We Cease to be Mere Fragments: Justice, Alienation, Liberalism and Socialism

I. LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM: OPPONENTS OR ALLIES?

What is the fundamental relationship between liberalism and socialism? Partisans of these two political traditions often see one another as ideological opponents: socialists often view liberals as defending merely formal varieties of freedom (and of other political values) that leave liberals as no better than naïve apologists for the worst excesses of capitalism; while liberals often view socialists as insufficiently attuned to the significance of human liberty, and beset by a rival form of naïveté that blinds them to the oppressive dangers of hubristic attempts at collectivist forms of economic organisation. On these mutually hostile interpretations of liberalism and socialism, the two stand in fundamental opposition to each other, and the prospects for their reconciliation seem remote.

Yet at the same time, there exist a more eirenic perspective on the relationship between these two traditions, with more reconciliatory views seeing broad agreement between liberals and socialists on many central normative values. From this perspective, the real disagreement between liberalism and socialism is confined to their rival accounts of the concrete economic and political institutions that would be needed in order to realise those shared values in practice. On this latter view, the prospects for productive engagement between liberals and socialists seem much stronger, such that one might even come to think, as Lea Ypi has recently put it, that socialism is just ‘liberalism minus capitalism’.¹

In what follows, we make progress on elucidating the nature of the relationship between liberalism and socialism by examining the emblematic encounter between two canonical representatives of these two traditions: Karl Marx and John Rawls. On the face of it, Marx and Rawls occupy deeply opposed positions in political philosophy. While Marx was a social scientist whose ultimate aim was to ‘lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society’² Rawls has been portrayed as a moralist who was ‘inattentive’ to the ‘neoliberal transformations of capitalism, the state, and society’ that took place during his lifetime.³ Similarly, while Marx is seen as a pioneer of a practical theory that seeks to uncover various forms of real-world power and domination, Rawls has been cited as an exemplar of a form of inert ideal theory that illicitly ignores the most egregious forms of racist, sexist, and class-based domination.⁴ And finally, while Marx is a trenchant critic of capitalism, Rawls has frequently been seen as an apologist for contemporary capitalist societies, developing principles of justice that enunciate the spirit of ‘unfettered industrial capitalism’⁵ and offer a ‘philosophical version’ of ‘trickle-down’ economics.⁶

Rawls’s direct engagement with Marx in some ways furthers the idea that their approaches to political philosophy stand in fundamental opposition. While Rawls, in his discussions of other canonical figures from the history of political thought, usually aims to find points of contact between his views and the figures he discusses, his engagement with Marx in the Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy constitutes a departure from this approach. Rawls treats Marx as a ‘critic of liberalism’ and shows how Rawls’s own view of justice as fairness has the resources to respond to these criticisms. To be sure, in keeping with Rawls’s background methodological commitment to interpretative charity when engaging with canonical figures in the history of political thought, Rawls’s treatment of Marx is not dismissive or hostile.⁷ Rawls speaks of Marx’s ‘marvelous gifts’ and, acknowledging the practical difficulties of Marx’s life, and his existence outside of the formal structures of the university system, Rawls judges that ‘his achievement as an economic theorist and political sociologist of capitalism is extraordinary, indeed heroic’.⁸ However, in treating Marx as a potential critic of justice as fairness rather than a precursor who contributed to its central insights, Rawls’s treatment of Marx seems to support the idea that liberalism and socialism are deeply opposed to each other.

In this article, we focus on Marx’s and Rawls’s normative views about work, justice, and the human good.⁹ We argue that their views on these topics are closer than many commentators realise.¹⁰ Perhaps most significantly, their views are also far closer together than Rawls himself realised. We focus on two directions of interaction between the two theorists, examining in turn: (1) Marx’s critique of liberalism (as interpreted by Rawls), and (2) Rawls’s direct critique of Marx. With regard to (1) we show that while Rawls argues that Marx’s criticisms do not apply to his own version of liberalism, Rawls allows that those criticisms do hit home against other versions of liberalism that lack his theory’s egalitarian commitments and institutional requirements. Thus, Rawls can be seen as accepting a surprisingly large part of Marx’s critique of capitalism. With regard to (2) we show that Rawls’s criticisms of Marx rely on a misinterpretation of Marx’s views. On a more plausible interpretation, Rawls’s criticisms lack force and, moreover, Marx’s views anticipate some of Rawls’s own positions in a way that Rawls himself did not appreciate.

