Matthew McManus’ The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a powerful attempt to merge two disparate traditions, parlaying reformist compromise into a coherent political program. It also rests on the assumption that socialism is inherently illiberal, an assumption that deserves to be questioned.
While often hailed as the single-minded son of America, perhaps the best proof that Ronald Reagan was firstly a product of Hollywood is the sheer number of weird things he said. One of the most notable of these came in 1987. Capping off a wide speech to the UN that dealt with everything from the Iran-Iraq war to the need for emboldened entrepreneurship to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, he offered an out-of-pocket musing worthy of a mind honed by the silver screen: “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
For many, the idea of an “alien threat” as a speculative conceit, or allusion to nuclear conflict, will seem quaintly nostalgic. Today after all such language, at least when used in the United States, can only have one target: the “mass immigration” that, so we are told, is sweeping the country, tragically imperiling the fates of (white) families everywhere. Yet one needn’t do more than consult the history of the interplay between liberalism and socialism to know that, on an abstract philosophical level anyway, Reagan isn’t wrong about the unifying power of overarching threats. Whenever revanchist aristocratism rears its head–as in, most notably, World War II–a conciliatory message is diffused: that while liberals and socialists may be different, they have common origins, and in any event are similar enough to justify strategic co-operation. But when the contradiction is simplified, when the two ideologies are at loggerheads with no third wheel in sight, a different approach is adopted. Now, what’s needed is for liberals and socialists to man the battalions against one another, taking aim at–depending on your preference–totalitarian communism or the ardent defenders of bourgeois right.
Given that the sons of Reagan have, since 2016, firmly sided with something resembling fascism, it’s no surprise that the latter tack is commonly called for, including on the left. But the “something resembling” remains a sticking point, and unanswered questions persist. Is the current far-right really fascist enough to justify setting to the side many of the left’s core concerns; core concerns that, we might add, need to be addressed in order for any victory over the Trumps and Le Pens of the world to be more than fleeting? And even if it was, how is this kumbayah effect supposed to take hold when (neo)liberals have so steadfastly opposed anything like a coalition?
It’s into this thorny impasse that Matt McManus steps with his new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Over the past few years McManus has earned a reputation as one of the most tireless exponents of the need for a unified front against the far right, championing this cause with impressive prolificity in the pages of Jacobin and in his published books. As many socialists in the English-speaking world abandoned the idea after the spectacular collapse of Corbyn and Sanders in 2020, this stance has been somewhat divisive. Indeed, to his defenders, McManus is that rare thing: a beacon of common sense, not to mention common cooperation, in a left conspicuously devoid of it. For his detractors, he’s something else: the mouthpiece for a Democratic Party collaborationism that subsists on a drip feed of support from prominent patrons, being dangerously out of step with the socialist rank-and-file.
This fracas aside, what’s clear from Liberal Socialism is that McManus can’t be pegged as simply a proselytizer for the DSA-right. Most residual advocates of left populism–the Trotskyists who made their peace with electoralist projects from Syriza to Sanders come to mind–use the parser of strategy to carefully separate out their commitments. “Yes, we’re socialists,” they say, “but in this conjuncture we must work with liberals.” As the title of his book suggests, McManus plays this song a different way. While often framed as mortal enemies, the mutual emergence of liberalism and socialism from the Enlightenment means they share key points in common, including a belief in the normative value of all humans and the importance of individual rights. This is attested to not just by select instances of historical cooperation, but by the efforts of thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Chantal Mouffe to John Rawls to generate a syncretic doctrine, blending the best aspects of both traditions. To illuminate this lineage, McManus proposes– following the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson–a method of “retrieval,” intended to trace its contours as well as interrogate its ethical commitments. For the most part, this is successful. Liberal Socialism is a swell, scholarly work, one even McManus’ most hardened Marxist critics could learn much from. But it also finds him at times failing to realize that to retrieve is also to create–of failing to fully grasp the political assumptions that undergird his own dicephalic alien threat.
