Matthew McManus, "The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism" (Routledge, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Yeah, thanks a lot for having me back, man. And happy holidays, happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates. I imagine you'll be listening to this in the new year, but I hope you had a good time. Liberal socialism. To a lot of people, that might be an oxymoron, but we'll get to talk about a lot of these definitions. But before that, I'm interested to know, I think you've been

Thinking about this idea of liberal socialism for a long time, I'm interested to know where the idea of this book, when the idea of this book started. And in your book, you start by this really interesting sort of anecdote that when you spoke or when you started tweeting about the idea of the book, you got a lot of reactions from the people. So can you talk about that before we start talking about the gist of the book? Sure.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so first off, thanks a lot for having me back on again. It's always a pleasure to talk. And in terms of the reaction, I was quite surprised when I announced the book. I was clearly supposed to be an academic text. I said, you know, it's going to involve talking about people like Rawls and Marx, etc. And I must have gotten...

dozens if not hundreds of people who tweeted at me. Interestingly enough, mostly people who are either on the far left or who are on the center right of the political spectrum. People who are on the center right of the political spectrum are

neoliberals, Milton Friedman fans, etc., etc. Their kind of argument was, of course, liberalism and socialism have nothing to do with each other. How dare you traverse our sacred tradition by suggesting that we have anything to do with the S-word? And then, oddly enough, a lot of those same concerns were echoed by Yankees, Marxist-Leninists,

those kinds of people online who had a similar kind of attitude, right? How dare you associate us with liberalism? We have nothing to do with that. If anything, liberals are the archenemy. I will say, though, that there were a lot of people who were very intrigued by the book. And quite a few who messaged me kind of asking, and this is a little bit of a bashful thing, like,

I think I might be a liberal socialist. That's what a lot of people told me. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means, though? So all that was to say, I thought that there was an interest behind the book before I even started writing it. And that really played a big role in animating me to try to produce the best book I could. Whether or not I succeeded, of course, is up to readers, but I'm quite proud of what I produced.

That was an interesting thing you mentioned that a lot of people said, look, I might be liberal socialist without me knowing it. When I spoke with your friend, I mentioned to you before we started recording, Alexander Laferve, I started talking about my political ideas. I said, look, I think I tend to think of myself as a Marxist. My colleagues think I'm a communist. My friends think I'm a bourgeois. And then I said, look, I have bad news for you. I think you're a liberal and you don't know it yourself.

So when I was reading your book, I said, look, there are a lot of things in liberalism that I identify with and I completely agree with. There are things that I'm not comfortable with maybe because, and we'll get to that as well, about a lot of those ideas or promises which they can't really put into practice. But again, yeah, I guess when I was reading your book, I said, yeah, I'm quite comfortable. I can say I'm a liberal socialist without offending either my liberal friends or my, you know, diehard Marxist friends.

I know that it's a very difficult task to come up with all these definitions, but I really, really enjoyed the part of the book that you were trying to describe or define liberalism because it's not really liberalism, it's liberalisms. But again, it would be great to give people some ideas of what is liberalism in the context of your book. What do you

mean by liberalism? And you mentioned a lot of thinkers such as Edmond Fonsetti, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. He comes up with four pillars of liberalism.

again, liberalism or liberalisms, leave it to you to give us an understanding of what liberalism is in the context of your research. Yeah, absolutely. So this is an enduring problem in political typology, right? Each of us wants to imagine that there is a kind of settled form meaning to the ideologies we identify with, whether it's liberalism or socialism or conservatism. But we all know in practice, once these terms get out into the wild, people identify with them

take them up and employ them in a wide variety of different ways. So following people like Michael Friedan or Alan Ryan, two great scholars of liberalism, I should say, I think it's actually, it makes a lot more sense to talk about a family of liberalisms rather than a kind of poor set of liberal principles that every liberal is just identified with. So

What I argue is that there are some very, very abstract commitments that liberals have to things like equality, freedom, solidarity. I should say I call them principles in the book, so I should backtrack a little bit on that. But these are understood in very, very different ways, depending upon the liberal that you're thinking about. Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek would obviously understand a commitment to liberty and equality equally.

in a very different way to someone like John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, even if all these figures can identifiably be called liberals. But I do say that it's this commitment to liberty, equality, and probably solidarity that is emblematic of all the different families of liberalisms, although the instantiations and particularities of how that commitment is cashed out are extremely important.

And in your book, you talk about those thinkers and their differences in liberalism, but you also mention some of the limitations, let's say, of their work. And this is the part that I was really intrigued by. So we always know that liberalism has great promises, but when you look at the history of liberalism, or sometimes when liberalism is practiced by current liberal governments, it's

you do see that they don't really live up to the standards. There's a lot of, to the ideals they set up, there's a lot of hypocrisy, let's say, and that's why everybody says, oh, those liberals, they're worse than, you know, well, the right, at least with the right wingers I know who I'm dealing with. So is your book, are you also trying to, with the idea of liberal socialism, are you trying to kind of maybe bridge that gap? So look, this is liberalism, but these are the areas they haven't really practiced, but liberal socialism is a way forward?

Yeah, absolutely. So there were two main theoretical influences on the book. One was C.B. McPherson, the great Canadian political theorist, author of an important book called The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. And the title of my own book is, depending on who you talk to, either an homage or a plagiarization of that text. And we can get into C.B. McPherson later. But the other major influence on the book was Samuel Moyn.

who's authored a number of very important books on human rights and liberalism. But the one that I was particularly inspired by was his book, Liberalism Against Itself, which was about Cold War liberalism. And he joins a large number, indeed a growing number of scholars of liberalism and pointing out that if you were to go back to liberalism's heyday in the 18th or the 19th century, liberalism was really associated with these extremely dynamic, indeed revolutionary projects

promising to bring emancipation, democracy, and equality to huge swaths of the globe. Now, any scholar of liberalism will tell you that these promises were very infrequently kept, not least to women, men,

racialized minorities. Indeed, very often liberals carved out enormous exceptions for the groups that their nation states wanted to domineer, is the only way to describe it. And some of the hypocrisy has become extremely blatant when you think about somebody like, say, John Stuart Mill, who was a militant advocate for a kind of socialism in the United Kingdom, very progressive on things like women's equality, and also a fierce defender of British imperialism.

We can talk about some of those contradictions later on. Nonetheless, with Moyne and people like Helena Rosenblatt, not to mention Alex, there is something I think very inspiring about this ambitious, muscular liberalism of hope, as Moyne likes to call it. And I would characterize liberal socialism as a liberalism of hope. But what Moyne points out is that during the Cold War, what really occurred was that

that many liberals ceded this kind of visionary optimism to things like socialism and communism and internalized a large number of conservative arguments about the need for caution, constraint, and indeed a deep wariness of public involvement of politics.

Now, Moyn and others, including myself, will point out that those strands of liberalism have always been there. But what's characteristic about Cold War liberalism for Moyn and Rosenblatt and me is precisely how it came to monopolize people's sense of what the liberal tradition stood for. I kind of banished the more visionary, more hopeful, and more optimistic versions of liberalism into

to the left wing of the political spectrum, sometimes trying to imply that these things weren't really liberalism at all. Or if they were liberalism, they were the kind of liberalism that we should no longer vest our kind of loyalties in. And I think that this was a huge mistake for the reasons that you're gesturing to. I think that

as a consequence of the promulgation of Cold War liberalism, what we've really seen is the establishment of neoliberal societies characterized by enormous levels of inequality, plutocratic rule that is sometimes increasingly becoming very blatant, and

a deep dissatisfaction on the part of the public with political actors who they feel often quite rightly are mainly working in the interests of the more powerful. And it should come as no surprise that a society that is built on such an unstable and frankly dissatisfying foundation would prove very susceptible to the temptations of things like right-wing populism, various forms of ethno-chauvinist nationalism, with all kinds of ugly connotations that implies.