While disagreements between Marx and Rawls remain, we show that these disagreements are different to, and more interesting than, the disagreement that Rawls takes himself to have with Marx. By providing a fuller and more accurate understanding of the relationship between Marx and Rawls, we thereby contribute to a clearer view of the relationship between liberalism and socialism, which addresses their (often overlooked) common ground as well as their (often exaggerated) differences. While liberalism and socialism are, of course, both rich traditions of political thought and practice, with great internal diversity, Marx and Rawls plausibly stand as the canonical modern representatives of each tradition.¹¹ Their shared project of critiquing the normative failings of contemporary forms of market capitalism, and of imaging the emancipatory possibilities for what could be put in its place, point towards a broader convergence between liberalism and socialism.

The article proceeds as follows. In Section II we consider Rawls’s response to Marx’s critique of liberal conceptions of individual rights (as developed in his ‘On the Jewish Question’). Next, in Section III we address Rawls’s response to Marx’s critique of capitalism in terms of the problem of alienated labour (as developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). We then turn to Rawls’s criticisms of Marx’s view of justice under communism, starting with his criticisms of the lower phase (Section IV) before considering his account of the undesirability of the ‘evanescence of justice’ in the higher phase (Section V). Section VI concludes by examining how a more careful understanding of the relationship between Rawls and Marx can lead to a more perspicacious view of the relationship between liberalism and socialism.

II. THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL RIGHTS

We start with Marx’s critique of liberal rights as found in ‘On the Jewish Question’. Rawls distinguishes two lines of criticism that he discerns in that text: one focusing on Marx’s critique of the atomistic and egoistic conception of society implicated by the traditional liberal ‘rights of man’ and another focusing on the merely formal nature of the ‘rights of the citizen’. We consider each in turn.

III. ALIENATION AND SELF-REALISATION IN WORK

We now turn from Marx’s objection concerning the poverty of liberal political rights to his objection that capitalism produces alienation and undermines the possibility of self-realisation in work. While Rawls’s response to Marx’s critique of liberal political rights is convincing, we argue that Rawls’s response to Marx’s charge that capitalism produces alienation is less clearly decisive and illuminates important questions for Rawlsian political economy.

Rawls outlines two different Marxian objections that touch on these issues:

To Marx’s objection that a constitutional regime with private property secures only the so-called negative liberties (those involving freedom to act unobstructed by others), we reply that the background institutions of a property-owning democracy, together with fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle, or some other analogous principle, give adequate protection to the so-called positive liberties (those involving the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities, leading to self-realization).

To the objection against the division of labor under capitalism, we reply that the narrowing and demeaning features of the division should be largely overcome once the institutions of a property-owning democracy are realized.³²

The Marxian criticisms of liberalism that are laid out by Rawls open up a distinct line of critique that stands apart from the line of argument embodied in Section II and brings the argument onto the territory of Marx’s idea of alienation.³³ Famously, Marx describes four forms of alienated labour under capitalism. These are the alienation of the worker: 1) from the product of their labour (which dominates them); 2) from their labour activity (which they experience as a torment and only perform out of economic necessity); 3) from their own ‘species-being’ (which they cannot realise); and 4) from their fellows (whom they view as competitors for jobs or as mere means for the achievement of their egoistic ends).³⁴ Alongside this negative depiction of labour under capitalism, Marx also puts forward a positive account of what would happen if we ‘carried out production as human beings’.³⁵ This account sees human beings as achieving self-realisation in work that provides others with the goods and services they need to pursue their flourishing.³⁶ In a nutshell, Marx’s objection to liberalism is that, by defending some form of capitalism, liberals effectively allow workers to lead lives of alienated toil, depriving them of the good of self-realisation in work.

