Brexit. Trump. Meloni. Le Pen. Liberalism is struggling — and no wonder. Since neoliberalism emerged triumphant in the Eighties, and certainly since the Financial Crisis ravaged communities from Dundee to Delaware, sensible centrists have dramatically failed to improve the lives of working people. Shorn of any positive economic vision, they’ve instead retreated to vague calls for democracy or equality, even as authoritarians loudly proclaim a better and more xenophobic tomorrow.
If it’s to survive the century, then, liberalism must rekindle a sense of hope, one that dovetails respect for institutions with a politics of plenty. I believe the solution can be found in two words: liberal socialism.
For some, the term’s an oxymoron. Many classical and neoliberals see liberalism as doggedly committed to unbridled capitalism, with the economist Ludwig von Mises summarising the ideology as representing “private ownership of the means of production”. Many on the Left would surely agree. For socialists, isn’t liberalism the “bourgeois” ideology par excellence, serving as an intellectual defence of capital ownership and worker exploitation?
In fact, liberalism is a much more dynamic, complex family of creeds than these reductive labels suggest: while thinkers such as von Mises were quick to equate capitalism and liberalism, there’s always been an economically progressive strain to liberal thinking too. For these self-proclaimed liberal socialists, redistribution isn’t simply preferable — but actually the only way of securing liberal goals. Put it like this: domination by bosses is no less oppressive because it happens in the market and is sanctioned by the state.
Two of the first thinkers to develop these ideas were Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In his seminal book Rights of Man, and in pamphlets such as Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that property was a social rather than a natural institution. This meant that the rich owed society a debt for their property, a debt which could be paid through heavy taxes and fund a lively proto-welfare state.
Wollstonecraft is, of course, most famous for her stirring arguments for women’s equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Less remembered, though, is her acid claim in the same work that from “respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.” From there, Wollstonecraft went on to argue that both the aristocratic rich and the emerging capitalist class could be compared to a fungus growing upon society, one which distorts its moral virtues through avarice and greed.
Wollstonecraft and Paine were important precursors. But it was really John Stuart Mill who developed a mature form of liberal socialism. Mill is best remembered today for his uncompromising defence of personal liberty. Less familiar are his innovative economic arguments for workplace democracy.
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SubscribeWhen you keep the proceeds of your labour, and choose to then use it as you will, you are a free man. If someone else takes the proceeds of your labour, and it is they that choose how and who benefits, you are a slave.
Of course there is a degree to which people must contribute towards society as a whole, if only as insurance against injury, bad luck, ill health, or defence against someone attacking them.
So it’s a sliding scale, between how much of the proceeds of your labour you keep, and how much you contribute to society. That latter should be the minimum necessary to preserve the situation where you keep the proceeds fo your labour. To argue that an individual required to surrender more of his or her labour to the State would thereby be living in a more ‘liberal’ (free) society requires ‘liberal’ to mean something that it literally doesn’t.
It wouldn’t be the first word to suffer that fate, but it’s a particularly important one to defend.
If you don’t give your labour to government it doesn’t disappear, the people who do the labour decide what to do with it.
You are missing the point completely: capitalism is precisely about employers appropriating the proceeds of their workers’ labour.
employ
give work to (someone) and pay them for it.
Yes. There is important, positive-sum exchange going on.
VOLUNTARY exchange. That’s the key. Capitalism is a purely voluntary system. Socialism ain’t voluntary.
Thank you for that. One aspect of socialism that escapes most analyses is that it must be forced upon society. I, for one, do not appreciate being forced into anything. Nor do most of the animal species.
“Capitalism is a purely voluntary system.”
Sure, in the same way that someone on a ship in the middle of the ocean is free to leave the ship at any time they want.
It’s voluntary in the sense that no one is forced to buy a product. When it’s no longer voluntary is when government gets involved.
Well in Canada you can just start walking north. Won’t be long before you will have evaded capitalisms grasp.