So like Moyne, Rosenblatt and many others, I should say, I think that if liberalism is going to have a future in the 21st century, it was really necessary for liberalism to recover a lot of this visionary, optimistic and hopeful qualities and to live up.

to those fulfillments by keeping its promise to build a society that is genuinely committed to liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. And I hope that liberal socialism as a kind of theoretical project might give us a few insights on how to do that. You've raised a lot of important points, which I guess we'll go back to later on. But it was quite interesting to me because I was speaking with someone else a few months ago, and I asked, he wrote a book about...

It was called Turbulent 70s. Michael Hart, you may know him, of course. So I asked him, what is the lesson for us now in the 21st century? And he said, look, we have abandoned all those visionary politics that we had in the 1970s, and at least we need to reclaim them. And you sort of, what you were talking about, sort of echoed the same sentiment, right?

Before talking about, I do want to ask you a few questions about socialism, but in your book, you highlight two principles of liberalism. One of them is normative equality and the other one entitlement to liberty. Would be great if you could talk about these two principles of modern liberalism.

Yeah, of course. So these are two principles that I mainly draw from the work of Ronald Dworkin, who some people might know as the important American constitutional theorist and political theorist. And what Dworkin points out in books like The Moral Reading of the Constitution or Is Democracy Possible Here? is that liberals have always been committed to ideas of normative equality and personal liberty, but they've often been confused about what the relationship between

between the two is. And I think that Dworkin is right in saying there is a deep affinity between this commitment to equality and to liberty. And I'd side with Dworkin in saying that equality takes priority over liberty, which might be a surprise to some liberals.

Why is that? Right. Well, because this idea of normative quality basically holds that each person's life, irregardless of their background, their station, their gender, their race, is as valuable as any other. And it's as important that their life goes well as anyone that anyone else's life goes well. And.

It's important to understand just how radical a principle this is. In the book, I talk a lot about the philosopher Charles Taylor, another great Canadian thinker. And he talks about how in pre-modern or pre-liberal social imaginaries, society was fundamentally conceived as a pyramid predicated on what he calls hierarchical complementarity. And what this meant essentially was that any ancient thinker from Plato to Aristotle would say, some people's lives are just more important than others, right?

Obviously, everyone in society needs everyone else. The people who are going to be at the top of the pyramid need the people at the bottom to clean the streets, you know, fix the sewers, all that kind of stuff. But they possess less dignity, less agency, and less respect than the ghosts who are at the very summit. Liberalism really challenged this view by saying, no, right, the king is just another person, often not even a very intelligent or very capable person. And the

who works on vital social service deserves to be paid as much respect as anybody who arbitrarily happens to be born into the nobility. And this is a kind of radical thing

transformative idea, I would argue, in the history of many Western states. Now, to be clear, liberals did not come up with the idea of normative equality. You can find antecedents in things like the Buddhist tradition. Of course, you can find things in Stoicism that

lean that way. Christianity, as Nietzsche would point out, is an enormously important catalyst for a lot of these egalitarian concerns. But liberals are the ones who really took these kinds of principles of moral equality and turned them into a revolutionary credo. Now, how does that align with liberty? Well, Dworkin points out, once you believe that each person's life is as morally important as anyone else's,

The argument for liberty flows pretty organically from that, because there's something exceptionally problematic in someone else insisting that they know better than you and are entitled to, for instance, use state coercion or moral coercion or even social coercion to compel you to act in a way that they think is appropriate because they are your equal. Right. And.

You can see the association between liberty and equality, for instance, very clearly, and things like the American Declaration of Independence. It's the point Danielle Smith makes, right? Where Jefferson certainly would argue that unless you have this commitment to equality, the idea that each person is equal to everyone else, it's very difficult to get the idea of liberty, since if you don't believe in equality, there's obviously nothing wrong with somebody who is your better telling you how to live your life and what to do.

And of course, liberals, for the most part, tend to reject that. Now, let's get to another different definition of socialism.

And as you mentioned at the beginning of the interview, a lot of people might think that socialism and liberalism are arch enemies, but I didn't consider myself a liberal before. I still don't. Like I told you, I'm inclined to say I'm a liberal socialist, maybe. But when I was reading Helen Rosenblatt, if I'm not mistaken, Hidden History of Liberalism, you have a chapter on socialism and liberalism.

If I consider myself a socialist, I would say, well, I have a lot in common with liberals as well. There are a lot of ideas that the socialists that I've read from have also echoed. But then there is, again, this new 1970s or 80s version of liberalism, American liberalism that comes with, you know, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and you have talked about Ludwig von Mises, who would say that socialism is the complete opposite of liberalism.

How do you define socialism? And is it really, and what are its principles? Is it really the complete opposite of socialism, as Von Mises claims? No, certainly not, right? Now, again, this is where it's important to talk about there being families of socialism, or sorry, a socialist family and a liberal family, right? Obviously, there are certain...

forms of socialism that would be incompatible with any kind of liberalism, for instance, command, economy, socialism of the sort that you see in the Soviet Union. And von Mises and others are right to point out that that's completely incompatible with liberal values. But von Mises is wrong to insist that liberalism is incompatible with any form of socialism.

He's only right in insisting that socialism would be incompatible with the kind of liberalism that he thinks is the only legitimate kind. So in his book on liberalism, he says that if you were to boil all the kind of fundamental principles of liberalism down to one, it would be a commitment to private property or private ownership of the means of production and all the other demands of liberalism flow in some way, shape or form from that.

Well, that's a pretty narrow and I think deeply inspiring understanding of liberalism. But whatever else you want to say for it is certainly not representative of the family of liberal doctrines as a whole, many of which are vastly less committed to this fetish for property than von Mises is. So what is socialism?

There are a lot of different definitions of socialism that are floated out there. And again, there's a wide array of different views on this. But fundamentally, the simplest one is that socialism calls for social ownership of the means of production. And this is grounded, I argue in the book, in a very similar set of principles to those that liberals hold to, which

shouldn't surprise us, since socialism was a mature Enlightenment doctrine that carried on very much in the spirit of Enlightenment humanism that liberalism itself kind of bequeathed to the 19th century when socialism became a major force in politics. So,

Socialists, I argue, are very much committed to many of the same principles as liberals. If you were to ask any socialist, are you committed to things like equality and liberty, they would, of course, say yes. And they would usually add a commitment to solidarity or fraternity or community. But I argue that many liberals also are committed to that. Certainly, if you think about the French revolutionary tradition, this whole idea of liberty, egalité, fraternité emerges from out of this kind of liberal republican ethos.

