Introduction
From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue. One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.
– Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Liberalism has been in trouble for a decade now. In the struggle against self-described post-liberal ‘aristopopulists’ and ‘illiberal (not quite) democrats’, there have been successes and retreats. But only the most naïve would deny we’ve come a very long way from a mere 30 years ago, when intelligent commentators could confidently say liberal democracy was the end of all of history.
In the United States, the re-election of Donald Trump has provoked a great deal of soul searching amongst liberals and democrats (not to mention the Democrats). One of the most surprising developments has been the resurgence of Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party. The self-described democratic socialists have been touring the country playing hits old and new, regularly bringing out tens of thousands keen to fight against oligarchy. This has not gone unnoticed. Some centre and even centre-right commentators have softly endorsed left-populism as a potential counter-weight to right-wing illiberalism, even suggesting Sanders was right to worry about growing inequalities of wealth and power. But plenty of other movers and shakers have expressed deep reservations, echoing many of the old worries about whether one can even call Sanders and co liberals at all.
On Being Liberal
This view owes a lot to the still widespread perception amongst many right-wing and centrist liberals, and not a few leftists, that liberalism is inherently committed to moderation and must be instinctively wary of any and all calls to challenge the power of capitalism. Many agree with Ludwig von Mises in Liberalism (1927) that to be a liberal means defending private property, though few would follow Mises in holding this to be the central demand of liberalism from which all others effectively flow.
From the 20th century onwards, most moderate and even some centre-right liberals have expressed modest support for measures to ameliorate the lot of the very poor. F.A. Hayek, who warned that socialist planning would pave a short road to serfdom, supported unemployment insurance and even flirted with endorsing public healthcare (which would ironically put him to the left of many in today’s Democratic Party). But, according to this narrative of liberalism, anything more than providing a basic minimum to insulate the unfortunate against capitalism’s invariable ups and downs will increase economic inefficiencies, limit market freedoms, and expand the government to unacceptably illiberal levels.
This familiar narrative is, in fact, a very much skewed one, without even particularly deep roots. As Helena Rosenblatt points out in The Lost History of Liberalism (2018), in the 19th century, liberals from John Stuart Mill to solidarist republicans in France and social democrats in Germany saw no contradiction in defining themselves as liberals while calling for economic redistribution and even outright democratic socialism. Mill himself proudly identified ‘under the general designation of socialists’ in his Autobiography (1873). In Liberalism Against Itself (2023), Samuel Moyn reminds liberals that their penchant for reflexive moderation and militant support for capitalism is a modern development that owes a lot to neoliberal thinkers incorporating conservative ideas into the liberal canon during the Cold War fight against communism. In historical fact, liberalism was born as a revolutionary creed determined to smash the aristocratic regimes of Europe and beyond. The descent of liberalism into cautious insularity may have seemed like a sensible move. Recent electoral results have shown that perhaps it was not, after all.
In the rest of this article, I will briefly introduce some of the core figures and tenets of left-liberalism, or, as it is sometimes called, liberal egalitarianism. This tradition is itself quite vast and often penumbral, ranging from revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft to feminist Aristotelians like Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen to self-described ‘liberal socialists’ like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls.
The Origins of Left-Liberalism
It is actually quite hard to clearly designate when left-liberalism began since, qua Moyn’s observation, liberalism came into the world as a revolutionary creed that caused immense disruption through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. As Sheldon Wolin notes in his Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989), even the comparatively cautious American Founders were revolutionaries twice over: first overthrowing English monarchical rule, and then replacing the country’s first constitution with another crafted from scratch. The most well-known uprisings include the Glorious, American, French, and Haitian revolutions. But they also include the mass uprisings across the European colonies in Latin America, the demands for constitutional monarchy and republican government in much of Europe and beyond, and, of course, the great and controversial pushes for the expansion of the franchise that defined much of domestic politics even in established parliamentary regimes.
The success of liberals was astonishing. At the end of the 18th century, moderate conservatives like Edmund Burke wrote with amazement and not a little revulsion that
now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.