After clearing his throat and taking an obligatory pot shot at “Stalinism” (2), McManus gets down to business in the first section of the book. In order to understand liberal socialism, he tells us, it is necessary first to understand its prehistory; the early liberalism it emanated out of, and the egalitarian impulse contained therein. While the question of who is the “first liberal” is contentious, Thomas Hobbes is likely as good a candidate as any. Though often forgotten today, what is astonishing about Hobbes in light of the tradition that preceded him is how forthrightly he asserts the equality of individuals. All people are, he tells us, basically equal at least in the sense that they can kill each other. Consequently, the sovereign is less a divine elect than just some random dude who, by centralizing power and promoting civil peace, safeguards the stability of society. Yet if Hobbes’ ideas have a somewhat uncertain status with respect to latter-day liberalism, this primarily has to do with the way that, while he may have humanized ruler and ruled alike, he did not subtend this with the supposition of inalienable individual rights. That task fell to Locke, who–with his rights-based republicanism and effective invention of the human–doesn’t lack for influence on liberalism as a whole. Of course, Locke was far from perfect. One only need be familiar with his treatment of “‘America’ as appropriable terra nullius” (39), or his participation in the slave trade, to know that. But his call for property owners to surrender surpluses to the poor does suggest a concern with an uncynical notion of equality that later (early) liberals would build upon. Thomas Paine, for instance, is best known as a propagandist for the American Revolution. Less remarked upon is that he shifted his position by the time of the French one, criticizing the rights of property and even calling for something resembling a negative income tax. The “most complete” (77) early liberal of all though is Mary Wollstonecraft. For in addition to sharing Paine’s reservations about the limits of actually existing liberalism, also parlayed this into a powerful argument for the recognition of women as persons.
While the likes of Paine and Wollstonecraft show how wild the liberal ferment of the eighteenth century could be, McManus is keen to stress that it would not be appropriate to call them “liberal socialists.” This is for the simple reason that socialism–a movement that emerged largely as a response to the inequality liberalism helped engender–didn’t exist yet. The first person to truly combine these doctrines is thus likely John Stuart Mill. One of the interesting things about Mill is that, a bit like England itself, he moved leftward over time. Beginning his career as an unreconstructed Benthamite, he soon–under the influence of his wife, a changing political climate, and the writings of the utopian socialists–struck a different tone, calling for wide redistribution of wealth as well as acknowledging the wisdom of proletarian governance once the working class were ready (and becoming, let us not forget, the GOAT male feminist). Of course, this didn’t spare him the barbs of Marx, who famously charged his work with trying to “reconcile the irreconcilable” (114); that is, generalized commodity production and social equality. But while we can learn much from Marx’s theory of power, and while he was far from illiberal himself, this doesn’t mean he was without fault. The implicit “democratic centralism” (135) of The Communist Manifesto, for instance, seems in hindsight to anticipate a number of latter-day authoritarian regimes. Given this, it’s unsurprising that much of the liberal socialism of the twentieth century was defined by its disambiguation of socialism and authoritarianism. For the Fabian socialist R.H. Tawney, this took the form of stressing the link between socialism and Christianity; the way that socialism’s concern with collective life is intended to realize differences between individuals, not negate them. For the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, it took the form of “evolutionary socialism”; the idea that socialism was above all an incrementalist project that could be achieved by electoralist means. For the economist John Maynard Keynes, it took the form of a state-planned liberal economy; a vision that, while certainly preferable to unfettered capitalism, erred in the lack of a role it assigned to organized labour. And for the Italian anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, it took the form of a vitalistic liberalism that pit the need for a ceaseless process of becoming against the deterministic platitudes of orthodox Marxism.
McManus continues the second section of the book by profiling the liberal socialists of the post-World War II era. While perhaps less sexy than their iconoclastic precursors, what makes these thinkers interesting is that they wrote within an environment in which liberal socialism had already been partially accomplished via welfarist capitalism. Thus their work can partly be read as the system’s own self-reflection; as an attempt to suss out the limitations of the regnant social model. The first person McManus deals with is C.B. MacPherson, whose book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism inspired the title of the volume under discussion. MacPherson is in some ways a self-contradictory figure. Scornful of the atomistic “Locke-Bentham” theory of man, much of his published work takes a scorched earth approach to the liberal lineage, charging it with using high-minded ideals to disguise its role as a handmaiden to power. Yet he also pursues this critique from within the premises of liberalism itself, eschewing a defection to the socialist fold in favour of the idea that liberalism contains the resources within it to self-correct. A similar tension can be seen in the work of John Rawls, a figure particularly central to McManus’ analysis. Rawls is well-known for the “veil of ignorance”: a thought-experiment according to which–by suspending consideration of our personal circumstances–we can make better choices concerning the society we ought to create. This is supplemented by two principles: that we should afford the maximum amount of liberty to individuals shy of infringing on that of others, and that socio-economic disparities are only justified insofar as they benefit the worst off. What McManus stresses is that, while Rawls initially wavered over whether “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialism” was the best way to realize these ideals, the experience of neoliberalism eventually compelled him to come down on the side of the latter. This does not mean he ever fully reckoned with the presuppositions of his position. He never really moved beyond ideal theory, for one, posing rather than resolving the question of the kinds of class coordination that would be needed to bring about his sought-for society. Nor did he take account of the role that race plays in determining social mobility–a point made by Charles Mills, who posits a “black radical liberalism” to try to remedy this.