Uh, so how does this cash itself out? Uh, well, social ownership of the means of production, according to socialists is a necessary prerequisite, uh, to ensure the full flourishing of the individuals, um, in under conditions of freedom, uh, and the full flourishing of all individuals more or less equally. Uh,

Uh, now what social ownership means has been very different depending on the socialist author, uh, or figures that you're talking to, uh, which is again, where we come back to the incompatibility issue. Obviously, uh, from a kind of Stalinist perspective, social ownership means, uh, ownership of the means of production by the state, uh, and ultimately the party that controls the state. Uh, and I don't think that anybody, uh, in the 21st century should find such an idea remotely attractive. Um,

from an economic standpoint, let alone from a moral standpoint. But many of the socialist and liberal socialist authors that I talk about in my book had a very different view, right? They said, look, there are different ways of achieving social ownership of the means of production. John Stuart Mill, who expressly identified as a socialist, said, social ownership of the means of production can mean that workers manage the firms themselves.

capitalists aren't really necessary in order to secure the smooth functioning of this economy. They bring a certain know-how into firms that might be difficult to replace, but certainly not impossible. And by and large, workers would be better off and morally elevated for that matter if they were to run firms themselves.

produce for themselves and distribute property amongst themselves in a more or less democratic way. Or take somebody like Johnson Rawls, who's another major figure in the book that I talk about. Rawls said, look, we can experiment with different kinds of nationalization, for instance, decommodifying healthcare, decommodifying transportation, decommodifying education. And when it comes to the consumer sector, we can also commit ourselves as liberal socialists

to work her own firms that will be highly egalitarian. And he thought that this would be sufficient to...

accommodate most of the socialist concerns about achieving a society free of economic domination. So there's a huge array of different views out there. And I happen to think that the liberal socialist understanding of what social ownership of the means of production entails is the most attractive of all the socialist views out there. Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions.

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So now here comes the idea of liberal socialism. I'm going to ask you for a definition, especially that you have, you call it the political theory of social liberalism, and it has three core principles. One of them is normative individuality, second one commitment to good and happy life, and third, participatory liberal democratic institutions. So as an anecdote to all those grievances we have these days, economic or political grievances,

What is the political key of liberal socialism and its three core principles? Sure. Well, liberal socialists are committed to the idea of securing economic democracy or the democratization of the economy in a liberal democratic context that is highly respectful of liberal rights. But of course, liberals put very different weight on

but very different weight on things like the right to private property than neoliberals would. Liberal socialists think that all individuals, of course, have a right to personal property. But that means it's different depending on the thinker. But private ownership of the means of production, where that will lead to the domination of

others particularly the domination of workers the marginalized etc that is not compatible according to liberal socialists with our commitment to other core liberal rights for instance uh socialism well i argue the first and the most basic uh is a commitment simultaneously to methodological collectivism and normative individualism so those are kind of very technical terms but what methodological collectivism holds uh is look um

Aristotle, Hegel, and for that matter, Marx, had a much better understanding of who we are anthropologically than, say,

Thomas Hobbes or Jeremy Bentham, right? Uh, fundamentally we are social animals. Uh, our development, uh, and our full flourishing can only be secured in a social context. Uh, and this makes it very important to ask yourself, uh, what kind of institutions, practices, communities we're born in, uh, because we're born into a deficient community or into a community with deficient practices and institutions. We're unlikely to fully flourish, right? Uh,

So that's the kind of methodological collectivist angle. The normative individualist angle is, despite the fact that liberal socialists will say all of us are inherently social animals, we remain committed to this idea that it's individual flourishing.

either present or, for that matter, future generations. That is of moral concern or what we should morally weight. And the reason for this is a good old materialist reason of the sort that I think even Marx would be sympathetic to, because liberal socialists would say you can't sacrifice individual flourishing for the sake of something like national self-aggrandizement or civilizational perfectionism, because liberal socialists would say things like the nation, things like the civilization, things like the faith,

are important, right? But they're only important downstream from the needs of actually existing individuals who make up society. And anybody who tries to project a kind of transcendent normative importance onto these reified abstractions is making a very serious mistake.

So that's the normative individualism side of things. So then we get to the second principle, which is what I call a commitment to a developmental rather than an acquisitive ethic. And this is a term or set of terms, I should say, I draw from C.B. McPherson, again, the great Canadian political theorist. So McPherson criticizes classical or possessive liberals, or possessive individualist liberals, for being committed to this idea of an acquisitive ethic. And what the acquisitive ethic basically holds is that

We are all fundamentally self-interested, competitive creatures who spend most of our time privately pursuing the gratification of our hedonic desires. And to the extent we're able to acquire a lot of stuff in order to gratify those desires, I can be said to have led a better rather than worse life. If I have...

a flat screen TV, I'm better off than if I'm just watching things on, you know, an iPad or on my phone. But if I have a 3D TV, let alone, you know, a big, sorry, you know,

a projector, then I'll be happier than if I don't. Now, liberal socialists who are committed to a developmental ethic from little onward would say, obviously, there is some truth to the idea that we are acquisitive human beings. Most people would not be happy living lives of abject deprivation. Maybe Buddhist sages or

or Hindu Brahmins, uh, or, you know, or, uh, Franciscan monks. Uh, but most people would rather have more stuff rather than less. However, uh, the developmental ethic stresses that, uh, the acquisitive ethic misses why it is that we want a lot of stuff, uh, which is we want stuff in order to develop and refine our human powers or human capacities as it's sometimes called. Uh, so if I want, for instance, a violin, uh,

I don't want a violin because I just happen to want more musical instruments. I probably want to have a violin because I want to get better at playing the violin, right? If I buy, you know, a bouncy castle for my children, it's not because I want a bouncy castle. It's because I am committed to developing and improving myself as a father or as, you know, an uncle in my case, right? And you can see instances of this all around. So,

Just to give two quick examples, John Stuart Mill, for instance, was very critical of the acquisitive ethic of Bentham, saying, look, the reality is people aren't just in the business of trying to ratify their desires. They're really also concerned with developing and expressing their individuality, with making their own life a kind of project.

And the only way to do that, following von Humboldt, he thought, was to foster people's human capacities. And he didn't think that capitalism was doing a very good job at all of doing that, at least for most people, particularly the poor. Or think again about John Rawls, right? John Rawls, famous for what he called an Aristotelian principle in the 19th

Last third, a theory of justice, where he said, by and large, we enjoy exercising our powers and our capacities, and the higher or more refined those capacities are, the happier or the more pleasure we end up getting. I'll be much happier learning how to play the violin very, very well, or learning how to be a better father than I will becoming an expert in counting grass on the field. Now, how does this have connotations? Well,

Mel Rawls and all the other liberal socialists I talked to say, once you recognize that it's this commitment to developing human powers, a developmental ethic that takes priority over the acquisitive ethic, you can recognize how our society is, particularly our hyper-capitalist societies, are doing a very bad job of offering...

many, in some cases, most people, a robust set of opportunities in order to develop their human capacities. And here in the book, I talk a lot about how Marx was actually right. So Marx is also committed to this developmental ethic. In Capital Volume 3, he says, the difference between capitalism and socialism is that under capitalism, the development of human powers is only carried out to

with a mind to economic efficiency. To go back to Adam Smith's factory, for example, if I'm working in a pin factory, then capitalism will have every incentive to help me develop my powers of becoming efficient at producing pins, because that's necessary for economic growth. But it's not going to be nearly as invested in developing other kinds of powers I might happen to want to develop. And Adam Smith, I should add, was also aware of this problem.

Whereas Marx said, you know, under socialism, the development of human powers and human capacities will become the end of society for the first time. And it won't just be, you know, a means to producing more efficiently under conditions of economic necessity or mute compulsion. So I think that...

This is a very inspiring kind of view, and it's its commitment to the developmental ethic that's really at the normative core of the book. So now we get to the last principle, which is this commitment to achieving economic democracy in a liberal democratic context that's respectful of fundamental liberal rights.

Obviously, this is the much more practical of the three principles. And this has been understood probably in the most granular way by all the different liberal socialist authors that I talk about. Because depending on where they're from, their kind of backgrounds, they think of liberal democracy and what's important in liberal democracy in very different terms. So...