Before we consider Rawls’s response, it is worth emphasising that the very fact that Rawls thinks this objection requires a careful response is itself telling. On some views, ideas of alienation are thought to rely on a ‘comprehensive’ perfectionist conception of the good. Given the association of liberalism with neutrality between different conceptions of the good, one might have thought that a concern with alienation in work would simply be beyond the remit of liberal political philosophy, as a number of prominent liberal theorists have argued.³⁷ However, notwithstanding his own neutralist commitments, Rawls is himself clearly concerned with the ‘narrowing and demeaning’ character of work under capitalism and the way in which it may become inimical to self-realisation.³⁸ This concern is brought vividly to life in Rawls’s autobiographical writing, in the example of Ernie, a colleague Rawls met when he was a young man, during a summer working in a doughnut factory in downtown Baltimore, as he saved for a sailing expedition. Although Rawls’s stint in the factory was brief, he recounts how encountering Ernie’s predicament of a lifetime of hard, repetitive, mundane work (‘6am to 6pm, six days a week’, ‘it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life’) affected him:

I came to feel very sorry for Ernie. Often I’ve felt my days at the doughnut factory and Ernie’s decency and stoicism in view of his fate – or so it seemed to me – made a lasting impression. So that was how most people spent their lives, of course not literally, but to all practical purposes: pointless labour for not much pay, and even if well paid it led nowhere.³⁹

Alongside this concern with work under capitalism, Rawls sometimes even appears to be attracted to something like Marx’s idea of self-realisation in work. In a revealing passage in A Theory of Justice, Rawls states that ‘[i]t is a mistake to think that a just and good society must wait upon a high material standard of life’:

What men want is meaningful work in free association with others…. To achieve this state of things great wealth is not necessary. In fact, beyond some point it is more likely to be a positive hindrance, a meaningless distraction at best if not a temptation to indulgence and emptiness.⁴⁰

Rawls maintained an acute awareness of both the value and significance of work (as a source of meaning and a basis for citizens’ self-respect)⁴¹ and of its possible dangers and pathologies (as when its effects can become ‘narrowing and demeaning’).⁴² This double awareness required both that work be securely accessible to all, but that the work available should be of a sufficient quality. Rawls came to respond to the requirement of the availability of work in a very direct way, arguing that an employment guarantee with ‘society as an employer of last resort through general or local government’⁴³ was not just an institutional requirement for a just society, but a more fundamental requirement of stability for any well-ordered liberal political society.⁴⁴

Whereas Rawls’s appreciation of the value of secure employment was, by the time of the full development of his view in his late writings, to bring him to specifying access to secure work as a direct requirement of justice, his response to worries about work quality, and hence his response to Marxian concerns regarding alienation, are by contrast rather more indirect and elliptical. Rawls’s writings suggest two distinct lines of response to Marx’s challenge. The first points to the way that the concern with alienation in work can be mitigated through the operation of Rawls’s principles of justice, in particular FEO and the Difference Principle. Simply put, Rawls’s thought is that the worst forms of alienation will exist in societies marked by severe economic inequality, where the most disadvantaged workers are effectively forced to accept exploitative offers out of sheer necessity and are then subject to alienation in work. By contrast, in a just society possessing good levels of public provision and highly constrained economic inequality workers would be under less pressure to accept demeaning job offers and hence less subject to alienation at work. As Rawls puts it, in a just society ‘no one need be servilely dependent on others and made to choose between monotonous and routine occupations which are deadening to human thought and sensibility’.⁴⁵

Rawls’s second line of response requires more explanation. In both the Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy and in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Rawls’s brief reply to Marx’s criticism concerning alienation gives a reference to the discussion of ‘The Idea of a Social Union’ in A Theory of Justice,⁴⁶ and in particular to the discussion of the idea that what Rawls calls the Aristotelian Principle ‘holds for institutional forms as well as for any other human activity’.⁴⁷ Now the Aristotelian Principle is the idea that ‘other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.’⁴⁸ While Rawls presents this as an empirical claim about motivation, held to be consistent with his rejection of perfectionism about the good, in some respects it functions more like a normative claim about the nature of human excellence, and hence not so different in kind to Marx’s own claims about our ‘species-being’ as involving free, creative production.

