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Liberal Socialism: A Response to Critics
November 5, 2026
The greatest fear of any author isn’t to see their book criticized. It is to see it ignored, watching it fall “dead-born from the press” in Hume’s famous quip. Fortunately, that hasn’t been the case with my recent books The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism and its complementary essay collection What is Liberal Socialism? My project of “retrieving” and defending liberal socialism has benefited from a wide array of reviews, many of them positive. Having worked on this project for many years, it’s gratifying to see it received with interest rather than a thud. But we’re here for the drama of pushback, and my retrieval and defense of liberal socialism has received many criticisms and counter-arguments.
In a probing and erudite examination for Historical Materialism, Peter Lamb expresses frustration that I haven’t been sufficiently clear about the distinction between more centrist versions of liberal egalitarianism and liberal socialism. He is also critical of the lack of clarity on the relationship of liberal socialism to Marxism. These criticisms have been lobbed elsewhere. In his Triple A review “Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Liberalism!” Conrad Hamilton describes The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism as a “swell, scholarly work” (thanks). But Hamilton is very critical of my imputation of constitutive flaws to revolutionary Marxism and remains insistent that any illiberal traits within socialism will not be overcome by a merger with liberalism but by the triumph of socialist movements. In his review for Marx and Philosophy Review of Books Theryn Arnold criticizes me for naivete in thinking the liberal democratic state could be comprehensively reoriented towards a socialist project. Invoking Nicos Poulantzas and Bob Jessop’s theorizations, Arnold charges that because “the state’s institutional selectivity is designed to secure the cohesion of the capitalist social formation, any reformist project working within its strategically selective channels will find itself disciplined and reoriented toward capital accumulation.” Perhaps most critical of all, Yanis Iqbal describes liberal socialism as defined by “contradictions,” most notably because it calls for a socialist politics while being enamored with liberal humanism and reformism. Iqbal summarizes my approach as “first a universal human essence is posited, then social relations are seen as distortions of that essence, and finally politics becomes the task of recovery. Yet this chain collapses under scrutiny. There is no untainted human condition of equal emotional needs; from the outset, individuals are formed within hierarchies of class and gender.”
I have responded to these criticisms in various places. But their volume is sufficient (not a bad problem to have!) that further clarification seemed in order. My forthcoming book Liberal Socialism: A Defense will address the most commonly noted limitation, which is that the earlier works tend to be historical retrievals that introduce the tradition of liberal socialism rather than argue for it comprehensively. Here I will take a few pages to reply to some of the more immediate criticisms in a spirit of dialogue.
The Relationship Between Liberal Egalitarianism and Liberal Socialism
A major point of ambiguity in my books is the relationship between liberal egalitarianism and liberal socialism. Lamb is especially critical on this point. He suggests that though I am aware that liberal egalitarianism and liberal socialism are not the same, the two traditions often risk getting muddled and confused in my books. This constitutes something of a missed opportunity to break with the limitations of liberal egalitarianism á la Mill, Rawls, and others. Lamb argues that had I “avoided the conflation of liberal socialism and liberal egalitarianism, [McManus] could have built a definition of liberal socialism as a theory which overcomes the restrictions of all forms of liberalism, including liberal egalitarianism or left liberalism.” In particular Lamb insists that I ought to abandon the still all too bourgeois forms of individualism found in liberal egalitarianism for the richer forms of individualism argued for in Marxist socialism.
Lamb denies liberal egalitarianism can be particularly radical. In the end it remains too much a species of meliorist liberalism, content with some redistributive efforts while precluding any designs on socialist economic democracy. While liberalism “has a history of giving concessions when the economic climate allows this,” when the chips are down it will oppose any efforts that will endanger “the ability of the economically powerful to continue to prosper.” Lamb therefore wants to clarify the boundaries between meliorist liberal egalitarianism and a genuine socialism that retains respect for rights but does aspire to economic democracy. This may require that the “liberal attributive adjective” be abandoned.
This is a complex issue. Liberal egalitarianism is a powerful theoretical tradition in academic spaces, even if its practical influence has been minimal in a neoliberal age. Historians of liberal egalitarianism, such as Katrina Forrester in her In the Shadow of Justice, typically trace its origins to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. On this view Rawls broke decisively with classical liberalism’s toleration of deep inequalities by making at least redistributive equality central to academic liberalism. In the aftermath of his work, philosophers like Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Danielle Allen continue to theorize how liberals can think about equality in ever more granular ways.
Some version of this history has been widely accepted, including by sharp socialist critics of liberal egalitarianism like Tony Smith in Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. However, I do not think that it accurately chronicles the intellectual history. In some respects it is over-defined by the parameters of Cold War discourse, which took liberalism to be unambiguously pro-capitalist over the course of its history — at least up until the mid-20th century when they acknowledge that some theoretical and practical efforts were made to criticize and ameliorate capitalism.
