Liberalism was the notion that educated, property owning, tax payers should be able to elect representatives who would decide Government policy rather than leave such matters to the Crown, the Clergy, and the great territorial magnates. If the bourgeoisie got the sort of fiscal policy which increased their own income and thus generated more and more tax revenue, a virtuous circle was created. The State could perform more than 'night-watchman' functions in a manner which rendered more and more of the working class able to pay taxes which in turn could provide the sort of 'club goods' which raised their productivity and hence ability to pay taxes. If this did not happen, sooner or later there was entitlement collapse and National bankruptcy.
It was possible, of course, to have a cosmetic, rights-based, Liberalism which, however, severely rationed remedies for rights' violations. In the same manner that lipstick manufacturers are happy to laud the practice of putting lipstick on a pig, some pedants or politicians might praise cosmetic politics of this sort. However, that type of Liberalism was fragile because, at the end of the day, lipstick costs money but doesn't make pork taste better and pigs have to compete with cheaper pigs reared elsewhere.
Socialism was the notion that the means of production- agricultural land, industrial machinery, mines etc- should be owned by Society as a whole. Liberal Socialism would be Socialism with free and fair democratic elections, freedom of expression, and the right of lesbos to bump uglies. It was believed that a Socialist society would be more allocatively and dynamically efficient and thus voters would be happy with the new arrangement. Sadly, Socialist administrations tended not to be very efficient. Moreover, there was increased strife between low-paid unskilled workers and the 'labour aristocracy'. High marginal tax rates had a big disincentive effect and entrepreneurs and enterprises fled the jurisdiction. If an economically efficient Socialism were possible- or the idea once again became plausible- there is no reason why Liberal Socialism might not once again attract voters.
Matthew McManus, writing in Aeon, takes a different view.
The existential woes of 21st-century liberalism require we do more than return to the forms of neoliberal governance that generated discontent in the first place. It requires retrieving the revolutionary emancipatory and egalitarian ethos that defined liberalism at its revolutionary best to offer a new deal to citizens of liberal states.
Socialism was attractive when it promised a streamlined economy with higher material standards of living for the vast majority. A revolutionary movement which appears likely to make things better can appeal to the masses. One which merely wishes to repeat the mistakes made by paranoid nutters a century ago is unlikely to gain much traction.
The strand of liberal political theory that offers the richest guidance on what form this new deal should take is liberal socialism.
Socialism had appeal when it appeared to be Scientific and 'low hanging' technological fruit was easy to hand. It was thought that great things were achievable through a National Planning Commission, using networked Computers (like Allende's Chile) to allocate resources. This was a pipe dream. The solution to the Social Transportation problem is in a time class exponential to the life time of the Universe. In other words, no Planning procedure could be efficient. Moreover, because of 'disruptive' technological change and geopolitical volatility, Knightian Uncertainty has increased such that there can be no single market where all relevant information is aggregated. This is because, hedging occurs through, not coordination, but discoordination games- which are also why arbitrageurs exist.
The plain fact is that a number of mathematical discoveries which became well known by the end of the Sixties made clear that the assumptions made by Socialists- including people like Einstein- were simply false. This also meant that things like the two fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ or the folk theorem of repeated games were wrongheaded. It wasn't that markets could be proved to do as well as coercive regimes. It was that an algorithmic method for determining general equilibrium would require exponential time.
The idea of ‘liberal socialism’ might appear odd and even oxymoronic.
Only if we accept that Socialism is shit. Liberalism entails voters approving public policy. That's why a Liberal Socialism is as much an oxymoron as a Democratic Gulag.
This is especially true for those on the Right and the Left who regard liberalism as the philosophy of market capitalism.
If voters believe public ownership of the means of production would sustainably raise material standards of living, there can be a Socialism in a Liberal Democracy.
Of course, there are many classical and neoliberal thinkers for whom that is true. From John Locke’s
who rejected toleration of Catholics
emphatic defence of life, liberty and property
unless you were a nigger or a Catholic or, worse yet, a Catholic nigger
to Hayek’s declaration that state planning in the economy was the road to serfdom,
though the actual road to serfdom was feudalism, which Capitalism could degenerate into if it became dynastic and incorporated the purchase of military power.
liberal defences of the ethics of capitalism are easy to find. The economist Ludwig von Mises no doubt spoke for many (including plenty on the Left) when, in his polemical tract Liberalism (1927), he proudly declared that:
'[The] programme of liberalism … if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production … All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.'
