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COALITION SOCIALISM  
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Chris Maisano
November 13, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ The intertwined relationship between liberalism and socialism
offers important lessons for today’s fractious intra-left fights. _

A mural depicting the Newport Rising of 1839, a Chartist rebellion in
Wales, Wikimedia Commons

 

Reviewed:

_Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s
Social and Political Thought_by Bruno LeipoldPrinceton University
Press, 2024, 440 pp.

_The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism_by Matthew
McManusRoutledge, 2024, 268 pp.

In June, somewhere between 4 and 6 million Americans showed up to No
Kings Day demonstrations in more than 2,100 cities and towns across
the country. Observers estimated that this was the largest single-day
protest in U.S. history since 1970, exceeding the mass demonstrations
of the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, the anti–Iraq
War protests of 2003, and the mobilizations against police brutality
after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Indivisible, the progressive
protest organization formed during Donald Trump’s first
administration, led the organizing effort. A sprawling coalition of
over 200 other groups, including labor unions, advocacy groups, and
faith-based organizations, joined them in a massive show of defiance
against the Trump administration’s drive to consolidate an
authoritarian, oligarchical, and white supremacist regime.

The country’s largest socialist organization, Democratic Socialists
of America, was conspicuously absent from the list of sponsoring
organizations, though many DSA members (myself included) and local
chapters mobilized for marches and rallies in their own capacities.
Unfortunately, this was consistent with the political orientation of
DSA’s current national leadership, whose majority is too wary of
working in coalition with organizations and movements that are not
explicitly socialist.

This was not, of course, the first time socialists took a sectarian
stance toward developments outside their own ranks, nor will it be the
last. Despite this stubbornly persistent tendency, however, the
socialist movement has often been enriched and renewed through
engagement with other political traditions and movements. In the
present moment, traditions like republicanism and liberalism, which
are rooted in opposition to arbitrary and despotic modes of rule, seem
particularly worthy of engagement.

In his excellent book _Citizen Marx_, the political theorist Bruno
Leipold demonstrates in great detail how important such engagement was
to Karl Marx himself. Leipold argues that the traditional account of
Marxism’s three main sources—German philosophy, English political
economy, and French socialism—is incomplete, because it omits the
formative role of nineteenth-century European republicanism in
Marx’s political thought. Among its many valuable contributions to
the vast literature on Marx and Marxism, _Citizen Marx_ establishes,
against critics like Hannah Arendt, how fundamentally political and
democratic Marx’s socialism was.

In _On Revolution_, Arendt takes Marx to task for his “obsession
with the social question and his unwillingness to pay serious
attention to questions of state and government.” Under Marx’s
baleful influence, she argues, revolutionaries traded the struggle for
political freedom for the conquest of bread for the masses—a fateful
turn that signaled the arrival of new and even more terrible
despotisms. Yet while Marx’s conceptions of politics, state, and
government are certainly not above criticism, Leipold conclusively
shows how such judgments more accurately “descri . . . the
antipolitical forms of socialism that Marx tried to displace.” For
Marx, it was precisely by the achievement of political freedom through
the establishment of a democratic republic that “the social
question” would be solved.

A strong orientation toward democratic political action differentiated
the socialism of Marx and Engels from the communitarian socialisms of
Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon, and other “utopian”
socialists of the early nineteenth century. Owen, for example, thought
that a socialist transition would come about through the spread of
small-scale intentional communities, like his New Lanark in Scotland
or New Harmony in Indiana. “This communitarian transition to
socialism,” Leipold notes, “was deliberately developed in contrast
to the republican insistence on political reform.” The British
workers of the Chartist movement who campaigned for manhood suffrage,
annual parliamentary elections, equal representation, and other
political reforms were, in Owen’s view, wasting their time. By
setting up cooperative communities under the patronage of enlightened
industrialists, the workers of the world would win “emancipation
from their present sufferings by a much shorter and surer course than
through political agitation.”

Marx, who had closely followed the Chartist struggle for democracy in
Britain, rejected these antipolitical socialisms and developed a new
kind of republican socialism (Leipold uses “socialism” and
“communism” interchangeably throughout the book). “One of
Marx’s great contributions,” Leipold contends, “was to place
politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of
socialism.” This in itself is not an original insight: Michael
Harrington, for example, argued in his 1972 book _Socialism_ that
“what set [Marx and Engels] off from all other radicals of the time
was their insistence on the democratic character of the coming
revolution.” What is new about _Citizen Marx_ is how conclusively
Leipold documents this political commitment, through exhaustive
research into Marx’s fruitful engagement with the republican
tradition.

