Is Liberal Socialism Possible? Reflections on “Real Utopias” *

It is a great honor to celebrate a remarkable person and scholar by reflecting on a question that helped animate Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias initiative. That project, which achieved resonance across the globe among scholars and activists, embraced “a tension between dreams and practice.” Its work, Erik commented, was founded “on the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions.” ¹ That program sought to understand and curb the mendacious advantages conferred by property and class position, not least an erosion of the content, meaning, and standing of liberal democracy.

As a matter of realism and utopianism, the question I should like to probe is this: Is liberal socialism possible? Not just as a dream but as a practice shaped by our visions. To my knowledge, Erik never explicitly confronted the conundrums of liberal socialism, a promise, I believe, that was so compelling to him that it functioned as an unquestioned, thus implicit, normative arrangement. Erik’s socialism was deeply democratic and pluralistic, his commitment to human self-determination passionate, his guardianship of rights unfettered. His socialist ethic—what he called socialist democracy—was grounded in social power, a perspective that utterly rejected the idea that confining capitalism must be authoritarian or that advancing liberal rights must be a barrier to more egalitarian outcomes. Erik’s institutional evaluations placed human freedom front and center as he sought to secure means to mutually buttress liberty and equality through fraternity.

This orientation, of course, was one of the most appealing features of the New Left of the early to mid-1960s. Erik’s politics and views of society emerged within this movement of sensibility and protest, as they did for those of us who oriented Politics & Society at its founding to the quest for a liberal socialism. During the initial years of the journal in the early 1970s, all the editors believed a positive outcome to be necessary and achievable. We did not question the actual viability of liberal socialism, the subject of this essay.

During the decades that followed, Erik persisted in that optimism. His depth of commitment to a liberating sociology powerfully sketched where a realistic utopianism might go without making the socialization of the commanding heights of the economy the sine qua non of a socialist vision. That achievement, in my view, would have even been stronger had it explicitly engaged with the field of tension designated by the conjunction of liberalism and socialism.

The prospect that he might do just that deepened over time as Erik’s attention to the intersection of moral values with institutional designs came increasingly to complement his structuralist approaches to class and class formation. As he came to think increasingly about the moral underpinnings of a realistic utopian socialist project, one can project how he might have grappled with the normative as well as the practical features of liberal socialism, including how to link different, often incommensurable, values in political, social, and economic life with deeply egalitarian commitments.

At a conference organized in London by Radical Philosophy in 1988, just as communism was in deep crisis and was about to expire in Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union, Peter Osborne sought to set the character of the liberal and socialist relationship in historical context in a manner consistent with Erik’s inclinations. Osborne observed that

to write of the future of liberalism in Britain at the end of the 19th century was, of necessity, to write also about socialism. Today, a hundred years later, the reverse is true: it has become impossible to write of the prospects for socialism without raising once more the question of its relation to liberalism. ²

At the present moment characterized by unbridled and unbound capitalism, it is the existence of liberalism without socialism that impels a reconsideration. The combination of radical market ideology and practice, having shaped nearly unprecedented levels of inequality, calls out for renewed vision and imagination to advance an appealing engagement of the two complex traditions. This hardly is a simple quest, however, for the relationship of liberalism and socialism has been characterized by a prickly history. Not without reason, each has almost never been comfortable with the other or even quite sure about the range and content of the other. Liberalism and socialism are essentially contested, from inside and from without. They constitute families of possibilities with defining boundary conditions. It is here that any meaningful project of engagement should begin.

There can be no liberalism without central commitments to individual and collective rights, government by consent, the rule of law, and political representation. Of course, there are important economic and cultural aspects to the long liberal tradition, but the bedrock is political, an attempt to ask how to manage the contours and awesome powers of modern states and their rulers.

There can be no socialism without a profound commitment to human equality in terms of minimum standards, life chances, and access to crucial assets. Any meaningful concept of socialism, moreover, embraces the goal, as Karl Polanyi put the point, to curb and adjust “the self-regulating market by constantly subordinating it to a democratic society.” ³

If these are the core boundary-defining concepts of liberalism and socialism, the variety of actual characteristics, contents, and configurations is quite extensive. Neither socialism nor liberalism is a fixed category. Both invite a politics of engagement. Simple and fixed definitions are elusive.

