1    

Axel Honneth

The Idea of Social Freedom.

On the Intellectual Roots of Socialism.

(First draft, without footnotes)

The idea of socialism is an intellectual product of the period of capitalist

industrialization. It first saw the light of day in the aftermath of the French

Revolution, when it turned out that the Revolution's demands for liberty,

equality, and fraternity had remained empty promises for large segments

of the population, and that they were still far from becoming social

realities. It is true that the term "socialism" had already entered the

vocabulary of philosophical debate in the second half of the eighteenth

century, when Catholic clerics set out to expose the doctrines of the

German school of natural law as dangerous aberrations. They used the

term "socialistae", a neologism derived from the Latin term "socialis",

with a polemical intention to refer to what they suspected to be a

tendency in the writings Grotius and Pufendorf: namely, to think of the

juridical order of a society as being founded on the human disposition to

sociability (Geselligkeit) rather than on divine revelation.1 There is a

straight path leading from this early critical use to the German

jurisprudential manuals of the late eighteenth century, which referred to

Pufendorf and his disciples as "Socialisten". By that time the term had

shed its connotation of reproach and was meant simply to indicate the

project of providing natural law with a secular basis in human sociability.2

                                                                                                                         1    2    

2    

Yet when the English expressions "socialist" and "socialism" gained

currency throughout Europe in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth

century, their meaning was no longer in any way related to their original

use in the context of the natural law debates. The followers of Robert

Owen in England and of Charles Fourier in France now employed those

terms to refer to themselves, without any intention of participating in

philosophical disputes over the foundations of law and right.3 In this new

context, the two expressions became (in Wolfgang Schieder's words)

"future-oriented movement concepts" which denoted the political aim of

founding associations that would contribute to moving society as a whole

closer to a "social" condition properly speaking.

To be sure, there existed efforts long before the first half of the

nineteenth century to implement specific measures that would first make

society properly "social". Take, for example, the Scottish moral

philosophers who sought to remind us of the human sentiment of mutual

sympathy and who were hoping to derive from it the principles of a well-

ordered society. Or take Leibniz who in his youth was flirting with ideas

of this sort when he sketched plans for the establishment of learned

societies, partly moved by political ambitions. Initially these societies

were called "Sozietäten", later "academies", testifying to their inspiration

in Plato's idea of philosophers' rule. They were meant to serve the

common good by performing not only an educational and cultural role but

also by facilitating the social integration of economic life.4 In his brief

manuscript "Society and Economy", written in 1671, Leibniz sketched the

economic tasks of the future academies and proposed that they should

support the poor and ensure a minimum wage in order to end economic

competition and thus to inaugurate "true love and trust" among the                                                                                                                          3    4    

3    

members of society.5 Some passages of these writings read like

anticipations of the radical aims that Charles Fourier, a hundred and fifty

years later, was hoping to realize by establishing the kinds of

cooperatives that he named "Phalanstères".6

Yet Fourier's plans for a cooperative society were developed in a

normative context quite different from the one constituted by the feudal

environment of Leibniz's time. In the intervening century and a half, the

French Revolution with its principles of freedom, equality, and fraternity

had instituted a set of moral demands which amounted to a list of

requirements for any just social order and which could henceforth serve

as a reference point for anyone aiming at a further improvement of social

conditions. The French and English thinkers and activists who began to

refer to themselves as "Socialists" in the 1830s did so with full

awareness of the normative debt they owed to those revolutionary

innovations: In contrast with Leibniz and other social reformers of pre-

bourgeois times, who had to think of their own proposals as being at

odds with normative reality, they were able to appeal to already

institutionalized and generally validated principles, from which more

radical consequences could be derived. It is not quite transparent in what

ways exactly the groups that in retrospect came to be called "early

socialists" thought of themselves as developing the three fundamental

norms established by the French Revolution. From the 1830s onward

there was a lively exchange between the followers of Robert Owen in

England, on the one hand, and the two French movements initiated by

Fourier and Saint-Simon, on the other. It seems that the thought of jointly

presenting themselves as "Socialists" arose only after Owen had visited

                                                                                                                         5    6    

4    

Fourier in Paris in 1837.7 But their respective ideas about the shape of

the desired social reforms were too different to reveal any sort of shared

goal.

