism, given its roots in the broader liberal tradition, is particularly attentive to the needs of the single individual. Indeed, what distinguishes the liberal form of socialism from those variants more firmly rooted in dialectical materialism is a very different starting point, namely the Aristotelian conviction that the model society is one that offers the best possible conditions for individual flourishing. McManus is superb here:

By contrast, liberal socialists emphasize that, while the procurement of satisfactions is undoubtedly important (especially in conditions of absolute or near-absolute scarcity), far more important for pursuing a qualitatively good life is the development of their human powers or capabilities.

While it must be noted that Marx himself, particularly before the turn toward scientific socialism, expresses similar sentiments, the basic distinction remains intact. Liberal socialists, firmly grounded in liberal individualism, effectively tack on the socialism ex post facto, neither as the fulfillment of the dialectical churn of history nor as an end in itself, but as a conscious and willed means of securing the most favorable conditions for the full flowering of the human personality.

This “developmental ethic,” as McManus aptly terms it, has rendered liberal socialism especially attuned to the specifically immaterial dimension of being under socialism — that is, to the innumerable ways in which a more just and solidaristic social order enriches the inner life of the single individual. In a certain sense, then, liberal socialism can be understood as a kind of humanist response to the essential sterility of acquisitive liberalism, an insistence that, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, “man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.” That it was his encounter with Romantic poetry that began Mill’s long journey away from the faith of his fathers only serves to confirm this observation.

It might come as somewhat of a surprise that Nordic socialism very much shares this commitment to what McManus terms “normative individualism.” Much of this can be attributed to its aforementioned “theoretical deficit,” meaning the fact that the Nordic welfare society was largely erected according to no preconceived blueprint. Instead, its foundation stones were the outcome of the pragmatic measures of socialist parties and their allies in the labor movement. The task of articulating the welfare society in the discursive realm was largely taken up by figures from the humanities, particularly poets and novelists.

As the Danish scholar Lasse Horne Kjældgaard has described, the debates over the emergent welfare society in the 1950s and ’60s witnessed a gradual reworking of the very concept of welfare. It moved away from its original synonym velstand (prosperity), a purely material measure, toward the much more expansive velbefindende (wellbeing), which incorporates cultural, moral, and psychological components. At stake was the critical question of what impact the broadly shared prosperity and security of the welfare society would have on the single individual, whether it would tend to produce more cultivated, more ethical, more fulfilled human beings.

Whether this shared orientation toward individual flourishing constitutes a strength or a weakness remains subject to considerable disagreement among socialists. But what cannot be denied is that the durability of the Nordic welfare society owes a great deal to its attention to the immaterial aspects of individual well-being, as reflected in the oft-cited international indices of happiness, public trust, etc. Liberal socialists in the Anglosphere, of course, find themselves in a fundamentally different situation, and must by all means take care not to put the cart before the horse. And yet if there is any truth at all to the old saw that, at least relative to its famously “collectivist” Nordic neighbors, anglophone culture is constitutionally individualistic, then there is at least some possibility that this might be turned into an advantage.

Economic Democracy Over State Socialism

Since liberal and Nordic socialism alike are comfortably within the reformist wing of the broader socialist movement, neither has much to offer its revolutionary alternative. At issue here is the all-important matter of property relations, the very rock upon which seemingly all reformist socialisms have eventually run aground.

Critically, both traditions evince skepticism toward the excessive concentration of economic power within the state. For liberal socialists the reasons for this are obvious, principally the historical origins of liberalism in the struggle to secure private property rights against absolute monarchy and feudal privilege. For Nordic socialists, this can in part be attributed to the fact that a rapidly executed expropriation of the expropriators was never within their power as well as, just as importantly, because the Nordic welfare society was consciously constructed in opposition not only to the free-market West but also to the command economies of the Eastern Bloc.

Instead, both traditions share a commitment to expanding the sphere of democracy into the economy, to the gradual minimization (and sometimes the eventual elimination) of the role of private capital in economic life. How close the two socialisms are on this point is everywhere apparent. Here is McManus:

Liberal socialism entails instituting a basic social structure characterized by highly participatory liberal-democratic political principles into the economy . . . Through this process of democratization and the extension of worker rights, capitalist control of the means of production would become less central and ideally even eliminated wholesale.

And here is Dragsted:

A commitment to democracy and individual rights thus necessarily entails the desire to change the economic system because our present system is based on an antiquated understanding of democratic participation, according to which many of the rights we enjoy as citizens are taken away the moment we enter the workplace, and further because of the concentration of capitalist ownership and the exertion of antidemocratic and oligarchic power.

Once again, the question of whether this gradualist approach to private property is a strength or a weakness continues to be subject to furious debate among socialists. And it must be admitted that outside Norden, the grand plans for the democratization of the economy, whether found in Mill and R.H. Tawney or in the Marburg School of “lectern” socialism, have largely remained a drawing-board project. Matters are of course rather more complicated in the Nordic countries, where mid-century socialists famously managed to engineer a class compromise according to which capital agreed to concede to a degree of state regulation plainly unthinkable in the Anglosphere. Perhaps the signal achievement of postwar Nordic social democracy is that it remains a condition of participation in the labor market that all large firms be subject to national collective bargaining agreements. This is why Amazon has made so little headway in the Nordic market, and why Swedish Tesla mechanics remain on strike.

And yet no one may deny that the Nordic model, because in its mid-century form it did not fundamentally challenge the right to the private ownership of the means of production, remained vulnerable to counterattack. When the global economic slowdown began in the 1970s, capitalists in the Nordic countries, like their compatriots in Western Europe and North America, were ready to pounce.

Nordic socialists did, unlike most of their comrades elsewhere, attempt to meet the neoliberal challenge head-on — in Denmark with the proposal for Economic Democracy (ØD) and in Sweden with the better remembered Meidner Plan — but such efforts were ultimately in vain, roundly rejected by the populace. Perhaps most discouraging, ØD and Meidner would turn out to mark the formal end of visionary social democracy. Today, the economic policies of Nordic social democratic parties are all too often virtually indistinguishable from those of the center right.

Converging Pathways?

And yet it would be wrong to claim, as numerous critics left and right regularly do, that little if anything of the mid-century Nordic welfare society remains intact. Anyone who has lived in a Nordic country will immediately tell you otherwise. More importantly, it is evident that Nordic publics, much like their counterparts in the Anglosphere, have had enough of decades of neoliberal retrenchment. A new generation of Nordic socialists has gradually arisen, committed to reviving the far larger dreams of their ancestors, and yet equally aware of where earlier projects went wrong. Included among this movement are the Reds of Norway, a reinvigorated Left Party of Sweden, and Dragsted’s own Red–Green Alliance.

What may come as a surprise is that many on the new Nordic left, Dragsted included, attribute a part of this revitalization to events in the Anglosphere, particularly to the emergence of the Sanders and Corbyn movements. In this part of the world it has long been customary for leftists to point to Sweden and Denmark as evidence that we need not, say, resign ourselves to a situation in which three single individuals control more of the national wealth than the bottom half of the population. But it is something new to see Nordic leftists returning the favor. This was everywhere apparent during our tour, which was just as much an opportunity to meet with and learn from so many dedicated socialists across the United States as it was a chance to share our own ideas. How Nordic is liberal socialism? How liberal is Nordic socialism? The answer to both questions, it seems, is more and more.