Within this ambit, there long have been significant discussions concerning whether and how liberalism and socialism might form appealing patterns of interaction and mutual support. Whether and how to reconcile socialism and liberalism was addressed and debated by many mid-nineteenth-century socialists in France regarding how to secure the “liberty” and “equality” proclaimed by the French Revolution. Parallel considerations were central to many discussions in Britain, not least in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century work of John Stuart Mill and the early New Liberals.

Especially with the formation of the Fabian Society, the Labour Representation Committee, and the Labour Party, each of which advocated a parliamentary route to socialism, the early twentieth century witnessed an acceleration of those deliberations. The grand eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911 in twenty-nine volumes with 40,000 entries, devoted a long account to “socialism” written by the Scottish historian and student of political economy James Bonar, who had lectured on economics to workers in London’s East End and served as a senior civil servant in Whitehall. His essay is charged with contradictory language. Noting that the “leading idea of the socialist is to convert into general benefit what is now the gain of the few,” Bonar underscored how socialists wish to “employ the compulsory powers of the sovereign state.” Such powers, he wrote, are dangerous to political liberalism: “A strong central government to which all power was given over all the chief industries in the country would . . . be contrary to liberty. Our leaders would be too likely to become again our masters. . . . Great powers would be a temptation to abuse power.” ⁴

Notwithstanding this anxiety, the essay favorably cited the goal enunciated by the New Liberal Thomas Hill Green in his 1881 lecture Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract, where he famously wrote, “It is the business of the State to maintain the conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible.” ⁵ The text also highlights how Sir William Harcourt, Liberal chancellor of exchequer under Gladstone after 1886, declared in 1888, “We are all socialists now.” Bonar closed his contribution by insisting that under conditions of strong representative government, “socialism, whatever be its precise complexion, need have no terrors. It too will represent the people at its best.” ⁶

In all, more than a little uncertain. Over a century later, can we find successful empirical examples? Painfully, few to none. Arguably the closest to qualify would be the postwar Labour Party government led by Clement Attlee, whose achievements included an expanded welfare state, notably including the National Health Service and the nationalization of the railroads as well as coal, steel, and iron. As it turned out, none of that socialization of the commanding heights of the British economy lasted, the assertive welfare state has been trimmed, and, more broadly, the era’s profound egalitarian impulse has withered.

And yet the question does more than persist, for it remains at least as imperative as when Carlo Rosselli, imprisoned off the coast of Sicily for his antifascism, wrote Socialismo liberale in 1928 and early 1929. The movement Rosselli founded after escaping to Paris in 1929, Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), was based on voluntarism and freedom, parliamentary democracy, and pluralism: that is, on political liberalism. It was a revolutionary liberalism, Rosselli argued, that “put the passwords liberty and democracy first” in conjunction with strong socialist aspirations. ⁷ Neither sectarian nor dogmatic but open-ended and imaginative, his quest for liberal socialism announced aspirations for a democratic Left that have yet to be surpassed.

Rosselli was a real utopian. At the center of his thought and politics was the belief, against odds, that a transformative reorganization of political, social, and economic institutions through a combination of liberalism and socialism might rescue the best of each tradition from the larger thuggery represented, in 1937, not only by Mussolini in Rome but by Hitler in Berlin and Stalin in Moscow in the era of Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, show trials, and the Great Terror. Soon enough, National Socialism and Stalinism’s illiberal socialism organized unprecedented killing fields.

Rosselli’s convictions proved personally dangerous. His voice was stilled in June 1937, soon after he fought against Franco alongside Spanish anarchists, when he and his brother Nello were assassinated in northwest France by killers sent by Mussolini, for whom the very idea of liberal socialism was an abomination.