For all three groups, however, the starting point of these protests against

the post-revolutionary social order was indignation at the fact that the

concurrent expansion of the capitalist market prevented large segments

of the population from effectively claiming the liberty and equality

promised to them by the revolutionary principles. It was regarded as

"humiliating", "shameful", or simply "immoral" that rural and urban

workers along with their families were subject to the arbitrary power of

private landowners and factory owners, who regardless of their

willingness to work forced on them a life of constant hardship and the

ever-present threat of immiseration. If we are looking for a common

denominator of the normative responses that the awareness of these

social conditions elicited in the different strands of early socialism, it will

be helpful to start with a proposal made by Émile Durkheim. In

attempting to provide a definition of the term "socialism" in his famous set

of lectures by that name, Durkheim suggested that what the various

socialist doctrines had in common was the goal of placing the control

over economic processes, which had slipped away from other social

mechanisms, back into the hands of society as represented by the state.

However great the differences between the multiple currents of

socialism, in Durkheim's view they all shared the idea that the destitution

of the working masses could be remedied only by re-organizing the

economic sphere so as to tie its activities back to collective social

decision-making.8 Even though this definition is not sufficient for an

adequate understanding of the normative goals of socialism, it does at                                                                                                                          7    8    

5    

least reveal the shared experiental basis of the various different

movement and schools that soon developed under that name: Robert

Owens and his disciples as well as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and their

respective schools all thought that the injustice suffered by the working

population was due to the fact that the capitalist market had moved

outside the reach of social control and was now governed solely by its

own law of supply and demand.

But if one takes a closer look at the vocabulary shared by all the early

socialist movements regardless of their differences, one is soon struck

by the fact that Durkheim's proposal makes no attempt at all to explain its

pervasive reference to the normative ideals of the French Revolution.

Durkheim treats the various groups as though their sole concern were a

problem of social technology, namely the social re-embedding of the

market, rather than the historically much more salient goal of realizing for

the broader population the recently proclaimed principles of liberty,

equality, and fraternity. Similar attempts by other thinkers to articulate the

central ambitions of socialism, impressive as they are in some respects,

suffer from the same lack of attention to the underlying moral ambitions

of the movement. To name just two examples, both John Stuart Mill's

and Joseph Schumpeter's writings on socialism tend to reduce the

socialist project to the sole aim of achieving a more equitable distribution

of resources, without examining the underlying moral or ethical

purposes.9 But the extent to which the early self-described "socialist"

thinkers were in fact moved by genuinely normative principles, drawn

from the list of demands put forward during the still recent revolution, is

immediately apparent when we consider what justifications they offered

for their projects. Robert Owen, who was more of a practical than a

                                                                                                                         9    

6    

theoretical bent and who was certainly least influenced by the

reverberations of the great revolution, explained his initiation of workers'

cooperatives in New Lanark by saying that the experience of mutual

assistance would lead members of the lower classes to acquire "mutual

benevolence" and would thus teach them a type of solidarity that

extended even to strangers.10 Similarly, albeit with a commitment to

more ambitious claims in social philosophy, Saint-Simon and his

followers were convinced that workers' lack of freedom under capitalist

conditions could be overcome only through a social order in which

centralized planning would make it possible to remunerate each person

according to his abilities and which would thus amount to a "universal

association" of mutually supporting members.11 Finally, Fourier and his

disciples justified their plans for a cooperative society by claiming that

only the establishment of voluntary associations of producers, i.e. the

"phalanges" I already mentioned before, would allow an adequate

realization of the normative demand that all members of a society

cooperate without coercion.12 Nowhere in these arguments for socialist

aims is the socialization of ownership in the means of production

presented as an end in itself or a simple instrument for a more equal

distribution. Rather, to the extent that it is deemed necessary at all, it is

conceived of as a prerequisite for the realization of quite distinct and

properly speaking moral or ethical aims. Foremost among these are the

first and the last of the three principles of the French Revolution, that is

to say, liberty and fraternity, whereas equality is often given a

subordinate role. At times one gets the impression that the three socialist

groups were content with the rather incompletely realized legal equality

of the time and were mainly concerned to establish on this minimal                                                                                                                          10    11    12    

7    

juridical basis a community of mutually supportive producers who are led

by solidarity to complement each others' respective abilities and

contributions. Operative in the background of these normative ideas is a

conviction that is stated only in passing by the various authors, but which

is an important source of agreement among them. They all believe that

the existing conception of individual freedom, conceived mainly in legal

terms, is too narrow to be compatible with the ideal of fraternity.

