Title: We Cease to be Mere Fragments: Justice, Alienation, | Liberalism and Socialism
Domain: philosophy

Question: What is the relation between liberalism and socialism?

Background: 1.Partisans of two political traditions, liberalism and socialism often often see one another as ideological opponents. | 2.There is a more eirenic perspective on the relationship between liberalism and socialism, with more reconciliatory views seeing broad agreement between liberals and socialists on many central normative values.

Definitions: 1.Liberalism: A political and moral philosophy based on principles of individual liberty, equality before the law, and the protection of fundamental rights. It emphasizes the importance of limited government, rule of law, free markets, and the promotion of political and civil freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, and association. | 2.Socialism: A political and economic ideology that advocates for the collective or social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution of goods. It emphasizes reducing economic inequalities by promoting social welfare, equitable distribution of resources, and workers’ participation in decision-making processes. | 3.Justice: A moral principle that individuals are to be treated according to what is due to them—whether in terms of rights, deserts, needs, or equality. It involves questions of fairness, legitimacy, and reciprocity, and is central to ethical, political, and legal theory. | 4.Alienation: The experience or condition in which a person becomes disconnected or estranged from aspects of their human nature, their work, their community, or the products of their labor. It involves a sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, or loss of agency in relation to oneself or the surrounding social and material world.

Methodology: 1.Examining Rawls’s response to Marx’s critique of liberal conceptions of individual rights, as articulated in Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question.2.Examining Rawls’s response to Marx’s critique of capitalism concerning the problem of alienated labour, as articulated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.3.Reviewing Rawls’s criticisms of Marx’s view of justice under communism.

Answer: 1.Point out the key issue | Two perspectives on the relationship between liberalism and socialism: First, Someone view the two stand in fundamental opposition to each other, and the prospects for their reconciliation seem remote. Second, 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. | Key issue: What is the fundamental relationship between liberalism and socialism? | 2.Rawls's response to Marx's critique of liberal conceptions of individual rights | 2.1 Rawls's response to Marx's critique of the atomistic and egoistic conception of society implicated by the traditional liberal 'rights of man' | Rawls responded to Marx's famous argument that the 'rights of man'—Marx follows the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in speaking of rights to 'equality, liberty, security, property'—presuppose an atomistic view of human relations that is antithetical to true freedom and meaningful community. | The atomistic individualism is certainly not the view held by Rawls. For Rawls, the rights and liberties protected by his first principle of justice are not those of competitive, antagonistic and egoistic property-owners, brought warily and uneasily into social contact, but the rights of free and equal citizens who are participating in the shared project of realising and sustaining a cooperative social system. | Rawls does not treat the right to private property in productive assets as a fundamental right. Rawls's line of response to Marx here suggests that on Rawls's view any version of liberalism which ruled out a socialist system of economic organisation would by virtue of that feature show itself to be defective. | Conclusion: Rawls does not say that Marx's criticisms of the atomistic and egoistic conception of society implicated by the traditional liberal 'rights of man'are without foundation. | 2.2 Rawls's response to Marx's critique of formal nature of the 'rights of the citizen'. | In 'On the Jewish Question' Marx distinguishes the 'rights of man' from the 'rights of the citizen', understood as rights to political participation (e.g., the right to vote and hold political office). As Rawls rightly says, Marx's attitude to these two varieties of rights diverge in important ways. While Marx recognises the value of the 'rights of the citizen', he thinks that under liberalism these rights are 'merely formal' in the sense that although they are held by all citizens equally, the rights are not enjoyed by all citizens equally on account of the deep inequalities of power and wealth under which these rights are exercised. | Rawls responds not by offering a general defence of the adequacy of liberal political rights, but by pointing to a special feature of his own particular conception of justice. It is a distinctive feature of Rawls's approach to the basic liberties that he defends not only a formal set of personal and political liberties, but that he further argues for the necessity of the protection of the fair value of the political liberties (FVPL). | Conclusion: Rawls's argument that Marx's critique of formal nature of the 'rights of the citizen' does not hit home against his own version of liberalism tacitly accepts that it does strike its target with regard to many other forms of liberalism, as it condemns all those forms within which adequate protections for (something at least close to) FVPL have not been put in place. | 3.Rawls's response to Marx's critique of capitalism in terms of the problem of alienated labour | 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. | 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) and of its possible dangers and pathologies (as when its effects can become 'narrowing and demeaning'). | 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. The second line of response gives a reference 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'. 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.' | Conclusion: 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. 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. | 4.Rawls's criticisms of Marx's view of justice under communism | 4.1 Rawls's criticisms of Marx's commitment to a principle of self-ownership that precludes the redistribution of income and wealth. | Rawls's criticism is that Marx would reject redistributive principles, such as FEO and the Difference Principle, that Rawls takes to be necessary for 'maintaining background justice over time'. | But Rawls's claim that a principle of self-ownership is honoured in a future communist society is mistaken. Marx's vision of the development of communism is far from a society in which self-owning workers each receive the undiluted proceeds of their labour (as Rawls's interpretation seems to suggest), but rather a society in which communism develops over time through the collective development of a range of shared institutions that cater to the needs of all citizens. | Marx argues that the Contribution Principle represents a significant improvement on distribution under capitalism, where some people who do not work get rich from the labour of others. But this does not rule out the possibility that Marx might find the Difference Principle acceptable for the lower phase of communism. | Conclusion:if we limit ourselves to the somewhat non-ideal circumstances of the lower phase of communism, where moderate scarcity and a capitalist mentality prevail, Marx and Rawls's views about justice are not that far apart. | 4.2 Rawls's criticisms of Marx's commitment to a 'technological fix' that creates limitless abundance and so transcends the circumstances of justice. | On Rawls's reading, Marx's account of the higher phase of communism is a society 'beyond justice in the sense that the circumstances that give rise to the problem of distributive justice are surpassed'. | Rawls suggests that, even if under the imagined future conditions of communist superabundance, the 'evanescence of justice' should then be seen not as a pure state of liberation, but as a regrettable loss of something of great value. | However, it is likely that Rawls and Cohen misunderstand the ways in which Marx sees communist society as moving beyond 'the narrow horizon of bourgeois right' as Marx puts it in 'The Critique of the Gotha Programme', understanding this in excessively technological terms. | The transformation that Marx looked for under the higher phase of communism relied to a greater extent than Rawls appreciated on a transformation of the soul rather than a transformation of the conditions of production. Rawls and Marx would be at one in thinking that a central element of a good society is a commitment to the needs of one's fellows. | Conclusion: Rawls's deep philosophical antipathy to countenancing the evanescence of justice therefore should not have led him here to accentuate his differences from Marx; on the contrary, their views are closer together here than Rawls imagined. | | Conclusion: Marx's critique of capitalism can be endorsed by Rawls, and Rawls's own highly egalitarian liberalism plausibly evades most Marxian worries about liberal political positions. 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.

Checklist: 1. Does the answer include content on Rawls's response to Marx's critique of the atomistic and egoistic conception of society? | 2. Does the answer include content on Rawls's response to Marx's critique of the formal nature of the 'rights of the citizen'? | 3. Does the answer include content on Rawls's response to Marx's critique of alienated labour? | 4. Does the answer include content on Rawls's criticisms of Marx's commitment to a principle of self-ownership? | 5. Does the answer include content on Rawls's criticisms of Marx's commitment to a 'technological fix' transcending the circumstances of justice? | 6. Does the answer discuss the relationship between liberalism and socialism?