Reading Rosselli, it is impossible not to hear the vibrant voice of Erik Olin Wright. He launched “real utopias” in 1991, two years before John Rawls introduced his own cognate term “realistic utopias.” ⁸ Erik underscored the need to combat cynicism and hopelessness generated by often ugly contemporary trends. Moving beyond abstract formulations to institutional designs geared to alter probabilities, he probed the intersection of moral values and institutional details, much like the articles published at a different and even more ugly moment in the early 1930s in the journal of Rosselli’s Justice and Liberty movement, an older cousin, as it were, to Erik’s cherished Politics & Society.

“Liberalism,” wrote Rosselli, “in the most straightforward sense can be defined in the political theory that takes the inner freedom of the human spirit as a given and adopts liberty as the ultimate goal, but also the ultimate means, the ultimate rule, of shared human life.” ⁹ We know, of course, that Erik was devoted, passionately and intellectually, to what he designated as socialist alternatives, an ambition he articulated in many places, including a Fall 2006 article in New Left Review that sketched his commitment to an emancipatory social science devoted, in Rosselli’s language, to the freedom of the human spirit. ¹⁰ Any of us privileged to have spent time in Madison at the Havens Center, or to have worked with Erik on the editorial board of Politics & Society, or to have interacted in multiple registers with this rigorous yet playful person, cannot but recognize his affiliation with and commitment to Rosselli’s understanding that at its best liberalism is not just a set of ideas or institutional designs but, especially in dark times, is what he called “the ultimate means . . . of shared human life.” ¹¹

Rosselli and Wright both rejected the claim made famous in the 1940s by Friedrich Hayek that unalloyed free market capitalism and political liberalism have no choice but to be mutually constitutive. ¹² Rosselli disquietly observed that when a choice had been offered or had to be made between capitalism and liberalism, “all over the world the bourgeoisies . . . are no longer necessarily liberal,” the more they try “to escape from the discipline and pattern of liberty.” ¹³

We are familiar with just such doleful choices, as anyone who subjects herself to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal cannot but recognize. Not just the party that dominates our political order (as I write), but a great many privileged supporters seem all too prepared to degrade constitutional liberty for the sake of economic deregulation, tax relief, and the political guardianship of ever-growing inequalities of income and wealth. Too often, liberal democracy is debased in combination with efforts to secure an unbounded liberty for the most advantaged, notwithstanding the price paid in tangible humiliation and significant deprivation. A counterweight with countervailing ethical, institutional, and policy power has become deeply urgent.

In pursuing such possibilities, we might be inspired by Rosselli’s insistence that we recognize alternatives at the conjunction of liberalism and socialism, that is, liberalism and socialism at their best. “The phrase ‘liberal socialism,’” he wrote, “has a strange sound to many who are accustomed to current political terminology.” Nevertheless, he insisted that paths to decent outcomes require “forcing socialists to assume a liberal function in the quite traditional sense of the term. The day will come,” he projected, “when this word, [liberal] . . . will be claimed with proud self-awareness by the socialist: that will be the day of his maturity, the day when he wins emancipation at least in the domain of the spiritual.” With this recognition, socialism becomes “liberalism in action; it means that liberty comes into the lives of poor people,” not just a privileged minority or even a privileged majority, for there is no real liberty for people without a minimum degree of economic autonomy and the chance to escape from “the grip of material necessity.” ¹⁴

Can this ambition be achieved? Writing as a real utopian, Rosselli insisted that “liberalism and socialism, rather than opposing one another in the manner depicted in outdated polemics, are connected by an inner bond. Liberalism is the ideal force of inspiration, and socialism is the practical force of realization.” ¹⁵ Or has the logic and empirical reality of what he called outdated polemics actually won the day?

The question presses. Uncertainty and disbelief about liberal socialism have not been expressed only on the Right. On the democratic Left, Karl Polanyi, whose Great Transformation has been formative for so many of us, had his doubts notwithstanding his strong commitment to this combination. He was drawn to Christian Socialism and to the left flank of the Fabian Society, especially G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism for the way it guarded against excessively concentrated power by dividing forms of political representation in combining workers councils and a territorial legislature. ¹⁶ Advocating the subordination of the market to democratic politics, he also sought to deepen liberal rights, including the right to dissent.