Employing some hermeneutic charity we might say that the three early

socialist groups discovered an internal inconsistency among the different

principles proclaimed by the revolution. The inconsistency is due to a

narrowly legal or individualistic understanding of the freedom demanded

by the revolution. All three groups are therefore, without quite realizing it,

struggling to expand the liberal conception of liberty in such a way that it

becomes compatible with the Revolution's other goal, that of "fraternity".

The ambition of reconciling the two principles of liberty and fraternity by

re-interpreting the former is even more apparent in the writers following

the first wave of socialist movements. Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon, two critics of the expanding market economy who otherwise

followed quite different trajectories13, each explain their critique by

pointing to the specific conception of liberty that they believe to be

reflected in the institutional foundations of the market: that is to say, a

conception which ties liberty to the pursuit of purely private interests, or

in Blanc's words, to "private egoism"14. Both writers were convinced that

as long as this narrow construal of individual liberty remained prevalent,

not only would the degrading economic conditions remain unchanged but

moreover it would be impossible to realize the widely recognized

demand for a "fraternal" society, a society of solidarity. Thus both Blanc                                                                                                                          13    14    

8    

and Proudhon assumed that one task of the socialism they advocated

was to eliminate an inconsistency among the several demands put

forward by the French Revolution. They thought that the normative goal

of fraternity, of standing up for one another, could not even begin to be

realized because the further goal, freedom, was conceived exclusively in

terms of the kind of private egoism that gave rise to the competitive

social relations of the capitalist market. The economic policy blueprints

developed by Blanc and Proudhon, which were designed either to

supplement or to supplant the market by other forms of production and

distribution15, were therefore primarily guided by the aim of establishing

in the sphere of economic activity a type of freedom that would no longer

stand in the way of realizing the demand for fraternity. Only if the

economic core of the new society could incorporate freedom as a

practice of solidarity, in which individuals mutually complement each

other, rather than as the pursuit of merely private interests, could the

normative demands of the French Revolution be consistently realized.

If we now look back again at Durkheim's definition of the basic idea of

socialism, we can venture a first intermediate conclusion: while he is

correct in claiming that all the socialist projects share the same basic

intention of re-integrating economic activity into the sphere of collective

social decision-making, he overlooks the normative or ethical reasons

that first gave rise to this intention. The early Socialists' main concern

was not simply to place the economic sphere under the direction of

collective social choices in order to avert the threat of a merely half

achieved moralization of society, one that stops at the gates of the

economy – as Durkheim wants to have it. Nor did their main goal consist

simply in bringing about a more just distribution of vital material goods.

                                                                                                                         15    

9    

Rather a greater degree of socialization of production was meant to

serve the moral goal of readjusting the freedom proclaimed by the

Revolution to the moral demand of fraternity and solidarity. Instead of

serving the pursuit of merely private interests, freedom was to be

understood in a way that rendered it compatible with fraternity, the other

revolutionary promise.16 So conceived, socialism was from the very

beginning a movement of immanent critique of the modern capitalist

social order. It accepted the normative foundations of that order's

legitimacy – freedom, equality, and fraternity – but it harbored doubts as

to whether those ideals could be consistently realized unless freedom

were to be thought of in a less individualist fashion and more along the

lines of an intersubjective process.

