Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Liberalism Meets Socialism: Unpacking Their Surprising Connections with Matt McManus
We begin a NEW season here at Varn Vlog after 4 years of recording. The episode explores the complexities of liberal socialism, emphasizing its potential to bridge the ideals of liberalism and socialism through mutual values like equality and freedom with Dr. Matt McManus. The discussion engages with historical perspectives, critiques from Marxists, and contemporary applicability, ultimately fostering a deeper understanding of the past and future of these interconnected ideologies through a discussion's of McManus's recent book on liberal socialism
• Examination of the definitions of liberalism and socialism
• Discussion on skepticism surrounding liberal socialism
• Core principles of moral equality, liberty, and solidarity
• Historical influences of John Stuart Mill on socialist thought
• Critiques of Marx on the limitations of liberalism
• Global perspectives on capitalism and socialism
• Future potential of liberal socialism in modern discourse
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to Realm Vlog. And today I'm here with scholar of the right and advocate of liberal socialism, and I'm going to say that, without throwing up this entire time, this is my promise. I'm not going to vomit once on this.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that On this podcast, an author of many works, including the one we're discussing today on the political theory of liberal socialism, as well as works from GA Cohen, um which, you know, if I was being real snarky, I would say that's already the theory of liberal socialism, but you know that that would just I wouldn't actually disagree with you entirely about that. Um, uh, yeah, except you would say it as a compliment and I would say it as a slight.
Speaker 2:However.
Speaker 1:I do think a lot of just going into this. I think a lot of our positions might be a little bit easier to understand once we pull this out, and I think one thing we're going to have to do is talk about liberalism as a tradition as it manifests in your book and in your larger work, and socialism as a tradition that manifests in your book and in your larger work, because while I am not a liberal socialist, I think everyone who has ever dealt with me would probably know that about me, and I'm one of the few people I know who's come to socialism, who's also not a weird nationalist from a frankly, a liberal background. I say a liberal, maybe illiberal. Even the parts of conservatism I was attracted to in my youth were probably the least liberal parts of the conservative tradition.
Speaker 1:But that in and of the Renaissance maybe even I could take it back to Renaissance humanism and the fall of the Catholic scholastic period and the it is and socialism is a tradition that I attach to the Marxist variant. But the Marxist variant is itself only one variant and it's not actually even one of the earlier ones, it's just one of the most theoretically rigorous. And Marx's relationship to what we call liberalism is complicated and I will totally admit that it is not a simple negation, no matter how you look at it, At least prior to 1850, Marx was very much in a liberal tradition and seems to emerge out of it, at least in his own self-conception, what he maintains and what he jettisons we could debate, but I want to hand this over to you what is liberalism and what is socialism, before we deal with the seemingly oxymoronic liberal socialism?
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely. Well, listen, I can appreciate the skepticism about the term, in no small part because I've been greeted with a lot of skepticism about it from the very, very beginning, right, and that's also why I'm very grateful for you giving me the opportunity to come on here and talk a little bit about it, to come on here and talk a little bit about it. So I think that it's important to follow someone like Alan Ryan in recognizing that liberalism is really a family of different doctrines which share, like any other family, a resemblance to one another, but can also be quite different in pretty substantial ways. So anybody who's part of a big family will know that there are certain people that you'll meet cousins, brothers, sisters, second cousins where you, well, you think, oh yeah, we belong together in the same group. And then you can meet other family members where you're like, how the fuck are we related, right? You know who did mom sleep with down the line to punch you out? So, understanding that, I think we could say something very similar about socialism, right, it makes a lot more sense to talk about plural than a kind of singular socialist tradition, whether Marxist or any other.
Speaker 2:So, understanding that, I point out in the book that there are definitely forms of liberalism and definitely forms of socialism that are absolutely incompatible with one another. One very clear example of this drawing from CP McPherson is what we might call possessive strains of individualism, or what's sometimes called classical. Liberalism is obviously irreconcilable with socialism, because people are committed to possessive strains of individualism and possessive strains of liberalism are committed to capitalist forces of production, capitalist relations of production. The whole works right. But there are many other liberals who were not so committed and who felt, actually, that various kinds of socialist reform were not only compatible with liberalism but perhaps even necessary. And, as I point out in the book, there are many people who are very proudly and happily identified as liberal socialists, even seeing socialism as kind of the culmination of liberalism or, as Carlo Rosselli would put it, the great anti-fascist kind of making liberal freedoms available to poor people. That was from his book, liberal Socialism.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of the way that I understand liberalism as a family, I argue that there are two, maybe three core normative principles that all liberals are at least peripherally committed to. The first is this idea of the moral equality of all human beings, or at minimum the legal equality of all human beings. Now, this is a kind of an ideal, typical principle, since who counts as part of the all human beings, of course, has never been an uncontroversial question in liberalism. Drawing upon the great black radical liberal, charles Mills, I point out that for many liberals, going all the way back to people like Locke, huge numbers of people didn't count in the family of moral equals. But nonetheless, over the course of the history of liberalism, we started to see who counts as a moral equal gradually become expanded to include groups like women, racialized minorities, former slaves, etc. Etc. Etc. Now, this commitment to moral equality doesn't mean that liberals have ever entertained the idea that social or economic equality is necessary. Some liberals have, but by no means all. But what it does mean is that there's a kind of normative necessity to show equal concern to each person or, if you want to put it in utilitarian terms, to have each person count as one and no more than one in a kind of philosophic counts and calculus.