Iconic statements of early left-liberalism abounded. In Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), political scientist and philosopher Danielle Allen notes the radicalness of the Declaration’s ambitions. The Declaration appropriately declares that all men are created equal and possess natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It then insists that government itself is instituted to protect those rights, but only through the consent of the governed. This consent can be withdrawn, and it then becomes the ‘right of the people to alter or abolish’ government and institute a new one. It is hard to overstate the influence, the transformative quality, of this view.
One important writer of this period and tradition was Thomas Paine, author of the hugely popular revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense (1776). Here, Paine insisted that aristocracy was a buffoonish form of government, contrary to people’s sense of dignity and the titular common sense.
By the time he was defending the French Revolution against conservatives like Edmund Burke, Paine went further still. In Rights of Man (1791-2), Paine called for a mass redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. He reprimanded the rich for expropriating the earth’s land held in common, arguing that they thus owed an enduring debt to the poor, who were denied the land’s use, and to society, which created and guaranteed their property. This had to be paid as a matter of right rather than charity.
In Agrarian Justice (1797), Paine broke from Lockean dogma about natural rights to property by insisting that personal property was in fact ‘the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.’
Mary Wollstonecraft, a fellow enthusiast for revolution, would have agreed. Now most famous for her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft was also a stinging critic of aristocracy and inequalities of property. She followed Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in arguing that reverence for property and the rich was a great source of personal corruption, comparing it to a ‘poisoned fountain’ from which most of the vices of the world flowed.
Wollstonecraft travelled through much of northern and central Europe near the end of her life, encountering emerging capitalists along the way. She was singularly unimpressed. In her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she describes the nouveaux riches as a ‘species of fungus’ who are so devoted to commerce that they ‘lose all taste and greatness of mind.’ (It is not hard to imagine what she would think of Elon Musk’s recent peerless descent into cringe.)
Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft died young, meaning she never offered a systematic exposition of her views. But she provides an early example of how left-liberals connected concerns with women’s equality to other struggles for economic egalitarianism and the free development of all.
Left-Liberalism Matures
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, liberals were confronted with a new arrival on the left, socialism, that complicated the political spectrum. Some liberals responded by moving further to the right, à la Ludwig von Mises or Herbert Spencer. But many other liberals accepted or welcomed socialism as another mature Enlightenment doctrine that sought to make liberal freedom and equality meaningful in the lives of the poor.
The quintessential figure in this regard was undoubtedly John Stuart Mill. In his early life, Mill was a vigorous, though never dogmatic, defender of unbridled capitalism. As Helen McCabe notes in her seminal work John Stuart Mill, Socialist (2021), there is an ongoing debate about what led Mill to change his mind. Some attribute it to the influence of his wife, while others (including Mill himself) suggest that his deeper engagement with socialist authors like the Saint-Simoneans seems to have done the trick.
Whatever the case, Mill came to identify under the general designation of socialists in his mature period. In later editions of his Principles of Political Economy (seventh and final edition published in 1871), he offered both economic and moral reasons for gradually abolishing the capitalist class in favour of worker-run firms, arguing that these would be both more efficient due to incentives and more liberal in not requiring workers to bow and scrape towards bosses. Mill even gave something of an inverted Nietzschean defence of equality, arguing that no liberal man should want to be the subordinate of another. That included within the workplace.
In Chapters on Socialism (first published, posthumously, in 1879), Mill acknowledged concerns about the potential for an authoritarian socialism, while still characterising the socialists as the more ‘far sighted’ successors to liberalism. In particular, socialists recognised that the main sources of poverty in society were problems with society itself. They had little or nothing to do with individual merit. Mill pointed out that there was something very unusual in the insistence that hard work, talent, and contribution should merit reward, given that working-class men and women often worked very hard at vital jobs and earned nothing, while plenty of wealthy people inherited affluence and station with which they did little.
Mill was also a vigorous early proponent of women’s rights. In The Subjection of Women (1869), he was amongst the first to insist that securing women’s freedom and equality would require more than just formal legal equality. Entire norms around gender roles and the dynamics of the family would need to be challenged to ensure liberal justice meant something to women.
Following Mill’s lead, many liberals came to accept the importance of dramatic economic and social reforms in securing equality, going far beyond simply rolling back aristocratic forms of state power and securing freedom of speech, religion, etc. Notable liberal theorists like Leonard Hobhouse and John Dewey called for an extension of liberal principles of freedom and democratic management into the economy. Theologians like Paul Tillich and religious civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. repudiated the far right and insisted that there needed to be a far more just distribution of goods and power for all of God’s children.