The third and final section of the book deals with the post-1980 period; one that in many ways represents a nadir for liberal socialism, due to the way that the decline and fall of the USSR enabled a class politics from above in the form of neoliberalism. One of the major political thinkers of the 1980s was Chantal Mouffe, whose Ernesto Laclau co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy became a cause célèbre after its publication in 1985. McManus’ assessment of her work is somewhat circumspect. There is no doubt, certainly, that Mouffe is a liberal socialist. Along with Keynes, Rosselli, and Rawls, she’s one of the few thinkers in the book who actually self-described this way. This owes in her case to the influence of Norberto Bobbio, who similarly applied the term to his work. Nor can there be any doubt that the agonistic core of her writings–her Schmittian call to name the left’s enemies and forge together fragmented interests–helped wed liberal socialism for the first time to a robust theory of power. Yet where Mouffe deviates from McManus’ desired direction is in her jettisoning of Marxist political economy. A poststructuralist at bottom, for Mouffe the highest calling of the left is not to wage class struggle but to construct a “hegemonic coalition” consisting of various identities: feminists, workers, ecologists, and so on. But does this not ignore Marx’s key insight; to wit, that proletarianization is already giving us the means to organize across diverse lines? And doesn’t it already seem passé in light of the tremendous resurgence of interest in class politics in the post-2008 period? In many ways, the reverse problem can be found in the work of Axel Honneth. The most lauded member of the third generation of the Frankfurt School, Honneth’s writings can easily be read as an attempt at course correction, swapping the Kantianism characteristic of Habermas’ theory of communicative action for a more sweeping dialectical vision. .The result of this is an impressive oeuvre, that largely succeeds in producing a theory of justice immanent to modern society. But if Honneth has an Achilles’ heel, it’s that he’s too Hegelian. Trapped within the closed circle of immanent critique, he’s unable to get under the skin of class relations in the way so many Marxists have. After this, McManus caps off the book with a taut conclusion, calling for liberal socialists to develop a stronger theory of power, eschew statist theories of justice, and broaden their work to encompass the concerns of various minorities.
When surveying Liberal Socialism, one of the most instinctive responses of any socialist is going to be to evince indignation at the rift between form and content. Over and over through its 266 pages, McManus insists mantra-like on the need to apply the method of Marx, whose class analysis serves as a prophylactic against the navel-gazing characteristic of “ideal theory.” But this method is placed in the service of ends that hardly conform with those of socialism’s signature author. Liberal socialism, McManus tells us, will either take the form of cooperative-driven “market socialism” or “an economy still nominally capitalist but oriented by heavily unionized private firms whose production is largely determined by state investment” (21). At the risk of stating the obvious, this is decidedly not what Marx sought, either in the Critique of the Gotha Program or certainly in full communism. Then again, this contradiction may not appear to McManus, since he–in what is surely an ideological tic in light of his generally strong scholarship–reads him as espousing the idea that “the development of human capacities” must be an “end rather than a means for the valorization of capital” (155). Right: and the goal of Spider-Man is not to rid the city of villains but to use them as a means for advancing science and generating lucrative media opportunities.
The tension between Marxist critique and bourgeois reverie has not gone unnoticed by McManus’ critics. Yanis Iqbal, in the pages of Cosmonaut, has accused him of both advocating a Hegelian evolutionism premised on pre-Cantorian mathematics and sidling up to imperialism by championing Swedish-style social democracy even as he rhetorically rejects it. Iqbal is a smart guy, and these criticisms are plausible enough. But it’s important here to remember McManus’ point, in the final section of the book, about the need for both immanent and non-immanent critique. Working from without, Iqbal doesn’t bother to adopt McManus’ operative assumptions, making conformance with a discontinuous conception of dialectics a litmus test for liberal socialism as a whole, as well as attributing prejudice to him on the grounds that his work contains a meaning that functions “behind the back” of its author. Nor does he acknowledge the point, made long ago by Fredric Jameson, that Hegelian evolutionism is not just wrong; rather, it indexes to real processes within capitalism. The result is something of a grotesque caricature: a religion of rupture, that would fail to explain why Lenin could support both Taylorist production and avant-gardism in art as in politics.