The writings of the authors I have mentioned so far are of no real help in

actually understanding this new conception of freedom, despite the fact

that it was pivotal to their movements. It is true that the earliest socialist

groups used terms such as "association", "cooperation", and

"community" to indicate that the various economic set-ups they

proposed, with their novel forms of production and distribution, were

designed to ensure that individuals would be mutually dependent for their

respective self-fulfillment. But they made no attempt to present this kind

of intersubjective interdependence as a conceptual alternative to the

merely individualist conception of freedom associated with the liberal

tradition. One writer who takes at least a step in that direction is

Proudhon, who in his 1849 Confessions of a Revolutionary goes so far

as to say that "from a social perspective, freedom and solidarity are

identical terms".17 To this sentence, which very clearly alludes to the

vocabulary of the French Revolution, he adds that in contrast with the                                                                                                                          16    17    

10    

Declaration of Man and Citizen of 1793 the socialists think of "the

freedom of each" not as a "barrier" but as an "aid" to the freedom of all

others.18 Yet this proposal becomes blurred again by the next step in

Proudhon's argument. There he advocates the establishment of popular

banks that would provide interest-free loans to small workers'

cooperatives and would thereby facilitate the kind of intersubjective

freedom just discussed. But this suggests that Proudhon holds merely

that each individual's freedom should meet with the support and aid of

other individuals, not that others are strictly speaking a condition of its full

realization.19 Proudhon is still wavering between two different alternatives

to the individualist conception of freedom. The difference between them

turns on the question whether a free action can be considered complete

prior to the contribution made by the other, or whether that contribution is

a necessary element of the action, without which it remains incomplete.

Depending on which of the two conceptions one favours, one is

accordingly going to take somewhat different views regarding the

structure of the "associations" or "communities" that are supposed to first

enable a society to be properly social, by allowing freedom and fraternity

to be reconciled and indeed identified with each other. On the first

conception, a society is composed of individual members who are free

prior to and independent of their social association and for whom the

cooperation with others provides motivation and support, but not a

condition of their freedom as such. The second conception, by contrast,

views social cooperation as a precondition for each individual's full

attainment of freedom, since the latter requires that an individual's

incomplete practical plans are filled in and complemented by those of

others.

                                                                                                                         18    19    

11    

In the writings of the early socialists and also in the writings of Proudhon,

these different conceptions of what I will from now on refer to as "social

freedom" are not yet adequately distinguished. It is true that they were

already clearly aware that continuing the as yet unfinished project of the

bourgeois revolution without becoming entangled in self-contradiction

would require overcoming the individualism about liberty that found its

expression, in particular, in the capitalist market economy. Freedom

would have to be rendered compatible with the demand for fraternity. Yet

the early socialists lacked the conceptual means to articulate in more

concrete terms what it could mean for the achievement of individual

liberty to be tied to the precondition of a communal life marked by

solidarity. The first steps towards such a further articulation were taken

by the young Karl Marx, who set himself the task, at about the same time

as Proudhon did, to spell out the theoretical foundations of the incipient

socialist movement. Living in exile in Paris, he was thoroughly familiar

with the theoretical efforts of his French socialist contemporaries. But in

contrast with them, Marx as a German did not directly face the challenge

of articulating the aims of their shared project within the normative

framework provided by the still unfinished revolution. He was able largely

to forgo terms such as "fraternity", "liberty", and "solidarity", and to build

instead on the efforts of his compatriots who sought to productively

extend the Hegelian legacy. Taking up the terminology of idealism in the

naturalistic interpretation provided by Feuerbach gave Marx an

advantage with respect to conceptual sophistication, though it brought

with it the disadvantage of greater opacity regarding moral and political

implications. But even Marx's early works still betray the intention of

demonstrating that the conception of liberty presupposed by the political

economists and actualized in the capitalist market is characterized by a

kind of individualism incompatible with the claims of a "true" community

12    

among the members of society. Thus the young exile's writings from the

1840s can also be viewed as taking a further step within the theoretical

project of developing the idea of "socialism" from the internally

inconsistent aims of the liberal social order.