But this is simply not true. The impetus of what we can call egalitarian liberalism goes back far further, as I gestured to in my book. From the beginning even very bourgeois economists like Adam Smith expressed reservations about the tendency of power to concentrate in the hands of monopolists, and in The Theory of Moral Sentiments expressed concern that the tendency to worship the rich was having a corrupting effect on moral sentiments. From the 18th century onwards egalitarian liberals like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft were already describing the stark divisions of private property as a poisoned chalice from which most moral corruption flowed.[1] J.S. Mill had declared himself as a socialist by the middle of the 19th century, and applauded socialist economists for seeing further than their bourgeois counterparts. In Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism, Alan Kahan describes how liberal socialism became a popular ideology in the 19th century, with the Solidarist theorist and French Prime Minister Léon Bougeois declaring “…I am a socialist, but a liberal socialist, the most liberal of socialists.” Liberal socialist theorists like L.T. Hobhouse “distinguished liberal socialism from illiberal socialism” while “justifying far more extensive state action on behalf of the poor than his predecessors had ever imagined.”
What this showcases is the extent to which socialist and egalitarian instincts go back a very long way in the liberal tradition. This ought to make us more wary of the claim that liberals will always defend the economically powerful from any and all threats. Of course many will do so; possessive and pro-capitalist strains of liberalism have often been more dominant than their more egalitarian counterparts. For the past 40 years both left- and right-wing versions of neoliberalism have rolled back or precluded deep egalitarian advances. But the egalitarian liberals and liberal socialists I described in my book were very critical of similar developments in their time, while remaining steadfastly committed to the principles of liberal democracy. In this respect I stand by my claim in The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism that historically liberal socialism can be situated on the left end of a broader swathe of more or less egalitarian liberalisms.
On the more scholarly question of what the relationship is between liberal socialism and modern, academic liberal egalitarianism, my response is that it depends. Most seminal liberal socialist thinkers and movements came into being centuries or decades before Rawls ever put pen to paper. Mill, Hobhouse, Rosselli and Bobbio certainly didn’t need Rawls to come up with the idea of liberal socialism. That said, my own liberal socialist position is highly influenced by Rawls (and Marx). I think that Rawls' theory of justice as fairness, taken seriously, would require liberals to commit themselves to a liberal socialist regime. Another important thinker who made this argument about Rawlsian philosophy was . . . John Rawls. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls rejected the claim that welfare state capitalism would be sufficiently just because it allowed too many inequalities and enabled control of political and social life to concentrate into a few hands. Consequently, the only regimes that would be adequately just would be “property owning democracy” or “liberal socialism.” In his lectures on Marx in Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Rawls describes liberal socialism as an “illuminating and worthwhile view” with four elements: a constitutional democratic republic with fair value of the political liberties, competitive markets, worker- or public-owned businesses, and a more or less even distribution of the means of production.
Rawls’ theory is deeply imperfect and needs to be supplemented by large doses of Marxist realism. This is especially true in terms of its non-discussion of economic power and the role ideology plays in occluding the nature of society to its members — especially the working classes. But as a moral defense of what a free and equal society would look like, it is very powerful. It provides a vital complement to socialist theorizing, which has all too often avoided offering moral arguments or done so in a vague way.
So in sum, liberal socialism generally is a species of egalitarian liberalism expansively defined. It is situated on the very left end of the spectrum. Liberal socialists differ from more moderate liberals in thinking that transformative changes to relations of production are required if we are genuinely committed to liberty and equality for all. In terms of its relationship to the more narrowly defined academic liberal egalitarianism — most liberal socialists historically and to this day often don’t derive their principles from Rawls and other modern liberal egalitarians. But I do derive many of my principles from Rawls and think that is the right way to go moving forward.
What Would Liberal Socialism Look Like?
In his otherwise laudatory review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, rising socialist commentator Peter Milonas stresses the book nonetheless has serious “limitations.” The most serious is that my “abstract commitment to justice and equality lacks concrete proposals for institutional reform or economic restructuring. Readers hoping for policy recommendations will find little beyond broad assertions.” This is undoubtedly a real weakness of the book. The limitation is not just a gap, but an ambiguity. As such, it leaves me open to Arnold’s charge that liberal socialism reifies the inherently capitalist state by instrumentalizing it as a tool for economic transformation. Arnold insists that “liberal socialism cannot realize its own noble aspirations — to secure the equal substantive and social freedom of all — without confronting the structural, spatial and form-determined limits of the capitalist state.” Arnold notes that I acknowledge these challenges when criticizing the lack of internalist focus and statism of much of liberal socialist thought. But without an adequate response to them, he worries liberal socialism will revert back to viewing “the state as a neutral, malleable arena that can be occupied or recaptured through democratic participation to progressively expand citizenship, rights and the development of the free personality.”
