I appreciated Yanis Iqbal’s recent article “The Contradictions of Liberal Socialism: A Critique of Matt McManus” published in these very pages. Iqbal formulated a cogent and tight hard-left case for rejecting liberal socialism grounded in classic sources like Althusser, Badiou, and others. Unfortunately, despite graciously engaging with my work on the subject of liberal socialism he misses or ignores substantial writings where I address points raised by Iqbal in detail. More significantly, Iqbal misrepresents and outright gets my position wrong on several points. Because Iqbal’s arguments echo objections to liberal socialism I’ve encountered from many hard leftists, this seemed an opportune time to briefly respond. Here I will sequence my rebuttals from the more trivial to the more significant.

(1) Iqbal charges that my form of liberal socialism  “shifts socialism away from an immanent critique of historically specific forms of domination toward a transhistorical anthropology in which politics becomes the art of institutionalizing an already intelligible essence of the human.” Iqbal regards this objection as significant enough that it appears at various points in his essay; for instance when accusing my “humanism” of not theorizing “alienation as the product of historically specific relations of production, but as a moral aberration from human potential.”

Simply as a matter of fact this is not true. My 2022 book The Emergence of Postmodernity is very much an immanent critique of the historical relations that gave rise to the condition of postmodernity. It discusses how postmodernity emerged at the intersection of liberalism, capitalism, and secularism which climaxes in neoliberal capitalist realism. It concludes with a lengthy section arguing that the time consciousness of postmodernity is defined by an alienating phenomenological individualism, and that the solution to this has to be a transition to liberal socialism as a political theory of futurity and hope.

Now to be clear, while ecumenically Marxist the book is certainly not beholden to orthodox materialism. Ideational factors play a role in the emergence of postmodernity in my telling, and I do not accord explanatory primacy to forces and relations of production. Iqbal may consequently find the “immanent critique of historically specific forms” of domination and alienation unsatisfactory. But it very much exists and has always been an integral part of my argument for liberal socialism.

(2) Iqbal criticizes my “reliance on Aristotelian language of powers and capabilities.” This “situates liberal socialism squarely within a normative philosophical tradition that defines the political task as cultivating the capacities of human beings.” Proponents of the argument to develop powers and capabilities include, according to Iqbal, “Aristotle, J.S Mill, and later Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.”

It is a shame Iqbal didn’t look at the section of my book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism where I point out that an emphasis on capabilities is also central to Marx. This of course includes the early “humanist” Marx to use the Althusserian language. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx writes extensively about the “essential powers” of human beings, and how industry has simultaneously increased and alienated these through objectification. One of the major goals of Marx’s communism is to end this alienation and enable the full development of each through the development of all, which will require ending the division of labor and reducing the working day so each of us can develop a broader range of powers.

This language of capabilities doesn’t end in the young Marx. In Marx’s Ethical Vision Vanessa Wills points to the passage in the Grundrisse where Marx asserted the desirability of “the development of the rich individuality which is all all-sided in its production as in its consumption.” Achieving this rich individuality would require the development of human command over the external world and one’s self and be directed “toward the satisfaction of human needs and development of human powers…” As late as Capital Vol III he returns to it. Marx argues that a society of “associated producers” would govern humanity’s metabolic relationship with nature more rationally, but that this would not be the “true realm of freedom.” The true realm of freedom “the development of human powers as an end in itself, beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”

There are countless more textual examples and a growing secondary literature but I’ll leave it at that. This is a classic instance of Iqbal projecting back into Marx some of the Althusserian assumptions he relies on throughout his essay, even though they do not belong there. Marx may not have been fond of writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future. But he did have an “ethical vision” and the development of human powers/capacities was a central part of it. Liberal socialism as I define it is heavily inspired by Marx on this point in calling for a “developmental” rather than “acquisitive” or “possessive” ethic.

(3) Iqbal relentlessly charges that liberal socialism is insufficiently attentive to imperialism and other global forces. Discussing some of my work evaluating “Nordic socialism” he contends that I “relegate imperialism to the status of a contingent background.” He charges that because I do not theorize the “strategic significance of imperialism as constitutive to politics” and so “lapse” back into “humanist teleology.” This is an instance of confusing the silence of a tradition commented on with silence by the commentator. Liberal socialism has indeed traditionally been overly silent about imperialism, or even overtly collaborated with it in the case of J.S Mill.

But part of my project has been to charge historical liberal socialists with failing to address this. The introduction to The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism highlights the “longstanding failure on the part of liberal socialists to be sufficiently attentive to issues such as imperialism, race, and gender.” Mill and Rawls are both singled out in this regard at considerable length. The book highlights “liberal socialism’s bad record on imperialism; with figures like Mills, Bernstein, Tawney, and Keynes defending or failing to criticize it and Walzer offering apologetics in the present day.” Discussing the “major gaps” of historical liberal socialist theory I stress how liberal socialists need to “think through international justice or recognize internationalist forces of power (including the nature of capitalism as a global totality).” The book has a lengthy chapter on Charles Mills’ “black radical liberalism” and its critique of European colonialism and white supremacy. It concludes with a call for whatever future liberal socialists emerge to take these issues far more seriously than their predecessors if they are going to avoid similar mistakes.