Let's go with Chantal Mouffe, right? Chantal Mouffe is a figure I talk about in the book. Many people are probably familiar with her classic book written with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. She was also a self-described liberal socialist in the 1990s and still is. And what she says is liberal socialism should entail...

forming a kind of popular front of marginalized people to resist the various forms of domination that are imposed upon them by existing social structures. And the way to achieve freedom or liberation from these forms of domination is ultimately going to be through democratizing wide swaths of social life, including economic life. So that's her kind of take on this.

People like Rawls, again, think of this in very different ways. Rawls thinks what we should have is a society where essentially the Constitution is very committed to basic liberal principles, indeed more committed to basic liberal principles than it ever has been before, with the exception, of course, of this very strong emphasis on private property that people like von Mises would think is essential to liberalism. Rawls says, obviously, people should be entitled to personal property, their home, their car, their laptop,

you know, the lawnmower, that kind of thing. But once, you know, ownership of property reaches a certain threshold where your ownership or possession of it can facilitate your domination of others, you know, ownership of the means of production or the commanding heights of the economy of some sort, then we can say there are compelling liberal and moral reasons to step in and to try to socialize ownership of property.

those forms of property in order to inhibit domination, ensure equality, particularly political equality, and of course facilitate the development of everyone's human capacities rather than just a few.

And this idea of liberal socialism, it's not a completely new idea because in your book, Part 2 and 3, I guess you talk about the antecedents or precedents of liberalism, socialism, liberal socialism. You talk about thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Edward Bernstein. I really like the fact that John Stuart Mill sometimes considers himself to be a socialist, which to me was a complete surprise. Yeah.

Can you talk about some of the, let's say, intellectual precedents of liberal socialism? Who are the people who came up with the idea first or touched upon that idea? Sure. So the story in my book begins with a discussion of classical liberalism, as it's now typically called, Locke and Hobbes. But I argue that the idea of liberal socialism, the intellectual idea at least, really came to the fore in the writings of people like

Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, who are kind of the first two figures I write about at great length in the book. Now to be clear, neither Paine or Wollstonecraft were liberal socialists, right? Socialism didn't even exist as a term when they were writing their major works.

Uh, but what I point out is they both offer challenges, uh, to much of the classical liberal worldview. Uh, but the challenge, the challenges are recognizably liberal. Uh, and what they insist upon is that stark inequalities of property align with stark inequalities of power. And this is impermissible, uh, from a kind of liberal standpoint. Uh, so just to give, uh, the, just to kind of run through this quickly, uh,

Thomas Paine, as many people probably know, was a major figure in the American Revolution, the author of an important pamphlet called Common Sense that was read widely by American Revolutionary soldiers. And for the most part in Common Sense, he's pretty standardly a figure within the classical liberal tradition, albeit quite a bit more radical than many of his contemporaries.

By the time of the French Revolution, you start to see notable shifts in Paine's thinking. For instance, in the pamphlet Agrarian Justice, he starts to insist that actually it's a mistake to think of property as some natural institution or natural fact of life that precedes society and that society has no right to interfere with.

Payne insists, actually, property is very much a social product. And consequently, we need to ask ourselves what kind of social arrangement of properties is beneficial to most people. And here, Payne thinks

So Pleiades are radically deficient. So he points out that the rich, who for the most part haven't contributed very much to society, according to Paine, owe the poor an enormous debt for their expropriation, particularly of the land, which has denied many people the opportunity to use the land to cultivate their own human powers and their own human potentials. And

Payne says, consequently, the rich owe society, especially the poor, enormous debt for the retention of their riches, for the most part in the land, but elsewhere as well. And he says they can pay this through very, very, very, very, very high levels of taxation that will provision what amounts to the first welfare state in Payne's mind. Ensuring things like an old aid pension, education for all, a kind of guaranteed...

for all after they reach a certain age, guaranteed work, and not only work, but quality work, quite generous, indeed, expansively generous by the standards of the 18th century. Many people even talked about how pain can probably be seen as an antecedent to arguing for things like a universal basic income. So some left libertarians even like him for this reason.

Uh, then we have Mary Wollstonecraft, right? So Mary Wollstonecraft is, um, best known as the author of a vindication of the rights of woman, uh, obviously a seminal text and feminist theory. Very, very important to read if you have any interest in women's issues, which I do. Uh, but, um,

One of the kind of less studied sides of her work is her approach to things like property and inequalities of property. So Mary Wollstonecraft was scathingly critical of inequalities of property from a liberal standpoint. And she's very influenced by people like Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on this point. But in The Vincation of the Rights of Woman, she essentially says that it's from the inequalities in property and society that most of the vices of society flow, and

as though from a poisoned river. Why is that? Well, because she points out that for the most part, the kind of indolent rich who don't again contribute very much to society insulate themselves from the lived reality of most people, don't really contribute much back to society, but nonetheless control the reins of society and skew laws, policies, etc. to secure benefits for themselves.

And the other negative consequence of this, she thinks, is the poor, precisely through envying the rich and wanting to emulate them, internalize a lot of the same kind of bad habits and bad propensities that the rich themselves embody, except from a more kind of resentful and envious standpoint. And the only solution, she thought, would be a much more radically egalitarian distribution of property and society, which she thought would be more conducive to a virtuous Republican citizenship instead.

because you can't really have a republic of fundamental unequals. Now, for the most part, in her early work, Wollstonecraft is talking about the kinds of inequality that you see in the Anshan regimes of Europe, aristocratic society, etc. But later in her career, she very much extends the same scathing denunciation to emerging forms of capitalism. So in her letters on her trip to the Nordic states in 1850,

northern Germany. She talks about the kind of emerging burger or bourgeois class, factory owners, etc., in cities like across northern Germany. And she actually compares them to funguses or mushrooms, where she says they kind of grow from the manure. They don't really contribute all that much to society. And these are people who

by and large, adopt the most kind of venal and crass moral values that one can imagine, where she says, you know, you talk to the average capitalist, and for the most part, they see

any aspiration to construct a more virtuous society with a great deal of suspicion because their outlook is fundamentally centered on one thing and one thing only, which is the acquisition of money, making as much money as possible as frequently as possible until they die. And Wollstonecraft had nothing but contempt for this kind of nullity that you saw emerging in capitalist society. So

What these two authors indicate, I point out, is that from very early on in the liberal tradition, there was a recognition of how inequality, particularly inequalities of property, and even early on, inequalities of property of the sort that emerge under capitalism could be corrosive to other things that liberals have good reason to value. Yeah.

Republican citizenship and equal participation in politics, the moral virtues of people, which can only be adequately cultivated in a more egalitarian society, these kinds of things. And then, as you mentioned, I argued that...

It's with John Stuart Mill that theoretically all these kinds of intimations to come together to form the first mature theoretical expression of liberal socialism. So like you, when I was taught Mill in undergrad, for the most part he was just presented to me as the exemplary classical liberal, right?

He was the guy who wrote on liberty and defended freedom of speech under all circumstances. And that is true of Mill. Let's be clear, right? What's less known of Mill, as you point out, is that he expressly identified as a socialist in his autobiography and did so with quite a bit of pride, right? Where he points out how in the early days, he had not seen further than the limitations of classical political economy. And it's only under the influence of

his wife, the Sassimonians, and his own kind of concentrated thinking that he realized it was possible to go much further than the limitations of classical political economy, which is why he identified under the general designation of socialist in the mature period of his career. Now, Mills' socialism is very interesting and very unique. If you are interested, I'd recommend Helen McCabe's great book, John Stuart Mill's Socialist. But he offers a lot of different arguments for this, and I'll just go through a few

the most important two right now. So I already gestured to one earlier, which is Mills' argument that by and large, workers could manage economic firms for themselves. They don't really need capitalists to do it. And he points out how capitalists, for the most part, expropriate a great deal of the value produced by workers without giving an awful lot back.

