Ed Quish is an assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
For decades, many of Eugene Debs’s admirers have claimed that the socialist leader was a good, patriotic American unsullied by a foreign doctrine like Marxism. But the Cold War is over, and there’s no need to be defensive: Debs was a Marxist who rightly opposed American nationalism.
John Rawls is remembered as one of the twentieth century’s preeminent liberal philosophers. But by the end of his life, he was sharply critical of capitalism.
John Dewey is commonly seen as the liberal philosopher par excellence. But his staunch commitment to democracy put him on a collision course with capitalism.