In one of his most important writings from the 1840s, which has received

much attention especially in recent years – his comments on James

Mill's work on political economy – Marx explains what faults he finds with

the current constitution of society and what, in his view, a non-deficient

community would have to look like.20 His debt to Hegel is even more

evident here than in the so-called Paris Manuscripts. It is reflected in the

fact that the two models of society contrasted by Marx are characterized

in terms of two different modes of mutual recognition. Marx holds that the

members of a capitalist society relate to each other only very indirectly,

by exchanging their respective products on an anonymous marketplace

through the medium of money. To the extent that other participants in the

market even become visible to any given individual, they do so

exclusively in terms of abstract qualities like business acumen and

economic interests, but not as specific other individuals with particular

needs. In an ironical allusion to Adam Smith, Marx writes that the

members of such a society are nothing but merchants to each other.21

The recognition which the members of a society must accord each other

if they are to constitute an integrated social unit in the first place amounts

here to nothing further than the mutual affirmation of the right to

"outsmart" all the others. The individual actions that constitute the "social

nexus" do not complement each other but are instead, in Marx's stark

expression, performed "solely with the intention of plunder".22

                                                                                                                         20    21    22    

13    

What Marx is aiming to do in this first part of his investigation is to

translate into Hegelian terms the very same arguments to which his

socialist predecessors had already appealed in analyzing the

impossibility of "solidarity" or "fraternal social relations" under the

conditions of a market society. Since market participants encounter each

other only as subjects interested in their own respective private

advantage, they are unable to offer each other the sort of concern and

support that would be required for social relations characterized by

fraternity or solidarity. As if to convey an even more drastic sense of this

prevention of solidarity, Marx's text alludes to a famous image from the

Phenomenology of Spirit and states that "our mutual recognition" under

these conditions takes the form of a "struggle" in which who prevails is

determined by who possesses greater "energy, insight, or skill".23

Towards the end of his analysis Marx turns to a brief description of the

relations of production that would obtain if the members of a society were

united by a mutual recognition not of their private egoism but rather of

their respective individual needs. This sketch has its roots in the

anthropological notion, taken from Feuerbach and perhaps also from

Rousseau, that the satisfaction of human needs almost always requires

the activity of other subjects. Above a certain threshold of the division of

labor, my hunger can be stilled only if others produce the food I need;

and my desire for adequate shelter can be satisfied only if there are

workmen willing to produce a habitation for me. Marx believes that the

previously described capitalist conditions of production have the effect of

systematically withdrawing this mutual dependency from the view of

those affected by it. While it is true that the subjects are working in order

to satisfy a certain economic demand, and thereby the needs that give

                                                                                                                         23    

14    

rise to this demand, their motivation is not concern for these desires of

others but solely an egocentric interest in serving their own advantage.

According to Marx things would be quite different if the goods produced

in a society were being exchanged in ways other than through a money-

mediated market. In that case, he thinks, each person would be aware of

the needs of those for whom he was producing, so that he would find the

characteristic human condition of mutual dependency affirmed both in his

own action and in the anticipated reaction of the other person.24 Marx

speaks here only of the "double affirmation" among the members of a

society, but clearly what he is thinking of are conditions of production in

which people mutually recognize each other’s individual needs. In what

Marx is later going to call an "association of free producers", individuals

would no longer be related to each other merely through the anonymous

coordination of their respective private aims but would rather be

motivated by a shared concern for the self-realization of all others.25

Formulating Marx's train of thought in this pointed way is useful because

it enables us to abstract from the rather vague economic proposal he

makes and to focus on those general features of it that point towards the

concept of social freedom. Like his socialist predecessors, Marx initially

thinks of freedom as the maximally unimpeded and unconstrained

realization of self-chosen goals and intentions. He also agrees with them

that under capitalist conditions, the exercise of freedom, so understood,

implies that others are regarded as mere means to the pursuit of one's

own interests, and is thus in conflict with the already institutionalized

principle of fraternity. To resolve this internal contradiction Marx offers a

rough sketch of a society in which freedom and solidarity are integrated

with each other. He thinks that such an integration would be possible in a                                                                                                                          24    25    

15    

social order in which each individual conceives of his or her own ends as

also constituting the conditions of the ends of others; a social order, that

is, in which the ends of different individuals interlock in such a way that

they can be realized only on the basis of each individual’s full awareness

of their mutual interdependency. But the reference to "love" that occurs

in a central passage of the commentary on Mill26 also reveals quite

clearly that the other person is thought to be relevant not merely to the

execution but already to the formation of each individual's plans. As in

relations of love, so too in the novel form of association envisioned by

Marx my own activities will from the very outset be restricted to those

aims that serve not only my own self-realization but also that of the other

with whom I am interacting, since otherwise her freedom would not

constitute a direct object of my concern.

