Socialism and Liberalism

The early papers reproduced here argue that socialism should be understood not as rejecting liberalism but as transcending it, in the sense of going beyond it but preserving its valuable features. This view is broadly maintained in my recent work on ethics and markets, in which I argue both that socialists should regard ethical judgments as an important element in politics, rejecting the exclusion of ethics favoured by many 20th century 'neutralist' liberal theorists, but also that this exclusion is not actually required by core liberal principles that socialists should continue to support.

In that more recent work, I also argue that the ethical evaluation of economic institutions involves both normative judgments and empirical claims about the ethical character of different institutions. In doing so I draw partly on the co-authored paper on socialism, reproduced below, which argues that this is best understood as involving both normative and institutional elements, which need to be addressed independently in assessing socialist critiques of capitalism.

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Liberty and Language  1980

In this review essay on Geoffrey Sampson's Liberty and Language I examine the author's attempt to justify a free market economy with a minimal state (which he terms 'liberalism') in the human creativity displayed not only in market operations but also - and for Sampson, as a linguistic theorist, paradigmatically - in human language. Here he disagrees radically with Noam Chomsky, for whom the (creative) nature of language instead points us towards socialist, non-market institutions. Whilst sympathetic to Sampson's criticism of Chomsky's focus on syntactical rather than semantic features of language, I argue that his 'liberal' justification for markets relies on too narrow a range of creative potentialities, some of which point in a socialist (though not necessarily non-market) direction.

Individualism and Community in Socialist Thought 1981
Having noted how, in the nineteenth century, both socialists and conservatives criticised ‘individualism’ in the name of ‘community’, this paper argues that the two critiques, along with their respective conceptions of community, differ in important respects. Socialist community, it is suggested, must preserve what is valuable about individualism, including especially the separate identity and autonomy of individuals. In developing this argument, considerable attention is given to the three-stage model of historical development in Marx’s Grundrisse.

Liberal Rights and Socialism 1982
This paper rejects the view that liberal rights have no place in socialist societies, a view often held by both friends and enemies of socialism. The argument is presented through a critical response to Leszek Kolakowski’s claim that Marx’s critique of such rights in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ has inherently illiberal implications. An alternative reading of this text is proposed, according to which liberalism is to be seen as incomplete rather than mistaken. The argument is then used to criticise Rawls’s liberal theory of justice as insufficiently concerned with economic inequalities.

Delivering the Goods: Socialism, Liberalism and the Market 1996
This paper explores the relationships between goods-based arguments for market boundaries and wider debates and traditions in political theory. It argues that ‘classical’ justifications for the market, with their focus on human well-being, are more amenable to arguments for non-market provision than ‘liberal’ justifications that focus on contractual exchange, and criticises contemporary neutralist liberalism for excluding the substantive concerns about markets and goods that have been central to socialist and conservative traditions of political thought.

Socialism (with John O’Neill) 1998
This co-authored paper, written for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, examines some of the main arguments for socialism and the critical responses often made to these, focusing in turn on debates about economic efficiency, human wellbeing, democracy and power, and distributive justice. In doing so it addresses both normative and institutional elements in the socialist critique of capitalism, according to which capitalist economic institutions have inherently objectionable features that can reasonably be expected to be absent in some specifiable alternative form of economic organization. [A later, extended version of this paper replaced it in the Encyclopedia in 2011]

Individual Rights as Social Rights 2015
Socialist critics of market economies often argue that their liberal justification in terms of 'individual' rights is based on atomistic conceptions of society that fail to recognise the inherently social character of human life, and are inevitably hostile to the 'social' rights protected by welfare states. Drawing on Durkheim's account of contractual exchange as an inherently 'social' relationship, I argue that we should instead recognise that both market and 'welfare' institutions can best be seen as complementary social means of serving individual well-being.