These theoretical demands were often married to practice. In the United Kingdom, economist John Maynard Keynes called for ‘liberal socialism’, insisting that high levels of unionisation, state investment, and the breakup of plutocratic control were vital to securing the health of the nation. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt called for a ‘Second Bill of Rights’ to secure ‘equality in the pursuit of happiness.’ He warned that bitter experience had shown that destitution was the stuff out of which dictatorships were forged.
In interwar Germany, the Social Democratic Party was, as Richard J. Evans notes in his Third Reich trilogy (2003-8), the most fiercely defensive of the fragile Weimar Republic. In the end, of course, the fledgling German democracy was brought down by the Nazis, allied to the more conventionally conservative German National People’s Party, which lumped socialists, liberals, and democrats together as symptoms of political decadence and turmoil. The German philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger spoke for many on the far right when he declared liberalism and socialism to be ‘metaphysically the same’ in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953 and based on a 1935 lecture course). Both were Enlightenment doctrines committed to liberty, equality, and solidarity for all—though how to achieve that was a matter of much technical debate.
Left-Liberalism Today
Welfare state capitalism also rejects the fair value of the political liberties, and while it has some concern for equality of opportunity, the policies necessary to achieve that are not followed. It permits very large inequalities in the ownership of real property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of the economy and much of political life rests in few hands. And although, as the name ‘welfare-state capitalism’ suggest, welfare provisions may be quite generous and guarantee a decent social minimum covering the basic needs, a principle of reciprocity to regulate economic and social inequalities is not recognized… This leaves… property owning democracy and liberal socialism: their ideal descriptions include arrangements designed to satisfy the two principles of justice.
– John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)
Without a doubt, the most significant contemporary left-liberal thinker was and is John Rawls. Often misleadingly credited with reviving English-speaking political philosophy, Rawls is justifiably famous for his gigantic (and often tedious) book A Theory of Justice (1971).
Reintroducing the tradition of the social contract, Rawls argued that liberty and equality were not in conflict, but in fact core principles that all just liberal societies needed to realise. Economic inequalities could be justified, but only to the extent that they worked to the benefit of the least well off.
In the 1970s, Rawls’s work was often taken by critics left and right to be a defence of the Lyndon B. Johnson era welfare state. But in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), Rawls expressly repudiated this more moderate take on his work. He insisted that while welfare states did a better job of realising liberal justice than purely capitalist states, they still permitted very high levels of inequality. Most damaging of all, they permitted great inequalities of wealth, which could translate into vast inequalities of political power. In our increasingly oligarchic age of billionaire government, Rawls’s concerns look increasingly prescient. In Justice as Fairness, he insisted that only a property-owning democracy or liberal socialist regime could adequately realise liberal principles of justice.
Rawls’s work has had a titanic impact on contemporary left-liberalism. Feminists like Martha Nussbaum, economists like the Nobel Prize-winning Amartya Sen, and even Marxists like G.A. Cohen have cited him as a major influence. More recently, he has provided the impetus for deep thinking by ‘black radical liberals’ like Charles Mills and Tommie Shelby, who are concerned to apply liberal principles to societies wrought by long histories of racism.
The economist Daniel Chandler has produced a large manifesto, Free and Equal (2024), highlighting how skyrocketing inequality has contributed to the widespread perception that liberal societies are illegitimate. Far from championing a ‘selfish individualism’, Chandler sees Rawls as recognising the importance that cooperation and reciprocity have long played in liberal thought, and seeing that they must be foregrounded again. The philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre agrees, reprimanding liberals for not doing enough to establish a fair and cooperative society. In Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024), Lefebvre draws on the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard to characterise the neoliberal epoch as a faux kind of ‘liberaldom’. Many claim to be liberals, but few are willing to take the necessary steps to ensure liberalism means something in the lives of the poor, vulnerable, and alienated.