This important feature of Marx's model can be brought out more clearly

by drawing on a distinction introduced by Daniel Brudney in the context

of his comparison between Rawls and Marx. According to Brudney,

social communities can be distinguished according to whether the ends

shared by their members are merely overlapping or whether they are

intertwined.27 In the first case, individuals do indeed pursue shared ends,

but these are ends that they can jointly accomplish without having to

individually aim at that joint accomplishment. An example of the

collective realization of this type of shared end is the market, at least

according to the classical conception of it. In it, each participant is able to

pursue his own economic interests while thereby simultaneously

furthering the shared aim of increasing everyone's wealth. Intertwined

ends, by contrast, are ones whose realization requires that the members

of a society jointly pursue them by each adopting them as a maxim or as                                                                                                                          26    27    

16    

a direct goal. As Brudney points out, in this second case the individuals

are active not merely “with one another” but "for one another", since what

they desire is specifically to contribute to the realization of the ends

shared by all. In the first case, the case of overlapping ends, the fact that

my own actions contribute to the realization of those ends is a contingent

effect of the content of my intentions. In the second case, the case of

intertwined ends, their realization is a necessary result of the pursuit of

my intentions.

In my view it is quite apparent that Marx's proposed alternative to a

capitalist social order is based on this latter model of social communities.

Using the terminology of mutual recognition that is consistently employed

by Marx in his commentary on James Mill's political economy, we can re-

articulate the relevant distinction roughly as follows: whereas in a

market-based society shared ends are realized insofar and because its

members recognize each other only as individual consumers and

systematically deny the relations of mutual dependence among them, the

realization of shared ends in an association of free producers would be

accomplished through the members' being intentionally engaged for

each other's benefit, because they recognize each other as individuals

with specific needs and because they act for the sake of satisfying those

needs. Even though Marx himself does not say it, it seems evident to me

that he takes his alternative social model to have accomplished

something that his socialist predecessors had unsuccessfully attempted

to do: that is, to provide an immanent extension or reformulation of the

concept of individual freedom, and thus of the basic principle of

legitimacy of the current social order, in such a way that it comes to

necessarily coincide with the requirements of a life of fraternity or

solidarity. At this point our task is thus to examine with a more systematic

17    

intent whether the social model sketched by Marx can indeed fulfil its

aspiration of reconciling individual freedom and solidarity in a novel way.

To begin with, this analysis is going to pay no heed to the fact that all the

early proponents of socialism thought of their principle of social freedom

as having its place only in the sphere of social production or labor.

Imagining that this sphere alone could account for the reproduction of

society as a whole, they accorded no independent role to political

democracy and were therefore never prompted to ask whether other

forms of freedom might perhaps already have found institutional

embodiment there. But these questions I leave to a fourth chapter in the

planned book, here I will only discuss whether the model of social

freedom just sketched constitutes a sound and independent alternative

to the individualism characteristic of liberal conceptions of freedom. Did

the early socialists really develop an original and novel conception of

freedom or did they merely offer an improved presentation of what is

known to us as "solidarity" or, to use the older term, "fraternity"?

A premise of the liberal model of freedom is the idea, at first glance

hardly contestable, that it makes sense to speak of individual freedom

only where a subject is able to follow through with his own intentions

while facing as little impediment or constraint as possible. Freedom of

action, so conceived, is said to have justifiable limits only where its

exercise might create impediments to the freedom of other subjects.