So in some respects I agree with Iqbal that a failure to seriously address imperialism has been a problem for liberal socialists, but he confuses or ignores my drawing attention to that for a continued indifference on my part. Iqbal occasionally acknowledges my theorizations of imperialism, but only for it to then “be set aside” to use his terminology. Nor does Iqbal ever dive deeply into my own theorizations of imperialism; for instance the sections on neoconservatism/neoliberalism and US empire in The Political Right and Equality or my lengthy discussions of fascist internationalists like the late Schmitt or Alexander Dugin. If nothing else these constitute considerable efforts to rectify the gaps in liberal socialist theory I intentionally called out. It isn’t incumbent on Iqbal to read everything I’ve put out. But it is incumbent on him to look at whether his charge has merit and to withdraw it if the evidence isn’t there.^[1]

(4) Without a doubt the most relentless accusation Iqbal makes is that I am committed to an essentialist “humanist” project. Apparently my humanist projects rotates around realizing what Iqbal variably calls (strap in): a “moral essence,” a “politico-philosophical essence,” the “emblem of an essence” in Northern welfarism, a “transcendental essence,” the “equal worth of persons as essence,” and finally just “human essence.”

Briefly; in my (allegedly and apparently) “Hegelian framing, Northern welfarism becomes the emblem of an essence, an ideal form of liberal socialism that history never fully corrupts but only delays and distorts.” Iqbal contends that a large “flaw” with liberal socialism is that “by positing human flourishing as an invariant moral essence” it “reduces alienation to a deviation from what is already given.” He insists that freedom “is an immanent product of history, not a transcendental essence that is waiting to be realized.” My “vision” of institutional reform, global solidarity and redistribution apparently all rest on the “ontological priority of a human essence waiting for realization.” Perhaps the clearest objection is where Iqbal claims my framework is as follows:

First a universal human essence is posited, then social relations are seen as distortions of that essence, and finally politics becomes the task of recovery. But this chain collapses under scrutiny. There is no untainted human condition of equal emotional needs; from the outset, humans are formed within hierarchies of class and gender.

Despite and perhaps because of the centrality of the references to “essence” this argument is strange. It is very confusing how frequently and eclectically a variation of the argument is aggressively asserted without nearly enough attention paid to theoretical stringency. You don’t have to be an analytical philosopher to think that just because you like picking on a term like “essence” that doesn’t mean you should try and discover it everywhere possible.

As a reading of my work this is simply wrong. Indeed wrong about such a fundamental issue that Iqbal’s entire objection “collapses under scrutiny.” The entire basis of my argument is that egalitarian aspirations only became possible with the collapse of Aristotelian essentialism and teleology.^[2] These forms of essentialism held that there is an ontological chain of being where all are vertically organized and have their place based on the roles they are to fulfill in the organic whole. This propped up what Charles Taylor in Modern Social Imaginaries calls a vision of “hierarchical complementarity” and was essential in ideologically justifying class, gender, racial, and other kinds of rule prior to the advent of egalitarian modernity. I identify the breakthrough at the level of theory with Hobbes’s materialist critique of Aristotle. By “mocking the plausibility of teleological modes of thinking,” Hobbes “contributed much to shifting the hegemonic terrain against hierarchical complementarity.” Later in the book I argue Marx’s own continuity with and radicalization of this effectively liberal position, in no small part by stressing the embeddedness of human beings in material context.

…Marx agrees with liberals like Kant and Hegel and proto-liberals like Hobbes that the social world is very much a creation of human beings working throughout history. It is not oriented by some intrinsic teleology, ordained by God, or ‘natural’ in the sense of conforming to a transhistorical pattern. But it is not a direct creation of human consciousness either, established according to some blueprint or design ala the social contract.

I could go on adding further references, but I think the point is made. My argument for a developmental ethic may be wrong but it doesn’t rest on the idea of an intrinsic essence to be realized. Quite the opposite-the development of human powers is intended to expand the freedom for individuals to self-define in cooperation with others. And to reiterate-if my non essentialist developmental ethic is wrong then Marx’s ethics is also wrong. I formulated the argument in reference to him and others influenced by his approach like Rawls, Sen and Nussbaum. Now it may be that Marx is in fact wrong about a developmental ethic, and Iqbal might think he ought to be chided on that basis. But if so, liberal socialism is ethically closer to Marx than Iqbal is. The irony.

-Matt McManus

1. Much of Iqbal’s critique emerges from a discussion of my work on “Nordic socialism” which I acknowledge benefited from integration into the worldwide capitalist order. Nevertheless, I still defend a radicalized version of the project. I think his condemnations are overstated given that all contemporary production is carried out under capitalism, and Nordic socialists like the iconic Olof Palme were undoubtedly far more militant in opposing imperialism and colonialism than most other world leaders. This didn’t go far enough, but then I never claimed they were models for exact emulation. Indeed, I offer immanent critiques of the Nordic model on multiple occasions for failing to adequately roll back the power of capital. This includes in the review essay “Closer than Mars” Iqbal cites, where I stress the need to look at “Nordic socialism’s internal limitations” and cite the failure to sufficiently push against the capitalist class as an example.

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2. The only place in the book where I even talk about the realization of a “human essence” is in a discussion of C.B. Macpherson’s work, but I in no way sign off on the terminology or point. It's simply a discussion of Macpherson’s position.

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