This is foolish. Many different types of regime would protect private property. Since Liberalism is associated with Parliamentary Democracy, and since voters can decide to pursue Socialism, Liberalism is not what you should clamor for if preserving your property is important to you. It may be argued that you could have a constitution and an independent judiciary upholding property rights. Sadly, experience has shown that this is no great defense.
But this would be to ignore the reality that many great liberal thinkers have historically been wary (to downright critical) of capitalism.
But 'great liberal thinker' means 'shithead who earned a little money writing books about things which seemed like a good idea at the time'.
This goes far back. Adam Smith may have been an enthusiast for free trade and market liberties, but in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
which was trying to bury older notions of synderesis or a 'natural' or innate voice of conscience
he also decried how:
'This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.'
But this was still better than admiring and seeking to emulate the most sociopathic war-lord or Viking raider with a penchant for genocide and gang-rape.
This was reiterated in Smith’s polemics against monopolisation and the alienating effects of the division of labour in The Wealth of Nations (1776).
There already was a Common Law doctrine of 'restraint of trade'- In Mitchel v Reynolds (1711) Lord Smith said 'it is the privilege of a trader in a free country, in all matters not contrary to law, to regulate his own mode of carrying it on according to his own discretion and choice. If the law has regulated or restrained his mode of doing this, the law must be obeyed. But no power short of the general law ought to restrain his free discretion.' Since the time of the Tudor monopolies, there had been great resentment of monopolies created by the Crown. It is in this context that Smith should be understood. Being a Scot he was at least 50 years behind the time. Add another half a century on account of Smith being a fucking Professor and you understand why his book was useless enough to become an instant classic.
By the industrial era, some of the greatest liberal thinkers expressed sympathy and even came to align themselves with socialism. John Stuart Mill, the greatest liberal philosopher of the 19th century, openly declared himself a socialist in his Autobiography (1873) and stressed in Socialism (1879) how ‘great poverty, and that poverty very little connected with desert – are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society.’
Mill appreciated that competition could be 'wasteful' and 'repugnancy markets' could be abolished in a manner which benefitted everybody. What we would now call the theory of externalities and 'cooperative solutions' or 'correlated equilibria' based on public signals, were beginning to gain salience in the literature. With Edgeworth we have the notion of the 'core' or even the 'kernel' of economic games.
Mill himself had always stressed the Malthusian aspect of poverty. However, over the course of the Nineteenth century, it became clear that, properly incentivized, families figured out ways to limit fertility.
Mill was hardly alone in sympathising with such a fusion of liberalism and socialism. In his essay collection Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973), the political theorist C B Macpherson coined the term ‘retrieval’ to refer to getting ‘clear of the disabling central defect of current liberal-democratic theory,
which was that it was a theory- i.e. shit.
while holding on to, or recovering, the humanistic values which liberal democracy has always claimed.’
more particularly when enforcing Jim Crow or committing genocide on indigenous people occupying valuable real estate.
We must now make an effort to retrieve the political theory of liberal socialism and make the case for its salience in the 21st century (a project I continue in my forthcoming book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism).
A physics theory guides the research of physicists whose findings get embodied in technology. It may be that there was some theory which guided 'liberal socialists' but it was stupid shit in the sense that it caused such 'liberal socialists' to fuck up the economy. This is why they have either gone extinct or else have morphed unrecognizably.
Liberal socialism is a political ideology that combines support for many liberal political institutions and rights with a socialist desire to establish far more equitable and democratic economic arrangements.
It is fine to have desires of that kind. Indeed, you are welcome to pleasure yourself while indulging in that type of literature be it plain vanilla third wave bukkake or more recherche Corbybista shit-on-your-tits RPG.
The latter point is put plainly by Michael Walzer in his book The Struggle for a Decent Politics (2023),
who is 89 years old. He should be struggling for a decent bowel movement.
in which he writes that, while ‘liberal socialists are not “egalitarianist”, they are serious about equality –
the grave will equalize him soon enough. Death is a serious business.
more so, generally, than liberal democrats.’ This deeper concern for equality relative to classical liberals becomes apparent when we look at when liberal socialism emerged and how its major figures defended its core arguments.
They said Socialism meant higher economic efficiency. They were wrong.
There is extensive debate
among senile shitheads
over periodising classical liberal theory. Many date its origins to the 17th century and the writings of Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Hugo Grotius among others. Whether or not these thinkers can be correctly labelled ‘liberals’ full stop, they undoubtedly developed or systematised a lot of the theoretical architecture that later liberals would rely on.
Liberalism meant telling Crown & Church to fuck the fuck off and take the fucking Dukes with them.