Yes, appropriate part of the proceeds of their labour, the rest going in wages and taxes. If it’s a thriving economy, that is free from government mismanagement, they’ll also invest and create more jobs.
Theres the rub! Government mismanagement is almost certain to develop irreversibly. Centralising resources is way too attractive to rent-seeking parasites – specialists who will politick their way to positions of power.
This is why state socialism always fails eventually, and tends to deliver the very opposite of what it promises. That is: inequality between the proles and the privileged players tends to increase rather than decrease.
Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with that, but do go on.
Not any amount at all. Capitalists organize labour in a competitive marketplace and make money off taking good risks.
Rubbish.
The problem is that under neoliberalism you pay for the corporate state in all kinds of sneaky ways. Because of this we have a tendency to call that ‘capitalism’ and the ‘free market’, while it’s more like socialism for the rich. The stats are pretty clear, your labor surplus is increasingly not going to you and other workers from the 80s onwards. It doesn’t matter if it goes to crony big capital or the state. Supply side voodoo economics and trickle-down are simply wrong, we don’t profit from it as a society. So yes, ‘socialism’ is perhaps too much of a loaded term at this point but we need to manage the economy very differently. A good start would be to take the postwar consensus as an example.
The world is changing. Things like tax havens for multinationals are an issue. But you don’t solve that issue by making government bigger and making everyone a slave. I think part of the solution is to make sure all economic decisions are made at the lowest level possible…..
But how are you going to achieve “make[ing] sure all economic decisions are made at the lowest level possible”? Big unaccountable private entities have no intention of turning that into a reality. Much of the government – together with private power – probably also don’t but at least you have some democratic control over them. Especially if people ever manage to look beyond the PR.
Like all other change in the world it will entail a small group of people getting organized and fighting for it.
To be a liberal means you believe in individual liberty in some form. That’s it. And it’s pretty vague, and certainly doesn’t entail what you should think about the optimal level of taxation or the laws of property ownership, as the diversity of positions under the umbrella term “liberal” shows very well.
For myself, I think the whole “taxation is theft” line is a libertarian fantasy. The state creates the conditions under which you can benefit from your labour in the first place. Without the police, the courts, the laws of property, public goods like education, infrastructure, energy, all you’d be is some farmer out in the wild west, living by your wits and hoping you didn’t fall ill or get attacked or enslaved by anyone who fancied your produce. A very heroic and macho lifestyle, I’m sure. But an unrealistic and, for most, undesirable fantasy, all the same.
Liberalism is struggling because of socialism. Not from a lack of socialism.
South of the border, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” have div > p > a”> div > p > a”>done much to update a liberal style of socialism for new generations
And yet the source cited for this indicates something a bit more nuanced about the place of socialism in society,
“Overall, there has been a small uptick in the percentage of Americans with a favorable view of socialism “
While perceptions of capitalism have changed rapidly among young adults, perceptions of socialism have changed more incrementally among all age groups. Slightly fewer young adults now than in 2019 say they have a positive view of socialism (51% now vs. 55% in 2019). But that dip is offset by slight increases in the number of adults ages 35-64 and 65+ who say they have a favorable view of socialism.
Yes, people have lost faith in Capitalism, but that doesn’t mean that they’re swinging towards socialism. Whatever happens they’re smart enough to work things out. They want improvements but they don’t want socialism.
We already live in a proto-liberal socialist world. How else do you explain the fact that the top 10% of earners contribute to approx. 90% of the income tax intake in most developed nations. A large part of of the social turmoil we see in Western societies today can be attributed to the misguided attempts towards ‘egalitarianism’ for perceived victims, namely immigrants/asylum seekers and self-diagnosed ‘victims’ who have been made believe they are such by the warped woke ideology. Denmark have already come the realisation that their liberal-socialist society cannot function without strong social cohesion and cultural hegemony. Attempts to merge a multicultural society with varying value systems has led to a rapidly dissolving of social cohesion. As the introduced cultures often do not share the same values, they take advantage of a generous welfare state without feeling any obligation to give back. Entitlement without obligation means those who do contribute rightly feel hard done by. Until ‘liberals’ realise that no state can support the worlds less fortunate, and their obligation is to their own population above all else, we will continue to see the native populations vote for the ‘barbarians’ in ever increasing numbers.
