Nostalgia pervades the second Trump term. We can look upon our previous political order through a tunnel vision of imminent anxiety and despair, seeing in it an answer for now. If only we could go back, we say to ourselves. Life was so much better before. But this nostalgia betrays us. It saps political aspiration by suffocating creative vision and redirecting our attention toward a misunderstood past.
What we need is a better political vision. What we need are political principles that can help us to imagine a better world: a world where we are more accountable to those concrete others right beside us, where there is no more racism, no more sexism, no more labor exploitation, no more imperialism, and where the dignity we proclaim everybody has is actualized in our everyday society.
In place of nostalgia, we need what political theorist Matthew McManus calls a philosophy of hope. And in his new book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, he attempts to retrieve such a philosophy. Liberal Socialism, argues McManus, offers a set of political principles that might guide our commitments and actions in the present in order to usher in a just world. Indeed, McManus’s critical retrieval of past political traditions is far removed from the nostalgia that imagines political life under our neoliberal democratic order as better than it was.
Wanting to better understand these traditions of liberalism and socialism, and in search for a better political theory to frame my relationship to the present, I sat down to talk with McManus about what liberal socialism offers us today. In our conversation, we discussed the nature of the liberal and socialist traditions, the ambiguous legacy of such traditions – their emergence alongside and within capitalist, racist, patriarchal societies – and what liberal socialism shares with Christian faith.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
COLTON BERNASOL: In 2023 you published a book on the political right and equality, where you trace how some liberal language and ideas get used to express accounts of social hierarchy. Of course, this is not the only genealogy to liberalism. A year later, you published on the political theory of liberal socialism and offered an account of liberalism’s alternative political trajectory. Given liberalism’s multiple, contradictory, developments, could you briefly explain what you mean by liberalism and socialism and what bringing these two traditions together offers?
MATT MCMANUS: Liberalism and socialism are both large ideological families. There are many different strands of liberalism which will bear resemblance to one another while being extremely different. And the same can be said of socialism, or for that matter, the political right. I define liberalism as an ideological doctrine that emerged in the 16th and 17th century and matured in the 18th and 19th centuries. Liberalism was broadly committed to the idea of liberty and equality for all, and, certainly in its European variance, to solidarity or fraternity for all.
Now, the bourgeois understanding of liberalism was specific. But I point out that if you were to ask socialists in the 19th century what core ideological principles that they hold to, many of them would have been very comfortable just reiterating that idea. They were committed to liberty for all, equality for all, and certainly solidarity or fraternity for all. They’d add that they just understand these commitments in a different way than bourgeois thinkers. I think this is extremely important and has sometimes been understated. While liberals and socialists have often thought about liberty, equality, and solidarity in very different ways, quite a few liberal and socialist thinkers have thought about them in very similar ways. This is the idea of liberal socialism.
BERNASOL: Could you speak about the language of denaturalization that you associate with liberalism? I found that language helpful – that there are thinkers within the tradition of liberalism who use the language of individual rights and liberty to denaturalize social hierarchies and question their taken-for-granted nature.
MCMANUS: There was this assumption on the part of many thinkers that the hierarchical mode of organization present in society was natural and, consequently, beyond contestation.
And you can see many different examples of this, but just to focus on one that I discussed in the book: consider Aristotle. He’s very insistent about the idea that in society there are certain people who are natural slaves, and their job should be cleaning the toilets, sweeping the streets, and doing a lot of the hard manual labor precisely to liberate those who are not natural slaves to be able to pursue higher order activities. Aristotle just thought this was the natural way of organizing things.
Liberal thinkers reacted strongly against this for a wide variety of different reasons. But let’s just talk about Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is one of the first to challenge the naturalism of social hierarchies and claims that, by nature, all human beings are homologous to one another. There are some people who are a little bit smarter or a little bit stronger. But mostly we all have the same kind of capabilities, and we certainly have all the same needs. And in a state of nature, we’re all in competition with one another, which is a bad thing, so we create civil society, but it’s an eminently artificial creation. Civil society and the hierarchies that are established through the social contract liberate us from the stage of nature. But this is very much an artificial contract. In Hobbes’s case, this was understood in quite an authoritarian way. Once you contract into civil society, you can’t really contract out of it. But later liberal thinkers are going to radicalize his intuition to say that society is artificial.
