Enzo Rossi recently published a provocative essay, “Socialism is Not Liberal Moralism on Steroids”, for Damage. In it, Rossi argues against “left-liberals” and “self-described liberal socialists,” both of which he associates with “social democracy”—a “short lived anomaly in the history of capitalism.” Rossi takes particular aim at left-liberals working in a broadly Rawlsian tradition, critiquing them from a sophisticated Marxist position. One such left-liberal is myself. Rossi references an older essay of mine for Jacobin as an example of positions becoming “somewhat popular of late” and so warranting rebuttal. 

But Rossi’s main theoretical foil in his essay is not me, but John Rawls, the late American political philosopher best known for authoring A Theory of Justice. Rossi describes Rawls as “the foremost liberal theorist of the second half of the twentieth century” who exercises “unparalleled influence within Anglophone academia.” After a quick 101 on Rawlsian philosophy, Rossi admits that Rawls’s theory of justice calls for a society “far more egalitarian than any society we’ve known”—even more so than social democracy. Given that private control of resources would be far more limited and wealth would be less concentrated if Rawls’s theory were carried out, isn’t this basically “just a few steps from socialism?” 

Rossi says no for two reasons. I’ll deal with the first here. 

Rossi reads Rawls as still committed to capitalism, and merely as tying it to the “ball and chain” of justice. In other words, Rawlsians want to maintain capitalist societies while insulating citizens from their worst consequences—for instance, by limiting inherited wealth. He admits that some Rawlsians have a “vision” that requires going further—for instance, limiting the capacity of capital to purchase labor. But by and large Rossi thinks most left-liberals inevitably slip back into market reasoning; pondering how “it can be right to redistribute so much of the money they ‘freely chose’ to work for…” Such a failure of vision and nerve is at least one reason why left-liberal social democratic projects ended up just being a “temporary concession” by capital.

The problem with this reading is that it doesn’t really account for Rawls’s own radicalness on any number of points. The first edition of A Theory of Justice notes that the question of whether a socialist system, a “private property system”, or the “many intermediate forms most fully answer to the requirements of justice cannot, I think, be determined in advance.” Whether one of these systems is to be chosen as the best to institute the principles of justice will depend “in large part upon the traditions, institutions, and social forces of each country, and its particular historical circumstances.” Nothing at even this early point forecloses the possibility of socialism in Rawlsianism. And the choice for it must be made on materialist reasons of historical circumstance.

Contra Rossi, the late Rawls is unambiguously critical of “welfare state capitalism” (i.e., something very close to the social democratic states of the mid-twentieth century) for denying “fair value of the political liberties” through enabling the very wealthy to enjoy unequal power. Welfare state capitalism also does not have sufficient concern for “equality of opportunity” and permits “very large inequalities in the ownership of real property… so that control of the economy and much of political life rests in a few hands.” It does offer “quite generous” welfare provisions and a social minimum, but these do not rise to the level required by a “principle of reciprocity to regulate economic and social inequities….” Consequently Rawls concludes that only a “liberal socialist” or “property” owning democracy (basically a society where private property would exist, but at a very small scale and more or less equally distributed) could satisfy his two principles of justice. 

In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Rawls dedicates three talks to Marx, who is applauded for his “remarkable achievements”, which count as “extraordinary, indeed heroic.” Rawls reprimands those who think “Marx’s socialist philosophy and economics are of no significance today” for making a “serious mistake.” He goes on to outline four elements of the “illuminating and worthwhile view” of liberal socialism. A liberal socialist society requires 1) a constitutional democracy with robust political liberties; 2) a system of free competitive markets, ensured by law as necessary; 3) a scheme of worker-owned businesses managed by elected or firm chosen managers; and 4) a property system establishing a more or less even distribution of the means of production and natural resources. 

It’s clear here that Rawlsian liberal socialism is committed to a view that goes explicitly beyond “welfare state” social democracy. It is a kind of market socialism with guaranteed personal liberties and worker-owned firms to prevent concentrations of resources and power which could create inequalities in the value of citizens’ “political liberties.” This vision is explicitly indebted to Marx and Marxism, who is commended throughout Rawls’ work. Rawls certainly had little time for the idea that it would be wrong to redistribute wealth someone has “worked” for.

Liberal Socialism and Ideology 

Rossi’s second and more powerful critique is that left-liberals have largely been unable to theorize the nature of power under capitalism because of

ideology. Liberals simply take desires, preferences, and moral intuitions as given. That’s the problem with their “justice talk”: it’s largely a discourse delimited by the dynamics of capitalism. It is constrained by the ideas and sentiments that are already prevalent within society as it is. 

Consciousness is determined by economic life. Rossi’s essentially epistemological claim is that liberal modes of cognition are so molded by capitalism that they simply cannot think their way past it in any meaningful sense. Inevitably they end up reproducing “status quo commitments” that befit the role of liberalism as the herald ideology of capitalism.