It’s worth stating that I categorically do not view the ‘new-right’ politicians sweeping across Europe as barbaric in any sense of the word. Many of them are themselves semi-socialist in nature, and are only called rightwing as they are critical of open borders and identity-driven victimhood policies. Policies that are illiberal in nature as they require curtailing the rights of others in favour of the perceived victims.
The reverse of this story is pretty much true if you look at the at the (macro)economics a bit deeper. The government essentially doesn’t tax to spend, it spends to tax but much of what is spends it doesn’t tax back. Remember, much of big capital has been on the government lifeline, especially since 2008.
Follow the money through QE, where most stimulus ends up etc. you get quite a different picture. Economists Lockwood and colleagues wrote a nice research paper trying to find the relation to what workers earn and how much they actually contribute to the economy and found an almost inverse relationship.
Also if we just use common sense we should wonder what those armies of managers, consultants and financial speculators, we are see everywhere since the 90s, actually contribute to the real economy.
‘With the barbarians now looming, the choice for any liberal should be clear.’
I, for one, hope the ‘barbarians’ bury liberalism and socialism. These totalitarian and homogenising ‘isms’ we could do well without.
The socialists and progressives appropriated the honourable term “liberal” for their Newspeak purposes.
Liberalism, at its core, is about removing unearned legal privileges and undeserved legal disabilities – laissez faire.
Perhaps the most damaging unearned privilege is held by the cartel of banks. If they expand credit beyond prudent limits they get bailed out (or their hapless depositors “bailed in” cf. Cyprus) where any other business would go bankrupt.
Credit expansion is money creation. The banking privilege means there is no elastic restoring force to maintain the average money supply. In other words, the money supply inflates permanently.
The true rate of inflation has been much higher than retail price inflation (the measure everyone looks at). As a result, the acquisition of tangible long term assets has been pushed ever further beyond the reach of ordinary workers whose work has been underpriced by the illusion of relatively low daily retail inflation.
Look up the Cantillon effect to understand how this rigged financial market increases the gap between rich and poor.
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P.S. State socialism ain’t the answer! It rather exacerbates the problem.
With over 50% of the UK working age population.paying no tax (and 10m of them “workless”) I think we.can safely say that socialism is alive and strangling the economy. Throw on top open borders.and a fast escalatng illegal immigrant cost, and I suspect we’re making a contribution to international socialism as well. The effort.needs to go imto thw.level playing field, not the level trophy. And there’s plenty of work to do there in anti-trust and competition regulation, as well as education.
Like a great big boa constrictor murdering everybody’s freedom.
Macro economic emotional and idealogical rubbish: modern economics renders most of those quoted, in this context totally irrelevant.
I’m convinced that UnHerd are just rage-click-farming with this preposterous article.
The terms socialism and liberalism carry too much baggage for this article to succeed. With regard to socialism, managed economies have failed to grow because they have failed to find a mechanism to make the numerous decisions that are needed. Market economies are very effective at making decisions and can promote growth. The debate then is “should everyone have a fair reward for their labour” The qualifier is fair – should it be made fair by restricting abuse by the more powerful participant, be it an entrepreneur or a union. The extremes do not look attractive to me but finding a balance remains a problem. With regard to liberalism the debate is “should society look after those who fail to look after themselves” and the qualifier is “fail” – should it be subject to making an effort to look after oneself. The change in my lifetime has been the growth in a sense of entitlement. I prefer to be a member of a society that is considerate to those in need where those in need are considerate of their obligation to contribute to society. I do not understand why anyone should have an unconditional entitlement to anything.