Speaker 2:Now the second principle I argue all liberals are committed to is this commitment to liberty for all. And that flows pretty naturally from this commitment to equality. And if you read the writings of people like Thomas Jefferson, paine or Locke, it all becomes pretty clear right, the idea being if we are all equals by nature, or equal in natural rights, or equals before the law. There's something that's extremely problematic about me presuming that I can tell you what to do with your life because of some epistemic or natural superiority that I might happen to have and you know this is of course can be mobilized as an argument against the various regimes of Europe Right, not to mention various religious systems that are seen as infringing on people's liberty.
Speaker 2:And then, last but not least, I argue that many liberals, particularly in the continental European tradition, are committed to more Republican principle, which is this idea of solidarity or fraternity or fraternity.
Speaker 2:Now, this might seem a little bit unusual to Anglo-American audiences, for whom these ideas of solidarity or fraternity might seem ominously continental right, but I point out that even people like Thomas Jefferson gesture in the direction of fraternity or solidarity in things like the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson says things like look, we all want people to be able to enjoy the fruits of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that cannot necessarily be secure in social contexts where they are subject to domination.
Speaker 2:Consequently, you know, where people are tyrannizing their natural or violating their natural rights. The people are entitled to rebel en masse and to establish a new kind of government which is, of course, one of the ideological justifications for the American Revolution which has these kinds of openly solidaristic qualities to it, even something like the American Constitution that opens with the preamble about we, the people, giving ourselves this new set of laws. So the solidarity or fraternity principle a little bit more complicated and probably more controversial than the equality and liberty principle, but not unless one that I think is still very important for the liberal tradition as a whole.
Speaker 1:Well, solidarity is part of the Western tradition in general and that it's also part of Catholic social teaching, which is something that I think often gets confused by Americans who don't know how to deal with it.
Speaker 1:They're used to hearing solidarity from Marxist and then occasionally from the Pope, and by that I don't just mean Pope Francis, I also mean Pope Benedict that I would agree with you that those three core values, principles are something that is shared by most liberals I would say most at this point, because, as liberalism gets atomized down and the family resemblances get weirder and weirder, parts of this get dropped, and arguably one of the first liberals and I piss an anti-liberal off by saying this, and I'll probably piss you off by saying this Hobbes was not for liberty, even though he accepted equality and fraternity as part of his view of the world, although fraternity, interestingly enough, was something that he thought pretty much had to be enforced by a sovereign. So I find this interesting. I also was thinking about the list of people that you list as liberal socialists, and some of them I am ambivalent about, such as JS Mill Bernstein I would erase from history if I had the chance, go back in time and just whack him in the head once.
Speaker 2:Get rid of the reformers you know before they can cause any damage well, no, to be fair to bernstein.
Speaker 1:Actually what bernstein was dealing with was the incongruity between what the orthodox marxist position was represented by the, by the center of the second international, and the espada uh kotsky was saying, versus what the party was actually doing. And he did not pick up, for example, the second international argument for positive German colonialism and imperialism which was actually pretty popular on the second international socialist right and I don't mean Nazis by socialist right there, I mean in the SPD, not something so. So even though I'm kind of being hard on Bernstein, I actually do think he was dealing with fundamental contradictions of the time. There's also the Fabian socialists who are kind of all over the place when you actually look at their individual writings, but very much are in this JS Mill tradition, somehow trying to reconcile that with classical social democracy.
Speaker 1:But one thing I do like about your book immediately is its complication of the idea of a classical liberal, complication of the idea of a classical liberal. I've always found this laughably problematic when you actually looked at early liberals. This idea that they were all just, you know, private enterprise marketeers is funny both in the British and continental context is funny both in the British and continental context, but also in the Anglophone North American context, as in Thomas, paine was clearly not super into what you would see as classical liberalism, even though he's often been appropriated by the right. I mean, we can think about 20 years ago when Glenn Beck was trying to use pain to make some argument against the government in a weird way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when Ronald Reagan quoted him saying you know we have it in our power to remake the world or to make the world anew right.
Speaker 1:Right, which I just always find that very strange. I'm like so the guy who used to give Edmund Burke the shits at night, you're now claiming for the right. That's funny.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, think about poor George Orwell, right? I mean, he can't go a day without having his name parroted out by some Fox News personality. And this is a dude who, very close to his death, said every word that I put on paper in my mature writing was a critique of authoritarianism or totalitarianism and a defense of democratic socialism, as I understand it right. So you know, you can't control what people do with your legacy, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:And one thing you point out when you quote Irving Howe in this book that I thought was interesting, that I actually sort of agree with, even though I'm going to have caveats to this because I'm definitely not a liberal but that the socialist tradition and by that we mean both the Lasallian and the Marxist socialist tradition I am guessing I actually can't speak for Howell specifically here, but the critique he's aiming would have hit both has lacked or refuted a theory of politics as an autonomous or at least distinct activity. So you know, you mentioned Alan Ryan. I have Alan Ryan's book on Marx, like actually visibly back there, and Alan Ryan points out there's not really a clear theory of the state and Marx. And Alan Ryan points out there's not really a clear theory of the state in Marx. If we were to take Haldreper at his word, he was attempting to write one but he never got to it. And if you actually look at the theory of the Committee of the Bourgeoisie, there's two separate theories of the state in Marx, implied theories of the state in Marx, implied. One is the theory of the manifesto, where the ruling committee of the bourgeoisie actually operates the state pretty seamlessly and they have aligned interests, and the other is the chaos that you see in the Civil War in France and the Brumaire, where the state, while still ensconced in bourgeois politics, is an arbitrator between factions of bourgeois politics, and also he has to deal with the fact that capitalists will negate liberal impulses when it is convenient for them, thus decoupling capitalism and liberalism in some sense. That's Alan Ryan's argument in his book on Marx, and I think your work sort of also deals with that in some degree that Marx's critique of liberalism may be sound in many ways, but we don't really have a clear theory of the state to operate from in Marx or what the sphere of politics should be.
