The Liberal Socialist Canon

A liberal socialist economic project thus needs to experiment with property rights actions through contract law, antitrust activity, sectoral regulation, tax policy, and other rules determining conditions of ownership and the location of economic activity to affect the organization and performance of the economy, the patterning of economic governance, the spatial distribution of economic growth, and the degree of inequality present in the economic system. It is committed to the proposition that capitalism’s lock on the state and political process is not absolute and that transactions between the state and capital can be renegotiated and transformed in an egalitarian direction. This working hypothesis is confirmed, I believe, by the ferocity of the current assault by capital on so many of the rules and regulations concerning state-economy transactions. This power-grab aimed at the contraction of government and collective democratic authority and the expansion of private prerogative does more than threaten growing economic inequality; for it narrows the scope of democracy and mocks the meaning of liberal rights.

-Ira Katznelson, Liberalism’s Crooked Circle

Many of us were brought up in a cultural environment where “liberal socialism” would be taken as at best a curiosity, at worst an oxymoron. It was well understood that liberalism meant supporting individualism rather than collectivism, capitalism rather than socialism, and at least some “sensible” kinds of conservative values like respect for authority and law over and against the revolutionary values of the left. These well worn narratives have long been overdue serious revaluation, and fortunately are receiving it. In his recent Liberalism Against Itself Samuel Moyn reminds us that liberalism came into the world as a revolutionary creed committed to liberty, equality and solidarity for all. Prior to the very late ascendency of Cold War liberals who drew heavily on conservative themes, many important liberal thinkers not only learnt from but identified with the ambitions of radical reformers and socialists.

Elizabeth Anderson in Hijacked observes how liberals divided on who should receive the lion’s share of the wealth in society, with those endorsing a more “conservative work ethic” arguing for the rich and others arguing for the poor. That those endorsing the “conservative work ethic” won out for a while should be little reason for taking their views as representative. Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism goes so far as to argue that “classical liberalism” is in fact very much a recent discursive creation, as from the beginning liberals from Smith to Mill felt very strongly that much more needed to be done to help the poor. This included arguing for “liberal socialism,” with luminaries like Hobhouse claiming “true Socialism serves to complete rather than to destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” 

My new book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is intended as a brief and by no means definitive “retrieval” of the intellectual side of this important political tradition. I argue that liberal socialists are broadly committed to three principles.

1. Methodological Collectivism and Normative Individualism: Liberal socialists believe that human beings are social animals and can only flourish in the right context. However, it is ultimately the flourishing of existing individuals (and potentially future ones) which normatively matters-not the flourishing of abstract entitles like the state or nation.  
2. A Developmental rather than Acquisitive Ethic: Liberal socialists are committed to each person having as equal an opportunity to lead a good life as possible through the provision of shared resources and the design of social institutions for the cooperative development of their human powers or capacities. This developmental ethic is distinct from the extractive or acquisitive one characteristic of possessive individualism, which focus on acquisition for the purposes of hedonic gratification or the pursuit of profit.
3. Finally, liberal socialists are committed to a basic social structure with highly participatory liberal–democratic political institutions and protections for liberal rights,. Liberal socialists want to extend liberal democratic principles into the economy and the family to establish more egalitarian arrangements free of domination and exploitation.

I call the book a “retrieval” because it doesn’t offer a defense of any particular flavor of liberal socialism; or even these three core principles. Instead it just discusses some of the major figures in the tradition, their insights and weaknesses, before speculating on the future. In that vein this article will just briefly introduce readers to some of the major liberal socialist author and their respective position. The hope is this will provoke further discussion and reading. Of course the list is hardly exhaustive.