The Nordic model has changed substantially towards the US model, and while redistribution remains a feature of their economy, deregulation is prominent, particularly in Sweden. The U.S. has embraced an extraordinary amount of redistribution at the federal level, with federal welfare program expenditures outside Social Security and Medicare amounting to $1.7 trillion dollars, or 2.5 times the size of the U.S. defense budget; redistribution now accounts for 30% of US GDP, only 1% below the level in France.
And what has the redistribution in the US accomplished beyond creating an ever-expanding bureaucracy that has every incentive to perpetuate poverty and no incentive to reduce it?
It has transformed Washington DC from the 15th richest city in the US to the 1st in about 30 years.
We need to drain the swamp and send the swamppeople away.
What a story. Just so, as Kipling would put it. The fact is that it’s a lot easier to work at a company than to start one. Which is why software code writers and med-techs surf from job to job; steel workers and German auto execs, not so much. Thank you Joseph Schumpeter. What is killing liberalism is not its economic fruits, which will always be many and contentious, but its loss of teleology. No free society can sustain materialist determinism. Even if you modify it with “liberal.”
There is nothing liberal about socialism.
“workplace democracy”?
Has anyone ever worked in a restaurant? Restaurant work is like going to battle. Everyone has a role to play, and everyone has to coordinate. There really is not much time scope for “democracy,” but there is much demand for hierarchy–hence the language of “chefs” and “sous chefs” and such.
There is literature out there about economic organization. Market-mediated exchange involves parties bargaining over positive-sum exchange boss-to-boss. But then much exchange goes on within organizational hierarchies with bosses ostensibly telling subordinates what to do. Subordinates may shirk, of course. They may engage in this business of “quiet quitting,” so one has to wonder what advantages hierarchy has over say contracting. Instead of bringing someone into the hierarchy, why not just contract with them? We see a lot of that kind of thing whether it involve franchising contracts or other contract work.
sensible centrists have dramatically failed to improve the lives of working people.
Perhaps herein lies the problem. It is not the role of govt to improve people’s lives. It’s also not the role of govt to make people’s lives more difficult. Govt’s job is to efficiently and effectively provide the services that we as citizens and voters have decided are more easily handled through the public sector. Police and fire protection, the courts, streets and roads, maybe schools but mostly because of the size of the enterprise because the effectiveness is suspect, national defense, and a few other things.
It is not the job of govt to make you richer, smarter or taller. It is not the job of govt to micromanage every facet of human existence, from the type of vehicles we are “allowed” to drive to what appliances are used for cooking to how much water is used per toilet flush.
The entire concept of “liberal” has done a 180, with most things that fall under the left’s banner requiring some measure of force and coercion. It is “liberals” who are trying to punish speech and expression; it is liberals who ignore crimes and immigration law, putting crooks and illegals over the law-abiding and citizens. These people have done enough.
Liberal governments can decide which Laws of Physics should be, and not be, obeyed. 🙂
Amen and hallelujah!
Very well put.
Liberalism can work within any non-authoritarian system, and Socialism always ends up as authoritarianism.
Socialism is generousity with other peoples money, and corrupts people’s thinking: the state can be generous, inefficiently of course, and it drains the wealth that frees people to be liberal with their own money, time, effort and thinking.
Yes, it is quite the opposite of what America represents. Just ask any legal immigrant.
liberal socialism. For
someanyone who understands English, the term’s an oxymoron.FIFY
Do not confuse the socialism of voluntary association (the liberal ideal) with state mediated socialism. State socialism is, by definition, authoritarian and coercive – the antithesis of liberalism.
Bernie Sanders and “the squad” represent state socialism.
What is the socialism of voluntary association?
Examples of the “socialism of voluntary association” are: the Israeli Kibbutz, and some family businesses. Socialism only works on a small scale where it can be regulated by personal interactions amongst all the members of the society. Beyond that, politicking rent-seeking parasites become ever more likely to corrupt the system into tyrants ruling proles.