In his discussion of ‘The Idea of a Social Union’, Rawls presents the institutional analogue of the Aristotelian Principle in this way:

In a well-ordered society each person understands the first principles that govern the whole scheme as it is to be carried out over many generations; and all have a settled intention to adhere to these principles in their plan of life. Thus the plan of each person is given a more ample and rich structure than it would otherwise have; it is adjusted to the plans of others by mutually acceptable principles. Everyone’s more private life is so to speak a plan within a plan, this superordinate plan being realized in the public institutions of society.⁴⁹

How does this respond to the Marxian concern with alienated labour? Imagine living within a just society, the institutions of which have been arranged to be justifiable to all its members. Suppose that in this society you find yourself with one of the less attractive jobs, lacking some of the variety or creativity of the work done by some of your fellow citizens. What Rawls is saying is that, where this really is a just society, and where those shared institutions are the expression of a multigenerational commitment to create and sustain a system of social cooperation justifiable to all, your relation to your occupational role will be completely different to what it would be within an unjust society. You can see your own role – even if it is not especially intrinsically rewarding, creative, prestigious etc., – as a valuable part of this collective, multigenerational endeavour. And you are thereby able to identify with the whole range of achievements of your society, which have been achieved within the framework of the collaborative production of an institutional structure that affirms the standing and dignity of all of its members as free and equal citizens. As Rawls puts it, ‘the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments: that part of ourselves that we directly realize is joined to a wider and just arrangement the aims of which we affirm’.⁵⁰ Once citizens have good reason no longer think of themselves as ‘mere fragments’ but as cooperating participants in a sustained collective social achievement, the threat of alienation can be greatly diminished.

As with his response to Marx’s critique of liberal rights, note that Rawls’s response to the alienation objection turns not on defending liberalism or capitalism per se, but showing how only a seriously egalitarian liberal regime could successfully escape Marx’s criticisms. The implication indeed is that, under forms of substantially less egalitarian liberalism, workers would be condemned to lives of alienated toil and have no opportunity for self-realisation in work. As a result, they would also be unable to identify with their occupational role, take pleasure in the achievements of their fellow citizens, or avoid alienation from their social and political institutions. Again, then, Rawls’s response to Marx is tacitly critical of existing capitalist societies, which manifestly fail to live up to the egalitarian commitments embodied in justice as fairness.

Nevertheless, Rawls’s explicit response to Marx’s alienation objection is not clearly decisive and generates a number of further questions concerning possible ways of organising work and production in a just society. Beginning with Rawls’s first reply: while FEO and the Difference Principle certainly seem likely to improve the quality of work available to the least advantaged citizens, it is doubtful that they would fully address the problem of alienated labour. Consider FEO.⁵¹ FEO requires that citizens with the same talents and motivation enjoy the same employment opportunities irrespective of their class background and position in society. Put this way, FEO is a radical principle, mandating (among other things) a well-resourced and highly egalitarian educational system that removes the pernicious effect of class-based privilege. However, FEO does not directly alter the sum total of meaningful work within society.⁵² Its concern is only that everyone has an equal opportunity to access meaningful work. This is consistent with that good being enjoyed by some and not others who, lacking the talent and/or motivation of their fellow citizens, may still be ‘debarred from experiencing the realization of self which comes from a skilful and devoted exercise of social duties’.⁵³

We can say similar things about the Difference Principle. The Difference Principle allows inequality only on the grounds that it maximally benefits the least well-off. In a society which enacted the Difference Principle, it seems plausible that workers would not be forced to accept exploitative employment offers out of sheer necessity. With greater wealth at their disposal, workers could push for better pay and working conditions. Consequently, they would be able to avoid the most egregious forms of domination that exist within contemporary labour practices. Again, however, none of this fully precludes the possibility of alienated labour.⁵⁴ It rather suggests that alienated labour would be done under better terms than at present. While this is certainly preferable to the status-quo, it seems to miss Marx’s real concern. Indeed, Marx himself was contemptuous of the idea that an increase in wages extinguishes the concern with alienation, saying that such an increase ‘would be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.’⁵⁵

Much then depends on Rawls’s second reply, encapsulated by the idea that, under conditions of justice ‘we cease to be mere fragments’. Recall here the idea that, in a just society, even if you find yourself with a routine job that lacks the variety, creativity, and complexity of the work done by some of your fellow citizens, your job would not be alienating because it plays a role in the ongoing collective endeavour of maintaining just institutions with which you identify. But if the worry with Rawls’s first reply was that it does too little, the worry with this second is that it proves too much. For if identification with the valuable collective project of maintaining justice is sufficient to address alienation, why do we need meaningful work ourselves? Why can’t we just identify with the larger project of maintaining just institutions irrespective of our ‘monotonous and routine’ occupation? This appeal to identification with a larger project may seem implausible in the face of the ‘narrowing and demeaning’ lived experience of low-quality work. Returning to the example of Ernie and the doughnut factory, it might seem like scant consolation to be told that he is engaged in a cooperative joint endeavour with his better-paid and more engagingly employed colleagues.⁵⁶