Antecedents to Liberal Socialism 

Thomas Paine

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich…All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a party of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

-Agrarian Justice

Thomas Paine was an enormously influential figure in two revolutions. His classic polemic against aristocracy, Common Sense, was widely distributed during the American Revolution. Initially he was largely committed to conventional economic views. But by the time of the second half of Paine’s Rights of Man and “Agrarian Justice” he’d shifted notably. Here he increasingly insists that enormous concentrations of wealth are neither natural or beneficial to society. This extends even to the culture; Paine, like Adam Smith, laments the “superstitious awe, the enslaving reverence, that formerly surrounded affluence…” He claims the rich owe the poor a significant debt for the often extravagant efforts society makes in preserving their property. Paine argues this debt can be paid off through steep redistributive policies including: a proto-universal inheritance, old age funds, guaranteed well renumerated work, quality public education and more. Most importantly Paine describes this not in terms of charity or even generosity-the poor are entitled to this as a matter of right, and the rich cannot deny it to them without violating those rights. 

Mary Wollstonecraft

Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty. And to this selfish principle every nobler one is sacrificed. The Briton takes place of the man, and the image of God is lost in the citizen! But it is not that enthusiastic flame which in Greece and Rome consumed every sordid passion: no, self is the focus; and the disparting rays rise not above our foggy atmosphere. But softly–it is only the property of the rich that is secure; the man who lives by the sweat of his brow has no asylum from oppression; the strong man may enter–when was the castle of the poor sacred?

-A Vindication of the Rights of Man

Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for her stirring defense of women’s rights in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Less well known was her calls for equality on other fronts; notably economic. Wollstonecraft lampooned conservatives like Burke for making a fetish of property and hierarchy, even chastising them for leaning on hyper-emotional appeals to “tradition” and affection for the way things are. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she claims that from “respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.”

Initially much of her revulsion was directed against aristocratic and inherited property. But during Wollstonecraft’s travels, chronicled in her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norward, and Denmark her venom extended to burgeoning forms of capitalism. She described capitalists as a “species of fungus” whose petty fascination with wealth inoculates them against “greatness of mind” and “embrutes them till they term all virtue of an heroic cast, romantic attempts at something above our nature, and anxiety about the welfare of others, a search after misery in which we have no concern.” Unfortunately Wollstonecraft’s early death meant none of these thoughts were systematically developed. 

Liberal Socialism Matures

John Stuart Mill 

If some Nero or Domitian was to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that they were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation … [it] is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune.

-Socialism

John Stuart Mill is in many respects the first comprehensive liberal socialist philosopher. In his Autobiography Mill notes how in his earlier years he’d seen little further than the classical political economists, before maturing sufficiently to recognize it was possible to go further than capitalism in ameliorating human misery. This led Mill to proudly identify “under the general designation of Socialists.” Mill’s socialism was unique in of course placing an enormous emphasis on personal liberty. He was deeply concerned with early arguments for statist and command economic approaches to socialism. But in later editions of Principles of Political Economy Mill opined that capitalists really didn’t contribute much of value to firms, even though they were well renumerated for their idleness. He argued for a transition to worker managed firms in market settings-an early kind of market socialism that would be decentralized but still entail workers owning and running the means of production. This would be accompanied by redistributive public spending organized what was a generous welfare state by 19^th century standards. 

L.T Hobhouse 

If then, there be such a thing as a Liberal Socialism-and whether there be is still a subject for inquiry-it must clearly fulfill two conditions. In the first place, it must be democratic. It must come from below, not from above. Or rather, it must emerge from the efforts of society as a whole to secure a fuller measure of justice, and a better organization of mutual aid. It must engage the efforts and respond to the genuine desires not of a handful of superior beings, but of the great masses of men. And secondly, and for that very reason, it must make its account with the human individual. It must give the average man free play in the person life for which he really cares. It must be founded on liberty, and must make not for the suppression but for the development of the personality.