The thinkers and agitators Marx grappled with wanted to overthrow
autocratic regimes and establish new republics that guaranteed equal
civil and political rights for all. They also recognized that such
rights could not be guaranteed without an economic system that
counteracted social inequality and prevented citizens from sinking
into a state of material dependency on employers. For radical
republicans like Félicité de Lamennais and William James Linton,
freedom meant the absence of arbitrary power—in Leipold’s words, a
state of “not being subjected to the will of another and instead
having democratic control over the laws to which one was subject.”
The republican conception of freedom aspires not merely to
noninterference, but rather to non-domination; domination still exists
even where masters treat their subjects with liberality and kindness.
Lamennais, Linton, and other nineteenth-century republicans expanded
older, more aristocratic conceptions of republicanism downward and
outward, from a rejection of monarchical rule to a rejection of the
social dependency of women and workers.

This sounds a lot like socialism. But radical republicans were not
necessarily socialists. They wanted a democracy of widely distributed,
small-scale property ownership, and thought the collectivization of
property would lead to a new system of despotism. To Marx, modern
capitalist development—with its massive industrial enterprises and a
burgeoning world market—had scheduled this essentially artisanal
vision for extinction. The property question was thus the main
dividing line between republicans and socialists, and in retrospect
both Marx and his republican interlocutors had a point. Marx was right
to insist that capitalist expansion could help lay the foundations of
a free and equal society, but the communist experience has vindicated
republican fears of full collectivization by the state.

The social-republican tradition that Leipold excavates is of more than
academic interest. Its emphasis on freedom as a cardinal political
value, and on the struggle against domination as a potential link
between different emancipatory movements, has practical importance for
building coalitions and alliances on the left. It may also give
socialists an effective counter to conservative claims that any kind
of socialism is the road to serfdom. Through its insistence on freedom
from all forms of domination, including domination by repressive and
anti-democratic states, republicanism can help the socialist movement
address some of its traditional blind spots and reach beyond the
already converted.

Nineteenth-century liberals also wanted to topple despotic regimes and
establish basic civil and political rights, but not all of them were
comfortable with mass politics or working-class participation in
affairs of state. Liberals “believed in the importance of
representative government,” Leipold writes, “but rejected
extending the suffrage to all, maintaining that political
participation should be limited to the capable through property and
educational qualifications on the vote.” If the property question
divided republicanism from socialism, then the question of democracy
was the dividing line between republicanism and liberalism.

While it is certainly true that many liberals opposed democracy on
elitist grounds, Leipold’s sharp distinction between liberalism and
democracy is overly categorical. As Matthew McManus reminds us in _The
Political Theory of Liberal Socialism_, “it is more accurate to
speak about liberalisms than liberalism.” Even in the nineteenth
century, there were liberalisms with an affinity for democracy, and
even for certain conceptions of socialism.

McManus describes his book as an exercise in “retrieval,” a
concept borrowed from the Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson.
In McManus’s summary, retrieval entails reconstructing “the key
ethical commitments of a tradition which ha become occluded,
calcified, or perverted into ideology over time”—in this case the
tradition of liberal socialism. In doing so, he seeks to build a canon
of liberal socialist ideas and thinkers ranging from John Stuart Mill
in the mid nineteenth century through Charles W. Mills, Chantal
Mouffe, and Axel Honneth in the twenty-first.

McManus seeks to convince the reader that “liberal ideology can be
detached from support for capitalism and that socialism can be made
conciliable with liberalism.” This is no easy feat, considering that
the very word “liberal” has become an all-purpose term of
opprobrium on today’s left. The sorts of labor-liberals whom
Harrington once sought to win over to a project of social democratic
reform are long gone. For many younger socialists, you can’t spell
liberalism without the prefix “neo.” For them, Barack Obama or
Hillary Clinton is the paradigmatic liberal, not Shirley Chisholm or
Ted Kennedy. Nevertheless, whether they admit it or not, even the most
avowedly anti-liberal socialists take the basic predicates of
liberalism—including the freedom to publicly criticize
liberalism—for granted. So I am very sympathetic to McManus’s
goal, and his book is an admirable first step toward developing a
distinctive conception of liberal socialism. There are, however,
notable gaps in his canon and lingering questions about how he
reconciles liberalism and socialism.