By and large I have gestured to a radicalized version of what Francis Sejersted in The Age of Social Democracy calls the “Scandinavian variant of socialism” or what Pelle Dragsted calls “Nordic socialism.” This has sometimes been misunderstood — most prominently by pro-capitalist critics of capitalism, but also by some socialists — as simply calling for a redistribution of goods through a more robust welfare state. Of course, the Scandinavian welfare state is far more generous than its American counterpart. But reducing its achievements to simply dividing up a large economic pie more fairly is misleading. In Creating Social Democracy, editors Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark give us a glimpse into the ideological ambitions of the Swedish Social Democrats in the mid-20th century. There essayist Villy Bergström notes how the party’s major thinkers emphasized “what is shared by liberalism and socialism. In their ultimate aims, liberalism and socialism are to a large extent in agreement, wrote Sandler in the Nationalization Committee. These aims are freedom, welfare, and the leveling of differences to the degree that is compatible with continued progress. Karleby agreed but also said that liberalism gave ownership their petit bourgeois artisan form, one that was not developed for that degree of large-scale activity demonstrated by modern production. Socialism has gone further to develop these ultimate aims under modern economic conditions.”
This goal of achieving freedom, welfare and equality for all is one liberals and socialists do indeed share. A major achievement of the Scandinavian socialists, at least at their most ambitious, was getting closer to achieving the socialist ideal than most other self-described socialist countries on earth. A primary way they did this was through experimenting with different means of transcending wage labor relations and the domination of workers by capital. The means to achieve this varied. In Nordic Socialism, Dragsted emphasizes how in Denmark there was an intense emphasis on the formation of cooperatives, such that by “1899 there were already a thousand [consumer cooperatives] in Denmark.” This reflected the distinct wariness of the state that characterized Danish society, which inclined leftists to support bottom-up forms of worker organization over statism. In all three countries extremely high levels of unionization became the norm; in Sweden the number was as high as 85% in the 1990s and union density remains at around 65–69%. High unionization rates are complemented by co-determination laws that grant workers greater say in how firms are governed at the board level. Beyond that, there are of course the legendarily generous redistribution programs. This includes guaranteed healthcare, education, maternity and paternity leave, amongst others. In Finland, there has also been a recent major push to decommodify housing for the least well off through their “Housing First” policy. This allows homeless people to get government-funded apartments without needing to first address substance abuse issues or find employment.
In its heyday Scandinavian socialists aspired to go further and beyond social democracy through policies like the wage earner fund. Proposed by Swedish economist Rudolf Meidner, it aimed in his words to “deprive the owners of capital of the power which they wield.” The “Meidner plan,” as it is often called, would have taxed company profits to provide funds for trade unions or other wage earner collectives to buy stock in the firms workers labored in. This would have gradually transitioned the economy to one where workers controlled the means of production in any sector that hadn’t been decommodified by the state. These ambitions for the future are what likely led Sweden’s iconic Prime Minister Olof Palme to proclaim that “we have come further in realizing socialism than the countries that usually call themselves socialist.”
For reasonably developed states I think the Scandinavian variant of socialism provides an ideal template for how to realize the ambitions of liberal socialism. They pushed further than anyone else in achieving a genuinely liberal democratic state that had thoroughly democratized the economy. This of course doesn’t mean that they are perfect, or that we ought to emulate their steps uncritically. In his careful book The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy, Kjell Östberg is highly critical of the Swedish Social Democrats for allowing considerable power to remain in the hands of the capitalist class until very late in the game. This ensured that when economic woes and the global turn to neoliberalism took place in the 1980s, capital was able to mount a successful counteroffensive and roll back the ambitions and later the achievements of figures like Palme. Liberal socialists in the 21st century will need to do better by going further in the direction of full economic democracy; one of reasons liberal socialism is legitimately “socialist” rather than a moderate form of social democracy is precisely this ambition. But as I quipped in my review of Dragsted’s book, if I was trying to build a rocket ship to get to Mars, I wouldn’t ignore designs that had gotten us to the Moon. I’d look at them carefully and try to see how we can go further.
This is where my primary objection to Arnold lies. He is no doubt correct that the modern state emerged with capitalism and very much participates in its totality. But conceptually liberal socialists have never seen the state as the sole answer to our prayers; from Mill to Rawls to Mouffe, there has always been a strong emphasis placed on the importance of democracy within firms. Moreover, both conceptually and empirically, the Scandinavian states provide examples of how the state can be sufficiently transformed in a non-capitalist direction. Of course it isn’t sufficient to just get the right party in charge and then redistribute goodies like they’re manna from heaven. But what makes Nordic socialism impressive in its heyday is reorienting the state towards more solidaristic functions alongside concurrent changes at other levels of society – particularly through challenges to relations of production within firms. That said, Arnold is correct that theoretically and practically liberal socialism will be in a tough spot if it attempts such changes merely at the state level. Capitalism is a global systematic totality, and it will be very hard to move beyond it — even locally — without challenging that. However, I don’t think this problem is unique to liberal socialism; it’s one that has haunted the socialist project from the very beginning and will until the end. Establishing nodes of power in different countries to begin the project of building a cosmopolitan socialism would seem a worthwhile first step.
[1] I’ll momentarily use the term “egalitarian liberals” to distinguish liberals committed to equality from liberal socialists and the later academic tradition of liberal egalitarianism.
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