This piece highlights the growing tensions between State and Society which have come about through woke liberalism with positive rights having increasing power over negative rights.
The result of positive right overreach is that the State is increasingly desiring dominion over Society rather than being in service to it.
As such, Liberal socialism will be actualised when Society is fully captured by the State to the extent that the panopticonisation of Society will be complete in service to Progressivism.
At this point, all negative rights will be lost and apart from Progressive elites, everyone else will be serfs to the ruling liberal socialist regime in which all will be equal but some will be more equal than others.
The moral of the story, don’t trust the genetics of idealists. They only want to own and control you in their own self preservation image.
Good. We cannot afford these self-righteous Pharisees
The world definitely needs a Left that sticks to the economics. A vision of hope or whatever the authors phrasing was.
The problem is the modern left’s agenda is to destroy not build. These post modern, identitarian, green obsessions aren’t about helping the working class.
They are the barbarians!
The centre left I can understand. They want pretty much the same as the centre right with slight variation on how they achieve it. But the rest, historically, have a strange psychopathology that reveals something irrational and obsessive but without direction. They have never achieved anything. As others have noticed there is more destruction than building. It’s as if they don’t want to achieve anything except some nihilistic satisfaction they experience by fighting with everyone around them. I would be tempted to classify them as sociopathic narcissists, a serious psychiatric disorder.
All very interesting, but no political philosophy with “socialism” in the title is ever going to resonate with me.
Not that interesting. The writer is obviously a follower of Dodo-ism.
Author conflates ‘socialism’ with ‘fairness’ and ‘capitalism’ with ‘inequality’. Western challenges are a lack of opportunity, creativity and productivity because governments, often with highly socialist thinking, have strangled enterprise to keep crony capitalist incumbents in domination.
Author conflates … ‘capitalism’ with ‘inequality’.
Which is true in a way. A business doesn’t survive because it seeks equality. It seeks a significant market share to survive and grow. The market demands many things from the company or product, among them quality, price and perhaps some integrity. The markets supports competition which leads to better outcomes for them. There’s nothing about equality in this and it would be a lie to suggest otherwise.
The only thing I agree with in this article is the admission that liberal socialism is an oxymoron.
Socialism is slavery. The ruling class takes all of the production of the workers and spends it as it wants, just like the slave masters took the proceeds of the work of slaves and spent it as they wanted. That is why socialism always ends in censorship, forced labour camps and murder.
Left-liberalism (think Rawls, McPherson, Moyn and this author) is practically indistinguishable from socialism. These people are welfare state utopians dreaming of the socialist redistribution valhalla. If they were honest they would simply join the socialists and leave the liberal camp altogether. There is nothing freedom loving about any of them.
Hear hear. Rawls the father of social justice. He never figured out what do with the unreasonable and his Theory of Justice was no theory at all even though he kept changing it.
Political Liberalism = Socialism
Totally recommend a search of Gerald F. Gaus.
The left in the US is the main threat to liberalism. A Ministry of Misinformation? Censoring and coercing social media? Opening the borders to illegal immigration. California just passed a law that it is illegal to ask for identification when someone is voting. The government is relocating illegals to swing states, If unchecked we will end up a one-party country. How liberal is that?
Dude is a political science professor at University of Michigan. He’s phoning from the real world.
This strikes me as a poorly argued article, which doesn’t even begin to address obvious objections. Firstly, all modern Western societies are nothing like the caricature painted by most socialists. They all raise very significant fractions of their GDP in taxes and distribute these in various ways. Yes the pattern differs between states, but in every single country there are constraints on how far this can be carried out realistically. I’m sure for example Rachel Reeves’ every political instinct would be to raise taxes even further than they already are, and redistribute more.