And he thinks that this also produces not only economic inefficiencies, but moral corrosion as well. Because Mill points out, if you're a liberal who believes that we shouldn't be living in a society characterized by subservience, right, which was what a lot of liberals criticized the old regime for, you should be very, very concerned about the fact that these liberal principles essentially stop being used

resonant when workers entry the factory where they're forced to brown nose and submit themselves to the capitalist, to the owner, if they want to keep their job. And he thought it'd be more morally uplifting for them to manage firms themselves on a relatively democratic basis. Now, the second argument that Mill puts forward, and there are more, but this is probably a crucial one, is kind of early critique of, you know,

meritocratic mythologies. So even perhaps especially in the 19th century, Mill would point out everybody continuously defends capitalism by saying those who do not work shall not eat. That if the rich got to where they are because they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they put in their 12, 14 hour days, they avoid advice and that's why they ended up with a lot of money. Well, Mill points out that that just is patently untrue. For

First off, he points out many people just inherit enormous sums of wealth. Indeed, most of the rich people in the United Kingdom at the time when he was writing inherited their wealth in some way, shape or form, which completely contradicts this meritocratic principle. But more importantly, he points out, if you really believe that hard work should be the basis of reward, that indeed that contribution should be the really basis of reward. Mill points out that

Coal miners, Rick layers, the kinds of people who work, you know, 14 hour days in the factories. They're the ones who are really working the hardest in a society. Indeed, they're working the hardest in the most vital jobs.

And yet they are also the ones who are the least remunerated for their efforts, despite their efforts being far greater than what most of us could even imagine, certainly from a 21st century standpoint. So he says, if we were really committed to this meritocratic principle, things would have to be entirely inverted and you'd have to support something like socialism rather than capitalism. Now, there are problems with both of these arguments that I gesture to in the book. And there's even more glaring problem in Mills' project, which is his argument

unbridled endorsement of a very nasty form of British imperialism, which he defends in extraordinarily ethno-servantist terms. We can talk about it if you want. But nonetheless, I characterize Mill as a noble but flawed beginning to the mature period of liberal socialist thought, because he put a lot of the ideas together in a way I think is attractive, even if he didn't quite get the formulas right, and even if he made some really calamitous moral mistakes. Mm-hmm.

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Oh, it's such a clutch off-season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the GOAT.

And when you were talking about socialism and liberalism, you do point out some of the limitations, such as, I think you also mentioned it, Jane Stewart's endorsement of imperialism. You talk about John Rawls, who didn't really engage with issues of race at the time, which was really, really prominent. And you talk about the fact that he was a socialist,

And that doesn't really fit in with those liberal ideas of freedom and fulfilled life. And your book is trying to address some of those gaps, liberal socialism or political theory of liberal socialism. But what do you imagine some of the limitations of liberal socialism might be? And I'm also interested to know

What are the barriers? Why hasn't it really been fulfilled so far or hasn't been fulfilled as much as we want it to be? Well, that's a great question. So I'll talk a little bit about the intellectual problems first, which are less significant ultimately than the material barriers, which as any good socialist, which any good socialist should emphasize, certainly post-Marx. So

I want to be clear that my book, As I Flame It, is intended as a retrieval of the liberal socialist tradition. This is a term again I take from C.B. McPherson, who's, I can't stress enough, was a huge influence on the book. So McPherson characterizes retrieval as essentially going back to traditions that we thought we knew to try to recover...

emancipatory potentials within them that we weren't aware of before. And he tried to do that himself with liberalism, right? For all, my first one was very critical of classical or possessive liberalism. He was quite attracted to the liberalism of people like John Stuart Mill, for example, and really wanted to recover elements of it for a socialist or a left project.

Now, the reason I characterize it as retrieval rather than, say, a defense is, to your point, I think that there are huge deficiencies in liberal socialist theorizations as they exist today, even in the greatest and most important thinkers.

Let's just go to Rawls for a second, who you mentioned, right? I think that Rawls lays out a wonderfully complex and rich set of normative justifications for a liberal socialist tradition. And it's important to note that he identified with liberal socialism in the mature period of his writings as well. A lot of people don't know that about Rawls, right? Rawls' thinking was often construed as a defense of kind of the mid-century welfare state, right?

of the sort that you saw under the New Deal and Great Society regimes. But actually, Rawls says by the time of justice and fairness's restatement, actually, welfarism permits too many inequalities.

to be compatible with liberal justice's fairness. And in particular, it permits too many inequalities economically that can lead to political inequalities down in the future, since invariably economic inequalities are going to lead to political inequalities, since people will get uneven value from their basic political rights if, for instance, they have enough money to

buy a social media network, hypothetically, and use it to advance their political views in a way that many of us aren't incapable of doing. And he said, consequently, the only two regimes that a good liberal could be committed to are what he called property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. And like people, like many others, I think that liberal socialism is the regime that Rawls should have come down on, as opposed to property-owning democracy. Back on point, we don't need to get into it. But

There are a lot of problems with Rawls' outlook in the same kind of way that there were a lot of problems with John Stuart Mill's outlook. Probably the most serious set of problems were developed by the great critic of Rawls, Charles Mill, in his book Black Rights, Right Wrongs, where he points out that Rawls' theorizing really operates at the level of what he calls ideal theory. It lays out a kind of normative vision of the world

as it should be, but it doesn't really deal all that concretely with the specific forms of injustice that Rawls was very, very aware of in actually existing U.S. society. And the most transparent of those, of course, according to Charles Mills, is race and racial inequality, where he points out that Rawls, who fought bravely in the Second World War, who lived through the Civil Rights Movement, barely has anything to say about the impact things like segregation, Jim Crow, etc.,

have had on millions of his fellow American citizens. And this is a serious defect to his theory. And I agree with Charles Mills on this, right? And that's why I think liberal socialism as a kind of political theory needs to be much more directly politically active and confront concrete struggles than, for instance, Rawls was willing to indulge in. And related to this is...

the kind of Marxist critique of Rawls, which also holds that his theorizing is too idealistic, too normative, too disconnected from a real analysis of power. But more importantly, I point out that if you look at Rawls, you see that actually he doesn't really have a very robust or sophisticated theory of power beyond the very simple claims of power that liberal theory traditionally analyzes. So if you were to...