-Liberalism

L.T Hobhouse is less read than some of these others; which is a shame. While he was not an original thinker on par with Wollstonecraft, Mill or Rawls, Hobhouse was a powerful synthesist with a knack for clear exposition. Like Paine and Mill he makes fun of the idea the idea that “wealth” and “property” are natural and not social phenomena. The “prosperous business man who thinks that he has made his fortunate entirely by self help does not pause to consider what single strep he could have taken on the road to his success but for the ordered tranquility which has made commercial development possible, the security by road, and rail, and seas, the masses of skilled labour, and the sum of intelligence which civilization has placed at his disposal, the very demand for the goods which he produces which the general progress of the world has created, the inventions which he uses as a matter of course and which have been built up by the collective effort of generations of men of science and organizers of industry.”

This means society is an “indispensable partner” to the creation of the rich’s man’s riches.  Hobhouse notes how these kind of meritocratic mythologies aren’t harmless when they offer ideological justifications for inequality and a lack of economic democracy. He emphasized how great inequalities result in them ceasing to be “essentially an institution by which each man can secure to himself the fruits of his own labour, and become an instrument whereby the owner can command the labour of others on terms which he is in general able to dictate.” The solution had to be establishing a society where the needs of all were met.

Eduard Bernstein  

It is indeed true that the great liberal movement of modern times has, in the first instance, benefited the capitalist bourgeoisie, and that the parties which took the name Liberal were, or became in time, nothing but straightforward defenders of capitalism. There can, of course, be nothing but enmity between these parties and Social Democracy. But with respect to liberalism  as a historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only chronologically, but also intellectually. Moreover, this receives practical confirmation in every question of principle on which Social Democracy has had to take a stand. Whenever an economic demand in the socialist programme was to be met in a manner, or under circumstances, which appeared seriously to endanger the development of freedom, Social Democracy has never shied away from opposing it. For Social Democracy, the defense of civil liberty has always taken precedence over the fulfillment of any economic postulate. The aim of all socialist measures, even of those that outwardly appear to be coercive measures, is the development and protection of the free personality.

-The Preconditions of Socialism

Eduard Berstein is an important thinker whose work has recently been reintroduced by Elizabeth Anderson and Gary Dorrien amongst others.  In his day Bernstein was enormously controversial for arguing that socialism could be achieved through reform rather than direct revolution. He also wrote respectfully about Marx, while being critical of orthodox Marxism’s emphasis on economic determinism and ignoring problems with the labor theory of value. Bernstein argued that the movement to socialism would be a process rather than a break with liberalism. Indeed he claimed that socialism was very much the “heir” of liberalism as an Enlightenment doctrine committed to securing liberty, equality, and solidarity for all politically and economically. For Bernstein one could even “call socialism ‘organized liberalism,’ for if we examine more closely the organization that socialism wants, and how it wants them, we will find that what primarily distinguishes them from the superficially similar feudal institutions is their liberalism: their democratic constitution and openness.” During the First World War he found himself at the center of further controversies for refusing to endorse the conflict and later highlight German responsibility for helping launch the war. None the less he later became one of the chief reference points of movements arguing for democratic socialism and social democracy. 

Carlo Rosselli 

Socialism is nothing more than the logical development, taken to its extreme consequences, of the principle of liberty. Socialism, when understood in its fundamental sense and judged by its results – as the concrete movement for the emancipation of the proletariat – is liberalism in action it means that liberty comes into the life of poor people. Socialism says the abstract recognition of liberty of conscience and political freedoms for all, though it may represent an essential moment in the development of political theory, is a thing of very limited value when the majority of men, forced to live as a result of circumstances of birth and environment in moral and material poverty, are left without the possibility of appreciating its significance and taking any actual advantage of it. Liberty without the accompaniment and support of a minimum of economic autonomy, without emancipation from the grip of pressing material necessity, does not exist for the individual; it is a mere phantasm.