All the more reason to attend to Polanyi’s elegiac consideration of the stalemate of the 1920s that had been marked by the failure to secure compromises across class lines, in part, but not only, because of rigidities imposed by the gold standard. Often forgotten is how he also argued that the combination of social democracy and capitalism helped prepare the way for his era’s brutal regimes by interfering with the logic of economic markets just enough to make capitalism seize up, yet not sufficiently to achieve social justice. Restricting capitalist exchange, he thus cautioned, was necessary for positive outcomes, yet inherently marked by ill-fated hazards.

Notwithstanding his own preferences, when he sketched alternatives in 1944 Polanyi did not designate Rosselli’s vision as a realistic option, at least not then. Chastened by experience, he listed Bolshevism; Fascism, which included Nazism; and what he designated explicitly as the New Deal, a regime whose achievements he admired not only for rescuing liberal democracy under great stress but for combining markets with means for society to defend itself against the excessive commodification of land, money, and labor.

Despite its rotten compromises with racism, about which I have written, the New Deal was understood rightly at the time to have global significance. As an indicator, when FDR’s presidency was still young, Nehru saluted the president from a British prison cell in New Delhi for having come to liberal democracy’s rescue. ¹⁷ But liberal socialism the New Deal was not.

What, then, of the Scandinavian welfare states that connect a forceful project of decommodification with efforts to enhance human economic and social security? To be sure, they falsify the Hayekian claim that the welfare state designates a necessary road to serfdom. The practical good achieved by the often-moving triumphs of social democracy, however, has not proved to be sufficiently capable as a counterpuncher to the effects of radical market capitalism. Social democracy is well worth fighting for—indeed it may be the best, perhaps the only, credibly available pathway to attractive possibilities—but it stops short of what Carlo Rosselli meant by liberal socialism and, indeed, well short of the ambitions that motivated Erik Wright’s real utopias.

Today, the term appears for many on the Left as a utopianism without realism and for many on the Right as a chilling prospect. And yet precisely when Polanyi’s sense of realism was colliding with his preferences, fresh openings and tantalizing possibilities for liberal socialism in fact did germinate. Some liberals—including many on the Left within the New Deal, some of whom guided the recrudescence of the European liberal and democratic Left after the end of the war—as well as key Liberal policy intellectuals in Britain, including William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes, ¹⁸ advanced a dramatic expansion of public responsibility for social welfare and for the management of capitalism, at home and globally. The Attlee government soon followed this playbook.

Liberal socialism, in short, beckoned during the high crisis period of Great Depression capitalist collapse and antiliberal depredations on an unprecedented scale. Faced with the era’s Fascist, Nazi, and Bolshevik regimes through the war and, in the case of Stalinism, beyond, liberal socialism was summoned as an effective guardian of political rectitude. The moment did not last. The zone of liberal socialist possibility contracted in the context of the Cold War. As the Soviet bloc doubled down on its commitment to illiberal socialism, socialism, however liberal and democratic, came to be discredited. Concurrently, the US-led anti-Soviet coalition fashioned a deep commitment to liberal capitalism.

The current crisis is generating fresh openings. The spectrum of political ideas and policy possibilities has been widening, often for ill with many triumphs of antiliberal politics, but some for good. Even in the United States, socialism is no longer on the list of proscribed words.

This linguistic recrudescence is welcome, yet also discomfiting. Critiques of liberalism on the Left for timidity when faced with the injustices of race and gender as well as class—critiques many of us share—too often become so fierce that the indispensable value of political liberalism comes to be scorned and cast aside.

Citing the harsh language of denunciation by the Jacobin’s chief editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, Jeffrey Isaac has rightly rebuked such an unbalanced political orientation. ¹⁹ After the Working Families Party endorsed Elizabeth Warren rather than Bernie Sanders during the 2019 primary season, Sunkara resonantly deplored how the party had “written itself out of history.” ²⁰ And in his Socialist Manifesto he elided the crimes of self-styled Marxist regimes when in power in a manner at once blithe and credulous. “Having seen ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval,” Sunkara wrote, “the Bolsheviks can be forgiven for trying to chart a course to a better world.” ²¹