Liberalism therefore ties the general protection of this kind of freedom to

the idea of a legal order designed to ensure that each individual is

enabled to act without constraint to an extent that is compatible with

everyone else's equal claim to the same freedom of action. A first

complication for this basic liberal model is introduced by Rousseau and,

following him, by Kant. Both of them share the conviction that we cannot

18    

speak of individual freedom where a person's motives are provided not

by freely adopted ends but by merely natural drives or inclinations. Both

therefore introduce an added requirement to specify the internal

dimension of freedom, on which the older conception had remained

silent: the decision or choice that initiates an action must be an act of

self-determination, which ensures that the ends pursued by a subject

have their source in her exercise of reason.28 It seems that the early

socialists were on the whole happy to go along with this transition from a

"negative" to a "positive" conception of liberty, to use the terms coined by

Isaiah Berlin to mark the extra step taken by Rousseau and Kant (a step

against which Berlin was warning for political reasons).29 Even if the

socialists may not have been aware of the detailed arguments for the

new conception, it would still have been close to obvious to them,

whether on the basis of Rousseau's "Contrat social" or on the basis of

Kant's moral philosophy, that individual freedom is present only where

the ends of action are rationally intelligible rather than simply dictated by

nature. However, when it comes to spelling out what exactly is meant by

"rational", the socialists are certainly no longer following Kant. For them it

is not true that actions can be called "free" only if they result from an

individually executed procedure whereby one's maxims are tested for

their morality. It is more plausible to think that they are following

Rousseau or, in the case of Marx, Hegel, both of whom hold for different

reasons that individual intentions are "free" to a sufficient degree when

they are aimed at the satisfaction either of needs that are "not corrupt" in

the sense of "natural", or of needs that correspond to the reason's

current historical stage.30 For the socialists, then, individual freedom

initially means simply the ability to realize one's own free intentions – that                                                                                                                          28    29    30    

19    

is, those intentions that are more or less shared by all on a rational basis

– by performing actions that are subject to no other constraint than the

one deriving from the equal claim of all others to the same kind of

freedom.

The special twist that Proudhon and Marx give to this model of positive

freedom results from the fact that they take a much more encompassing

view of the kinds of unjustified constraints that may prevent subjects from

realizing their freely adopted ends. The early liberal view largely

identified those constraints with external social forces, whose

paradigmatic example was the authority of a person or body to impose

its own will on a subject.31 The republican tradition, represented today by

writers like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, expanded the scope of

what counts as coercive constraint so as to include ways of influencing a

person's will. This is what is meant by the now familiar formula of

"freedom as non-domination".32The socialists go much further than this.

They hold that there is coercion wherever the realization of a person's

reasonable ends meets with social obstacles in the guise of opposing

ends had by another person. In their view, the truly non-coercive

realization of an individual's rational ends within the social whole would

be accomplished only if the relevant action met with the approval of all

others and only if the action's completion strictly required complementary

actions on the part of other individuals. Ultimately, thus, individual

freedom is present only where it has in fact attained "objective" form, to

use Hegel's terminology; that is, only where an individual is able to

regard the other members of his society no longer as potential sources of

                                                                                                                         31    32    

20    

constraints on the pursuit of his own ends but rather as partners whose

cooperation is required for the realization of those ends.33

This is the point in the socialists' argument where their special notion of

"community" becomes relevant, which they tend to mention in the same

breath with "liberty". However much their terminology may vary, they

always mean by "community" something more than what is usually

denoted by the term. A community, in their sense, is characterized not

only by shared values and a certain degree of identification with the aims

of the group, but also and especially by mutual support and concern. We

already encountered this strand of the socialist concept of community

earlier in the idea of ends that do not just overlap but intertwine, so that

agents are active not merely with one another but for one another.34

Thus the question we now need to address is what connection the

socialists saw between their specific concept of community, on the one

hand, and their concept of liberty, on the other.

One way of making this connection would be by thinking of communal

solidarity as a necessary precondition for the exercise of the kind of

freedom I described. In a somewhat weaker form, one which does

without the loaded notion of community as mutual concern, such a thesis

has been defended by Joseph Raz in his book The Morality of Freedom.