How could Rawls reply when the alienation objection is pressed further in this way?⁵⁷ One approach would be to explore ways in which, through some variety of increased economic democracy, the power of workers to influence their working conditions is enhanced. We can imagine here three different kinds of strategies, increasing in strength. A first approach might be for the state to take a ‘promotive stance’ towards labour unions, by implementing a regime of labour law that was conducive to their growth and development.⁵⁸ A second approach could be to go somewhat further, in creating structures for industry-level codetermination, allowing unions to play a greater role in the shape of economic development, and thereby to influence the evolution of employment conditions, in a more general and strategic manner. Waheed Hussain has eloquently defended such Rhenish or Nordic policies of codetermination (or Mittbestimmung) as representing the most faithful institutional realisation of an economy that sought to realise Rawls’s principles of justice.⁵⁹ A third and more interventionist approach would be to mandate the democratic organisation of all workplaces. A justification for this kind of generalised workplace democracy can be developed making use of materials available within Rawls’s overall system, either in terms of creating the kind of socioeconomic conditions that are necessary for the secure development of citizens two moral powers, or in terms of the protection of the social basis of citizens’ self-respect.⁶⁰

On each of these three strategies, workers would have an institutional basis to secure effective power at work, and would thereby have significant influence over the structuring of economic production. Under such conditions one would naturally expect that the organisation of production would reduce the prevalence of alienating forms of work, with more scope for the reorganisation of work tasks within economic units so as to ensure that work could be experienced as meaningful for more workers than it would have been under an economic regime where workers’ power to shape the organisation of production was much weaker.⁶¹ Nevertheless, although these strategies would have the potential to achieve a great deal in this direction, none of them would provide a guarantee of non-alienating work, for a variety of reasons, whether because the relevant institutions (unions, works councils etc) would still have limited power to effect outcomes, or because such institutions might nevertheless democratically chose to make different trade-offs between work quality and other desiderata, such as economic efficiency.⁶² Moreover, it is worth noting that – like FEO and the difference principle – all of these strategies remain indirect in terms of their capacity to reduce alienation at work, with none guaranteeing outcomes where ‘narrowing and demeaning’ work is avoided altogether.⁶³

A more radical alternative would be directly to mandate a regime of sharing burdensome work, i.e., work that, though necessary, does not call on an array of human powers. This radical move might be thought to be implied by Rawls intriguing suggestion that in a just society ‘[e]ach can be offered a variety of tasks so that the different elements of his nature find a suitable expression’.⁶⁴ The thought here is that the tasks that can neither be automated away, nor made meaningful for the workers performing it, should be shared between everyone able to perform them.⁶⁵ This would not be a society in which people do ‘one thing today and another tomorrow’, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticising after dinner’ but one in which people share the burdensome toil involved in maintaining society over time.⁶⁶ By sharing such work, there would be no more Ernies spending their entire working lives performing relentlessly ‘deadening’ tasks.

While the ‘burden sharing’ approach provides a more direct response to the problem of alienated labour, the mandatory sharing of burdensome work would appear to be in tension with other concerns of justice, such as freedom of occupation and economic efficiency. Since both freedom of occupation and economic efficiency are important elements of justice as fairness, it is not clear that the ‘burden sharing’ response is straightforwardly compatible with Rawls’s theory of justice. If this is right, then it looks as though Rawls’s ability to respond to the alienation objection might be constrained. More precisely, it would appear that Rawls would be forced to choose between indirect strategies that mitigate but do not overcome alienation, and direct strategies that take alienation off the table but at the expense of other concerns of justice. Our present aim is not to settle the question of which of these strategies promises the best way forward, but simply to give a clear account of the normative terrain: either strategy could potentially be defended, but neither is costless in normative terms.