Forgiven by whom, we might ask, and why? Such ideological insouciance recalls the 1943 appraisal of the USSR by Harold Laski. While acknowledging that Soviet elections were farcical, liberal rights absent, and arbitrary arrest and execution without trial common, Laski nonetheless lapsed into apologetics. “Despite many grave errors,” he wrote, the country’s rulers “did not maintain personal power for its own sake merely. The great end of the Revolution remains in being.” Unlike fascism, he argued, “there is nothing in the nature of the Bolshevik state which is alien from the democratic ideal,” and he predicted that should the regime gain physical security, its “true character as a genuine search for democracy and freedom . . . can verify itself in experience.” ²²

Far better to recall the 1989 assessment of Laski’s student, Ralph Miliband, a leading Marxist critic of liberal capitalism during the second half of the last century and one of the earliest international supporters of Politics & Society. Two decades after publishing The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband offered “Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes,” an article published in Autumn 1989 in New Left Review. Miliband castigated these governments, soon to fall, for their “savage oppression,” and he observed that “the system entailed an extreme inflation of state power, and, correspondingly, a stifling of all social forces not controlled by, and subservient to, the leadership of the party/state.” Writing for an audience of Western socialists, including Marxists of varying types, Miliband closed with “the simple fact of the matter . . . that capitalist democracy, for all its crippling limitations, has been immeasurably less oppressive, and a lot more democratic than any Communist regime.” ²³

Who among us would disagree that any recrudescence of socialism must not dance with illiberalism? Happily, apologetics for the brutality and antiliberal features of twentieth-century communist regimes have become unusual. But the exceptions do put pressure on whether liberal socialism is possible. Or must we remain trapped in the field of play defined by George Orwell in his gloomy 1944 review of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom? “Such is our present predicament,” Orwell wrote. “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.” ²⁴

He did not raise his hands in despair. Rather, Orwell asked whether a road could be discerned leading away from such devastation. To that question, he answered positively: only within the space of liberal socialism. At key moments, other antitotalitarian thinkers and activists have thought the same. When Steven Lukes published a collection of dissident Czech intellectuals in 1985, he strikingly observed that Václav Havel, Ladislav Hejdánek, Václav Benda, and Miroslav Kusý were not just liberals but liberal socialists. None of these campaigners, Lukes wrote, “is explicitly unfriendly to the socialist idea or socialist principles,” ²⁵ as each was advancing a thick liberalism based on an active and plural civil society. Perhaps these rebels understood that liberalism left entirely on its own lacks adequate resources with which to pursue egalitarian goals. Their legacy challenges us to ask not just whether but how to construct deep egalitarian policies and practices on secure liberal foundations.

The institutionalization of decency depends in considerable measure on how we answer that challenge. It was not just the authoritarian, even totalitarian, features of actually existing socialism that proved chastening but important aspects of actually existing liberalism. Some of the tradition’s best elements, including religious toleration, well-defined lines between the public and the private, the treatment of citizens as rights-bearing without regard to their values or social attachments, and the refusal to choose between competing conceptions of morality and virtue—that is, a determined and principled thinness—can leave liberalism vulnerable to illiberal temptations. As I wrote in a book called Liberalism’s Crooked Circle, composed in the mid-1990s as two open letters to Poland’s Adam Michnik, “Not without irony, I believe liberalism needs socialism (although not only, and not just any, socialism) as a partner to provide moral and practical elements that it cannot supply on its own to help guard its crooked circle against illiberal adversaries.” ²⁶

A quarter-century later, the question presses: Is that partnership in fact possible, or must quests for liberty and equality trade off? Are these values antithetical assets, or are there promising rules of engagement?