This doesn’t mean that society is useless. There is an enormous amount of value that comes from society. But once we realize society is artificial, we can recognize that the kind of hierarchical modes of organization that ancients and medieval thinkers took for granted can be rearranged and reconsidered in line with basic principles of liberal justice, which had their root in even older traditions like Christianity and Stoicism.
Socialists insist on very much the same thing. Consider Karl Marx. One of his most insightful observations is to extend a lot of these ideas about the artificiality of social organization into the economy. Marx says, look, it can be taken for granted by bourgeois thinkers that capitalism is just a natural mode of social organization and of economic production. And there are plenty of people who make these kinds of arguments to this day – that capitalism is just rooted in human nature. But, Marx says, capitalism is very much a specific mode of production that hasn’t even been around for all that long. Sure, capitalism has done a lot of useful things and there are many things capitalism is quite good at doing that other modes of production aren’t. But the idea that capitalism is natural, inexorable, and can’t be improved upon is a-historical and immaterialist, even unscientific and irrational. Consequently, the argument for capitalism as natural is to be rejected.
Indeed, I think one of the great points that Marx shares with many of the liberal thinkers is his optimism regarding human nature. It is recognizing the principle of artificiality that leads us to think that while many human constructs are quite useful and serve a lot of human needs, we can probably improve upon them and do a little bit better given enough time and enough intellectual energy committed to the project of improving human life.
BERNASOL: When I think about liberalism, I think about it arising alongside and within nations. But nations are often committed to massive forms of inequality, whether that’s the patriarchal assertion of the right to men over women or economic systems like chattel slavery. How does one reckon with this legacy in trying to retrieve liberal socialism? And how does this legacy inform a contemporary account of liberal socialism?
MCMANUS: Dominico Losurdo is one of the best guides to the most perverse aspects of the liberal traditions. Losurdo is a seminal Italian Marxist who wrote a very good book titled Liberalism: A Counter-History. There he chronicles the innumerable ways that major liberal thinkers and politicians were invested in programs of racial dispossession, imperialism, sexism, crushing the labor movement, or endorsing sinister policies of racial eugenics. I would argue this strain of liberalism continues to the present day.
Losurdo also points out that for all the bad that liberalism has brought into the world, its merits are so obvious they don’t even bear dwelling upon in his book. I think this is the more appropriate stance for a Marxist to take – the dialectical stand. While there were a lot of bad sides to liberalism, Marxists should recognize it was an enormously emancipatory and egalitarian doctrine.
Indeed, the way that I would answer Losurdo and other critics like him from a liberal socialist perspective is to acknowledge what they say as genuinely true. I’d point out that a lot of these failings come from the fact that many liberals identified their own doctrine far too closely with support for capitalism and capitalist political economy. To the extent that liberals aligned themselves with capitalist political economy, which was very frequent, they ended up supporting these hierarchical forms of social domination that even worsened conditions for many people.
The figures that I talk about in my book, by and large, were far-sighted in recognizing that there is this deep, even existential, conflict between supporting basic liberal ideas around the universal equality and dignity of all human beings and supporting an economic system that invariably produced new forms of domination or even fresh forms of domination.
What liberal socialism thus constitutes is a liberation of liberalism from its own ideological shackles by disconnecting it from a system of political economy with which its principles were never fully compatible – even though historically they tended to emerge at the same time and were more often conflated by various liberal figures.
BERNASOL: Some social democracies or welfare states with more robust senses of public goods also have a strong sense of social solidarity that depends on marginalizing or excluding those they don’t recognize as belonging. Take, for instance, those without citizenship, those of different religions, those who may be racialized differently, etc.,. How does liberal socialism help us to understand how solidarity can also depend on exclusion?