Speaker 1:And I will tell you on the Marx and Engels texts that try to get closer to articulating that and by that I like on authority, they actually get into fundamental contradictions with themselves about, like, where freedom is, what necessary authority is and what you do with divisions of authority, because frankly, socialists do not actually have a history of dealing with it at all.
Speaker 1:I mean, like frankly, it's like we have tended to leave that either to anarchists that we make fun of or liberals that we make fun of, but we often do not actually take seriously the problems they're in, and I think you can see in the massive variety of Marxist governments that have actually tried to exist and actually existing socialist societies use the appropriate scare quotes as you see fit um, that there is not a consistent theory there, like you know. I mean you can have something like a hereditary dictatorship, and and the dprk, uh, you can have I don't even know what the fuck the government of the commuter ruse really was, and um, kill every word of glasses, which means I, that you and I would be gone also, right, that's the operative principle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean, you know, duh, but there are different theories of the state implied in Chinese communism. Figure out a unitary theory of the state from Soviet tradition, either depending on the time period, or even if you're just limiting yourself to Stalin. There seems to be two or three different ones, depending on what you're looking at. So, you know, I think we can kind of ask ourselves some key questions about that. So, to turn this back over to you, you know, I mean, it is interesting that you do not try to argue that Marxism is automatically a in an extension of liberalism, and I think that's interesting because there are people who we know who would argue that the the people around the platypus affiliated society basically see Marxism as a as a as an attempt to fulfill the promises of liberalism as expressed in a bourgeois civil society, which they somehow see as separate from capitalism, a word Marx barely uses in his actual text.
Speaker 1:But go ahead. I mean, why did you focus on the kind of tension in Marx? You know you don't kick him out of your liberal socialist tradition, but you realize you can't wholly claim him either came out of your liberal socialist tradition.
Speaker 2:But you realize you can't wholly claim him either. No, absolutely. And as you point out, what I state in the book is that Marx's relationship to liberalism is complicated and the relationship of Marxism as a theoretical and indeed practical tradition to liberalism is also complicated. So I don't want to spoil too much about the book, because I'd be here forever talking about these issues. But I want to make it very clear, in case anyone is misinterpreting me, that I'm not saying that Marx is a liberal socialist, or that if he were alive he would agree with me, or that I'm really the best Marxist and all Marxism leads up to me right, since I always find those kinds of arguments annoying.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to break down what you said into about three parts and then deal with each of them in turn. The first one I'll talk a little bit about the Marxist theory of the state, since you brought that up. Then I'll talk a little bit about Marx's critique of liberalism and then I think I'll talk a little bit about what Marx could say about a liberal approach to the state or a liberal socialist approach to the state. So first off, as you mentioned, it's quite hard to discern a systematic theory of the state in Marx's work. He wrote quite a bit about the state, oddly enough usually in his earlier works Right If you think about his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right but most of these were critical works. They kind of express reservations about various state forms that were existing in Europe at the time and sometimes they weren't published in his lifetime either.
Speaker 1:I mean that needs to be pointed out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, you know they were primarily intended for self-clarification, even though they're very helpful to many of us now. Right, and people have tried to extrapolate Marxist theories of the state from some of those early works. I'm reading such a book right now by Bruno Leopold, very interesting, called Citizen Marx, where he tries to make Marx out to be essentially a Republican thinker right by reading many of these early texts. And I'm not opposed to such a reading right. But I do want to make it clear that I think that's a violent reading that extrapolates certain conclusions from bits and pieces of text and then kind of reconstructs them in line with the author's own vision. So in terms of what we could say about a Marxist theory of the state, I think that in terms of the theoretical reconstructions that have been put forward, there are kind of three major traditions of thought. One is actually more the Engels line of thought In his later works. Christine Sipnowich talks about this very nicely in her book the Concept of Socialist Law. And this argument is essentially that because the ruling class is really the epicenter of the state, once the proletarians revolt and eliminate the ruling class, expropriate the expropriators, eventually the state will, in the famous terms, just wither away right, because there'll be no more need for it and, as you point out, none of the major Marxist revolutions ever ended up looking that way. Now, it's not like Engels ever predicted that this withering away was going to take place day one, but it wasn't very, very well theorized right. And partly because it wasn't very well theorized, this left a lot of latitude to people, even those who believe that the state would live their way, to try to say what an intermediary state that was reconstructed on Marxist lines would end up looking like, and we don't want to get too much into that. But again, I don't really think that this Engels approach is really consistent with Marx's own theory of the state.
Speaker 2:The second theory of the state that Marx will sometimes put forward is a more functional, functionalist understanding of the state. This is the kind of thing that you see in excuse me, the contribution to the critique of political economy, where he talks about the base superstructure metaphor, right when he talks about the base is consisting of forces of production. Then there's relations of production, which Marxists argue about all the time whether they are part of the base or the superstructure, we don't get into that. And then there's the whole superstructure law, the state. Ideology arguably, et cetera, et cetera. Ideology arguably, et cetera, et cetera, and all these play a role in calcifying and conserving the forces of production and the relations of production. But what the relationship is between all these different variables is somewhat unclear. And, as you mentioned, many people think that Marx was anticipating writing a fourth or fifth volume of Capital. They'll clarify a lot of these questions, and then they never really got around to it.