IV. BEYOND THE NARROW HORIZON OF BOURGEOIS RIGHT? SOCIALISM AND JUSTICE

We now turn from Marx’s criticisms of liberalism to Rawls’s criticism of Marx. Drawing on G.A. Cohen’s strikingly individualistic interpretation of Marx’s views of communist society, Rawls argues that Marx was committed to (A) a principle of self-ownership that precludes the redistribution of income and wealth; and (B) a ‘technological fix’ that creates limitless abundance and so transcends the circumstances of justice.⁶⁷ Rawls subjects both views to criticism. However, these criticisms rely on a misunderstanding of Marx’s views. On a more plausibly social interpretation of Marx’s vision of the good society, these criticisms lack force, and Marx and Rawls are closer together than Rawls realised.⁶⁸

V. LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM: CEASING TO BE MERE FRAGMENTS?

Rawls’s engagement with Marx is in many ways both surprising and suggestive. It reveals both Rawls’s high ambition to have developed a form of liberalism that could avoid the most powerful lines of socialist critique, while at the same time tacitly showing Rawls’s clear-eyed assessment that most defences of liberalism and capitalism – as well as liberal capitalism in its actually-existing varieties – are devastatingly caught by those very lines of socialist critique. Rawls as a reader of Marx is clearly a theorist who has no illusions about the realities of capitalism, but who nevertheless retains a clear core of hope for the prospects for a form of egalitarian liberalism that go beyond the limitations of the capitalist economic system.

Yet Rawls’s encounter with Marx at the same time seems like a missed opportunity; there was more potential here for productive engagement if Rawls’s reading of Marx were not so distorted by the starkly individualistic interpretation of Marx’s view of the good society that he took over from Cohen. The dispute that Rawls took himself to be having with Marx on the nature of justice was in many ways much less interesting than the dispute he could have had. The real issue here, with regard to the kind of social transformation that Marx thought possible, is about the nature of justice itself – whether we should ‘take people as they are’, with their limited capacities to act towards the flourishing of others, and build our just institutions with those limited capacities in mind; or whether instead we could hope that a transformation of the institutions within which we live our shared social and economic lives could in time bring about the ‘alteration of men on a mass scale’⁸⁹ that would allow for an even more egalitarian and emancipatory form of society.⁹⁰

The irony here is that that this issue is essentially at the heart of Cohen’s own critique of Rawls’s approach to social justice; and this is clearly the substantive issue that Cohen takes to go to the very heart of the limits of egalitarian liberalism, and to what is at stake between liberals and socialists. By convincing Rawls of an impoverished reading of Marx’s view of communism and the role of justice within it, Cohen pushed Rawls into a less substantive and significant engagement with Marx’s ideas, and away from the very issues that Cohen himself took to be of prime importance in thinking about the borders of liberalism and socialism.⁹¹ On the view we have outlined above, the real action with regard to the normative engagement between Rawls and Marx is located not so far from the core of the substantive dispute between Rawls and Cohen. We have raised the question of whether the Difference Principle, on Rawls’s own understanding of that principle’s demands (where such demands are largely consistent with ‘taking people as they are’) might have a place within a revised Marxian account of the lower stage of communism. Alternatively, the more demanding and socially transformative ‘Cohenite’ reading of the Difference Principle, as involving a reconfiguration of individual ethos and outlook, brings us very close to Marx’s own account of justice under the higher stage of communism.⁹²

What then does our exploration of the relationship between Rawls and Marx tell us about the relation between liberalism and socialism? We have shown how much of Marx’s critique of capitalism can be endorsed by Rawls, while Rawls’s own highly egalitarian liberalism plausibly evades most Marxian worries about liberal political positions. Marx’s target for attack here was, after all, a form of classical liberalism that Rawls also repudiated. We have also shown how much of Rawls’s critique of Marx can be dissolved away as soon as we free ourselves of the effects of some unfortunate misreading that misdirected Rawls in his engagement with Marx’s ideas. In all of these aspects, our conclusions point towards reconciliation between the two traditions.

And yet, while our discussion of Marx and Rawls suggests that liberalism (at least in its egalitarian form) and socialism should not be seen as fundamentally opposed to one another, we have also given some reasons for thinking that socialism is not just (to return to Lea Ypi’s phrase) ‘liberalism minus capitalism’. Our conclusion is therefore not the fully reconciliatory position outlined as a possibility at the outset, as residual normative disagreements do persist. One source of disagreement concerns alienation and self-realisation in work. As we have seen, Rawls stands apart from other prominent liberal theorists in taking Marx’s concerns with alienation and self-realisation in work seriously; and he offers substantive (albeit indirect) responses to these concerns, while further responses can be constructed on the basis of other elements of Rawls’s view. However, we have argued that none of these indirect Rawlsian responses provide an entirely satisfying response to the ‘alienation objection’, while more direct lines of response stand in tension with Rawls’s other commitments. The difficulty here suggests an underlying tension between liberalism and socialism: the socialist concern with alienated labour is not one that can be easily addressed within liberal political philosophy, at least not without sacrificing (or at least diluting) some of its other central commitments, such as freedom of occupational choice and the concern with economic efficiency.⁹³

