Many leftists in the Anglosphere have long held up the Nordic countries as real-world examples of a more just and humane social order — hardly socialist in any strict sense, but nonetheless concrete proof that society can be organized in a manner very different from their own.

Having recently returned from a US tour for Danish MP and Red–Green Alliance leader Pelle Dragsted’s book Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy (for which I served as translator), I can report that the Nordic model still very much retains its centrality in the imagination of socialists across the country. And yet beyond this basic agreement, several questions remain unresolved. We heard them on nearly every stop of the tour: Can the much-celebrated model really be exported to a much larger and more diverse country like the United States? Is there not something at the very core of what it means to be an American that is fundamentally opposed to the principle of solidarity that animates Nordic social organization? Does it really make sense for anglophone socialists to borrow a program of social reform from abroad, or are we better off looking to our own homegrown socialist traditions for inspiration?

These issues were very much on my mind as I read Matt McManus’s book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. A meticulous retrieval of a long-suppressed minor current within the larger liberal tradition, McManus’s volume weaves together a diverse collection of thinkers, among them liberals who remain open to certain socialist tenets as well as, to a lesser extent, socialists who have incorporated liberal ideas. While a handful of continental figures appear in the book, the liberal socialist canon is dominated by anglophone thinkers, and as such constitutes perhaps the most highly developed theoretical counterpart to Nordic socialism.