But this just isn’t an indefinitely sustainable option. All modern Western States borrow enormous amounts. If you borrow from somebody else – you either default on your loans and make yourself a poor bet, pushing up the price of future loans, or if you want not to be beholden to these dastardly money markets, you have to make much more radical public spending cuts than any that have so far being carried out anywhere. This willful blindness to obvious facts of economic and political life that are endlessly made by economic left wingers is exasperating. If the other side are wrong, provide some good arguments, not these weak ideas, which moreover been tried numerous times and failed. It is interesting that there is only a handful of countries that are ever cited as being successful social democratic states, let alone purely socialist ones. And here it is worth mentioning that a high degree of homogeneity is probably necessary for the degree of social trust needed for major transfers of wealth; societies with a high degree of ethnic diversity and breakdown of trust a light unlikely to be in this category: Sweden has gone very much in the wrong direction in recent years.
Scandinavian countries are primarily capitalist; they possess efficient and effective industries that generate wealth. You have to be pretty careful not to destroy this. Ok, let’s tax wealthy multinational corporations more. But how do we in fact do this? Can we for example force China to raise its corporation taxes? In practice many countries jealously guard their rights to vary taxation including having low levels on corporations – for the obvious reason that they might then decide to locate within their domains and post their profits there, Ireland being one European example, but there are many more.
Then we have this statement: “From there, Wollstonecraft went on to argue that both the aristocratic rich and the emerging capitalist class could be compared to a fungus growing upon society, one which distorts its moral virtues through avarice and greed”. Just because Mary Wollstonecraft is a famous person and wrote some decent books, doesn’t mean to say that her utterances in this case should be taken as any kind of authority. The comment might be a quasi Marxist polemic of the most crude kind; the main wealth producing mechanism in capitalist societies is simply likened to a “fungus” in which corporations are motivated by “avarice and greed.
Again, please deal with the obvious argument, that when an exchange of money for goods or services takes place, both parties benefit; one gets more money and the other gains a good or service that he would not otherwise possess. An excellent example would be Amazon, which owes its great success to the fact that it efficiently sells and conveniently delivers a vast range of consumer products that people want and are difficult to source elsewhere. It also has good customer service policies on exchange and return. Does it force other shops out of business? Not really; it simply provides a better service for most people, much as I love bookshops. Uber is another interesting example in that it is damned for not making enough profits! These examples speak to a kind of nostalgia that much of the Left possess, harking back to some arbitrary period (which was also in its own time a radical departure on previous economic and market infrastructure) such as the High Street. And upon this nostalgia imposing legislation or taxation of ordinary people (the very people that we are supposed to be helping!) – to maintain inefficient, antiquated and costly arrangements that people do not prefer when given a free choice.
I would very much be interested in ideas that can realistically improve perceived fairness in society, possibly reigning in the excesses of what become huge oligopolies, whilst not also trampling on major liberal achievements such as wealth creation and freedom. This has always been the big problem with every form of socialism, even of the social democratic kind. Bureaucracies become the most powerful agencies in society as has been well argued and documented, their main goal almost inevitably becoming their survival and growth, quite possibly when there is no longer any real need for their existence. Such societies run a high risk of becoming overweening and bossy and indeed not even always providing particularly good public services. I don’t think this is inevitable, but it does require strong leadership and the need for divergence between the outlook of the political leadership and the bureaucracies, with a degree of ruthless efficiency needed in the former. This is very far from the case in, for example, modern Britain under Labour, or even the Conservatives. Lee Kuan Yew might be able to do it; I’m not sure that Keir Starmer can, or even has any idea of its necessity!
We have had, for example, decades of quasi religious worship of a not particularly brilliant health service, largely because of its socialist structure, rather than the better outcomes it achieves than comparable countries. It seems “fairer”. And even if it is the case that spending has been lower on the NHS than in France, that is ultimately because while people are often ready to virtue signal about tax, they are much less likely to want to see their own taxes increased! Both direct and indirect taxes on the incomes of ordinary people are always high in social democratic societies. For that reason I tend to believe that this is pretty inevitable, and that it can’t all be done by squeezing the very wealthy. If it could, it would have been done already!