Speaker 2:And then the third theory of the state that Marx sometimes puts forward is a little bit more reformist. So, as many people point out, marx himself always had to kind of deal with complicated questions about how much he wanted to be a kind of ure-revolutionary, arguing that the state was invariably a force for domination, and how much he wanted to use the existing state structures of Europe to catalyze positive forms of change, for instance by expanding suffrage or protecting certain kinds of liberal rights that he thought were essential, or using state power to advance working class concerns by lowering the working day, etc. Etc. And on this base we have more of a kind of theory, we have more of a strategic understanding of the state, where it's, if not quite a neutral, medium that can be directed, depending on who controls it, because obviously the ruling classes are more likely to control it. At least there's some flexibility in terms of what a sufficiently powerful working class or proletariat movement could do if it wins office or gains political power, even using the potentially deficient tools of bourgeois feudal state structures. And partly because there's such diversity in Marx's work on these questions.
Speaker 2:As you know, almost every Marxist who's ever lived has said this is my theory. The state is the one that Marx himself would have signed off on. And then they point to the parts of the text that they like and they say everyone else is somehow heretical or doesn't really understand that right. So in terms of my own work, what I've become more interested in and this will lead into my comment about liberalism is some of Marx's more political theoretical arguments. So I think that Marx again had a variety of different political theoretical sympathies over the course of his life.
Speaker 2:He wasn't fundamentally a normative theorist. First and foremost he was engaged in a critique of political economy. But I think in the Communist Manifesto which he co-wrote with Engels, what you see is much more of an argument for what's sometimes called democratic centralism that aligns with the vision in the state that Marx seemed to be flirting with at that point, which is that it's an instrument or a tool that's used by the ruling class. And in the Communist Manifesto, of course, famously, marx and Engels describe class struggle as the motor that drives history. And in this kind of text what they argue is, of course, for a kind of proto-Vanguardism right that the Workers' Party or a Workers' Party will one day seize control, establish a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriate the expropriators and then gradually establish a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriate the expropriators and then gradually establish a communist society.
Speaker 2:None of this is established or defended in any extraordinarily concrete way. Nor should it have been right. I mean, it was intended to be a short punchy pamphlet, not a you know opus, you know manifesto, you know not. You know the Bible of the working class and of any means. But I have criticisms of this kind of democratic centralism that I love in this book, not least to the fact that it seems rather undemocratic right to place this kind of onus on any political party with extraordinary powers to enact the kind of sweeping social changes that Marx thinks are appropriate.
Speaker 2:Then I argued that later on, by the time we say the civil war in France, his position shifts in favor of a much more radically democratic or even radically Republican understanding of the appropriate kind of national assembly that is going to be somewhat responsible for, as the name suggests, national affairs, but it's going to be very accountable to the people because representatives will be on almost automatic recall if they deviate from the will of the people in any kind of way. There'll be very few checks on the legislature, because Marx quite understandably associates checks on the legislature with this kind of bourgeois anxiety to preserve especially property rights against democratic interference. But then Marx argues that in addition to the National Assembly there'll be more local assemblies which will have enormous amounts of powers devolved to them to kind of run local affairs, which makes a lot of sense. Right, marx was very committed to this idea that you shouldn't be governed from afar by unaccountable powers. You should take responsibility for your own governance, both economically and politically. And I think that there's quite a bit that's quite attractive about this kind of hyper-democratic vision.
Speaker 2:But again, it's not really spelled out in a lot of ways and even socialist critics like Hava pointed out that there are problems with it. Not least is the liberal reservation that unbridled majoritarian democracy can actually end up treating people quite unequally. And anybody knows who's read Carl Schmitt will know this right, that democracy can very much entail treating people unequally, because you might decide that this is the people who are allowed to participate in democracy, but all of you over there aren't entitled to certain kind of rights, aren't entitled to certain kinds of participation, and really we're allowed to do whatever we want to you, as long as we kind of legitimate that through majoritarian processes, right. So an interesting idea, but not one that I'm kind of sold on. So this leads me to the kind of relationship of Marx with liberalism or with liberal socialism. So Marx had a lot of criticisms of liberalism, politically and obviously economically, that we can kind of run through later on if you want.
Speaker 2:But very briefly, he's very clear about the fact that bourgeois society, as usually his term, is an advance on the old feudal system, that while this break between civil society and politics or the state that emerges in liberal societies is problematic, nonetheless it is freer than what you found in the more organic states of the feudal system. So it's an advance in that sense. And you know, of course he commended the bourgeoisie for being the most revolutionary class to ever exist prior to the advent of socialism. Now why would he feel that way? Well, because he's a dialectical materialist right. He never is going to just crudely criticize a position and say that it's wrong, certainly not one that's of such world historical significance as liberalism. He's going to kind of ascribe a certain degree of necessity to it that can be legitimating in certain kind of senses, while also pointing out limitations to the bourgeois form and to liberalism as a whole.
