I wanted to express appreciation for Peter Lamb’s generous review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Lamb’s review stresses the book’s scholarly merits and suggests it will be “very resourceful” for critical theorists interested in “immanent critique”. Lamb emphasises the “untapped potential” of the argument for liberal socialism and my failure to push it into a “new dimension”. I will respond two of Lamb’s major objections. Firstly, I will clarify liberal socialism’s commitment to normative individualism and methodological collectivism. Secondly, I will respond to Lamb’s concerns about the relationship between liberal socialism and Marxism.
Methodological Collectivism and Normative Individualism
Many of Lamb’s criticisms focus on the ambiguities surrounding the most abstract principle discussed in my book: that liberal socialists are committed to methodological collectivism and normative individualism. Lamb argues that my approach incorporates so much of liberalism that the book “almost loses sight of the methodologically collectivist social ontology which [McManus] deems a crucial feature of liberal socialism”.
My use of the term methodological collectivism is deeply inspired by Tony Smith’s seminal Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Smith is critical of Marxist theorists who do not recognise the extent to which liberal egalitarianism is distinct from classical liberalism. He emphasises how the “leading advocates” of liberal egalitarianism “reject standard liberal views” on issues like social ontology, rights and nature.[1] Elsewhere, Smith argues that the “liberal egalitarian embrace of normative individualism – that is, the view that individuals are ultimate units of moral concern-does not imply a commitment to metaphysical individualism…. For liberal egalitarians, no less than for Marxists or communitarians, individuals are essentially social beings, their identity formed through socialisation into particular communities and ongoing social interactions.”[2]
I argue that liberal socialists are more radical normative individualists and methodological collectivists than mainstream liberal egalitarians. They hold that actually existing individuals (and for many later figures, future generations of individuals) are the ultimate unit of moral concern. Liberal socialists echo the Marxist claim that abstract collectivities like the nation, Volk, civilisation or Church are reifications. This means abstract collectivities are, at most, of ancillary moral concern. They matter only insofar as these collectivities are conducive to the well-being of the individuals who constitute them. Individuals’ well-being cannot be traded off against the well-being of a reified collectivity. At the same time as they are normative individualists, liberal socialists embrace a “methodologically collectivist” social ontology which acknowledges the degree to which human individuals are social animals. You cannot understand the nature of human identity and life except through the contexts and relations we form with others, which often obtain an independent (even alienated) power. This relates to normative individualism because, since human beings are social animals, they cannot fully flourish outside a well-ordered society.
In The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, I trace the maturation of these commitments, from the tentative first steps of J.S Mill down through John Rawls and Chantal Mouffe. For example, in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls described his preferred regime as “property owning democracy” or “liberal socialism”.[3] One of Rawls’s major theoretical innovations was insisting that it was not the individual and her rights, but the “basic structure” of society that was the chief subject of liberal justice. In his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Rawls clarifies that “A Theory of Justice follows Hegel … when it takes the basic structure of society as the first subject of justice. People start as rooted in society and the first principles of justice they select are to apply to the basic structure.”[4] This not only expresses the fusion of normative individualism and a methodologically-collectivist social ontology characteristic of liberal socialism more generally. It demonstrates the extent to which figures like Rawls were inspired by Hegel, Marx and other touchstones of the broader socialist theoretical tradition.
What Is Liberal Socialism’s Relationship to Marxism?
Lamb is uncertain about the relationship between liberal socialism and Marxism. He wishes my book included a “more thorough examination of the relationship between liberal socialism and Marxism”. Referencing my reservations about what Marx would think about liberal socialism, he claims these anxieties would “carry more weight if [McManus] had focused more closely on the key features of Marx’s work that became a basis for Marxist thought”. Lamb asks “…whether liberal socialism can be narrow enough to avoid conflation with the left of liberalism, but wide enough to include some variants of Marxism”.
Marx’s own relationship to liberalism is complex, but by no means unremittingly critical. As a dialectical thinker, Marx was keen to emphasise both the regressive and emancipatory dimensions of liberal ideology.
On the critical end, Marx had many condemnatory things to say about liberalism. In “On the Jewish Question”, Marx is critical of liberals who conflate political emancipation for human emancipation. They confuse how the entitlement to egoism guaranteed by political emancipation, in turn, secures unfreedom for those who are economically marginalised and dependent.[5] In Capital Volume I, Marx developed a devastating immanent critique of workplace domination, stressing how liberal pieties about the importance of representative political participation and the division of power ceased as soon as workers entered the factory floor.[6]
On the other hand, Marx commended liberalism as major advance over its feudal predecessors. Where reactionaries and conservatives were, by and large, treated as beneath contempt, Marx was influenced by and responded to the various liberal philosophers he criticised. From his early career as a young liberal to his maturity as a radical socialist republican, Marx unfailingly stressed the importance of liberal rights to expression, assembly, and, of course, suffrage for the working classes.[7] In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx even insists that “bourgeois” right will still persist in a new communist society that is “stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[8] Extending this reasoning, Marx would likely be very sceptical of any kind of millenarian socialism which speculated that liberalism will simply disappear in the new Year One. Those kinds of millenarian anticipations, still common on the Left, are not Marxist anticipations.
These issues are important for liberal socialists, given the centrality of Marx and Marxism to the socialist tradition. As I stress in the book, “for all its many and well-recorded flaws, Marx’s critique of capitalism remains the most influential and sweeping yet developed”.[9] But, more importantly, liberal socialists’ failure to internalise many core Marxist lessons have resulted in a theoretical tradition with serious weaknesses. These are not fatal. But they are serious enough to – as Lamb insinuates – limit the critical potential of historical liberal socialist theory and pose barriers to serving as an immanent critique of actually existing (neo)liberalism. In the future, liberal socialist theory must draw far more heavily on the Marxist tradition in at least three respects. Firstly, it must develop a deeper understanding of power. Secondly, it must move beyond the statist “basic structure” to comprehend capitalism as a global systemic totality. Thirdly, it must recover the power of a “critique” of political economy by being more critical of ideology. Without these developments, liberal socialist theory is likely to remain a noble, but irretrievably flawed, idealism.
Bibliography
Leipold, Bruno. Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)
Marx, Karl. Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ernest Mandel (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990)
Marx, Karl. Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone. (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1992)
Karl Marx. Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994)
McManus, Matthew. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2025)
Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. (Cambridge, MA. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001)
Rawls, John Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Shoikhedbrod, Igor. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. (Cham, SW: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
Smith, Tony, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017)
[1] See Tony Smith. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017) at p. 54
[2] See Tony Smith. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017) at pp. 54-55
[3] See John Rawls. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. (Cambridge, MA. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001) at p. 138
[4]See John Rawls. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) at p. 366
[5] See Karl Marx. Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone. (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1992) at pp. 211-242.
[6] See Karl Marx. Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ernest Mandel (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990) at pp. 549-550.
[7] See Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. (Cham, SW: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) and Bruno Leipold. Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)
[8][8] See Karl Marx. Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994) at pp. 320-321
[9] See Matthew McManus. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2025) at P. 123