This view of liberals, especially liberal socialists, as simply taking desires, preferences, and moral intuitions as a given is incorrect. From John Locke and Immanuel Kant’s guides to educating free reasoners to Mary Wollstonecraft’s fierce denunciation of how women and the poor were educated to induce their willing subordination, there has long been an abiding respect for critical thinking and pedagogy on the part of liberalism. John Stuart Mill, who himself identified as a liberal socialist, famously declared it was simply better to be unhappy Socrates than a blue-pilled pig. Many others in the liberal socialist tradition would insist the same, following radicals like Chantal Mouffe in calling for a rejection of hegemony to adopt a more agonistic attitude toward power—especially the power of capital.

But Rossi is correct that one simply cannot compare the theoretical rigor and depth of Marxist and other critical traditions on ideology and hegemony to what one sees in the writing of left-liberals today. Moreover, otherwise impressive liberal socialists from Mill to Rawls to Axel Honneth have by and large demonstrated a poor understanding of the nature of capitalism as a global system of mute compulsion. Some have followed Mill in defending imperialism for ideological or strategic reasons. Others were sympathetic to the need for worldwide changes à la Rawls but utterly failed to provide a compelling account of the current system of global political economy. 

Nevertheless, many left-liberals and liberal socialists have worked to sublate this limitation. Samuel Moyn has written about how even in the halcyon days of liberal internationalism, the commitment to rights for all the world was “not enough” to constitute a genuinely radical project. Self-described black radical liberal Charles Mills, who endorsed a form of market socialism and left economics near his death, drew heavily on Marxist theories of ideology to account for why right-wing liberals so readily endorsed imperialism and racist practices. Mills also chastised Rawls for being inadequately engaged in the material and historical realities and operating at the level of “ideal theory.” In other words, left-liberalism and liberal socialism are evolving and revitalized theoretical traditions addressing many of the criticisms Rossi (and myself for that matter) have raised at a high level.

Once More on Moral Philosophy 

Rossi’s most general critique isn’t just directed against left-liberalism/liberal socialism but moral philosophy and argumentation generally. Identifying with the “materialist Left” he associates with Marx, Rossi doesn’t think we should be writing “recipe books for the cook shops of the future.” Instead we should begin to cook and see how it turns out; achieving socialism through a unity of theory that aims to describe the world and praxis that aspires to change it. It’s worth quoting Rossi here in full:

If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist Left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works and how present dynamics limit our imaginations, to improve the position from which we make political choices. This is the sense in which our conception of emancipation is different from the liberal one: rather than striving for the freedom to get whatever we want here and now, we try to create conditions under which our desires are truly our own. That requires radically dispersing power as widely as possible, away from the elite of owners and bosses, and in ways that don’t let the profit motive become a primary drive. The aim is to genuinely leave people to their own devices, in the hope—and this really is little more than an educated hope—that they will be able to figure out a better way to live together, as individuals. The freedom to try to fulfill one’s individual preferences while at the mercy of market forces will be transformed into the freedom to collectively self-determine our priorities, to create space for genuine individual flourishing.

I have nothing against using theory to describe the world. Nor, to be clear, do any left-liberals or liberal socialists. But there is something extremely odd in claiming to eschew moral theory and argumentation before appealing to “our conception of emancipation,” the creation of “conditions under which our desires are truly our own”, and the “freedom to collectively self-determine our priorities” in order to establish spaces of “genuine individual flourishing.” These are paradigmatically moral ideals—indeed, both socialist and liberal ideals. Rossi may argue that he is not interested in theoretically defending these socialist ideals, but rather only in using theory to anticipate the conditions under which the ideals might be realized in practice. That’s a swell project, but it also means that the ethical ideals of socialism are either implicitly assumed to be correct, or at best that there is nothing valuable to be gained by explicating the ethical ideals and arguing for them clearly. 

In either case I think it is a mistake. There can be nothing gained by constraining or chiding socialist thinkers for offering arguments for moral ideals we have good reasons to endorse. The correct attitude would seem to be: from each socialist thinker according to his ability, to each according to the rigor and impact of their case. 

Liberal socialist thinkers have good reason to dedicate more time to describing the real world of power, and focusing less on ideal theoretical moral arguments. But the inverse is true of any Marxists and materialists who until the late twentieth century often got by on the now completely discredited idea that science simply showed that socialism was the future—whether one thought it a good future or not. We don’t need to write recipe books, but it’s useful to think about what kind of dish we ought to make with the ingredients on hand. 

This brings me back round to liberal socialism. Whatever Rossi thinks, it is not simply a “self-description.” It is simply a historical fact that thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Norberto Bobbio to Chantal Mouffe and Carlo Rosselli identified as liberal socialists and thought it a regime worth defending. In my book I attempt to retrieve the political theory of liberal socialism by arguing it is defined by three core principles: methodological collectivism and normative individualism, a developmental rather than acquisitive ethic, and a commitment to achieving the democratization of the economy and family within a liberal constitutional framework guaranteeing equal basic rights—but excluding rights to private ownership of the means of production. These principles have often been inadequately defended by many liberal socialists, who to my mind were never Marxist enough. But they remain attractive moral ideals worthy of loyalty. 

Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.