As for Moralesian standpoint, questions about things like hegemony or ideology or the global nature of capitalism as a kind of systemic totality, you find very little resources in his work in order to address those forms of power, which are.

very, very important. Uh, and indeed I'd argue, uh, perhaps most significant, uh, from a socialist standpoint in the 21st century. Uh, so liberal socialist theory, from my standpoint, at least needs an awful lot more Marxism injected into it, uh, in order to make itself viable. Uh,

in the 21st century, precisely because it needs to be more attentive to actual concrete struggles, the way that Charles Mills think it must be, and also because liberal socialists need a much more granular internationalist, indeed global, understanding of power than what the tradition has previously relied upon. So those are the kinds of intellectual barriers, I think, to fulfilling the project. The material barriers, though, as you mentioned, are far more substantial. So

So in terms of the kind of state of liberal socialist political theory in the 21st century, I think intellectually we're actually in quite an exciting place. You mentioned Alexandra Lefebvre. You interviewed him a few weeks ago. He had some nice things to say about my book. I had some nice things to say about his book. We're in agreement about a lot of different things. But there are a lot of us, people like –

I mentioned Helen McCabe, Igor Shokitbrod, myself, Daniel Chandler, Alex Lefevre, all of whom are really interested, Elizabeth Anderson, in revolutionizing or radicalizing elements of the liberal tradition for a left project. And I think we're producing some very interesting work in that regard. Certainly, all the people I mentioned are doing great things. But materially, the

The sad reality is we are in many ways far further away from achieving something like the liberal socialist vision than we were even in the 1970s. And there are a lot of different reasons for that. But the big story is that neoliberalism produced an extraordinarily toxic society where you had a ruling class that in many ways for the first time in history felt it was

purely responsible for its own station and consequently are nothing to the people at the bottom, and a working class that was frequently told that if it was deprived, that was purely their own fault. Because according to the ethics of neoliberalism, if they wound up at the bottom, that was because they couldn't cut it, they didn't work hard enough, or they weren't talented enough. And so to use the proper Trumpies, they're losers who deserve where they wound up. And it

it should come as no surprise that in such an extraordinarily toxic, plutocratic, anti-egalitarian cultural environment, that something like right-wing populism of the stored-in body by Bolsonaro, Trump, and many others would become enormously attractive to many people as a vehicle to try to extricate from this kind of neoliberal paradigm. Now, I think that this is very much a kind of...

bad force to hit yourself to, because in many ways, right-wing populism doesn't break from this neoliberal ethic or from a lot of its practices, but doubles down on many of the worst elements of them, right? Think about what Trump and others are promising to do right now by cutting government services alongside creating an extraordinarily hard border, shipping millions of migrants back home, which is going to entail mass violations of

untold numbers, a number of people's civil rights. But they are responses to real problems. And my argument is that unless liberals, and this is Morin's point, recognize that the institutions of neoliberalism failed because people were dissatisfied with them and fundamentally rethink what is necessary in order to re-inspire people,

We are unlikely to see our creed survive into the 21st century. And as he puts it, survival is not good enough, right? What's really needed is not just to get people to commit to liberalism because it's better than right-wing populism, but to commit to liberalism because it is worthy of loyalty and even love, because it offers them a sense of hope for a better world. And fundamentally, I would characterize liberal socialism as a philosophy of hope, although I'm not...

particularly hopeful that we'll see it instantiated given all the kind of barriers and all the kinds of antagonists that we're facing right now. However, I'm enough of a Gramscian to always say pessimism of the intellect of the sort that I just iterated always needs to be complemented by optimism of the will. And that's what I keep telling myself every single day.

Great. That was a great response. Thank you. And Joseph, you mentioned John Rawls. I wanted to ask you about Marx and his critique of liberalism. But I'll first ask about Rawls.

Because, again, I'm sure that's one of the things that many people find surprising, that, yeah, he was a liberal, but at the same time he engaged critically with the ideas of Karl Marx and he felt that he was inspired by some of his ideas. Can you talk about John Rawls' engagement with Karl Marx's ideas? And maybe the second question that I will just ask you now is Karl Marx's critique of liberalism. But it was not a total rejection, as many people might point out.

So, and that's the second question that I have. Yeah, absolutely. So, again, there's this kind of caricature of Rawls that many of us were brought up in, which held again that he was more or less a pretty dogmatic apologist for the mid-century welfare state and didn't have any kind of more radical tendencies baked into his system. And as I pointed out, that's simply not true, right? He himself rejected welfare state liberalism

in Justice's Fairness Restatement. And you already see him saying, no, no, no, that's not necessarily what I'm aiming for. As early as the first editions of Theory of Justice, where he says liberal socialism might very well be an attractive way of instantiating

justice is fairness. It's just up to us to empirically test that. But one of the reasons why Rawls was so friendly to the left, as you mentioned, was precisely that he was very transparent about how much he had learned from figures like Marx and Hegel. So if you read his lectures on political philosophy, he

What you see is him characterizing Marx as a great genius. Indeed, as he puts it in one place, a heroic figure who is self-taught and often self-sacrificing in his fight against various forms of injustice.

And what Rawls says he really takes from figures like Marx and Hegel is this idea that the basic structure of society should be the first subject of justice. Now, this might seem like a technical point, but it's actually quite a profound reorientation for liberal political thought. So remember I mentioned this commitment to methodological collectivism. This is where you see Rawls really enact it, because a classical liberal thinker would say the

starting point of liberal justice or the first subject of liberal justice is the individual and their basic rights and the state of nature or whatever it happens to be if we go back to someone like Locke. And from there, you kind of build your political system. Rawls says no. Actually, the basic structure as Hegel and Rawls has taught us

is highly determinative of where people wind up in life, indeed enormously determinative of where people wind up in life. So that's what liberals need to consider first and foremost, because unless you have a just basic structure, you're not going to have liberal citizens who are able to exercise their freedom or enjoy the fruits of equality the way that they should. And

In his lectures on Marx, he once again talks about liberal socialism, says it's an extremely attractive view, and argues that liberal socialism could answer many of the Marxist concerns about capitalism in an effective way.

Certainly to the extent that he thinks they should be answered. And this would involve some of the stuff that I was talking about before, right? A commitment to various forms of nationalization or decommodification of things like healthcare, education, et cetera, instantiation of workplace democracy, very high levels of social security, and of course, guarantees of liberal democratic principles, you know, rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, toleration, all that kind of good stuff.

Now, pivoting to talk about Marx, right? This reception of Marx by Rawls might appear surprising if you think of Marx as just an unabashed critic of liberalism for whom liberals could have nothing but contempt. But actually, following people like Igor Shokhodbrod in his revisiting Karl Marx's critique of liberalism, I point out that actually Marx's appreciation for liberalism is a lot more nuanced than just

sheer condemnation. He was always very, very clear throughout his work that the bourgeois epoch was the highest form of society that existed thus far, that the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity guaranteed by the French Revolution amongst others and codified in things like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen or historical advance

What he pointed out, of course, and very rightly so, is that these kind of formal guarantees of liberty, equality, and fraternity were just that. They were formal. If you were not willing to undertake the much more transformative measures

of the nature of our political economy that would be necessary to make their benefits available to everybody. So his critique of liberalism is very much a kind of imminent critique of liberalism, suggesting that we will not be able to live up to liberal promises unless we advance to a higher form of society that doesn't abandon these liberal commitments, but instead makes good on them in a way that classical liberalism and certainly capitalism isn't capable of.

uh, of doing. Uh, and this is a point that he comes back to again and again, uh, over the course of his life. So it's not just a kind of, uh, immature, uh,

fascination with liberal radicalism. So if you look at the Critique of the Gotha program, the Critique of the Gotha program is, of course, a seminal Marxist text, one of the few where he talks in some way about what an alternative kind of society would look like. And there he's actually very critical of what we can call millenarian socialists who argue that after the revolution, all is to be changed. He says, no, no, the reality is that

Any kind of socialist society that emerges from the bourgeois state is going to be, as you put it, stamped by many features of bourgeois right. And right, of course, is the German term that refers not just to bourgeois ethics, but also bourgeois institutions.

basic political rights, etc., etc. And he says the kind of hauntors of bourgeois right will persist well into the future of a socialist society, indeed for an indefinite period of time. He says it will only be once we so develop the means of production that the state is able to

knows, maybe wither away or assume a different kind of role. And then we can inscribe on our banners the principle of from each according to his ability to reach according to his needs. But that's a long way off. And there are good reasons for Marx to take this kind of position beyond just a kind of

caution against monolinarianism, right? One reason, of course, for them to take this position is Marx, as an anti-utopian thinker in many respects, was very well aware that you're not just going to be off a year one things. If you have a society that emerges from, to use his metaphor, the womb of bourgeois society, it's going to carry on a lot of the characteristics of its parent society. It's going to be a lot of bourgeois society

features to the new socialist society, but also as a good historical materialist. Marx is aware of the fact that any kind of utopian millenarian break is ahistorical. It's this kind of wish to redraw society from a blueprint.