By contrast, in Liberalism (2nd ed, 2014) Edmund Fawcett insists that mature liberal political philosophy only really appeared on the scene in the 19th century,
after the Crown & Church & fucking Dukes had more or less fucked the fucked off from the realm of Fiscal policy.
when the term itself became popularised, and self-described ‘liberal’ parties and movements began to appear.
because the Crown & Church & the fucking Dukes had fucked the fuck off
Whoever you agree with, there’s no doubt that liberal socialism emerged later than classical liberalism, extending the latter’s antipathy to the hierarchical ancien régimes of Europe to demand more radical changes still.
Radical demands had always been made. The fact that some cunts wrote books about it didn't matter in the slightest. What mattered was whether one could do to entrepreneurs and bankers what had been done to the Crown, the Church and the fucking Dukes. It turned out that it was one thing to curb the parasitism of the toffs and the God-botherers, it was another to drive out the smart and productive element in Society.
While mature forms of liberal socialist political theory didn’t appear until the mid-19th century, there were important precursor figures. Two of the most influential predecessors to liberal socialism were Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Paine was such a pain in the ass only 6 people attended his funeral. He shouldn't have attacked George Washington. Mary did not have a penis. Naturally, she was quite miffed about this. Thankfully later generations of women were able to gain penises thanks to the bounty of Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale.
Paine remains most famous for his stirring rhetorical defences of the American and French revolutions and his acidic polemics against Edmund Burke and conservatism in the Rights of Man (1791).
He was a racist shithead who achieved nothing. Only whites should be American citizens. Darkies should be slaves.
Until recently, Paine was largely viewed as an extraordinary pamphleteer for the classical liberal and republican viewpoint, while not being an especially original thinker or theorist.
Because he was a shithead.
That appraisal has since undergone a major shift, with Robert Lamb in 2015 stressing Paine’s importance as a theorist whose ‘every instinct’ was egalitarian.
All Whites should own an equal number of Black slaves- right?
Paine is an important precursor to liberal socialism because he embraced
Slavery. Socialism can only work if you have Gulags and slave labor.
the importance of individual flourishing and rights, while becoming increasingly sceptical that this could be achieved without a major redistribution of wealth and privilege.
So, before you can have liberty you must have tyranny. But what is to prevent those doing the redistribution to enrich themselves and become the new holders of wealth and privilege?
In the pamphlet ‘Agrarian Justice’ (1797),
which would have destroyed the incentive of the hereditary warrior class to defend a given realm. There would emigration of the more able and immigration of the poor. Productivity would collapse. A tyrant might be able to organize national defense but material standards of living would collapse.
he rejects the methodological individualism of classical liberal approaches to property rights, and insists that property is an eminently social phenomenon:
So is getting invaded and enslaved. A realm characterized by 'Agrarian Justice' tended to very soon become the fiefdom of some Tzar or Kaiser or else remain the playground of marauding hordes.
Personal property is the effect of society;
But society is the effect of sufficient military power to repel invaders and slaughter insurrectionists. If the indigenous people can't provide this power, they suffer genocide or subjugation.
True the middle class could provide just as good military leadership as the Aristocrats but, first, there had to be sufficient Fiscal headroom for a standing army. The bourgeoisie rose by financing, through taxation, their own regime. It wasn't till labor productivity had risen to a point where total wars of attrition were sustainable by industrialized democracies that you could have the modern welfare state. But unchecked immigration could cause it to collapse. If you can't seal the border, why bother paying to protect the territory? Just try to get into a gated community or move to a place where there are crazy, bigoted, gangs or militias of your own creed or ethnicity.
and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society,
unless he and his clan are good at killing
as it is for him to make land originally.
people clear forest and drain swamps and irrigate deserts.
Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property.
But a society which can't defend itself won't have any property. Its members will be slaves of a more ruthless or richer tribe.
He goes on to suggest that, since many wealthy people monopolise productive land and capital without giving anything back, they owe a major debt to the poor as a matter of right.
Only in the sense that they owe blowjobs to hobos.
In the second part of the Rights of Man and in ‘Agrarian Justice’, Paine develops these arguments into a call for redistribution,
Paine was cool with Americans redistributing the land of the First Nations to White peeps fresh off the boat.
sketching out an early scheme for the welfare state.
When the Mayflower landed, the Puritans had initially set up such a state where 'each gave according to his ability and took according to his needs'. Then they began to starve and thus went back to the old way of doing things.
This includes providing money for education, guaranteed employment for those who want it, a stipend for every child born, and a prototype of an old-age pension.
What about the duty of property owners to give beejays to hobos?