-Liberal Socialism

Carlo Rosselli never had time or opportunity to produce grand scholarly work on liberal socialism. The book which bears that title was written in part while Rosselli was being jailed by the Italian Fascist party. He later escaped and died fighting for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Like Bernstein, Rosselli is critical of what he takes to be deterministic and mechanical versions of Marxism-perhaps to a fault. Rosselli argues for integrating socialist and liberal principles together; an aspiration he thinks should be natural given their abiding alignment on many issues. That many liberals disagreed owes much to their having become “dogmatic” in defending “economic libertarianism” while failing to recognize how the forms of domination that emerge under capitalism limit the liberty of the poor. One way to offset this is the “constitutionalization of the factor regime” where workers should enjoy greater basic rights, including to democratic control. A very brave man with a forceful style, its a great tragedy that Rosselli’s life and contributions were cut by combat with the authoritarian right. 

C.B Macpherson 

The notion that individualism and ‘collectivism’ are the opposite ends of a scale along which states and theories of the state can be arranged, regardless of the stage of social development in which they appear, is superficial and misleading. Locke’s individualism, that of an emerging capitalist society, does not exclude but on the contrary demands the supremacy of the state over the individual. It is not a question of the more thorough-going the individualism, the less collectivism; rather the more thorough-going the individualism, the more complete the collectivism.

-The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism

C.B Macpherson was a Canadian political theorist best known for his critique of “possessive” forms of individualism, which he argued provided an ideological foundation for classical liberal and neoliberal defenses of capitalism. These “possessive” commitments underpinned societies characterized by capitalist domination. But Macpherson also argued there were forms of liberalism worthy of “retrieval.” This included the forms of left-liberalism defended by figures like Mill, which dropped many of the ideological mythologies about property being natural and hard work being the basis of reward. Instead they focused on envisioning societies where a “developmental” ethic would replace an “acquisitive” one, and the development of each person’s human powers became the end of social and political policy. Such a developmental liberalism would need to be paired with an extension of democracy into the economy and an erosion of plutocratic political forces. 

John Rawls 

Welfare state capitalism also rejects the fair value of the political liberties, and while it has some concern for equality of opportunity, the policies necessary to achieve that are not followed. It permits very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of the economy and much of political life rests in few hands. And although, as the name ‘welfare-state capitalism’ suggest, welfare provisions may be quite generous and guarantee a decent social minimum covering the basic needs, a principle of reciprocity to regulate economic and social inequalities is not recognized… This leaves… property owning democracy and liberal socialism: their ideal descriptions include arrangements designed to satisfy the two principles of justice.

-Justice As Fairness: A Restatement

If Mill was the most important liberal thinker of the 19^th century, Rawls was the most important liberal thinker of the 20^th. It is quite telling that the two most important liberal thinkers of two centuries either argued that only socialism could realize the aspirations of liberalism, or expressed enormous sympathy for it. Rawls’ Theory of Justice was often taken to be a defense of the mid-century welfare state. He later rejected that interpretation, holding that welfare states still permitted too many inequalities; especially economic inequalities that fed into unequal political power. Rawls argued that only a property owning democracy or liberal socialist regime could satisfy his two principles of justice.

In the Lectures on Political Philosophy Rawls rejects command economic socialism while defending the importance of learning from Marx. He calls liberal socialism an “illuminating an worthwhile view” with four key elements: 1) a constitutional democratic political regime, with the fair value of the political liberties , 2) a system of competitive markets, ensured by law as necessary, 3) a scheme of worker-owned business, or, in part, also public-owned through stock shares, and managed by elected firm-chosen managers, 4) property system establishing a widespread and a more or less even distribution of the means of production and natural resources. These Rawlsian arguments for liberal socialism have proven influential on contemporary thinkers like William Edmunson, Elizabeth Anderson, Daniel Chandler and more. 

Modern Liberal Socialism 

Chantal Mouffe

What is important, whatever the name, is the recognition that ‘democracy’ is the hegemonic signifier around which the diverse struggles are articulated and that political liberalism is not discarded. An appropriate term could be “liberal socialism” by which Norberto Bobbio refers to a social formation that combines liberal-democratic institutions and an economic framework with several socialist characteristics….Envisaged in such a way, the project of the radicalization of democracy shares some characteristics with social democracy before its conversion to social liberalism, but it is not a simple return to the postwar compromise between capital and labour.