That's highly idealist in orientation and abstracted away from the materiality of power and materiality of the kind of institutions and practices that we engage in. So does this mean that Marx was a liberal socialist? No. I want to be very clear about that because I've already had one person misread the book in that way. Marx was not a liberal socialist.

He had his own unique political philosophy. It's a political philosophy that is extremely rich and well worth learning about. But what I point out, just for those who might think that Marx would be unremittingly critical of liberalism or liberal socialism, is that I think that his approach would be more nuanced than that. And that can open the door, I think, for liberal socialists and indeed liberals or liberal egalitarians to learn a lot from the Marxist tradition. And hopefully my book

if it does anything, might kick off a dialogue or might contribute, I should say, to a dialogue between liberals and Marxists on these kinds of questions of the sort that's already beginning, right? I was really inspired by a book called Beyond Liberal Legalitarianism by Tony Smith. Fantastic work. People should take a look at it. Mm-hmm.

And speaking of some of the limitations of liberalism and social liberalism, I was really intrigued to learn about Charles Mills' ideas. So he was a proponent of black radical liberalism, a tradition that I hadn't heard of myself before coming across your book. So can you talk about that black radical liberalism and also Charles Mills? Who was he and how did he try to address some of the ideas that maybe other liberals hadn't approached?

Yeah, absolutely. So Charles Mills is a very interesting guy, right? A great writer and a polemical contributor to the liberal tradition, but somebody who really is consciousness raising and conscience raising, I should say. So his most famous book has a text called The Racial Contract, which he wrote in the 1990s, or published, excuse me, in the 1990s.

that was inspired by his partial break with Marxism, but his ongoing leftist reservations with many aspects of the liberal tradition. So what he points out in the racial contract is that there's this tendency on the part of many liberal theorists to kind of downplay the considering with race or the overt racism of many in the classical liberal tradition. People like John Locke, John Stratton Mills,

Tuckville, you name it, right? And he points out that there are a lot of different evasive ways that people try to dodge the concern with race and racism of these figures by usually suggesting, well, that was peripheral to their core concerns, or we can extract their kind of core normative commitments from any kind of bad opinions they might happen to have. And in the racial contract, he says, well, actually, no, if you read law

Locke or you read Kant or you read the Founding Fathers for that matter, it's very clear that oftentimes when they were talking about liberal principles, liberal rights, what they meant were for property white men. They were going to be the beneficiaries of the kinds of freedom, equality and political participation guaranteed by the liberal social contract, whereas those who were not white would be denied those kinds of opportunities.

And sometimes this can be made extremely express. Think about the Dred Scott decision in the United States, right? Dred Scott was a decision issued near the Civil War where Chief Justice Taney essentially said, look, the U.S. Constitution was enacted by white men for white men, right?

only white men can be citizens of the United States. And even if a non-white person is free, so not a slave, they do not possess any kind of guaranteed legal rights under the U.S. Constitution. They only get the kind of privileges that the white majority deigns to give them. A very kind of

transparent articulation, according to Taney, of the racial dimensions of the American social contract that people like Mills really want to foreground. Or let's go to our early example and talk about the earlier Mill, John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill was an enormously progressive figure, as I mentioned, on things like women's rights,

He was a fierce advocate for universal suffrage, although qualified by certain kind of epistocratic reservations. You know, he was obviously a socialist who believed in workplace democracy. But he also saw nothing wrong with the United Kingdom invading other people's countries with the goal of uplifting them in this kind of paternalistic manner. And he thought that what he called the kind of benign despotism, paternalism,

by whites would be appropriate in those countries until they could be developed to the point of maturity. And I don't need to tell you or anyone else how damaging the impact of those kinds of views was, not to mention just how chauvinistic and racist they happen to be. All my admiration for Mill's side. So Charles Mills rightly draws our attention to these very important

and extremely immoral features of the liberal tradition. You haven't even gotten to Immanuel Kant, who he points out had some horribly racist things to say about more or less everybody. But what was interesting about Mills is Mills says, look,

This does not mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to recognize the important contributions of liberals and liberalism to our understanding of freedom and to our understanding of equality, including for many who have been racially marginalized for a long time. So he argues, or he started to argue, I should say, he passed away not too long ago, sadly, before the project came to fruition, for a kind of black radical liberalism, where he says, look,

This black radical liberalism would obviously be of a very left bent economically. He points out that it would probably have a kind of market socialist structure in terms of the kind of general orientation it had towards the economy. This is why I include him in the list of liberal socialists. But black radical liberalism would, of course, take much more seriously the need to engage in issues of racial repair, right?

than white liberal theory or ideal liberal theory, which has tended to be unconcerned with issues of ameliorating or ending the ongoing impact of systemic racism. Now, again, sadly, Mills passed away before he really brought this project to fruition. He wrote a couple of essays on it, which are very interesting. And then he kind of teases in a sting at the end of Black Rights, White Wrongs.

what black radical liberalism would look like. But I got the sense that a bigger book was supposed to be on its way, spelling out all the implications. And he died relatively young, only at 70, right? So we never got to see that. And of course, I imagine many people will be more interested in carrying on and developing this project, since it's a very intriguing and very worthwhile one. So that's who Charles Mills is. And again,

Very, very worth reading. People get a chance to take a look at his work. And a very nuanced author. Not to mention a great lecturer. If you want, you can go listen to some of his talks online. He was a really funny, very warm, affable individual who I personally learned a lot from in this book.

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I have a couple more questions. This one came to me out of curiosity when I was reading your book. There's a section of the book, you just make a passing comment to the life of Donald Trump.

and Bolsonaro, and you call them postmodern conservative authoritarians. I perfectly understand why they're authoritarians. I sometimes, I'm hesitant to call them conservatives because they look, yeah, they might be conservative, but they are just simply reactionary radicals. They don't even care for some of those, you know, intellectual conservative traditions that existed before. But I'm interested to know why you call them postmodern conservatives, right?

Sure. Well, this goes back to one of my first books, The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, or my asset collection, What is Postmodern Conservatism, that people can check out. But what I point out following Marxist theorists'

and Marxist-adjacent theorists like Wendy Brown and Frederick Jameson, is that there are a lot of different ways to understand postmodernism or postmodernity. I understand it as a kind of cultural condition, one that emerges out of modernity and carries on many of the features of modernity, but stripped away of the sense that historical transition is possible. That's putting it really, really simply. And what Jameson points out is that under the conditions of postmodernity, where modern

it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. What we start to find is people recycling or looking back to the past quite nostalgically in order to find values, aesthetic tropes,

you know, a sense of identity in order to project a sense of meaning onto the world that seems increasingly devoid of it and characterized by a kind of ubiquitous nihilism. And it's precisely this nostalgic looking back to aesthetic tropes, identities, symbols, et cetera, that I think characterizes postmodern conservatism. So, yeah,

What you see people like Trump perennially try to do is suggest, look, we need to make America great again. That obviously has a kind of nostalgic register to it. And the implication is once upon a time, you were better off, particularly if you were a white working class American or white upper class American, for that matter.