Wollstonecraft was less policy-minded than her contemporary Paine,
because she didn't have a penis
but even more scathing in her contempt for the corrosive effect of the inequities of property that defined aristocratic and early capitalist societies. In her classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft insisted that:
Women be redistributed to the poor from the rich?
'From the respect paid to property
respect is only paid to property which can be defended against all comers by its proprietor. If this is not the case the property will be disrespected though the proprietor may not be sodomized because he has run the fuck away.
flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.'
Her hubby was glad enough to take money from Shelley who was the heir to a great Estate. The contemplative mind needs money. Still, if your domestic life is a miserable failure it is understandable that you might want the whole Species to change its fundamental nature. I myself, thanks to my principled refusal to do the washing up, have often advocated the replacement of kitchen utensils by wealthy young virgins who could feed me with their own delicate hands using edible plates and dishes of various descriptions.
For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage;
whereas in the slums, there were no drunken rapists.
and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue.
but does virtue not require the redistribution of beejays to hobos?
One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue.
This lady thought she had talent. Virtue- not so much.
In her later Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she lambasts the nouveaux riches as a ‘fungus’ with the criticism that:
they hired nutters like her to tutor their daughters. What she didn't get was that having a crazy feminist as a governess inoculates kids against that type of stupidity- unless they are too ugly or bad tempered to get a hubby.
An ostentatious display of wealth without elegance, and a greedy enjoyment of pleasure without sentiment, embrutes them till they term all virtue of a 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.
Mary got paid a bit for making an ostentatious display of her heroic and romantic attachment to being a virtue signaling cunt.
Wollstonecraft believed in private property, arguing it was a just reward for labour. But even this had a radical connotation, as she was critical of those who lived in luxury or defended privilege while ignoring the ‘women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education…’
Why did the Queen not invite more fishwives to balls at Bucking Palace?
Her critique of the idle or undeserving rich both echoes Locke’s condemnation of aristocracy and anticipates later Ricardian socialist and Marxist condemnations of the parasitic wealthy.
They also echo my demand that rich virgins of extraordinary wealth feed me with their own delicate hands. I don't mind if they are naked and giggle coyly amongst themselves as they dart their pink little tongues at each others pert little nipples. Or large nipples. Seriously, I'm quite broadminded in such matters.
People who now look down on me because I'm as poor as shit would feel new respect for me if they knew of the many billionaire Supermodels whom I store in my kitchen cupboard.
Much like Paine, Wollstonecraft had an unfailingly egalitarian instinct (including, of course, on gender relations) insisting there ‘must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground…’
I'm sure I'd be much improved morally if more wealthy young virgins were sent to my home by Adult Social Services.
In her ideal society there would be neither rich nor poor,
because everybody would be identical in terms of talents and motivation.
and the competitive race to accumulate private property would be a far less significant social priority than the relatively equal development of human intellectual, artistic and moral powers.
Why not make levitation, teleportation and the gaining of omniscience the social priority? It is totes unfair that more respect is paid to what exists or could possibly exist than to what is a puerile pipe-dreams engaged in by worthless pedants or pedagogues.
It’s this solidaristic emphasis on the development of human powers in a society of equals that makes Wollstonecraft such an important figure in the movement towards liberal socialism.
Only in the sense that Nostradamus was an important figure in the movement towards better economic forecasting techniques.
Liberal socialism reached its maturity in the 19th century with John Stuart Mill, its most articulate and well-known spokesman.
No. The English knew too much about how the sausage of industrial prosperity was actually made. It was in less developed societies that eggheads could dream of technological utopias. Marx thought a day would come when scarcity would disappear. People would only work for the sheer pleasure of doing stuff. Naturally, they would hand over the produce of their labor to anyone who wanted it. What he didn't get was that a fashion designer would not want me to wear their clothes because I'm as ugly as shit. Currently, I can buy stuff with money because producers need cash. If nobody needed to be paid to work, nobody would work for me because I have a horrible personality.
Early in his career, Mill had been a more conventional supporter of the free market. But, later in life, mostly under the influence of the utopian socialist St Simonians, he shifted his views markedly.
Because he was stupid. He didn't get that St. Simon's 'industrious class' had already risen into the landowning aristocracy and would continue to do so. One reason to work hard is so you can stop working hard and sit back and watch your kids live the life of the toffs.
In his Autobiography, Mill declared that his ‘ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists.’
Nobody cared. The Trade Unions had thought it beneficial to have Mill on their side in overturning the Master & Servants Act and this brief moment of political importance contributed to Mill's recantation- The doctrine hitherto taught by all or most economists [including myself], which denied it to be possible that trade combinations can raise wages, or which limited their operation in that respect to the somewhat earlier attainment of a rise which the competition of the market would have produced without them, - this doctrine is deprived of its scientific foundation, and must be thrown aside.