Elizabeth Anderson goes further still. In books like Private Government (2017) and Hijacked (2023), Anderson notes how no liberals would ever defend a state where the ruler could dictate when people wake up, when they could go to the bathroom, what they could wear, when they could eat, and who they could contact. And yet, echoing Mill, Anderson notes how contemporary right-wing liberals not only accept but defend just these practices when they take place within the workplace under the auspices of the ‘free’ market and freedom of contract. This is in spite of the fact that social democratic reforms such as unionisation and co-determination have demonstrated how they can make workers’ lives better while retaining and even expanding other liberal freedoms. In the light of such reflections, liberals might have to ask themselves what they care more about: liberalism or capitalism.
Conclusion: Arguing for Left-Liberalism
One of the lazier arguments sometimes lobbed against left-liberalism is that it isn’t ‘really’ liberalism. Firstly, because liberals are inherently supposed to be attitudinally moderate or even slightly conservative. Secondly, because of the operative presumption that being a liberal means supporting a position anywhere between a slightly moderated capitalism and a Ludwig von Mises-style complete private ownership of the means of production. But as should be clear, there is really no basis for taking either of these attitudes or positions to historically and exhaustively represent liberalism. They are at most possible variations.
On the first point, in Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (2015), Michael Freeden notes that any and all liberals must be instinctively wary of power. This includes the power of the state, and historically (and increasingly once again) the power of economic actors. But being wary of power doesn’t mean rushing to moderation, and it certainly doesn’t mean endorsing unbridled capitalism where concentrations of economic power and affluence enable the rich to exercise aristocratic dominion over their workers and society as a whole. Indeed, where the exercise of power becomes domineering, liberals have often demanded radical steps be taken to counter it.
On the second point, as Helena Rosenblatt and Samuel Moyn stress, the fact that ‘classical’ and ‘neo’ liberalism came to stand in for liberalism tout court owes as much to Cold War anti-communist reconstruction as anything else. The truth is that what is sometimes referred to as ‘classical’ liberalism or ‘possessive individualism’ is simply one member of the liberal family. As in any family, the members bear resemblance to one another while also being marked by often striking differences. Hayek and Mises aren’t somehow more real or more authentic liberals than Mill, Rawls, Nussbaum, and Mills. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair aren’t more representative liberal politicians than Franklin Roosevelt or Clement Attlee.
In the end, the merits of left-liberalism as opposed to other liberalisms must be evaluated argumentatively, rather than through some strange puritanical insistence that a centuries-old doctrine of worldwide influence must be understood in one way only. On this point, centrist and right-wing liberals might find themselves surprised.
Left-liberal thinking is currently enjoying a period of great creativity and energy that was only very briefly surveyed above. Much of this has been spurred by the joint feeling that liberalism must be saved from the hard right and that right-wing and centrist liberals who have been leading the charge have not done a good enough job of inspiring a restoration of faith in liberalism for a public that associates liberalism with elitist remove and smug technocracy. This has given contemporary left-liberal thinking something of a rejuvenating ethos, with many looking to the past to discover how a more mature and fair liberalism can be conceived. Much of this is being done by learning from, and criticising, the writings of Mill, Rawls, and others.
I would argue that left-liberalism looks especially attractive to many right now, which goes some way to explaining the appeal of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other American progressives. In many countries, centrist and right-wing liberal parties have more or less been in the driver’s seat since the 1990s. It was thought that such an alignment was the safe and cautious move for liberals to make. It turns out that wasn’t true. Centrist and right-wing liberals in the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have often struggled or failed to contain the hard right. This isn’t to say that left-liberalism would do any better. We would have to try it and see. But it is hard to avoid the feeling that a lack of enthusiasm contributed to, say, the Democrats running three centrist candidates against Trumpism and coming away with one electorally thin pyrrhic victory and two losses.
In Liberalism Against Itself, Samuel Moyn notes that if liberals don’t reevaluate their creed, we are unlikely to see it survive—and besides, survival alone isn’t good enough. A liberalism that offers hope for a better future was a liberalism that triumphed in revolutions. Perhaps it can be worthy of such triumphs again.
Related reading
Hope, Fear, and the Recovery of a Heroic Liberalism, by Matt McManus
Meaningful Control: The Pursuit of True Economic and Political Democracy, by Zwan Mahmod
The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter
Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle
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