Speaker 2:Now, later on, the probably most important piece of writing that I draw upon to talk about Marx's relationship with liberalism is the Predica, the Gotha program, one of the last major writings that he worked on, and in this piece Marx is actually quite critical of what we might call a utopian socialist or even millenarian socialists, who just assume that we can kind of enact this radical break with bourgeois society. Right, and you still see this online, I'm sure you have right. You know people who are like we're going to year one it right. You know, after the revolution everything is going to be different. Well, marx would say that's very anti-materialist and anti-historicist right.
Speaker 2:The reality is that the contours of bourgeois right or bourgeois rect are going to remain in any socialist society that emerges after the revolution, the society is going to be stamped by many features of bourgeois society for a very long time to come and it's only going to be after a long historical process, post-revolution, that we're going to be able to get to a full communist society that will advance under the banners of, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, and of course he never really gives a timescale for that right.
Speaker 2:So I point out that even if Marx himself would not be a liberal socialist and again I want to stress, I'm not claiming that at all I do think that there is evidence in his writings to at least suggest that he wouldn't necessarily think that there was going to be some fundamental break with liberalism in terms of a Lenarian break with the transition to socialist society. In fact he would probably see that as ahistorical and anti-materialist in certain important ways. So even though I'm under no illusions that he would sign off on my recipe book for the cookshops of the future right to use his polemicalical term I think that there are things um about liberal socialism that I hope you'd find admirable, or at least are intriguing um, so the uh.
Speaker 1:So I just point that out even as early as the manifesto. Uh, there's some key liberal thinkers who are highly influential on marx, and I also pointed out to point, to like point out something that you also argue with Mary Wollstonecraft that the idea that all the early liberals were clear laissez-faire economist is not really true at all. So back to the book. Um, we've talked a bit about, uh, liberty, equality, uh, liberty. That's about half say it in french and half say it in english we'll just say it in english liberty, equality and solidarity slash fraternity.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, I, I. I think that's an interesting place to start because I would say that's something that a Marxist tradition, at least in theory, accepts. In fact, the critique of liberalism from the Marxist dialectical point of view is that there are counter traditions in liberalism that make fully manifesting those three values impossible, traditions and liberalism that make fully manifesting those three values impossible. And thus, you know, socialism is necessary to enact those three key values of liberty, equality, liberty, equality and fraternity. I get half in English, half in French in my head, in my head, um, and I, I wanted to pick up from that, because I do think that you don't see a liberal critique of equality until later, and I think we see that, uh, at the end of the 19th century, where you start seeing liberals turning on the value of equality, are trying to like fundamentally cut it off. Uh, some of them actually pick up on arguments, ironically made by marx, that formal equality is is all well and good, but you don't actually mean it, and then they kind of go well, yeah, we don't actually mean it at all. Um, and in fact you can't have equality and freedom.
Speaker 1:Um, and I was thinking about you, you invoke the ghost of, uh, john gray in the beginning of this book and then you also I say shouldn't. Shouldn't say ghost, because he's not dead yet. I was gonna say he's. He's still a lot of kicking and writing, still being all honoree and pessimistic. A man after your own heart, right? Yeah, he's my favorite conservative, to be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, he's a great writer and I really enjoy reading him. I'd never deny that he's a lot of fun and he's always insightful, even if I sometimes think this is getting a little batshit.
Speaker 1:He goes crazy, but, um, I do think it is. His work is interesting in that he basically calls out the isaiah berlin tradition of liberalism as a source of negative liberty. I mean, he does that pretty early on, um, and your book also seems to push against this idea that we can only understand liberty, uh, equality and fraternity, slash solidarity in a negative manner, in the manner of negative liberty, and um, and uh, in almost hobbesian atomization. Um, you know, and we, you know, you call Hobbes a proto-liberal. I call Hobbes, uh, the.
Speaker 1:I call hobbes the first liberal who's also an illiberal, which you know is totally confusing to anyone who doesn't get why I would call him that. But, um, it's fun though I mean, I also think it's true. I mean, I, I think he accepts liberal. I think he's the first person, even in english, to lay out the fundamental conditions that we accept of as, as liberalism, and then try to use them all towards illiberal means. But he accepts them all as true. He doesn't argue any of the things we would expect like a, you know, a pre-English Civil War monarchist to argue, mean, he basically does argue an inherent human equality, um, and the need for a social contract, and and and um, but yeah, I mean, uh, cory robin um even argued I think this is a bit unpersuasive, but it's a certainly tantalizing argument that hobbs is in fact, uh, in many ways, the first modern conservative.
Speaker 2:Uh, the reason being to your point, uh, that he was the first modern conservative because he accepted many of the arguments of liberals and reformists and revolutionaries and then tried to show very, very carefully why it is that they ended in conservative conclusions. Right, when you accept fundamental equality and the basic freedom of all humankind and you realize that the state of nature sucks, then you end with a despotic state, that kind of thing. Uh, again, I'm not entirely by that is, but it's definitely a tantalizing reading of hobbes yeah, I mean I, I think, uh, it's, it's possible, um, uh, I do think it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I do think it. To me it's undeniable that in hobbes you see, one thing that comes out that is that I think is endemic, and Macpherson's theory of possessive individualism, and that is the idea that human beings and Hobbes meant this literally. I don't think people quite get that. He meant this literally. This was not a metaphor. We're like atomic agents that humans were. Humans were self-contained atoms that they didn't really need society, um, the society was, was, uh, was good because it stopped life from being, you know, nasty, brutish and short, but that it isn't inherent to anything human.
Speaker 1:And this atomized individualism which I want to point out, for Hobbes, even tied into theology, like he thought of as God in an almost ancient, stoic way, god was a physical, material being and we were atoms who made them up from some of the other stuff.