Mill didn't get that workers can extract a rent where labor supply is inelastic. The general wage rate can rise if immigration is restricted. 'Social' and 'moral' considerations don't matter for tradeable goods and even services which can relocate. Marshallian analysis made Mill obsolete but the Trade Unions and then the Suffragettes grew in strength and were gradually able to redistribute rents towards themselves. Smithian 'higgling' doesn't matter. Force, however, can prevail- even if that force is merely that of the voter or the Trade Union or Feminist backed political party.
While being critical of statist forms of socialism and expressing a wariness of the threat they posed to liberty, he claimed to look ‘forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all.’
This was meagre and mealy mouthed compared to the Marxist Utopia where there is no scarcity.
This shift towards socialism was reflected in later editions of the Principles of Political Economy (1848). Mill defended extensive experiments with workplace democracy and cooperatives, arguing that they would potentially be less domineering, more economically efficient, and more conducive to the flourishing of workers.
Robert Owen had shown the thing was feasible. Bentham was one of his investors. Sadly, Owen invested much of his gains from his Scottish enterprise in co-operative experiments in the United States but the feckless Americans couldn't make a go of them. He died penniless.
As Helen McCabe traces in her excellent book John Stuart Mill: Socialist (2021), he also came to advocate for wealth redistribution through state ownership of railways
the Belgian state had shown it could build and run railways successfully from the 1830s onwards
and roads,
there already were toll roads built and operated by Princes
and municipal ownership (and provision) of utilities such as gas and water.
Again, some such already existed.
He also at least suggested it would be permissible for the government to provide public hospitals;
which had always been the case
national banks;
the Belgian National Bank dates from around 1850.
a postal service;
The American Constitution authorized the state run Postal Service
‘manufactories’; and a corps of civil engineers,
like the East India Company's, Roorkee trained ,PWD engineers
so long as the government did not maintain a monopoly on these professions or services.
a meaningless stipulation in the case of 'natural' monopolies. There's a story that Abba Lerner tried to convert Trotsky to marginal cost pricing! As Coase would show, who owns what doesn't matter. What matters is if there is a mechanism whereby control rights are appropriable by those best at allocating resources. By the Thirties, it was obvious that public ownership wasn't a panacea. The economic problems remain the same.
Mill’s flavour of liberal socialism based around cooperatives and a generous welfare state anticipated many contemporary forms of market socialism, as well as being a direct inspiration to important ethical and Christian socialists such as R H Tawney.
TH Green was important in England. Still, there can be no doubt that Evangelical Christianity of various stripes brought many people into the Socialist movement.
In the early to mid-20th century, an impressive array of authors came to endorse liberal socialism.
American Capitalists couldn't get a bail out after the Crash. The State was welcome to take on the down-side risk in the name of Racial Purity, or National Socialism, or Christian Communism or any other such oxymoron.
In a 1939 interview with The New Statesman and Nation, John Maynard Keynes proposed: 'A move out of the] 19th-century laissez-faire state
which had already occurred during the Great War. After the Crash FDR started confiscating gold.
into an era of liberal socialism … where we can act as an organised community for common purposes and to promote economic and social justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual – his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.
but not his right to fuck other dudes.
A variety of European democratic socialists such as Eduard Bernstein
a sensible enough fellow who refuted Marxist orthodoxy with facts and figures about how land and industrial capital ownership was becoming more diffuse.
and Carlo Rosselli worked to theorise closer connections between liberalism and socialism, echoing Mill’s claim that socialists were the more ‘far-sighted successors’ of liberalism. Bernstein’s classic The Preconditions of Socialism (1899) offered a sustained critique of orthodox Marxist revolutionary theory and proposed a conciliation with liberalism.
It would have been better if he had stuck to common-sense empiricism. Don't start wars you are bound to loose. Don't kill the golden goose. Also, get the fuck out of Germany if you happen to be Jewish. A country which can produce a Kant or a Hegel is bound to turn to shit sooner or later.
He insisted that ‘with respect to liberalism as a historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only chronologically, but also intellectually’,
Racism was its even more legitimate heir. If you think your ideology makes you superior, it is natural to say that people of your own creed or ethnicity are superior by nature.
and stressed that there is ‘no liberal thought that is not also part of the intellectual equipment of socialism.’
Or Racism or any other type of evil shit.