And you would have been the highest and most important kind of person in your community. But all that was taken away from you. Why was it taken away from you? Well, it was taken away from you by decadent liberal elites, deprivates.

Democrats and Washington and the immigrants and feminists and trans folk that they claim to be defending, even though they don't really care all that much about them. There's a kind of cynical dimension that's always baked into Trumpism. And oftentimes when Trump will articulate and defend this vision, or for that matter, Trumpists will defend this vision, it's very much using the technologies and tropes and

to media that is characteristic of our postmodern moment. And sometimes this is made very explicit, I should add, by proponents and defenders of Trumpism. So Chris Ruffo, who some of you ministers might be familiar with, is a very important mover and shaker in the American conservative movement. He has been...

why he was rather responsible for, um, the panic around critical race theory that kind of broke out in the middle of the Biden administration. Uh, and in an interview, uh, with a very far right magazine in the early 2020s, uh, he said, look, uh, we live in a postmodern moment. He singles that out, uh, where the way to galvanize political attention, uh, is through narrative, right? Uh,

affecting information and controlling, uh, the story. Uh, and the person who's able to do that in our postmodern media moment effectively, uh, is going to have an awful lot of power and be able to influence politics. Uh, and you see that, uh, in the way that postmodern conservatives, uh, approach, um,

as a kind of simplistic, agonistic struggle that nostalgically, again, projects this need to go back to a past that never really existed in order to affirm those who feel that they are superior people in their superiority while banishing the undeserving back to their place. And I think that's an extremely corrosive and dangerous kind of politics. And it has an authoritarian dimension as well because...

And this is a point that Corey Robin brings up. For many, conservatism is associated with this idea of trying to change what one must in order to conserve what one can't. It's inherently viewed as a kind of moderate or even pragmatic kind of philosophy. But what I point out following Robin is that very often hasn't been the case. When conservatives feel that they have been in the driver's seat for a long period of time, of course, they're going to talk about trying to conserve existing social structures, traditions, etc.,

But if they feel that it's actually the left that has been in the driver's seat for a long period of time, then you reach the point that Glenn Elmers claims that we've reached in his article, Conservatism is No Longer Enough, where he says, what's there left to conserve? Our society has become too liberal, too permissive, too egalitarian, too prone to giving the unworthy their fair share. And so what is needed is a kind of

counter-revolution or conservative revolution, as many of them are now calling it, that is going to change precisely in order to bring us back. And this might seem paradoxical, and to a certain extent it is, but that's kind of the appeal of it, right? Postmodern conservatism is able to

galvanized on behalf of this idea that we're not really doing anything to transform it, we're just going back to principles that have been longstanding, so there's a nostalgic dimension to it. We're still capturing the energies and the motivations that many people yearn for if they want to be part of a major political movement that is going to upset the status quo. And I have one final question.

Donald Trump has been elected as the president of the United States and a lot of people, you know, given all the conflict that has been going on in the Middle East and the way the conflict or reporting of the conflict was handled, I personally lost a lot of faith in a lot of liberal institutions that I still want to believe in.

And there was this tweet from Jason Hickel that I'm assuming you know on Twitter after Donald Trump was elected. I read it and said, yes, I agree with it. Then I read your book and it's OK. There's still some hope. That's a tradition liberal socialism that I can believe in. With your permission, I'm going to read it and then I want your response towards that, because a lot of people has just been kind of criticizing, rejecting liberalism.

But I guess the main issue is neoliberalism as well that you mentioned, and we have already discussed some of the barriers to that as well. But anyway, so he tweeted, I guess, a few, a month ago, on just a quote, the problem with liberalism is that it rests on fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved.

It will always fail. It will always collapse. And this explains everything about our current moment. Liberalists try to hold two commitments at once. On the one hand, they're firmly committed to capitalism. On the other hand, they express support for principles like human rights, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, environment, and the rule of law. This duality is the core principle.

of liberalism, but there is a problem. Capital accumulation requires cheapening labor and nature, and this eventually comes into direct conflict with principles like human rights and conflict. And whenever this conflict appears, the liberal ruling class sides with capital, abandons their lofty principles, and throws workers and nature under the bus every single time. This results in fragrant displays of hypocrisy, and it goes on and on, but I guess you get the gist.

I can see how your liberal socialism is way out of this because a lot of liberals have been also critical of neoliberalism and capital accumulation. But I want to end this interview on a positive note. Is there hope and what's your response to these sorts of criticism that liberals almost always get?

Well, I think that he's absolutely right. I think that there is a fundamental contradiction between supporting liberalism and supporting capitalism. And I think one of the great errors of many liberals has been assuming that their commitment to liberal principles are complementary to their support to capitalism, or even one in the same, when in fact,

There is an extent to which you cannot be committed to things like democracy, certainly robust democracy, and limitless capitalist accumulation that's going to end in the emergence of a plutocratic class. There is a sense in which you cannot be committed to this idea that

everyone's life matters just as much as anyone else's and then allow for the kind of staggering forms of inequality that we see not just domestically but around the world. There really is a sense in which you can't say we are committed to things like the rule of law and the importance of legal equality before the law and then have a justice system that so clearly favors the rich while ultimately

oftentimes being an active agent in the persecution of the poor, particularly through things like the war on drugs. And you can see my book as an attempt, a modest one, to try to overcome this contradiction by saying that to be a good liberal or consistent liberal eventually means to

taking seriously the kind of socialist challenge and recognizing that the democratization of the economy has to be the way forward for a viable kind of liberal program. So

in a sense, breaking liberalism off from its historical and material alignment with capitalism to save or recover what is most valuable in the tradition from this kind of remnant that it no longer needs and that is in many ways a kind of moral barrier to its success in the 21st century. Now, do I think it is possible that liberals will come around to this more progressive way of thinking about things?

Here I am a little bit hopeful, right? So, for instance, in the United States, there has been a resurgence of interest in things like the Democratic Socialists of America, whose membership shot up post-Trump. Bernie Sanders has gained an awful lot of accolades recently for calling out the failures in the Democratic Party, including, I was surprised, from Fox News the other day, of all things.

Um, you also see things like union density increasing, uh, and a growing interesting and things like, uh, labor activism. Uh, and that's not just true here. Uh, there are other examples of that all around the world and places like my home country in Canada. Uh, but those are all things that I should say I'm actively searching out, uh, as reasons for optimism. And they are real, uh,

But by and large, I think there's a vast array of forces directed against us right now. And this is actually, I suppose, one of the strategic reasons we're taking my book seriously, because I think that if liberals and leftists don't realize that they need one another right now, then what we're going to end up with is a very dark future characterized by ethno-chauvinist populism with a highly authoritarian quality to it. So...

At this point, it's really all hands on deck. And even if one is skeptical of something like liberal socialism, which one certainly can be, I would say that if nothing else, the dialogue that needs to be opened up between liberals and socialists is absolutely vital if we're going to prevent this kind of dark future from becoming our present. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Matthew. As always, it's been a great pleasure to speak with you.

The book we just discussed was The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, published by Rantlitz in 2024. Make sure you get the book and read it. There are lots of fascinating parts in the book. What we just discussed was simply scratching the surface and giving you a general overview of what is in the book. So make sure you do get the book. It's an easy read. And I'm sure there's a lot food for thought and also hopefully some antidote to the current grievances we have, economic and political grievances.

Thank you very much, Matthew McManus, for your time to speak with us on NewBooks Network. Yeah, thanks a lot, Martez. It's always a pleasure. And yeah, happy holidays to everyone.