Crisp, persuasive answers do not exist. Writing a critical assessment of the writings of the liberal socialist Noberto Bobbio, Perry Anderson claimed that liberalism and socialism in combination constitute “an unstable compound”; that “after seeming to attract one another [they] must end by separating out, and in the same chemical process the liberalism moves toward conservatism.” ²⁷ With this formulation, although from a rather different political perspective and with the opposite set of commitments, Anderson echoed Othmar Spann, the organicist conservative Austrian philosopher, sociologist, and economist (designated by Polanyi as a philosopher of fascism), who, as a contemporary of Hayek, argued that socialism’s chiliastic and collectivist impulses are inherently inconsistent with liberalism’s quest to confine concentrations of political power. ²⁸

As an empirical matter, this skepticism on the Left and Right cannot simply be dismissed. If correct, however, we would be compelled to live with the indecent outcomes defined by the poles designated by Orwell. Better, I think, to ask which conditions are necessary to increase the likelihood of success for liberal socialism by raising the prospects for positive synergies. At a moment when a former Hungarian dissident, Viktor Orbán, now prime minister, touts what he calls “illiberal democracy,” a growing global phenomenon married to right-wing populism, and at a time of rigged capitalism, the term used in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf to designate a political economy marked by protected privilege, bruised lives, and the absence of the public good, the task has become ever more vital. ²⁹

Combining the language of Erik Wright with that of more estimable 1980s dissident East European leaders such as Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, is it possible, we might ask, to invent a real utopia of liberal socialism that is self-limiting? That quest, I wish to argue in concluding, requires conditions that concern property and sovereignty, the scope of socialist and liberal ambitions, and the boundary separating the public and the private arenas. Each demarcates a space of engagement for particular societies and decent political regimes, thus creating domains where real utopias can be identified, tested, and advanced.

These were themes about which I wrote in my two letters to Adam Michnik, especially the first, which I titled “La lutte continue.” ³⁰ Drawing on that text, I would continue to argue that the interconnection of liberalism and socialism should be premised on rules of play, each requiring mutual adjustments, mutual learning, and a significant dose of modesty. Socialism must give up the impossible dream of a future entirely without exploitation and scarcity; liberalism must understand that it cannot secure its core goals without bonding with a thicker purposiveness. Together, through instruments of policy and regulation, they can advance melioristic but not inconsiderable egalitarian objectives within a liberal polity that is self-limiting while recalling to both traditions the inherently social qualities of the cherished norm of human autonomy.

This creative pairing must be premised on what Michael Walzer notably identified as distinct spheres of justice. ³¹ Within the ambit of liberal socialism, the barriers erected by classical liberalism to separate property and sovereignty and the private from the public are not collapsed but transformed into boundaries that prohibit the accumulation of resources in one sphere from being used to accumulate resources in another.

On this approach, socialism must come to terms unequivocally with the permanent separation of the zones of property and sovereignty, a distinction the Bolshevik version of socialism insisted on eliminating, resting content to negotiate the terms of their institutional relationship and degree of permeability and overlap. In turn, liberalism must adopt conceptions of property as a general, inclusive right and as a legal and social construct that, at minimum, reckons with the conditions and entitlements of the propertyless and nearly propertyless.

Similarly, socialism must recognize the indispensability of the distinction central to liberal citizenship between distinct, if sometimes overlapping, public and private zones. Liberalism, in turn, must recall its own doctrinal commitment to understand and regulate the public aspects of putatively private activities while insisting that liberalism’s understanding of the scope and content of what counts as political should be extended in many circumstances.

It is good to remember that liberalism and socialism do not exist as disembodied entities. Separately and together, they are embodied in distinctive situations within particular times and countries, parties and movements. Real utopias, moreover, as Erik taught, are not abstractions but specific institutional designs, bundles of incentives and disincentives, with normative purpose.

Writing to Michnik, I observed how, in the past, activists on the Left too often had “erred on the side of pretentiousness in declaring ultimate aims but were too temperate in identifying means. Today, faced with the right-wing’s capture of the meaning of 1989, they have lost ambition and initiative.” Prodded by real utopias to regain ambition and initiative, the questions with which I closed persist. “Can we do no more than hold our breath while witnessing the onslaught on the welfare state, the campaign to install an unbridled capitalism as humanity’s highest good, and the crusade to eliminate public and democratic counterweights to naked class power?” ³²

These puzzles were central to the bold analytical and institutional imagination of Erik Olin Wright. Like Orwell, he sought to rescue both liberalism and socialism from their demonstrated capacity for depredation. His legacy challenges us to proceed with the audacity of real, and realistic, utopianism together with an awareness that, unfortunately, the obverse of an appealing utopianism always beckons. La lutte continue!