Is a more latent line of critique available to us, then? One that hews closer to McManus’ own modus operandi? It’s telling that, for a work that clearly aims for the high ground of dialectical historicism, there are several instances of historical insensitivity strewn throughout Liberal Socialism. McManus, for instance, follows most contemporary commentators in expressing discomfort with Wollstonecraft’s description of the women of her day as inferior to men–even as she explicitly advocates greater social inclusion as a means of remedying this. The problem is though that the idea that inferiority is a question of perspective is a twentieth-century one, in the sense that it presupposes a level of equality that did not exist in Wollstonecraft’s era (and being as time is not just time, much the same could be said of Simone de Beauvoir’s similar characterization of American blacks). But this issue also affects the book at a deeper level. One of the most important ballasts of the text, one could argue, is McManus’ claim that The Communist Manifesto contains certain unseemly, “democratic centralist” elements. While this seems a bit anachronistic–more likely is that the agonistic spirit of the French Revolution had not yet been procedurally recuperated by 1848, making Marx’s conception of democracy a bit difficult for McManus to parse–the point here is not to quibble with his reading. Rather, it’s to point out that, even as he follows Igor Shoikhedbrod in seeing Marx as synthesizing many tenets of liberalism, McManus still feels compelled to find within Marxism an “original sin.” For if socialism does not have a constitutive flaw, if it contains within itself the resources to bring about a greater state of freedom, then there is ipso facto no need for a merger with liberalism.
The most important question raised by McManus’ work therefore is: how do we interpret the historical relationship of socialism to liberalism? Does socialism need liberalism, lest it collapse into an authoritarianism Marx dreamt a premonition of? Instructive in this respect are some of his comments on early liberal thinkers. One thing McManus takes pains to illustrate is that the likes of Paine and Wollstonecraft initially believed that the elimination of aristocratic privileges would, by extension, lead to relative economic equality. When this didn’t happen–when liberalism contributed to the heightening of inequality through the role it played in freeing markets from the trammels of feudal rule–the result was, beginning in the 1820s, the creation of socialism. This tells us something important: that socialism can be just as easily read as a break with liberalism as a continuation of it. The workers that rallied to Robespierre’s side didn’t leave liberalism. Liberalism left them.
The intellectual apotheosis of this schism was Marxism–a doctrine that “corrected” for the limitations of a rights-based model by positing the primacy of the economic. That this doctrine was later used to furnish justifications for the actions of authoritarian states is trivially true. But is this because of a constitutive flaw in Marxism? Or is it due to the way that, within this expanded framework, states were willing to make trade-offs to address the issues they perceived as most pressing? The biggest problem facing Lenin at the time of his ascension to power was not the absence of bourgeois right; it was World War One, and the absence of bread. Much the same could be said of Mao, who took the reins of a country in 1949 in which the average lifespan was 36 years old. The continued threat posed by the imperial core, as well as the attendant realities of unequal exchange, meant that these problems were only resolved decisively by delinking from the world market. But whatever violence this entailed, it does not simply represent an abandonment of liberalism as envisaged by its founders. Rather, it was a fulfillment of it, in the sense that the raising of whole nations out of poverty, the provision of education to untold millions now told, cleared away the most essential obstacles to the achievement of individual freedom. Of course, it’s easy to observe–and would not be obscure to someone like Mao–that the martial imperatives of delinking engendered a process of bureaucratic calcification. But given that liberalism itself was first advanced through dictatorship–over slaves and colonies if not the polity as a whole–how fair is it to attribute this to a constitutive flaw in Marxism? A more plausible explanation would be that socialist projects remain authoritarian because openness for them can only mean openness to imperialism. And if this is true, it tells us something else: that the illiberal traits within socialism will not be remedied by a merger with liberalism. They will be remedied by the victory of socialism.
That such thoughts would likely be experienced as heresy by the DSA-right only means that this refusal of openness runs two ways. This doesn’t mean we have to condemn McManus’ book. The great merit of Liberal Socialism, in addition to its refined scholarship, is its honesty. Time and time again, we’ve been told that unity with liberals is an instrument for the achievement of socialism. McManus simply spells it out: what’s needed is a fusion with liberalism, aimed at the creation of a society that may remain “nominally capitalist.” Having spelled it out, he’s able to take responsibility for it, reaching conclusions that sometimes run to the left of those who would never in a million years countenance such a synthesis–that the Mouffian pluralism that influenced left populist movements ranging from Podemos to Insoumise may be insufficiently committed to the proletariat, for instance. “I like rightists,” said Mao in a 1972 conversation with Richard Nixon, on the grounds that they’re less duplicitous than their left-wing peers. McManus is surely too ambiguous for Mao to have liked. But he could perform a similar function for the DSA-right: making clear what it’s already become.