-For A Left Populism

The Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe has been arguing for an agonistic form of liberal socialism for many decades now. In this she is deeply inspired by the Italian thinker Norberto Bobbio, who published influential revaluations of the relationship between liberalism and socialism throughout the late 20^th century. Mouffe’s own liberal socialism is far more political than the others. She argues that countering the hegemony of reactionary movements will mean organizing a “populist” left aligned by commitments to democratize many different areas of life. Mouffe claims this will mean “political liberalism” must be rescued from “economic liberalism” through a realization that we cannot have a society of free equal citizens where capitalism is dominant. Influenced by Carl Schmitt and others, she encourages liberal socialism to not be afraid of a language of opposition to “enemies” or radical rhetoric. While her programme is relatively unspecified, Mouffe provides valuable insights into the politics behind the political theory of liberal socialism.

Charles Mills

Black radical liberalism is a liberalism informed by the realities of racial capitalism and self-consciously oriented accordingly by the need to rethink white liberal theory in that light. So it is not merely a matter of arguing for a left/social-democratic/“socialist” liberalism, mindful of the failures of both free-market/neoliberal capitalism and Stalinist “socialism” (a familiar enough project by now), but of taking into account liberalism’s historic complicity with white supremacy, both nationally and internationally.

-W.E.B Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal

Charles Mills passed away recently meaning we unfortunately never got a systematic exposition of his “black radical liberalism.” In the 1990s Mills wrote the classic polemic The Racial Contract where he argued that liberal thinkers had largely ignored or actively sidelined an engagement with liberalism’s racist history. This included looking at the racism of central figures in the canon like Locke, Jefferson, Kant and more. This critique continued up to late works like Black Rights/White Wrongs.

But in this book and later paper’s Mills took a more constructive line. Drawing on the writings of people like Kant, Rawls, and Tommie Shelby Mills sought to develop a “black radical liberalism” which would take racism seriously and ask how liberal societies could address it more comprehensively. This included looking at the legacy of “racial capitalism” by incorporating, amongst other things, Marxist insights. Discussing black radical liberalism’s approach to the economy, Mills notes it would  “obviously be of a left-wing variety.” He goes on to not that liberalism is  “opposed to state-commandist socialism (what was represented as ‘Communism’”), but state-commandist socialism has proved itself to be a historical failure, both economically and morally. Liberalism is not in principles opposed to social democracy or market socialism.”

A long and prestigious tradition

As mentioned, this list is by no means intended to be exhaustive. It doesn’t include important figures discussed in The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism like J.M Keynes, R.H Tawney, Axel Honneth, and Bobbio himself. Also not discussed are other significant figures who argued for liberal socialist fusions like Paul Tillich, John Dewey, and arguably Martin Luther King. 

What does the future hold for liberal socialism as a theoretical and practical tradition? As a theoretical tradition the future looks very bright indeed. Some of the most exciting work on left-liberalism and liberal socialism is being down by historians like Moyn and Rosenblatt, philosophers like Anderson, Shelby and Edmundson, and economists like Dan Chandler and Crotty. There is a deepening sense, to paraphrase Alexandre Lefebvre, that neoliberalism has faltered for a reason. Indeed, far from being an embodiment of liberal principles, it is more like a kind of “liberaldom” that professes adherence to those principles while bastardizing what they stand for through enabling inequality and plutocracy. Whether these theoretical developments will translate into practice is hard to say. There are a lot of cliches and bad history that would have to be overcome to make a liberal socialist movement effective. But as the canon discussed here shows, liberal socialism is a long and prestigious tradition which is worthy of our attention. It offers a liberal vision that warrants not just loyalty, but love. 

Featured image is Carlo Rosselli - Lapide commemorativa, by Triangle rouge