MCMANUS: Liberal socialists should be committed simultaneously to methodological collectivism and normative individualism. Methodological collectivism means acknowledging the fact that we are invariably social animals, as Aristotle described us, which means that we are mutually interdependent in ways that are so profound for any person to fully appreciate in their life. We come into the world hugely dependent upon our parents and society as we are educated and grow; we are simultaneously dependent upon them and a huge array of other people, including social institutions.
Acknowledging this and assuming a sense of accountability on a social basis should be a vital part of maturing away from a more egocentric way of thinking about the world into a way that is more encompassing and other-oriented. Now, the reason I say that liberal socialists are methodological collectivists is because methodological collectivism means acknowledging this anthropological point about human nature which, in turn, has political and social implications.
I also say that liberal socialists are normative individualists in the sense that they ultimately take the individual’s well-being to be the normative endpoint for politics. Liberal socialists are very dismissive of the idea that reified abstractions have a kind of normative primacy over and above the well-being of the individuals that make up society.
And I think this is a really important point to foreground today when we hear about anti-immigrant rhetoric, which is especially prominent, for example, when directed against cities like Chicago. Some people will say, “look, it may be that people have rights to mobility or a certain level of treatment on a liberal framework, but the need that we have for national homogeneity trumps these obligations that we might have to people who do not belong to our national or racial family.” Any liberal, including all liberal socialists, would be emphatically critical of this idea by saying, “No, understanding that human beings are mutually interdependent and that we rely upon one another does not entitle you to privilege and abstraction, like the race or the nation, over and above the concrete and material needs of real existing people.” I think there is a very generative relationship between methodological collectivism and normative individualism. These commitments are the beating theoretical heart of liberal socialism. There are good reasons to hold both positions simultaneously.
BERNASOL: Marx is an important figure in your book. Another figure who is important is John Rawls. You read them together and name them as significant dialogue partners for you. What is it that they bring to the conversation in retrieving liberal socialism?
MCMANUS: I identify as a kind of Rawlsian Marxist, and if I wasn’t writing a book of retrieval but a defense of liberal socialism, it would look a lot like a fusion of them.
I think Rawls offers an extraordinarily powerful, normative, vision of what a just society should look like and how to argue for that just society. Now there are problems with Rawls’s framework, but I think this idea that the basic structure of society should be the first subject of liberal justice and that deliberating upon that from a reasonable objectives standpoint would lead to liberal socialism. This is the conclusion that Rawls himself made. Sometimes he is inaccurately portrayed as nothing more than a welfare-state capitalist. But he explicitly rejected that position by the time of Justice as Fairness, where he argues that although welfare state capitalism would be far superior to a pure free market system, it still allows enormous inequalities in wealth and power. Under welfare state capitalism, the wealthy are far more able to hedge society in ways they think are appropriate. There is also a lack of solidarity in welfare state capitalism. So, Rawls ultimately says either a liberal socialist or a property-owning democracy kind of society is the appropriate one for liberal justice.
Problematically, Rawls’s thinking operates at the level of what is sometimes called “ideal theory.” He’s very good at making moral and philosophical arguments for his positions. But he doesn’t offer many answers to questions such as: How do we instantiate this society? How can we think about the class, status, and legal barriers to achieving this? He just doesn’t really have much to say.
And that is where Marx comes in. Rawls was enormously laudatory of Marx. This is not quite appreciated about him. In Rawls’s lectures on Marx – Rawls gave three in his history of political philosophy – he says Marx is a heroic figure who engaged in extraordinary work. And he goes on to list numerous different achievements of Marx and says that ignoring his work and the insights of socialist economics would be a serious mistake on the part of liberal thinkers, one which sadly many liberal thinkers have nonetheless seen fit to make time and time again. Still, there is just not very much there in Rawls in terms of a theory of power or a theory of how capital operates. And I think that Marx offers an analytical framework for understanding the way that capitalism operates as a global mode of production to instantiate a regime where the mute compulsion of various forms of economic power dominates us all. In Marx’s understanding, capitalist domination isn’t directly the result of human malice or even greed, but a system that compels us to compete and accumulate in lieu of pursuing more human and humane goals.