Speaker 1:He's, he's got some weird ideas about, um, what human beings are, what god is. A lot of people think he's an atheist and I think no, he's just a materialist. We just it's hard for us to grok a materialist theist, like it's been a long time since anyone's argued that god is a physical being, um, but anyway, um, but I think that's that's interesting to deal with, because it's possessive individualism that you point out I think is undeniably and you get it from mcpherson uh, one of the negative traits of liberalism and is inherently there. And if you take someone like like Alexander Dugan on the right, a Dominica Lacerdo on the left, they basically argue that that's all liberalism ever was, yep, and while I may argue that that's all liberalism might be now, I think it's false to argue that that's all it ever was, that there's no contradictory tensions in it as an idea set. So why do you think this idea that liberalism is just possessive individualism?
Speaker 2:has so much cachet today. Well, I think there's actually been some really good recent scholarship on this on all of the foregrounds that a lot of it is the result of the Cold War, right? So people like Sam Moyn and Helena Rosenblatt or McPherson himself for that matter stressed how, as the kind of Cold War heated up, there was really this need for liberals to do two things right. One was very strictly distinguish themselves from communism, even though there might be some genetic similarities to them, historically and even ideologically. And then the second thing to do was to kind of obfuscate or even just completely eliminate liberalism's own revolutionary and radical history, or at least the revolutionary and radical dimensions of liberalism. And you saw this in a number of different Cold War philosophers, all of whom would try to create these kind of bizarre but very, very affecting bifurcations right, saying things like liberalism is committed to individualism, whereas socialism is committed to collectivism and in fact also fascism is committed to collectivism. So really the core divide in the 20th century isn't even between liberalism and communism or liberalism and fascism, but between individualist societies or open societies and closed and collectivist societies, all that kind of stuff. And when people like Rosenblatt, moyn and McPherson point out is.
Speaker 2:Even though there is no doubt that Cold War liberalism and, prior to that, possessive, individualist versions of liberalism are very much part of the liberal tradition, they're hardly exhaustive of the liberal tradition or even, in many points in history, representative of the liberal tradition. So Rosenblatt, in particular, is very good at this in her book the Lost History of Liberalism, where she points out look, there were without a doubt what we might consider be classical liberals from the very beginning, but nonetheless, over the course of the 19th century they were hardly mainstream. In fact, in France, many liberals identified with socialism under the term solidarisme and saw no kind of contradiction between saying we should have a society that accepts Republican values, basic liberal rights and also redistributes property. Of course, in Germany, as you know, the social democratic tradition of people like Edward Bernstein always stressed that there was a deep continuity between the goals of liberalism, including the goal of creating community between equals, and the goals of socialism, and that they can be reconciled. Obviously, if you look at the Nordic social democracies, many liberal parties in the late 19th century put forward proposals that were later picked up by the Norwegian Labour Party or the Swedish Social Democratic Party, things like social asserts, for example.
Speaker 2:The list goes on and on and on, and I don't know if I'd go as far as Rosenblatt in saying that the idea of classical liberalism was really cooked up at the end of the 19th century by pro-capitalist liberals who were just kind of tired of being associated with all these socialist-friendly kind of liberals. But I do think that you know, without a doubt, it was a shift that occurred. There was a that occurred then, uh, that really calcified by the time of the cold war, where you started to see liberal thinkers become a lot more cautious in the face of communism and even starting to draw arguments from thinkers that they probably wouldn't have drawn, uh, arguments from before.
Speaker 1:a lot of conservative figures, uh like, say, edmund burke, right well, you know, um, I always think eben burke is like the first. I see him as the first conservative in the modern sense and that he comes he ostensibly actually comes from a liberal party, the wigs. Uh, he is somewhat even sanguine on the american revolution, which is kind of surprising given his arguments later, but then he doubles down on this whole, like the past has a vote, stuff that you see, uh, and later Burke, particularly after the French revolution. Um, although I will also say, you know, conservatism has a Janus face because it also has its non. Uh, it's truly non-liberal, but not possible till after liberalism exists.
Speaker 1:Uh, face of demestra. So I always think of like the two faces of conservatism, as burke on one hand and demestra on the other. Um, just kind of how we often think of socialism as like the communist tradition on one hand and whatever the hell they're doing in norway on the other. Um, uh, or someone like that, right, you know, right, yeah, it's a nice little guy with a pipe, you know, sitting there in a suit, being like.
Speaker 2:You know, we need to get coal production up a little bit more, uh, in order to keep the furnaces going. So that's the main goal of socialist society right now Keep coal production high.