Many Marxists and liberals posit an organic relationship between
liberalism and capitalism and deny the former is compatible with
socialism. McManus seeks to refute this idea. All liberals, he
contends, share a “commitment to the normative equality, or equal
worth, of all human beings and, relatedly, their fundamental
entitlement to equal liberty in civil society.” These commitments,
however, are not enough to get from liberalism to socialism. To do
that, McManus introduces republicanism and the hybrid figure of the
“republican liberal,” who embraces the principles of solidarity or
fraternity. These republican liberals appear to be basically
indistinguishable from liberal socialists, who also embrace “the
republican principle of community and solidarity” and “extend it
to the economy.” Republicanism therefore plays a crucial if not
fully acknowledged role in McManus’s framework—a kind of
emulsifier that allows for the potentially incompatible ingredients of
liberalism and socialism to mix successfully. And there are recurrent
similarities between McManus’s elaborations of liberal socialism and
the radical republicanism Leipold considers in _Citizen Marx_.

“Put loosely,” McManus writes, “liberal socialism is committed
to instituting a basic social structure securing the equal
emancipation of all society’s members as a basis for their shared
long-term flourishing. The various political theories of liberal
socialism attempt to justify and unpack this core commitment.” This
is rather like the republican insistence that equal civil and
political rights cannot not be guaranteed without a complementary
economic system that counteracts social inequality and facilitates
popular political participation. According to McManus, liberal
socialists “highlight how relations of power pervade many other
forms of human relations,” including the economy and the family. We
find something similar in _Citizen Marx_, where Leipold describes the
radical republican William James Linton’s belief that marriage
forced women to “surrender the natural right of sovereignty and
stoop to be the property and possession of their lords,” and that
“arbitrary threats of hunger” put working people “under the
power of another class of men who dispose of them as they think
fit.”

Yet it is not clear from McManus’s book whether the pursuit of
liberal socialism necessarily entails the abolition of private
property, or something short of it. He writes, for example, that
whether a transition to liberal socialism would entail “a form of
market socialism characterized by cooperatives or an economy still
nominally capitalist but oriented by heavily unionized private firms
whose production is largely determined by state investment is a big
question.” A liberal socialism need not adopt a single perspective
on programmatic or institutional questions to be valuable. But this
somewhat indeterminate quality can make it difficult to see where
liberal socialism begins and republicanism or social democracy ends.

McManus ably surveys many essential figures of a liberal socialist
canon, including Mill, Eduard Bernstein, Carlo Rosselli, and John
Rawls. There are nevertheless some notable omissions, such as J.A.
Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, and other advocates of the socially conscious
New Liberalism that emerged in Britain and elsewhere in the late
nineteenth century. Against the “old” laissez-faire liberalism of
the early 1800s, these liberals supported the extension of rights from
the political realm into social and economic life and advocated for
extensive redistribution to combat the rampant inequality of
turn-of-the-century Britain. As Helena Rosenblatt puts it in _The Lost
History of Liberalism_, they “began to say that people should be
accorded not just freedom, but the _conditions_ of freedom.” That
position led Hobhouse to conclude that “true Socialism serves to
complete rather than destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” While the
postwar Labour government built the major pillars of Britain’s
welfare state, its intellectual architect was William Beveridge, a
Liberal Party economist whose work focused on social insurance and
full employment. John Maynard Keynes, whom McManus rightly includes in
the liberal socialist canon, was another product of this milieu,
although McManus notes this only in passing. Greater attention to New
Liberalism would not only have given the movement its due place in a
liberal socialist “retrieval”; it might also have helped McManus
reduce his reliance on republicanism as a middle term between
liberalism and socialism.

These reservations aside, McManus is to be commended for his work in
reconstructing a liberal socialist tradition, and for pushing back
against the hostility to liberalism too often found on the socialist
left. His book is unfortunately well timed to the second Trump
administration’s authoritarian lurch, and reminds us that liberalism
was once a fighting faith whose radical heritage is worth retrieving.
Leipold and McManus also remind us of just how intellectually fruitful
and politically dynamic it can be to put socialist ideas in dialogue
with other traditions that share an interest in human emancipation and
the development of our individual and collective capacities. This is
always worth doing, but especially in a time when everything that
democratic and progressive people hold dear is under existential
threat. We hang together, or we hang separately.

_CHRIS MAISANO is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of
America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
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