Rosselli made similar claims in his book Liberal Socialism (1930), holding that:
'Socialism is nothing more than the logical development, taken to its extreme consequences, of the principle of liberty.
or Racism. After all, people of a particular Race are likely to have a Society of their own. They also may think they are entitled to real estate currently owned by others.
'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.'
Racism, when understood in its fundamental sense, is the superiority of all people belonging to a particular race and their indefeasible right to the property of everybody else. Liberalism in action is wars of Colonial conquest. Incidentally, Bertrand Russell thought such wars were justified provided the aggressor was superior. The problem here is that the victor will end up superior one way or another.
While he never identified with the label, I’d argue that Macpherson can also be correctly characterised as a liberal socialist,
i.e. useless wanker. But for his own 'possessive individualism' he would have dedicated his life to giving beejays to hobos as Nature intended.
given his lifelong effort to ‘retrieve’ a radical democratic and egalitarian core to the liberal tradition.
of giving beejays to hobos? No? Sad.
Finally, in the United States John Dewey worked hard to extend American conceptions of democracy beyond the horizon of the state.
but not to such an extent that billionaires ended up giving beejays to hobos. Even sadder.
His most famous contributions were of course in education, where Dewey insisted on the pedagogical superiority a more egalitarian classroom where students actively participated in their learning, rather than being regarded as passive recipients of knowledge delivered by an intellectual superior.
People with superior intellect don't teach. With 'active participation' the pedagogue may learn something- unless he teaches worthless non-STEM shite.
But Dewey was also keen to extend democratic principles to the workplace, becoming president of the League for Industrial Democracy in 1939 and advocating for the labour movement.
A Maoist faction split off from it in the Sixties and did some crazy terrorist shit. Industrial Democracy meant killing the foreman and then running and hiding from the pigs.
In the postwar era, there have been several prominent figures aligned with liberal socialism, including Irving Howe, Michael Walzer and Chantal Mouffe.
Nobody gives a shit about them.
But by far the most significant figure to express sympathy for liberal socialism was John Rawls.
He became famous at precisely the moment working class voters turned against redistribution. They hated the Welfare Queen more than the French revolutionaries hated Marie Antoinette.
For a long time, Rawls’s brick-like Theory of Justice (1971) was taken as an apologia for the welfare state system that, tragically, began to decline right about when the book was published.
It was stupid shit. Rawls didn't know that everybody is always behind 'the veil of ignorance' which is why what obtains is insurance and hedging, not a pre-compact to prioritize the needs of the worst off.
But this understates Rawls’s radicalism. In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2000), Rawls described Karl Marx as ‘heroic’ and praised his ‘marvellous’ intellectual gifts.
The guy truly was retarded. Still, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it was safe enough to pretend Marxism hadn't always been shit.
By the time of his swan song Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), Rawls insisted that welfarism did not do a good enough job of realising liberal principles of justice.
Because welfarism just means collective insurance. It is about hedging not justice.
Only a property-owning democracy or ‘liberal socialism’ would be sufficient. While Rawls himself wrote more about property-owning democracy, Edmundson’s book John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (2017) makes a powerful case for why the most rigorous interpretation of justice as fairness would require liberal socialism instead.
But nobody wants that type of justice. What voters will pay for is Justice which involves catching and incarcerating rapists and murderers and Bernie Madoff type fraudsters. On the other hand Justice as Judges giving beejays to hobos is finding increasing support among the criminal community
As history shows, liberal socialists are not a monolith.
they are an obelisk of obtuseness
They disagree on many core points. Some of these are theoretical: is the strongest basis for liberal socialism some kind of utilitarianism, deontology or pragmatism?
The strongest basis is magical thinking.
Other divides are over practical questions such as the relationship between statist welfarism
which features entitlement collapse once the State runs of cash
and bottom-up democratisation of the economy;
more immigrants! Goody goody.
Mill famously vested his hopes in worker co-ops where many modern liberal socialists focus on social programmes.
the problem with worker co-ops is that workers have to work, otherwise they don't get paid.
Nevertheless, all liberal socialists are committed to three central principles, which I’ve arranged from the more abstract to the more concrete.
These guys have cement in their skulls.
First, liberal socialists are committed to methodological collectivism
sadly, no one can say what is or isn't the 'extension' of a collectivist 'intension'. Who is 'working class'? Keir Starmer? Elon Musk. Also should we count chicks with dicks as women? Yes, if they are hot more especially because they will be easier to please.
and normative individualism.
coz 'Socialists' are actually individualists- right?
They believe that the wellbeing and free development of individual persons (and, for a growing number, nonhuman animals) is the highest moral priority.