Speaker 1:So one thing I will say about your book that I was surprised is it made me slightly more and only slightly more sympathetic to JS Mills. So I want to go into your conception of JS Mills and socialism. What you see is it's, it's uh good, you're very, you're very, praising of mills, except on one key aspect, and we'll talk about that, but that's imperialism. Um, shocking, uh, yeah, shocking um, but uh, what do you see as jS Mills' kind of utilitarian socialism? How did he differ from Bentham, the guy that Marx really loved to hate on all the time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question, right. So if you were anything like me, you're probably introduced to Mill as kind of the great, even canonical classical liberal thinker, as kind of the great, even canonical classical liberal thinker. As Michael Friedan points out, in the canon of liberal saints Mill is very close to Christ, or at the very least in the upper pantheon of figures. So there's never been a person who's more liberal than John Stuart Mill, and most people become familiar with him through the essay On Liberty, which offers a stirring defense of freedom of expression, free speech, individualism, especially individualism of the mind, all that kind of good stuff that anybody who has ever had any sympathy with the liberal tradition will find engaging. But as recent scholarship by people like McCabe and Shooket Broad and Anderson pointed out and shook it broad and Anderson's pointed out, it wasn't until recently that people started emphasizing once more that Mill was very much a socialist and that's not a kind of unusual interpretation or even an overly generous interpretation of his economic predilections. He identified as a socialist by name in his autobiography and quite helpfully charts his evolution towards falling under, as he put it, the general designation of a socialist, which is how he identified in the mature period of his life. So he points out how in his early days, under the influences of people like Bentham, but also under the influence of figures like Carlyle and Malthus and Tocqueville, he didn't really see very much further than what we now call classical political economy. He felt that really the only way that you could eliminate inequality was through political reform, not economic reform. If there was any kind of economic reform you can indulge in, it was at most breaking up certain kinds of excessive inheritances. But then he says look, the more farsighted successors of liberals, the socialists, have pointed the way forward to a more radical program of egalitarianism and democracy in the economy, and he was extremely sympathetic about that, enough to of course align himself with that. Now, Mill was not just anyone's socialist right. He was kind of appropriately too individualistic to identify with any of the schools of socialism that had emerged thus far. But if you read his later works, he's quite knowledgeable about the Owenites, the Sassamonians, the Fourierists and, as McKay points out, he even seems to have been aware of some of Marx's writings for the International Workingmen's Association, even though he probably wasn't familiar with Marx as an author, Although he liked what he saw. You know, he wrote laudatory comments about this which, as anybody who reads Marx knows, the affection wasn't mutual right.
Speaker 2:So Mill ends up arguing in later editions of the Principles of Political Economy, his essays on socialism and several other works for what we might call a kind of market or cooperative socialism, where he argues that for the most part capitalists are an indulgence that society can no longer afford. They don't really do all that much to help the economy go, although they do expropriate a lot without contributing anything of value through that expropriation. So he says, look, the best thing to do would be to transition to an economy where there will be independent firms, but they're going to be directly run by workers. So workers will own the means of production, quite literally, and they'll produce for themselves. They'll still compete with other worker owned firms and this will drive innovation, Mills thinks. But this will be a much more kind of egalitarian market society, since you don't have capitalists, only workers who own firms. And he thinks that they're more likely to distribute profits amongst themselves in a much more egalitarian fashion. And he hopes that these firms will be democratically managed. And he thinks that this will be morally uplifting for workers as well, because Bill, staunch individualist that he is, finds something quite ruinous about the subordination that occurs in capitalism, where you know your relationship to your boss is kind of like a peasant's relationship to their lord. It's a relationship of kind of slavish subordination, and Mill does not think a dignified liberal society should have any truck with that.
Speaker 2:Now, accompanying this transition to kind of cooperativist market form socialism, Mill envisions a welfare state, quite a generous welfare state by 19th century standards that would secure the health and education of its members, make certain kinds of provisions for the poor and provide different cultural activities in particular. That I think will be uplifting. Now, none of this would be that generous by the standards of the 20th century, particularly the mid-20th century social democracies, If you think about Norway, Sweden, Denmark or even a country like Great Britain. But I think Anderson is right that had he lived to the 20th century and seen these develop, given his progressive bona fides, there's absolutely no reason to think that Mill would have embraced even these kind of more radical forms, uh, of redistribution. So that's the kind of millsian vision of socialism. Right, it's a market socialist economy with worker-owned firms largely uh, with um liberal political institutions, um staunch protection for certain kinds of liberal rights, particularly the rights to speech, assembly, etc. Uh, and a welfare state that would be quite expansively generous.
Speaker 2:Now, as you point out, I'm very critical of Mill for one great glaring era and because we're running out of time, this might actually be a good place to talk a little bit about some of the limitations I point out about liberal socialism generally, because Mill is a pretty unbridled apologist for imperialism. Ironically, in his autobiography he takes great pride in being on, as he puts it, the progressive end of liberal thought on almost every issue but the death penalty. He was a staunch advocate for women's enfranchisement and women's equality in books like the Subjection of Women, probably the only feminist classic written by a man. But in hindsight, actually I'd say even more than the death penalty. It's this chauvinistic and xenophobic attitude towards immature, so-called peoples that entitles the British to despotism over them.
Speaker 2:That's extremely problematic, and what I point out is related to this is Mill's failure which you cannot accuse Marx of to understand capitalism as a global system of production. And I think that most of the liberal socialists that I talk about in my book make almost exactly the same mistake. Sometimes they're quite good at theorizing state structures and certainly how to reform state structures, but there's very little insight into the global arena, how capitalism operates on a worldwide scale and how that's absolutely necessary to its overall functioning. And aligned with that, I also argue, many liberal socialists consequently have a pretty deficient understanding of various forms of power in capitalist society, certainly compared to figures in the Marxist tradition, and I think that this is a serious limitation to the liberal socialist theoretical tradition that would have to be overcome if people were interested in rejuvenating it, Because it goes all the way back to Mill, persists through people like Rawls and, I'd argue, people like Asa Honath and Shantanu and, to a lesser extent, people like Charles Mills, and we haven't really seen anybody figure out how to solve that problem yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going seen anybody figure out how to solve that problem. Yeah, yeah I was. I was gonna say the. There are two things that I would, that I noticed reading your book, uh, that I see are limitations one, capitalism as a system beyond national boundaries and two, uh that because these political economic systems are beyond any particular governing state, any singular state, although they are very interrelated with the state, um, that there is a methodological nationalism, even from good liberal cosmopolitans.