At the same time, in Marx there is not really a great deal about how to morally argue for a socialist society. What kind of society would that look like? Indeed, Marx is often contemptuous of that question and says we shouldn’t be writing recipe books for the cooktops of the future. But I think that aligning these two thinkers together in a way that draws on the best aspects of the traditions of liberalism and socialism can produce a powerful synthesis that gives us a moral vision for what could be and a clear-headed account of the power dynamics and ideological barriers to achieve that vision.
BERNASOL: Can you speak to the way that religion, and Christianity specifically, shape an account of liberal socialism?
MCMANUS: R.H. Tawney and Gary Dorrien come to mind immediately. Tawney was a prominent English Christian thinker who argued for a humanistic vision of Christianity that looks like liberal socialism: a strong commitment to democracy, a very strong commitment to liberal rights, but also a much more equal distribution of goods, and certainly a much more equal distribution of economic power across society, particularly to the working classes.
Gary Dorrien is a seminal American thinker who has written some marvelous books on the importance of social democracy and the tradition of democratic socialism in the United States. There is a very deep religious angle to his work; and he’s also very committed to the ideas of civil rights, democracy, anti-imperialism, and the need to be far more militant in defending precisely those kinds of rights and those kinds of opportunities for the marginalized when they’re under attack by authoritarian regimes like right now.
I also understand this association between liberalism, socialism, and Christianity through the great Christian theologian Paul Tillich, who was an antifascist thinker who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s about the need to reject a Christianity of blood and soil, which was then gaining a lot of ascendency in Europe. Instead, Tillich called for a Christianity centered around a humanistic ethic that would recognize that for individuals to form a genuinely meaningful relationship with God, they needed to dedicate a great deal of their time and their soul to contemplating what they thought was of ultimate concern. And this can take many different forms for a wide range of different individuals depending on the context in which they happen to be brought up.
He points out: If you are brought up in a working-class family, ideals of solidarity and family and connection might be of what is ultimate concern. Consequently, the way that you are going to frame and understand God will be very much in line with those kinds of values. Alternatively, if you were a bohemian intellectual who was very well versed in German philosophy, the way Tillich was, you might decide to approach God as an object of ultimate concern through cognition and the intellect. What I really admire about Tillich is precisely how he draws on Christian themes to say that a good Christian community should create space for a wide array of different individuals to pursue their own vision of God based upon what they think is of ultimate concern. At the same time he was extraordinarily critical of fetishistic or idolatrous ways of understanding the divine that try to reify it and consequently limit our apprehension of God.
I understand this vision as Tillich himself did: along liberal socialist lines. We should create free and democratic spaces for people to share and commune about their ideas of God while, of course, providing a robust material basis for human flourishing so that we are able to dedicate ourselves to these higher order considerations.
Indeed, it is my belief that liberalism and socialism are both philosophies of hope at their best. And I think that one of the big reasons why many people are turning to reactionary forms of politics and outright fascism is precisely that they don’t really feel a great deal of hope about this world or the next. Consequently, it’s very tempting to turn to nihilistic impulses toward self- and collective- destruction as an alternative. If we do not offer our fellow citizens a philosophy of hope, which I think liberal socialism is, then we are bound to see more of these kinds of destructive impulses. The most unrealistic thing we could do at this moment as political actors is to dream small, because what people really want now is big dreams for bighearted people who have not been satisfied for a very long time.
The Political Theory of Liberalism, Routledge.
Image Credit: A rose (Rosa species): flowering stem. Watercolour. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.
Colton Bernasol is the Managing Editor of The Bias and a PhD Student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.