The problem here is that the 'disutility' arising from feeling you are being robbed of your hard earned may outweigh the utility gained by the beneficiary of Robin Hood. This means the more able evade or avoid taxes or simply flee the jurisdiction. The other problem is that workers may not want to subsidize refugees, addicts, and Welfare Queens.
However, they disagree with many classical liberals’ insular and competitive conception of human nature and their individualist approach to conceiving social relations. Liberal socialists hold that, to properly think through how individuals will best thrive, one must recognise their embeddedness in society, and how it can improve or disrupt their capacity to lead a good life.
Go to Dubai and you'll see that rich peeps from any country under the sun aren't embedded in fuck. Nor are Corporations which is how come land locked Mongolia has a bigger shipping registry than the US.
On the other hand, if you assume that what Judges really want to do is give beejays to hobos then my conception of Justice is perfectly reasonable.
Taking seriously commitments to liberty, equality and solidarity requires going beyond the social hierarchies established under capitalism
not to mention the hierarchies established by dick size
Secondly, liberal socialists are committed to each person having as equal an opportunity to lead as good a life as possible through the provision of shared resources for the development and expression of their human powers.
Who is to say that is not already the case? Any sort of structural change will create winners and losers. Some will have a worse life than they currently have without any guarantee that any sizable, deserving group, gains anything in the medium to long-term. Indeed, they may be the biggest losers.
To put it another way, liberal socialists focus on the free development of human powers or capabilities along a wide array of metrics.
Like levitation? Hindu Socialists are committed to everybody getting the chance to develop supernatural 'siddhis'.
What Macpherson calls this developmental ethic can be contrasted with the extractive and possessive ethic characteristic of classical liberalism and hedonistic forms of utilitarianism.
Developing countries realized quite soon that development economists, more particularly those who gassed on about ethics, were all fucking retarded.
Where the extractive/possessive ethic holds that the good life comes from production and consumption, the developmental ethic of liberal socialism emphasises the equal development and application of each individual’s powers as a condition for their flourishing.
What Zelensky will tell you is that 'flourishing' depends on being able to kick the ass of invaders. But this is also true of drug gangs in your 'hood.
Thirdly, liberal socialists are committed to instituting a basic social structure characterised by highly participatory liberal-democratic political institutions and protections for liberal rights concurrent with the extension of liberal democratic principles into the economy and family to establish more egalitarian economic arrangements free of domination and exploitation.
If your elasticity of supply and demand are high- i.e. you have good alternatives- nobody can dominate or exploit you. Only 'economic rent' can be extracted. Domination costs money. Making factors more mobile- which is what technology tends to do- reduces rent rapidly.
This also means that liberal socialists do not ascribe the same weight of private property rights to the means of production that many classical liberals do.
You have to pay to enforce property rights one way or another. The thing isn't a 'free good'. What matters is appropriable control rights. Sometimes, gangsters or Maoist rebels can allocate these more cheaply and effectively than the Government. If so, the State gets disintermediated.
While all liberal socialists believe in rights to personal property, this doesn’t extend to rights to acquire forms of property that would enable forms of workplace domination or political plutocracy to develop. In these instances, what impacts all should, in part, be decided upon by all.
So that all can end up jobless or scraping by in an informal gig economy.
Liberal socialist authors will defend and articulate these principles in various idioms, and emphasise one or another to various degrees.
If the subject they studied and went on to teach made people smarter they could be Elon Musk wealthy and create any type of workplace they liked- at least in the short to medium term till China eats their lunch.
This testifies to the internal diversity of the tradition, if nothing else.
The tradition was merely playing catch-up because it relied on an obsolete economic pedagogy.
Macpherson was very critical of atomistic ‘possessive individualism’ but supported a liberal humanist ethic of developing people’s capacities or powers.
But his discipline turned its votaries into fucking cretins.
Nevertheless, he had comparatively little to say about what kind of social structure could realise this ethic. In The Socialist Decision (1933), Paul Tillich
who hadn't noticed that Socialism was creating a Hell on Earth wherever it gained power.
offers a theological defence of liberal democratic socialism, which obviously runs counter to the secular approaches of Mill and Rawls.
If you believe you will go to Heaven if you along with stupid shit, why not do so?
Mouffe’s agonistic liberal socialism foregrounds the importance of political contestation far more than Rawls’s temperate insistence that a pluralistic society needs to unite around an ‘overlapping consensus’. Charles Mill’s
His father, Gladstone Mills, was a great academic and Jamaican public servant. He is credited with ensuring free and fair elections in a country with plenty of very tough guys.