Speaker 1:that is a very big limitation on, uh what they want to do, and I would. I would see that like if your critique of marxism is that there's not enough thought about balancing out, uh governmental forms and what the nation should look like, partly because marx doesn't want to do that normative work and doesn't sometimes argues that we can't even do it pre, uh prefiguratively at all. That's one thing, but I also think it's a it leads to some, some very strange places and I and I don't think it's just an obvious liberals. I mean both the first and second international had pretty big imperialist blind spots.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, pro imperialist factions within it. Um, so did parts of the socialist party of america. Uh, deb's camp most of that shit down, but he didn't get rid of it. It's part of why the socialist party couldn't join the third international. Um, etc. Etc, etc. Um, so I think that's a that that was I. I was actually pretty happy with you talking about that in terms of your book. Um, since you have a limited amount of time and you're approaching it, I want to just go ahead and ask you, uh to come back on and talk about two figures in your book. Um, more specifically and with more time, um, so, if you'd like to come back and talk about jay cohen, someone that we're both pretty familiar with, and jay cohen, someone that we're both pretty familiar with, and rh tani, someone that we're both pretty familiar with, but almost nobody else is.
Speaker 1:I'm actually like amazed how under read tani is in english.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um which is weird too, because his book on, uh, the protestant work ethic and capitalism is actually. It's really good, uh, and for people who want to find a way to kind of do weber's protestant work ethic thesis. But from a socialist standpoint I keep thinking like the book is just right there, waiting for someone to rediscover it, right yeah, well, I have it.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's one of the things I was actually like. Oh, you mentioned rhtani. Almost no one else does except for, like the british marxist historians. So, like it's like me, you, and then like the people who read the footnotes, and thompson and hinton, um, that's it. Oh, so, uh, I would love to have you come back to talk about those figures, particularly tony, because he's under read. Um, but also ja cohen, because I think there's a lot of uh debate.
Speaker 1:Uh, one, one question, though that I'm gonna leave you to end this conversation on. So we're gonna invite you back for those two figures. But I wanted to ask you um, you know, in some ways the liberal socialist tradition lost rhetorically, but in a strange way I think it actually survives uh in policy, probably more than more radical forms of marxism does, because it is so influential on things like mmt, the institutional school of economics, the, um, the MMT, the Institutional School of Economics, the. Arguably, there is a liberal and an illiberal strain in the German historical school, and so I wanted to ask you where do you see liberal socialism today? This will be the last general question, and we'll have you come back to talk about those other two figures at a later date.
Speaker 2:Sure, well, this is where I'm going to be very Gramscian and, I suppose, talk about optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will, because I just kind of invert that classic formula. I actually think that liberal socialist theory right now is in a pretty good shape, certainly compared to where it was before. There are a lot of very interesting writers that are emerging that are rediscovering strains of egalitarianism in liberal thought, or liberals that are rediscovering socialism, for that matter, and think that there's a lot there to like. You know, you can think about people like Sam Moyne or Dan Chandler or Elizabeth Anderson or Igor Shukinbrog A lot of people that I talk about in my book Right or William Crotty, will Edmondson, right Author of John Rawls, Reddison Socialist. So I think that, theoretically and intellectually, there's a lot of firepower behind the movement right now.
Speaker 2:In terms of optimism of the will, though, I don't really see a huge constituency for liberal socialism right now. In terms of optimism of the will, though, I don't really see a huge constituency for liberal socialism right now, and I definitely don't see this as being at the kind of vanguard or cutting edge of the culture, since in a lot of places it's actually the far right that's ascendant and is kind of gaining an awful lot of cultural ground. Now, obviously, you and I have talked about that before, and I find that extremely worrying, for a lot of different reasons. That's a whole other conversation, right. But I would argue that liberal socialism can offset some of that, because I think that liberal socialism, when you boil it down, is a liberalism of hope and optimism that points forward to a world that kind of transcends the limitations of let's call it Fisher's capitalist realism, while retaining many aspects of what's best in a liberal tradition, and I would hope that the intellectual stamina that is behind it right now would eventually translate into some political stamina as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, All right, thank you. Where can people find your work, matt? And, like I said, we will just extend this conversation into the future. So where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:and while they're waiting for us to talk more about the more obscure, more recent parts of your book, sure people can find me on Twitter at Matt Paul Prof and yes, it'll always be Twitter as long as it pisses Musk off or they can just email me mattmcmanus300 at gmailcom. I'm pretty good at answering emails, so just shoot me one of those, but try to keep it relatively brief. Sometimes people send me these fucking long essays, and it's not that I mind or I'm angry at it, but I'm just like I just don't have time to read all that with everything else in the day, and I guess if people want to find the book, they can get it at the Rutledge website off right now, so it's not a bad time, uh. Or if they're feeling greedy, uh, or sorry, bad, uh, they can find it on amazon also all right.
Speaker 1:Um, I think it's a book that's worth reading. If you are one of those anti-liberal socialists like most of twitter, or if you are a liberal socialist like myself, um, and I do think there's a difference uh, then we can uh you, you will get something out of this book too. It will be definitely challenged to you, um. So thank you for coming on, matt, and we'll see you again soon to talk about, uh, jay cohen and rh tani. Yeah, thanks, buddy, great talking to you. Talking to you too.