According to him, individuals are unable to make use of their autonomy

unless they live in a society that offers them specific options for the

realization of their various aims.35 But the socialists want to go further

than that. The communities outlined by them are not merely a necessary

precondition of the kind of freedom they have in mind. Rather it seems

that only cooperative activity within a fraternal community counts as a

                                                                                                                         33    34    35    

21    

proper exercise of freedom in the first place, while anything short of that

does not really deserve this title. Social freedom then means

participation in the social practices of a community whose members have

such a degree of mutual concern for each other that they help others

realize their reasonable needs, and do so for their sake. Here the

concept of freedom has become an element of a type of holistic

individualism, according to which what is meant by the term "freedom",

even in the basic sense of an unhindered realization of individual goals

or ends, is essentially something that cannot be achieved by any

individual person but only by a suitably constituted collective. This does

not entail that the collective should be conceived of as some sort of

higher-order entity existing over and against the individuals who are its

parts.36 It is true that on the socialist conception, freedom is a property,

capacity, or achievement of a social group taken as a whole. But the

existence of the group itself is owed to the cooperative activity of

individual subjects. The collective becomes a bearer of individual

freedom only when it succeeds in instilling in its members certain kinds

of practical dispositions. Foremost among these is a mutual sympathy

that results in everyone's exhibiting a certain amount of concern for

everyone else's self-realization, for non-instrumental reasons. The

socialists believe that to the extent that such modes of interaction

become prevalent in a society, all the negative phenomena that

characterize a capitalist society are going to disappear. Once subjects

have a sufficient degree of sympathy for each other, they will relate to

one another as equals and will refrain from any kind of exploitation or

instrumentalization.

                                                                                                                         36    

22    

The idea of socialism, as it is originally conceived, is rooted in the notion

that it will be possible in the future to fashion societies in their entirety

after this model of a fraternal community. This is a way of swiftly if

somewhat forcibly unifying into one single principle the three demands

issued by the French Revolution, which were otherwise seen to be

standing in tension with each other. Socialism is the idea to allow

individual freedom to flourish in such a way that it becomes congruent

with a form of life in solidarity – that is the communitarism elements in all

forms of socialism, as David Miller has shown. Individual freedom is

interpreted as consisting in finding one's complement in the other, so that

it properly coincides with the requirements of equality and fraternity. This

holist idea, which conceived of freedom as something realizable not by

any individual but only by the fraternal community itself, was the point of

departure for the socialist movement. All the measures later taken by its

adherents to remedy existing evils – both the beneficial and the harmful

measures – were ultimately guided by the aim of creating such a

community whose members would mutually complement each other and

would treat each other as equals. It was this close link with the demands

of the Great Revolution that from the very beginning made it difficult for

bourgeois critics of socialism to simply reject the aims of the movement

as unjustified. After all, the socialists were appealing to the very same

normative principles under whose banner the bourgeois had once been

fighting for a democratically organized state. To this day, the charges

that socialism is guilty of collectivism or of a romanticization of

community therefore leave a strange aftertaste, insofar as they seem like

attempts to deny the fact that the basic principles of legitimacy of

present-day societies include not only liberty but also solidarity and

equality.

23    

At the same time, the socialists made it easy for their critics, who

appeared on the scene very soon. They failed to develop a sufficiently

convincing version of their original and path-breaking idea. The

proposals produced during the first half of the nineteenth century all had

flaws that quickly exposed them to serious objections. Not only did they,

as I briefly pointed out above, strictly limit the idea of a fraternal

community to the sphere of economic activity, without giving any closer

consideration to the question whether a society marked by a rapid

increase in complexity could really organize and reproduce itself in its

entirety by relying solely on that single sphere. For reasons that are hard

to fathom they (also) largely ignored the entire domain of collective

political decision-making, so that they were unable to sufficiently explain

the relation between their own project and the recently established

legally defined liberties. And finally, the founders of the socialist project –

above all, Saint-Simon and Marx – tied that project to a metaphysical

account of history that rendered it all but impossible to view its ambition

as one of engaging in experiments designed to assess capitalist

societies' capacity for transformation. Since they thought it a matter of

historical necessity that the revolution for which they were calling would

take place at some point in the future, albeit perhaps in the near future,

all attempts to implement gradual changes here and now were dismissed

as both cognitively and politically useless. Among these several flaws of

the original socialist program we can distinguish between ones that are

due to the historical context in which this program originated, i.e. the

early phase of the industrial revolution, and others that are more

fundamental and that concern the very structure of the proposal.