‘black radical liberalism’ rightly takes many Left-liberals to task for ignoring, or even supporting, imperialism and racism.
and, more recently, 'regime change' and 'forever wars' which were won by the Taliban and Iran.
But behind this variety is a core conviction that taking seriously commitments to liberty, equality and solidarity requires going beyond the social hierarchies established under capitalism.
except in Jamaica, if you actually came from the Jamaican elite.
Given the eminence hof many of the figures attracted to liberal socialism, it is somewhat perplexing that the term can seem oxymoronic.
Under Reagan, Liberalism became 'the L-word' which dare not speak its name. Socialism just meant queuing up for five hours to collect your ration of turnips. Thankfully, the queue for the Gulag was shorter.
The explanation probably has more to do with politics than philosophy, especially in the US. As Moyn points out in Liberalism Against Itself, throughout the mid-20th century, many prominent ‘Cold War’ liberals turned against the more progressive and egalitarian elements in the tradition.
When had they been for it?
This led to the banishing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G W F Hegel and Marx to the fringes,
The Anglo Saxons had established their superiority to the Huns and the Frogs
and the dilution of the more radical arguments of prominent liberals like Mill.
Because, during the War, everybody had lost any relish for the Command Economy
By the time liberal egalitarians began to marshal formidable theoretical arguments for welfarism and social democracy in the 1970s,
Both had passed their post-War apogee. Incidentally, new mathematical discoveries re. complexity, concurrency and computability had settled the 'Socialist Calculation Debate'.
the time to realise such an agenda had passed. Neoliberalism had taken hold across much of the world, further squeezing out progressive forms of liberalism and liberal socialism.
Why? Well, the Arabs and other oil producers had rebelled against the Bretton Woods strait-jacket because the US had financed Vietnam by printing money. Thus exchange rates would have to float which meant that there was an impossible trinity. You cant have free capital flows and fixed exchange rates as well as an independent monetary policy. Keynesian liberalism had run out of road because 'money illusion' wasn't fooling anybody.
Nevertheless, the future for liberal socialist political theory is bright.
not for bright people
While not everyone listed below would identify with the label (and some might reject it), a considerable number of prominent and up-and-coming theorists have been working to bring out the affinities between the two traditions and canonise (or re-canonise) the major figures. These include Helen McCabe, Michael Walzer, James Crotty, Chantal Mouffe, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Lillian Cicerchia, Samuel Moyn, Daniel Chandler, William Edmundson, Elizabeth Anderson, Tony Smith, Rodney Peffer and many more.
Provincial, or, worse yet, Canadian, Assistant Professors who teach drooling imbeciles or investigate things like forced marriage.
It isn’t hard to see why the prospect of liberal socialism would be appealing today.
To Assistant Professors teaching nonsense to drooling imbeciles in the sticks.
Liberalism remains in or near crisis, and vast numbers express discontent with the neoliberal status quo.
Which Putin upended. There was a time when Liberalism was Rich. Sadly, if Xi & Putin prevail, Liberalism will become equal to even the most egalitarian shitholes.
At the same time, there are very good reasons to reject revisiting forms of authoritarian ‘real existing socialism’ and communism. Liberal socialism offers the prospect of combining respect for liberal rights, checks and balances on state power, and participatory democracy with socialist concerns for the equal flourishing of all in a sustainable environment, the extension of democratic concerns into the workplace and ‘private government’, and pushing back on plutocratic rule.
not to mention levitation for Lesbians and teleportation for trans people.
It also philosophically aligns well with concrete democratic socialist and radical movements appearing in the US, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere that want radical economic change but align with liberal values.
Radical economic change is occurring anyway. First 'exorbitant privilege' will disappear as the global financial system overcomes dollar hegemony. Along with it, the whole intellectual property regime will come crashing down. After that a new 'gravity model' of Trade will emerge. I suppose the US- or parts of it- might do quite well but North West Europe will be marginalized. Liberalism will die where it was born.
Whether liberal socialism can transition from being a theoretical tradition and become a popular political ideology is a hard question.
Before the Revolution you can have liberal socialists and non-violent Nazis and Jew-loving Islamists. But that type of delusion doesn't last long.
But, in a world defined by growing anger at inequality and plutocracy, liberal socialism is worthy of our loyalty.
Our current anger will be nothing compared to our sorrow when we find our Societies becoming more equal to that of shithole countries where citizens at least have the consolation that child rapists get strung up by the balls. When productivity and competitiveness are on a upward secular trend, we may dream of levelling up. Sadly once those with historically much lower real-wages start actually levelling up to us, our concern is to stave off a further levelling down.
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