The other residual disagreement between Marx and Rawls, which suggests another potential source of conflict between liberalism and socialism, brings us back to the question of human nature and parallels a tension within Rawls’s own thinking, between realism and utopianism.⁹⁴ In his acceptance of economic incentives, Rawls’s Difference Principle accepts the (moderately) self-interested motivations of people under capitalism as a fixed point of the theory. This ‘concession to human nature’⁹⁵ is one that many socialists, including Marx and Cohen, do not want to allow. While Marx is fully alive to concerns about political feasibility, the concessions he allows under the lower stage of communism are not concessions to human nature as such but to human nature as shaped by capitalism, and are therefore conceived as strategic, temporary, and self-limiting; waypoints on the onward journey towards the socialist transformation of human motivations and sociality. In this aspect of his thinking, Marx embodies a socialist optimism that goes beyond anything that liberals such as Rawls can countenance.

It would be much too simple, though, to draw a line between realism and utopianism, or between pessimism and optimism about the transformation of human motivations, putting liberals on one side and socialists and the other. On the one hand, both Rawls and Marx are concerned with political feasibility; on the other hand, both Marx and Rawls are deeply engaged in thinking about the ways in which the political and economic institutions under which we live can shape and reshape our outlook, motivations, and self-conception. The conclusions of their political thinking diverge, but there is much that is shared in both their values and their sense of the political and intellectual problems that need to be faced when think carefully about what it would be to realise a society that was truly justifiable to those who live within it. In parallel to how things stand between Rawls and Marx, so too things stand with egalitarian liberalism and socialism: neither deeply opposed nor seamlessly reconciled, but two sibling political traditions that share more than they realise, not least their shared tendency to overestimate their distance from one another.

As we have seen (in Section III above), Rawls wrote movingly of how, in a just society, our self-conception could be transformed through an appreciation of how what we achieve on our own is just part of a broader achievement of social cooperation, ‘the aims of which we affirm’. Under such conditions ‘we cease to be mere fragments’.⁹⁶ There is an arresting moral grandeur to this idea, but it can also be transposed from institutional life to the level of theory itself; from a description of the alignment of aims between citizens, to a way of thinking about the alignment of aims between socialism and egalitarian liberalism. Each tradition has its distinctive identity, but each can also be thought of in its best light not as an isolated fragment, but as a collaborative constituent element of a broader shared human endeavour: the project of conceiving of an emancipatory ‘alternative to capitalism’⁹⁷ that ‘abolishes the current state of things’.⁹⁸

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article greatly benefitted from searching discussions following presentations at Sapienza Università di Roma, and at the annual meeting of the September Group at Columbia University. For extremely helpful discussions related to the ideas discussed in this article, we are grateful to Caleb Althorpe, Gustaf Arrhenius, Pablo Aguayo Westwood, Michael Bacon, Samuel Bowles, Harry Brighouse, Pascal Brixel, Chiara Cordelli, Alice Crary, Matteo Falomi, Rainer Forst, Fabian Freyenhagen, Markus Furendal, Pablo Gilabert, Paul Gomberg, Stefan Gosepath, Angus Hebenton, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Amy Kapczynski, Faik Kurtulmuş, Fernando Lizárraga, Callum MacRae, Barry Maguire, Sarin Marchetti, Suresh Naidu, Anne Phillips, Agustín Reyes, Debra Satz, Fabian Schuppert, Tommie Shelby, Hugo Seleme, Seana Shiffrin, Lucas Stanczyk, Alan Thomas, Philippe Van Parijs, Roberto Veneziani, Joan Vergés Gifra, Nicholas Vrousalis, Stuart White, Lea Ypi, and the late and much-missed Waheed Hussain. We would also like to thank the Editors of Political Philosophy and two anonymous referees for greatly helping us to improve the final version of the article.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The authors declare that they have no competing interests